Get Smart Once

By Steve Michener

A word of warning to those of you now using the internet; be careful mixing alcohol and the world-wide-web!  You might soon find yourself in a foreign country, watching a band you once loved….

One night last September, I had had a few ciders, and was heading down my own personal YouTube Rabbit Hole in search of videos by the band that shaped my youth, when I saw a new posting announcing that the band The Monochrome Set would be playing a 40th anniversary gig in London.

old style fandom

The Monochrome Set was a band I’d truly loved but lost track of after the mid-80’s, when the original group had broken up and the stray songs by the new lineup I heard didn’t grab me.  I was surprised to learn that they’d reformed a couple of times since then and were making interesting music again; not only that but the reunion gig would feature the original guitarist, Lester Square, playing music from their first two classic LPS. It being late, I immediately fired off an email to their manager, who ran the FB page, asking if there were plans to bring the band stateside and received a quick, eye-opening lesson on how expensive the U.S. work permits are. Instead, the manager suggested, why don’t I come over for the gigs? 

Hmmm.

I contemplated the logistics over another cider. Luck was on my side when I found out that Norwegian Air had recently started flying from the U.S. to Gatwick and had cheap, introductory fares. Add to that, lodging was not going to be an issue.  My friend Michele, who I knew from my days back in Boston and with whom I’d shared a deep love of the early 45s and LPs by the band, lived in London, as did my brother-in-law.  My wife was quick to sign off on the trip, telling me it would be my upcoming birthday present from her.  I hovered over the ‘purchase’ key for a full minute, unsure if I wanted to subject myself to the 10-hour flights, unsure if flying from Portland, Oregon to London, England in February was such a great idea.

What the hell. CLICK. I hit ‘purchase’ and went to bed, unsure of how I’d feel about it all in the morning.

Just so you are aware, I’m well into my 50’s and even getting across town to a show is a big deal for me. Back in the 1980’s, I would go to 5 or 6 gigs a week but now that was more like my yearly total.  Standing for hours in a club, especially on a work night, takes a toll on my (slowly) aging body that often takes a couple of days and many Advils to put right.  Sometimes, a gig would lift me up and inspire me and other times it would make me question why I put in the effort. Recently, I’d begin to wonder if going to shows really even added anything to the experience of music, over and above listening to albums.  Some bands definitely made it worth your time while others played their songs and left me wanting more.

So what made this one different? Maybe it was just a desire to get out of town, or the convenience of knowing people in London. But certainly one of the chief drivers of my desire to see TMS was that, unlike most of my favorite bands of the ‘80’s, I’d never seen them play live.  They had made some trips to the East Coast back then but, for various reasons, I’d always missed them. In 1982, I was in San Francisco for the winter and they were booked to play the I-Beam. However, when their van broke down in Ohio, their driver was arrested for outstanding warrants, and the West Coast tour dates were scrapped.  The band flew home to England, not to return for over two decades. So there was a bit of a ‘Moby Dick/Great White Whale’ thing developing between myself and the band.

In 2017, I started a Facebook ‘Feature’ called ‘The Monochrome Set Friday’ where I featured a video and a story about the star-crossed history of the band.  The postings were a “big success”, i.e. sometimes garnering as many as ten ‘likes’ per week!  However, the friends who did show up and comment were as passionate about the band as I was.  This is kind of what it was like to be a TMS fan all along: it’s a small club but we’re very much into the band.

Besides, the Monochrome Set had been a favorite of mine in my early 20s. In 1980, I was fresh out of my suburban High School, living in a basement flat in Boston, and working a blue-collar job that easily covered my $95 rent and left enough over to enjoy gigs at the many local clubs where you could see Mission of Burma and two other bands for $3. And, thanks to an incredible trio of college radio stations (WMBR, WERS, WZBC), we were turned onto sounds from all over the planet, with a strong focus on English post-punk bands. The rest of my pay not spent on pizza went to the many independent record stores in the area. It was to these shops that I would venture every payday to pick up the latest 45s or LPs by the likes of the Mekons, PiL, The Clash, and The Monochrome Set.  

The last band on that list really struck a chord with me as both a music fan and an aspiring musician: when I placed ads in a local Boston weekly in my early attempts to find fellow musicians to form a band, I listed my influences as ‘Mission of Burma, Flipper, The Monochrome Set, and The Fall’.  I wanted to make sure TMS got in there so people would know I wasn’t just your average post-punk fan.

You see, to my mind, the Monochrome Set played a brand of music that didn’t sound like any other.  They definitely weren’t ‘punk’, they were hardly even ‘post-punk’, more of a mix of the Kinks and Sergio Mendes with some very twisted lyrics, like these from ‘Eine Symphonie Des Grauens’, inspired by an old German horror movie:

“I'm dead and dank and rotten

My arms are wrapped in cotton

My corpse loves you, let's marry

Get smart, once - Every night at sleepy time

Get smart, twice - I hang my skin out on the line

Get smart, sing - Oh, darling, would you be, be mine”

That these lyrics crammed with catchy melodies only endeared them further to me.  One of their early singles was the eponymously-titled, ‘The Monochrome Set’ in which Bid, the main writer let you know, tongue firmly in his English cheek, that the band were on a higher plane than their audience:

“I fascinate, infatuate
Emphatically
You're dreary, you're base, deary
Your face is weary for me
I'm heaven sent, so eloquent
And curiously
I entertain your tiny brain
So spuriously
The Monochrome Set, Monochrome Set, Monochrome Set
The Monochrome Set, Monochrome Set, Monochrome Set”

This particular song was set to a tub-thumping beat that sounded not unlike what Adam & the Ants were up to around that time and it’s funny that you should mention that...  The Set came from Hornsey, in North London, also the birthplace of Stuart Goddard, aka Adam Ant.  The somewhat convoluted history of the two bands is summarized below (from the official TMS site):

“Primordial soup: Andy Warren and Bid went to school together, Lester Square and Adam Ant both attended Hornsey School of Art. The latter two formed a band called "The B-Sides", which Andy joined sometime in 1976. Bid also joined a couple of months later, and Adam left shortly after. Lester, Andy and Bid occasionally continued to write and rehearse together, until Adam formed The Ants with Lester and Andy. Whilst Andy continued on with Adam to record the first Ants album, Lester left The Ants in 1977, to form, firstly The Zarbies & The Ectomorphs with Bid and Jeremy Harrington, and then The Monochrome Set with Bid (Jeremy joined later). Andy would join the MS in 1980 after leaving the Ants.

To quote the Asahi Evening News, 1993: "When B-Sides singer Adam Ant quit the band for an ill-fated solo career, The Monochrome Set was born."

The early group made a series of 45s that, in my opinion, rival the run of singles that bands like the Buzzcocks and The Mekons.  There was a mix of wit, intelligence, and musical sophistication that blew me away and stands up to this day.  I, too, wanted to be in band that could shift gears and explore different musical styles without a care about what the press or the public thought of them.  Bands like the Clash and the Jam inspired me with their fiery passion and politics but the Monochrome Set appealed to the wanna-be intellectual and pop music fan in me. I loved lots of different styles of music coexisting within one band.  I wanted to write arch lyrics with wordplay and wit!  They were a band that was making the music they heard in their heads, seemingly out of touch with their times and they etched themselves onto my musical DNA.  I loved Bid’s crooning and Lester’s Ennio-Morricone-gone-surfing-in-Spain guitar style.  Their lyrics, at least what I could make out in the pre-internet days, were brilliant. Later, when I could see what they actually were on the web, they were sometimes very different from what I had gleaned earlier, but always clever and full of literary and cinematic references, pointing to a well-educated group of friends. They were ‘fishes out of water in the post-punk scene,’ according to Lester Square, and that was one of the reasons I loved them.

I wasn’t the only one paying attention back then.  Allegedly, when Johnny Marr first met Morrissey, Steven had winnowed down his record collection to just ten 7-inch records, the Monochrome Set in amongst T. Rex and some 1960’s girl groups.  Marr was also a fan and a band was born.  Unlike the Smiths, however, the MS toiled in relative obscurity, even in their home country. They had the same bad luck that the Go-Betweens seemed to have, labels would disappear overnight and critical acclaim didn’t translate into record sales. Another big fan of the band was Alex Kapranos, who, before he formed Franz Ferdinand, hired Bid to produce an album by his band Karelia, who sounded not-unlike a jazzier version of the Set.  Another protege whose career (eventually) took off while the teachers stayed at home.

Anyway, the trip was on!  I had the plane tickets and gig tickets and had a few months to ruminate on everything that might unfold.  I alerted my Facebook page of my plans and a few friends even offered to join me.  Ultimately, my old pal Mark Wyatt from Great Plains was the only one who could swing the logistics. Mark and I had played many gigs together back in the 80’s and again in 2008 when both of our bands reunited for a brief tour to support a new compilation CD from my band Big Dipper. It turns out that Mark was also a big TMS fan who had similarly lost track of the band after their initial run.  He had managed to catch a gig when Bid came over to the US and was backed up by Ohio locals, LazerLove 5 but had also never seen the actual Monochrome Set.  We made plans to spend the time in London together, immersed in this quirky (note: no band likes to be called that) band. 

The plan for the weekend sounded perfect to me: Each night the band would play a first set of songs, new and old, featuring the current lineup of Bid, bassist Andy Warren, keyboardist John Paul Moran, and drummer Mike Urban, then take a brief break and return with original guitarist, Lester Square for a run-through of ‘Strange Boutique’ on Saturday, and ‘Love Zombies’ on Sunday. They were old friends, these albums, and had defined my early 20’s. The ones I would put on the turntable when I was feeling down and, 30 minutes later, my bad mood would be reversed. As I said earlier, I’d always avoided these ‘play the album’ shows, but, standing in the Lexington on a cold February night, 5,000 miles from home, it now sounded like the best idea ever.

Now here is where I must confess to an unexpected degree of anxiety surrounding this gig. The last time this occurred was when I saw Paul McCartney in 2011. As a huge Beatles fan growing up, I felt like one of the Shea Stadium teenage girls as I waited for him to start.  Needless to say, Paulie delivered but I was a little worried that this gig wouldn’t live up to my expectations. Having never seen the band, I had no idea if they were one of the groups that were even worth seeing in person.  Their live YouTube videos didn’t exude tons of charisma but Michele assured me that the band put on fun, memorable gigs.  A number of bands lately have been doing these ‘Old LPs played in entirety and in order’ shows and I was also somewhat cynical about that conceit. I like gigs to have spontaneity and, it seemed to me, that playing a set where everyone knows what comes next would take some fun out of the experience.  There’s also an element to nostalgia to that approach that turned me off. 

The saving grace for TMS is that they are a working band, not just some duffers dusting off their guitars for a few bucks from the punters.  Although Lester had left the band in 2014 to focus on his art teaching profession, the others were still putting out new albums on a small German label, with five releases between 2012 and 2018.  As I caught up to these discs that I had missed, I was happy to discover that the wit and intelligence that I loved so long ago was still intact.  They had become maybe a little bit more of a ‘normal’ rock band, musically and Bid’s lyrics explored more adult topics (including the ‘Platinum Coils’ LP,  dealing with the 2011 stroke that nearly killed him and left him with the titular metal device in his brain), but they were still writing great songs.

Fast forward to early February in London:  Mark and I are eating in the restaurant of the club that the Monochrome Set will perform in later that night.  The band walks in after their sound check and we are both a little star-struck. I am fully aware that this is silly, that the band are ordinary gents (well, Bid is descended from some Indian royalty, but still).  Both Mark and I were in bands that attained a small amount of renown, in an indie sense, and had dealt with fans from a band’s perspective many times.  At our reunion shows, fans had flown from the West Coast and even from England just for the shows, leaving me flabbergasted.  Logistically, I’m well aware that there is no difference between the band and us fans but something inside of me was enjoying this my return to my pre-cynical fan boy days. Anyway, we knew we’d get our chance to meet them later through mutual-friend, Brian Nupp, so we left them un-accosted for now. 

The set times were posted in the club so it was a bit of a surprise when The Monochrome Set took the stage almost 10 minutes early, very likely the first band to do that in my 40 years of shows. More time for us, I thought, since the club had a posted 11pm curfew on live music.  As the band started up with ‘Super Plastic City’, a smile formed on my face that wouldn’t leave there for the next 36 hours.  After a few songs from their ‘middle period’ that I was not very familiar with, they started ‘The Mating Game’ from ‘Eligible Bachelors, and my grin got even wider and my feet began to move. Mark let out a yelp of child-like glee and Michele went into high gear with her dancing. (While Mark and I are too old/goofy/self-conscious to actually dance at a gig, Michele expresses her love of the music by dancing, something that I envy).

The band left but quickly returned for the SB set with Lester in tow and launched right into the tribal drumbeat for their signature tune, ‘The Monochrome Set’ as all 200 of us punctuated the chorus with cries of “The”, surely the oddest sing-along i’ve been involved with. These albums, for me, are ones that I can anticipate the next song as the previous one fades out and it was just wonderful to hear each song, some of which had never been played live before. I was, at once, experiencing it very privately in my head and, at the same time, communally, as part of this crowd of hardcore fans who were loving every minute of it right along with me. I guess if I were an actual music writer, I could put this into words somehow but, as a fan, all I can think is that this experience is what I go to shows to find.  Discovering that these people loved the band as much as I did was a very warming feeling, somehow.  Maybe I wasn’t so crazy for being obsessed with this obscure band that few around me were familiar with?

Meanwhile, Bid was entertaining us with his sardonic stage banter, wondering if hearing the songs was making us feel young, despite being “bald and incontinent.”  He seemed to be chafing a bit, perhaps, about the nostalgia element of the night.  He could have just been in a bad mood because the band was clearly making a lot of mistakes on the older material. Luckily, with his wry wit, he was able to point out their glitches and keep the audience on his side.  The band tore through the 36-minute album in about 28 minutes and nailed two classic tunes in the encore, ‘He’s Frank’ and ‘Jet Set Junta.’ 

After the set, the word had gotten out that there were a trio of Yanks in the audience and many ciders were bought for me by strangers, all wearing the same grin that I was.  We bonded over our love for the band, how great it was to hear these songs, and our anticipation over the next night, when ‘Love Zombies’ would get played.  Mark and I were soon swept up in a small group heading to a local pub and, it wasn’t until I got there that I realized the group included John Paul Moran, the keyboard player and his gal, Marian. They were delightful people and we spent the next hour talking about their set, politics, and Monty Python.

 

The next night I was much less nervous, convinced that this was a band worth traveling to see and that everything going forward was gravy. Just about everyone in the audience was back for the second night and there was a collegial atmosphere before the band even started.  Nothing prepared us for the performance to come, especially after the enthusiastic but messy performance the night before.  The band was playing together amazingly well, turning in performances that sometimes even topped the well-remembered recorded versions.  Bid’s mood had drastically improved, and his humorous comments had the crowd laughing along as one. The films projected on the screen behind them by ‘Fifth-Monochrome’, Tony Potts, added another element to the songs, putting behind the technical glitches he encountered the night before.  By the end of the regular set, the audience was going crazy and the encore of ‘Eine Symphonie des Grauens’ and the instrumental ‘Lester Leaps In’ brought the weekend to a close as we all collapsed into each other’s arms. Fantastic.  As the lyrics in ‘The Mating Game’ go:

 “Thrust, pump, spurt, slump

Ciggy, ciggy, puff, puff, cough and wheeze”.

I said my emotional goodbyes to all my old and new friends at the club, eager not to miss the last tube back to my brother-in-law’s place in far west London, and, as luck would have it, as I left the club, there stood Bid, the only band member I hadn’t had a chance to talk to on the weekend, enjoying a post-gig cigarette on the sidewalk all alone.  As I shook his hand and thanked him for all the songs and for making my long weekend trip from America so damned enjoyable, he looked a little flabbergasted.  But as I said goodbye and headed down to King’s Cross station, all doubts about traveling across the globe to see this band had been erased. 

I wonder whose playing in Madrid this summer? 

Steve Michener is a registered nurse. He played bass in the bands Big Dipper, the Volcano Suns, and Dumptruck. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.