The Wire 300: David Keenan locates the roots of the UK’s current DIY underground in the anarchic activities of The A Band

The A Band occupy a key position in the evolution of the UK underground. Acting as a lightning rod for players like Richard Youngs, Neil Campbell, Sticky Foster, Stream Angel and Stewart Walden, the group brought together many solitary musicians who were then working - primarily intuitively - with new experimental forms. In providing a social network and a creative context for their various appetites, The A Band highlighted the common technique that underlined all of their work: the practice of improvisation. Yet it was an approach to improvisation that owed little to the breakthroughs of jazz, extrapolated more from weirdo rock records and ‘primitive’ folk music than any previously articulated modern praxis. The A Band’s revolving, big band line-up emphasised the collaborative, interactive aspect of improvisation while doubling as a team that could ensure safety-in-numbers when the audience, as they inevitably did, rose up against them at open mic nights and support slots for conventional indie outfits. The Old Angel in Nottingham is the venue most associated with the group, a room above a pub in the city centre where they regularly staged their own actions, adopting the kind of guerilla thinking that has long been a necessary survival strategy for free music in the UK, from The Spontaneous Music Ensemble through Hession/Wilkinson/Fell. But unlike SME or AMM or The Music Improvisation Company, The A Band had no ideology and no formal models. They didn’t see themselves as expanding or exploding any particular genre. Instead they functioned as an umbrella for a range of diverse agendas, a shelter for committed non-musicians, disaffected punks, Hawkwind fans, dole boys, bookish English eccentrics and self-taught players drawn from a variety of backgrounds. In many ways they were closer to defiantly democratic assemblages such as Terry Day’s People Band, Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra or even Gavin Bryars’s Portsmouth Sinfonia, though their lack of any discernable angle differentiated them from the more conceptually-focused art music collectives.

The origins of The A Band can be traced back to a series of off-the-radar art/prank outfits put together by Stewart Walden and his brother Martin in Paignton, Devon in the early to mid-1980s. Two groups were particularly important: The Strolling Ones, a duo inspired by surreal British comedy a la Monty Python and riotous atonal noise, and Well Crucial, a conceptual performance unit that worked as cover for a host of otherwise unconnected cassette tape primitives, all tracing their lineage back to the Waldens and with cells secreted as far away as the Isle Of Skye. By the mid-80s Richard Youngs, then playing in his own experimental outfit Omming For Woks, made contact with The Strolling Ones, including them on a compilation cassette on his own Jabberwok label which in turn came to the attention of Neil Campbell. Campbell penned a fan letter to Youngs, raving about Omming For Woks while castigating The Strolling Ones as “the worst thing I’ve ever heard”. In the summer of 1986 Mark Turner, Campbell’s bandmate in his own post-Throbbing Gristle outfit ESP Kinetic, helped organise a music festival in Kettering, Northamptonshire, then Campbell and Turner’s home town. He somehow managed to scam Omming For Woks onto the bill while setting up The Strolling Ones as comperes for the weekend (much to Campbell’s disgust). In the event only Stewart Walden made the trip up from Devon, dressed in two suits, one on top of the other. “Why two suits in the middle of summer?” Campbell asked. “Because as of now,” Walden replied, “I’m moving to Kettering.” A few weeks later and Campbell was a member of the group. Well Crucial had infected and subverted yet another local scene.

The A Band’s accidental evolution effectively liberated it from any formal or conceptual considerations. First coming together in 1990 as an impromptu backing band for saxophonist Vince Earimal, the group originally consisted of Neil Campbell on bass, then moonlighting in various “shambolic rock bands” after the implosion of ESP Kinetic and the suicide of Mark Turner, and drummer Jim Plaistow, a joiner who was also Earimal’s employer. Earimal’s background was ostensibly in jazz but his diverse interests led him to all sorts of fringe activities and he was a naturally ‘out’ player. As a teen he had been a prize bodybuilder, an ex-Mr Nottingham. For the first gig Plaistow assembled a percussion frame with circular saws and springs on it. Campbell rose to the bait, tackling his bass with an electric razor and triggering loops of Earimal’s clarinet before the trio ended the show with an impromptu version of The Fugs’ “Carpe Diem”. “That's Vince all over,” Campbell insists today. “He was a sax player, had a gig, then mysteriously ‘lost’ his sax, possibly had to pawn it, so he borrowed a clarinet instead.” For the second gig, Earimal failed to turn up at all, thereby forcing the hand of chance and setting the stage for the first ‘true’ A Band performance.