History - 0
The Early Days
Mr Concept was born into the world naked and penniless. It was a strange world that you may or may not be familiar with. It's called 'The 50's'. This was a world far from life today... a world where anything was possible. A world where children played games such as hide-and-seek, skipping and 'tick' (nothing to do with head lice - they were considered a delicacy). And children played outdoors! They went for long bike rides, fished in streams and climbed trees. They collected birds eggs and stamps and coins and ate lard on toast and had scratchings with their chips.
There were no supermarkets - instead there was a different shop for each type of produce - grocer, greengrocer, butcher, sweet shop, baker, ironmonger. You would queue in each shop and wait to be served. The grocer would cut your cheese off a huge block and wrap it in grease-proof paper, he would pour vinegar from a barrell into a copper jug then pour it into the glass bottle you'd brought with you. And while he farted around wrapping stuff up in twists of paper the queue would get longer... You would have brought an old shopping bag to carry the stuff home in and we used 'Pounds, Shillings and Pence'. 240 huge pennies in a pound. The shops smelt different, cheesey in the grocers, parraffin in the ironmongers, and fart in the sweet shop. All those sweets in jars used to set me off....
Drinks came in glass bottles - no Coke for us - Ginger Beer, Dandelion and Burdock and raspberry soda. And when we'd finished we took the bottles back and got some money - 'the deposit'. Sometimes we climbed over the sweetshop fence and got empty bottles out of the crates to claim a second 'deposit'.
As soon as he was old enough Mr Concept was subjected to slavery and mental torture in the form of shelling peas on a Sunday lunchtime and being forced to listen to 'Two-Way Family Favourites' on the 'Light Programme'. If any peas were found to be left in the pod he would also be made to listen to 'The Clitheroe Kid' and 'eat his greens'.
There was dog crap everywhere and we wore Fairisle jumpers and Balaclava hats. Oh Yes! No wonder we're all f***ing mad...
Mr Concept was always interested in how things worked, and fortunately there was a lot of 'Army Surplus' equipment around to be experimented on... Radios and telephones and the like... With these things anything was possible! And things were changing fast - Sputnik, Telstar, Man on the Moon, The Beatles, Teddy Boys, Mods & Rockers, Flower Power...
On 4th May 1967 Mr Concept bought his first guitar from a teacher at his junior school for £2. Miss Hodson - Form Mistress Class 1N 1966-69. The guitar was a cheap acoustic one with nylon strings, wheras Miss Hodson was an expensive loud one with dark nylon stockings. She also gave guitar lessons - basically she had the whole guitar thing stitched up... Mr Concept began by playing the songs of the day. The main source of tuition was a book by Bert Weedon called 'Play Every Day' which contained such wonders as 'Bobby Shaftoe' (who, by the sound of it, was a bit of a bender...). Within months he was performing in front of live audiences at 'Concerts' given by his sister and friends to raise money for the sinister cult 'Animal Aid'. This was a front to a dark coven who raised kidnapped children as 'Barbara Woodhouse' clones.
The first recordings Mr Concept ever made were on a Philips EL3451. It had a 'Magic Eye' (not to be confused with a 'Come To Bed Eye') in the middle of the 'Stop' button which glowed more green the louder the input signal was. The recorder used to get really hot, which was comforting as we didn't have central heating. It could also be used as a P.A. amplifier and had a microphone input and speaker outputs. Most of my reels of tape came from the dustbins at BBC Radio Leicester's Epic House. The BBC had these special reels which came apart and the tape itself could be tipped out of the spool then the spool could be re-used... Mr Concept Snr used to pick up these huge flat pancakes of tape when he visited Epic House (he worked on another floor for a different company). To get the tape back onto a spool we would put the tape on an old LP record and switch the record player onto play. The tape would start to spew off the roll. We just let it fall over the bannister into a big pile at the bottom of the stairs. When it was all off the roll in a big pile we then rewound it back up the stairs onto a new tape recorder spool. Sometimes the tape would be covered in cigarette ash. It was no use trying to play the original recordings from the BBC - they'd been made at a higher speed and so played really s-l-o-w-l-y and couldn't be understood.
The EL3451 was always going wrong - the wheels kept slipping inside because some rubber bits didn't grip so Mr Concept replaced them with a cut up school rubber. It worked quite well. The main role of this machine was to record the Top 40 hits from the BBC on a Sunday evening. A microphone was placed near the radio in the front room of primordial Concept City and as well as the music it recorded the budgie tweeting away in the corner. The second role of this machine was to record farts.
During the early seventies Mr Concept carried on working through 'Play Every Day' and began 'jamming' with other crap musicians he'd 'met down the pub', mainly 12 bar blues stuff. Although it sounded awful Mr Concept learned about music - for instance a song is made up of say four of those bits, two other bits, then two of the first bits again, one new bit then one of the second bits then two of the first bits to finish off with before stopping. Oh shit! I just realised whilst typing this that if you count them there are twelve lots of 'bits' altogether. So that's why they call it a twelve bar blues! And I thought it meant something to do with pubs.... kuh! you learn something new every day.
In the late seventies something happened that changed everything : Punk Rock. Suddenly it didn't matter if you were crap! Everybody was in a band. (This is not meant to imply that everybody in a band was crap)
Mr Concept joined experimental electro outfit 'Cold Tap' (with Mark 'Paradiddle' Walters and the mysterious Jade Lex) using his home-made Minisonic Synthesiser, and later played guitar with 'Sticky Bob And The Klingons'. He also got a hair cut and a posh guitar.
Cold Tap experimenting
And so... through the medium of Punk Rock, the young Mr Concept slowly developed his skills and his circle of friends enough to flourish into the wonderful talent that you all know and love. Armed with these skills he laid the first foundation brick of CONCEPT CITY in 1979.
Concept fact! : Mr Concept has another name - 'Rob Grant'. He still sometimes uses it in posh company and for tax purposes.