Scientists

Scheduled
Friday, 21 September 1984, "Garage Box", 22:15 - 22:45

Line up
Kim Salmon – vocals, guitar; Tony Thewlis – guitar; Boris Sujdovic – bass; Brett Rixon – drums

Set list
00 Backward man

Recording
Unknown

Other info
At the time, it seemed as if none of us did anything for the first year in the UK but stand in queues and pay exorbitant VAT- inflated prices when we got to the end of them. In retrospect, and at the risk of boasting, I can only be amazed at how far we got in that small amount of time. Firstly, we had a local release for Blood Red River on Rough Trade. Next we virtually walked into All Trade Booking Agency and got a whole stack of shows at places like Dingwalls, The Electric Ballroom, The Lyceum and The Clarendon Garage. As well, Tony and I rather cheekily wrote Kid Congo a letter telling him we were going to support the Gun Club on their UK tour. There was no talk of this with the agency - we just did it 'off the bat' and that seemed to clinch it taking care of exposure over the rest of England for us. The next step was for the Dutch fellow previously mentioned [Willem Venema – P@ndora] to walk in to All Trade and see our photo and then book us into Futurama in Belgium and the Pandora's Box festival in Rotterdam. At Pandora's Box we found ourselves in front of a huge jampacked room which moved back a full metre the moment we launched into our set. After that we got our picture taken a lot and I ended up having to do loads of interviews for foreign mags that I would never be able to read unless they were in the three sentences of Deutsche that I know. As Boris pointed out to me, this gig set us up for Holland and Belgium over the next couple of years. It wasn't long after these festivals that we made it to Paris and then Hamburg.
Back in the UK, our audience at this stage was comprised partly from the network of Cramps and Gun Club fans who had been alerted to our existence by the tireless efforts of Scotsman and Next Big Thing writer Lindsay Hutton and partly from a curiosity amongst punters as to what kind of act could draw the particular kind of adjective from the ink of the three British trade papers, NME, Sounds and Melody Maker, that we did. I was quite happy at that stage of my life to be referred to as the "lowest form of uncaring anti-social filth" in what amounted to a music tabloid with a circulation of hundreds of thousands so long as they meant we were great. We got quite a bit of coverage and most of it was positive in that kind of way. At Pandora's Box a Belgian chap called Paul Delnoy asked if he could make a record with us on his label. He did not seem to have enough English to understand 'no' (we were tied up contractually) which is why we ended up in Brussels at the end of the year trying to make up another record from scratch that didn't overlap with the material we were working on for our next proper album. (http://www.citadel-records.com/mailorder/600/discs/scient.html)