overlap

In 1998 I was working for probably the worst people-manager it's ever been my misfortune to encounter, and I count my subsequent blessings on a regular basis. Around this time I came across an album review on the teletext service of Channel4, that compared something to one of my favourite bands, and one I'd initially encountered in a review of their debut album in exactly the same place. Auspicious beginnings, and one of the few times I've been tempted to buy an album purely on reputation without ever hearing anything.

I picked up this album in my lunchtime of the monday it was released, stuck it in my bag and forgot about it, returning to work for one of those 9-5 days in the office that finished around 9.45 - yes, quite! When I finally did get home I was shattered and just wanted to sleep, but figured I'd stick the album on and probably drift off before the second track got going. But though it sounded little like what it had been compared to, one fantastic song that kept me awake followed another until I'd gone through the album twice.

The album sleeve only had the first names of the band and postage stamp-sized head and shoulders pictures, nothing in the way of history or background information, and much as I came to love the album and force copies of it on friends of mine as I built up a small stock of them at ridiculous prices from bargain bins, there was no sign of further material in the shops and no trace of the band members either.

Several years later, and with the internet gradually becoming a commonplace, I tracked down a reference to an EP that had followed the album, but again never saw a copy anywhere.

Fast forward to six months or so ago, and in the middle of some late night websurfing, I once again searched for the band on the offchance the EP might turn up on some secondhand music selling site or similar, or there might be some other reference to the band or any of its members out there. To say I was surprised to find the band now had its own website is an understatement – like the Spanish Inquisition, I really wasn't expecting that.

Half an hour later I'd downloaded a couple of tracks that were entirely new to me and a couple of demo versions of stuff I did know, and fired off an email to the band. A handful of emails went back and forth, with the news that that album was possibly going to be re-released, and that a compilation of other stuff was also in the works. Hallebloodylujah.

And so it was that a couple of weeks ago I took the afternoon off to go to London, take in most of Antony Gormley's Event Horizon from a certain distance, and watch the band do their first live performance in seven years. There are no further shows on the agenda at this point.

That sort of gig is always going to be easy to build up into something special that'll never live up to the pressure of high expectations, and two days prior to the gig spent going 'Wow, I'm finally going to get to see…' possibly didn't help. And even with half a dozen rehearsals, a band that hadn't played in anger in years was always going to be an interesting proposition rather than the slick, efficient machine of a regularly touring act in the middle of a sequence of gigs over consecutive nights. With a half and half mix of familiar songs and material new to me, it was great to finally get to see the songs given life outside my CD player.

I've been lucky enough to meet virtually all my musical heroes, and seen almost every band I could wish to see – and that's an awful lot of people – so I can take or leave chatting with people I don't really know, and I got over being starstruck many years ago. Given the way this had become the great mysterious lost act that I'd been searching for more info about for all these years, I had to say hello in person when I got the chance despite my half-plan to leave straight after their set and get on my way home. After all, as they were the support band, I stood a decent chance of getting home before the sun came up for once.

Enough post-gig practice at asking relevant questions (in order a) future plans, b) recent past and developments, c) anything else that comes to mind) meant that I got to find out a little about the band's origins, that the EP probably hadn't even made it into the shops, that this compilation is of material that largely predates the first album and some other stuff about how the songwriting process works in their case.

As a very wise person once said, if you've got the songs then you've got the songs and you can't argue with that. With a fresh copy of this 'new' CD of the lost material safe on my passenger seat as I made my way home, just for once I wished I had a CD player in the car, but I was equally aware how the moral of this story is that with enough patience and persistence, there's a lot of things that can happen if you don't give up hope, and stick with something! We got there in the end.