20th Century Music Group

The Grøm of an Idea

In late 2003, Graham Gill (keyboards, 1979-81) had a brilliant idea. Why not reunite the classic line-up of the 20th Century Rock Band that had recorded the single Stand Up and be Counted in 1979? It would be the 25th Anniversary of that group's first gig, on 16th November 2004. Emails started flying in the early Spring of 2004, with old band members Allchorn, Simons and Matthews eagerly adding their support. And so began an international search to try and track down the rest of the group.

The issue of where to hold the Anniversary Gig was also an interesting question. Graham's family were now based in the Cotswolds, where he worked on digital maps. Mark Allchorn (lead vocals, 1978-80) was based near London in Kings Langley, where he taught history. Simon Matthews (drums, 1979-82) was now an art dealer in central London. Tony Simons (lead guitar, 1976-80) lectured in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. The two most likely venues seemed to be the Cotswolds or Sheffield; and in the end we went with Sheffield, because in addition to a venue and local PA hire options, there was a good support network of friends who could offer to put up families overnight.

Various rumours abounded that Mark Hammond (bass guitar, 1978-81) was working for an Automotive Software company, that was either in either Austria or Germany; or that he had embarked on a world tour and was currently in Australia; or that he had moved on from there, but was in India. John Roe (technical support, 1977-80) was now a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University in the USA. We could not find Dermot Boyle (blues guitar, 1979-80) anywhere on the Internet since his high-school days. Eventually, Mark Hammond got in touch to say that he needed to make up some extra days work in Germany and regretted that he could not take part. So we invited Dave Hobson (bass guitar, 1976-79), who was delighted to fill the position of bassist. Oddly, he had been just about to get in touch, as if some force were drawing us back together...

Song Sheets and Demo Tapes

How do you prepare for a gig? Well, it used to be a matter of writing down an order of play for the set, and that was it. Except, could we still even rembember the songs, after twenty five years? Probably not. So, we each had a trawl of our attics and came up with old bootleg cassette tapes that 20th Century used to record in each of our live concerts. Tony Simons had a kind of master cassette, onto which he had dubbed, over the years, the better performances of the band's live repertoire. This became the master for a series of demo tapes, that was circulated to the band members who had signed up for the reunion, which now included John Roe. By good fortune, he was currently on sabbatical leave from UPenn State and residing in Edinburgh, with his family. He was due to give a seminar in Newcastle on the day before the gig, so coming down to Sheffield from there would be easy. It felt good to have this kind of convergence, which always seemed to happen for us, as if it had been planned...

The next part was working out all the lyrics for the songs. These were not written down anywhere, so we had to rely on people's memories for some of the songs and go back to the demo tape for the rest. There were two difficulties with this approach. The quality of the original recording on the demo tape was variable, so sometimes a line of words was obscured by the other instruments. The other problem was with Mr Allchorn's variable recall of the said lyrics during live performances. When listening to the demo tape, you realised that a song would sometimes repeat half a verse in the wrong place. We put this down to the natural creative process of singing live, when the main thing is to engage with the audience. Still, we needed a more secure source of reference. Fortunately, backup copies of songs were eventually found. In particular, Sam Gibbs (lead and second guitar, 1977-79) and Jonny Griffiths (folk group, 1978-80) had re-recorded some of Sam's songs on an album called How Far? in the early 1990s. Bit by bit, we pieced the missing lines together.

The last part was working out the structure of each song. For the gig, we had one fewer guitarists than the classic line-up of the band. This meant that Tony would either have to grow extra fingers, or Graham would have to double up on the Moog for the harmony lines that used to be played by Dermot. Eventually, we had a working structure ready, with reminders of the song keys, backing vocal lines and any additional sound effects.

The Sound and Lightshow Set-Up

The morning of 27^th November had arrived (being the nearest Saturday to the actual anniversary that everyone could make). Various group members and their families had set off in the early morning by car from all over the UK, some stopping overnight en route. Dave drove up from Worthing, Mark from Kings Langley, Simon from London, Graham from the Cotswolds, John came by train from Newcastle and Mike Stone from Cambridge. Tony only had to walk across the road, which was one advantage of organising the reunion. We held the gig in Christ Church, Fulwood, on the western edge of Sheffield.

In the end, we had decided to hire a PA rig from a local Sheffield company, called Avid AV, which provided a turnkey solution, rather than dig around in people's attics and garages to try to find the remains of the original 1980s PA system that Mark had built. We were impressed by the professionalism of Robert Beck and the installation team from Avid, who gave us a 3.5kW rig for around 300 quid. The most important thing was that the church buildings had to be left in the original state after the gig, which they were careful to ensure. Mike Stone (technical support, 1977-80) offered to provide a full lighting rig, which he brought with him, in his car, from Cambridge. This included four 600W spotlights with zoom and barn doors, three 2.5m high stands (one a T-bar holding two spots) and four 13-15amp tail lights.

From about 10am in the morning, members started showing up. It seemed like an unbelievably early hour to get to Sheffield, but such was the commitment of the group, and everyone wanted to get started as early as possible. Before lunchtime, John was working with the Avid team on the use of the sound desk, and Mike was nearly set up with his lights. From about 11am, it was possible to start rehearsing.

How Does That Bit Go Again?

The church was very cold, so we all started out in our coats and sweaters. Songs selected for the gig included Stand Up and Be Counted, He is the One, and a barnstormer written by an early incarnation of the group, called Help Me. Although we couldn't remember who had written this, it had the advantage of offering a solo break for just about every musician in the band. So, this was a good warm-up piece; except that we couldn't make up our minds about the order of the solos. Fortunately, the song structure chart solved this argument.

We prepared a few of our favourite covers from After the Fire, such as One Rule for You, Listen to Me and the instrumental number we always used as an opener, Joy, which featured the mini-Moog. As lunchtime approached, everyone had arrived and we made an exodus down the road to Tony's house, where Penny had kindly provided an endless lunch of freshly made wholesome vegetable and spicy lentil soups and warmed bread rolls. It was hard to tear oneself away again, but in the end we had to return to the rehearsal, armed with bottles of water. By this time, the church was warming up and daylight was fading, so Mike could experiment a bit with the lights.

The problem posed by the double guitar solo in The King Will Come was solved by having Graham play the harmony line on the Moog. When we got to another popular self-penned number, Masquerade, there was the issue of a tricky bass guitar link at the end of each chorus, which deliberately played against the key of the chord, which eventually resolved to match the bass note. Now, Dave was doing a stirling job filling in for Mark Hammond in songs he had never played before, during the 1970s, but somehow could not quite get this link right. "How does that bit go again?", he would say. We would repeat the section and the line still would not settle. Eventually, Tony pointed out, helpfully: "Dave, you wrote this song, remember?" and this seemed to jog the memory sufficiently.

Finally, we had gone through each number enough to feel that we might actually make it through the gig. We were tired, and it was approaching 6pm, so we clocked off to have supper at Tony and Penny's again. This was a buffet of ham and salad, with pizza for the kids, of which we had amassed a considerable number. We made sure there was lots to go round, as Mark Allchorn had earlier replied to a message about possible dietary requirements with: "Food arrangements sound great; plenty of it as I still eat like a horse...", no doubt referring to an historic hot dog contest.