The Loft

Curioso artículo publicado por The Guardian. Escribe Bill Prince, bajista original del grupo y actualmente periodista de éxito...

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A regular feature in the list-obsessed rock press is the portmanteau article "before they were famous". It's a fecund subject to be sure, and almost as entertaining as the "after they were famous" exposé - a speciality of the tabloid press. These are necessarily rarer. After all, it's not every day you discover that David Van Day, once of fun-sized 80s pop duo Dollar, is now working in a slightly less glamorous burger van.

But what if, instead of vertiginous decline, one's pop career is eclipsed by the life that followed? Last summer, I was forced to confront my tiny brush with 80s pop stardom, as the bass player with the Loft, when we reformed to play a couple of shows for a 20th anniversary repackaging of our only album, Once Round the Fair, itself a posthumous compilation of our two Creation singles and solitary BBC Radio 1 session, originally released following our acrimonious demise onstage at Hammersmith Palais in June 1985.

After we split, and a year or two fronting my own take on southern-fried boogie as the Wishing Stones, I pursued a journalistic career; first at the NME, later at Q magazine and, since 1997, at GQ, where I'm deputy editor. I've interviewed many bands without once wishing I was anywhere near a stage.

But, given the other three members of the Loft seemed happy to re-form, how could I decline the invitation to strap on my 70s Precision bass and join in the long strange trip down memory lane? Not that I had any intention of telling anyone at work. As a believer in flat hierarchies in the workplace, I wasn't about to lower myself into even the slightest depression among the twentysomething staff by announcing my return.

I wager the average GQ reader is not interested in the bare-bones recordings of the harbingers of indie-rock 20 years after the event. And if they are, they probably buy Word. So, thankfully, there was no question of GQ reviewing Magpie Eyes. I was able, instead, to commission GQ's and this paper's regular music columnist, Alexis Petridis, to write about the spurt of re-formations among 80s bands. Petridis came up with one of the best reason why middle-aged blokes were brushing up on the antic guitar-pop of their youth. The death in October 2004 of John Peel, a crucial figure in the careers of many of those bands, had reminded us all of our relatively short time on Earth. Reason surely to set aside differences, musical or otherwise, and play again in the fertile fields of our youth.

Which is why I succumbed to the heady aroma of Backstreet rehearsal rooms on the Holloway Road, and how the Loft stepped on to the stage of the Spitz club in fashionable Shoreditch last September, welcomed back by a crowd of new friends, old friends, and the obligatory presence of three excitable Japanese girls. And why am I writing about this now, eight months later? Well, by "old Loft" standards we've been gigging frantically: two in May alone. And we've recorded a new record - our first in 21 years. One single, Model Village, may not sound like much. But it increases by 40% the number of Loft originals recorded for release. Only three more new songs are needed now before, once again, we can combust on stage and return to obscurity.