Awesome. It was awesome. We made posters ourselves, sometimes drawn with ink or hand painted, and took them to the printers before sticking them up with blue tack in the local newsagents and cafes. We sent out hand written letters to our fan base after we collected home addresses. Best of all we waited for that phone call from a prospective agent, manager of record company on the phone at home in a house. And the phone was stuck in the wall with a curly wire.
My bands – like many – Indian Runner and Kaikoura between 1996 and 2000 met up and practised in the front room at my mum’s house with our coats on because she couldn’t afford to keep the heating on. The other alternative being upstairs in the pub in exchange for a monthly gig.
For us that meant the Unicorn in Preston along from the Moorbrook in Preston – a pub which did pea soup at lunchtime and kept two lively boxer dogs between the toilets and the main lounge. Going to relieve yourself meant an exercise in dog calming or be jumped upon with hefty paws and slobbering jaws on your ear. Friendly of course but intimidating.
Some of the time we funded ourselves by signing on the dole for unemployment benefit which we took as a basic income scheme on principle designed for serious musicians – who were brilliant of course – wanting to get somewhere with their original songs.
The idea was that you got yourself a set of ten killer songs together, a fan base and regular gigs in Manchester to get a reputation and attract record company interest. Indian Runner started to alternate fortnightly gigs with another band called Haven at the Blue Car Cafe in Stockport. We played all original music and our crowd became excited at gigs – not one of them talked throught the set or spent their time on their mobile phones because they didn’t have any modile phones
Nobody asked us to play Sweet Caroline or told us how we should play and what we really needed to do. They trusted us to write our own songs. They wanted us to write our own songs which sounded like us.
There was no self marketing on twitter, Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, Spotify or any of it we simply went into a recording studio, made a CD and sent it to a contacts list – which worked. And not everybody was a musician online trying to make it with a budget and one of millions of millions of uploaded songs.
The ultimate dream was to be heard playing in Night and Day or wherever and get a record made – even if it was actually a plastic throwaway CD destined for Burscough car boot sale in 2022 or Vinyl Exchange – we still thought of it as a record. A hit record. A number one album.
Haven eventually ended up on Top of the Pops, in the middle of the New Musical Express magazine, touring the likes of Japan and Germany with hit songs played on Radio One. They did it all without the need for Facebook posts and an Electronic Press Kit.
Indian Runner on the other hand did eventually get that phonecall from the Smiths manager asking him to join his bands and practice upstairs at Night and Day as well as a set of DJs from Picadilly Radio offering us the chance to promote a song.
Oh but we’d split up and fallen out by then.
The Music Workers Diary 
Awesome memories and reflections. A great read. That’s some last line…..
LikeLike