My Exciting Life In ROCK (part 3): May 1988 - Deacon’s School Hall, Peterborough

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Undeterred by the fact that several hundred people had made their answer VERY clear and precise - "NO" - when asked if they'd like to see more of The Masters Of Nothing, we decided to PLOUGH BRAVELY ON.

This would become a pattern that has remained with me to this day.

Our next chance for glory came in a particular WHITE HOT Furnace Of Perfomance where many of the biggest bands of today, such as Take That, were first FORGED - the School Assembly. At our school week one class would be given an Important Topic every week and CHARGED with explaining this to their peers. Traditionally this would consist of Improving Readings, Musical Recitals and/or a bit of an old PRAYER, but when it was the turn of the sixth formers a small amount of leeway was allowed.

This generally resulted in Monty Python Sketches and people pretending to be Rik Mayall SQUEEZED vaguely into an explanation of Caring For Friends or Personal Hygiene, usually featuring, for some reason, the cast of SCOOBY DOO. This did not go down very well with the sterner members of staff, and so by the time it was the turn of MY class the whole CONCEPT was on probabation.

We thus decided to explore the theme of "Growing Up" with a rude poem, a Monty Python sketch featuring The Scooby Doo Gang and, as the grand climax, a performance by The Masters Of Nothing. Since our "triumph" at the Comic Relief gig we'd actually worked out a couple more songs and, although none of them were specically ABOUT growing up surely, one might argue, NOTHING was more expressive of adolescence than three idiots titting about with instruments they couldn't play, SHOUTING?

Thus it was that our compere, THE HEAD GIRL, came onstage after a particularly haphazard take on The Spanish Insquisition and said "There are many problems encountered in growing up, like spots, boyfriends and girlfriends, and having your head cut off. So here are The Masters Of Nothing to sing a song about decapitation."

We LEAPT out and launched into a song called "Decapitated Blues". The first verse went like this:

When I woke up this morning and I thought I should be dead
Because when I woke up this morning I found I had no head
My head had gone off to live with some other body instead

... and carried on in pretty much the same vein with Robin changing the casio keyboard drum pattern every so often and Mileage making a NOISE on the - still untuned - guitar. It was GRATE! The Kids, who could sense this was taking daftness to a WHOLE new level gave us BIG cheers and we were AMAZED to see that even Mr Galvin, the TERRIFYING English Teacher who SCREAMED at us if we were late, was DOUBLED over with laughter.

The very next day a MEMO was issued that was read out to every class. From now on TEACHERS ONLY would be in charge of the content of School Assembly. We had BROKEN the SYSTEM - ROCK AND ROLL!

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