Words by Luke Murphy
It's almost ten years to the day since Brutalligators first stepped into a rehearsal space and started as a band. I don't think we can even class ourselves as a 'never-quite made it' band, as we've always been so far from the levels of banddom that involve labels you've heard, tour supports, or big stages that other bands seem to find easy. Instead, we've settled for selling out fifty-cap rooms a handful of times, broken down vans, and occasionally reaching a couple of thousand monthly streams on god-awful streaming platforms. But hey, we've got some stories from consistently failing to do anything, so I thought I'd start writing them down…
The band was never meant to happen. Or at least, not this band. In 2016 I went to Indiefjord in Norway for the first time and flew home a broken husk of a person, determined to start the most twee indie-pop band the UK had ever seen. Because who wouldn't want a faded photocopy of Belle and Sebastian, fronted by a jaded ex-musical theatre performer whose only accolade was playing a naked bat-child in the Australian premiere of a musical nobody knew or cared about?
What I got instead was an emo band.
I met Paul, the guitarist and resident musical wunderkind of Brutalligators, while I was trying to shill tickets for a folk-punk singer in our small town. He ran a tiny, struggling record shop in Hitchin, trying to sell Fucked Up and The Hold Steady records to a town whose idea of a big night out was a Bon Jovi cover band. (We ended up stealing their drummer. They were wasting his talents, but paying him way better than we ever could.)
I went in to extol the virtues of Will Varley and somehow came out the other side nerding out about emo bands, with Paul talking me into booking a rehearsal room to 'jam'. My guitar playing at that point was the same three chords on a loop, and my singing was my best Smith Street Band impression: the thickest Australian accent I could muster, slightly off-key. I still have no idea how, but we wrote three songs in two hours. So much for twee.
I talked Rhys into giving up Bon Jovi and a semi-successful acoustic career playing every pub in Hertfordshire, and made a deal with Simo that I'd pay for their train up from London if they'd lend us their bass for at least a month. Somehow, we managed to convince Simo to stick around, and I even stopped funding their train travel at some point, much to their chagrin. And just like that, we had something resembling a band.
The joy of starting a band when you're all in your thirties (Rhys was technically in his mid-twenties, but he's had the soul of a jaded forty-year-old since the day I met him) is that you don't have to put up with the bullshit you tolerated in your twenties. I'd spent a couple of years in Simo's previous band, Castle Radio, working the absolute dive circuit of semi-pay-to-play showcase gigs in London. Nothing says 'promotion' like a bill of bands who sound nothing like each other, and a quid for every ticket you sell, as long as you sell at least twenty. So if fifty of our friends, who couldn't give two shits about our music, turned up and paid to watch us struggle through half an hour of Mumford & Sons meets Funeral for a Friend, we'd walk away with thirty pounds. Between five of us. After driving 40 miles into London, paying twenty quid for parking, and praying nobody smashed a window to get at my collection of empty Mentos packets.
The dream was alive.
So I approached Brutalligators like the savvy band manager I had zero experience being. With all the unearned confidence of a straight(ish) white man(ish), I booked our first headline show myself. Sure, we barely had twenty minutes of songs. And yes, the venue hadn't hosted a gig in what I'm pretty sure was five years. But I could be my own Tony Wilson and build our own scene, even if it was mostly friends and colleagues who couldn't care less about the emo renaissance that was clearly just around the corner.
Somehow, we sold about sixty tickets to that first show at The Macbeth in Hoxton. I'd like to think people saw the potential in a band with the stupidest name since Danananananananananakroyd. More likely it was because we'd convinced Stephen from Tellison to open for us. How, I'm still not entirely sure. Partly guilt, I think, after I'd bought nearly a hundred copies of their latest record for my first ill-fated vinyl subscription. Partly because the venue was a two-minute walk from his house. The problem with booking someone way better than you as your support act is that two songs into your set, half the room leaves.
We played our little middle-aged hearts out anyway. We made our way through five or six songs about recycled heartbreak and bad decisions in a semi-competent way to a half-full room of nonplussed faces staring back at us. I'd almost figured out my shitty multi-effects pedal, which had the excellent feature of turning into a wah if you stamped on the tuner too hard, transforming us mid-song into some kind of jazz-funk emo odyssey. And because we still didn't have enough songs to fill a set, we chucked in a Promise Ring cover in the vague hope of earning some obscure emo credibility.
As we packed up and headed out to check whether anyone had stolen my Mentos, I caught Stephen's eye at the back of the room. He's the nicest man in emo, so I knew he'd give my fragile ego the validation it so desperately needed.
"Nice Promise Ring cover."
That was about the most he could manage. So at least we'd leveled up our obscure emo credibility by one.
