Grow Up recorded their debut EP Stay Awake at Graveyard Studio on 17 February 1979. After a bad experience with a bass player who famously strolled into a gig during the closing song of a set, I took to bass and Roger Blackburn came in as guitarist. Soon Richard's younger brother Steven joined in on trombone, and then drummer John MacDonald. We performed as a duo for a while, with Richard playing toy accordion and bits of percussion besides the sax. So I got together with saxophonist Richard Westwood. 'When I started writing my own songs Steve Solamar didn't want to incorporate them into the Objects' set. By 1979, however, the precocious guitarist was growing restless. Everyone in the band has freshness, they're all 20 or under, and they play effectively without in any way being virtuosos.'īisset-Smith remained with Spherical Objects for two years, recording the albums Past & Parcel and Elliptical Optimism. I found that musicians of my own age were very cliché-ridden so I looked for younger musicians where the chances of them being less spoilt were greater. In fact Solamar knew exactly what he was doing, telling Paul Morley in an NME interview: 'I've been in bands long enough to know now what I want, and I've got reasonably strong ideas on how I want to present it. I turned up for the audition with an acoustic 12 string.' 'I think he took me on as lead guitarist mainly because I couldn't have played a conventional solo if I'd tried. I refused, and said they were treating me like a freak show.'Īt about the same time Bisset-Smith was invited to audition for Spherical Objects, a new band being put together by songwriter and Electric Circus deejay Steve Solamar. The inclusion of tent poles in the list of instruments for this gig made the front page of the Manchester Evening News, and local current affairs programme Look North asked me to play on their evening show. I performed under the name Pride, and playing part-composed, part-improvised pieces for piano and kettle, as well as cymbals, tent poles, paint tins, treble viol and 12 string guitar.
My first ever public appearance was at one of these eclectic nights, with The Fall headlining.
It was a fertile brew of different energies, and there were regular MMC gig nights at the Band on the Wall on Swan Street.
'The core of the MMC then included Dick Witts (percussion, and soon to form The Passage), Trevor Wishart (electro-acoustic composer and extraordinary vocal improviser), Simon Holt (art student and serialist composer) and Tony Friel (bass with The Fall, cello with the Collective). In 1978, aged just seventeen, John Bisset-Smith was a student at Rochdale Art College, and an early member of the Manchester Musician's Collective. One of the most talented and prolific bands on cult Manchester label Object Music, precocious avant-pop group Grow-Up released a pair of great lost albums, drawing comparisons with XTC, Beefheart and even Weimar cabaret, yet ultimately sounding like no-one else.
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