CABLE
‘Indie Heaven’ is littered with the corpses of valiant heroes, struck down in their prime. I mean, it’s kind of the point of all this. But at the same time, I can’t think of any band who deserved better than Derby noizinks, Cable. Beloved by all who knew them, struck down in their prime by contemptuous greed - even by the standards of the music industry - the band ended their all too brief existence in 1999. Rarely has a week gone by in the 21 years since where I haven’t blasted out at least one of their records, and I still yearn to see them play live again. That said, this being 2020 at the time of writing, I yearn to see anyone play live again.
I managed to track down Darius Hinks (guitar), Pete Darrington (bass) and Richie Mills (drums) for a natter. And the band were kind enough to give me some photos from their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reformation in 2012 to pepper throughout this piece. They’re by Brian Whar, by the way.
Right. Shall we start at the beginning? How did Cable come to be?
Darius: “Matt [Bagguley, vocals and guitar] and I met at a sixth form college in the rock capital of the universe, Nuneaton. We started jamming in a school hall trying to cover Mudhoney songs and managing to make them even messier than the originals. We ended up going to the same university, in Derby, and spent all of our time trying to get a band off the ground instead of studying. We were at the lovely old art college on Green Lane and got pally with another local band, Bivouac, who were doing well, getting press and gigs, so we started writing our own songs and it progressed from there. Our original rhythm section quit on the eve of a gig, so Pete stepped in to help and then we wouldn’t let him leave. Richie joined just after we recorded our first album, replacing Neil Cooper, who went on to drum with Therapy?”
Pete: “I had been working at a local rehearsal studio that had an 8-track recording setup - I was in charge of recording the ‘live’ demos there. Cable came in and recorded every song they had over a weekend. It was long hours and all done live and they recorded something like 15 songs over the Saturday and Sunday. There was no pro-tools or anything like that in those days, it was all to tape and if you made a mistake you did it again. Anyway, a couple of days after I recorded all their songs, Darius phoned me and asked if I could stand in for a bunch of gigs as their bass player and drummer had quit right after the demo. I said ‘yes’ and said I knew a good drummer who could also ‘stand in’ - which was Neil. If I hadn’t had listened to all their songs about 50 times over the weekend, I probably would have failed the audition. I took Neil to meet Matt and Darius at the pub and we said we’d give it a go. We had one rehearsal the afternoon of the gig, which was at the Princess Charlotte in Leicester, and then we just went out and smashed it. I remember Matt fell over backwards into the drum kit during the last song and it all collapsed in a punk rock sort of way. We were still trying to pick ourselves out of the tangled mess on stage when Gaz Roberts who ran Krunch! Records got up on the stage and offered us our first deal. We ended up doing two 7” records with him.”
That’s fitting. I've never met a single person, ever, with a negative opinion of Cable. They might not know of Cable, but anyone who does is a fan. Why do you reckon this is?
Darius: “Hard to say. Apart from Richie, and Neil before him, none of us really knew how to play, so maybe that forced us down avenues more proficient musicians would avoid? Also, Matt always had an ear for a killer tune. I think it’s a real shame he never wrote any songs after Cable went belly up.”
Pete: “I had been trying for a couple of years to learn to play ‘properly’ from a book that taught you scales and progressions and all that stuff, so when I started playing in Cable it was a total breath of fresh air. These two guys had no idea about the ‘rules’ but they were coming up with these amazing riffs and chords, all through experimentation. In the early days I would ask, ‘what chords are you playing?’, or ‘what time signature is that?’ and they didn’t know. They’d just say ‘I don’t know, I’m doing this’ and play something mental. It was clearly something very raw and creative in that sense, so I think that’s why what we did stands out as something that broke the mould - but really we didn’t know what shape the mould was in the first place. Being off the wall is great, but at the core, you need some great solid drumming to keep it all nailed down and something for the bass player to lock into. I felt very fortunate to have had that. Neil and Richie are without fail the two greatest drummers I’ve ever played with - and I’ve been in quite a few bands before and since Cable. They have that rare talent which is not just being great drummers, but serving the song.”
Richie: “I came from a thrash metal background, so had never heard of Cable, nor any of the bands that Cable had listed as influences in their ‘Drummer Wanted’ ad. However, as a complete outsider, I was instantly drawn to the band’s sound. I think that says something about everyone else who either stumbled across the band, or grew up with them.”
So your debut album, Down-Lift the Up-Trodden, comes out in 1996. You go on tour with AC Acoustics, then your tour bus is hit by a drunk-driver at high-speed, flipping the car onto the roof. Just how bad was it?
Darius: “I can’t remember anything until I woke up in hospital, but the others tell me it was pretty bad…”
Pete: “I thought it was the end of the group for a few days. Darius didn’t even seem to know he was in a band for about 48 hours. How none of us were seriously injured is a miracle. We were parked up, counting the money out from that night’s show and paying our crew, when a car hit us from behind at 70mph on a 30mph street. The van was flipped upside down and we had to smash the windscreen to get out. I had nightmares about it for months. The sound of the crash and all the stuff flying about in slow motion. The disorientation. I remember I was covered in random stuff like merch and our kit and I stood up and couldn’t figure out why the seats were above my head. Matt was shouting that Darius wouldn’t wake up. It was like something from the first few minutes of a Casualty episode.”
Richie: “I wasn’t in the band at this point, but i do remember it happened close to me joining the band, and Darius telling me he couldn’t remember his own name for a minute…”
Christ. Down-Lift the Up-Trodden was produced by the legend that is John Robb. What do you remember about working with him? Did he wear his gold suit while recording you?
Darius: “He always wears his gold suit under his normal clothes. He’s basically a musical superhero. He was the first proper producer we’d worked with, so I remember being a bit in awe of him. I remember being impressed that he liked reading James Joyce. He seemed to really know his stuff and I love the sound he got on the record. He recorded us pretty much live with maybe a few overdubs, so we got the raw, [Steve] Albini kind of sound we were after.”
Pete: “John is a character. He’s woven into the tapestry of the punk rock underground of this country. I don’t think you could call him a producer in the modern sense of the word. He never touched the desk - he would just use the intercom to tell us we needed to play it again, but this time it needed to be faster or more intense. But he did coax the record out of us that we wanted to make, which was no mean feat because we were very inexperienced at making records. A guy called John Grey engineered the recording though and I hope he went on to do brilliant things because he was very good.”
John Peel played Down-Lift the Up-Trodden in full on his show. Then he called you mid-show to offer you a session. What was your relationship with John like?
Darius: “We met him a few times but I was always too shy around him to say much. He was my hero growing up. When he first played ‘Sale of the Century’ on his show I was at my parent’s house near Birmingham, in my old bedroom, and it was such an incredible moment. It’s 25 years ago now, but I can still remember it so vividly. It was mind blowing hearing him say that he loved our record. We grabbed him at a festival one time, when we were all pretty drunk, and I managed to speak almost a whole sentence. I doubt we’d have had any kind of career if it wasn’t for him playing our records and giving us sessions. I still feel sad he’s not around.”
Pete: “I was the only person who had a phone, so he called me. My phone number was on the back of the record. It was 1994 and we’d just finished uni and were on the dole, so having an actual land line was quite rare. We only had a phone because my partner actually had landed a proper job and we needed to be contactable. At the time you never knew what [John] was going to play, but I always listened to the programme. Suddenly he said, ‘Our William always asks if there’s something good in the post this week, and for once I could say a definite yes’, and then ‘Sale of the Century’ came on. I shat myself. While the song was playing, the phone rang and naturally I thought it was a mate calling to tell me we were on John Peel. I picked the phone up and it was Peely himself. I thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre that night. He offered us a session right there and then and told me Alison [Howe], his producer, would give us a ring to sort the date out. Then he said he had to go as he needed to put the next record on! Matt only lived at the top of my road at the time and I ran round to his flat and banged on the door to tell him. It was something I’d dreamed of happening since I’d been about 13. ‘Teenage dreams, so hard to beat’, as it says on his headstone…”
Richie: “The initial interaction between Peel and the band was before my time, and I guess being so ‘metal’ I didn't really appreciate his status as the god-like musical pillar like I do now. I do remember sitting in the field at Phoenix Festival in 1996 one night with some mates after Cable had played, and he slumped down next to us in the grass and said , “hello Richie”. My friends were just open-mouthed. I just didn’t appreciate the gravity of it all until it was too late. I still think about him quite a bit.”
As someone who was in a band that John played on his show, I can relate. Now then, the spacesuit in the 'Arthur Walker' video. Where on earth - no pun intended - does one get a spacesuit from?
Pete: “I honestly don’t know. The fellas [Nick Abrahams and Mikey Tomkins from production company Trash 2000] that made that video were so resourceful it was ridiculous. They made all the sets for about a quid and the spaceship out of a strimmer. They also made the Cable light up ‘letters’ that we took on tour with us for years after that. I think the spacesuit hire was about 90% of the budget. They had that Blake’s 7 mentality that turned pipe cleaners into space ship control rooms. They did a video for Bis after that, which had them being menaced by a giant cat. I’d like to think they do the effects on Star Wars now.”
Remarkably, for the time anyway, Sprite used your song ‘Freeze The Atlantic’ on a TV advert. How did that come about? And do you even like it because I think it's fucking horrible…
Darius: “Obey your thirst. Sprite is the amber nectar. Drink Sprite.”
Pete: “We played a show at The Garage in London and our A&R at our publisher at Chrysalis, a lovely lady called Cheryl [Robson] introduced us to someone from Coca Cola marketing that wanted to use our song. We were quite dismissive to them and thought, ‘yeah, whatever’. I think we thought it was a joke or would never happen. Then the advert came on the telly. Our royalties were great for about 6 weeks! I remember they offered to ‘sponsor’ a big tour, but said we’d have to have these Sprite banners behind us. We told them to fuck off’. We never heard from them again.”
The record that song is taken from is When Animals Attack. It was produced by Kramer, from the Butthole Surfers and the Shimmy-Disc label. What are your memories?
Darius: “His whole studio had the most amazing shagpile carpet. The recording sessions were a bit fraught and we were out in the arse end of New Jersey, but I have amazing memories of hanging out in New York with him in the evenings, meeting Shimmy-Disc legends like Dogbowl and When People were Shorter and Lived Near the Water. Kramer is an incredible character so it was brilliant meeting him and his weirdo music pals.”
Pete: “I had no idea Richie had found the experience so difficult until recently. I thought he was joking. I was quite dismissive when he said this before and I owe him an apology. I think in hindsight, we were probably too in awe of him because we’d grown up listening to Galaxie 500 and the like. For that reason, Richie was able to be more objective about how the record was actually going at the time. That record could have been better. Kramer was letting us ‘be ourselves’ at a time when we probably needed some real guidance to make the record we wanted to make. Is he a bad producer? No, he just probably wasn’t the sort of guru we needed at the time. I know When Animals Attack is a fan favourite, but for me, Sub-Lingual is the best Cable record. It’s the reason I’ve continued to work with Paul Tipler since then.”
Richie: “I'll tread carefully around this one, as we’ve fallen out over this before. I personally didn’t really enjoy the process - mainly down to the fact I'd only been in the band for five minutes and was really still trying to find myself within it. I didn’t click with Kramer’s work ethic. Too much weed and not enough attention. We had often recorded all day with his engineer, and then he’d show up later on in the day and either dug what we’d done or not. That’s 100% my opinion, and not at all the other guys’. Being in America for the first time was fun though. I’d never actually left the UK before that other than a day trip to France!”
What do you remember about the Brixton Prison show, which you recorded for an EP in 1997? What are the logistics of arranging a show in a prison?
Pete: “It was a surreal and very humbling experience. The thing I’ll never forget is the gratitude from the prisoners that a rock band had wanted to come and play for them. The security was very intense. We had to leave all our personal belongings at the gate and all our kit was thoroughly searched on the way in and out. We were chaperoned by guards the whole time. The gig took place in the chapel. We knew they wouldn’t know any of our songs, so we dropped a couple of Johnny Cash numbers into the set, hoping they would resonate. The audience were so appreciative, not at all hostile. More bands should play in prisons. I know the people there are serving sentences for serious crimes, but we shouldn’t ever forget that they’re people.”
Richie: “It was as surreal as it sounds. Proper prison full of proper convicts... of all types. Folk in for petty crimes to murder. I think we tried Broadmoor as option number one. Glad we didn’t do that.”
I have to ask about the legal dispute that led to the end of the band. Could you walk through that for anyone who might not be aware of it? How did you eventually get out of that mess?
Darius: “We fired a manager which put us in breach of a stupid contract we’d stupidly signed. He claimed we were about to be the next U2 and sued us for an appropriate sum. We pratted around in court, thinking we couldn’t lose. Then we lost. As part of the settlement, we were unable to perform together again. Our publishers, Chrysalis, stepped in to pay a lot of the money off, but we still went away with debts and a bad taste in our mouths. I think Sub-Lingual - which was just about to be released - could have brought us to a wider audience, but who can say.”
Pete: “Like Darius says, we put the nail in the coffin of the band on day one and we were in and out of court for pretty much the whole of our career because of it. We signed a five year contract with the bloke that managed the Wedding Present - because, well, The Wedding Present were doing pretty well in our eyes. Only when we toured with the Weddoes, it became obvious that they managed themselves and this guy was pretty much an accountant for them. Not what we needed. We told him we needed someone who was more hands on and we’d like to leave the company. We’d found someone who suited our needs better. He was fine at first, we offered him a favourable chunk of record company money as severance. Then he spoke to a solicitor who told him to take us to the cleaners and we found a writ waiting for us when we got back off a tour. In the end he got a big settlement that allowed us out of the contract, but there was a clause in the settlement that said he could still take 20% of our earnings until something like 2005 if we continued as Cable. We were now skint and didn’t want to give him another penny. The only way to stop him getting more money was to end the group.”
Are you still angry about it? You unquestionably split way before your time…
Darius: “I sulked for about a year, but I can be a bit more philosophical about the whole thing now. We got to arse around in a band for nearly ten years, travelling the world, meeting our heroes and getting paid for it. Not many people get to do that. It’s a shame it ended the way it did but I mainly have happy memories of Cable.”
Pete: “Sadly, that’s show business. There’s always someone waiting to sue you when you’ve got financial backing. I was broken for about a year as well. I didn’t even think about being involved in music for several years. Now I look back and think we had a brilliant time, made some records that are special to some people’s ears and got away with doing what people in a band dream of for the best part of 10 years. If there’s one thing I do regret, it’s not staying as close to the other members of the band as I could have. We had our differences and our ups and downs as people, but we went through a lot together and then drifted apart.”
Richie: “I think we were all angry, and shell-shocked at the same time. It shouldn’t have happened that way.”
Well, here’s an idea. Why not reform now! C’mon!
Darius: “We live quite far apart. Matt’s in Oslo working as a translator, but we still keep in touch. We even reformed in 2013 for a few shows, which was amazing and probably even more fun than the gigs we did in the ‘90s, but I can’t see it happening again. We’re all very old and it could be dangerous.”
Pete: “We were a great band and the creative chemistry was something special and there’s still a lot of love for the band. I got a proper job in the broadcast industry as an engineer and raised a family, while playing in bands and putting records out for fun - but I would do it again, sure, especially as the pressure is long gone.”
Richie: “Like Darius said... we are a lot older than we were at our prime. The idea of playing drums like that again makes me wince! I’m paying the price now as a man pushing 50 for playing like a thug in my 20’s & 30’s…”
You can’t blame me for trying. Okay, regrets are pointless - but tell me some anyway…
Darius: “I wish we’d written more songs. That was always my favourite bit of being in Cable. We’d spend endless hours practicing songs we’d already recorded when I think we should probably have just kept making up new stuff.”
Pete: “I think we had another record in us at least. We should have had some time off while we dodged paying that guy any more money and then made another record completely under our own steam in secret. Cable was such a creative force that defiantly ploughed its own furrow. I think a record under our own steam where we were completely in charge would have been brilliant.”
Richie: “Yeah, like Darius, I really enjoyed our song-writing process. Darius’ bendy time signatures were as slinky as his on-stage body-shapes. I regret that we never figured out how to continue.”
As do I Richie, as do I. Want to plug anything?
Darius: “I write novels about wizards and spaceships. You can buy them on Amazon.”
Pete: “I now run Reckless Yes Records with former Louder Than War editor Sarah Lay, who I met through continuing to work with John Robb. We release records on vinyl and CD as well as digital. We have fantastic bands like Llines, Fightmilk, Chorusgirl and Bugeye on our roster and it’s growing all the time.”
Richie: “I am a licenced Ham-Radio operator - and still have a stupid beard.”