I first went to a 3 minute warninf event when I was but a young lad of twenty eight [subs, check this for me would you?] Whaddoiremember form it? NOTHING MUCH because I’m old and tired now.. or at least, I don’t recalll too many details. It was at the cube and I believe Paul Hurley might have become a snail, there was perhaps a film largely centred upon a man crying to ‘Love Me Tender’ and burying his face in a tub of vanilla ice-cram (it made an imprint, like a death mask in yellow,m nice) someone sang a asong about Bonnie and Clyde and there was even a raflle but these are performances that might have occurred in subsequent 3 minute warnings, maybe even in completely differnen t events  or even in the fevered secotions of my more discipline-0sepecigic dreams.

Shit, that just took me 45 seconds.

I’d bne a crap typist, I’m telling youl.

OK I’M A=GONNA HAVE TO SPEED UP FORGIVE THE MISATLES.

WHAT do I love about 3mw (ABBREVIATED DUE TO TIME)? I love its gaffer tape and bits of string slapdash devil may careness and its open to sugggestionness. I love its noncurated ethos and its fall-pflat on your faceness and the mass baffled release of breath after some wof the weirder 3 minutes, the particularly strange ones (that most often are the longer ones) the film with the kittens, remember that one? Dead mice hanging from strings on a dress and kittens sratching at her legs all bloodfy. Bloodfy HELL. WOULDNA’T want to sit throughb that again no matter, where was I:?

3JMW has, obviously, one rule: 3 minutes, and that’s it but whilst everything else is open to persuasion as it were theer is one other major consideration; you have to be lo tech. I learned my elssona early on in this respect, presenting my first 3mw piece proper with a laptop, microphone, and a dancing british soldier toy that sang “we will rock you’; all I needed was to plug into the 3mmw house video projector. easy you might have thought, and the damn thing worked at home but NO, WHEN YOU WILL EVER LEARN, you get into the heat of the moment and it becomes apparent that the video projectoor has approximately SEVENTEEN PIXELS ON IT. YOU KNOW that fantastic idea yopu had, for the simple 3 minute piece with a clear-therough line and a funny edge? GUESS WHAT. IN FRONT OF THE AUDIENCE IT’S NOT SO SIMPLE.

?

I bombed. I bopmbed in the most profounbd way possible> Do you know what it sounds like when a whole roomfull of people mentally SHRUG? I do.

that;s why I love 3 mw. YOU fail. You fail good.

\And it’s fine.

We’re all friends here.

At the darkside 3mw there was the bloke who stood in front of the audience with his lips pinched together weirdle whilst some ENORMOUSLY LOUD MUSIC BOOFED FROM THE pa. I wodnber if he thought he failed. I couldn’t tell.

2 ikmmnutes! Apple s

Sometimes the very veryb simplest ideas are the best. Anyone at Sunday’s event will remember Folake’s piece where calmly, quielt,y she explored the limitsz of what she was able to do / capable of doing on the stage. the fact that she occasionally stumbled only made me like it more. Anyone who was there will remembver Iaian Morrisson, like an insane parrot screeching to get out of his cage, vibrating every node “frankly leiza I don’t give a damn.” I also don’t imagine anone wil quickly forget the food-colouring splattered tea partym, but for different reasons. “I think this is going to last more than three minutes” hje says at one point, stitching a fabric teapot YES I TBLOODY WELL IS. His moral, much like the one presented to me when I first performedn: “Should’ve thought it through.,” In fact: what a marvbellous motto for 3 mw generally. Imagine it on a coat of arms, (kordys victorious with Bradley stripes, Marshman rampant) and inscribed beneath: SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT THROUGH.

Whgat’s the latin for “should have thought it through? “ answers on a postcard p[les.a

the irony – if everyone did , completely, think it through, we probably wouldnb’t be watching anything at all on stage. And if we were, I’m bnot sure it would be as much fun.

“hey it might take me more than three minutes to eat all this raw garlic and chilli” – not as mich fun. “hey these featheres are going to go everyfucking where” – not as much fun “ hey if I light up a candle on this cake, will the fire alarm go off?” not as much fun “hey… wait a minute, maybe I should learn the actual words to this song, after all there are only, like, twenty of them” WITHOUT a doub,t not as much fun.

anyway my time is almost up

HOLD YOU BREATH, LEADIS AND GENTLEMAN, HERE COMES ANOTHER THREE MINUTES.

3 min, you have been warned … warned that you are going to be challenged, amused, entertained, questioned, touched, moved, annoyed, as many time as you can fit 3 min in 2 hours.

Warned that you might find yourself wishing you had come prepared with 3 min of something.

I say that because it is what happened to me the first time I went to a 3 min Warning  event in the basement of some bar in some part of Bristol.

So the next time I was to go to a 3 min warning, at the Cube, Bristol, during IBT festival. I did put my name down, I got called and I walked on stage, not hiding behind a computer or a mixing desk, just me. I was there for 19 sec … you see it doesn’t have to be a whole 3 min … or a sole 3 min.

I would normally shy away form such a opportunity but there I didn’t it was compulsive, I felt I had to, I wanted to. Because I wouldn’t be judge, I didn’t have to performe, but I could try. I was encourage to try, by some je ne sais quoi the Spaghetti Club and its audience manages to infuse in these event….

This time round, in the Arnolfini theatre, I stayed on stage for the whole 3 min, even a bit more I think, and I open my mouth, I told a story.

Folake Shoga walked on stage for the first time in  her life, gave a prose about live art and climaxed taking her clothes off revealing herself wearing pajamas, stating “ I have reached the limit of this game of exposure.” Paul Hurley gave us lecture on Robert Filliou, and the birthday of art. Ian Morrison standing on a stool incarnated a Women Beat poet from the 60’s and made us cry with laughter, as well as showing off his vocal range. Alex Bradley talked to us via a “Roberts radio” from his bunker about how  the government take the p*** out of us. Tom Marshman visited his inner sailor and showed off his anchor.  Ivan Thorley covered the stage in feathers as the finale of “Swan Lake” revisited by the Ugly duckling.

These are just examples to illustrate the variety of forms we witness in the space of two hours.

As an Interval we had Bloody Marys in the theatre, just to make sure that we would stay in the theatre and talk, meet.

We saw accomplished performers, impulsive first timers and works in progress. We had a drink, a chat, a laugh. We got inspired, we were made to the think about our past and present. Some of us got to expose them-selves to an un-expecting, encouraging, sincere audience. What a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Can we do it again sometime.

Thanks to the Spaghetti Club, Arnolfini and its audience-  and NWN ( for the train ticket ).

Charles Poulet

“There were hailstones as I ran to the theatre with papers stuffed in my leather case and hand on my hat to stop it blowing over the Quayside. I noticed how the city of Bristol had grown cold since my last visit twenty-five years before, yet, again they welcomed me with open hearts and purses. On entering the Arnolfini I saw from afar, Thomas Mossmann, with golden coat and tall-frame inserted, directing proceedings from afar. In the staging area, Mr Pinchbeck, swastika hat at a jaunty angle, took his turn. Ms Thorntonclare was clicking away with her camera (such a device I had never seen) as Mr Pinchbeck and the Singing Nun took their respective positions. After he had finished it was nearly my turn.

But not before the performance of Tiny Tim Webster, he was now around six feet, amazing that he had survived that hard winter to be on the same card as his creator. I’m sure Old Bob (Cratchit) and his lady wife would not have thought he would be here, dressed as an elderly woman, with two naked men before him. A greater likeness to an old lady I never did see.

Thomas Mossman treated me to mince pies and chocolate fingers as I thought about the delectable treats I could serve the expectant crowd.

I was nearly ready and hoped that the incident with the dog would not be repeated, no time to speak about that, looking around I saw that there was a remarkable range of characters on display. I originally thought of starting with (Christmas) Carol but then decided to begin with the Trail of Pickwick vs. Ms Bardell. A lady called Pat asked if I needed my beard tending to and commented on how Mr Dickens had such piercing eyes. I said my lady, this beard is mine, unhand it. I stepped from the dark into the light where Ms Thortonclare said take your position. There she captured me in gravitas near the end of the reading, head bowed, hand outstretched, re-enacting Sam Weller’s kindly father placing his hand on the shoulder of his son.

At the end of the performance the hall roared with approval, well I thought that they would, mainly they sat in a reading area at the back of the hall. Here pamphlets of previous performances were laid out. It was a respectful but not exuberant audience, often the case on the first night of a tour, afterwards I sat and talked to a lady who had traveled from the town of Reading, she knew of my work and we talked at length about my triumphs.

It was a long afternoon, I prefer readings later in the day but not too late that the audiences’ festivities render them incapable. I then had to change my waistcoat because Mr Pinchbeck said he was possessed by a fellow called Chris Burden, and wanted me to shoot him in the arm. I said if I was to shoot you why would I shoot you in the arm? That would be a waste of both of our time. However I obliged and throughout the hall rang, Bang! Ow, owwww, I’m in terrible pain, just one shot Mr D…Bang! We retired to the seating area to be quizzed by a doctor who asked many questions but could do nothing to relieve my advancing chill, nor the puncture in Mr Pinchbeck’s arm.

Afterwards we retired to the bar to discuss the events of the afternoon. All of a sudden Thomas Marshman ascended the bar. Towering over his subjects Thomas read out a poem that recalled the events in a somewhat fragmentary manner. This poem complimented the file of photograms taken by Ms. Thortonclare, where we could see all the performances together. Lo-and-behold, there was I, beard untouched, thrilling the audience again. There was much wine consumed during this final interval. However there are some performances that one does not wish to re-enact, so my glass remained empty

Later in my lodgings I had a terrible coughing fit, the effect of that first night had gone straight through me. Yet the thought of future performances, repeated over and over to ever larger and more rapturous crowds drove me to a satisfactory and most necessary sleep.”

———————————

Written by Calum F. Kerr in response to Tom Marshman and Claire Thornton’s ‘Performance Re-enactment Society’. Mr Dickens was interned into the Arnolfini performance archive with his rendition of the Trial from Pickwick Papers first performed on 2nd December 1867 (Boston,USA) and re-performed on 2nd December 2007 (Bristol, UK).

He later played the ‘friend’ who shot Chris Burden (Michael Pinchbeck) with a 22 calibre rifle, he did not miss.

Before consciousness
Begin with the impossible - an infinitesimally small period of time in a performance, a half or quarter of a moment.
Examine it and see that in such an instant, between the action that is made and its reception by an audience, there is no subjective interpretation. In a time so short that even the performer themselves is not yet conscious of what they have done, there is the action and the action alone. But by examining such moments we bring awareness to the performed action; we force ourselves onto the specific incident and insert our perspective into the event. We distort the original action into a performance unique to us and us alone. Sometimes brutality is unavoidable.So it is with the documentation of the most seminal performances, and so it is with the most memorable of our own experiences.

I have no idea if I was wearing brown shoes
When, as a member of Tom Marshman and Clare Thornton’s Performance Re-enactment Society, put on as a part of The Spaghetti Club’s Darkside series at the Arnolfini, my turn came to remember a moment from my own experience of performance, the ease with which I filled in the details and coloured in the blanks was staggering.The atmosphere was relaxed, informal and non-judgmental; it was perfectly acceptable to admit ignorance in the interview that took place before and after the moment I chose to re-enact, and yet I felt the need to bring my memory more fully to life, to paint it more vividly than I actually remembered. My performance memory was in the past. In the past I owned a pair of brown trainers. Does that mean it’s okay to overlap the two?

The Sound of Music within a Derek Jarman installation
Invading the stage at a heavy metal concert; removing Yoko Ono’s clothes with a pair of scissors; falling in love with a fellow actor; Charles Dickens delivering a reading 150 years previously; such were the layers of the palimpsest. Each time a new person stepped forward the space was transformed. And with the next it transformed again. Each change was punctuated by an eagerly received Polaroid of the moment and, as a trace of the event just commemorated lingered within the space, the next memory would be installed. A wig became Chris Burden’s hair, and for the rest of the afternoon, its presence would always be, in part, the top part of him.

* * *
The relationship of documentation to performance is of interest to many, perhaps a part of today’s artistic zeitgeist. Rightly or wrongly it is here to stay. Performances will continue to be documented with cameras, video and words. But in the Performance Re-enactment Society an offer was made; an offer not often extended. We were given the chance to remember and, by taking advantage of that, were allowed to attach significance again to the briefest of moments that we thought had long ago been lost.

Tim Jeeves

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so it becomes something other than performance. [Phelan, P. 1993: 146] Peggy Phelan has written much about the temporality of performance. She enters into a discourse with Derrida who claimed ‘The theatre is born of its own disappearance.’ It was with this thought in mind and some trepidation that I entered the Arnolfini to attend The Performance Re-enactment Society. The aim was to reenact our performance memories and accession them to the Arnolfini’s Live Art Archive. We sign away our memory with archivists at the doorway. We dress up to re-enact our performance memory for a photograph. We visit a Doctor on a chat show sofa who asks for more information about our memory. We walk away with a sticker and a polaroid of the performance re- enactment in a sealed envelope. We help ourselves to a cup of tea and a biscuit. The bureaucracy of performance re-enactment sits somewhere between donating blood and a REACTOR experience. In Hill and Paris’s recent Performance and Place, Leslie Hill bemoans the fact that there is no ‘Live Art Louvre’ she can visit to see Carolee Schneeman’s Interior Scroll. And yet here I am watching Arnolfini Programmer, Helen Cole (who writes beautifully in the same publication about live art leaking from buildings) re-enacting Yoko Ono’s Cut piece with a man who had witnessed a restaging of the original. A re-enactment of a re-enactment. Here I am witnessing the recreation of a Derek Jarman installation at the National Review of Live Art in 1989 and leafing through the NRLA brochure from the same year with white gloves on. Here I am recreating Chris Burden’s Shoot with a man I’ve just met shooting me in the arm with a cardboard rifle and a blob of ketchup for the blood. I think I have found the Live Art Louvre. In the end we have our own Mona Lisa as a member of the audience disrobes to recreate a memory of Forced Entertainment nudity. Perhaps no Live Art Louvre would be complete without a naked woman – with or without her interior scroll. The denouement of the event is Tom Marshman’s poetic text delivered from the aluminium surface of the Arnolfini bar. He has collated data from our memories – fusing his father’s recollections of riots at a Little Richard gig with Lady Diana’s death. The Spaghetti Club has given us closure by opening an archive of words and images ofwhich we are all the architects. If performance’s life is only in the present then perhaps we have re-presented thispresent to create new palimpsests of our memories. I think of our Shoot as Re-shoot and Cole’s Cut as Re-Cut. Thisevent is the hyphen between re and enactment as we participate in the circulation of re-enactments of re- enactments taking place today. In conclusion it is no coincidence that I slip from past to present tense. In order to capture the ghosts of performances being brought back to life I start a blog at the event. However, re-enactment is more interesting than documentation of re-enactment so I am compelled to engage more with the live than the blog. I have the experience of subjectivity Phelan cites in response to Derrida’s claim of performance’s disappearance: Writing towards preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself [Phelan, P. 1993: 148]

Michael Pinchbeck
January 2008

Bibliography
DERRIDA, J., 2005, Writing and Difference, New York:
Routledge
HILL, L. and PARIS, H. eds., 2006, Performance and
Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
PHELAN, P., 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of
Performance, Routledge: London and New York
REACTOR, Nottingham-based artists collective.
http://www.reactorweb.com/homepage.htm

1am, and the watchword is grace. I’m not shaking it about at all, that’s not my job tonight, although my arms are raised and I give the occasional regal twirl of the wrists. My headdress is enormous, a silvery Bahia crown, I imagine it stretching up to the sky. I’ve spent most of the past five months making it from scratch. My skirts, also silvery and twinkling, stretch out from me a good couple of feet. I’m like a bell, a slowly turning bell. All around me: the noise is incredible, and endless. Not only the split-speaker buzz from the nearest trolleybus as it inches slowly down the carnival mile, but the distorted vocals from other buses in train, before and after us. My voice will be red-raw tomorrow. I’m going to be singing all night, to the yatta rutta ta-ta ta-ta of the samba school bateria. Behind me, a giant silver eagle, shimmering in the flash of cameras, slowly beats its mechanical wings.
(Carnival Mile, Rio De Janeiro, 1983)

I’m wearing a suit and I’ve got a large beanbag on my head, covering my face and making me look like some sort of human mushroom. My companion is similarly attired and we’ve just boiled a kettle and poured the contents into a bowlful of salt. We’re sitting down, having a conversation about how, last night in the bath, I worked out how to make art irrelevant, but then fell asleep and forgot how I did it. We’re both dipping dry weetabix into the bowlful of water and eating the horrendous resulting mess. The small audience – invisible to both of us because of our headgear – are simultaneously laughing and audibly cringing. The wall behind us is curtained, and in a moment I’m going to stand and pull back the drapes to reveal the legend YOUR FACE written in massive, black gaffer tape letters.
(“Integrated Brine Workshop” by The Beanbags, University of Bristol, 1996)

In front of a sell-out crowd I’m sat at the piano, nothing unusual there. Dead centre stage, I’m rooting through an orange Sainsbury’s bag full of bits of paper, trying to find the lyrics to a song someone’s just called out for.
(Nick Cave, Colston Hall, Bristol, 2006)

The audience are sat on three sides of a square, and I’m sat on the fourth side, by myself, a bank of TVs behind me with the faces of my friends and family. The side of the square opposite me is a long, high table, where earlier on I’ve asked some of the audience members to make sandwiches. The room is dark except for a spotlight on my son, who’s wearing a spangly frock and talking into a microphone. He’s a tall lad, very thin. A dancer. He’s not dancing now, he’s telling a story. He’s telling two stories at the same time, actually. And the two stories are: the first, of how his Dad got murdered. The second, of how I got raped. They’re true stories. I’m sitting, and I’m listening. The line that means the stories are over is “That’s some fucked up synchronicity.” We’ve been doing this show for two years now, but we’re going to stop soon.
(“Susan And Darren” by Quarantine / Company Fierce, Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton, 2007)

A false wall has been built at the far end of the top floor gallery, painted the uniform white of the rest of the room, and a very small hole drilled into it roughly about eye level, so that maybe you could miss it, maybe it wouldn’t register, but maybe you’ll put your face to the wall and squint in. I’m inside this hidden cavity, a cavity built so as to only just allow my bodily frame, and I’m here all day, occasionally moving, occasionally -
( )

How do we know what is pre-meditated and what is spontaneous? Would we think any less of something that had been “thrown together” in a matter of minutes to something that had been heavily pre-considered to the finest details? Does the audience sense the time and conditions that it took to make a performance and either way does having this pre- knowledge of viewing a performance act as a realistic sub-text to alter our opinions. Surely the act of seeing the performance and the time we view the performance is about the there and now?

These are all questions which were highlighted and were ones which by pure chance I had coincidentally been debating on myself in my recent practice as both live artist and live art curator, A recent bursary was offered to myself and Rhiannon Armstrong  by NewWork NetWork to view a performance called “Foreign Muck “by Spaghetti Club’s Alex Bradley and live art promoter Anthony Roberts as part of the Arnolfini’s DarkSide series in the Bristol gallery’s  Dark Room. Bradley and Roberts have created a mythical  band “Foreign Muck”, said to have existed only in the minds of LSD devotees living in a commune in the grounds of a Colchester church. Commenting on  the current culture of band reformations, their creation that dissolve at their first gig.

The audience entered the space and  I was unaware of this sub-text of irony  and viewed the band’s three tracks as being a “serious” “real” band.Yet the over exaggerated  actions of some of its members such as Richard DeDominici  and Roberts himself were so whimsical that surely there must have been a parody going on somewhere from the start. The music was aggressive  and thrashy and harmonious at times.Yet you could feel a sense of insularity amongst the performers as no really unity prevailed and each kept to their own individual section with only a couple of performers who tried to integrate with the others such as rolling on the floor or using a megaphone.Their actions fell short of any real interaction with eachother. Unlike a punk band who may fall into the audience or  wish to interract with the audience with an unrelenting anger, the sterility of the dark room allowed for an almost invisible layer of smoke to form between the audience and the performers. How I longed to gatecrash the stage and take hold of the megaphone! Yet at just three songs, my temperament heightened and anticipation reeling, I was left on a high.

The next part of the night consisted of a piece entitled Karaoke Raffle downstairs in the gallery’s Bruce McLean designed café-bar which alludes  to  something between Parisian cabaret revue bar to something slightly seedier in a Soho back-alley. It ‘s bright multi-coloured décor and emergency red walls would surely allow an audience to fire up their emotions if they run alongside the McLean’s playful yet stark aesthetic within the bar. This mood fitted perfectly with the act that followed by Frenchman Paul Granjon whose karaoke was a sure winner.Alex Bradley did a bizarre interpretation of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star followed by some disco classics. The night ended with me chatting with several members of the Spaghetti Club about their hopes and aspirations about the performance and its ultimate realisation.

Two teenage kids apparently gatecrashed  Foreign Muck.One walked in and described it as being “rubbish” and the other commented “ironic”. So the band’s ethos had worked by this youngster’s admission. Secondary schools must obviously be hotter on post-modernist prinicipales and the likes of Baudrillard since I was that age!

Speaking with Alex outside, telling me that Anthony Roberts had been called to create the event only a few hours before going on stage, gave me food for thought and it was a wonderful experience in seeing how energy and passion could create something memorable in such a short space of time.

The bursary had been developed to give artists and performers the chance to view regional work which so often gets overlooked to the excess and superiority that London lends itself. It was an invaluable experience and I spoke to other performers with similar concerns to how I am currently feeling about the state of live art in this country and its pre-concepitons. I hope to keep up this debate with Alex and the others I spoke to and look forward to hearing of their future endeavours.

Lee Campbell
September 2007

leejjcampbell@yahoo.co.uk
myspace.com/leejjcampbell

It’s been 13 years since Foreign Muck last turned their amps up to 11 and rocked our world. Or maybe it’s been 4. Or maybe it’s been as much as 20, no-one really seems to know for sure. Our reporter Timothy X Atack catches up with the Muck at Arnolfini, where they’ve convened for one last batter through the classics, and asks: is this really the end?

Anthony Roberts picks up his guitar. There’s a sudden squall of ear-splitting feedback… and we’re back in Czechoslovakia. For a brief moment it’s Prague 1969, just after the Soviet invasion and the fall of Dubcek, and our heroes Foreign Muck are back in that dingy cellar two streets short of Zizkov football stadium, down in the graffiti-encrusted vault where they played a secret gig supporting Plastic People Of The Universe. “Oh yeah,” drawls Roberts when I speak to him later, “I remember that one. We had to be smuggled across the border disguised as nuns. The organisers reckoned it was the only way to get us all in, I just thought they fancied the sight of yours truly in a wimple.

He takes a swig of beer before reflecting: “I didn’t look bad, mind.”

Roberts can no longer remember when he first formed Foreign Muck (or “The Muck” as they’re known to both fans and detractors worldwide) and the rest of the band aren’t much help. “Wasn’t it down the dogs?” asks guitarist Julian Hutton. The rest of the group shake their heads.“I’m pretty sure Anthony got drunk one night, opened up the phone book and called anyone with a slightly funny name,” mutters Elaine Kordys, one of the band’s two bassists.“Nah,” says Richard Dedomenici, (vocals, turntables, interpretive dance) “It was a bet. It was a bet Anthony made with Andy Warhol that went horribly, horribly wrong.”

“…I can’t remember a thing about it, and it feels like we got together yesterday,” reflects drummer Jon Bentley.

The sense of novelty is unsurprising, as Roberts is employing his usual working methods. These ‘methods’ involve not telling the other band members anything of his intentions, before collecting them together in a loose affiliation hours before any gig in order to frantically batter through a bunch of half-formed musical ideas. “Not even half-formed, really,” he admits later, “In terms of how formed they are, I think we’re looking at, whatever, fucking decimal points with zeroes in front.”

Tonight is Foreign Muck’s first gig in – depending on who you ask – eight years, twelve years, twenty two years or nine years. It’s the brainchild of Alex Bradley, the band’s motormouth manager between 1979 and 1996. “There was a close one in 1993,” says Bradley, “When Foreign Muck almost opened for Lisa Stansfield at the Hammersmith Apollo. It was a – whaddyacallit -” he snaps his fingers - “Um, a category error, that was it. A couple of hours before the gig there were lots of apologetic calls, it got pulled, I was gutted - who wouldn’t be? - but eventually everyone agreed, you know, I agreed with Stansfield’s management, it was all for the best.”

So what brought on 2007’s reunion, a gig also envisaged as the band’s last?

“It just got more and more difficult to grab everyone together at short notice. You know, Gemma Paintin, she’s got that part in that soap opera, the, um, thingy, you know, the depressing one, um, Richard ended up doing those adverts for crisps, Dulcie Wood is touring with Stereolab now… and I just suggested to Anthony, you know, for old time’s sake, before Richard ends up presenting Top Gear and Gemma starts running the Queen Vic, we should have one last shot at it. Just one last shot, what’s the harm in that?”

A reunion presented one major problem, and that was the tragic death in 2004 of Dieter Sprecher, Foreign Muck’s keyboard player and percussionist. “It was bad, such a bad way for him to go,” says Bradley, “I mean, he was such a fastidious person and… they really should put warnings on trainers, you know. Not to lace them too tightly. The poor bastard’s feet just came straight off.”

At first Sprecher was deemed irreplaceable but after a series of rigorous phone calls a solution was found in the gangly form of Duncan Speakman, last seen playing the lugubrious hitman in crap British gangster flick Apples and Pairs. “Yeah, I was game,” says Speakman. “I was aware the gig came with its downsides… I’d heard that Anthony could be a real grumpy bastard, especially if he heard you playing anything right.”

Robin Deacon (guitar) remembers the evening when the phone call came from Roberts. “I laughed,” says Deacon. “I just laughed and laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed and laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. I laughed, laughed, laughed and then I laughed some more, I laughed, I laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed, laughed and laughed. Then I said no.”

“Yeah, Deacon. Deako was a tough nut to crack,” says Roberts dryly, “You have to utilise reverse psychology with Deako. So when he said he wouldn’t do it, I told him that I didn’t fucking care and that he was never any good, and what’s more there’d never been anyone fucking decent in any band with the name of Deacon. How rock and roll is a name like Deacon? Sounds like the fucking Church of fucking England to me. Then I casually expounded upon my theories by shouting down the phone some more. To prove my point, I shouted at him that the shittest member of Queen was John Deacon. This really gets Deako worked up, not because he likes Queen you understand, but because the shittest member of Queen was in fact Roger Taylor, everyone knows that, and Deako’s a fucking pedant. He can’t stand errors in pop trivia. So in the end, increasingly harsh words were exchanged, I told Robin that if he wanted to settle the score he knew where to find me, lo and behold the bloke turns up to the venue anyway, just to beat me up. And hey fucking presto, that’s when we start rehearsing.”

Indeed, the NME once described Foreign Muck as “the sound of otherwise competent musicians trying to play whilst being kicked repeatedly,” and at their last ever gig, they do not disappoint. They play, as usual, in the corner of the room, without a risen stage, on the same level as the audience. I’ve heard - from reports of their 60s gigs - that this off-stage positioning is an assertion of spiritual equivalence with the crowd, and ask Roberts whether this is true. “Fuck off,” he says, “It’s just so we’re nearer the fire exit if the police turn up.”

The Muck play a typical set, full of non-scathing political satire, terrace chants and Velvet Underground covers. When various members gather round a mic and belt out the refrain “I’ve never felt better in my life,” they sound like they’re drowning.

During a new variation on the seminal counterculture dirge The Battle For Hearts And Minds - in which each band member takes it in turns to perform an impromptu solo - Roberts enters into a garbled ecstatic rant that makes him look like an enraged scientologist having just missed the bus home. Elaine Kordys tells the famous non-pc joke about menstruation (the same joke she told at the Muck’s Greenwhich Village gig in 1978, and the one that got her blacklisted from Andrea Dworkin’s open brunch sessions.)

Much to the audience’s dismay, Phillip Roberts (bassist and, despite all evidence to the contrary, absolutely no relation to Anthony) does not perform in his inimitable style of old; bass amp strapped to his back, standing on top of a slowly melting slab of ice balanced gingerly between two chairs. “I’ve done that one too many times,” he ruminates later, “I used to be six foot four.” Robin Deacon does reprise his usual position of back to the audience throughout the gig. “Still dunno why he does that,” says Roberts, “Maybe because the audience are mostly ugly bastards.”

In fact, it’s a mixed crowd tonight, far from the usual collection of muso nerds and ageing hippies. I move amongst the crowd conducting short interviews; when did you first hear the Muck? What’s your favourite Muck LP? When did you last see the Muck? Are you a fan of the Muck of the 60s, the disco muck, the electro muck or the muck’n’brass so beloved of Bristol in the mid 90s?

The results are startling: not least of which is my discovery that 65% of the audience are in fact lawyers, representing clients injured, slandered, or indeed, killed at past gigs. Of the younger fans (by which I mean those below the age of 52) most originally discovered Foreign Muck as a result of the notorious drug eulogy It’s My Fucking Nose being used in a 2003 Asda commercial.“I just, like, fell in love with the complete totality of their sound,” says one lanky goth, “It contained almost everything I could think of. And some stuff I couldn’t.”

Afterwards, I ask the different band members how they feel the gig went. The responses range from Richard Dedomenici’s “NO CAMERAS! NO CAMERAS!” to manager Alex Bradley quite literally bouncing off the walls with happiness.

I talk to Gemma Paintin (floor tom, tambourines, vocals) about her statuesque stage presence, and the fact that it’s very hard for an audience to read whether she’s enjoying the experience or not. She just stares at me for two minutes, poker-faced, and says nothing. Three days later I receive a letter at home (recorded delivery, signed for in triplicate) within which Paintin details in immaculate and intricate terms her precise reactions to pretty much every second of the concert. “I feel it most important,” she concludes, “To maintain a modicum of decorum at all times in these affairs. I consider it especially important in a public milieu where I’m likely to spend most of my time twatting drums like a gibbon.”

And how did Anthony Roberts feel the performance went? “S’alright,” he shrugs, opening up another beer.I mention that I noticed there wasn’t an encore.“Oh, you noticed that, did you? What, surprised, are you? You shouldn’t be. We don’t do encores.”Is that, I ask, because it’s a tired showbiz cliché?

“Nah. It’s ‘cos no fucker ever wants us to do one.”

Do you remember seeing Foreign Muck at any of their seminal gigs in the 60s, 70s, 90s or naughties? Let us know — post a comment here! The Darkside is waiting for your call.