#07 - William, Maybe - Always Sunday Doomtown (1987)

‘William, Maybe’ were dubbed ‘The New Smiths’ by the NME for a brief spell back in early ’87, in that period between The Smiths and The Las, when anyone who even remotely glanced at a guitar in the pawn shop window was labelled ‘The Next Johnny Marr’.

The band were never destined for great popularity.  The first obvious problem was naming themselves after a work by obscure English Romantic Poet Calicia Dore: printsetters often forgot to include the comma, which lead to much confusion with the teenage scream pop element who believed fey, androgynous lead singer Heathcliff Trent was actually a flamboyant solo artist called William Maybe, backed by some boring, unsexy musicians.

This could have been easily cleared up if Trent had deigned to give an interview to, say, ‘Smash Hits’, but he deemed them unworthy, and would only talk to the Serious Music Press, who kept playing up the ‘Heathcliff Trent Is The Artist' angle to compensate, thereby also ignoring the terminally-anonymous Other Three, (who were nothing if not the ‘Sleeperblokes’ prototype).

Unfortunately, all this meant that when the debut single, ‘Always Sunday Doomtown’ arrived for sale, the general confusion all round meant it sunk with barely a ripple in the sea of Depressive mid-80’s Singles about boring people doing boring things in boring places. It was no surprise to me that Madchester had to happen: all the dopey, smiley teenagers were popular music’s penance for all the mopey, frowny teenagers of the preceding few years.

Even Trent’s sudden death a week later behind the wheel of a Morris Minor with his revealed-in-death-to-be transsexual girlfriend Cathy, only lead to a minor pop scandal, with no resulting increase in sales, but instant canonisation from the clove-cigarette-and-beret-wearing art school crowd.  To this day, if you see a girl with a Louise Brooks Bob,clutching her charcoals whilst dressed entirely in black, odds are good there’s a black-and-white Unhappy Snap of her stretched out on his grave in Yorkshire, albeit Photoshopped. ‘They were a band too good to last’, she’d probably say, sighing heavily, before suggesting a walk in the rain to a nearby non-American-franchised coffee shop to partake in a spiritual ‘l'heure verte’.

None of this mattered to me. I was a lonely teenager, over-sensitive and under-talented, convinced of my specialness whilst displaying absolutely no evidence of it. So, the logical course of action was to buy a bunch of singles about how resoundingly shit things were in crappy, eternally-rainy towns in Northern England, and thus get around in a calf-length black wool coat and scarf in the decidedly non-cold and excessively-arid surroundings of a rural Australian town. It didn’t matter. I was a northern lad in spirit.

Luckily, I was snapped out of this by my Eric, who had seen how crazy the girls at school were over Robert Smith and Heathcliff Trent, and decided that he too was a moody, misunderstood rebel outcast, as being one was obviously how you’d get girls. I can see why he’d pick that option: like me, it was easier than admitted no-one liked you because you were ugly and weird. It also seemed flawed logic. They always dated rugby players, no matter how much they'd scream over pop stars.

He decided my black coat wasn’t moody enough, and had to go one better, so went down to the Army Disposal store and returned with a German Uniform coat. Since Doc Marten’s were unavailable in our area, he had to make do with Army Combat Boots. Looking back, he looked less Heathcliff and more Future School Semi-Automatic Shooter. (I’m just glad that 80’s depressiveness required far less ammo than the 90's version, let alone far less hair product than the 00’s version).

I went with him to the dodgy store down the road from the school that would sell cigarettes to anyone in a school uniform – undoubtedly even a Kindergartener would have been able to walk away with a packet of Gold Label Benson and Hedges. He said he had decided to take up smoking, because it was ‘cool’. I had long before decided not to, because who had the kind of regular income a smoking habit required? It was hard enough scraping together money for books and records.

Still, encouraged by his certainty that we were on the right track, I started the long process of being cool with him. This resulted in many hours standing against walls at the Roller Disco, kicking rubbish around, waiting for girls to approach. None ever did. All the cigarette's had done was make him Smelly on top of the original Ugly.  Eventually, I started reading a book for something to do. And not even a fitting one, like Colin Wilson’s ‘The Outsider’. I was probably reading Stephen King.

“You can’t read!” he’d say. “That’s not cool!”

“But I’m bored! Can I at least go for a skate?” I hadn’t tried that since I went with the girl up the road five years previously, and the experience was marred by her singing every Olivia Newton-John song from the Xanadu Soundtrack. (I’m just thankful it was before the world was subjected to the horror of ‘The Grease Megamix’).

He wasn’t going to let me. “Don’t skate! That’s *really* uncool!”

So this led to more posing. I was starting to feel all these gorgeous, depressive pop singles were somewhat dishonest.  This wasn't all melodramatically bleak and romantic.  There was no wind off the moors blowing my hair about into something that might, by chance, resemble sexy.  No beautiful bleak desolation to stand alone in and make the fact that no-one loves you no less tolerable, but at least seemingly-noble.  All there was were squeaky wheels, cheap coloured bulbs, water-stained cement, and empty chip wrappers stained with tomato sauce.  It was just outright depressing.

Eventually, Eric realised his moody posing with an, (usually unlit), cigarette wasn't working.  (At least it wasn't a toothpick, the oral substitute for tough guys who don't want to get spotted by their Mums smoking).  No parade length line of cute teenage girls wondering who the mysterious loner+1 leaning on the wall near the Pepsi Machine was forming, so he decided to go one better and started wearing sunglasses at night, (‘like the song!’), which turned out to be the breaking point I didn't know I had.

“Now that’s really not cool!’ I said. “That’s just poxy! And that song *really sucked*”. (It is, and it does).

“Tom Cruise does it!”

This just lead to a heated argument where I refused to wear mine, or stand near him if he was wearing his.

“That’s OK with me,” he said. “I’ll reckon I’ll have more luck by myself”.

That was all I needed: I was off the hook. It seemed like a win-win situation to me: being cool was damn boring, and Eric had failed to realise that the moody, misunderstood outcast act doesn’t work because people think you’re mysterious and therefore interesting, it usually works because the people doing the posing are Good-looking to begin with. The pair of us, all pale and pimply, decidedly weren’t. Therefore, I officially decided to give up all adventures in Being Miserable, but kept the coat because it was useful in Winter.

Eric, however, didn’t, and decided the problem had to be the place, since it was hard to catch a girls eye when she’s whizzing unsteadily past with a gaggle of friends at 30kms an hour to the tune of Bananarama’s ‘ Venus’ awash with distant, cavernous Cheap P.A. Echo. As such, he soon abandoned the Roller Rink, and started hanging around the Bowling Alley instead. “I’ve realised there’s only one scene in town,” he explained over-enthusiastically. “And it’s the bowling scene”.