These ARE the Earlies

We're coming back

“For all my talk of what it's like to do an earlies gig.... The first thing I've done is put the Earlies on, and feel a deep and meaningful excitement come bubbling up.

We're like the robot boy in the movie AI, when, after thousands of years trapped in ice, some awesome aliens come along and give him one day with his long dead mum.”

Thus spoke Nicky Madden, aka PC473XB-the Love Puddin’ and the Dibble from Kibble, when I told him the other week there was a chance that we could play together as the Earlies this year. I like the comparison, it is like we’ve been trapped under the ice. Nicky and me always talk to each other in film references, it’s an effective shortcut to the real emotional meat of the situation. As I always know Nicky is reading this I’d like to fire this clip right at him. It’s from the hugely emotional and massively underrated Rocky Balboa of 2006.

That’ll have hit Nicky hard. Right now his kids are probably saying “Daddy, why are you crying?”

I’ll tell you why, it’s because the Earlies have still got something in the basement.

We’re old, bent, burned out and broken but we’ve still got something left to give. It’s that flame I told you I was crouching over last year, when I was remembering our debut. It still burns. It burns in all of us and now it’s time to let it take hold and become a briefly roaring fire.

We’re coming back, for one night only, don’t sleep on me here or you’ll miss it.

On October the 11th, the Earlies will reform, thawed from the ice for a day. We’ll be playing songs from our unfathomably glorious debut album These Were The Earlies before joining Scotland’s most treasured human asset, King Creosote, in performing the entire KC Rules OK album. Alela Diane will be playing too, she doesn’t know it yet but I’ll play with her as well. Like the good old days when you couldn’t keep me off the stage. We’re going to celebrate ourselves, the music we made together and above all the label that Billy Campbell created to house our oddball creations in the early years of this century. Names Records was the home that we gladly chose and it deserves a day of recognition. This isn’t a tour, it’ll happen once and then it’ll be gone forever.

This isn’t drama for it’s own sake, I’m not trying to inflate value through artificially imposed scarcity. It’s just the reality of being part of a band that never really realised its potential. We’ve all had to grow up. Most of us have children, we all have jobs and commitments of one type or another. We can’t all go and live on a bus for a month for the joy of the music and the dreams of what the exposure might bring. We can get together for a day though, we can bring our friends and families with us and celebrate our youthful follies and triumphs. Whatever the tickets cost I can promise you the Earlies will be walking away from this with nothing more than the shirts on our backs and a thumping headache. But we are so fucking up for this.

Marie sums it all up in this, another breathtaking scene from Rocky Balboa:

“I mean we all have that feeling that fire but you usually never get a chance to use it and then it just goes away but you can, you've got this opportunity so do it, why not? I mean this is who you are, you know this is who you'll always be and you don't move aside from nobody until you're ready to move. And it doesn't matter how this looks to other people all that matters is how it looks to you”

It looks good to me, we’ve got an opportunity to use that fire. It’s who we are and that’s all that matters.

But if you feel anything like I feel then look out for tickets going on sale next weekend, I'd like you to be there with us.

Have I oversold it?

Yes Christian, you have. Just a bit. Maybe dial it back a bit. All that fire and ice stuff, some pretty artless metaphors. Like an A-level poetry effort. It’s just a fucking gig. In Hackney, a shithole by all accounts.

Okay I’ll go basic.

”Hey everybody, there’s an Earlies gig on Saturday the 11th of October in London at the Hackney Church. King Creosote and Alela Diane are playing too, it should be fun!”

That’s more like it.

I prefer all my other shit about Rocky coming back for one last bash, about him having something left to leave out in the ring. I like the fire that burns and the ice that thaws. But whatever, take your pick.

Here’s Kenny Loggins.