– The Field Mice – live at Tufnell Park Dome, London (Farewell concert) – Nov. 21, 1991 – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
The Field Mice for a Wednesday night. Listening to this show, and knowing it was the last one strikes me as particularly sad and poignant. I don’t know the reasons for the breakup – according to Wikipedia, it was the result of a “fractious tour” – which leaves the door open for a wide range of possibilities. But suffice to say that, listening to this show, and hearing their earlier Peel session, I am struck with the feeling of “why the hell did you break up?” – they were a wonderfully engaging and lyrical band – several cuts above a lot of bands around at the time – I thought Annemari Davies’ voice was haunting and other-worldly. They were pretty damned perfect and perfect for the time.
But . . .water under the bridge. People break up for practically no reason, so why shouldn’t bands? It just seemed a shame that, between the Peel session and the final gig a lot of growth had taken place. It would have been incredible to hear where it was all going to lead, and how much more influential they would have been, had they stayed together.
You can go insane pondering the what-ifs. Shit happens – you have no control over it. Feelings change and you don’t know why sometimes. You just know that things were one way on Monday and by Tuesday it was all different.
All that said – I thought The Field Mice were an extraordinary band with a bright and successful future. But not this lifetime I guess.
Crank this one up anyway and enjoy what the lucky members of the audience got to hear.
Summer is over, Winter is around the corner and everybody is back at work or school. If you’re in school you’re probably knee-deep in History – tests, reports, papers – homework. Reading about things that happened decades before you were born – can’t quite wrap your head around it. If you’re a teacher, it’s like pulling teeth to get your students even remotely interested in what happened before they were born. If you’re at work, you may be one of those people in middle-management who have to do presentations – something to amaze your boss and your colleagues – no pressure, but you have to deliver the goods, usually yesterday. Not to brag, but Past Daily is one website where you can find out about a lot of things you didn’t know about – hear things you aren’t familiar with – and by becoming a subscriber you can download all this audio (at last count over 10,000 sound files) you can build your own reference library, a mouse click away. You can also go exploring by using the Search Engine to dig deep.
You can do all that if you become a subscriber with Patreon – subscribing for as little as $5.00 a month, you have access to all this history, pop culture, music, famous and not-so-famous people, to download and keep forever.
All you gotta do is click on the red box (Become A Patron!) just below and make your pledge. You can do it for a month, a year or forever. And it helps us out by being able to keep the archive running – digitizing everything and fixing things when they break. Takes a lot of time to run Past Daily. We’re in it for the history and the long haul – and we need your help. We don’t run ads because they are distracting and annoying – so we depend on you. If you like what we do and you like exploring, click on the link and make a pledge – totally painless and you get 7 days for free just to check us out. Cool, no? Yeah, we thought you’d like that.
