IT was an omen... sputnik will play for all the judges, lawyers and Magistrates at their
party... u couldn't make it up
....... The Inner temple of Sputnik!
the piece in the Times Diary
CHAPTER 2. Holy Gigs!
A friend of mine, Nick Valentine called me to say he was helping organise this big charity ball at, of all places, the Inns of Court at the Inner Temple... the holy place and centre of the law courts in Britain... every year they held this big party in a huge marquee on that very hallowed ground, and this year the people organising it, unbelievably, asked if Sputnik could play at it... it seems mad to say, but we'd never considered playing live again... that was all too real, but the others said let's do it..so we started rehearsing. So that is how it all began to become real...
Meanwhile we'd started to learn how to use Cubase programming on my Apple computer and then I began to realise we could make records here too...
We played the gig supported by Belinda Carlisle, coming on stage at 3 in the morning, all of us for the first time ever completely sober and nervous..... Mick Jones of course came, and Magenta De Vine our old publicist and Tj's co conspirator all those years earlier... we got Claudia the old Fin de Siecle drummer..and we taped the show and we sounded so great..Micheal Zimmerling (yes him again ) mixed the live sound.......
Back at base I upgraded Sputnikworld with more sections... I loved the idea that fans could run part of the site... the Sputnik avatars were born,..rather than try and shut down fan sites like lots of groups were doing, which I thought was ludicrous (if I can digress... that is how the grateful Dead became massive... they encouraged fans to tape their concerts and as these tapes passed from fan to fan like a virus and thats how they became a massive live attraction... that is why I love napster... this is the best advertising in the world... there were fans at our show last week only because they heard for the first time, Sputnik tracks on napster and came to the show because of that - and bought our CD there!! great)... no, I wanted the fans to be part of it, so fans ran individual pages and I linked to them...we were held on computers from Australia to Europe to the USA to Africa... truly global (and we still are)..... and we are still expanding.....
Then I remixed Atari Baby at home, Neal helped put it together (he'd become really good at Cubase programming as he'd been doing it for years) and it sounded great and we figured let's put out our own remix album on Sputnikworld records.a guy called Michael Pilmer emailed me... he worked at Alien Skin Software who I knew through using photoshop... he lived in the USA and had designed a new logo for us which he emailed me..... I started to get more and more emails every day... I answered every email personally, answered every question... fuck... these people kept us alive... there were so many... Darick Chamberlain, a science fiction writer from Seattle who had worked with William Gibson , who I had quoted on the sleeve of Dress for Excess, sent me his book which was even more Sputnik than I was... he would do the sleeve for me... It was incredible... there was this global army of sputnik fans out there all working for the cause...
We released the Ultimate 12" collection in the fall of 1998, a collection of really great remixes of the old material...
But we needed more.....