Degville, X and Tj by the river
just before the first gigs.
CHAPTER 3. A New Underground
All this in cyberspace... no one else knew we existed... everything we did was through the internet...
I sold my house in London and moved to Somerset near Glastonbury, a magical place... and we bought the most beautiful 16th century house and we built a studio in the barn... well a freeezing cold room for the computer, me and X to sit in and all our old equipment...
Connected to the net I could be anywhere and Martin and Neal realised there were gonna be a lot of 2 hour drives to the country to sit in that cold room... Neal was still playing with Marc Almond to stay alive, and we spent weeks writing new songs, scrapping them, updating the internet site, and writing more... Neal was determined we could make an album that was new, not just a retread of the old songs like so many groups do when they re-form... more songs were recorded and scrapped... weeks turned into months.....
More and more emails kept coming... from people so excited to find, against all odds that Sputnik was alive and well... kids who had been 8 years old when we started wrote to tell me Sputnik was the greatest and there was no one like us still... it kept me believing...every email was like a little stroke, telling me all this work was worth it...
Then in December 99 ,I got an email asking us if we would headline the Gothic Treffen festival in Leipzig Germany... my old friend Andy sex gang had told them about us and they were fans... we still didn't have an album we were happy with, but it was starting to happen... so we geared up to play live again, carrying on developing the songs as we went... it was great because we would have a chance to try them out in front of a real audience..... we would play to 7000 people in Leipzig in June 2000... scary
More gigs came via the internet, headlining a festival in Whitby, which was called the Whitby Goth festival and it would be our first gig outside of London... we were thrilled when it was sold out well in advance..... there was a piece about it on the Jo Whiley TV show which was done in a rather condescending tone and I thought - oh no the same old demons are coming back to haunt me... Ian Broadie was immediately snotty.. but it was Finley Quaye of all people who said "yeah I'm glad they are making a new record - they should do" that somehow showed that not everyone in the industry hated us... When we arrived in Whitby on a sunny April day to find everyone so enthusiastic, the fans so happy to see us, that it was a really great gig in every way and the new songs went down like they were old classics... I sat gazing out to sea the next morning and thanked God, well - any god who was listening, for giving us another chance - there's no better thrill in the world...
We played a club at the Scala Cinema... people came from all over the world , from Boston and San Fransisco in the USA and from Europe to see us... all connected by a common thread... the internet... I felt almost humbled by the faith that they showed in us... We played more shows in Germany, more little clubs in London and we were selling them out..... promoters seemed amazed that they could just email me to ask us to play and we would be there, and so would the fans... we played every show we were asked to do.....
And we all felt connected... like we knew each other.. it was different from everything I had ever experienced before in my career... I felt like I'd spoken to everyone who came to our shows personally, that I'd written to everyone who ever bought a CD from us- personally, everyone who ever emailed saying please put me on your mailing list, I felt like they were a new friend... and I still do... it is the most extraordinary wondrous thing...