BOILERMAKER - '81/82'

  After hearing a few really cool songs by Boilermaker and deciding I needed to share one on here I was struggling a bit to find any info on the band other than they lined up Max Turnbull (vocals), Phil Coates (guitar), Mike Robson (drums) and Steve Addison (bass) and that they've only just played their first gig. Instead of filling in this intro with a bit of empty waffle I instead asked MaxTurnbull if he'd supply a few facts on his band and I'll lazily just copy and paste his reply below.....

   "2 of us were in Last Rough Cause (Phil and myself), the drummer is in Gimp Fist and Thankless Graft and was also in Last Crusade and it's Ste the bass players first band. Ste asked me to jam with him a couple of years back so I played drums and sang to his guitar. We were going through a few covers of Sham, Rejects and a couple of Agnostic Front songs.

Last Rough Cause stopped playing so we asked Phil if he would come down if Ste moved onto bass so we started practicing a few new tunes I'd already written ages before. I was still drumming at this point but felt I'd be better suited to singing as I was frazzled after doing both for a couple of hours practice so I was glad when Mike offered his services coz he was always a harder hitter than me anyway. Apparently I'd asked him when I'd had way too much to drink at a Gimp Fist gig at the Forum in Darlington? I really can't recall this alleged fact? Either way we all started playing together and very slowly and steadily, we got our act together.

After quite a long time we had a decent set length of about 8 songs as well as a couple of covers. After trying to get an opinion on 4 songs we recorded from a few labels, we sort of came to realise that no label is going to touch a band that hasn't gigged so a date was lined up and we played our first show last night (26/11/16) at The Railway Tavern in Darlo. We really loved it so hopefully the crowd liked it too. They seemed to enjoy it and gave good feedback so we'll see what happens? We've all agreed we won't be doing a lot of gigs though so 4 or 5 a year will be enough for me.

Only Mike is from outside Darlington, living in Bishop Auckland and he is the only lad who is a construction man rather than the rest of us who are welders (hence the band's name)."

Anyway, one of the songs that impressed me, this is 81/82......