I Was There – Cardiacs at Reading Festival, 24/08/86
Everyone loved them – except the public
“The smaller the attendance, the bigger the history,” says Tony Wilson – or at least, Steve Coogan pretending to be Tony Wilson – to cheer up a rather disconsolate A Certain Ratio, who’ve just played to 30 people in the early days of the Hacienda. “There were 12 people at the last supper, six at Kitty Hawk,” he continues, referring to the Wright Brothers’ first successful airplane flight, before concluding “Archimedes was on his own in the bath.”
While that may not always be true, it certainly was in the case of Cardiacs’ appearance at Reading Festival in 1986. Not that there weren’t a lot of people at the festival – there were, despite it being three years before its reinvention in 1989 as an indie event. Hawkwind and Saxon were among the headliners, although the inclusion of Killing Joke, New Model Army and The Mission showed that the times they were a changing. It’s just that when you’re tasked with opening the festival’s Sunday morning at the distinctly un rock ‘n’ roll time of noon, then most of the 40,000 or so audience will still be in their tent sleeping off their Saturday nights.
So, it was a decidedly tiny gathering of a few hundred people who witnessed Cardiacs troop dejectedly (all part of their act. they’d apparently been larking around and having a mud fight backstage) onto the Reading stage in their tattered military bandsmen’s uniforms looking every inch like vanquished soldiers returning from a battle, facepaint smeared across their faces. Sarah Smith, the six piece’s sax player, is the only exception, dressed in a Miss Haversham-style ballgown that’s seen better days. Although, in fact, she was married to frontman Tim Smith at the time, the band gleefully spread the rumour they were brother and sister, which certainly added a certain frisson to their onstage snogging, to the extent that the nation’s moral guardians at The Sunday Sport were moved to run a two page feature on the ‘disgusting’ spectacle.
The audience may have been minimal, and it did swell as the gig went on, but even at this stage of their career you could tell those who loved Cardiacs really, really loved them. There was even a flag proudly amid the modest assembly featuring the scrawled picture of a man and house from the sleeve of their debut album A Little Man and A House and The Whole World Window. Their profile had been boosted by being invited on a UK tour by prog rock second genners Marillion around 18 months before, on which they were received so badly that the headliners’ frontman Fish actually took to the stage during one support slot to berate his own audience for their bad taste.
We weren’t to know it then, of course, but this was the band at the peak of their powers, the six piece configuration of Tim Smith (lead vocals and guitar), Jim Smith (bass and vocals), William D. Drake (keyboards and vocals), Sarah Smith (saxophones and vocals), Tim Quy (percussion and keyboards) and Dominic Luckman (drums) later being referred to as their classic line up.
Their sound combined many disparate elements and all put together in such a way that it was every bit as weird and unfathomable. At Reading, they open with the crashing cymbals, marching drums and fairground freakery of ‘Icing on The World’, then dive deep into the breakneck thrash of ‘To Go Off And Things’, tiny gaps of silence punctuating and adding even more viciousness to the screaming guitars. The manic ‘Eating In Bed’ is like Madness remade in the image of Trout Mask Replica-era Captain Beefheart. ‘R.E.S.’ starts with Quy’s junkyard percussion beating out one of the quirkiest rhythms you’ll ever hear, before Drake plays a back-and-forth organ line that stops, starts and re-starts in what is, depending on your taste, either awe inspiring precision or an incredibly frustrating unwillingness to stick to any recognisable pattern. No guessing which camp this writer was – and still is – in.
But in between all that madness, there are moments – occasional but all the more powerful as a result – of jawdroppingly direct songwriting. They close the set with the pairing of ‘Is This The Life’ and ‘The Whole World Window’, both heart rending and tragic and almost ‘normal’ song form. As close as Cardiacs ever got anyway.
These two songs’ feeling of impending doom, of tragedy hanging precariously above the band’s heads, were not unfounded. In 2008, after a night out going to see My Bloody Valentine at the Roundhouse in Camden, Tim Smith suffered a major stroke and an episode of cerebral anoxia which left him all but completely debilitated until his death in July 2020.
But in the years since, while commercial success completely eluded then, they left an indelible mark on music. Slowly, and through tireless touring, they became one of the UK’s most notorious cult bands, hated by the press and radio but able to carry on regardless.
They co-headlined a tour with that other press non-darlings Chumbawamba and shared stages Napalm Death, but also were supported by Radiohead, both bands declaring their love for Cardiacs. The list of other declared fans includes Supergrass, Faith No More, Squarepusher, The WIldhearts (who even wrote a track called ‘Tim Smith’), Black Midi and Blur to name but a few. Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl has even started posting about discovering them – in the last year.
Blur even invited them on to the bill for their triumphant Mile End show in 1995, where their ever uncompromising approach saw them booed and pelted with missiles by a 17,000 strong crowd, proving that they definitely had a career progression of sorts. By this time, adverse reactions were bread and butter to them, and they appeared to be loving every flying bottle of piss moment of it.
Nevertheless, this show at Reading 1986, in front of a select but – for once – appreciative audience, which was later immortalised as the live album Rude Bootleg, remains seared in the memory.
It’s just a shame they weren’t still around to join the fun at Damon Albarn and co’s Wembley Stadium shows last year. The chance to wind up 80,000 people?! Surely, they’d have jumped at it.
Ben Willmott
Cardiacs’ Heaven Born & Ever Bright album is re-issued this week