Blue Vega
Kinda Funky
Blue Vega were, I think, a bit of a footnote in the history of the Kirkcaldy bands of the 1980's. I think most of their members were from Edinburgh and I only recall them playing once or twice. But they are interesting to me, and worth including in this website, for a number of reasons.
One of their guitarists was Rob Jackson, pictured above and below. Rob was in the same year as me at college and I recall being tremendously impressed by his guitar playing. Rob was briefly a member of the Crucified Brains and has played at their first real gig, the 1985 charities gig at Bentleys. Musical differences forced Rob out of the 'Brains around the Summer of 1985 and he went in an entirely different musical direction (as different as you can imagine from the Crucified Brains) with Blue Vega.
The audio files below are taken from the 1986 charities gig. This was the most eventful musical day of my life and other material from that day, and stories from that day, are on the pages of other bands that played that gig - The Crucified Brains, The Ghost Train, Domestos, Political Asylum and the Surgical Wars.
Another guy from my course at the tech, Ken Miller was the bass player of Blue Vega and this was his first ever gig. As this day was my first ever gig too (as bass player with the Surgical Wars) I remember having a kind of fellow feeling with Ken that day, although our styles were somewhat different.
So much happened that day, and the Blue Vega performance was not without incident also. As some of their members were from Edinburgh, the drummer got stuck in traffic and didn't make it on time for the gig. I recall a lot of debate about what to do, and eventually Mark Deas of The Crucified Brains was asked to, and agreed to, sit in on drums. It's amazing to me, and a tribute to Mark's fine musicianship, that it was only once or twice during the gig that you could tell Mark had never even rehearsed with the band and didn't know the songs. It's also amazing to me that two of the guys from the Crucified Brains played a set that was so, so different from the one they had played the year before.
This may have been a truncated set, or maybe I just got bored, but the MP3's below are all the material I recorded of that gig. It could be that, struggling on without their normal drummer, the band played a shorter set than they planned. Shame it still didn't stop Deutsche Sphincster hitting buckets on stage for so long after that the Ghost Train could only manage four songs, and that was Davie Brown's first gig with the band too.
So here is the gig, captured in mono on my Marantz cassette recorder:
Download whole gig as one Zip file (15Mb)
The eventfulness of the Blue Vega set didn't end after the set had finished, as their errant drummer finally turned up and Rob's then girlfriend (and future wife I believe) Arlene, started a one woman campaign to insist that the band got to go back on and play at least one number with their normal drummer. As the whole gig was running late and, thanks to Deutsche Sphincster would run a whole lot later, there was no way that anyone could allow this, but there was also no way that Arlene would back down. I can still picture the scene backstage at the Tech's assembly room, with the drummer with his suit on, drumsticks in hand, standing looking disconsolate and Arlene raging away. I ended getting involved, as I thought it was a reasonable line of argument to state that, as it was a charity gig, we should all have our minds on higher things than on one disappointed drummer. Arlene just seized on this line of argument and turned it back on me, stating, not without logic, that if it was a charity gig, it would be a charitable act to let the band back on. 1986, eh? I wonder of Bob Geldof had these problems?