Caption Competition... Sort Of

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was round at the house of Donald ‘King Thumb’ Campbell, ass-kickin’, hell-raisin’, bass player of The Signals, where I ran the gauntlet of rock ‘n roll excess by sitting in his sunny back garden enjoying a nice cup of freshly brewed tea. AND a hob-nob. We discussed many of the important issues of the day – mainly stuff about how much we hate moody teenagers and queuing in shops and how frustrating it is for him not to get served immediately in a bar (he’s only 4’ 8”) – but eventually we got on to the subject of this whole internet fad and what more we could be doing to promote our band in a so-called “digital medium”.

Donald: “So Soapy, this MySpace pish… what’s that all about then?”
Neil: “Well Donald, it’s some kind of ‘digital medium’ (I made that ‘apostrophes’ sign with my fingers that I’ve seen condescending Guardian readers on arts programmes do when they haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about) where you get your own ‘space’ (fingers again) to… eh… do music up and down loading and make new friends.”
Donald: “Friends? I don’t wanna be making friends with no train-spottin’ computer geeks. Can we no just put some photos on it and pretend we’re 21 again?”
Neil: “And how would that be any different from any other day?”

So we dug out some old photos and tried to insert them into the slot in the computer but were abruptly informed by Donald’s moody teenage daughter that we needed something called a scanner… “Ye ken..? So yous can ‘scan’ (condescending fingers) them in like, ya coupla fannys.”

Anyway, long story short, there are now many new (i.e. ‘old’) photos on The Signals MySpace site although I think you might need the relevant kind of “log-on” to view them.

One of our favourites is the one you can see below which was taken sometime in the mid 1980s by official band photographer Alex Burt on the site of an old Roman fort near Bonnybridge, Scotland’s UFO capital of… um… Scotland. I’ve looked at this photo many times over the last 20+ years but have only recently considered the vexing question of… “What the f#ck was I thinking with that jump?”

On the extreme left you’ve got ‘Handsome’ Doug Grant looking cool as always like he’s in that scene from the first Mission Impossible film when Tom Cruise gets blasted from a helicopter on to the back of a speeding Channel Tunnel train. Next to him, young Billy Boo Bob looks like he’s attempting the long jump in a remarkably similar pose to that donned by Paul Weller on the front cover of a Jam album (Stuart – help me out here.) Donald, soon to hit his mid-life crisis at the tender age of 22 and with it, become The World’s Most Tolerant Man™, looks to have spotted the fluffy bunny who shat on his white, pristine Shakin’ Stevens boots and is about to crush the life out of “the furry little f#cker”.

And on the extreme right there’s me who, if I didn’t know any better, appears to be exclaiming, “Oh hooray, I’ve just bought some half-price Sticky Toffee Pudding scented candles from Au Naturale.”

So please, if you can think of any cool or hip (Daddy-O?) caption that might better explain what on earth is going on here, a rare piece of Signals memorabilia could well be heading your way.