The Perseverers (lost tapes)
1998. I was all set to trade my itinerant life for a move to Rome; Craig was living the domestic idyll on a housing estate in Luton. The glamour was short-lived, though, and with our respective relationships suddenly crashed and burnt, we both found ourselves back in the comforting bosom of The Midlands – periods of rehabilitation courtesy of Yarker’s Batchelorium. At the tail end of that year, Craig Stephens and I syphoned our collective angst into the blender hoping for some cheap creative therapy. A loose pastiche of early ’70s classic The Persuaders (with well-heeled renegade Roger Moore paired up with street-wise Tony Curtis) was envisaged as the perfect retro-chic vehicle for our re-invented selves: The Perseverers.
For a decade those master-tapes languished in a dusty drawer. But now, finally, they have been digitised for universal consumption. Flying Down to Malta, Fine Art and the brooding existentialism of Extension 526; all meditations on the unending quest for meaningfulness. A fourth video, Casanova Beat, was considered either too violent or too rubbish for inclusion.
We played one live gig, at Jaki & Viki’s birthday bash. We partied like it was 1999, which it indeed was. The dream became real. We quickly got girlfriends. And had a break from the music industry – for 9 years. Thanks to The Kitchen Garden Cafe in King’s Heath, The Perseverers have returned to host a couple of Retort evenings in the past year and there is the promise of some new material soon.
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Tags: craig stephens, extension 526, fine art, flying down to malta, kitchen garden cafe, retort, the perseverers, the persuaders, the retort cabaret
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There’s some valuable archive footage from Midlands Today (or possibly a Central TV arts roundup programme) of The Perseverers playing in Coventry’s now destroyed Odeon cinema. I think it might be an extract of Fine Art. I’ll root around for it.