Hey Coo Kids,
A fairly important part of playing live, for me anyway, is doing a poster for the gig I'm going to play.
I decided quite a while ago (not entirely independently, I'll admit) to start doing gig posters (or 'live notices' as I file them as, or 'Coo Cards' as they are popularly known) and decided to do one for every gig.
I've currently done about 393 of them, so it's been an undertaking!! But it's also been an immense pleasure as it's a creative side I can let out with very minimal worry about pleasing anyone else or worrying what people think.
To explain and do justice to them in 12 images is fairly insane due to how many there are but as the title says, it's a brief history and if you require further investigation you can see all of them, the good, the bad, and the ugly on the Coosticks website's gallery.
So, without further ado, here's an introduction to Coo Cards, starting at the start:
00101
I was taking a train to and from work and kept seeing these trees and wanted to take a photo of them. And when it came to do a poster, I chose them! I still really like this one, but the first thirteen cards are quite free with their design when it comes to the number boxes that are now standard on each card near one edge.
The Cobden Club was a nice venue that was usually under-populated. We were encouraged to bring as many people in to the venue as possible but only got a few. I remember one of my friends from the Isle of Wight came once which absolutely delighted me. The guy who booked us was perhaps a little disappointed that we didn't bring a bigger crowd. There were four of us at that point. And I still remember Dan, the guy manning the door who was extremely friendly and chatty to us.
A quick note that I dont have any idea where a visual record/copy of 00103 is, but it looks very similar to 00104 which are jellyfish from an aquarium in Australia.
00112
This is the last gig we did as the line-up of Ben on guitar, Steve on drums and Mike on bass. We had moments when we sounded great, but we all lived miles from each other and so it was very impractical to rehearse or keep it going from the start. Still, they all were very prepared to drive for miles for the short time we did it together and I am eternally grateful to them all for putting in so much effort.
This card has my sister-in-law's wonderful photos of us on it which I believe were shot somewhere near Guildford maybe??!! The card doesn't have the word 'Collectables' on it which most of the others do and I got the numbers from this and 00113 mixed up and didn't correct it because at that time I would print them too and by that point they were part of history. I like that mistaken quirk now but these days I try and get them as accurate as possible.
Not a great design this one, I'm pretty hard on myself and I'll let you know at what point I started to actually like a strong batch of them.
00115
I think the nice design/overall feel of this one is accidental - sometimes (often?) with CooCards I just throw something at the wall and see what sticks. This is a fairly crucial card in that it was the first time I played at the Camden Bar open mic, a night run by my good friend Tim Wilson, which became an extraordinary institution for a number of years. I don't think I always realised how lucky we all were - a bewildering amount of great music, great musicians and great nights passed through there, sometimes quiet and intimate, sometimes packed to the rafters with people.
I remember a Christmas one there that was so full it was hard to move around and the place lit up when I did Somebody To Love, with a table full of girls (some who worked there) screaming the backing vocals back at me. Great times, but this was my first, nervous visit. I think I went with my friend John and I'm pretty sure I sang Queen's Under Pressure and definitely two originals which I have videos of. One of them, Pandora, is a song I have played so rarely that I forgot I even wrote it. Looking back at the video, it sounds really good, I might post it for you to see!