Page blank, mind blanker. 

Hula.  Rings a bell...

It should all be there.  The recordings, the gigs, the support-tour with Depeche Mode, the rehearsal rooms, the studios, the TV, the radio... Christ, there must be something...

Facts.  Hit ‘em with data, maybe something’ll come out of it.

I was friendly with Nort.  Odd, but there it is.  I had a few trips abroad - hitching, bumming around, hotel work - returned and started work as a music journalist of the impoverished-local-stringer-why-don’t-you-move-to-London-with-the-5000-other-MJs-and-get-more-work-instead-of-covering-three-counties-and-all-the-bands-in-‘em-alone-you’ll-never-get-noticed-up-there ilk.  Nort had joined his nth band in the interim; Hula.  He played me their new album – Murmur.  Knockout.  He asked me to manage the band.

Odd request.  I’d never managed a band.  I had no idea what he wanted from me, he knew less, and as I was later to discover the rest of band didn’t know I’d been made the offer.  A meeting at crossed-purposes, my first glimpse of the confusion and somehow I was in the backroom.

160 words, one very long.  Not enough.   

Mindblank.  It’s not amnesia.  It’s all there.  There’s just nowhere to begin, nowhere to end and nowhere to middle.  There’s no tale, just a clatter of indescribable impressions.  Four people, four minds, four personalities that matched one another in much the same way a rhododendron, the Eiffel Tower, the left elbow of a middle-ranking Venezuelan politician and a partial lunar eclipse match one another.  It should never have worked and it didn’t; four men, three and a half agendas.  ‘Go left!’  ‘Go right!’  ‘Slow down!’  ‘...!’ brick wall BLAM!  Thank you, goodnight and oh... please don’t call again.  Ever. 

In saying nothing perhaps I have already said too much.  There will be emails.

But all the while it wasn’t working, before the whole thing imploded, something came out of it. 

Something.

The pro in me says start again... or at least edit.  But how?  This is how it was this mess, this jumble, this jungle of half-formed ideas seeming unusable... and yet now and then there’d emerge a blood-spattered dark ring of something other.  Backheel basslines; strange majesties; ambience and an edge; angst, threat and calm-before-storms; sampled theft long before such theft became compulsory.  But that’s the sound; you know the sound or you wouldn’t be here.  This is all cliché.  Something new.  Give ‘em something new. 

Something new.

I’m safe.  I’m in China.  I could do it.  They can’t get me out here.  I could talk about what happens when people rub each other up the wrong way with fistfuls of broken glass but they’d hate it and... I’ve got to go back to England some time.  And there it is, the problem, nutshelled.  To talk about Hula without mentioning debates and rifts and arguments and rows and stormings out and stormings back in again and sulks and spats and all the spittle-flecked invective would be like discussing procreation without reference to sex.  I’d love to tell you that Hula were found under a gooseberry bush where they’d been dropped by a stork, a happy tale, Sheffield’s Fib Four, but forget it; the bullshit won’t come and, failing bullshit, there’s a need here for restraint.

That you ever heard Hula at all is a miracle.  That it all actually worked is incomprehensible and yet it did work, often brilliantly.  In the shrapnel that followed the delayed explosion I heard a demo; New Hula, pure soul with a funky bass line.  It was excellent, truly excellent.  Truly excellent soul with a funky bassline.  I pinched myself so hard I bled for a week.

So there you have it.  Or there you don’t. 

Here are some happier moments.  All I could come up with.

* Hula were an abstinent lot.  They would never drink before a performance which meant that, on tour, they would always go for the fruit juices and soft drinks we got with our rider, always located at the bottom of the fridge.  This necessitated removal of all the bottles of beer, retrieval of the right bottle or carton and then the replacement of the beer, an arduous task.  Pete Care, the film maker, sometimes toured with us.  I remember on one occasion he got to the fridge first, spotted what he wanted at the bottom of the pile of bottles as usual and, to my horror, grabbed it and yanked.  I shut my eyes and waited for the crash.  Silence.  when I opened my eyes again Pete was happily opening the bottle.  I looked in the fridge to find its exit had left a perfect hole; all else was totally undisturbed.  It's hard to explain without knowing Pete but he really was that kind of a guy.  He gave the impression at times of one who'd have trouble tying his own shoelaces but, in reality, he was a very sharp bloke, not given to making mistakes.  The bottle-jerk was Pete to perfection; a clumsy notion dextrously executed.

* In another example of abstinence, on tour with Hula I can only remember the band ever getting approached by one female in search of sexual fun-and-games.  She ended up spending the night with our van driver.

* When it came to abstinence, John Avery was perhaps the least consistent.  When ordering a meal at a gig the question was always raised... "So John... are you a vegetarian today?"

* Our van driver used to amaze us in Chinese restaurants where we would often go when touring abroad.  It's bad enough to try to work out what a Chinese menu has on offer in English, but a Chinese menu written in Dutch or German is unfathomable.  However, our driver would always open the menu, scan it and order with total confidence.  One day we asked him how he did it.  "Easy," he said.  "I always look at the menu to see if there is a number 33.  If there's a number 33 I order it.  Whatever I get, I eat."

* Hula's final night on tour with Depeche Mode was one of the biggest gigs they'd ever played - the Wembley Arena in London.  When they came to the final, crescendo number - 'Walk on Stalks of Shattered Glass' if I remember correctly - to the consternation of Nort, one of the roadies went on stage and removed one of his drums.  Then another piece of his kit.  Then another.  By the end of the song he was left beating frantically at a single snare drum.  It could have been worse.  The same roadies with another DM support band exchanged their super-8 dark-and-arty filmwork with one of the crew's family-on-holiday-at-the-beach footage.

*    I think it was Brighton where, while the crew set up, Depeche Mode and Hula took advantage of all the lovely floor space to have an impromptu football match, them vs. us.  The strangest vision was Martin of DM playing with skin-tight trousers and handcuffs dangling from his belt proving himself an alarmingly adept player.  Largely thanks to him, Hula were trounced.

* Strangely, whenever I managed a Hula tour, when I got into hotel beds at night they would frequently collapse beneath me.  Young and naive in those days, I was amazed at how it kept happening... and more to the point, only ever to me.  These days I am a touch less naive.  Lads, if you're reading this... can I have a word?

Nice.  A happy ending.  I love happy endings.

Pete Marchetto for Sour Eden