John Seghers, local sound guy, gave me a set of locally-infamous and astoundingly terrible stage monitors. I mean, seriously, they just hurt to listen to; musicians would cringe when they saw them on stage.

They’d been through a lot of bands by the time they reached me, and came with an amp I was also being given. They were, in fact, more or less the price of the amp – if I wanted that, I had to take these wretched things too, just so John didn’t have to haul them to the dump.

And upon testing, they were indeed hilariously terrible. They totally lived down to their reputation. There was dirt caked in the speaker foam, and they were filled with fibreglass insulation and in one case quite literally a small dead animal. I was looking at a parody of bad stage gear.

But that is not the story. The actual story is how it turned out they were secretly – very secretly – great, just… buried, and muddled beyond all recognition.

They’re back now; for the first time in literally decades, they sound really, genuinely good. But it was a long way home. This is how we got there.


The original back panel – anybody ever heard of this crew?