‘A FORKBEARD FANTASY’ (1974)
This was the very first ‘officially booked’ live performance, with just Chris and Tim performing. We didn’t have a company name at this point, it was later we adopted the Forkbeard Fantasy. The show, “A Forkbeard Fantasy”, was originally written as a story about a time-travelling Viking Invader, but we never gave ourselves time to learn the lines let alone rehearse. It ended up instead as a kind of dada happening with a large box, a transistor radio and a tool-kit. It was performed as a lunchtime show at the Edinburgh Fringe Club to a bemused and probably quite unimpressed smattering of lunchtime feeders. Later in1974 we took ourselves to Warwick University Festival at the invitation of Jeremy Shine. Here we constructed a ramshackle painted cardboard structure in which we based ourselves, making forays into the crowds, doing what we then called ‘infiltrations’, moving about among the punters in the bars and audiences for bands like Kilburn & The Highroads and Hatfield and The North. At this event we met performance artist Roland Miller. Liking what he saw, Roland encouraged us to apply for our very first grant of £200 from The Arts Council’s Performance Art Panel.
EXPERIMENTS (1974/5)
Thanks to this first recognition of our then entirely visual performance work, there followed a period of events and processes exploring solitary eccentrics and insect life-forms which we tried out in locations like scrap-yards, hilltops and desolate docklands. The aim was not to attract audiences but to experiment with ideas and gadgets.
A POTTED HISTORY OF THEATRE (1975)
This was performed to 500 enthusiastically screaming teenagers at The Southampton Nuffield Theatre, at the invitation of then Artistic Director Rob English. This wild and unfettered comic crash through the evolution of theatre from Caveman to Beckett, helped us get our next paid work at the 1975 Southampton Performance Festival, organized by Hugh Adams.
SOUTHAMPTON PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL (1975)
Mostly we performed in parks, streets and the St Mary’s Market and one show in the Southampton Art Gallery, with Mine Kaylan. Here we saw and met up with numerous artists like Bruce Lacey, Lumiere & Son, Bath Arts Workshop, Rob Con, Ian Hinchliffe, Reindeer Work, Hesitate & Demonstrate, Dave & Clare and many more; new openings, new contacts, less isolation.
EDINBURGH AGAIN (1975)
Our 1974 ‘happening’ at the Fringe Club had drawn us to the attention of one Birkenhead Dada with whom we hired a space for the following year’s Edinburgh Fringe 1975. Along with saxophonist Lol Coxhill , brother Simon Britton, Mine Kaylan and Ian Hinchliffe, this week-long stint of evening ‘shows’ earned us the dubious notoriety of getting banned from the Edinburgh Festival… We didn’t return until 1997.
THE EXCRETIA SHOW (1975)
Our first touring show. Many of our early shows had versions and permutations for all the different places we were asked to perform at and in. These could be pubs, clubs, streets, shopping precincts, the emerging alternative fairs and festivals, galleries and art centres. The picture shows us at the only just opened and then completely empty St Edmunds Church, now Salisbury Arts Centre. This piece, continuing our interest in insect life-forms and mechanisms, was about a loud & persistent mess-making Life Form and his drab Council Cleaner companion evolved entirely to tidy up behind him.