How I joined The Mechanisms

I started writing this anecdote in late 2019, when my band of the past 10 years, The Mechanisms, made the mutual agreement to break up. I originally intended to write a full account of my time with the band in three chapters. However, shortly after the band’s farewell gig in January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and during the stress of that period I lost vast stretches of my memory. All I can remember of the band’s middle years, for example, is that I once insisted on making us all packed sandwiches for our gig in London, causing Ivy to dub us “the world’s most wholesome rock band.”

Anyway, I thought I might as well present these fragments for your interest, and to document one of the most exciting formative periods of my life and musical career.

Part one: The Beginning

I arrived back in Oxford a month too early to move into my new house, and a month too late to join The Mechanisms.

Apparently, Jonny and Dr Carmilla had already formed the idea of the band at that summer’s Edinburgh Festival, a petri dish for strange new projects. I’d been at the festival too, doing the lights for a queer feminist burlesque show, but I had been unaware that the pair even knew each other. Of course, Jonny always turned out to know everyone – I once turned up to help shoot a short film for the local Super 8 competition, only to find him playing the starring role of a terrifying giant death rabbit in a white fluffy suit in 30 degrees heat. So it’s no surprise that he would eventually cross paths with the enigmatic musical genius Dr Carmilla.

I always admired Carmilla – she was a brilliant instigator, sitting like a majestic Gothic spider at the centre of a web of music, cabaret and writing, inviting people into her world of prog rock, anime, Dieselpunk and sinister storytelling. To my knowledge, she still is.

And so, that October, when Dr Carmilla invited me round to her rundown house off the Cowley Road, I found the kernel of the band already crammed into the bedroom – Jonny on vocals, Ivy on flute, Nastya on viola, the long-lost Scuzz on cello, Ashes on bass and Carmilla on vocals, piano and every other instrument required. Drums and acoustic guitar were absent, but many of the band’s core concepts were already established – the idea of performing in character as the mechanised space-pirate crew of the starship Aurora, for one. Dystopian fairy tales, for another: “Rose Red” was already in full marching order. But the idea to knit the songs together into an overarching narrative was yet to be established. Crew members’ origin songs rubbed shoulders with fairytale ballads and a frantic, repetitive cabaret number about a nightmare that Jonny had once had.

The room itself was tiny – I had to lie down in the gap between the bed and the wall to listen to the band rehearse. The music washed over me in a jumble of mysterious and off-kilter melodies – raw and unformed, but no less exciting for it. My confidence buoyed by the recent acquisition of a mandolin, I immediately asked to join the band. I was told that I was too late: they already had all the musicians they needed. No matter. All I had to do was bide my time.

Still, I was happy to stay on the outside for the time being. I’d already started writing my own music by then, and, in fact, debuted “The Hedonist” and “The Spiv” at the same open mic night where The Mechanisms debuted some of their first shanties (for which I showed my glowing appreciation by stating that they were “almost like proper songs.”) I wasn’t there for their official launch gig on Halloween – I’d been booked to perform in Birmingham, one remaining obligation hanging over from when I thought I might be staying in the dreaded Midlands after coming home from university. I was there for the band practices, though, where the recently-press-ganged Drumbot Brian had to gamely make do with a single snare drum, and where they rehearsed how their very first gig would begin: Carmilla tripping a switch on each of her frozen band members, bringing them to life for the first time.

After rehearsals, we would drink red wine, eat cake and talk happy nonsense, crammed onto the tiny sofas, the floor, and sometimes each other, much to the chagrin of all involved.

Soon enough, my window of opportunity arrived. My big break came with the Queer Cabaret at St Hilda’s College that winter – I’d moved into a proper house by then, and no longer had to sleep on Jonny’s living room floor, with him and his housemates constantly playing Fallout Three on playstation and embedding its retro 1940s soundtrack into the deepest recesses of my brain. I was brought in because Jonny couldn’t make the gig. He’d started a job in London working nights, one week on, one week off, which would render him only able to attend 50% of Mechanisms gigs for the next two years (we worked it out – it was indeed 50% exactly). I sang his character, The Captain, in Nastya’s origin story “Cyberian Demons”: an ingenious, futuristic Russian Revolution story cycle that quite never made it to the recording studio.

To get into the military theme, I wore a vintage officer’s dress uniform that I’d purchased from Oxford antique market that summer as a reward to myself for passing my final exams. I believe I even wore a giant silver clockwork key fashioned from a spray-painted toilet roll inside, but that had to be dispatched with at later gigs, when my mandolin strap got in the way. Before the show, Carmilla photographed me posing in uniform in a local graveyard – and so the Toy Soldier was born.

Despite the fact that I made everyone on stage burst into laughter by improvising the line “I wish I wasn’t dead” during the tragic final song, the band seemed impressed with my performance, and I was invited to join permanently. This might have been partly down to an amusing opening skit with Nastya, where the Toy Soldier’s activation code consisted of the correct way to drink Earl Grey tea (milk, no lemon). The psychopathically cheery, excessively British persona of the Toy Soldier would remain in place from then on.

Part Two: The Middle

There was something about the following summer – the hot, lazy excitement of being part of a new cultural movement, part of the music scene of the city, that I’ve never felt since. I’ve never felt so current, so relevant, and so ridiculous. I wrote and recorded my first EP, Rogue’s Gallery, late at night in Dr Carmilla’s spare room, necking red wine to quell my nerves and still damp with river water from cooling off in the Thames earlier that day. Everywhere you looked, strange cabaret bands roamed the Cowley Road and haunted The Cellar, the main alternative gig venue in Oxford: the punk cabaret Borderville, who released a concept album version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis that lives rent-free in my mind to this day. Barberella, a glam rock clown cult whose show concluded with a man juggling, and then eating, raw onions. And Scarlett in the Wilderness – a feverish, burlesque-tinged jazz folk ensemble decked out in corsets and feathers. We fitted right in.

Despite this, I still hadn’t quite got my head round the strictures of being in a band. Some days, I decided I would rather go shopping than to band practice. At a garden party gig I refused to wear my Toy Soldier uniform because I was too hot and wasn’t allowed to sing the vocals on “Rocket Girl” (I remember playing glockenspiel extra loud in a fit of pique because of this). There were gigs in living rooms, basements, birthday parties, pubs and gardens. The venues almost always spelled our name right.

As far as I can remember, we recorded our first album, Once Upon a Time: In Space, in a farm in the middle of a very allergenic meadow, on the day my pet Triops (a kind of glorified sea monkey) had cannibalised each other. I was encouraged to jump up and down while singing to make the Rose Red character sound more punchy, and Johnny opted to record sans shirt (well, it was a hot day). The poor sound technician didn’t know what he was dealing with – this was before the arrival of the excellent Jimmy Heatherington, who was totally on board with our vision.