The 801 Photo Archive No. 10
Back to the Photo Archive Main Page								There are two little known stories about the 801's appearance at the Reading Festival. You may not be interested, but this is our website, so there. First off, they nearly played as a five-piece. Francis Monkman had gone up North to visit his dad somewhere in Yorkshire. He planned to drive straight to Reading, meeting the rest of the band backstage in one of the nicely appointed (not!) caravans available to the bands for R&R (that's rest and recreation for the curious amongst you). With ten minutes to go, Francis had failed to appear. Frantic re-organisations of the set ensued. His solo's were re-distributed, his intros parceled out, his name cursed to high heaven. Just after a nattily dressed young man in a pair of muddy bell-bottoms and a tie-died tee shirt had popped his head round the door and yelled: "Yer on!" a desperate looking Monkman threw himself into the caravan where he was greeted like a long lost brother and beaten into a bloody pulp. After that, everything went swimmingly (literally, given the amount of rain that had fallen on the audience). The other story? Oh yes. Bill borrowed a pair of very expensive but very tight trousers from Phil for the show. They split just as he hit the stage. This explains why there are no photos of MacCormick facing away from the audience in existence (as if you care).
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