I think I did this kind of backwards.I was heavily into the usual suspects through the eighties - Cure, Banshees, Sisters, Nephilim,.... So, I knew of NMA, but hadn't really connected with them properly. I'd got into The Mission after the Sisters split and saw quite few of their early gigs, and I seem to recall that there was some kind of animosity between the camps of hardcore fans.... so I somehow didn't pursue them.
Had I been paying attention, I'd have known I'd already got some NMA - I bought Love Is by Joolz when it came out and loved it, I just hadn't realized who was PLAYING on the record. Still... I'm sure by the early 90s, I knew loosely of songs like Stupid Questions, and I remember a bloke I was in a band with had NMA written somewhere on his leather, but still I didn't bite.
But they were slowly worming their way into my consciousness - largely courtesy of Vengeance being played almost every time I went to Full Tilt at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. "Yeah, I like that one of theirs - but aren't they the dour northern blokes whose fans wear clogs and are stuck in the dark ages...??" Not ready for them, quite yet then... until.... until I bought a load of back issues of a fanzine called House of Dolls, which came with a free 7-inch single each issue. I just recorded the whole lot onto a C90 and played it in the car - random bands, random tracks, The Host (whoever they were) was my favourite, and there was Every New Dead Ghost, Shark Taboo, Pop Will Eat Itself doing Wake Up Time To Die, and New Model Army doing 125 mph. Then it began to make sense. I might have borrowed Vengeance from the library and (ahem) taped it. But I didn't really listen to it - only got it because of the title track...
But I'd heard they were good live, and we knew a couple of friends who were over in England working as au pairs and who quite fancied going to see them, so I gritted my teeth and when History came out, I bought it to see if I was missing out. I was expecting Stupid Questions, I knew that one vaguely. I think I knew 51st State vaguely too. "We were singing in the rain, yeah, like we wrote that song". That got me first. I played that one again. But nothing prepared me for side two. That night I sat up till quite late playing Green and Grey over and over... So I got tickets, how could I not? And I saw them live for the first time at The Venue in New Cross, May 92. They must have known about my earlier doubts, cos they were billed as the "Grim Northern Bastards". The next few weeks were spent hoovering up their back catalogue. Finally, I'd got it and it wasn't just for Christmas, this was for life....
