Ian Mercher is half of Your Dad

Chas is coming to Presteigne on Friday, because Your Dad are playing at a wedding near here. I love playing weddings; they give me an oppurtunity to behave as badly as I like, and get paid for the privilege.

I was batting around on Chas’s website this morning, and found a link to the piece I wrote for the Telegraph a few years back about being bottom of the bill at Glasto, and thought it might be of some interest to my readers. The Telegraph didn’t actually manage to spell my name even halfway correctly; ah, the bitter fruits of show business. This piece was published on the Saturday of the festival; and, as so often with Your Dad, it did us few favours, since who reads the Telegraph at Glastonbury? Anyone who read it would be a million miles away from Pilton during the actual festival, you might imagine. By a remarkable coincidence, I did meet the man who must have been the only Telegraph reader on site that weekend; and it was, I swear by all that is holy, John Otway. He was in the theatre backstage restaurant drinking coffee, and he hailed me, and waved the paper at me. Chas and I had supported him at The Bath Fringe a few months before, and he was kind enough to remember me; and saw at once the problem with bigging up your act in the Telegraph. We laughed!

Also this morning, I was listening to the new Prefab Sprout album, ‘Let’s Save The World With Music’ on Spotify, and was feeling distinctly underwhelmed. I’ll always love Paddy, but I can see why this stuff has waited 17 odd years for release. It sounds nice, but there are no killer tracks. Many many many years ago (one might almost be tempted to say ‘back in the day’), the Prefab’s drummer Neil Conti used to play with The Mood Index while Paddy faffed about in the studio. These were the glorious middle years, when I had left the band, and the ten times ten wonderful Katherine Ellis was our singer. Subsequently, when she went on to greater and greater things, I was lured back, although she does sing backing vocals on The Mood Index album, which is a bit like Aretha doing BV’s for Otway. Since I rejoined, we’ve sunk below Your Dad on the bill, and are currently the 11236589th most famous band on the planet. Ho hum.