About a thousand years ago, I was really into a band called My Life Story. It was 1996: Britannia was about to be very cool and everything that happened in Camden was cool, even an inexpert piercing that immediately became infected, and they were good, goddammit. They were witty and splashy and knowing and pretentious, intensely melodic and defiantly unbothered by the impossibility of making any money if you went around with a 12-piece orchestra.
Looking back, they nearly made it a bunch of times – their debut album, Mornington Crescent, was No 2 in the indie chart in 1995, whatever the hell that meant, and they signed to Parlophone the year after, which is where all the hip cats were.
It never really felt as if they were on a one-way trip to the big time, however. Not only were they not particularly famous, but they weren’t even the most famous band with way too many instruments.
I had a music column in the Evening Standard then. I spent an awesome amount of time trying to persuade London that, far from being the poor man’s Divine Comedy, My Life Story were actually the rich man’s Divine Comedy. Sadly, no one listened and they split up in 2000, although the lead singer, Jake Shillingford, had a solo career.
They reformed for a Britpop festival in 2017, then a crowdfunded album in 2019. Then, on Saturday, they played the titchy 100 club in central London. Everyone there, about 200 people, was a superfan.
It was like when a billionaire gets Beyoncé to play at his birthday party, just because he can, except emphatically no one there was a billionaire. But that gets you somewhere close to the mood: disbelief at the sheer proximity of the idol, mingled with a reckless sense of belonging. A couple there had walked down the aisle to You Can’t Uneat the Apple, a weirdly unromantic song, but you do you, as they say. Shillingford was flogging his own merch at the end. Imagine a gig before music existed as an industry, when it was just some people who had found themselves in a room and knew all the words, but only one had a mic.
If no one heeded me 30 years ago, they definitely won’t now, so I’ll just leave it at: My Life Story – hard recommend.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
