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Today started with me noticing that Ade Matthews had posted a few interesting clippings from the Leeds Student Independent Newspaper, including a review of the Oblivious Participant bootleg CD compilation of the first two Spacemen 3 singles, on the Spacemen 3 Appreciation Society Facebook group. All the bits that Ade was posting were from the 90s, but it got me wondering if the issues they came from – and hopefully more – were online. It turns out that they are, and the online archive is here.
I was hoping to find some reviews of the Spacemen 3 gigs that took place in Leeds, but unfortunately I couldn’t see anything like that. What I did find was an advert and listing for a gig I hadn’t previously been aware of, from 18 October 1988 at the Duchess of York in Leeds. Asking around about this, Brian David Stevens on the Spacemen 3 Appreciation Group (UK) remembers going to a Spacemen 3 gig at the Duchess that was called off at the last moment. It then dawned on me that this would have been the day before the 19 October 1988 gig that was due to take place at the Venue in Edinburgh, that I had only been tipped off a few days earlier by niamhm on the Spiritualized forum that this was also cancelled.
There was a Spacemen 3 newsletter sent out to people on their mailing list from November 1988 that includes this bit of news:
So I expect that the Duchess gig, like the Venue one, was something that was hastily arranged, and that didn’t come off in the end. niamhm remembers asking Pete Kember about the Venue gig unexpectedly not happening when he next saw the Spacemen on 24 February 1989, and Pete claimed to have no knowledge of the cancelled date, so that could equally well apply to the Duchess one.
I’m always keen to put in the legwork of reading through archives of local papers like this on the off-chance of finding something. The problem is knowing that the archives exist in the first place. If anyone has any suggestions for other archives like this to investigate, please do let me know.