Kirk Field downing the dregs
of his most Delicious Poison
'Waves form to break and suns rise to set ...'
This post is a continuation: to read part 1 -
Delicious Poison: The First Sip (1981-85) - click here.
I.
By early 1986, Kirk and I both found ourselves living back in Leeds ...
The year started quietly (some might say ominously) with Delicious Poison playing a set at Haddon Hall to a virtually empty room.
Their following gig, however, at a club called Adam and Eve's and promoted in the Yorkshire Evening Post, was one of their best: "The band gave a very loud, energetic, and much angrier performance than usual. No frills just the thrills, as people like to say." [1]
Nevertheless, despite the band's slightly harder edge and the brilliance of new songs such as 'New Sun Rising', I found my enthusiasm for the project was waning - and I was growing tired of the entourage of losers that seemed to follow them everywhere; the Bromley Contingent they were not.
Another birthday gig took place at Haddon Hall on June 7th, for which I had gifted Kirk a hand-painted 'New Sun Rising' T-shirt and which he wore on stage that night. Gordon [2] approached me after the show, offering £25 plus material expenses to outfit the rest of the band with similar shirts.
I was slightly wary of getting too entangled in the band's inner workings again, but Kirk showed up at my door the following morning, and his persuasion won me over. I spent a whole day working on them, including a punky-looking unicorn design for guitarist Nick Ramshaw with the Delicious Poison slogan and song title (borrowed from the book by George Melly) 'Revolt Into Style' written underneath.
At a time when the UK average wage was nearly £4 an hour, I should have asked Gordon for at least £50, but, I suppose, this is what's known as a labour of love, or an act of friendship.
II.
By the late summer, Kirk and I had relocated to London once more, for another assault upon the capital.
On August 17th, we met up at the house he shared with the band in Tooting, not far from where they used to film on location for Citizen Smith [3]. That evening, fuelled by a bit too much whiskey, Kirk and I renewed vows of friendship and decided that we were, after all, two of a kind. Sadly, however, as the year wore on old differences resurfaced and our relationship remained somewhat fraught.
A September set at the Rock Garden felt shaky; the band seemed nervous, perhaps intimidated by the London crowd. A few weeks later at a club in King’s Cross, the stakes felt higher. Gordon was talking about a potential Janice Long session [4], but the gig itself was another hit-and-miss affair. The room was mostly empty, save for a few friends, and I could see Kirk's frustration boiling over. I felt for him; despite all his hard work, something wasn't clicking [5].
For me, the breaking point came during a meeting with Kirk and Gordon at the GLO offices in October. As we discussed the band's image, the irreconcilable differences between my vision and theirs became impossible to ignore. At one point, for example, the idea was floated for Kirk to adopt a matador look. I suggested it would be far more provocative (and pagan) if he came out wearing horns to embody the spirit of the Minotaur instead.
Neither Kirk nor Gordon seemed particularly amused by this. To break the silence that followed, I pitched an idea for a new song based on the story of Ariadne and of how we might incorporate Picasso's artwork. This, however, was rejected by Gordon as being a little too clever for the desired fanbase.
The year ended with two more shows: one on December 6th at the Polytechnic of Central London and one six days later at the Fulham Greyhound, a pub renowned for its live music gigs. Let's just say that when Delicious Poison were good - as they were at the latter - they were very, very good; but when they were bad - as they were at the former - they were very, very bad.
At the PCL gig the band looked tired and uncaring and were besieged by various technical problems to do with sound and lighting (which, to be fair, were beyond their control). If I hadn't felt a bond of loyalty to Kirk, I would probably have walked out. But I stayed - and even watched ten or fifteen minutes of the band they were supporting - the Blueberry Hellbellies.
Not bad. And, as I noted in my diary (with echoes of Miss Brodie), for those who like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing they like.
The Greyhound gig - the band's 50th - was much more fun and it was nice to see Kirk having a lot of fun (and being funny) on stage. He really should have been a stand-up comic rather than a singer and I remember once he suggested we form a comedy double act with the name Norfolk 'n' Good.
III.
1987: my new year's resolution was to try and keep my mouth shut as far as possible.
Kirk, meanwhile, had decided to detoxify the band's name by making it less poisonous. From now on they would simply be billed as Delicious. They had their first gig of the year under this new name at the Marquee on 14 January and Kirk was excited about that - and about the emergence of what he called new pulse music that would set the future dancing to a different beat.
Retrospectively, I can see now that Mr. Field was remarkably prescient and that my failure to understand what he was talking about showed my own ignorance of (and fundamental lack of interest in) the direction in which youth subculture was moving. Almost ten years after the event, I was still obsessed with the Sex Pistols and Mclaren's great rock 'n' roll swindle. Kirk, however, was looking forward rather than back and the shortening of the band's name to Delicious was the first step in shedding the punk past for something more neon and euphoric.
The Marquee gig was okay, but only okay. Despite intuitively sensing that old school rock as a guitar-driven band-oriented genre that involved songwriting and live performance was about to be superseded by house (i.e., electronic dance music characterised by the synthetic sounds of the Roland TB-303 and continuous DJ sets), for now Kirk was sticking with the boys in the band.
IV.
Didn't see much of Mr. Field for the next couple of months and when we did meet up for dinner at his place on March 7th, we didn't get on. No unpleasantries, but we bored one another.
Despite that, we sat up talking until after 3am and Kirk confessed that, for the first time, he was making plans for a possible future post-Delicious (indicating that he felt Nick and Colin were holding him back). Perhaps that explains why the next gig - again at the Marquee (7 April) - was so appallingly bad ...
I wrote a scathing review in my diary afterwards, describing their sound as Americanised rock and their performance as tired, desperate, and clichéd. Left the venue feeling sad and disappointed and hoping that Kirk would call time on the band, remembering Malcolm's words from the Swindle about the need to put a dying horse out of its misery.
Wrote a letter to Kirk telling him all this and received a reply a couple of weeks later essentially agreeing he had to make radical changes. Then, out of the blue, Colin Dodsworth (the bass player) rang me and asked if he could come over for a chat, to which I agreed.
Unsurprisingly, he was less than happy with how things were going for the band and voiced a series of complaints not only about Kirk, but about the manner in which his own role was minimalised and marginalised. 'No one', he said, 'likes to feel that they could be replaced by a monkey'. Which, I suppose, is true.
Didn't really know what to tell him (and, to be honest, didn't feel it was my place to advise him). It was clear he'd like to develop his own ideas in the future and so I simply wished him all the best (not mentioning that Kirk too was thinking of either quitting the group or sacking the other members of the band).
Somewhat surprisingly, Delicious were still together for Kirk's 25th birthday gig on June 7th, at the Rock Garden - and, actually, it was a lot of fun. And they even had a couple of new songs!
The thing that pleased me most, for Kirk's sake more than mine, was that a couple of members of the Porn Squad had made the journey down from Ulverston. They, along with several other old friends of Mr. Fields, formed the fan base of his punk band back in the late 1970s, Initial Vision.
I think it tells us something significant when a person can command such love and loyalty and, it has to be confessed, Kirk's charm is such that even though I first met him over forty-five years ago - and even though I've not seen or spoken with him for almost thirty years - I still feel a lot of affection when I think of him or record these events here.
V.
Monday 3 August: another Delicious gig at the Marquee. By this point, there's not much more to say: it was very much just another show. The flyer the band produced to advertise it is reproduced below, alongside a Delicious Poison postcard from back in the day that I have kept all these long years.
At the end of the month Kirk had decided the best thing for the band to do was release a single themselves (something he had previously long resisted doing). 'Delicious' b/w 'New Sun Rising' on a GLO financed label - Temptation Records - was originally scheduled for release in early November (1000 copies), but then put back to early in the new year.
As far as I know, this never came to pass (or, if it did, I never received a copy).
The year ended at the Limelight (22 December): it was a good night with new friends, but Delicious were like a group of strangers on stage, playing unknown (and unliked) material. Didn't get to speak with Kirk afterwards and the next time I saw him was in January 1988, in Mayrhofen, Austria, at the Scotland Yard pub, where he, Nick and Colin were now performing as the in-house band.
Without telling me any of the details, Kirk informed me that Delicious had officially broken up as a band (and that he wouldn't be having any future dealings with Gordon Lewis either). An inevitable ending and probably for the best. But I could tell Kirk was hurting, despite the brave face and the spin he was so good at putting on events.
I noted in my diary with a mixture of envy, admiration, and amusement that Kirk 'planned to stay in Austria for as long as possible; hanging around with the ski bums; drinking hot chocolate, walking in the mountains, seducing the local girls, and only thinking about where to go and what to do next when he absolutely had to ...'
It was a plan that, within two years, would lead Mr Field into a whole new world of adventure and he went on to become a defining voice of the UK rave scene, documenting and playing an active role in the very revolution he'd sensed coming back at the Marquee.
Today, Kirk is a celebrated author and public speaker; his critically acclaimed memoir Rave New World was a tremendous (and much-deserved) success and I'm happy to know that, in a sense, the world has finally recognised the star I always knew him to be.
Notes
[1] Quoted from an entry dated 24 Jan 1986 in The Von Hell Diaries 1980-89.
[2] Gordon Lewis was effectively Kirk's manager. As mentioned in part one of this post, as the founder of the Gordon Lewis Organisation (GLO), he produced some of the most memorable pop videos of the period. By the end of the '80s, Lewis had opened a number of stylish café bars and clubs in Soho, London.
Today, he is perhaps best-known as an author; his book Secret Child (2015) was a Sunday Times bestseller and made into an award-winning short film in 2018, dir. Yewweng Ho. I still think he should have paid me more than a pony for the shirts.
[3] Citizen Smith was a BBC TV sitcom (1977-1980), written by John Sullivan, and starring Robert Lindsay as Wolfie Smith, a would-be Marxist revolutionary and leader of the Tooting Popular Front. I was half-tempted to suggest that Kirk should adopt his look and start wearing an Afghan coat, Che Guevara T-shirt and black beret.
[4] Janice Long's early evening Radio 1 show was well-known and respected for promoting music by indie and alternative bands.
[5] To be fair, a second gig at the Rock Garden on 31 October - supporting Geno Washington and his band - went very well; a short, tight set with the brilliant new song 'Beautiful Friend'. Kirk was much more relaxed and made me laugh with his King of Siam impression, telling the crowd 'When I clap, you shall clap. When I cheer, you shall cheer. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!'
Readers who enjoyed this post, might want to check out his book, Rave New World: Confessions of a Raving Reporter (Nine Eight Books, 2023), or his latest, Planes, Trains & Amphetamines: Clubbing Holiday Confessions (Velocity Press, 2025). Both are available in bookshops, via Amazon, or from Kirk's website: click here.
