“Basically we saw them in The Project, a series of gigs that they ran,” he remembers. “The whole thing was incredible. There wasn’t a drummer, really chaotic, and at the time I was a bit scared of them. But it was that performance that stood out for me.”

“We used to see Gavin all the time,” says Shields, “so we just approached him on the street and said, ‘We’re in a band,’ and he basically told us to forget about London and go to Europe. He gave us this big list of names of contacts all over Europe, and that got us our first gig in Holland and from there we went to Berlin. Gavin basically saved our lives performance-wise because if we didn’t have that list of contacts… that kept us going for years; it made us really feel like a band. The Virgin Prunes were the thing that made us; it was that mentality of, ‘Don’t buy into that English thing of demo-ing and getting a record deal’. A really good thing.”