The Gas Board: The story of Bryan Ferry’s first band back home in Newcastle
The film director Mike Figgis was enjoying the biggest accolades of his career in 1995, earning Oscar nominations for ‘Best Screenplay’ and ‘Best Director’ for his work on the Nicholas Cage drama Leaving Las Vegas, but it still wasn’t enough to make him the most famous guy from his old college band, though.
Figgis was a horn player for a soul group called The Gas Board during his time at Newcastle University back in the mid 1960s, and when that band went out to recruit a singer, they landed on a fellow student by the name of Bryan Ferry.
“The music was good, and we looked good,” Ferry said in 1982, recalling his brief tenure in the group. “We wore American sweatshirts and white jeans. But when the rest of the band went professional, I ducked out. I couldn’t have taken the guilt of not finishing my studies and not having a proper job. It’s the old working-class ethic, I suppose.”
As Ferry rose to fame as the frontman for Roxy Music in the early 1970s, the story of his Newcastle music roots came up in the press fairly often, and his version of the events remained consistent. Things took an unexpected turn in 1993, however, when the aforementioned Mike Figgis offered up a counter version of The Gas Board tale to a reporter while out on a presser for the Richard Gere film he’d directed, Mr Jones.
According to Figgis, Ferry had actually been sacked by his Gas Board bandmates in 1965 “because he wasn’t a very good soul singer. He had that tremble”. The “tremble” in Ferry’s voice wound up becoming something of a calling card, so you wouldn’t think he’d be too offended by Figgis’s statement, but as it turned out, it annoyed him quite a bit.
In a 1993 interview with Q magazine, Ferry took aim at his old Newcastle chum: “How dare he say that. It’s fucking rude. I think [Figgis] was jealous of me.” Ferry reiterated that he’d bailed on The Gas Board because “I wasn’t doing any work, since I was organising it as well as singing, which meant I was going into college less and less”.
It’s unfortunate that two successful, middle-aged men had to start bickering about their (presumably not very good) student soul band rather than just laughing about old times. While Ferry eventually found his musical home with Roxy Music, Figgis’s decision to go pro with The Gas Board didn’t last long. He composed music for a British experimental theatre group called the People Show in the late ‘60s, and when one actor in the group quit, Figgis was recruited as a performer.
From there, while Ferry was out touring the world with Brian Eno, Figgis was touring the world with his theatre group, befriending young actors like Willem Dafoe and learning the ropes of acting, lighting, and directing.
“It was an incredibly rich 10 years,” Figgis told the New York Times in 1990.
Figgis remained deeply involved in the musical side of his films once he became a director, and stands right alongside Ferry as one of Newcastle’s favourite sons in terms of worldwide artistic success. Just don’t ask them why or how The Gas Board lost its singer.
