Pointy Finger
The anarchic Casio keyboard punk of Hevi Sosij came to an abrupt end in the spring of 1988, leaving Phil and Hubble with underage drinking problems and no outlet for their lack of creativity. Phil had been discussing a concept album with Dan for a while, and before anyone could stop it, Legge, Dan, Phil, Hubble and Ed had coalesced into Pointy Finger. No-one knew where the name came from but everyone agreed it was awful.
Dan, Legge and Ed were serious musicians, in that they could actually play instruments, and Hubble was learning the drums at an alarming rate. Phil couldn’t do anything and arguably still can’t.
The Pointy Finger sound was organic, acoustic classically influenced mechanical electropop of a kind that can only originate from putting five people with different musical tastes and no ability to communicate their ideas together in a room and recording it. Great jazz musicians can feed off one another to create great improvisations, and Pointy Finger were anything but great jazz musicians.
When played back, what had sounded like three people in a room destroying various stringed instruments while one took a saw to an old piano and someone else was murdering an old lady somehow ended up sounding… exactly the same. The first album “One Beats Our Pric” was received with no reception whatsoever.
The second album “Derek Nimmo”, however, has been described as a post-punk arthouse masterpiece (by Phil). For reasons best known to himself, Legge submitted the track Dead Body to a regional competition, leading to Pointy Finger being crowned the “second best band in Walsall”; a recording session and an unfortunately disappointing appearance on vinyl (1990’s The Wheel compilation; bizarrely out of print).
The third album “Why Not On This Ticket?” is not bad, but the band was suffering from their time in the professional studio and had more or less forgotten what had got them started in the first place. Phil and Hubble were by now relatively proficient on guitar and drums respectively, and their sound began to dominate, to the extent that Ed started working on various side projects which actually had a more authentic Pointy Finger sound than the “official” recordings.
In the summer of 1991, Dan, Legge and Phil got together to work on a few demos for the next planned release, but somehow instead recorded an entire double album, “Wayne Is Fat”, which they considered at the time to be their finest work; in retrospect it’s competent but it’s not “Derek Nimmo”.
Pointy Finger took a break for a couple of years to finish off their university careers, then in 1996 started work on the follow up to “Wayne Is Fat”, tentatively titled “This Is Not What I Had In Mind” - and it wasn’t, because it’s still not been finished.