At first the antique quality of the footage could be artificial. It’s as if a crafty editor has applied a filter to give the impression of film from an analogue camcorder. The horizontal bars of colour distortion jumping in and out. The image skewing and flickering like a candle flame in a draught. It’s pretty convincing.

The timestamp, too, could have been superimposed on a very recent recording, tricking the viewer to believe that these scenes were filmed an age ago.

But then there’s the pre-widescreen aspect ratio. And then there’s the guitarist’s quiff.

Off stage, across Britain and across the world, weeks-old shockwaves still reverberate from the Hillsborough disaster and Tiananmen Square. The UK’s number 1 single is ‘Back to Life’ by Soul II Soul. The space shuttle Columbia and the Soviet Union remain intact. The ousting of Thatcher from Downing Street is more than a year in the future. Mobile phones are science fiction.

The date is 14 July 1989, the video is real, and this is the first time I ever played live on stage with a band.

Some months beforehand, one evening, I answered a knock on my parents’ front door to discover a couple of lads from the year above me at school, who I’d never spoken to before. Their first question was “do you like The Smiths?”, their second “do you want to form a band?”. I couldn’t play anything and I’d never sung a note, but it seemed more fitting to say yes than no.

For the weeks in the run-up to that first show, I was shredded by anxiety. You only had to say the word gig and my stomach would implode.

Non-superstars

The Grimsby Rock Showcase was, for a while, an annual event staged at Grimsby town hall by Steve Jackson, who wrote about music for the Grimsby Telegraph. For all the insularity that suggests, it was a good thing. Hard-working, well-practised local metal bands could take a break from playing pubs in Hull and Doncaster to parade their leather trousers for a much bigger hometown crowd. It was good experience, too, for indie kids with far less confidence and far cheaper equipment but dreams as big as anyone’s. In 1989 the line-up even includes a pretty good hip-hop act. It would have been a stretch to call the Grimsby Rock Showcase eclectic, but as a cross-section it was at least a bit less monocultural than Grimsby.

The showcase is a well-attended event given the non-superstar status of the artists. Even allowing for the inflationary effects of anxiety and memory, we’re talking at least a couple of hundred.

Until we can find a drummer, our fledgling ensemble – named Conversation Fear, ostensibly after a line from one of our favourite obscure R.E.M. lyrics but also probably in acknowledgment of my own crippling social ineptitude – will feature only guitar and vocals.

So there are hundreds of people in the room, and only two of them are on the stage. I’m one of those two: a 17-year-old introvert who braces for random abuse every time they leave the house. Nine or ten bands are scheduled to play, and we’re on first.

What I don’t realise, behind my sunglasses and long fringe, is that somewhere towards the back of the room, someone is pointing a VHS camcorder at the stage. After tonight the tape inside the camcorder will be placed into a box and left in a dusty room full of junk. While the tape is in the box, I’ll move to Birmingham and the internet will become a thing, and broadband, and then someone will invent YouTube, and mobile phones will stop being science fiction, and I’ll move to Sheffield; and finally, more than three decades after it was stashed away, the tape will be retrieved, digitised and uploaded, and one of those lads who knocked on my door and who lined up next to me on stage in 1989 will tag me in a comment in 2023 alerting me to the footage, and I’ll receive the notification as my back pocket vibrates while I’m walking to pick up the younger of my two children from school one afternoon in February.

It’s like time travel just became real. It’s like all those viral tweets asking what you’d say if you could communicate with your teenage self. My teenage self is there on the screen, suddenly within reach, absurdly close.

It’s enough

I’m looking at the video for some kind of meaning to take away, some kind of revelation that might effect a great perspective shift and somehow instil a new sense of fulfilment to carry into my later years. A naïve demand for happy endings from real life, or at least for satisfactory narrative structure, is one thing I still have in common with the person on the screen holding the microphone, despite now being three times their age.

But there’s no need to reflect on what I might tell baby Pete if I could speak to them, or any of that stuff. There’s no need to contrive some consolation for the fact that I’ve gone from playing three gigs a month in the late noughties to one a year today. It’s enough just to peer through this wormhole and be fascinated.

After the town hall gig, Conversation Fear worked up a few more songs, finally acquired a full rhythm section, and popped up fairly regularly for a couple of years at live shows on the local indie/alternative circuit. We played more R.E.M. covers than was probably healthy, and some of those lyrics sound insufferably spiteful now, but it was fun. Being in my first band gave me the confidence to form my second and start playing live again in the late nineties. Not to mention the anecdote about once being too drunk to get on stage, at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon – but that’s a story for another day.

Before the video resurfaced there was only one thing I could remember about that first show. It was the way all my nervousness subsided when I went on stage. The first performance anxiety, the knotted stomach, the terror of ridicule. The sunglasses might have helped, or the bottles of Newcastle Brown. Maybe it was something else. Either way, I felt peace and belonging, and I knew I was doing what was right for me. Maybe you’d be able to see that in my face, if the footage was a bit less flickery and distorted.