Our request was granted by resident singer
Terry McCann who also added - "If you are no good you won't come
back!". With his good wishes ringing in our ears we did our spot and we
can't have been too bad as we eventually went on to be the regular
residents at the club when Mad Jocks were away and occasionally
headlined there until its sad demise in the early 1990s.
Dave left us in 1981 to pursue a different musical direction and we
stayed on as a duo. Although we missed the bass and the third harmony
we could at least travel in one car! Nothing much changed then for the
next 30 odd years! Check out the
Nostalgia link for memories and stories
about some of the many folk clubs and venues that we played at, were
resident at or ended up in by mistake. During the glory days of local
folk clubs we were out there sometimes 3 or 4 times a week.
Ah yes... The name "Malfunction". It arose on the walk home from the
Bell and Pump just after we had been given the floor spot for the
following week and we were desperate for a name. Being intellectuals we
were trying to think of a suitable descriptive name for our act (which
consisted of three songs at that time). Our three surnames of McGowan,
Ashton and Laverty gave us the three letters MAL which we tried to use
in various ways. MALadjusted was one possiblilty as was MALpractice and
we almost settled on Broken ALM (bit too clever for my liking) but in
our drunken state we settled on MALfunction and it has stuck with us
ever since. Shep Wooley said it reminded him of a "dodgy footballer" and one club billed us as Male-function by mistake. It was
a very strange club!
Perhaps the most successful part of our
history was running the Princes Corner Folkish Club in the King's Arms
in Harborne. This weekly club ran for around 6 years from the mid 1980s
and featured a guest every other week with singers' nights in between.
There's more in the Nostalgia section about the club but we had some
fantastic nights with some of the country's top performers. Strangely
enough, many of our regulars said they enjoyed the singers' nights even
more than the guest nights with artists from all over Birmingham
dropping in to join our regular singers. We never knew from one night
to the next who would pay us a call.
Since the closure of our
Princes Corner Folk Club in the early 1990s we have played only a few
gigs, most of which were with our good friends Alan and Glynn Briscow
otherwise known as Dandy. Although we never actually retired (or split
up!!), work commitments and lack of suitable venues meant a 5 year
break from performing.
Thanks to our old friend Vicky at the
Unicorn Folk Club we hit the stage again in June 2007 and, as it wasn't
a complete disaster, did a couple more gigs last year. With Chris having retired from teaching and me being doing a part-time job
you never know - there might be life in the old dogs yet!
John