Fake Mildmay Folk Memory

Five years after the group's last recording, Clone Guilt releases Fake Mildmay Folk Memory: a CDR album which covers the entire life of The Ideal Form since its formation in 1996 and the completion of the final mixes in 2009.

José Gonzalez e-Harmonix, the group's hairdresser since 1998, has released this statement:

I've just read another online band biog telling me how unique and special some new group is: sexier than Bo Diddley and rowdier than Kylie. Oh! listen: it's just some more perfectly acceptable pop; there's a lot of it about.

Here is a CDR collecting the most enduring works of The Ideal Form. Was The Ideal Form special and unique? Well of course, reader, just as special and unique as you, my precious petal. The music contained herein is as faulty as worn as your teenage boots. Why do those boots still fascinate? Unseen they rot in some distant landfill, but they still have a hold upon the imagination. The Ideal Form, living only in the past, exerts the same pressure.

Is it nostalgia? Why couldn't you leave that bastard at the door? I thought I was just pulling out an old cosy jumper because the nights are drawing in, but out with the moths flies nostalgia – full in my face! Well, I accept the charge: The Ideal Form was never about 'reach' anyway and if this amuses you, dear listener, then I am happy. Now please leave those heavy books on the sideboard for tonight and join me in a glass of sherry as we watch the cat toast its nipples on the hearth.

The complete album contains 27 tracks and is available for free by contacting perkyn [at] cloneguilt.co.uk. Selected mp3s are available to download from the Catalogue page, or to hear at Clone Guilt's myspace site.

Summer 1996, young men on the dole-face craft The Ideal Form.

The first public outing for the group was at a Dalston pub, the Trolleystop, on Saturday 23 May 1998. At the time this pub mainly played host to rock covers bands. The Ideal Form drank in here solely because we could get served after 11. Why the management would choose to put on a group which played a load of original compositions devoid of the essential pub-boogie element was probably a mystery to the regular punters. We clearly only got the gig due to playing the 'Irish card' with the landlord.

At the Hope & Anchor on 31 July 1998 (supporting Mock-Rockers Elephant), our friend Stephen brought a cake from the cake factory he was working in. Doctors subsequently ordered that he stop working there due to the painful cramps in his hands caused by his ceaseless cake-trolley pushing. We ate the cake and played rock music. The reception was warm.

We returned to the Trolleystop that August. It was a very hot summer evening and most of the pub's customers sat outside. Despite this, the gig was filmed; we were never quite clear about the director's intentions, and we never saw him nor the tape again.

This gig was particularly memorable for our achievement of driving the whole audience out of the room and into the evening sun. One friendly local managed to hold on for most of the set, but she finally gave in as we engaged in the brutal repetition of 'Hackney Scum', a performance which led to one of our first critical notices: 'lads, lads, that's not music,' the landlord told us.

15 October 1998, Walthamstow Standard. . .   we do not discuss The Incident.

In the summer and autumn of 1999, the group played a series of gigs at the Red Eye in Islington. These were largely successful and enjoyable, so not very interesting to write about.

It was a great venue: good small size, excellent sound engineers; now it is some flats.

Pat O'Shea never cut a more admirable figure as singer with The Ideal Form than when he left the Bull & Gate stage mid-set to go and 'sort out' a couple of hecklers. Being on stage at the time, I was oblivous to the whole thing, but today even I would venture out of my hermitage into the grim world of rock gigs again to witness a singer with that commitment to his craft.

The Ideal Form played its final gig on 14 January 2000 at the Bull & Gate. Like most B&G weekend gigs at that time it was recorded and video excerpts were available online for a few years. Archive trawlers have not returned this footage to us. Any ideas?

The group's final gig may have been in 2000, but some model of The Ideal Form continued as a theoretical group slowly disassembling in the rehearsal studio until 2004. Pat left the group and the country, and the mute Ideal Form continued with new instrumentalists; the huge sound only occasionally thwarted by studio-booking calamities which necessitated the substitution of a full drumkit by a cardboard box and saucepan lid.

Lads, lads... that's not music

In July 2003, the ninety minute, twenty-two song cassette album "Lads, lads... that's not music" – The Ideal Form 1996-2001 was completed to document and bury the first phase of the group.

Excerpt from sleeve notes:

Hackney Scum closed the set of The Ideal Form's earliest gigs and closes the first album. An archetypal lyric, Pat's disgust is never more acute. The flaws in the mix (principally the unsatisfactory balance of the 'ambient' noise and the over-reliance upon added effects) are symptomatic of the evolving nature of the song. My aim remains to remix the song to the benefit of the various sounds brutalised by the current mix. But the concept of definitive, final versions is troublesome: there is death in completion. Hackney Scum brings an end to the tape: it is not a CD designed to infect your shelf in its jewel case shame or be sold on for a humiliating 38 pence. It is a tape. If you do not like it, you can tape over it.