‘I wrote it in a bedsit on Nick Drake’s guitar’: how the Dream Academy made Life in a Northern Town

No pigeon fanciers … from left, Nick Laird-Clowes, Kate St John and Gilbert Gabriel in 1988. Photograph: -

Nick Laird-Clowes, singer, songwriter

I was a part-time presenter on the first series of The Tube, with Jools Holland and Paula Yates. That was filmed in Newcastle, but they didn’t keep me on, so I went back down to London. It was so depressing. I’d been in a band called the Act with Gilbert Gabriel, our keyboards player – one day we sat strumming guitars in his bedsit and decided to come up with “a big, African-style chant chorus”.