This is how it all begins. It’s May 1969 and four young men are crammed into a room in the Newtown Community Centre in Aston, Birmingham, inventing the future. Between them they sport an array of haystack hairstyles and unkempt moustaches, although they’re all barely out of their teens. The eldest is a darkhaired figure who plays his guitar lefthanded and emits an air of menace. At 21 he’s their unofficial leader. The rest of them are barely 20.
They’ve been playing together for nearly a year by this point, briefly under the name the Polka Tulk Blues Band, then even more briefly as plain Polka Tulk, and now as Earth. For most of that time they’ve been grabbing gigs wherever they can, mostly playing blues and blues-rock covers. But recently they realised they needed some material of their own.
