The name

Badger came together in Rossendale over 1979 and 1980.

The name came off a bus. One of the founding members was sitting there trying to think of something the band could be called, when a bloke got on and sat down in front of him wearing a Davy Crockett hat. Racoon? Beaver? Badger.

That was that.

Rising Bridge

The band’s spiritual home was the upstairs function room at Rising Bridge Working Men’s Club. A poky, out-of-the-way place that somehow became the local Mecca for anybody in Rossendale who wanted to hear loud guitars. A quid on the door, a rock disco every Friday, and a band when they could get one.

Badger played it every couple of months to a packed room right through the early eighties.

Hull, 1983

In the spring of 1983 the band spotted an advert in a music paper asking for demo tapes from unsigned bands. It turned out to be a bloke in Hull running a record label out of a studio on the ground floor of his own terraced house.

The deal: eight unsigned bands, one track each, everybody chips in towards the pressing costs. Badger’s share came to £250 — real money in 1983.

They drove over one weekend in the summer, stayed at a B&B round the corner, and spent all Saturday recording two songs — “Demon Rider” and “The Traveller”. They went with “The Traveller”.

It came out on a compilation called Metal Plated. Badger, Rossendale. More on that here.

222

During the Hull sessions somebody was rewinding the tape counter and it happened to stop at 222. Everyone went “AARRGH — 222!”, made appropriate gestures with their fingers, and it stuck. The Number of the Band. A straight piss-take of Iron Maiden.

Then they went for dinner and the café turned out to be number 222. Then a car went past with 222 on the plate.

Some things you don’t argue with.

The eighties, and after

Badger stopped in January 1985 after a last gig at Bank Hall Miners Club in Burnley. Between 1986 and 1988 some of the line-up carried on as a power trio called Reggie the Dog. Badger reformed in 1989 and have been playing on and off ever since — through the nineties pub circuit, through more line-up changes than anyone can reasonably keep track of, and up to the present day.

Coming: the book

Gian Rothwell has written the band’s history from the inside. Part One covers 1979 to 1999. Part Two is in progress.

More on that closer to the time.