There’s nothing quite as dispiriting as discovering that your musical hero now works in retail.

The other day I spotted erstwhile front-man of Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster Guy McKnight flogging jeans in a vintage clothes shop in Brighton. It was like Iggy Pop selling insurance or Andre Williams working a Caffè Nero.

For a band, my band, to be denied by circumstance the success they deserved, the disappointment was too great.  Although the circumstances were many – vicissitudes of the modern music industry, a music press that didn’t understand them and intractable divisions within the band – I never imagined it would end like this.

But it did. I loved Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster in the unadulterated way only a teenager can love a band. Fast, strange and original, they were a hurricane of fresh air at a time when music for adolescent suburbanites like me seemed to come only in two colours: ‘London rogue’ red or ‘New York hipster’ black. NME was pushing instantly forgettable dross like The Vines, The Datsuns, and Hot Hot Heat. The remnants of nu-metal hung like a stench.

And along came Matchbox with songs so spartan and fast they fit 10 of them onto their 25-minute 2002 debut album, Horse of the Dog. They showed, to the few that were listening, that the art of making wild bluesy punk music was by not adhering to loud-quiet-loud clichés but by surprising you. Matchbox stylised the sound of the black punk of Birthday Party into something completely new.

As a 16 year old from Brighton, Matchbox’s home town, the band was a thing of folklore. Its members formed a pseudo-label rooted in Buddhism called No Death that promised to put an end to mortality forever. No Death’s second and only signing was a suspiciously familiar looking four-piece called the Boogs who dressed as giant green bumblebees. They released one song about a race horse that dreams to be a man that arguably is Matchbox’s best song, although the band vociferously denies any claim to it.

At the same time rumours abounded around town of their antics on LSD while driving around their 1947 vintage Humber limousine, complete with gangster wheels and No Death skull emblem emblazoned on the side. They played with brilliant and obscure bands like Lapsus Linguae, Meanwhile Back in Communist Russia and The Parkinsons, a Portuguese-cum-American-cum-British band fond of smashing their equipment apart.

Andy Huxley was the biggest draw. The crash of his deranged guitar instantly drained adrenal glands and prompted crowds to riot, like during the climax of ‘Charge of the Guns’ when McKnight screams “COME ON AND DIE” on loop or as the underwater bridge of ‘Presidential Wave’ breaks into untamed distortion. Sym Gharial and Tom Diamantopoulo’s giant rhythm section thundered beneath.

The first time I saw Matchbox was at their 2002 Christmas Party at Brighton’s Concorde 2. A demented-looking McKnight skulked onto stage with a crude ‘Merry Christmas’ message smudged across his naked torso. Under strobe lights that remained switched on throughout the gig he opened with the tongue-in-cheek pantomime of ‘Morning has Broken’, before later launching into the band’s searing third single, ‘Psychosis Safari’. McKnight is the most captivating front man I’ve ever seen, alternating between staring like a dunce into the middle-distance and sprinting into the audience, long-leaded microphone in hand.

A few months later they played another show in the back room of a now-closed pub called the Freebutt. More people were turned away than got in. Men wore dresses in homage to their single ‘Celebrate Your Mother’ and McKnight tore around, obscured by a matt of long black hair, screaming ferociously in people’s faces.

Now most people have no idea who Matchbox are – many dimly recall their brief break into popular consciousness on the back of a generous record deal that financed a couple of very posh videos. Recently, after ranting about them to a girl in a pub she responded, “Yeah, I loved that [Matchbox 20] song, ‘If You’re Gone‘.”

Being an aging, hopeless fan boy is hard work. I was constantly galled that Matchbox never ‘made it’ but at the same time I was aware that in some way I wanted to keep them for myself and condescend to the world that they are missing out on something big.

Though they attracted a largely positive press, few understood them. NME described them as “zombie rock saviours”, a “brilliantly stupid indie rock horrorshow” and – I shudder to air this again – “a one way trip to rock nutterdom”. But insipid coverage aside, they had done well. They had a big record contact with Island Records and were spending the money.  They toured America and shot a video in New York for the Boogs.

For months Island sat on their second album, The Royal Society, eventually releasing it with minimal fanfare in late 2004. Despite a big, if slightly cheesy single that found its way onto the Sean of the Dead soundtrack, the album’s slower and more moody feel failed to generate much excitement at Island and the band were very unceremoniously dropped.

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