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anybody but them. You wouldn’t have got that with Thom. Certainly onstage he wasn’t arrogant. One of the interesting things about him in hindsight was that he was able to sit in the background on something even though he was so talented. He didn’t argue about doing the backing vocals and that’s quite a testament to his character I’d say. But then he knew he was doing it with [On A Friday] and we were a bit of fun to keep him going while he was at university.”
    At that point, although he’d had a fairly serious relationship before he came to university, Thom was still shy around girls, something he often blamed on the fact that he went to an all-boys school. Laura Forrest-Hay wasn’t quite sure of what to make of him.
    “I wouldn’t say he was moody but he was withdrawn,” she says, “which I suppose was shyness but coupled with his confidence it sometimes seemed like arrogance. I think I misinterpreted his shyness at the time.”
    Martin thinks that Thom partly relished his reputation as an outsider and an outcast. “I think he kind of enjoyed it,” he says.“He certainly nurtured that. Rather than walking into a room and going, ‘Hello everyone!’ He would walk in and look at the floor and be slightly mysterious.”
    At the same time there was genuinely a shy and unassuming aspect to Thom’s character. He wasn’t a raconteur but at Exeter he made several close friends and, even more significantly, met his long-term girlfriend Rachel Owen. Rachel was also doing a joint course, in Fine Art and Italian.
    “She really thought I was a freak,” he said to Melody Maker later. “She thought I was impossible to talk to, really moody, difficult, unpleasant and idiotic. And I think I was. But she bashed a lot of that crap out of me.”
    Rachel was heavily into music, too, and another Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Shaun McCrindle remembers that it was Rachel who first got him into the Pixies. “The first impression he made on me was when he came into the Hall Of Residence we were staying in at the time singing ‘Gigantic’, the Pixies’ song,” he says. “Rachel had just introduced Thom to them.”
    If his initial attempts to woo her had been unsuccessful, then it must have helped that Headless Chickens were becoming increasingly successful, albeit in the tiny world of Exeter University’s alternative scene. Very soon Thom had the disconcerting realisation that his ‘fun’ band at university was much more successful and popular than his ‘real’ band back in Oxford. Martin, who now runs a successful internet advertising company, worked hard at promoting them and the band were able to draw, at times, several hundred people to their gigs.
    “We did start taking it more seriously,” says Laura. “We started getting asked to play the stupid Balls they have every term at places like Exeter. We got to headline some of those gigs and they were quite big, they’d be maybe 500 people and we’d get paid for that so we’d practice properly and work out our set. Shack was very driven. He was very focused on his music and it was an outlet for that.”
    “When we were there, Exeter University was about 7,000 – 8,000 people and a lot of them were Sloane Rangers who’d just rent a big house in the country and fuck off,” says Martin. “Which meant if you wanted to do something, you could get an audience because there wasn’t that much going on. Through the network of maybe fifty of your mates, you could guarantee 150 people turning up towhatever you did. If we’d been at Manchester or London we’d never have got that. So it was a massive confidence booster to us as a band when, at our very first gig, a load of people came. We genuinely had a following who knew our songs and really liked a few of them.”
    The main thing that made Headless Chickens so popular in their own little world was the amount of effort they put into their performances. Unlike On A Friday, they were as much about the