I am sorry to announce that after a 22 year hiatus, my band Royal Anthracite have split up. There might* be a final gig. (* won't)
— Steve Oliver (@SteveOliver76) September 5, 2014

I posted the above tweet last week as a result of a whole day trying to remember the name of the band I attempted to form at college. This was my first band, formed in 1992, and although I’ve played in bands since, but Royal Anthracite has a special place in my memory because it was a band that never existed. The formation of the band came about during my first year at Boston College; I was sixteen years old and well into my metal phase; some like minded new friends and I decided we would form a band. After a few ideas for names were kicked around we came up with Royal Anthracite, mainly because it sounded a bit like Anthrax and as such it sounded like a heavy metal name. Nobody seemed to know at the time that anthracite is a type of coal.

The band never seemed to do anything other than talk about the band, (a spookily prophetic metaphor for my late blooming career) and didn’t even get round to little details like buying instruments or rehearsing. Essentially we were to the best of my memory a covers band, being into the likes of Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, and the like (I also had leanings towards Nirvana, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam and various other from that era), eventually writing our own material and would perform at Boston’s best known venues; Axe and Cleaver and the IQ were the main two. In my head we could progress to staging more theatrical shows on bigger stages using backing singers and dancers, remember this was before we collectively owned so much as a plectrum. The ravages of time have removed the full names of the band members that never were actual band members apart from my old friend John who I have on my Facebook friends list; although I’m sure there was a Rick and a John/Jonathon too. One of our brilliant plans was to have a heavily costumed character called Triangle Man© who would run on at the end of every song and deliver just a single ‘ting’ before running off again, the fact that he was costumed meant we could replace him at any time and the audience wouldn’t notice. If anyone wants to use the Triangle Man© idea for their band then please get in touch. If you steal the idea without my permission I will let it be known that you are a thief of ideas.

Royal Anthracite might not have happened, so we can only speculate on the different path my life might have taken. John joined a band called Federal Law with some of the others and some new people, and I was pleased to see that he is still drumming today. (Yes, he was the drummer – I had yet to become a drummer and had hilariously appointed myself as the lead singer). Twenty two years have flown by since those first ideas were talked about in the college canteen, and it occurred to me that because we didn’t formally announce the split then technically we are still together. Whenever a band says they are going on hiatus you know that there’s a 99% chance that the band members might never even be in the same room again. I was tempted to waste some time emailing the newspapers and music press (and obviously the local press around Boston) to break the news that Royal Anthracite have officially split up, or go to Boston and record some vox-pops asking how people were reacting to the news, but I couldn’t be bothered. A few years ago I tried to get in touch with some of the members to suggest a documentary series following our comeback, but it remains one of those ideas on a piece of paper in my office drawer.

I wish I had kept in touch with the other potential band members so that we could have got together to make a public statement to the gathered press and perhaps put on a farewell gig in Boston, which would technically have also been our first gig.

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