Interestingly, all communication I’ve been allowed to have with the band has been through someone called ‘Peter’. The weird thing is that I’ve never been able to find the real-life existence of a ‘Peter’ other than through the band’s Facebook mediums. It’s not like the band have been shy of their personaly Facebook presence, you can find their members through a cursory search using their real name. There’s been the handful of people who have stepped up on Facebook to defend the band publically too (“There yer dinner you cunt” etc.) yet the only communication I managed to get to talk to was Peter and always through the band’s official accounts. I’m not alone in my dealings with Peter, his email is even fit into the limited characters of the band’s Twitter biography.
Despite me requesting for direct quotes from the band while writing the article, the only communications I was allowed to have were channelled through this person who called himself ‘Peter’.
From the thread, it seems that some of the bad behaviour of the band has been partially excused (whether consciously or subconsciously) by the idea that someone else has been doing these dickish things without the band’s full knowledge of how they were being represented. I’m not speaking for everyone here, just those who were trying to give the benefit of the doubt to a band who they once loved.
With such secrecy about the band themselves, it’s hard to get any idea of how much of this behaviour they knew about. Instead we’re left to fill in the pieces around these interactions, such as Ravi’s attempts to ‘friend’ any person on Facebook who’d said anything that could be perceived as negative about the band. I don’t know anyone who has accepted said friend request, so unfortunately, the reason for this behaviour remains a mystery to this day.
This is a band without any label representation, this is a band whose continued existence is down to two individuals who continue to keep the name ‘My Vitriol’ alive. It seems crazy that they would be paying someone to act on their behalf considering the relative anonymity of the band 16 years after their first album was released.
Does Peter exist? I don’t know. There’s so much about the band that I would love to know if I had a way of finding out. There was always a part of me that wanted to write a story about how My Vitriol rose from the ashes to prove all the haters wrong. A success story after a period of negativity was basic Hollywood fodder. I wanted there to be a reason for all of this erratic behaviour. Instead I got little more than you could piece together from the information available in the public domain.
The one person who I never managed to hear anything directly from was Som Wardner, as far as I know, anyway. This isn’t North Korea, this is a band making music that they hope others will like too. In this day and age, you can tweet the President Of The United States Of America and he’ll probably read it. The whole thing has been baffling to me, and I wonder if we’ll ever know the truth behind it all.
