And Tom was right. For me it wasn’t enough just to hump gear, do security or pogo down the front at gigs. From the moment I saw The Clash I knew I had to form, or join, a punk band, and very soon I did. Not at university, though, but back home in Brighton. We only ever did one gig, but it is one I’ll never forget…
The seismic impact of punk rock had spread quickly all over the country, and by 1977 my home town had its own thriving scene, based in The Vault. This was, as the name suggested, an old 19th century burial vault, situated in North Road under Brighton Resources Centre, which was the headquarters of the local punk/anarchist/squatter movement. The Vault was simultaneously a rehearsal space and a gig venue, and all the early Brighton punk bands played there. On regular visits home from university to visit my mum and my friends and to watch my beloved Brighton and Hove Albion I had already seen three of Brighton’s first bands – Joby & The Hooligans, Wrist Action and the legendary Piranhas (whose legacy I would one day help to revive – but that was nearly 30 years later…) Now it was time to heed Strummer’s call and get up there myself. Together with two Albion-supporting mates, Max Cooter (vocals) and Miles Baigent (guitar) we formed Brighton Riot Squad, and tried to find a drummer.
But drummers were in very short supply. Then as now! Even punk drummers were in short supply. You didn’t need to be able to play the drums very well, but you still needed to own or have access to a kit. In desperation, we stuck an advert in the local paper, and we got a call from Frank.
Frank claimed to be a drummer, and he did have a kit. He also had that other essential rock ‘n’ roll prerequisite – a car to drive his kit around in. Hooray! But when we met up for our first rehearsal, our glee was soon tempered by the realisation that having Frank in the band had three major disadvantages.
One: even by the more or less non-existent standards of punk in 1977, he couldn’t play the drums. A dead turbot had a better sense of rhythm.
Two: he had very dodgy right-wing views: his parents were refugees from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and the very sight of a red flag or the mention of the word ‘socialism’ made him go nuts.
Three: he was a Teddy Boy.
The rivalry between Teds and punks in 1977 was media-created and of course blown up out of all proportion, but it did exist. Local Teds used to hang about outside the Vault looking for punks to beat up (for the painful results, listen to ‘Intensive Care’ by Brighton’s legendary Peter and the Test Tube Babies) and some punks were happy to return the compliment when the opportunity arose. Soon word of our unorthodox line-up got around, and one of Brighton Riot Squad’s rehearsals in the Vault was noisily invaded by another punk band - the very young, very drunk, more or less all girl Molesters. Plus their hangers-on.
‘See – I told you! Brighton Riot Squad have a TED DRUMMER! You WANKERS! You should be BEATING HIM UP, not letting him play in your BAND! And where are your BONDAGE TROUSERS? You’re wearing FLARES!!! You’re HIPPIES!’ (For the record: we weren’t wearing flares. But we weren’t wearing bondage trousers either. We didn’t think putting ridiculous amounts of money in Vivienne Westwood’s pocket buying overpriced rubbish which The Sun had told you was the right thing to wear had anything to do with punk rock.)
Frank’s politics were far more of a problem for us than his dress sense – we liked being different, that was what punk was supposed to be about, and having a Ted drummer certainly was different! Moreover, once we started to practise, we soon realised that what we had perceived to be his biggest drawback of all (the fact that he couldn’t play the drums) wasn’t going to matter one bit. Max, our singer, was more or less tone deaf. Miles could play the required three chords, but he couldn’t get them in the right order much of the time, and I was a complete disaster as a bass player, my self indulgent flashy style totally crap in a punk band. That is in retrospect, of course. I thought the exact opposite at the time…
Somehow, however, we got a set together, or we thought we did: a few of my earliest compositions like ‘Your Days Are Numbered’ and ‘Son of Sam’ plus covers of ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ and ‘We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together’ by the collective heroes of three quarters of the band, the Velvet Underground. (I say three quarters: the fourth member had never heard of them and thought Elvis was The King. I wonder if you can guess which one that was?) Joby Visigoth of Joby & The Hooligans designed a great poster for us. ‘BRIGHTON…RIOT SQUAD!’ it proclaimed at the top, above a large and brilliantly executed drawing of a riot policeman, truncheon raised menacingly above his head. We booked the Vault, plastered posters all over Brighton and waited with bated breath for our first gig. I asked Vi Subversa of the legendary Poison Girls, who at the time were based in Brighton, if we could use their PA system. ‘As long as nothing gets broken!’ she eventually agreed, with an understandable mixture of reluctance and suspicion.
The big day came. The Vault was packed: our posters really did look good, and we had plastered them everywhere. Joby & The Hooligans supported us, and they were really good, too.
We weren’t. We were absolutely awful.
We were worse than Crystal Palace.
(If you don’t understand the utterly, terminally damning nature of this statement, you will by the time you’ve finished this book, don’t worry.)
We didn’t manage to get the required three chords in the right order very much, and, thanks to Frank, were also completely out of time with each other. But we stuck to our guns and carried on. Vi Subversa stood at the front all the way through our set like a concerned mother hen, worried that the crowd were going to attack us – and therefore her PA - because we were so crap. But Vi needn’t have worried. It was a 1977 punk rock gig: the crowd were used to seeing bands that couldn’t play, and they didn’t attack us. Rather the opposite, in fact. They paid us the ultimate mid-1977 punk rock compliment.
They gobbed at us from start to finish.
That was our one and only gig, which itself is pretty punk rock, I reckon. I’m still friendly with both Max and Miles, 38 years later. As for Frank – he’s probably an Elvis impersonator. In Hungary. I’m sure his parents came from Hungary.
Wherever he is, I doubt very much that he’s a drummer…
It won’t surprise you to learn that the local emergent punk scene managed to survive the demise of Brighton Riot Squad: it went from strength to strength (The Depressions, Nicky & the Dots, Devil’s Dykes, Peter & the Test Tube Babies, The Dodgems, Smeggy & the Cheesy Bits, who became King Kurt… to name but a few of the other early bands) and on my visits home from university I turned up at the gigs whenever I could and sometimes helped out on the door or by putting up posters. But there was a developing problem. Before the punks had been let loose there, walls had been constructed in front of the actual burial chambers: the vibrations from rehearsals and gigs, plus general vandalism, caused breaches in them, and pretty soon skulls, bones and bits of coffin started turning up. Someone arrived at a gig with a skull they had found in a local telephone box.
Then whole coffins started to appear with still legible inscriptions, many with French names and plaques dating from the mid 1800s. Hugenot refugees, some having succumbed to some kind of plague - I distinctly remember one inscription ‘victime de la peste’. This worried me! One evening I had volunteered to take the money on the door and on arrival the first thing I saw was a little baby’s lead coffin, about a foot long, with the bones still inside. With due deference I moved the bones to one end and used the rest as a cashbox. If all this had happened ten years later I guess the Vault would have become the most popular Goth or death metal venue in the world – surely this was the very definition of death metal, or at the very least death punk - but there weren’t any Goths or death metallers then and many of us were actually rather uneasy about the whole thing. Not just because it seemed a bit disrespectful: I remember sitting in the Three Jolly Butchers over the road having a discussion about exactly how long a plague bacillus could survive…
Eventually, with skeletons quite li
terally coming out of the closet all the time, as it were, things got too much: the local council took action and the Vault’s doors closed for good. When a ‘mysterious’ (fascist-perpetrated) fire burned down the Resources Centre above, that colourful chapter in Brighton’s musical history came to an end, though it is preserved for posterity on two compilation albums, ‘Vaultage 78’ and ‘Vaultage 79’ on Brighton’s seminal Attrix record label. By then, however, I was playing bass in a punk rock band on the other side of the Channel, having met them through what was perhaps punk’s greatest achievement in the 1970s – the multicultural and truly international Rock Against Racism movement.
RAR and its sister organisation, the Anti Nazi League, came about as a result of four main factors. These were the punk explosion and the resultant politicisation of the music scene: the powerful links between punk and reggae epitomised by the likes of the Clash, the Ruts and Misty in Roots: the massive growth in support for the fascist National Front in the late Seventies: and the obscenely stupid behaviour of two members of what was by then seen as music’s ‘old guard’.
In 1976 David Bowie had given a magazine interview saying he was sympathetic to fascism and had later made a Nazi salute at Victoria Station on arrival back from a tour. Even more astonishingly, given that he was/is a blues guitarist and had just revived his career with a cover of Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’, Eric Clapton interrupted a concert in Birmingham to make an infamous speech supporting the racist Tory MP, Enoch Powell. All this in a year when the National Front was at its political zenith, achieving 200,000 votes across the country in local elections. What absolute cretins.
The impact on many music fans, and especially people involved in the developing punk scene, was enormous. I had never had any time for Eric Clapton, but I loved Bowie’s early stuff, and his references to ‘supermen’ and the ‘homo superior’ - which at the time I had passed off as arty, sci-fi posturing – now took on a new, sinister meaning. The National Front of course tried to cash in, and for a time after this I hated Bowie with a vengeance. There is no doubt that both he and Clapton soon realised how contemptible their behaviour had been and recanted, but the damage had been done, and to their immense credit, some people responded straight away.
Photographer Red Saunders (of whom more later), Roger Huddle and Dave Widgery, among others, orchestrated a host of letters to the music press in protest. They then started putting on concerts under the banner of Rock Against Racism, the first of which was at the Royal College of Art in December 1976 and featured reggae band Matumbi and singer Carol Grimes. Allied as it was with the developing punk scene, the RAR movement quickly spread all over the country.
At Kent University we took up the cause with gusto by mid 1977, ordering loads of copies of the RAR fanzine ‘Temporary Hoarding’, plus badges and stickers, and a group of us started planning gigs, using RAR’s format and inviting all kinds of bands (mainly punk and reggae) to play side by side. As the slogan went: ‘Reggae, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, funk, punk – our music!’ Our sporadic events were incredibly successful, even though many just featured Brighton and Kent coast bands (The Depressions, The Provokers, The Infested among others) and lesser known reggae bands like The Enchanters (from the legendary Ruts/Misty In Roots ‘People Unite’ collective in Southall). At these gigs I met RAR activists from other areas and went to the events they were organising elsewhere: as a white 19 year old from the Sussex coast I learned a lot, very quickly. Rastas and punks joined together at the gigs – People Unite indeed!
It was a heady time. I immersed myself in the new music and learned an awful lot about organising gigs, which would stand me in very good stead a few years later, when I needed to promote my own. Our Brighton Riot Squad gig happened that summer. Then, on 13 August 1977, Max and I, along with Joby & the Hooligans and members of various other Brighton punk bands, travelled to South East London to join thousands of others opposing a huge National Front march at what came to be known as ‘The Battle Of Lewisham’. It was a defining moment in modern British anti-fascist history: the Front had never been stronger, and they came to Lewisham boasting that they would control the streets of London and, in the words of wannabe Fuhrers John Tyndall and Martin Webster, ‘kick their way into the headlines’ …
‘Black and white, unite and fight! Smash the National Front!’
‘Punks and teds and natty dreads, smash the Front and join the Reds!’
Multicultural Britain turned up to stop the fascists in their tracks.
At Clifton Rise bricks rained down on the ‘master race’ from all directions and when a wedge of anti fascists split their so called ‘Honour Guard’ from the rest of the march, leaving the coachloads of bigots who had travelled down from NF strongholds like Leicester confused and isolated, the result was never in doubt. They got battered. Mainly, I am happy to say, by locals who were angry beyond belief that scum like that had dared to set foot there in the first place.
In the aftermath of Lewisham the Anti-Nazi League was formed, to play the same role in everyday political life that RAR did in the music scene, and all kinds of local ANL groups were set up: Teachers Against the Nazis, Football Fans Against Nazis (I was in there!), Left Handed Vegetarians against the Nazis….
Then came the huge RAR/ANL Carnivals. The first one took place on 30 April 1978 at Victoria Park in East London: The Clash, Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex and my soon to be mentor Patrik Fitzgerald (plus the Ruts and Misty in Roots playing on a flatbed truck – I remember that very well) with more than 80,000 people there to listen and celebrate. We marched to Victoria Park from Trafalgar Square, some 6 miles, and when we arrived they told us people were still leaving the departure point. The second one was on 24 September 1978, at Brockwell Park in South London: Aswad, Misty, Elvis Costello and Sham 69, and even more people!
RAR and the ANL, plus Thatcher appropriating the Front’s rhetoric at the 1979 General Election (‘we are being swamped by an alien culture’) saw to it that the NF would never again be the electoral force they had been – although the fascists didn’t go away, far from it. On the very day of the second Carnival they organised a march through the East End of London which we didn’t even hear about till afterwards, because the Carnival organisers took the decision not to tell us: this caused serious and lasting divisions in the anti-racist movement. Fascists were already causing trouble at RAR gigs, especially in London, and as the British Movement took over from the National Front as the main rallying point for the boneheads, Nazi violence at gigs would become a real problem.
By this time I was absolutely determined that one way or the other, music and words would be my living as well as my life. My academic work suffered enormously because of all my other activities – including standing unsuccessfully for Union President - but in the summer of 1978, in between the two RAR carnivals, I did my final exams at university and, somehow, got a degree. A Desmond.
So what next? English Disease had faded away as punk exploded, Brighton Riot Squad had been a gloriously catastrophic one gig wonder. By now, as well as the bass guitar and violin, I had mastered the mandolin (chosen because it tunes the same as the violin: I have never learned to play the guitar) and was beginning to make some serious attempts at writing songs. My head was full of lyrics. I needed a new band.
One of the Rock Against Racism gigs I had organized at university had featured a feisty Harlow punk/R&B outfit called Pete The Meat & the Boys, whose guitarist Richard Holgarth I’d met while staying in nearby Roydon with the Poulter family - Max, Pat, Rachel, Nick and my school friend Tony - who had provided me with a regular and very welcoming bolthole from my battles with my stepfather since I was about fifteen. I visited the Poulters and Richard in Harlow for a few days after my final exams in early June 1978, and one evening was having a beer with a few of the local punks in their hangout which at the time, rather, bizarrely, was the foyer bar of the Playhouse (the local theatre). A long-haired bloke in a Ramones T-shirt turned up, handing out le
aflets for a gig he was doing that weekend with his new band at the Triad club in Bishop’s Stortford, supporting the Poison Girls.
‘Poison Girls?’ I said. ‘I know them – they’re from Brighton. I’ll come! What’s your band called?’
‘Newtown Neurotics. It’s our second gig. I’m Steve, by the way.’
Newtown Neurotics - what an absolutely brilliant name, I thought. We had a good chat, I turned up as promised and the band were as good as their name: for a second ever gig, it was great, and I made a mental note to check them out again the next time I had the chance. Then I went back to my mother’s in Southwick and pondered my next move. I did some summer work as a ‘guide’ for a local language school - I was supposed to show students the cultural treasures of Brighton, so I took them to gigs, to the football and down the pub - and one of the students was Eric from Brussels, a wannabe punk guitarist who said he was getting a band together when he got home and invited me to the Belgian capital to play bass.
I knew I had to get away from the poisonous atmosphere at my mother’s and liked the idea of spending a bit of time in Brussels: Eric told me there was a good punk scene developing there, and going abroad to a French-speaking country with the promise of a band to play in seemed a good idea. But I was going to need to support myself, so I told him to hang on for a few months while I earned some money. Richard Holgarth told me that if I wanted quick dosh there were some well paid Christmas seasonal jobs going at the Gilbeys alcohol distribution depot in Harlow and he could fix me up with a bed at his mate Chris’s house. So off I went to Essex to work night shifts, pushing boxes full of various types of booze on and off a conveyor belt and, in common with my fellow workers, taking full advantage of the ‘breakages’!
I thought I’d be in Harlow for a couple of months.
Little did I know then that I’d eventually be based there, on and off, for more than twelve years…
ARGUMENTS YARD Page 3
