Record Play Pause

by Stephen Morris

  We were supposed to do two or three songs but ended up only doing one. (‘Being in a Band: Lesson 1’: recording will always take longer than you think it will, no matter what the song is.) Nick’s song was recorded, overdubbed and mixed by teatime. Not bad. My first day in a recording studio and, I have to admit, I thought it would be my last. Will duly entered the song into the Piccadilly Radio song contest.

  We then managed to land a gig at Poynton Folk Club supporting Horslips – Ireland’s premier folk-rock band. Horslips themselves were pretty sure that was the case as they turned up in their own customised Transit with ‘Horslips – Ireland’s Premier Folk-Rock Band’ emblazoned on the side. I was impressed. Wow, professionals, I thought. The romance of sleeping in the Transit as you make your way to the next gig.

  Our set was terrible. Luckily most of the audience had yet to arrive by the time we floundered onto the stage and floundered off again to deafening silence. ‘Could have been worse,’ I said, for it’s part of the drummer’s job to be eternally optimistic even in the face of unspeakable adversity. It’s also part of the drummer’s job to be universally ignored at times. This was one of those times.

  Nick’s song didn’t win the Piccadilly Radio song contest, but it didn’t come last either. It was in the runner-up category (is there anything sadder?), for which we received an invite to a ‘do’ at the Poco a Poco nightery, a Stockport club/casino that seemed to burst into flames quite frequently.

  Here, the winners and runners-up would be presented with prizes by the judges, including sometime Womble Chris Spedding. I liked Chris Spedding, who was already a fabled session guitarist, so I went. Using the full range of my conversational skills, I said ‘Hello, Chris’ to him. I wonder if he remembers.

  Not long after, the band drifted apart/went back to college/rejoined the folk circuit/got a better job elsewhere. Any or all of those things.

  The Poco was a class venue. I threw up there many times. I particularly liked the Bitter Suite.

  Faith, I had discovered, is not enough to get a band anywhere; neither is the combination of faith and money. I felt bad because Will must have spent quite a bit of it – half-days at Strawberry didn’t come cheap. What we lacked more than anything was motivation. I remembered what a struggle it had been trying to get the Sunshine Valley Dance Band to make a proper racket. If there’s no unshakeable conviction that what you’re doing is fantastic, that it’s you against the world, then you should be doing something else.

  There is a very fine line that separates self-belief from ego-gratifying self-delusion, but passion can be infectious and unstoppable. In Macclesfield it was in very short supply. It still is.

  On the plus side, the day in Strawberry did get me interested in how drums actually sounded. Tuning and all that nonsense was something that I didn’t really understand (and I still don’t fully); the only way to find out about that kind of thing was in the rare interviews with drummers usually tucked away in the back pages of Melody Maker, and they were frequently contradictory in the tips-and-advice department. My advice here, if you’re interested, is to practise. Do it enough times and you’ll work out what to do instinctively. Try explaining it to someone, and it sounds like mush.

  The nights out at the pub and the late-night, dope-smoking, album-listening parties were a way of having a laugh. It was a way of forgetting the fact that, realistically, I was going to be stuck working in an office, answering the phone or going on the occasional embarrassing sales excursion with my dad for the rest of my life.

  If I dwelt on my situation long enough, things would turn black, like they had when I was not going to Audenshaw. I could get maudlin. That would then turn into depression, then something worse. Self-medicating with dope and booze while listening to and reading about as much music as I could was my attempt at a cure.

  An extended trip out to a drink-and-drugs-fuelled music orgy might be the answer. Once again the lure of half-cooked burgers, Hare Krishna chanting and the never-ending queue for the shit cabin called. Where did I put that sleeping bag?

  Reading Festival 1975 would be my last festival for a while. I went with Phil Sturgess from school (not the drummer Phil), and the whole thing seemed a little bit of a ‘for old times’ sake’ kind of deal – not so much my friendship with Phil, but the whole music scene felt like it needed to change somehow. Maybe it was just me, but it all felt a little bit stale.

  Since my last festival outing, the audience had discovered a new form of ‘self-expression’. This consisted of hurling cans and the odd empty, half-empty or full beer bottle – occasionally containing piss – in the general direction of the stage to express disapproval with the act currently performing, or maybe just life. Most of these fell short of their intended target and landed on the innocent bystanders nearest to the stage. Those left uninjured by this rain of metal, glass, beer and piss expressed their anger by returning fire to the rear. And so the Reading Festival beer-can artillery duel was born. It was both scary and dangerous. Proof, if any were needed, that there’s never a Hells Angel or a policemen around when you need one.

  I was looking forward to seeing Hawkwind again but, despite getting suitably stoned, I found that they were boring beyond belief. The excitement of 1972 had gone – maybe it left when Lemmy got fired a couple of months before Reading. It was, coincidentally, also Stacia’s last gig with the band.

  On the plus side, Dr Feelgood were razor-sharp and stupendous. No frills, just raw rock-and-roll energy. Chirpy cockney Gary Holton’s Heavy Metal Kids had something exciting about them too.

  With hindsight you could see what would be coming in the next year or so. Even the Ozark Mountain Daredevils were surprisingly not bad and the Kursaal Flyers were fantastic but Supertramp and Yes again? Why had I come here? Yes to me symbolised everything that was wrong with music. Concept albums that went on and on – Tales from Topographic Oceans – do me a favour! Even the most elevated of consciousnesses would have struggled to see anything but old farts blabbering on and on and on. That Lou Reed couldn’t be arsed turning up said something. (He was probably sick of people asking him whether Metal Machine Music was a joke or not.) If I remember correctly, and my mind by the third night was ever so slightly addled, the comedy rock band the Albertos stood in for him in spirit by kicking off with the Velvet’s pastiche, ‘Anadin’. It was very apt, as was their Yes send-up ‘Close to the Bar’, the Albertos’ legendary Manchester drummer Bruce Mitchell sharp as ever. I did my best to love the Mahavishnu Orchestra featuring John McLaughlin but just got headache. Bruce Mitchell versus Billy Cobham? Mm – no contest.

  If you were pretentious enough, you could say, ‘I could almost feel the contractions of punk waiting to be born.’

  PART 2:

  FROM WARSAW TO JOY DIVISION

  I could almost feel the contractions of punk waiting to be born.

  Stick a bunch of blokes of a certain age together and give them enough booze, and they will get all misty-eyed about some year in the late 1970s, generally 1976. For this, gentle reader, was what is widely accepted to be the Year Zero of punk.

  A quality periodical unsuitable for adults.

  The debate will then descend into where-did-it-all-actually-start? territory. Was it the first Stooges record? Or the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams? Maybe the first New York Dolls album, the first Velvets or maybe it was the Deviants or something by the Pink Fairies? Unlikely as it sounds now, maybe it was the first Roxy album for, without glam, punk and new wave would have looked very different. Oh, and while we’re at it, what about northern soul? Though that is perhaps stretching it a bit. Perhaps it was the Modern Lovers’ first LP. What about Alice Cooper – surely Alice had been a punk at some time?

  Alice Cooper was the first band that I can remember people really getting upset and shocked about.

  ‘A man with a girl’s name?’

  ‘He performs with a live snake?’

  ‘Mock executions?’

  OK, this wasn’t entirely a new idea. S
creamin’ Jay Hawkins and the anglicised version, Screaming Lord Sutch, had been doing a similar act for years, and I’ll bet they weren’t the first.

  All the same, the guardians of the nation’s morals said such behaviour was too much for the young people of Great Britain. That most of Alice’s act was purely theatrics was by the by. It went to show that if you upset the right people you could go far, you could make a name for yourself.

  You could make a pretty good case for any of the above-mentioned bands as punk progenitors. It’s a bit like trying to pin the tail on an unwilling donkey, but it’s a lively after-dinner conversation pretty much guaranteed. The weird thing is that, back in the mid-1970s, all the teenage kids who went on to love punk would have been listening to much the same records – heavy rock, bits of Bowie, Iggy and Lou Reed, and of course a fair bit of prog – but that was all swept under the carpet after 1976 for fear of mockery or persecution by the musical cognoscenti. These days, it’s nearly OK to admit to owning The Snow Goose by Camel, but in 1976 it was a real no-no, a musical faux pas.

  I don’t think there is any real answer to the question ‘When did it all start?’ Punk wasn’t one big bang but a slower coming-together of a number of things, musical and social, from 1975 onwards, eventually gaining critical mass at the end of the 1970s, and collapsing and fragmenting into the 1980s.

  The first bands that I thought of as playing punk rock were the Stooges and the MC5; bands that were about anger and energy. In the very early days of punk, it was the American bands that I went for first: the Ramones and the Modern Lovers’ classic first album.

  If the 1960s were all about peace and love, then by the end of the 1970s that was replaced by boredom and frustration.

  In music, there was a lot to be bored by: bored by bands putting out triple-length concept albums of airy-fairy nonsense, bored by guitar solos that went on and on, definitely bored by drummers performing endless, self-indulgent drum solos that were the aural equivalent of Mogadon. That more of them weren’t guillotined is a wonder.

  The music press was full of news of punk bands and tales of the goings-on at the Roxy and the 100 Club in London, and at CBGBs in New York. Full of talk of things that were being done, that were new and fresh and vital, driven by youth, not by the out-of-touch old farts who ran the record business (the most boring of them all).

  I remember staggering home from the pub one Saturday night to see the Sex Pistols do ‘Anarchy in the UK’ on Tony Wilson’s show So It Goes. It looks a bit tame when you see it now but in 1976 it was electrifying: they were shocking the old folks. That was exactly what I wanted to do and had been wanting to do for ages. Now it was happening and someone else was doing it.

  ‘New Rose’ by the Damned was the first UK punk single, just beating ‘Anarchy’ by the Pistols by a couple of weeks. I bought it and virtually wore it out. It was jam-packed full of energy, an incandescent three minutes that managed to reference the Shangri-Las in the process. The Pistols and the Damned were soon joined by Buzzcocks and the Clash in getting heavy rotation on the Morrises’ stereo. Never Mind the Bollocks came out on my birthday. I didn’t get given it as a present.

  The appealing thing about the Sex Pistols particularly and punk generally was the way it really did upset people. The self-appointed guardians of public morals, aka the acolytes of Mary Whitehouse, would turn up with placards bearing slogans such as ‘Ban this Filth’ at the first hint of anything that threatened their conservative Christian viewpoint. This included homosexuality (obviously), virtually the entire output of the BBC, Alice Cooper (of course), Chuck Berry, violent films, unchristian films (they loved picketing cinemas) and even a play about the Romans in Britain. To Mrs Whitehouse, punk was like a red rag to a bull. The Pistols swearing on Bill Grundy’s Today show, by today’s standards pretty hard to spot, caused an outrage of biblical proportions. It might seem comical today, but to some, punks were seen as the disciples of Beelzebub: the sky was falling in. The share price of EMI (for a short while the Pistols’ label) plummeted. It was front-page news. The old folks were scared. Three fucks, two shits and one bastard on teatime TV was all it took. Bring on the revolution.

  This was exciting!

  I’d been to see old favourite Frank Zappa at Stafford a couple of weeks before ‘Anarchy’ came out and, much as I liked Frank’s stuff, it seemed to be veering straight into that long-winded-virtuoso-selfindulgence territory. What might have been interesting or amusing once upon a time was now getting fucking tedious. I still bought Zappa’s records, just in case it was an off night, but there was definitely something written on the wall. I left the gig feeling disappointed and a bit let down.

  Punk was turning everything on its head. Most importantly for me, it had that DIY ethic: you could make your own record, fuck the majors, you could do anything you wanted, be anyone you wanted.

  I wanted to get involved. Anyone could, it was all inclusive.

  One record that, for me, really added to this overall wind-of-change feeling about music was the release in January 1977 of David Bowie’s Low. If there was one single LP that would influence me, this was it. Low sounded to me like music from another dimension.

  The high energy of punk rock was nothing new. High-energy rock had been around since at least 1969 with the Detroit sound of MC5 and the Stooges. What was new was the attitude and DIY rebellious spirit that it represented. But in 1977 what Bowie did with Low was different: experimental in an almost Krautrock kind of way. It’s two sides fitted my life perfectly. Side one as pre night-out mood lifter and side two as come home, chill out.

  9

  WARSAW

  On 26 May 1977, the band Warsaw first entered my life. I’d gone to the Free Trade Hall to see Television and Blondie. I loved Television. Their first album is a classic and this was a great bill, showcasing the diversity of what punk/new wave was about. Blondie and Television were from opposite poles: Blondie did the three-minute classic dancey pop songs and Television played the longer, evolving art-schooly kind of tunes that were a bit more cerebral. The music papers had raved about Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s ‘sizzling twin lead guitar interplay’ ever since ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ in 1975. The way the two worked together on Marquee Moon sounded more abstract and jazzy than most of the other NY bands.

  Television, unfortunately, were to be one of the first new-wave bands to fall victim to the dreaded old-school showbiz blight of musical differences. Their original bassist Richard Hell (cited by Malcolm McLaren as the inspiration for the safety-pin punk look) was, it seemed, a bit too rowdy and not new wave enough, a little too wild and maverick for Verlaine, whose real name is Thomas Miller. If you take your name from a French symbolist poet there is always the distinct possibility you may be taking it all a tad too seriously. Hell left or was pushed, and went and formed the Heartbreakers (no, not Tom Petty’s band) with ex-New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. He then parted company with them and went on to form the Voidoids. Hell certainly got about.

  Blondie would later become pivotal – the band that crossed disco’s uncool and indie’s cool with ‘Heart of Glass’, a musical landmark. Tonight, though, it was just cool pop supporting cool art rock.

  In the bar at the intermission after Blondie’s set, I queued and fought for half a shandy (drinking and driving responsibly), and being on my own ended up buying a copy of a fanzine off a bloke. I was hoping it would make me look a bit less of a lonely loser. I retired to a corner for a browse. The mag was called Shy Talk and it was the work of a guy called Steve Shy. Its homemade pages were filled with items about the Manchester punk scene, Buzzcocks, the Drones and I think the Worst were in there too. It was both an informative and educational read. Near the back there was a section that, for obvious reasons, caught my eye: ‘DRUMMER WANTED’.

  Three newly formed bands were looking for drummers: the Fall, V2 and Warsaw. I’d never heard of any of them. Possibly a look of mild interest passed across my face, but most likely not, as I stuffed the rag
in the old bulging right inside pocket, polished off the shandy and got back to my seat pronto to beat the usual last-minute rush. This was the standard drill at the Free Trade Hall and had been for years, along with shouting ‘Wally’ and throwing paper planes off the balcony – there were some hippie traditions that would not die quickly.

  Television impressed. They did most of Marquee Moon and finished with a couple of covers – ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Satisfaction’. They also did an unreleased track, ‘Foxhole’, which I thought sounded pretty good. It boded well for their next record. I was full of expectation for the future, well the future of Television at least. It was a different story when their ‘hotly anticipated’ second album came out less than a year later. It was bloody awful. I tried to like it, but even the garish red vinyl it was pressed on emphasised the fact that it had been overthought. The life had been produced and polished out of it. A band that I had thought were genius had let me down; it would not be for the last time. Maybe Richard Hell should have stayed after all.