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Ever fancied moving in with Steve McQueen? Well, if you can scrape together $3.5m, his old home in Palm Springs is up for grabs.
Described as a ‘mid-century time-capsule’ by the agent, it’s located high on the ridge above Palm Springs. Apparently it has ‘the seclusion, glamour, history and mystique of the ’60s and ’70s Hollywood elite.’
The blurb continues….‘A double door front entrance with brass lion head doorknobs soars two stories. Inside, a split-level terrazzo foyer is adorned with hand carved, braided wooden and metal railings.
The living room is a steel I-beam and glass Modernist box projected into the magnificent city and mountain views and is surrounded by a cantilevered wrap-around balcony with sliding glass door entries to the pool & private yard.
The master suite sprawls along the second level, open entirely to the view by floor to ceiling glass. Each bedroom has a private bath and is furnished with original pieces of the period. The home offers a separate guest casita with full bath.’
It does look wonderful and, who, let’s face it, can face life without a separate guest casita?
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When Paul Kelly set out to make a film about the mercurial talent that is Lawrence, he was hoping it would take him roughly six months. The idea was to follow the creation of a new record by Lawrence’s current band Go-Kart Mozart.
Instead, the film, ‘Lawrence of Belgravia’ ended up taking eight years to make. The record, meanwhile, still hasn’t seen the light of the day. This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with life on Planet Lawrence.
“At one point I was thinking ‘I should be making a film about how hard it is to make this film” says Paul. “The one thing that kept me going was that every July, Michael Hayden from the BFI would ring up and ask if the film was ready to be shown in the London Film Festival. The answer was always ‘no’.”
“I stopped making it altogether about five times, for various reasons, but then I would think, ‘I’ve got the BFI waiting for this’ and I would push on again.”
“So at the start of this year I thought ‘I’m not going to let this continue into another year’ and when Michael Hayden rang with the usual question I said ‘Yes, it will be ready’.
So what made this project so prolonged? Put simply, Kelly was drawn into the orbit of one of the great English eccentrics and it turned into a frustrating, perplexing experience as the margins between art and real life blurred beyond all recognition.
“I would never, ever, make a film like this again, I got too deep into it. When I met Lawrence he was probably at his lowest ebb. He was very down. Denim (Lawrence’s previous band) had finished, no-one was taking any interest in Go-Kart Mozart, he was existing off benefits. He still is I guess.”
“I was becoming his carer at times, I helped him find flats when he was made homeless and I would often think ‘I’m not even in a position to make this, there’s a third person that should be filming this.’ I was too close, I was looking after him at times.”
I guess the experience shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise based on Lawrence’s past track record.
It’s true that the eminently quotable leader of Felt has been placed on a pedestal by fans who have gone on to have far more successful careers in music than their idol.
Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, Bobby Gillespie and Saint Etienne were all touched by the magic of Felt. Even Mark E Smith confessed that he rated the band and invited them on tour with The Fall. “Better than all those other Velvet Underground copyists,” he conceded.
Despite this, Felt never made a real commercial breakthrough. Primitive Painters, their elegant single that featured the Cocteau Twins Liz Fraser, is probably their best known track.
Lawrence though, was always good for a quote and his fastidious nature, obsession with his hair and appearance and the fact that he refused to eat vegetables or let anyone use his toilet meant that he came across in print as an eccentric Brummie combination of Lou Reed and Kenneth Williams.
My favourite Lawrence story is that he felt let down by the Glastonbury festival because he thought all the pop stars that appeared would be put up in cottages on the site !
Paul Kelly had been aware of Lawrence for a long time. Kelly was the guitarist in East Village, another much loved guitar band with a retro feel that couldn’t break through to commercial success.
“At one stage our label mates (on Heavenly Records) were St Etienne, Flowered Up and Manic Street Preachers who were all on the up. We were getting £500 a gig, which I thought was a lot, but they suddenly all took off and we….didn’t !”
Paul’s brother Martin was also in East Village and when the band folded he went on to run Heavenly with Jeff Barrett. Paul, who also took photographs and directed promos, began to find a new niche for himself and when Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley got the opportunity to make a film about London that became ‘Finisterre’ Paul was an obvious choice to get involved.
He co-directed the film with Kieran Evans and it was on this project that he bumped into Lawrence again when the singer recorded his recollections of moving to London for the first time.
“I just thought ‘this guy is really interesting, his mannerisms, the way he sees the world’ and he was just about to start work on a new album and I thought, ‘I’ll follow the progress of all that.’ In some ways you could just point a camera at Lawrence and you would get a film but, as I found, it’s not as simple as that.”
From the beginning Paul and Lawrence agreed they didn’t want to make a traditional ‘rock-doc’ with a dreary combination of talking heads and archive. Two major influences on the style Paul was going for were Marvin Gaye’s exile-in-Belgium film ‘Transit in Ostend’ and a documentary about Gene Vincent visiting the UK in the very late sixties ‘The Rock and Roll Singer’
“Whenever you see a chronological ‘rock-doc’ with a clip from one of those documentaries you always think ‘I want to watch that film!” says Paul.
Another plan was to roughly copy the structure of Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 Rolling Stones documentary ‘Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One)’ and the device of watching a song (or in this case album) develop from the ground up.
“Lawrence has got a great way of scuppering your plans. It was impossible to structure it because every time I would do set something up he just wouldn’t turn up. Also the record was taking forever. He would say ‘oh we did the bass the other day’ and I’d say ‘what !!’ I need to know these things.”
“The thing about Lawrence is that he can be the most frustrating person in the world but he has this amazing charm too. So, he can have let you down really badly and have failed to turn up for something that cost a lot of money to set up, like a shoot, and he’ll ring up and you’ll find yourself forgiving him.”
“He’s openly selfish, he’ll say ‘I’ll only talk to someone if I think I can get something out of him’ and, if it was anyone else, they wouldn’t have any friends or allies but he also has an incredible warmth.”
The many faces of Lawrence are all given a chance to show themselves in the film. It has to be said though, that viewers who haven’t followed his career since Felt will be shocked by the change in his appearance. Wearing clothes that would be described as ‘vintage’ if a man a few decades younger were wearing them, and an ever present baseball cap, it’s clear the years haven’t been kind to him.
“Stuart Murdoch saw the film in Glasgow and he was a big fan of Felt and he found it quite distressing. Physically, Lawrence is in a terrible state. He once came to me and said: ‘My doctor says I’ve got the blood of a 20 year old’ and I said ‘Yeah, in the body of someone a hundred years old.’
“He hasn’t looked after himself at all. He’s so obsessive about his music, his possessions, his art, his books, it’s been at the expense of his own physical wellbeing. He’s been heavily into drugs, I think that really kicked in when Denim started to fail, I think he went into a downward spiral.”
There’s a very funny scene in the film where Lawrence is persuaded by a friend to seek out a replacement for his battered baseball cap. As he critiques the options presented to him, it proves beyond any doubt that Lawrence’s deadpan wit is still intact.
“Strangely, he is still very obsessed with his appearance,” says Paul, “He’s….he’s very clean. He’s a very clean man, that sounds weird doesn’t it ? (laughs) He doesn’t eat well though, I mean, apart from a few handfuls of boiled rice, I’ve never really seen him eat much at all.”
As the film follows Lawrence’s quest to make his record, as well as giving an insight into his everyday existence, the director manages to avoid making the whole situation appear tragic. In fact, thanks to the keen intelligence of the documentary’s star, it’s actually laugh-out-loud funny a lot of the time.
One memorable sequence sees Lawrence reluctantly donning a full white boiler suit and, armed with a roller, making a half-hearted attempt at painting his new flat. We hear him wondering whether Bryan Ferry or Lou Reed have ever had to decorate their own homes.
“I wanted to celebrate him and his very unusual world view,” says Paul. “I didn’t want to mock him or make him a figure of fun, that was very important. I did want to capture the humour in his situation though, he can be very funny.”
The narrative that emerges from the eight years of filming is the struggles of a man who will not compromise on his vision, facing whatever suffering or humiliation that comes as a result.
“There’s two ways of looking at Lawrence, either he’s a delusional figure or a true artist and I see him as the latter. He will turn down opportunities that others wouldn’t. He was offered the chance, by a high-profile group, to write the lyrics for a bunch of songs. It could have been really lucrative. He sat down with me and said ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t work for other people’. I said, ‘Lawrence you don’t even have to use your own name you can do it under someone else’s name,’ but he wouldn’t do it.”
“Now, on one hand, that could be seen as a very foolish thing to do but I do think he refused on the basis of his artistic principles. That takes some guts.”
“There’s something here that I struggle with though, and it’s whether he is afraid of success. He does seem to scupper it whenever the possibility comes along. I wonder if he does like the idea of being a cult figure.”
And the theme of his film has left the director with more to think about than just the time and effort that it took to make. This, after all, was a project he undertook single-handedly and without any funding.
“It’s funny, someone who saw the film said ‘this is actually a film about you isn’t it Paul? It’s reflecting a lot of the things in your life. I thought ‘hang on a minute, you mean I’m delusional or maybe you mean I’m a true artist that won’t compromise?’.
If it’s the latter, I actually take that as a great compliment, I think you should be reflected in your film.”
“My girlfriend is incredibly supportive. We live in a tower block in Islington and we don’t have a lot of money but she’s always encouraging. I’ve got a fifteen year old daughter and she says ‘Dad, why don’t you make films that people want to watch?’ (laughs)
“The last shot in the film is this long pull out, shot from our flat of Lawrence on the balcony of a tower block opposite where he lives. It pulls back to reveal a tiny figure against this vast city backdrop and the point of it is to say how difficult it is for anyone to get their voice heard among the millions of voices out there. I guess though that shot could easily have been reversed and it would me in a similar predicament, it’s almost ‘who’s watching who?”
‘Lawrence of Belgravia’ is a really special film and a huge credit to a director who has clearly gone well beyond the call of duty to make it happen. There are nationwide screenings in May with a Q and A afterwards with Paul and Lawrence. All the dates are here.
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The illustration above is from a new British comic book called ‘Nelson’. It’s one of the best new books I’ve picked up recently.
I’ve had a thing for comics all my life, starting in the 70′s with IPC titles like Whizzer and Chips, Monster Fun and Krazy along with the Beano and Topper. Thursdays, when the comic dropped onto the mat rolled up with the daily paper, were looked forward to in our house.
Later, I graduated to Tin Tin books and then it was 2000AD. I’ve never been a sci-fi fan and couldn’t really get into Marvel or DC titles (though I’ve ordered my fair share of Sea Monkeys and X-Ray glasses) but 2000AD had enough wit to keep me intrigued.
I think it was the NME that started featuring a bunch of new comic artists in the 80′s, around the time that the DIY indie scene, your C86 bands for instance, was on the rise again. The same spirit seemed to permeate a new kind of ‘small press’ comic that had started to be published.
Leading the way was ‘Escape’ a glossy A5 mag that was the ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ of this new scene, documenting what was going on, featuring the best of the new wave, and encouraging others to get involved. Their model was the ‘Bandes Dessinees’ or BD’s. The phrase comes from France and French-speaking Belgium where ‘comics’ have long been respected as art and aren’t necessarily just for kids.
Escape featured new artists like Eddie Campbell and his ‘Alec’ comics. He later went on to collaborate with Alan Moore on ‘From Hell’ about the legend of ‘Jack the Ripper’. Great book, lousy movie. One of the best accounts I’ve read about this inspiring period is in Campbell’s auto-biographical comic ‘How to be an Artist’.
It was around this time, in the 80′s, that I found ‘Forbidden Planet’ nestled among the guitar shops of Denmark Street and a whole world of exciting new comics opened up to me.
Chief among them was the wonderful ‘Love and Rockets’ a beautifully drawn comic by the Brothers Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert. I couldn’t really get with Gilbert’s work but Jaime’s tales of life in ‘Hoppers 13′ with it’s cast of lesbian chicano punks, set in a ficitional Californian town was a revelation.
The adventures of Maggie, Hopey and Penny and their friends featuring unlikely stories about theatrical old-school wrestlers, semi-ironic super heroes and hopeless bands have clearly influenced lots of comic creators that followed in their wake.
My interest in comics has ebbed and flowed over the years but I’ve picked up great work by Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine and both of them seemed to have been heavily influenced by Jaime Hernandez.
I’d always hoped a British artist would create something with similar sensibilities but, if it’s out there, I’ve never seen anything comparable in quality.
My interest in comics has been piqued again just recently after I chanced upon a shiny new store around the corner from where I’ve been working. Gosh! is on Berwick St in Soho and it’s a beautifully laid out shop worth visiting even if you aren’t a comics-head. You’ll probably find something you want to take home.
On a recent visit I got talking to one of the staff who recommended ‘Nelson’ a recent release that has 54 UK artists collaborating on one story.
Each artist documents a year in the life of ‘Nel’. Born to working class parents in London in 1968, she’s a feisty, fascinating character, desperate to make her mark as an artist. There’s lots of wry observations and a peppering of social history along with some fab artwork. The collaboration thing really works and, if you don’t care for the style of one artist, well, there will be another one along in a few pages time.
Being somewhat out of the loop on UK comics I can’t say I’ve heard of many of the people involved but ‘Nelson’ has certainly made me want to investigate what’s going on. It’s published by Blank Slate Books, website here.
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This is a beautiful, haunting short film by Mickey Smith.
Raised in the tiny village of Paul in West Cornwall, he refused to limit himself to the expectations people had for him and instead reached out for a life of possibilities and adventure.
There’s a Kerouac-ian sense of wonder at the world here. If you like the film, check out his stint at the Do Lectures last year. Charming and inspiring.
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Thanks to everyone for their emails etc about ‘Boogie Wonderland’. It seems lots of people have a place in their heart for James Kirk.
Maybe it was well received because there’s so little information around about what happened to James and Steven Daly post-Postcard.
Now, to add to the myth and legend, here’s a fantastic story from Kevin Pearce of the estimable ‘Your Heart Out’ that would suggest there was once the possibility of an Orange Juice/Subway Sect supergroup!
Kevin says that original Subway Sec guitarist Rob Simmons sent him an email once after reading one of his ‘Your Heart Out’s’ saying he’d recognised the name Orange Juice and couldn’t remember why.
Then he remembered he’d been approached by a couple of guys who used to be in the group about starting a new outfit with him and Subway Sect’s Paul Myers. We can only presume this was James and Steven. Rob had a couple of meetings about it, but nothing actually happened.
It sounds like the kind of idea that could have been conjured up by Mr Alan Horne but it’s a wonderful story nonetheless.
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Legend has it that, if James Kirk had got his way, Roddy Frame would have spent the early years of his pop career fronting Brushed Denim.
Kirk, the mercurial former Orange Juice guitarist, it seems, was once the go-to guy for post-punk band names in his native Glasgow.
Famously, he’s credited with coming up with the moniker Strawberry Switchblade for the female duo who had a hit with ‘Since Yesterday’. When it came to Frame’s fledgling band, James also offered up a couple of names. History has probably proved Frame right in plumping for James’ option b, Aztec Camera.
That story, and a handful of others, give a tantalising insight into the original mind of a very intriguing, prodigiously talented songwriter who most people will never hear.
Frustratingly, this has nothing to do with Kirk’s music. He was a very big part of the original and best-loved Postcard incarnation of Orange Juice, when they were the quickest wits and cleverest cats on the block and he’s also wholly responsible for one of the most cruelly undervalued great works of all time, his sumptuous solo record “You Can Make It If You Boogie’.
No, the reason why most people will never be aware of James Kirk is that he’s proof positive that most musicians have a need for a willing cohort (a manager in most cases) who’s prepared to kick them along and make them do the promotion thing.
“He’s not like a pro-active guy who’s going to zoom about doing business. It’s not James’ style,” says Mick Slaven, who produced ‘Boogie’.
“I organised a playback party at the Riverside in Glasgow where the album was recorded and invited everyone who’d been involved, to say thanks to people who had done sessions, to listen to the final mix…and James didn’t come. I didn’t take the hump or anything, I didn’t really expect him to turn up, but that gives you some idea of the kind of character he is.”
James Kirk offers a text book example of how to keep people intrigued. The flipside to this, sadly, is obscurity.
The original incarnation of Orange Juice was a very special group. It’s well documented now that they were a bunch of super-bright Scottish kids whose frame of reference encompassed the Chic Organisation, The Velvet Underground, Subway Sect and soul. It was cheeky post-modernism before it’s time, DIY punk ethics coupled with grand ambition.
As Edwyn Collins once pointed out: “The most laughable part of it was, we would say ‘we’re aiming for the charts’”
It’s accepted that Collins was the focal point of the group, a natural maverick with a very original take on every aspect of pop. No-one looked like Edwyn, no-one sounded liked Edwyn and no-one wrote like Edwyn. But the strength of Orange Juice was that there were two talented songwriters in the group, and the other one was probably more eccentric and more of an enigma than the one getting all the plaudits.
“James Kirk…was a particular wonder, the like of which I’ve never seen before or since,” notes Edwyn’s wife and manager Grace Maxwell in her book Falling and Laughing. “To go back in time and tape some of his occasional onstage anecdotes would be a delight for me in my old age,”
Go back to Orange Juice interviews from the time and a pattern is already begin to emerge. James is rarely available or present and the gregarious and witty Collins, often egged on by label boss Alan Horne, has more than enough banter and opinion to fill the space.
There’s a great story in the sleeve notes of the OJ box-set ‘Coals to Newcastle’ about James being too shy to big himself up in the press and resorting to quoting from Billy Joel’s ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me’. Tongue pressed firmly in cheek no doubt.
Among the Orange Juice songs that made it onto vinyl in those early days: ‘Felicity’, ‘Wan Light’, ‘Three Cheers for Our Side’, ‘Moscow’ and ‘You Old Eccentric’ are all Kirk songs.
Edwyn was rightly credited with a very wry and original lyrical style but James’s words are equally distinctive. Who else, at the time would have written: “Through wooded glades on my trusted steed, air rushing through the trees, I’ll wander until the power of your will, sends messages which I must heed”?
What’s very clear is there is a very original and erudite mind involved here. Even after the group split, Edwyn was forced to acknowledge James’ puzzling brilliance.
“James is an intellectual, certainly the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” said Collins “He’d say ‘I’m interested in the dichotomy between structuralism and semiotics. I’d say ‘Wha?’ You know, Barthes, blah blah blah, all the rest of it. I couldn’t fathom him out.”
It’s never been totally clear why the band split, not long after signing with a major label, but it’s been widely acknowledged that they no longer saw eye-to eye. Edwyn had invited former Josef K guitarist Malcolm Ross into the group, a fairly direct challenge to James and this seems to have been a big factor.
So that was that. Orange Juice became Edwyn’s band to do with what he wished.
It took four years for James, and original OJ drummer Stephen Daly, to bob to the surface once more, this time as a duo called Memphis on Alan Horne’s new label; Swamplands.
Horne made sure all his bands got press and there’s a great NME interview from the time of the one and only Memphis release ‘You Supply the Roses/Apres Ski’. James is quoted: “I am to write the catchiest verse, the catchiest chorus, the catchiest guitar part and the catchiest middle eight and to keep it all simple. I can’t write complex or atmospheric songs.”
The programmed drums sound a bit dated now but it’s still a fantastic single. The b-side of the 12 inch includes an instrumental version of ‘You Supply…” where James is true to his word and conjures up endless memorable guitar parts. It sounds fantastic.
Swamplands fell apart after Alan Horne got bored of trying to be a proper record exec and, apparently, just stopped turning up to the office provided for him by London Records. That was the end of Memphis too.
James had begun a career as a chiropodist now but it’s tempting to suggest that he’d also lost his foothold in the music industry (ahem).
Then, in the early 90’s, Postcard re-emerged. Alan Horne clearly had some scores to settle and there was a flush of new records.
There were Orange Juice compilations featuring their original Postcard singles, albums from Vic Godard and Davey Henderson’s Nectarine Number 9 and another, “The Phantoms and the Archetypes’ from Paul Quinn backed by a host of Glaswegian musical luminaries called ‘The Independent Group’ and including James Kirk on guitar.
His trademark sound is used sparingly within a velvety noir backdrop but it’s still unmistakeable. There was also a follow-up ‘Will I Ever Be Inside of You’ and ex-Bourgie Bourgie guitarist Mick Slaven joined the ranks.
The band played two gigs at the Athenaeum and the Glasgow Film Theatre, staged with maximum theatricality.
“Alan Horne’s big thing was he could create a buzz, he could get journalists really interested in something and make it feel likes it’s the best thing in the world. He’s really talented at coming up with a visual angle or a way of promoting something,” says Mick.
But as ever, Horne’s enthusiasm began to wane and the second coming of Postcard fizzled out just like the original label.
“We enjoyed playing in that group. I mean, we didn’t make any money out of it that’s for sure. I would estimate that the total royalty payments from the stuff I did with Paul to be about £1.89,” says Mick.
But the guitarist had struck up a rapport with James during his time in The Independent Group and had become a big fan.
“He’s got a great melodic awareness. What he does is really catchy. He will come up with idea after idea and they are all really good. He’s a million miles away from a rock and roller or a blues riff-er. He plays really great pop hooks. All the time.”
It’s very likely that The Independent Group would have been the last time James’s distinctive style would have been heard on record without the intervention of two more fans of his work.
Stefan Kassel’s Marina label in Germany had been re-releasing a whole host of albums by bands associated with the 80’s Glasgow scene and had been working with Douglas McIntyre from Creeping Bent.
Between them they hatched a plan to ask James to make a record backed by The Leopards; Mick Slaven, Andy Alston and former Aztec Camera bassist Campbell Owens, with Mick as producer.
James was keen to try to make it work and already had some songs written. Mick became a regular visitor to James’s house as they began the process of bashing ‘You Can Make It If You Boogie’ into shape.
“He’s very entertaining, a really good laugh and he knows a lot about music,” says Mick. “He’s got a very dry sense of humour so a lot of the time you’re not sure whether he’s taking the piss.”
It was soon clear that this new batch of songs were going to be special. Eleven of the thirteen tracks had never seen the light of day before, there was a re-versioning of Orange Juice’s Felicity and ‘You Supply the Roses’ had mutated into ‘Krach Auf Weidersehen’. It was clearly a killer riff that James felt was worth another outing.
The songs were, as usual, clever, catchy and distinctive.
“It’s difficult to say which music James is influenced by,” says Mick. “Sometimes he’ll come out with something like, ‘that sounds really great, it sounds like Cheap Trick !’ (laughs). I would say that James was completely non-snobbish about music. If he liked something he didn’t care if it was Cheap Trick or Morrissey. He wouldn’t worry about whether it was cool or not.”
The band worked quickly, recording most of the backing tracks live. There was only one tricky issue to overcome.
“The big thing was to try and get James to put his vocals down. I’d be saying ‘Ok, we should try and get some vocals down now’ and he’d say ‘I’ve got this other guitar line I want to do.’ He’s never been a lead vocalist and so I think he’s a bit under confident with that. His singing voice is great though.”
It’s clear from these songs that James could still write wry and memorable lyrics. The opening track ‘Get On Board’ waltzes down to Holy Loch nuclear submarine base and includes a quote from maverick MP Tommy Sheridan: ‘these new guys make those Vikings seem alright’.
Elsewhere, there are words that seem to come from a writer who’s had his share of ups and downs. ‘Rehab’, ‘Old Soak’ and the wonderful ‘Outre’ all combine beautiful tunes with lyrics about disappointment and missed opportunities. ‘Houston, Texas’ is a humorous, cinematic tale of someone out in redneck country, ‘living in a mobile home.’ It’s like an updated version of the early scenes from ‘Five Easy Pieces’.
The record’s cover features James, high up in the mountains, replete with walking boots.
“Andy Alston and James are both really keen climbers, they go on walking holidays and climbing holidays to the Alps and that,” says Mick. “Andy would have taken that shot. For me it always defied belief that the two of them would get up these mountains and get back.”
The record was released in 2003 on Marina with some very positive reviews but very little coverage otherwise. Journalists might well have been intrigued by this superb comeback record, and there’s never been a shortage of press interest in the backstory of Orange Juice, but without a manager to twist James’s arm to do some interviews or a UK label to push the promotion it remained off most record-buyers’ radars.
There were rumours of dates with Belle and Sebastian, which would have made a lot of sense, but months went by and it became clear there wouldn’t be any gigs to support the album either. Live dates were never on the agenda according to Mick.
“James is, shall we say, a wee bit disorganised. I remember me, Andy and Campbell saying ‘if we did this live, with a call time of 9.30 we’d be onstage and James would be saying ‘yeah, I’ll be there about 10’ and we’d be wondering if he’d even turn up ! That’s why we probably never ended up playing live. The likelihood is it would have been a fairly fraught experience for everyone (laughs)”
There was talk of a follow-up record but it will soon be ten years since the release of ‘Boogie’ so it’s beginning to look unlikely.
If that really is the end of an intriguing musical career at least there’s now ample evidence of James’s songwriting talent available on record.
“Boogie is something I’m still really proud of and James was very pleased with it at the time too, I think” says Mick, “He’s also glad that he was involved in something as good as Orange Juice but I don’t think he carries the legacy of that around with him. It’s not a taboo subject either. I think he’s a happy, pretty well-adjusted guy.”
Felicity? I guess so.
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My favourite book so far this year is Nile Rodgers’ autobiography Le Freak. The first few chapters contain an early life story so harrowing that you’re beggging for a bit of light relief but it is fascinating.
Nile Rodgers is searingly honest throughout the whole book, never failing to remind you about his drug and drink problems, and the continuing issues with his family, even when his career is at it’s height. A genuis musician and a genuinely original biography.
This track crops up in Steve McQueen’s bleak but brilliant ‘Shame’. Difficult to believe Michael Fassbender didn’t get a nomination for best actor in this year’s Oscars. And then again….
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From Heaven to Heaven is a new book of photographs from the earliest incarnation of New Order. It covers the time when the band were still trying to escape the looming shadow of Joy Division and the suicide of Ian Curtis.
The first 750 copies of the book, out in January, are signed by Peter Hook and each one comes with an unused ticket from a New Order gig in Leicester from 1984. Maybe the group weren’t that popular in the East Midlands at that point.
Of course I’ve bought it. Pre-ordered, never seen the book in the flesh, but, yes, put me down for one. And here’s the nub of the thing. I don’t actually need another book about New Order or Factory Records. I really don’t.
Last night I scanned my shelves to check how many books I actually have devoted to New Order, Joy Division and Factory Records. It’s twelve. More than I have on any other subject, easily.
In chronological order, they are…
1)An Ideal for Living – Mark Johnson
This dates back to the mid-80’s, from a time when the ‘music’ section in any bookshop would run to about thirty titles, not the wall of criticism and biography you can find in Waterstones today.
Old heads will nod sagely about a time when you had to search out secret knowledge about your favourite bands as if it was a better, purer state of affairs. It’s fair to say when I bought ‘Ideal for Living’ there were plenty of holes in my Factory knowledge.
Remember, New Order was a group who, back then, were swathed in mystique. The word was they ‘didn’t talk to journalists’ and preferred not to put the title or even the name of the group on their records so any tit-bit of information helped.
The book’s not dated well. Breaking up the chronological story of Joy Division and New Order are achingly pretentious essays by Paul Morley (whose writing I like a lot, usually) his work credited as ‘Faces and Masks’.
On the plus side, there are some fantastic early photos of Joy Division before they really got their look together. Bernard looks like he could be an apprentice in Kevin Webster’s garage and Hooky, in leather cap and capped-sleeve t-shirt would make a decent extra in ‘Cruising’.
A word of warning if you’re thinking of picking this up on Amazon or Ebay. It’s from a time when everything on Factory was taken very, very seriously.
2)Touching From a Distance – Deborah Curtis
This is just a very good and extremely heartfelt book from the perspective, of course, of Ian’s long-suffering wife, the person who found his body after his suicide on the eve of Joy Division’s departure for their first tour of America.
Even before Anton Corbijn’s icy black and white movie adaptation ‘Control’, you could experience the drab chill of 70’s Macclesfield within these pages. It’s a moving account of how it feels when the party’s happening elsewhere and you’re not invited.
3)From Joy Division to New Order, The Factory Records Story – Mick Middles
It took Michael Winterbottom’s movie ‘Twenty Four Hour Party People’ to appear before the Factory myth factory cranked into gear in earnest.
There must be few people of a certain age who don’t know about the non-contract signed in Wilson’s blood, Happy Mondays’ poolside crack den in Barbados or the Hacienda’s metamorphosis from empty white elephant disco to the epicentre of the known world (1987-90).
This pre-dates the movie by quite a few years and it’s a dull old read. Mick Middles, especially when he used to write the pop page in the Manchester Evening News, always came across as old before his time.
This adequately covers the early days of Factory, but you get the feeling it all got too much for Middles when the drugs became the story, so he slunk off for a pint of bitter, tut-tutting about the decadence of it all.
The first book on Factory I really didn’t need.
4)The Hacienda Must Be Built – Edited by Jon Savage
I think I bought this at the bookshop at Urbis and it’s a re-print. It first appeared about 1992 when the club was still open but it’s best days were long gone. It even gets it’s own catalogue number, Fac 351.
It’s like a long, slightly hagiographic magazine article really, interviews with all the main Hacienda heads, lots of pics from the club, posters and flyers.
Only of interest to Factory train spotters I would have thought.
5)Freaky Dancin’ – Bez
I’d managed to ignore this book for quite some time before succumbing and buying it to take on some London to Manchester or Manchester to London train journey.
I’d flicked through it a couple of times and it seemed like the music biz equivalent of one of those rotten football hooligan books in which the author boasts about ‘running with the top boys’.
It’s written by Bez and his then girlfriend and someone at the publishers must of thought dropping the ‘g’ on every verb ie dancin’, freakin’ (and even huffin’ and puffin’ at one point) added a veneer of authenticity to the prose. It’s actually really annoying, right up there with journalists attempts to assimilate a Manchester accent in print with ‘fooking’.
D’you know what though? It’s actually quite good. Honest, funny, with some great stories. Top one Bez. Oops.
6)Twenty Four Hour Party People – Tony Wilson
Published to coincide with the release of the movie, Tony goes all McLaren on us with his account of (not that much) cash from chaos.
I think I picked it up for next to nothing in one of those remaindered bookshops and it’s an entertaining romp, a kind of ‘best of Factory stories’.
Being Tony’s book, there’s sure to be a mention of praxis and something about situationists, and the cast of characters; Gretton, Hannett, Saville, Ian, Vini, Mike Pickering, Barney, Hooky, Shaun Ryder and Bez are all present and correct.
Nothing really new here, but Tony was a special chap who made it all happen so I couldn’t begrudge him his share of my £3.
7)Designed by – Peter Saville
You know you’ve reached a certain stage in your life when you start to buy ‘coffee table’ books. This is definitely one.
Yes, there will be an essay or two by Paul Morley or Miranda Sawyer, yes, there will be some sumptuous imagery and yes, it’s a nice thing to have. Did I/do I need this? No.
8)Factory Records, The Complete Graphic Album – Matthew Robertson
See above.
9)1 Top Class Manager – Rob Gretton
Hmmm this is a little worrying. This is a book consisting wholly of Joy Division/New Order manager Rob Gretton’s notepads. He apparently used to constantly write ‘to do’ lists, as you do, to help him keep on top of his increasingly successful group’s nefarious activities.
Half of me believes I can justify buying this book because it gives me a privileged peek into the inner sanctum of my favourite group. The other half is pointing and laughing at someone who would part with real money for a book full of a group’s manager’s ‘to do’ lists.
I would like to point out though, that if you are the kind of person who wants to see the list of other names considered by the group when they changed theirs from Joy Division to New Order well, it’s here.
10)The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club – Peter Hook
Which brings me neatly to the most recent rash of Factory inspired books, those that are hell bent on puncturing the myths surrounding the label, the Hac and the main players.
It’s pretty clear that Hooky is setting up his pension fund by milking the Hacienda brand for all it’s worth. I wasn’t expecting much from this (but I bought it anyway, we’ve already established that I have a problem) and once again, I was proved wrong.
Hooky gets the balance right between celebrating one of the best club’s there’s ever been and undercutting the mythology by revealing how haphazard and cack-handed the running of it was.
One of the best anecdotes comes via a friend of Hooky’s who tells him he always knows who the Hacienda bar staff are when he sees them walking away down Whitworth Street at night. They’re the ones carrying bags full of pilfered cans from the bar.
11)Shadowplayers – James Nice
Man, I struggled with this. From the moment I saw this book, biblical in it’s size but bright pink with the Factory logo on the front, my first instinct was to march straight up to the book shop counter, like some helpless addict, and hand over the cash.
Then I sobered up. Did I really need another history of Factory Records? With so many more things to read and so little time, wasn’t this some verging on some kind of sickness?
I rewarded myself for my sensible attitude by spending an hour flicking through the book, perched uncomfortably on one of those little stools the assistants stand on to reach the higher shelves.
The next time I was in the shop, a week later, I fell off the wagon and bought it.
So help me, it’s good. Oh, it’s good. As dry as the sandpaper that encased the first Durutti Column record it may be, but it also goes out of it’s way to present the main players at Factory as real, sometimes quite damaged, human beings.
The author clearly has a bit of a problem with Tony Wilson but if you want to read the other side of the myth it’s all here.
12)Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl – Lindsay Reade
Now, beyond all hope of a cure, I picked this up last year. In my defence, it’s more of an autobiography than a book about Factory, although the author was married to Tony Wilson and worked at Factory at one stage…jesus, who am I kidding?
Even my girlfriend, who doesn’t have much interest in Factory at all, read and liked this. It’s a searingly honest account of the author’s life in the slipstream of the music business and her life with Wilson. Sometimes I wished the author wasn’t quite so hard on herself to be honest. One for the connoisseurs.
So there we are. This might be the worthless pledge of the irredeemable, but I can’t see me adding to this list in the near future….obviously that’s after ‘Heaven to Heaven’ arrives this month.
In saying that, I did read somewhere that Hooky was writing his two-part autobiography, the Joy Division years then the New Order years…now that might be interesting.
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I thought I’d missed the chance to see Carol Morley’s new film ‘Dreams of a Life’ until the great god of google smiled his inscrutable smile and pointed to a screening of it in, of all places, the Holloway Road Odeon on, of all days, New Year’s Eve.
So with this little bit of luck we got to see it in grimy old screen eight with five other wise souls who had sought the film out and hadn’t weakened at the last minute and opted for ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked’ instead.
I’m a huge fan of Carol Morley’s previous film ‘The Alcohol Years’ which managed to be poignant, sweet, sad and wise all at the same time. Her technique of remaining behind the camera but being present all the time really works.
‘Dreams of a Life’ could be depressing, in fact it’s quite difficult to sell the film as anything but (as I’m sure Carol Morley found out) when you explain it’s the story of a woman in her 30′s, Joyce Vincent, who dies alone in a bedsit in Wood Green. Her body isn’t found for three years.
The director shows great skill in managing to make it anything but. It’s mysterious, intriguing and touching and asks big questions about friendship, family and how we live our lives today. It also a film that keeps you thinking until the last frame and stays with you long after you’ve struggled to get a 43 bus home because Arsenal are at home and Holloway Road is packed.
The film has a great soundtrack by former Magazine and Bad Seed guitarist Barry Adamson but for me, the stand-out music is a track called ‘My Smile is Just a Frown’ by Carolyn Crawford.
It’s one of those beautiful soul songs that were churned out endlessly and effortlessly in the mid to late 1960′s. Apparently Crawford won a Motown competition for new talent and this was one of three singles she released on the label.
‘Dreams of Life’ will, no doubt, be disappearing from cinemas fairly soon, try and make it the first film you see this year.
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So there I was waiting for a hot chocolate in Kaffeine, Great Titchfield Street’s number one coffee place (and there’s some competition, Frank’s Coffee House is very good for jacket potatoes and coronation chicken rolls while the Scandinavian Kitchen’s meatballs and three salads makes a very tasty lunch).
To kill time, I started to browse through a stray copy of GQ Style. As usual, there was virtually nothing of interest, I’ve long since given up on the main mag with it’s fascination with Daniel Craig, Piers Morgan and dreary old articles about ‘what every man should know’. Anyway, there was one thing that caught my eye- a Q and A with Margaret Howell.
One of the questions was ‘What’s your favourite item of clothing you’ve designed?’ and the answer threw up an interesting nugget. Apparently she designed the jacket that Jack Nick wears in ‘The Shining’ ! It’s in burgundy cord and pictured right.
So I did a bit of digging around and the story is true. Nicholson apparently insisted that his character should wear a burgundy cord Margaret Howell jacket that he already owned. The film’s director, Stanley Kubrick acquiesced but ordered another eleven copies to be made as well, which the designer was happy to do.
Anyway, as it’s nearly Christmas, here’s a heart-warming moment from the movie.
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This is one of my favourite tracks at the moment, from ‘The Less You Know, the Better’, a welcome return to form. There’s a competition running for the best re-mix of ‘Scale it Back’. This, in my humble opinion, should win it.
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What sort of role did Bernie Rhodes have with the group? Was he a Malcolm McLaren-type figure?
Well, Malcolm was like, quite a powerful bloke and often, when he told someone to do something he did it. With Bernie, everyone just ignored him. He never encouraged me to do the jazz stuff, he hated it.
So, ‘What’s the Matter Boy?’ was the first Subway Sect LP to be released. How does that fit into things?
A lot of the songs were from the earlier era with me singing, the Black Arabs were on it Terry Chimes and his brother were involved. When that came out we were doing the Northern Soul set. It took so long to come out and that’s happened so many times, I suppose it’s confusing for everyone.
Do you think that’s why your career has been so stop/start?
Well I’ve never really had a career ! I never had a plan to make a career in music.
So, how did the jazz stuff come about?
I just got fed up with punk. There were so many rubbish punk bands, I just went off that sound altogether. I was trying to write classic stuff. We supported people like the Banshees and Birthday Party and all their fans wore that uniform of black leather and dyed black hair and we looked like people from Mars in tuxedos and they just thought it was a joke to start off with but they got into it. I remember we did one gig in front of 500 skinheads in Aylesbury and to start off with they looked really menacing but they ended up doing a giant conga all round the place.
It was really enjoyable because I think, like us, all the audiences back then were getting tired of all the doom and gloom and we could do anything we wanted. Sean (McLuskey) used to go on and do a 45 minute drum solo before we even went on. We did a swing version of White Riot ! It was like punk for us, like the early days playing with the Clash. I think there was only one place where we got bottled off and that was Liverpool.
And did a lot of thought go into the clothes, the image on stage?
Well when I did the jazz stuff I wore a tuxedo because that’s what jazzy people do (laughs). The Harris tweed stuff? Well that was our anti-goth uniform really because it was the furthest you could get from all that leather stuff.
And then there was Club Left that was a pre-cursor to all those bands in London who got into jazz in the 80’s?
Well that was once a week, every Thursday. That was a residency for six months. We did all the Songs for Sale set and some standards. There was one band for all the different singers. It was really refreshing at the time. It was like going back to square one, it was like a punk way of doing jazz. It was the ‘in’ place to be for a bit but we wouldn’t have done it if we weren’t really into the music. At all the other clubs you knew what you were going to get, Ultravox and all that. At our place you didn’t hear anything after 1955. We had great DJ’s with all these records from the 40’s and 50’s.
Then there was the next LP ‘Songs for Sale’….
Songs for Sale was another mess, too confusing to go into really, but Island paid for it and then lost interest and so Decca bought the tapes to put it out but it all took ages. I never got involved in all the business side. If I did, I wouldn’t have time to do new stuff. Even now I don’t have enough time to do music and I certainly don’t want to waste it on business.
Then what happened?
Well, Bernie had been paying me £50 a week to write songs for other people. He thought he would manage other people and I would be the sort of ‘in-house’ songwriter. After Club Left I had a row with Bernie and I started doing stuff with Geoff Travis. Trying to do an album, the tracks that ended up on the ‘Trouble’ album.
Ok. So there’s a lot of controversy about what happened with that. It ended up being really expensive didn’t it?
Yeah, well we had the cream of British jazz players at Olympic Studios in Barnes, which was the dearest place in London at the time. We had a cast of about twenty, the backing vocalists from Shakatak, top session people, Simon Booth from Working Week was on it. It was Mike Alway, (who ran El Records) really, who got the money for it. Geoff Travis wasn’t into jazz.
I think they got £250,000 out of Warner Brothers to start Blanco y Negro but that was meant to be for a few albums, there was a load of money wasted. Only one of the six things they got the money for made any money back. The mixing on ‘Trouble’ was done really quickly because they wouldn’t spend any more money on it and then Travis and Alway had their big barney and he wouldn’t put it out.
It was all very political and when it became clear that it wasn’t going to come out I lost touch with Alway and Geoff Travis. I didn’t think it would ever come out.
So after ‘Trouble’, was that the time you finally split with Bernie?
Yes, exactly at that time. I got married as well, I almost forgot that album existed. I couldn’t live on £50 a week. I was always doing other jobs, I washed up in a burger bar, worked in a bookies, later I worked for the post office so I’ve never felt like I was ‘in’ the music business. The only time I was really involved full time was during the punk era. That’s the only time I put on my passport that I was a singer (laughs).
For a while after that I didn’t do anything. I didn’t write words or any music. I didn’t have a car or any musical instruments. I still listened to stuff but didn’t do it myself. It was all jazz stuff though. I didn’t know anything about new music as far as the rest of the 80’s were concerned.
What sparked your interest again?
I got a guitar again in 1990 and I started writing songs again almost immediately. I had written some songs with a mate at the post office and he said “these are good, why don’t you send them to a record company?” so I sent them to Geoff Travis at Rough Trade. He paid for us to do some work on them but this was the time when Rough Trade were facing liquidation so that all came to an end too.
Is this the stuff that became the record ‘End of the Surrey People’?
Yeah. Then what happened was Geoff Travis had given Edwyn Collins some 8-track recording equipment as a present and he had always liked my stuff. It was all down to Edwyn that those songs even came out. He literally went round to all the record companies and had meetings to see if anybody would put it out. He tried Creation, but the only ones who really liked it was Heavenly, they loved it. After a couple of weeks of them saying they loved it and they wanted to do it, they got taken over by Sony. So then Edwyn said, whatever you do don’t put it out on Postcard, don’t sink that low (laughs).
What was the problem with doing something with Postcard? Alan Horne had started to release stuff again in the early 90’s hadn’t he?
There was loads of times when I said “Why don’t we put it out on Postcard ?” and Edwyn say no, no there’s a few others to try yet and then, it was a couple of years later and it was the last resort and so it went out on Postcard (laughs) He’s never got on with Horney, well he got on with him but he didn’t want to get involved with him financially, I think that’s what it was. He thought it could be a nightmare. It was never handled properly, it was never sent out to be reviewed or anything and that’s exactly what Edwyn said would happen.
Edwyn’s been really good to you then?
I’ve done two albums with Edwyn and without him I wouldn’t have been able to afford to do them. The second one (Long Term Side Effect) he said we could have a couple of weeks and it turned into about nine (laughs). Considering ‘Surrey People’ was recorded on his eight-track in his bedroom while his kid was growing up, he did a great job as a producer under really difficult conditions. He lived in a tiny flat at the time and we were recording in the main room so it was a bit of a nightmare for his family while it was going on.
So, tell me about ‘Long Term Side Effect”.
It’s sounds sort of post-war era. It’s the only album I’ve done where to me, it sounds like me. It was really natural. All the others, I’ve had a technician trying to make me sound like they think I should. A lot of it was done in different studios and so it sounds very varied. I’ve never been able to find a record company who could sell what I do. I know how they feel. It’s very influenced by American R and B but at the same time it’s fairly obvious that the bloke doing it is from London.
I’m a big Jimmy Reed fan, I like R n B from any era but there’s no way I’m going to do that. I’m from Kew (laughs). When I do a song, it doesn’t matter to me if I’m the main vocalist. If it’s out of my range I’d rather get someone else in to do it.
What ideally would you like to be ? Someone who lots of people cite as an influence or aren’t you really bothered?
I can’t really answer that. I don’t think I ever will be massively successful. All I can say is the reason I write a lot of high quality stuff is that I have so little time to do music that when I do have a spare hour it all comes pouring out. When I was on the dole and had all the time in the world I never wrote songs. I didn’t write stuff on a daily basis like I do now. My life’s this treadmill with endless tasks to be done and the only time I really enjoy myself is during that couple of hours when I’m making music.
Say Sony signed me up and I had a big hit, well, you’ve got to be really careful because they’ll pay you, but then you’re under their control and they want another one and another one. Someone I know, their cousin is in Menswear and they nearly had a breakdown because of the schedule they were on. When you’re in the music business, in your own time, the last thing you want to do is music. What are you going to write about if you’re in a group like Menswear just touring everywhere?
This works for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong I’m knackered all the time, When I go to bed at night I’m asleep within a minute of my head hitting the pillow. I must be getting a bit old for it (laughs) I tell you what, the ideal thing for me would be to just release loads of stuff, bootleg my own songs and then go down Shepherds Bush market and sell ‘em (laughs).
PS I found this at Kevin Pearce’s fantastic site ‘Your Heart Out’. It includes a link to a recording of the legendary 1980 ‘northern soul’ incarnation of Subway Sect mentioned in this interview, part one.
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One of the great pleasures in life is clearing out an old cupboard and finding all sorts of treasure. A few weeks ago I was doing just such a thing and happened upon some old cassettes.
Among them was a C90 of an interview I did with the mercurial Vic Godard back in 1997.
At the time, I was trying to get a documentary about him off the ground, hoping that someone I approached about funding would be a fan and see why Vic would be such a great topic for a film.
I’m very impressed that Paul Kelly has managed to do a similar thing with his new doc ‘Lawrence of Belgravia’. Lawrence from Felt is another intriguing, neglected pop figure.
The interview took place in the glamorous surroundings of the Pizza Express on Chiswick High Road when Vic was going through quite a prolific time, having re-booted his career on the resuscitated Postcard label with ‘End of the Surrey People’ and about to release ‘Long Term Side Effect’.
The only equipment I have that plays tapes now is in the car so to hear and transcribe it, I had to sit in the passenger seat with my Mac. It was worth it to hear it all again after fifteen years.
From the start, Subway Sect was just a bunch of school friends right?
Yes, from SW13, SW14 and SW15, all neighbouring areas in London.
And what was the idea that got you together?
Well, we all looked alike so we stood out. We were the only people who didn’t wear the uniform of the day. We didn’t have the same musical tastes it was just, well, that era was sort of a hippy-ish so non-hippies really stood out.
And what about music?
I was never really into music when I was young. I quite liked the ska stuff that was around but there was only a few numbers I would be able to tell you the names of.
I liked Junior Walker and the All-Stars, I used to like Georgie Fame. I quite liked The Rolling Stones when I was at primary school.
The Beatles and that Merseybeat sound, I hated that but that wasn’t just me, that was the whole house, my mum and dad too. Couldn’t stand all that. Never liked Elvis either.
My parents liked Max Bygraves and all that stuff, Matt Monroe, Frank Sinatra. That’s how I got to learn all the standards and that all came out later on.
Was it a musical family?
Yeah, my mum was a cleaner at a school and when she had a break she used to have a go on the piano. My dad’s not musical…well actually I tell a lie, he does a good Mick Jagger impersonation (laughs). One of my uncles was mad about Charlie Parker, he was quite influential. I used to spend a lot of time with him because he used to take me to see Chelsea FC play when I was younger.
So what fired your interest?
I don’t know. I’ve always been pretty open-minded and liking stuff from different eras but at that time there was all this progressive rock around and it didn’t do anything for me, there was no melodies or anything. I couldn’t stand it.
I mean the Sex Pistols wasn’t really a musical thing, it was more of an image thing. I didn’t really like their music. I liked it when it was out of tune but when it was all tuneful I didn’t like it anymore. It was really exciting early on. It was just total mayhem.
It was all to do with the shop (Let it Rock). In that era, that was the only place where you could get a certain type of clothes and so everyone would have gone there, everyone from south west London and probably farther afield.
If you wanted a 60’s style shirt or trousers that weren’t flared or something and you couldn’t find it in Oxfam that’s probably where you would have gone.
There was Lloyd Johnson’s later, he used to sell off all the army de-mob suits for £4.50…for a three piece suit, that’s where we got all our stuff but that was later. I used to go up to the West End to try to buy spats or shirts with detachable collars. I’m talking about 1975.
How did you get around to starting the band?
Well it wasn’t like we actually ever thought ‘let’s start a group’. What happened was that we were at one of the Sex Pistols gigs and Malcolm McLaren came up to us and said, “You’re a group” and we said “No we ain’t” and he said “Well you look like one” and we said “Well we haven’t got any money for any instruments” so he said “Well, get them on HP” and that’s what we did.
So we clubbed together and bought the gear and then put it in the shed and wondered what to do next really (laughs)
When was the first time you actually played a gig?
It was at the 100 Club Punk Festival. It was about six weeks after we got the drum kit and wondered what to do with it.
McLaren wanted loads of bands to play at so it looked like there was a punk movement ! He probably used the same tactics he used on us on loads of other kids.
What was funny was, we were all sitting round before the gig, all the bands on separate tables, and writers from the NME and the Melody Maker were going round asking all the bands what they had done before.
So they came round to us and asked us “Have any of you got any musical experience?” and our drummer said he’d been in the boy scouts. So the bloke from the NME said “I’ve never heard of them, who else was in them?” and our drummer said “What you’ve never heard of the boy scouts? They’ve been around for ages !”(laughs)
Are you saying you had no musical ability at all at this point?
No, and none of us has any interest in performing either really. Originally I was just going to play mouth organ but I ended up as the singer.
I mean, you take someone like Jonathan Richman, he had songs like Roadrunner that only had two chords in it so once you’d learned them you were away.
Our guitarist was really awful but he was the best of all of us. ‘Don’t Split It’, the first thing we ever wrote, was just ‘Waiting for the Man’ in the wrong key, played wrong, d’you know what I mean? We just made as much noise as we could really.
Why the name Subway Sect?
It was one of those ones where we all sat around trying to come up with a decent name. We knew we wanted to be a ‘sect’ of some kind…
Did you enjoy writing lyrics?
Not really I was sort of pushed into it. The guitarist didn’t want to do it, he wrote ‘Don’t Split It’ but that wasn’t his thing. No one in the group really wanted to be in it.
The drummer went off and joined the army, the bass player (Paul Myers) was never really a bass player then and he was embarrassed about it, always used to say he was a photographer. The guitarist (Rob Simmons) was just a bit of a weirdo then and no one really understood him.
The thing was, we were all on the dole and so anything else would have been enjoyable. When we went on tour with The Clash, we were staying in all these fantastic Holiday Inn’s and stuff, it was like Christmas every day.
So how were those early punk tours?
Well, we were like The Clash’s support band so when they played, we did. It seemed like that went on for years but it was really just until their first album came out and then they went to America and we didn’t see them after that.
That was the start of being involved with Bernie Rhodes. We used to use Rehearsal Rehearsals in Camden, which was his place, and through that he became our manager.
Again, I didn’t really like The Clash’s music. I liked Jonathan Richman and the Velvet Underground and then Television and Talking Heads.
All the group liked Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, even then. Jimmy Reed was a big thing for us as well. That was all that me and the guitarist had in common, we were both big fans of Jimmy Reed. He had all his LP’s and I only had a couple.
Did you always know then that you wanted to play a different kind of music, beyond punk?
No, it wasn’t really like that. I mean, we were totally incompetent. I wanted to learn how to play more chords. The drummer, and this is true, thought the bass drum was just a place to write the name of the group. He didn’t realize that there was a pedal and you were meant to play it !
We really couldn’t play and that’s probably why we stood out. In that era there was a lot of pub rock groups who just dyed their hair and said they were punks overnight but you could tell they could play. Whereas with us, there was no way that you could watch us and think we were anything but… raw.
By the end of the White Riot tour we could play our set, those ten numbers, really well but if you asked us to do anything else, no chance.
I mean, early on, Mick Jones used to ask our bass player to jam along so he could practice his rock and roll licks at their sound check and our bass player just couldn’t do it. Mick thought he was taking the piss.
He said, “How could you be in a group and have got this far if you can’t do that ?” That twelve-bar blues is the first thing you kind of learn but our bass player couldn’t even manage that (laughs)
So what did you do to improve things?
What happened was, I had to get this really good bass player who lived down my street, Colin. He was into Funkadelic and all that and he was really good by the time he was fifteen, I had to get him to teach our bass player the basics because it was really beginning to hold me back. I had all these ideas for songs that had a bit more to them.
And by that process, in the end, Colin became our bass player. Then that was the time that Bernie sacked the rest of the band because he didn’t think they did anything basically.
So once Bernie had sacked the rest of the band, what happened?
There was a weird one-off gig at the Music Machine in Camden and I had started writing these Northern Soul numbers and, thinking about it, Bernie must have re-hired the band for that gig.
He gave our bass player some money to buy some uniforms, hardly anything, £50 or something for five people and he must have gone off and spent it, that was the last time he got used (laughs)
That was the gig that the guy from Postcard Records, Alan Horne taped and took back to Glasgow. I think they latched onto us in Glasgow because they were all skint and out of all the bands we were just the same.
The Clash had people making their clothes for them whereas we had just walked out of Oxfam and dyed everything grey. If it wasn’t for us all the people up there would probably have thought you needed all this money to buy yourself a leather jacket if you wanted to be a punk and all that crap. We saw all that as not punk, that was rock, the brothel creepers and all that.
PART TWO COMING SOON: JAZZ, POSTCARD RECORDS AND LIFE AS A POSTIE
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It’s 1978 and the wonderful and strange talent that is Jonathan Richman kicks back with Tony Wilson on So It Goes.
Jonathan was in the UK on tour and it’s around this time that he became obsessed with trying to create a ‘loud sound at low volume’. It was Modern Lovers drummer David Robinson who suffered most. Jonathan wanted to reduce the size of his kit and before long it was down to just a single tom-tom.
This was judged to be too loud as well, even with a towel over it. In the end, Jonathan suggested Robinson could ‘just tap the side of it’. Understandably it wasn’t long before the band was looking for a new drummer.
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