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