The Xtraverts formed in 1976 at the outbreak of the punk movement. Creating music in a garage belonging to the guitarist Mark Reilly (Matt Bianco).
Playing classic venues such as the Roxy, Clarendon, the Greyhound and all over Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire they created a massive following from all over the country with gigs selling out nationwide. The Xtraverts appealed to the skinhead and punks alike and garnered a reputation for clashing with the local hooligans, while often a deterrent, it was also a draw to those fans wanting to revel in the atmosphere and feel part of the Xtraverts Crew.
The Xtraverts played with many the bands of the time, such as 999, The Vibrators, The Damned, Visage, The Satellites, UK Subs, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and many more. They also were part of the emerging punk scene playing alongside bands The Lurkers, The Slits, The Banshees, in 77-79, were regulars in the crowd and sometimes onstage at the Roxy
They released three singles in their early career, Blank Generation, Police State and Speed, which are now highly collectable records (especially the limited edition “puke” pressing of Police State). Their first album “So Much Hate” was released on Detour Records in 1978, and is still available in digital format today.
Their unique sound also appealed to a more mainstream audience, with appearances on John Peel’s radio show, a TV feature with Danny Baker and a show called Twentieth Century Box with Janet Street Porter looking at the impact of independent bands and labels on the popular music scene.
Over the years, many of the band members ended up in prison, however through quick changes and substitutions, the band carried on regardless. The death knoll for the band finally tolled however when singer Nigel Martin was imprisoned in 1980, the band finally naturally grew to a close. Without its front man and driving force, the musical direction faltered and the band members went their separate ways.
Over their relatively short career, the band had underground success with the single “Police State” and were Number 1 in both the Sounds and NME independent charts. While the band was enjoying its indie success former member Mark Reilly was topping the National mainstream charts with “Get out of your Lazy Bed” with his new band Matt Bianco. The Xtraverts past and present were enjoying a heyday that dominated across the music scene.
The band often made the alternative and oi! charts in sounds magazine in the early 80’s, and picked up a huge following, but circumstances and perhaps major labels not picking them up, like contemporaries, the Clash and Sex Pistols, the world never got to see the band.
30 years later,and after the death of bass player Mark Chapman, the Xtraverts, After meeting up with an old mate Symond Lawes, Manager of X-ray Spex and Concrete Jungle promotions, have decided to release some of their material, at the moment busily digging through the loft and remastering, what will always be pure Punk Rock. There may possibly be a one off gig, sometime in 2014…… Watch this space
“The Xtraverts were such a major influence on my life. Of all the Punk shows i have attended over the last 10 years, i have always thought, i would just so love to see the Xtraverts up on that stage. Lets hope that dream comes true, and the world get to hear such classic tracks”
Oi! is a subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. The music and its associated subculture had the goal of bringing together punks, skinheads and other working-class youths (sometimes called herberts).
The Oi! movement was partly a response to the perception that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic…and losing touch”. André Schlesinger, singer of The Press, said, “Oi shares many similarities with folk music, besides its often simple musical structure; quaint in some respects and crude in others, not to mention brutally honest, it usually tells a story based in truth.”
In 1980, writing in Sounds magazine, rock journalist Garry Bushell labelled the movement Oi!, taking the name from the garbled “Oi!” that Stinky Turner of Cockney Rejects used to introduce the band’s songs. The word is an old Cockney expression, meaning hey or hello. In addition to Cockney Rejects, other bands to be explicitly labeled Oi! in the early days of the genre included Angelic Upstarts, The 4-Skins, The Business, Blitz, The Blood, and Combat 84.
The prevalent ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough brand of working-class rebellion. Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers’ rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government. Oi! songs also covered less-political topics such as street violence, football, sex, and alcohol. Although Oi! has come to be considered mainly a skinhead-oriented genre, the first Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fit neither the skinhead nor punk label.
After the Oi! movement lost momentum in the United Kingdom, Oi! scenes formed in continental Europe, North America, and Asia. Soon, especially in the United States, the Oi! phenomenon mirrored the hardcore punk scene of the early 1980s, with Oi!-influenced bands such as Agnostic Front, Iron Cross, Anti Heros. Later American punk bands such as Rancid and Dropkick Murphys have credited Oi! as a source of inspiration. In the mid-1990s, there was a revival of interest in Oi! music in the UK, leading to older Oi! bands receiving more recognition. In the 2000s, many of the original UK Oi! bands reunited to perform and/or record. The song T.N.T. by hard rock bandAC/DC features the interjection at the start and in various parts throughout the song.
Some fans of Oi! were involved in white nationalist organisations such as the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM), leading some critics to identify the Oi! scene in general as racist. However, none of the bands associated with the original Oi! scene promoted racism in their lyrics. Some Oi! bands, such as the Angelic Upstarts,The Burial, and The Oppressed were associated with left wing politicsand anti-racism. The white power skinhead movement had developed its own music genre called Rock Against Communism, which had musical similarities to Oi!, but was not connected to the Oi! scene. Timothy S. Brown identifies a deeper connection: Oi!, he writes “played an important symbolic role in the politicization of the skinhead subculture. By providing, for the first time, a musical focus for skinhead identity that was ‘white’—that is, that had nothing to do with the West Indian immigrant presence and little obvious connection with black musical roots—Oi! provided a musical focus for new visions of skinhead identity [and] a point of entry for a new brand of right-wing rock music.”
Rightly or wrongly,The mainstream media especially associated Oi! with far right politics following a concert by The Business, The 4-Skins, and The Last Resort on 4 July 1981 at the Hambrough Tavern in Southall. Local Asian youths threw Molotov cocktails and other objects, mistakenly believing that the concert was a neo-Nazi event, partly because some audience members had written National Front slogans around the area. Although some of the skinheads were NF or BM supporters, among the 500 or so concert-goers were also left-wing skinheads, black skinheads, punk rockers, rockabillies, and non-affiliated youths. Five hours of rioting left 120 people injured—including 60 police officers—and the tavern burnt down. In the aftermath, many Oi! bands condemned racism and fascism.
These denials, however, were met with cynicism from some quarters because of the Strength Thru Oi!compilation album, released in May 1981. Not only was its title a play on a Nazi slogan—”Strength Through Joy“—but the cover featured Nicky Crane, a skinhead BM activist who was serving a four-year sentence for racist violence. Critic Garry Bushell, who was responsible for compiling the album, insists its title was a pun on The Skids‘ album Strength Through Joy, and that he had been unaware of the Nazi connotations. He also denied knowing the identity of the skinhead on the album’s cover until it was exposed by the Daily Mail two months later. Bushell, a socialist at the time, noted the irony of being branded a far right activist by a newspaper that “had once supported Oswald Mosley‘s Blackshirts, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two.”
Another subsequent source for the popular association between Oi! and a racist or far-right creed was the bandSkrewdriver. Lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson was recruited by the National Front—which had failed to enlist any actual Oi! bands—and reconstituted Skrewdriver as a white power skinhead act. While the band shared visual and musical attributes with Oi!, Bushell asserts, “It was totally distinct from us. We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.” Donaldson and Crane would later go on to found a magazine, Blood and Honour, and a street-orientated ‘skinhead’ club of the same name that arranged concerts for Skrewdriver and other racist bands such as No Remorse. Demonstrating the ongoing conflation of Oi! with the white power skinhead movement by some observers, the Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations refers to these groups as “‘white noise’ and ‘oi’ racist bands”.
Oi! is a subgenre of punk rock that originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s. The music and its associated subculture had the goal of bringing together punks, skinheads and other working-class youths (sometimes called herberts).
The Oi! movement was partly a response to the perception that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, “trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic…and losing touch”. André Schlesinger, singer of The Press, said, “Oi shares many similarities with folk music, besides its often simple musical structure; quaint in some respects and crude in others, not to mention brutally honest, it usually tells a story based in truth.”
In 1980, writing in Sounds magazine, rock journalist Garry Bushell labelled the movement Oi!, taking the name from the garbled “Oi!” that Stinky Turner of Cockney Rejects used to introduce the band’s songs. The word is an old Cockney expression, meaning hey or hello. In addition to Cockney Rejects, other bands to be explicitly labeled Oi! in the early days of the genre included Angelic Upstarts, The 4-Skins, The Business, Blitz, The Blood, and Combat 84.
The prevalent ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough brand of working-class rebellion. Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers’ rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government. Oi! songs also covered less-political topics such as street violence, football, sex, and alcohol. Although Oi! has come to be considered mainly a skinhead-oriented genre, the first Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fit neither the skinhead nor punk label.
After the Oi! movement lost momentum in the United Kingdom, Oi! scenes formed in continental Europe, North America, and Asia. Soon, especially in the United States, the Oi! phenomenon mirrored the hardcore punk scene of the early 1980s, with Oi!-influenced bands such as Agnostic Front, Iron Cross, Anti Heros. Later American punk bands such as Rancid and Dropkick Murphys have credited Oi! as a source of inspiration. In the mid-1990s, there was a revival of interest in Oi! music in the UK, leading to older Oi! bands receiving more recognition. In the 2000s, many of the original UK Oi! bands reunited to perform and/or record. The song T.N.T. by hard rock bandAC/DC features the interjection at the start and in various parts throughout the song.
Some fans of Oi! were involved in white nationalist organisations such as the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM), leading some critics to identify the Oi! scene in general as racist. However, none of the bands associated with the original Oi! scene promoted racism in their lyrics. Some Oi! bands, such as the Angelic Upstarts,The Burial, and The Oppressed were associated with left wing politicsand anti-racism. The white power skinhead movement had developed its own music genre called Rock Against Communism, which had musical similarities to Oi!, but was not connected to the Oi! scene. Timothy S. Brown identifies a deeper connection: Oi!, he writes “played an important symbolic role in the politicization of the skinhead subculture. By providing, for the first time, a musical focus for skinhead identity that was ‘white’—that is, that had nothing to do with the West Indian immigrant presence and little obvious connection with black musical roots—Oi! provided a musical focus for new visions of skinhead identity [and] a point of entry for a new brand of right-wing rock music.”
Rightly or wrongly,The mainstream media especially associated Oi! with far right politics following a concert by The Business, The 4-Skins, and The Last Resort on 4 July 1981 at the Hambrough Tavern in Southall. Local Asian youths threw Molotov cocktails and other objects, mistakenly believing that the concert was a neo-Nazi event, partly because some audience members had written National Front slogans around the area. Although some of the skinheads were NF or BM supporters, among the 500 or so concert-goers were also left-wing skinheads, black skinheads, punk rockers, rockabillies, and non-affiliated youths. Five hours of rioting left 120 people injured—including 60 police officers—and the tavern burnt down. In the aftermath, many Oi! bands condemned racism and fascism.
These denials, however, were met with cynicism from some quarters because of the Strength Thru Oi!compilation album, released in May 1981. Not only was its title a play on a Nazi slogan—”Strength Through Joy“—but the cover featured Nicky Crane, a skinhead BM activist who was serving a four-year sentence for racist violence. Critic Garry Bushell, who was responsible for compiling the album, insists its title was a pun on The Skids‘ album Strength Through Joy, and that he had been unaware of the Nazi connotations. He also denied knowing the identity of the skinhead on the album’s cover until it was exposed by the Daily Mail two months later. Bushell, a socialist at the time, noted the irony of being branded a far right activist by a newspaper that “had once supported Oswald Mosley‘s Blackshirts, Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, and appeasement with Hitler right up to the outbreak of World War Two.”
Another subsequent source for the popular association between Oi! and a racist or far-right creed was the bandSkrewdriver. Lead singer Ian Stuart Donaldson was recruited by the National Front—which had failed to enlist any actual Oi! bands—and reconstituted Skrewdriver as a white power skinhead act. While the band shared visual and musical attributes with Oi!, Bushell asserts, “It was totally distinct from us. We had no overlap other than a mutual dislike for each other.” Donaldson and Crane would later go on to found a magazine, Blood and Honour, and a street-orientated ‘skinhead’ club of the same name that arranged concerts for Skrewdriver and other racist bands such as No Remorse. Demonstrating the ongoing conflation of Oi! with the white power skinhead movement by some observers, the Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations refers to these groups as “‘white noise’ and ‘oi’ racist bands”.
Agent Bulldogg Started rehearsing in Thomas bedroom (much to his parents’ enjoyment) back in March 1986 after about half a year or so of talking about it, recruiting members and getting hold of equipment through various ways. After another year of learning, and a move to the legendary – in Täby anyway – Vita Huset (The White House) for rehearsals we played our first gig in the early summer of 1987. We played a couple of more gigs that year and also recorded a demo before original bass player Micke were replaced by Jens in early 1988. That line-up continued to play any gigs we could get, and also managed to record some songs who found their way onto a compilation album as well as recording our debut album – “Livsstil” (A Way of Life) – in 1990.
It wasn’t actually released until 1992 (on our own label) and by then Jens had left the band only to be replaced by Jarl. With this line up we played in Germany, Finland and Austria and also recorded our second album “Ett Tusen Glas” (One Thousand Glasses) – again on our own label – together with the new member Johan on saxophone and keyboards. When we released it 1995, Jarl had left and was replaced by Olof. We continued doing gigs, in Norway for instance, before original guitarist Andreas – more known as Bogh – decided that enough was enough and left. A friend of a friend’s friend then joined briefly, but that didn’t quite work out so Daniel stepped in for a while. However Olof moved to Switzerland and original drummer Magnus became both disillusioned and pre-occupied with his new job so he decided to leave as well. Olof stepped in to do some studio work and together with some help from a couple of other friends two tracks for the compilation album Brewed In Sweden were recorded and released 2002.
Thomas and Johan continued to write a couple of songs but with no other members available it started to fizzle out. However the band never officially broke up, so when a friend asked if we could play a couple of songs for his 40th birthday, Thomas and ex-bass player Jens teamed up with 3 members of Antipati to do so.
We got a few more offers of doing gigs so it just felt natural to continue with that line-up, although Reidar decide to leave due to other commitments a couple of years later.
Since then the band has played in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Poland and Spain as well as some festivals and other various gigs in Sweden, and also released a split 7″ with The Templars, contributed to a four band split (with Gimp Fist, Sandals and Booze & Glory) and released a new EP “Vi Är Tillbaks” (We Are Back…) on tour own label – as always. The current line-up is: Thomas (vocals), Johan (guitar), Robert (guitar), Jens (bass) and Thobbe (drums)
Agent Bulldogg are special guest at The Great Skinhead Reunion, and we will be all be helping them to celebrate Swedens national day, in Brighton, England June 6th -8th 2014
Agent Bulldogg Started rehearsing in Thomas bedroom (much to his parents’ enjoyment) back in March 1986 after about half a year or so of talking about it, recruiting members and getting hold of equipment through various ways. After another year of learning, and a move to the legendary – in Täby anyway – Vita Huset (The White House) for rehearsals we played our first gig in the early summer of 1987. We played a couple of more gigs that year and also recorded a demo before original bass player Micke were replaced by Jens in early 1988. That line-up continued to play any gigs we could get, and also managed to record some songs who found their way onto a compilation album as well as recording our debut album – “Livsstil” (A Way of Life) – in 1990.
It wasn’t actually released until 1992 (on our own label) and by then Jens had left the band only to be replaced by Jarl. With this line up we played in Germany, Finland and Austria and also recorded our second album “Ett Tusen Glas” (One Thousand Glasses) – again on our own label – together with the new member Johan on saxophone and keyboards. When we released it 1995, Jarl had left and was replaced by Olof. We continued doing gigs, in Norway for instance, before original guitarist Andreas – more known as Bogh – decided that enough was enough and left. A friend of a friend’s friend then joined briefly, but that didn’t quite work out so Daniel stepped in for a while. However Olof moved to Switzerland and original drummer Magnus became both disillusioned and pre-occupied with his new job so he decided to leave as well. Olof stepped in to do some studio work and together with some help from a couple of other friends two tracks for the compilation album Brewed In Sweden were recorded and released 2002.
Thomas and Johan continued to write a couple of songs but with no other members available it started to fizzle out. However the band never officially broke up, so when a friend asked if we could play a couple of songs for his 40th birthday, Thomas and ex-bass player Jens teamed up with 3 members of Antipati to do so.
We got a few more offers of doing gigs so it just felt natural to continue with that line-up, although Reidar decide to leave due to other commitments a couple of years later.
Since then the band has played in Belgium, England, France, Germany, Poland and Spain as well as some festivals and other various gigs in Sweden, and also released a split 7″ with The Templars, contributed to a four band split (with Gimp Fist, Sandals and Booze & Glory) and released a new EP “Vi Är Tillbaks” (We Are Back…) on tour own label – as always. The current line-up is: Thomas (vocals), Johan (guitar), Robert (guitar), Jens (bass) and Thobbe (drums)
Agent Bulldogg are special guest at The Great Skinhead Reunion, and we will be all be helping them to celebrate Swedens national day, in Brighton, England June 6th -8th 2014
Scores of youths have been given prison sentences following a Whitsun weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers at a number of resorts on the south coast of England.Yesterday two youths were taken to hospital with knife wounds and 51 were arrested in Margate after hundreds of teenagers converged on the town for the holiday weekend. Dr George Simpson, chairman of Margate magistrates, jailed four young men and imposed fines totalling £1,900 on 36 people. Three offenders were jailed for three months each and five more sent to detention centres for up to six months.
Obscenities
In Brighton, two youths were jailed for three months and others were fined.
More than 1,000 teenagers were involved in skirmishes on the beach and the promenade last night.
They threw deckchairs around, broke them up to make bonfires, shouted obscenities at each other and at passers-by, jostled holidaymakers and terrified elderly residents.
At about 1300 BST Mods and Rockers gathered at the Palace Pier chanting and jeering at each other and threw stones when police tried to disperse them.
The teenagers staged a mass sit-down on the promenade when police, using horses and dogs, tried to move them on.
In Margate, there were running battles between police and up to 400 youths on the beach early yesterday morning. Bottles were thrown and two officers were slightly hurt.
Later, on the high street, around 40 young men smashed council flat windows and vandalised a pub and a hardware shop.
Last night, hundreds of young men and girls were still wandering around the resort long after the last train had left.
Police stepped in to prevent further violence and dispersed about 30 youths in leather jackets who marched up the promenade shouting “Up the Rockers!”
There were further clashes at Bournemouth and Clacton.
From the early to mid-1960s young, mainly working class, Britons with cash to spend joined one of two youth movements.The Mods wore designer suits protected by Parka jackets and were often armed with coshes and flick-knives. They rode Vespa or Lambretta scooters bedecked with mirrors and mascots and listened to Ska music and The Who.Rockers rode motorbikes – often at 100mph with no crash helmets – wore leathers and listened to the likes of Elvis and Gene Vincent.Inevitably the two gangs clashed. The 1964 Whitsun weekend violence in Brighton was famously dramatised in the film Quadrophenia (1979).In August that year police had to be flown into the Sussex resort of Hastings to break up fights between the two gangs.
But two years later, most Mods had turned their attentions to the burgeoning, more laid-back, hippie culture. While the harder working class Mods created the Skinhead Subculture
Scores of youths have been given prison sentences following a Whitsun weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers at a number of resorts on the south coast of England.Yesterday two youths were taken to hospital with knife wounds and 51 were arrested in Margate after hundreds of teenagers converged on the town for the holiday weekend. Dr George Simpson, chairman of Margate magistrates, jailed four young men and imposed fines totalling £1,900 on 36 people. Three offenders were jailed for three months each and five more sent to detention centres for up to six months.
Obscenities
In Brighton, two youths were jailed for three months and others were fined.
More than 1,000 teenagers were involved in skirmishes on the beach and the promenade last night.
They threw deckchairs around, broke them up to make bonfires, shouted obscenities at each other and at passers-by, jostled holidaymakers and terrified elderly residents.
At about 1300 BST Mods and Rockers gathered at the Palace Pier chanting and jeering at each other and threw stones when police tried to disperse them.
The teenagers staged a mass sit-down on the promenade when police, using horses and dogs, tried to move them on.
In Margate, there were running battles between police and up to 400 youths on the beach early yesterday morning. Bottles were thrown and two officers were slightly hurt.
Later, on the high street, around 40 young men smashed council flat windows and vandalised a pub and a hardware shop.
Last night, hundreds of young men and girls were still wandering around the resort long after the last train had left.
Police stepped in to prevent further violence and dispersed about 30 youths in leather jackets who marched up the promenade shouting “Up the Rockers!”
There were further clashes at Bournemouth and Clacton.
From the early to mid-1960s young, mainly working class, Britons with cash to spend joined one of two youth movements.The Mods wore designer suits protected by Parka jackets and were often armed with coshes and flick-knives. They rode Vespa or Lambretta scooters bedecked with mirrors and mascots and listened to Ska music and The Who.Rockers rode motorbikes – often at 100mph with no crash helmets – wore leathers and listened to the likes of Elvis and Gene Vincent.Inevitably the two gangs clashed. The 1964 Whitsun weekend violence in Brighton was famously dramatised in the film Quadrophenia (1979).In August that year police had to be flown into the Sussex resort of Hastings to break up fights between the two gangs.
But two years later, most Mods had turned their attentions to the burgeoning, more laid-back, hippie culture. While the harder working class Mods created the Skinhead Subculture
Friday 17th November 2006, 30 years since Punk detonated, and I had the pleasure of sharing a few drinks with Ron Watts in my home. Ron promoted many of the early bands, and organised the now legendary Punk Festival at the 100 Club on the 20th and 21st September, 1976. Ron’s just published a great book which documents those heady and (for those lucky enough to have been there) exciting times. I switched on the tape recorder, put some wine on the table and off we went, talking about our mutually favourite subject. Music! I hope people will find this interview as interesting as I did, he’s a top bloke with some great memories. Rob Maddison, Tamworth, 19th November 2006. 100 Watts, a life in Music. Written by Ron Watts and forward by Glen Matlock. ISBN 0-9543884-4-5. Available from Heroes Publishing, the Internet (it’s on Amazon) or even a bookshop!
RM) Ron, firstly, why did you write the book? Ron) I was approached by the publishers, who said “would you be interested in writing your life story”. I thought about it, for about two days, and then thought yeah. Yes, I’d do that, you know what I mean.RM) How on earth did you remember everything? Ron) Most of it was in the house, still. I just had to find all the old diaries and booking sheets and things, and it jogged my memory, you know. RM) You kept all that stuff, then Ron? Ron) Well, yes, I suppose you would, really, wouldn’t you. To be honest, I sold some stuff off at auction, about 10 years ago, when I was skint. One thing was the Sex Pistols contract from the Punk Festival, which was handwritten by Malcolm McClaren.RM) Who bought it? Ron) I think it was the Hard Rock Café in Central London, to put up on the wall.RM) When’s your next promotion Ron? Ron) Well, I haven’t been promoting for a while, but it’s in my blood, and people are expressing an interest in me doing something. I’ve got 2 venues lined up for the new year, look here for news, come February. We’ve venues in Oxford Street and High Wycombe, but can’t say too much at this point!! These gigs are to be known as Ron’s part 1 and 2…RM) Who are you promoting? Ron) What I did in 1977. RM) What, new “Punk” bands, such as The View etc? Ron) No. Same bands I did in ’77. Same bands in the same place. Some of them are reforming, I’ve been on the bone mate!!RM) Who are you still in touch with from those days, Ron? Ron) Virtually everybody. People from the Sex Pistols, met some of the Clash quite recently, Damned I’m still in touch with, no end of people. RM) Glen Matlock wrote the forward to the book and is obviously a decent bloke. Ron) Glen is a nice bloke, and definitely part of the Pistols, but is his own man.RM) Did you ban Punk? Ron) No. Punk was banned around me, and while it was banned at one venue, I still considered doing it at another, the Nags Head in High Wycombe. At the first opportunity for it to go back into the 100 Club it went back in. It’s a false supposition to suggest I banned it. It was banned because the police and Oxford Street traders association objected to Punks standing in queues outside their shops waiting to get into the club. At this time Oxford Street was the premier shopping street in Europe. I’d be getting complaints, so would go out into the street and try and get people to move out of shop doorways etc, but as soon as I went back in the club they’d be back in there. And of course there’d been some real bad violence. When a girl loses her eye that’s a pretty serious thing. You have to remember that I didn’t own the club, I just promoted there. Simple as. RM) Did Sid Vicious throw the glass that injured the girl’s eye? Ron) Well, I presume so, the barman saw him do it. He didn’t know Sid from Adam, but he pointed him (Sid) out and told me it was him that threw it. I don’t think Sid meant to hurt anybody, except the Damned! If it had caught Captain Sensible on the head he’d have liked that! Funnily enough I was down at the 100 Club a couple of weeks ago, and Michelle Brigandage, who took some of the photos in the book, was telling me that she was actually sat with the girl who lost her eye. Apparently she was an art student from South London, never wanted any publicity and was broken hearted, as anyone would be who lost an eye, especially at that age. She was only 19 at the time. Michelle was sat with her when it happened, she was her mate, and it’s the first time I’ve had a real chat about it. She said herself that though she accepts that it was Sid who threw the glass, he hadn’t intended to do that. But at the same time, he had thrown the glass with malice, and might’ve done even worse damage to someone else, you never know. So in one sense, he’s exonerated to a degree, and in another sense he’s still a malicious Pratt. RM) Was there any collusion to get Sid off by discrediting the barman’s story? Ron) No, but so many people went down with him, to the police station, and said he didn’t do it that the CPS probably thought 250 against 1 and dropped it.RM) Were you surprised by Sid’s eventual demise? Ron) No. You know, his mother, Ann Beverley moved up to Swadlincote, near here. She got some money from Sid’s estate, and the Pistols gave her some money. She got a cheap house and a few bob in the bank, and when she’d run through that she topped herself. As for Nancy, the police weren’t looking for anybody else, but we don’t know, do we.RM) Ron, how proud are you of your role in Punk, and could it have happened without the 100 Club? Ron) Yeah, it would’ve happened anyway. It might have happened in a different way, but I suppose the traumatic birth it got, and the big hand it got via the Punk festival etc helped, otherwise it might have taken a bit longer. RM) Could it have started in any other city other than London? Ron) I think it needed London. It gave it the credibility. It might have happened somewhere else, and it might have been more interesting if it had happened, say, in Liverpool or Newcastle or somewhere, but it would have taken longer to be accepted, and London would have taken longer to accept it.RM) I suppose the Pistols, who catalyzed the movement were a London band, and people like Paul Weller, Pete Shelley etc always say the seeing that band is what galvanised them. Ron) Yes. They were the catalyst. We needed to have them in the Capital, playing in the middle of the Capital. It was always going to be a shortcut for them, you know. So yes, it would have still happened elsewhere, but in a different way. RM) Whose idea was the 1976 Punk Festival at the 100 Club? Ron) Mine. My idea, yeah. I approached Mclaren, as I knew that I needed the Pistols to headline it. And the Damned, they said that they wanted to do it, and The Clash agreed immediately, then we had to cast around to find some more. The Manchester bands were got down by Malcolm (Mclaren). Siouxsie approached me direct, although it wasn’t much of a band. Then, the Stinky Toys were volunteered by Mclaren, although I’d never heard of ‘em, and hardly anyone’s heard of ‘em since! Never mind, they got on eventually on the second night!RM) I read in the book that the Grande Piano on the stage got used like a climbing frame. Were you actually liable for damages if things got broken? Ron) The piano wasn’t going to get moved off the stage. It always stays there. Thing is, you’ve got to remember that it was a running, 7 nights a week club, for Jazz and Blues mainly, and the piano was a part of all that. The owners of the club left me to it for my nights, very seldom that they were there, even. If the place had been wrecked, it would’ve been down to me, I’d have had to pay for all the damage, you know.RM) Punk 77’s owner wondered if you thought the Banshees sounded as bad as he thought they did?! Ron) Well, in ’76 they weren’t really a band, you can’t comment. What they were doing was performance art, just getting up onto the stage and doing something off the top of their heads. They didn’t know any songs, and it sounded like it. It was weak, it was weedy. Sid just about tapped the drums. Siouxsie was doing the Lords Prayer and stuff like that. You couldn’t say it was a gig, or a rehearsed act, it was just people, getting up and trying to do something. I let them do it, you know, I might have done something like that at their age. I don’t think Siouxsie really lived up to her reputation, if you like. Well, not initially. RM) I didn’t like them, but the Banshees went on to become very skilled, musically. Ron) Yes. By then she’d recruited some good blokes. She’s been living in France for a long time now, I don’t see her.
RM) Were the early Punks, like Siouxsie, middle class students? If so, how did they feel when Punk was taken up by the masses? Ron) No. The early Punks were solidly working class. There was the art college mob, they weren’t numerically very strong, but they were the most vivid people, because of their appearance. They set the standard, the tone, you know? But immediately behind that, by the time of the punk festival of ‘76, the bulk of the audience was being formed by young, working class people and they took it to their hearts at once. RM) Were the movements roots biased towards the fashion element or more towards the music side, or was it one package?Ron) The fashion and art side, you know, was where Siouxsie was coming from. They took it very seriously, it was a new movement and they only had the one band to start with. It was very arty, but it was an art movement that worked. If you’d been there the first night I put the Pistols on, I think it was March 30th 1976, and you saw the Bromley Contingent coming in! They didn’t all come at once, they come in dribs and drabs. Each time, it was breathtaking and jaw dropping just to see them walk through that door.RM) Were contemporary Londoners shocked by the appearance of the early Punks? Ron) Initially, yeah. They’d got used to it by the end of that year. But initially, like in the early months, absolutely.RM) The summer of ’76 is famous for its heat wave. I bet you’ve great memories of it? RW) In that summer, and remember that it was the hottest, the best summer in living memory, it was the summer, people still talking about it now, and nothing was happening, everybody was asleep, you know. Anyway, this New Zealand film crew turned up to capture London. They’d been dispatched from Auckland to film London, in the summer. They were bright enough to cotton on to the movement, and they were haunting me! I mean, they got so many yards, so many miles of film, some of it’s not even been seen yet. All the main punk films, like the Rock ‘n Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury, were relying on their footage. They were amazed when they got their first, full on, Bromley Punk. They could not believe it. They said “You guys are 200 years ahead of New Zealand!” RM) Were you interested about the politics in Punk? Ron) I tried to keep it at arms length. I wasn’t interested in sub-divisions.RM) What about The Clash? Ron) Didn’t know that they were! (political). I think they were just trying to make it, I mean, they latched on to it. The Pistols had got a lot of the market wrapped up with their attitudes, so The Clash had to find some attitude, and they probably cooked it up with their manager, I reckon. What attitude can we have? Well, the Pistols have got this, that and the other and they found the one that they could go for. RM) I’ve read that the purists hated them, but I loved The Jam. They flirted with politics early on, and then really got involved, with Paul Weller joining Red Wedge later. Ron) The Jam were some of the biggest winners out of Punk. There was such a lot of talent in that band. That band was so tight.RM) Did you get more involved with them once they’d started to get bigger? Ron) They wanted me to help them with their American tour, by going ahead from city to city publicising it. But this was ’77, and I was amazed that their manager John Weller had asked me, and I would’ve loved to have done it. But, I was at the height of my promoting career, and I realised that. So I said “No, I’ve got to stick with this.” RM) The Jam always felt like a band that, as a fan, you had a stake in. Ron) I tell you what, they did a show for me at the 100 Club, when they’d been doing really huge venues like the Hammersmith Odeon. They’d always said, when we get there, we’ll come back and do one. They ended up doing three for me. One at Wycombe Town Hall, one at the Nags Head, which is a pub, you know! And, the 100 Club. They were really good like that, and I appreciate what they did for me and I love ‘em to bits.RM) It’s weird that there was all that acrimony between those people, and even stranger that Rick, and now Bruce, are playing in a Jam tribute band. (The Gift).Ron) Good drummer. I think, and this is my opinion, as I’ve no proof of it, that the girls all used to go for Bruce Foxton. The band was great, and they knew the band was great and they loved Paul Weller. But, in their hearts they all fancied that they’d get off with Bruce Foxton. When I did the box office at the 100 Club, there’d be all these girls turning up in school uniforms. I’d be saying “How old are you?” and the answer was always “19!” Am I really going to sell these girls tickets?!RM) I read somewhere, years ago, that Sid Vicious and Paul Weller had a fight after arguing about the Holidays in the Sun/ In the City riff. Did you hear that one? Ron) No. I can’t see that. Paul Weller was from a tough, working class background. A fight between him and Sid Vicious would have lasted about 8 seconds. He would have dealt with Sid in no time at all. It didn’t happen. Sid would need to have been tooled up, and I’ve had to fight him 3 times when he was. And I’m still here. Sid came at me with a chain, once. I confiscated it, and wish I still had all these weapons, as I could put them up for sale at Christies, couldn’t I?! And I saw Sid with a knife, threatening Elle, the singer out the Stinky Toys with it. I took that off him and gave it to Malcolm Mclaren. Wish I’d kept it. RM) Ron, did you have much to do with Rock Against Racism (R.A.R)? Ron) Only in as much as I endorsed it. And, I wouldn’t have any racist behaviour, as it says in the book, in any of my venues. I just wouldn’t. No way, I mean my bouncers were black, a lot of my acts were black, and I wasn’t going to have it. There were a few occasions when it surfaced, and I did the natural thing and let the black guys sort it themselves.RM) Empowerment? Ron) Yeah. At Wycombe Town Hall, the British movement guys were having a go at my bouncer, Gerry. One black guy against twenty or thirty of them, so I said to him “I’ll take your position, don’t be long, go down the pubs and get your mates.” And he come back in with a dozen big black lads. I said to them, “Look, you’re here to look after Gerry, not to kill these white guys.” So, Gerry stood in front of them, and there wasn’t a word out of them again! They moved out of the way, and went down the other side of the hall, these bullies. They saw the odds evening up a bit, and given the other 8 or 9 bouncers I had stood in the hall, we would’ve murdered them. RM) Jimmy Pursey went on-stage with The Clash at R.A.R in Victoria Park. Was this damage limitation on Pursey’s behalf? He seemed to get his fingers burned when the Skins affiliated to Sham 69. Ron) Exactly. And I don’t think he liked that one little bit. See, now, Jimmy Pursey is another guy, like Paul Weller and Joe Strummer, probably all of them at that time. Underneath he was a much nicer person than the media, and the world, would realise and portray. He was an alright geezer and he caught the wrong end of the backlash. People were believing what he was portraying and singing about, and that wasn’t necessarily him!RM) Did Sham 69 dance a bit to close the flame? They could be perceived as “rabble rousing”, if you like. Ron) They were looking for something to hang their stick on, if you like. The Pistols found it in one. Joe Strummer looked around with The Clash and thought about it and did it, you know. The Jam done it through their potent mix of soul and punk, and I think Jimmy Pursey thought he’d go with the hard boys in the East End. The skinheads, and the mobsters and the ruffians, you know. RM) Musically, Sham 69 were similar to the Pistols… Ron) Yeah, closer than some. I liked Sham 69, they were alright. I think Pursey is another guy who hung his hat somewhere, and that hat got on the wrong peg.
RM) How fast did Punk spread throughout 1977? Ron) Well, it got going in ’76. The Wycombe Punks, because they had me to promote at the Nags Head, got their first Sex Pistols gig there on September 3rd, which was actually 3 weeks before the 100 Club Festival. They were on the case really early. In ’76, Wycombe and the surrounding towns were full of Punks. By the end of that year, they even had a black Punk in Wycombe, a guy called Marmite. He had black hair, with a silver zigzag stripe in it. By ’77, it was all up and running everywhere. By January or February 1977 almost everyone under the age of 18 or 19 was a Punk.RM) When did the press really get hold of it? Ron) Then. But they were on to it before the Bill Grundy Show, the Punk Festival was before that show and from then it was just….you know. I used to get phone calls, from NBC and CBS in America asking if anything’s going on, or coming off, could you let us know. RM) That’s odd, being as the Americans claim to have invented Punk! Ron) They were a year or two ahead. It’s like most things. It’s like the Blues. We had to take the Blues back to America for White America to know about it. Cream, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, those sort of people. RM) America’s too big and too diverse. It couldn’t host youth movements like Punk and 2-Tone.Ron) No. It had to come from somewhere else. I mean, in New York it was a club scene, in Britain it was a national scene. RM) What did you think of those American bands?Ron) Some of them were really good. I didn’t think New York Dolls were as good as bands like Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. They were probably the best Punk band I ever saw, actually. RM) And Blondie? Ron) Well, Blondie. The bass player, Nigel was a guy from the Nags Head. Tigger, we used to call him. That was his name round Wycombe. He played at the Nags Head before he was in Blondie. I’ve got to say that Tigger and Blondie didn’t get on. Maybe she fancied him, and he didn’t fancy her!
RM) He would’ve been the only British male in the late ‘70’s who didn’t, then?! Ron) Perhaps he knew something we didn’t!RM) Back to the serious stuff, Ron. The Clash flew to Belfast, had some nice photos taken near some barricades and murals. Then they flew home. No gigs played. What do you think about all that? Ron) Well, it’s up to them. Sometimes, promotional events can take over. You can be wise after the event, it might have sounded like a good thing at the time. Who knows, I mean, it might have been sincere. I didn’t see them as a band who had very political motives outside of the publicity. I’m not saying they didn’t have a heart, but sometimes publicity sows a life of its own, you know.RM) If they’d played, this would never have been an issue with people over the years. Ron) No, but they would do benefits and things, R.A.R, and one just before Joe died, for a fireman’s benefit. RM) It’s ironic. The Pistols and Strummer/Jones last gigs in England were both strike fund benefits. And the Pistols, apparently, never cashed their cheque from that Christmas Day one. Ron) I wasn’t a party to any of that, but yeah, that was a good gesture. A lesson. A guy came down to interview me, and he lived near Joe Strummer. Lived in the same village and he was a long time journalist. He said that he thought that Joe Strummer had a lot of heart, and it was very typical of him that he’d go out and do a benefit as The Clash, but commercially would only do The Mescalero’s.
RM) Back to the Pistols, now Ron. What was their early live sound like? Ron) I’ll tell you something now that I’ve never told anybody before. Musically, when the Pistols started, I thought that they were, or sounded like, a youth club heavy metal band. Not the songs, or the vocals, or even the presentation but the actual sound of the band. It wasn’t a weak sound, but it wasn’t particularly pokey. Within three months, they’d perked it up a lot. RM) How big an influence was Dave Goodman to their sound? Ron) He brought a lot of stuff to them. He gave them a lot of advice. He’d make them sound a lot more pokey, he’d get them to do things. I spent a lot of time with Dave Goodman, as when you’re a promoter, you’re there to open it up. And Dave used to arrive early, you know, he’d arrive at four in the afternoon. I’d give him a hand in with some of the gear, and we’d spend some time together as we’d be the only ones there for a couple of hours. I’d be answering the phone and stuff, doing other things like that, but I got to know that guy. He never actually spoke to me about Punk. He mentioned the Pistols, but he never actually spoke about the Punk movement. I wish I’d recorded all those conversations!RM) Did you always fill the 100 Club? Ron) Well, after the first couple of months, it filled out, yeah. I mean, the Pistols didn’t pull a crowd for about their first six gigs. We’re talking about 50 – 80 people, the Bromley Contingent and a few interested parties!
RM) Some people must’ve come in to watch the Pistols out of curiosity? Maybe just walking by the club, then deciding to see what was going on in there, and finding their lives would never be quite the same again? Ron) Yeah, I think that younger people who come down to see it would change. They’d come down the first night with long hair and flares, and by the third night they’d seen them they’d come down in drainpipes and Punk haircut, you know?
RM) What about the other clubs, Ron, like the Roxy? Ron) Went to the Roxy, yes, many times. It was a bit of a pokey hole actually. The Roxy didn’t last long. The Vortex I went to. The stories I used to hear about that place! It was more of a disco crowd, actually. Rent-a-Punk, you know? It wasn’t for the faint hearted, not very savoury! RM) Did you get to read many of the fanzines? Ron) Yeah, I did. I used to see them all. We had one out in the Home Counties called the Buckshee Press, which is a piss take of the Bucks Free Press, of course there was Sniffin’ Glue, we used to see that at the 100 Club all the time. There were others, too, I came across them all over the place, actually, some of them were just one issue, you know, and just a couple of pages.RM) Did you know Mark Perry and the music hacks the time? Ron) Yeah, I knew Mark. Caroline Coon, too. Caroline has been very kind to me in her books, and things, you know. In fact she blamed me, or congratulated me for the whole of Punk in one of them, special thanks to Ron Watts, and that’s nice! Caroline was the first dedicated journalist who wanted to see Punk happen. And, I’m glad in a way that it happened for her, too, because she put her money on the table, you know? Same as I did. She ran that Release thing, which got all the hippies out of jail for cannabis. She was ahead of her time, I mean seriously, you can’t lock someone up for 6 months for smoking cannabis! RM) Changing tack again, Ron. What did you think of Malcolm Mclaren? Ron) I like Malcolm personally. No doubt, you know, I’m not just saying that. On first impressions he looked like an Edwardian gentleman. He’d got that off to a tee, I’d never seen anyone look like him, actually. I never had any bad dealings with him, and he was always very straightforward.RM) People either loved or loathed Mclaren. John Lydon isn’t a fan. Ron) Yeah, I think it was more of a financial thing, but I mean, John Lydon should also remember that without Mclaren he probably wouldn’t have been in them. Mclaren set the scene going, I was the first to pick it up, from that, before recording deals, but he never stuffed me like he stuffed the record companies. They made a lot of money, initially.RM) Did the record companies drop the band so willingly because it was Jubilee year? Ron) Well, the Pistols were full on and did it. I mean, “God Save The Queen” become one of the biggest selling British hit singles, didn’t it? It’s still selling now! And they wouldn’t let it on the shelves, would they. Bless ‘em! RM) You were on the legendary ’77 boat trip up the Thames, when the Pistols played and Mclaren got arrested. What was that like? Ron) It was lovely! You should’ve been there, honestly. The band were ok, they just did their normal gig. I enjoyed seeing people that you wouldn’t expect, talking to each other. When you’ve got the boss of Virgin, that business empire, talking to Sid Vicious, can you imagine what sort of conversation they had?! I’d loved to have taken a tape recorder in there! RM) Do you think the police raid on the boat was planned? Ron) I tell you what, I was amazed at that. I was actually on deck, and the boat was going downstream, back towards Westminster Pier. The Pistols were playing, and it got a bit jostley. You know, a bit of charging about in a small space ‘cause it wasn’t very big, the boat, really. So, I went out on to the deck by the railings, and a couple of other people come and joined me. There was plenty of food and drink, and I had a beer and a chicken leg or something, you know. And I’m looking and I can see these two police boats, and they were a way off. Downstream, I could see two more police boats, and they were a way off, too. I carried on eating the chicken and drinking the beer, looked round, and they were all there, together, at the same time! I mean, the degree of professionalism was just amazing! And then they were on that boat, in force, like about twelve or fifteen coppers, in moments. The boat was quite high sided, but they were up there. And you know what they were doing, they were up there and on that boat and we were escorted into the Westminster Pier basin.RM) Then Mclaren was nicked. Do you reckon he did just enough to get the publicity of an arrest without being charged with anything serious? Ron) I saw that. He got a lot of press out of it, yeah. He knew. Everybody turned to me, to try and sort it all out. One of them was a Countess! RM) Ron, you mentioned that no other bands were on the boat. Was there a real rivalry between these new bands at the time? Ron) The Jam were the young upstarts according to the Pistols, you know. The Clash were their biggest rivals at the time. The Damned, they had no time for.RM) Why don’t The Damned get their due credit? In my opinion, they should. Ron) I don’t know. A lot of people say they’re just a Punk cocktail act. You don’t see a lot about them, and yet they were the first to get a single out and they could play. Scabies could play. Brian James come up brilliant, but then he’d have done anything, if they’d have asked him to join Led Zeppelin he’d have done that, and Captain (Sensible), well I like Captain.RM) Buzzcocks were, from what I’ve heard on bootlegs, a bit rough to start with. They really hit a rich seam once they got up and running. Ron) If the Buzzcocks could make it, anybody could. I wasn’t impressed, really. But what’s in the future’s in the future, you never know what is at the time. They blossomed.
RM) And Magazine? Did you rate them? Ron) Yeah, I did. Brilliant guitarist, John McGeoch. And Penetration, they were a good band, and X-Ray Spex.
RM) Which bands are you the most pleased to have seen play? Ron) Well, I mean, it’s all of them. But where do you start?! Alright, the Pistols and The Clash, definitely, yeah. The Jam – pleased to see them anywhere, anytime. I did enjoy the Damned at an early stage, but they’re not in the top 5. And Sham 69, and The Heartbreakers.RM) I heard “Pretty Vacant” on the radio in my car earlier today, and I got the old goose bumps. Does any of the music from that time affect you the same? Ron) All the early Pistols stuff, yeah!RM) What’s your view on Punk and Reggae getting married? Ron) Yeah, if people want to get together and cross pollinate ideas, then that’s alright. It was the underbelly, twice. You had the white working class and the black working class responding to each other at last! RM) Some Punk bands who had a go at playing Reggae were better than others. Ruts, SLF and of course The Clash all cracked it in their own styles… Ron) The worst Reggae act I ever saw, were The Slits. Actually, probably just the worst act! RM) Do you think that Punk and Reggae blending in ’77 was the root of Two Tone? Ron) Yes. I’m sure it came out of that. I used to have a lot of Reggae acts on in that club, aside from Punk and the Blues and everything. I’d put on Steele Pulse, or an American Blues artist like Muddy Waters, as long as it was what I liked. RM) Your best front men and women? Ron) I’m thinking about this one…The best oddball front man was Wayne County. Best front woman, from what I saw, Faye Fife.RM) You rate Faye Fife over Poly Styrene?Ron) You’re putting me on the spot there! I’d put them equal for different reasons. Faye used to put on a great act. They were perennially at the club and at the Nags Head. Because I had so many venues, when they were coming down again, I needed to know, because that’s three bookings to give them. It was always like, “get your diary out, mate, when you coming down?” If I gave them three bookings, they’d come down, and they could fill it out with other stuff, do the rounds. X-Ray Spex were good, too. Really good band. The Rezillos are still going, actually. RM) I watched a documentary on TV the other night about that Stiff Records tour. The one where they hired a train from BR. Ron) They did the first night for me, at High Wycombe, yeah. There were some funny people there! Wreckless Eric was at the Punk thing I did in Blackpool this year. It took me about an hour to recognise him. I kept looking and looking and vaguely remembered him. Not a nice bloke. RM) Here’s the last one, Ron. Punk lit a fuse for many people. I’m one (albeit two years late), the other people who contributed questions to this interview are others and there’s millions more. As Ed Armchair puts it, his fuse is still burning to this day, and has affected virtually every aspect of his life since it was lit. Do you have the same feelings about Punk as we do? Ron) Yes. I got going through that and it still survives. My first love in music was, and is, Blues. I see a lot of similarities between Punk and Blues. They both come from the underbelly of a society, and they’ve both triumphed against all the odds. They both spoke for their people of that time and place. They’ll reverberate forever. Punk freshened up a stale music scene and the Blues were the bedrock for twentieth and twenty-first century music.RM) Ron, thanks for your time and best of luck with your new projects.END
Hello everybody!! We have a record & clothing store in Rochester NH that sells a wide variety of Punk, Oi! & Ska records & clothing. If you are not from the area we do have an online store we have just started up www.skele-tone.com or you can find us on facebook Skeletone Records add us as a friend we do mail order for anything you cant find on our website!!! If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here or email us asskele_tone@hotmail.com.We hope you like the store we work very hard to support the scene. Cheers!!!
Hello everybody!! We have a record & clothing store in Rochester NH that sells a wide variety of Punk, Oi! & Ska records & clothing. If you are not from the area we do have an online store we have just started up www.skele-tone.com or you can find us on facebook Skeletone Records add us as a friend we do mail order for anything you cant find on our website!!! If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them here or email us asskele_tone@hotmail.com.We hope you like the store we work very hard to support the scene. Cheers!!!
Jamaican producer and musician Harry Zephaniah Johnson, 67, credited with producing what is widely considered the first reggae single “No More Heartaches” by the vocal harmony trio The Beltones, passed away on Wednesday, April 3 in his Westmoreland, Jamaica birthplace, succumbing to complications from diabetes; Johnson leaves four children and three grandchildren.
Born on July 6th, 1945, Johnson, better known as Harry J, initially entered the music business as a bass player with The Virtues prior to becoming the group’s manager. Shortly thereafter, he took a job as an insurance salesman but his love for music continually beckoned. He booked time at producer/sound system owner Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One in 1968 and recorded The Beltones. The resultant debut release on Johnson’s Harry J label, “No More Heartaches,” is considered a defining record heralding the emergence of the reggae beat as distinctive from its rock steady predecessor. (“Nanny Goat”, a 1968 song produced by the better-known Coxsone Dodd and sung by the duo Larry and Alvin is also cited as a transformative record, moving the rock steady tempo into a reggae rhythm).
“At the time we were under contract with Coxsone Dodd but he wasn’t doing anything for us so a member of a popular group The Cables took us to Harry J; Harry was new to the business and happy to record us so we broke away from Coxsone and went with him,” recalled The Beltones’ former lead singer Trevor Shields told Billboard.biz. “The driving sound on “No More Heartache” was totally different; we were like outsiders starting something new but didn’t know it at the time. The song was No. 1 on the Jamaican charts for about four weeks, which was no easy feat in those days.”
Harry J’s next big hit “Cuss Cuss” by Lloyd Robinson, released in 1969, boasts one of the most recycled reggae rhythms in the voluminous Jamaican music canon. The same year Harry J released a succession of reggae instrumentals credited to the Harry J All Stars, a revolving cast of musicians that included pianist Gladstone “Gladdy” Anderson, keyboardist Winston Wright, bassist Jackie Jackson, drummer Winston Grennan and guitarist Hux Brown. “Smashville,” “Je T’Aime” and “Srpyone” an assortment of Jamaican originals and reggae adaptations of international hits, are just three of the Harry J All Stars’ instrumentals that garnered steady play from Kingston’s sound system selectors.
Their most successful was “Liquidator,” led by Winston Wright’s spirited keyboard solos, which peaked at no. 9 on the UK Singles chart and became an unlikely skinhead anthem there. The song’s opening bassline was subsequently featured on the introduction to The Staple Singers’ 1972 Hot 100 chart topper “Ill Take You There” (Stax Records). According to an April 7 report in the Jamaica Observer newspaper by Howard Campbell, based on a 2000 Observer interview with Johnson, drummer Al Jackson (of Booker T and the MGs, Stax’s in-house band) visited Kingston in 1969 and met Harry J who gave him a copy of “Liquidator”; Johnson was shocked to hear the song used in the Staple Singers’ hit and took aggressive steps to collect royalties from Stax but made little progress.
Following “Liquidator’s” UK success, British reggae label Trojan gave Johnson his own Harry J imprint; his instrumental productions never again reaped the popularity of “Liquidator” but Johnson triumphed working with several of the island’s vocalists commencing with Marcia Griffiths and Bob Andy: their 1970 duets covering Nina Simone’s “Young Gifted and Black” and Crispian St. Peters’ “The Pied Piper” reached the upper tiers of the UK singles charts.
In 1972 Johnson opened a sixteen-track studio at 10 Roosevelt Avenue, Kingston, which revolutionized the reggae capital’s recording industry. “Back then, we were recording two-track and four-track sessions so it took great foresight for someone to go all the way to 16-tracks, which brought us on par with the rest of the world,” engineer/musician/producer Stephen Stewart told Billboard.biz at Harry J studios; there Stewart learned audio engineering in the 1970s while still a teenager, working alongside the late Sylvan Morris. “Because he had the latest in technology Harry J attracted the best artists of the day,” Stewart noted.
A sampling of the classic 1970s roots reggae recordings done at Harry J studios includes: The Heptones’ “Book of Rules,” The Melodians’ “Sweet Sensation,” Toots and the Maytals’ “Reggae Got Soul,” Burning Spear’s “Days of Slavery” and Dennis Brown’s “So Long Rastafari.” Bob Marley and The Wailers also recorded their first four albums for Island Records at Harry J (“Catch a Fire,” “Burnin,” featuring Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, “Natty Dread,” and “Rastaman Vibration” with the I-Threes); presently, framed gold copies of those Wailers albums adorn the walls of the studio’s main room.
Harry J Studios are featured in the 1978 film “Rockers” (directed by Theodoros Bafaloukos and starring Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace, Gregory Isaacs and Jacob Miller) in a scene that spotlights singer Kiddus I recording “Graduation In Zion” there.
Although the 1970s were Harry J’s production heyday he continued to produce and release hit singles throughout the 1980s including Sheila Hylton’s cover of The Police’s “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”, which reached no. 38 on the UK singles chart. Harry J responded to the massive “Sleng Teng” rhythm released by the King Jammys label in 1984, which jumpstarted Jamaican music’s digital revolution, with his aptly titled “Computer Rule” rhythm that spawned numerous hits for various singers and toasters including Daddy Freddy, Charlie Chaplin, Uglyman, and Little John.
Following a seven-year dormancy during the 1990s, Harry J studios reopened in 2000, under the management of Stephen Stewart who refurbished and re-equipped the facility, with Johnson retaining ownership of the premises. “Harry J pushed the business aspect of the industry, putting deals together and cataloguing his songs (including releases on the Jaywax, Roosevelt, 10 Roosevelt Avenue and Sunset subsidiaries), which were separate from the studio operations,” Stewart offered.
Countless reggae veterans including Toots Hibbert, Burning Spear, Sly and Robbie and Luciano have recorded at Harry J studios in recent years while upstart Jamaican groups Raging Fyah and Di Blueprint Band and an abundance of European reggae acts have each sought out its authentic roots reggae sound. “People come here to capture that live session chemistry where recording is more than just one person using a computer program,” observes Stewart. “The legacy of the musicianship that has come through here makes Harry J studios really special, it’s part of the vision Harry brought to Jamaican music.”
Jamaican producer and musician Harry Zephaniah Johnson, 67, credited with producing what is widely considered the first reggae single “No More Heartaches” by the vocal harmony trio The Beltones, passed away on Wednesday, April 3 in his Westmoreland, Jamaica birthplace, succumbing to complications from diabetes; Johnson leaves four children and three grandchildren.
Born on July 6th, 1945, Johnson, better known as Harry J, initially entered the music business as a bass player with The Virtues prior to becoming the group’s manager. Shortly thereafter, he took a job as an insurance salesman but his love for music continually beckoned. He booked time at producer/sound system owner Coxsone Dodd’s Studio One in 1968 and recorded The Beltones. The resultant debut release on Johnson’s Harry J label, “No More Heartaches,” is considered a defining record heralding the emergence of the reggae beat as distinctive from its rock steady predecessor. (“Nanny Goat”, a 1968 song produced by the better-known Coxsone Dodd and sung by the duo Larry and Alvin is also cited as a transformative record, moving the rock steady tempo into a reggae rhythm).
“At the time we were under contract with Coxsone Dodd but he wasn’t doing anything for us so a member of a popular group The Cables took us to Harry J; Harry was new to the business and happy to record us so we broke away from Coxsone and went with him,” recalled The Beltones’ former lead singer Trevor Shields told Billboard.biz. “The driving sound on “No More Heartache” was totally different; we were like outsiders starting something new but didn’t know it at the time. The song was No. 1 on the Jamaican charts for about four weeks, which was no easy feat in those days.”
Harry J’s next big hit “Cuss Cuss” by Lloyd Robinson, released in 1969, boasts one of the most recycled reggae rhythms in the voluminous Jamaican music canon. The same year Harry J released a succession of reggae instrumentals credited to the Harry J All Stars, a revolving cast of musicians that included pianist Gladstone “Gladdy” Anderson, keyboardist Winston Wright, bassist Jackie Jackson, drummer Winston Grennan and guitarist Hux Brown. “Smashville,” “Je T’Aime” and “Srpyone” an assortment of Jamaican originals and reggae adaptations of international hits, are just three of the Harry J All Stars’ instrumentals that garnered steady play from Kingston’s sound system selectors.
Their most successful was “Liquidator,” led by Winston Wright’s spirited keyboard solos, which peaked at no. 9 on the UK Singles chart and became an unlikely skinhead anthem there. The song’s opening bassline was subsequently featured on the introduction to The Staple Singers’ 1972 Hot 100 chart topper “Ill Take You There” (Stax Records). According to an April 7 report in the Jamaica Observer newspaper by Howard Campbell, based on a 2000 Observer interview with Johnson, drummer Al Jackson (of Booker T and the MGs, Stax’s in-house band) visited Kingston in 1969 and met Harry J who gave him a copy of “Liquidator”; Johnson was shocked to hear the song used in the Staple Singers’ hit and took aggressive steps to collect royalties from Stax but made little progress.
Following “Liquidator’s” UK success, British reggae label Trojan gave Johnson his own Harry J imprint; his instrumental productions never again reaped the popularity of “Liquidator” but Johnson triumphed working with several of the island’s vocalists commencing with Marcia Griffiths and Bob Andy: their 1970 duets covering Nina Simone’s “Young Gifted and Black” and Crispian St. Peters’ “The Pied Piper” reached the upper tiers of the UK singles charts.
In 1972 Johnson opened a sixteen-track studio at 10 Roosevelt Avenue, Kingston, which revolutionized the reggae capital’s recording industry. “Back then, we were recording two-track and four-track sessions so it took great foresight for someone to go all the way to 16-tracks, which brought us on par with the rest of the world,” engineer/musician/producer Stephen Stewart told Billboard.biz at Harry J studios; there Stewart learned audio engineering in the 1970s while still a teenager, working alongside the late Sylvan Morris. “Because he had the latest in technology Harry J attracted the best artists of the day,” Stewart noted.
A sampling of the classic 1970s roots reggae recordings done at Harry J studios includes: The Heptones’ “Book of Rules,” The Melodians’ “Sweet Sensation,” Toots and the Maytals’ “Reggae Got Soul,” Burning Spear’s “Days of Slavery” and Dennis Brown’s “So Long Rastafari.” Bob Marley and The Wailers also recorded their first four albums for Island Records at Harry J (“Catch a Fire,” “Burnin,” featuring Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, “Natty Dread,” and “Rastaman Vibration” with the I-Threes); presently, framed gold copies of those Wailers albums adorn the walls of the studio’s main room.
Harry J Studios are featured in the 1978 film “Rockers” (directed by Theodoros Bafaloukos and starring Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace, Gregory Isaacs and Jacob Miller) in a scene that spotlights singer Kiddus I recording “Graduation In Zion” there.
Although the 1970s were Harry J’s production heyday he continued to produce and release hit singles throughout the 1980s including Sheila Hylton’s cover of The Police’s “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”, which reached no. 38 on the UK singles chart. Harry J responded to the massive “Sleng Teng” rhythm released by the King Jammys label in 1984, which jumpstarted Jamaican music’s digital revolution, with his aptly titled “Computer Rule” rhythm that spawned numerous hits for various singers and toasters including Daddy Freddy, Charlie Chaplin, Uglyman, and Little John.
Following a seven-year dormancy during the 1990s, Harry J studios reopened in 2000, under the management of Stephen Stewart who refurbished and re-equipped the facility, with Johnson retaining ownership of the premises. “Harry J pushed the business aspect of the industry, putting deals together and cataloguing his songs (including releases on the Jaywax, Roosevelt, 10 Roosevelt Avenue and Sunset subsidiaries), which were separate from the studio operations,” Stewart offered.
Countless reggae veterans including Toots Hibbert, Burning Spear, Sly and Robbie and Luciano have recorded at Harry J studios in recent years while upstart Jamaican groups Raging Fyah and Di Blueprint Band and an abundance of European reggae acts have each sought out its authentic roots reggae sound. “People come here to capture that live session chemistry where recording is more than just one person using a computer program,” observes Stewart. “The legacy of the musicianship that has come through here makes Harry J studios really special, it’s part of the vision Harry brought to Jamaican music.”
There are many great British bank holiday traditions; determined but ultimately doomed DIY projects, staring from stationary car windows in lengthy traffic jams or simply avoiding the predictable rain. One tradition though which has largely been consigned to history is the invasion of south-coast seaside resorts by teenage youth cults; namely the Mods and Rockers.
The seaside battles between the sartorially elegant Mods and their leather-clad rivals the Rockers fuelled much sensationalist media coverage in 1964. As news of the fighting and arrests filtered out, these youngsters found themselves at theforefront of public outrage. In fact, the Easter weekend shenanigans were pretty much the first mass-media scare over a drug-taking, mindless, violent youth. Of course there have been quite a few scares since. Newspaper headlines from March 1964 screamed ‘Wild ones invade seaside’ and ’97 leather jacket arrests; youngsters beat-up seaside’ as fighting broke out in Clacton-on-Sea. The trouble caused enough outrage for Panorama to investigate the groups and work out whether this phenomenon would be become a regular feature of future bank holidays. The results were strikingly candid; providing a snapshot of working-class youth at the point where deference to the establishment was beginning to wane. The Mods preached a hedonistic take on life; enjoying drugs, music, clothes and violence to a lesser or greater degree and set a blueprint for many a youth tribe to follow. The Rockers seemed more about the bikes.
Perversely for a group with an anti-establishment reputation, the Rockers citied Mods lack of education and class as factors behind their behaviour. The reality though was that both groups were predominantly working-class. The battles may have ceased almost as quickly as they began; but they have become the stuff of legend, immortalised in the album, film and now stage play “Quadrophenia”. But as with any legend, it has tarnished a little over the years amid claims that many seaside punch-ups were actually faked for the press. This tradition carried on through peaks and troughs, right up until the early 80’s when cheap Spanish holidays, took British youth abroad
Both groups still thrive today albeit in smaller, underground circles. The great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton or the resurrection of the Rockers haunt the Ace cafe in north London, or the continued vogue for modish Fred Perry clothing and their mainstream influence is still evident today, although the violence is consigned to the past.
Thought this bunch of clips might be of interest to you, a short movie around the Fred Perry 60th anniversary event and if you missed them, the Subculture movies themselves.
The Fred Perry event took place last week, a showcase for the clothing label and its heritage and the Don Letts-directed mini movies, throwing in some live performances and DJs, headed up by The Charlatans.
You can watch it here…
Episode 2: This Is A Modern World
Episode 3: Made in England
Episode 4: Soul Power
British youth culture and style has gone around the globe, but there is a growing number of events back on home soil. The Great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton, cant be missed for any self respecting Skinhead, People travel from across the World to the Mecca annual event
There are many great British bank holiday traditions; determined but ultimately doomed DIY projects, staring from stationary car windows in lengthy traffic jams or simply avoiding the predictable rain. One tradition though which has largely been consigned to history is the invasion of south-coast seaside resorts by teenage youth cults; namely the Mods and Rockers.
The seaside battles between the sartorially elegant Mods and their leather-clad rivals the Rockers fuelled much sensationalist media coverage in 1964. As news of the fighting and arrests filtered out, these youngsters found themselves at theforefront of public outrage. In fact, the Easter weekend shenanigans were pretty much the first mass-media scare over a drug-taking, mindless, violent youth. Of course there have been quite a few scares since. Newspaper headlines from March 1964 screamed ‘Wild ones invade seaside’ and ’97 leather jacket arrests; youngsters beat-up seaside’ as fighting broke out in Clacton-on-Sea. The trouble caused enough outrage for Panorama to investigate the groups and work out whether this phenomenon would be become a regular feature of future bank holidays. The results were strikingly candid; providing a snapshot of working-class youth at the point where deference to the establishment was beginning to wane. The Mods preached a hedonistic take on life; enjoying drugs, music, clothes and violence to a lesser or greater degree and set a blueprint for many a youth tribe to follow. The Rockers seemed more about the bikes.
Perversely for a group with an anti-establishment reputation, the Rockers citied Mods lack of education and class as factors behind their behaviour. The reality though was that both groups were predominantly working-class. The battles may have ceased almost as quickly as they began; but they have become the stuff of legend, immortalised in the album, film and now stage play “Quadrophenia”. But as with any legend, it has tarnished a little over the years amid claims that many seaside punch-ups were actually faked for the press. This tradition carried on through peaks and troughs, right up until the early 80’s when cheap Spanish holidays, took British youth abroad
Both groups still thrive today albeit in smaller, underground circles. The great Skinhead Reunion in Brighton or the resurrection of the Rockers haunt the Ace cafe in north London, or the continued vogue for modish Fred Perry clothing and their mainstream influence is still evident today, although the violence is consigned to the past.
Schylar Davis– Skinhead girl from and currently residing in Austin, Texas I was never really good at anything except art growing up. I played the oboe, and various classical percussion instruments, but still spent the time I should have been practicing concert pieces, drawing portraits of people I knew, or doodling random things to fill up a page.
I got into the skinhead scene when I was almost 16, through music, Laughter and good times. I was into punk rock, but It wasn’t so much me, I worked hard and had more aspiration to be something than most of the punk rock mantras proclaimed around me at that time. I felt more in tune with my skin friends than my punks, music and ethic wise (love them equally, just making a point). When I cropped, I was exhilarated, that’s when I figured myself out. I can be found at most local punk, Oi!, and Ska here in Austin. Like most people I am currently working my ass off at a job I hate to get the bills paid. Things are looking up,though! I’ve got apprenticeships coming my way within this year, And I’m considering continuing my education in illustration or graphic design at the local institute. I hope to do tattoos, become a barber, and learn to weld and do maintenance on anything. If you or anyone else need art done for flyers, tattoos, something to fill wall space, I’m always down for a challenge. If you just wanna say ‘hey’ that’s cool too. Contact me at poisnappl@gmail.com, Facebook.com/schrilla
News broke this morning that The Echo has cancelled what was to be the first installment of an event called Insta-Fest, to take place March 30. The punk rock festival, sponsored by Insta-Press Clothing, Durty Mick Records and others, was slated to feature a who’s who of international punk and oi bands, including Old Firm Casuals (featuring Lars Frederiksen of Rancid), Pressure Point from Sacramento and Toughskins, from L.A.
Durty Mick announced the cancellation this morning via Facebook, alleging that, after the Echo management caught wind that the festivities would feature “the skinhead element” it decided to pull the plug.
Instafest Cancelled
As we’ve previously written, the skinhead scene in Los Angeles is non-racist and overwhelmingly Latino. Neither it nor any of the bands scheduled have any connection to Nazi elements, whose members are referred to as “boneheads.”
In their statement (which you can read in full below) Durty Mick Records took issue with the cancellation and The Echo’s management. “Their lack of communication and unprofessionalism is beyond words,” it says. (A representative from the Echo did not immediately return a request for comment; we will update this post when they do.)
Insta-Fest certainly would not have been the first time skinheads have performed at the Echo. In November, reggae legend Roy Ellis performed there, while in June The Gaylads played to a packed house as well.
Still, the boots and braces crowd won’t want for something to do on March 30. Skamania!is presenting rocksteady legend Errol Dunkley at Los Globos.
Durty Mick Records statement:
After 6 months of planning, unfortunately Insta Fest will be cancelled.
The Echo at the last minute realized that some of the bands playing Insta Fest had band members and fans they referred to as “the skinhead element” and they do not want those types in their establishment. They now have decided to cancel this show two weeks before it was meant to happen. Their lack of communication and unprofessionalism is beyond words.
I would like to thank all the bands and people who have stuck by my side and helped me relocate after our first venue cancellation. Their tireless efforts to promote this event and to make sure it was going to be a success is immeasurable. However, sometimes things are not meant to be. I will be contacting everyone who purchased tickets via Durty Mick Records individually.
Headhunters … Terrence Matthews and Jason Marriner By MIKE SULLIVAN, Crime Editor, and ALEX PEAKEPublished: 26th March 2011 The Sun
FOR decades the mere mention of their name struck fear and terror into football fans across the UK and Europe.
They revelled in being the most notorious hooligans on the planet.
They were the Chelsea Headhunters — dishing out their savage brand of football violence on rival fans at grounds across the country in the Seventies and Eighties.
They disappeared from the scene for a number of years following a string of convictions for violence. Then last year the ringleaders coaxed the now middle-aged and pot-bellied brutes out of retirement for one last dust-up.
But yesterday the vile thugs’ 30-year reign of terror was ended once and for all as the last remnants of the ageing, desperate gang were brought to justice following their final brutal clash.
The chance to rekindle the tribal camaraderie and blood-fuelled adrenaline the Headhunters had once lived for presented itself when Championship side Cardiff City were drawn away to Chelsea in the fifth round of the FA Cup on February 13 2010.
The Welsh club’s own hardcore group, the Soul Crew, enjoy a formidable reputation and relished the prospect of invading west London.
In the deluded minds of the Chelsea old guard, getting stuck in to the Cardiff mob was a matter of defending national pride.
The scene that unfolded was a perfect storm of football violence — punch-ups and brick-throwing in broad daylight as terrified families cowered in the carnage.
Marshalling the bloated and blowing Chelsea soldiers that day were Andy “Nightmare” Frain, 46, and Jason Marriner, 43.
Dad-of-three Marriner, of Stevenage, Herts, was yesterday jailed for two years and banned from football grounds for eight years having been found guilty at Isleworth Crown Court of playing a “pivotal role” in organising one of the biggest ever violent clashes between football hooligan “firms”.
He was due to be joined by Frain — who was last seen arriving at court swigging from a bottle of vodka — but his sentencing had to be postponed due to illness. Frain, of Chelmsford, Essex, has pleaded guilty to violent disorder and is due to be sentenced later.
Frain and Marriner have previously been jailed for seven and six years respectively in 2000 after being secretly filmed plotting violence during a BBC programme by investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre. Frain discussed his involvement with the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 while Marriner had close links to Ulster loyalists.
Andy ‘Nightmare’ Frain … last seen at court with vodkaNational Pictures
On Thursday, 13 other Chelsea fans were jailed for offences of violence after the Cardiff game and received sentences of up to two years in jail. One of those was Ian Cutler, a 50-year-old builder from Wednesbury, West Mids, who has football-related convictions for violence dating back to the 1970s. He was seen kicking and punching a man lying on the ground and given 14 months and banned from football grounds for six years.
Judge Martin Edmunds QC told Cutler and other defendants they were “old enough to know better”.
On Monday, Terence Matthews, of Morden, Surrey, and two others pleaded guilty to affray. A judge warned them they face jail when sentenced in May.
A now slimmed-down Matthews, 50, was once accused of being the “Fat Man” who rammed a bottle in a barman’s face at a pub near Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground.
He was jailed for four years for affray in 1986 but, to the outrage of police and victims, was acquitted of the bottle attack. He later served a two-year jail sentence for assaulting a police officer. Det Supt William Lyle of the Metropolitan Police said of the violence on the day of the Cardiff match: “Nothing like it had happened since the 1970s. One heavily pregnant woman in a car became very stressed by fighting hooligans.
“There was CCTV of a father shielding his two children as missiles were thrown over their heads. We were prepared for trouble but nobody could have foreseen that.”
These fresh convictions have ripped the heart out of the Headhunters’ hierarchy who, in their heyday, became infamous for inflicting their own brand of torture.
In their “manor” of London’s trendy King’s Road they would administer the notorious “Chelsea Smile” — so-called because victims’ faces would be SLICED from the edges of the mouth to the ears.
To hurt or even kill the victim, he or SHE would then be STABBED in the stomach so the face would RIP when they screamed.
But with the arrival of all-seater stadiums in the early Nineties, football hooliganism was all but stamped out. The shaven-headed, hate-filled hooligans got older and there was a lack of wannabes waiting to fill their shoes.
In recent years the Headhunters became nothing more than a myth.
The group faded away after MacIntyre’s documentary exposed the remaining hardcore members.
But the cup clash with Cardiff last year proved too much for the now paunchy monsters to turn down. All the old crew were back for the reunion — Nightmare, Marriner and the Fat Man too.
Scene of terror … punch-up in 2010National Pictures
Police insisted on a noon kick-off but the first signs of trouble came in the morning when more than 100 Chelsea yobs marched on North End Road, splitting into two groups with military precision to attack Cardiff coaches.
Smoke bombs went off as the rival hooligans clashed before police took control.
The court heard this week how Chelsea fans then downed up to seven pints of lager and snorted lines of cocaine in pubs as they prepared to face their Welsh enemy after the final whistle.
The thugs jostled on the Fulham Road. A group of Cardiff fans broke away and made their way to the King’s Road, where they were met by the Headhunters.
More than 200 yobs then fought a running battle for the next quarter of an hour, hurling missiles and traffic cones at each other.
Bricks were thrown at police. One officer had his jaw broken and lost four teeth after being hit in the face with a rock.
The police quickly launched Operation Ternhill to identify the thugs and collected hundreds of hours of CCTV footage.
Seventeen hooligans were named to police in just two days last July following an appeal in The Sun.
A total of 96 people have been charged over the riot so far, with more than 60 having already pleaded guilty to offences of affray and violent disorder.
mpuDet Supt Lyle said: “A high number were in their thirties, forties and even their fifties. The oldest one was 55. A lot of them went because they knew there was a high possibility of violence.”
In February this year 27 Cardiff fans received sentences of up to 14 months in jail. A second batch of 18 more were given similar terms.
Brave telly investigator Donal MacIntyre was in court yesterday.
Thugs from the Headhunters firm attacked him and wife Ameera last year in “revenge” for some of their gang being convicted as a result of his 1999 report. A member of the gang James Wild, 47, was later convicted for the attack.
MacIntyre said: “They beat my wife up when she had a brain tumour. I’m here to see justice done. I’ve been running for ten years and now enough is enough.”
Headhunters … Terrence Matthews and Jason Marriner By MIKE SULLIVAN, Crime Editor, and ALEX PEAKEPublished: 26th March 2011 The Sun
FOR decades the mere mention of their name struck fear and terror into football fans across the UK and Europe.
They revelled in being the most notorious hooligans on the planet.
They were the Chelsea Headhunters — dishing out their savage brand of football violence on rival fans at grounds across the country in the Seventies and Eighties.
They disappeared from the scene for a number of years following a string of convictions for violence. Then last year the ringleaders coaxed the now middle-aged and pot-bellied brutes out of retirement for one last dust-up.
But yesterday the vile thugs’ 30-year reign of terror was ended once and for all as the last remnants of the ageing, desperate gang were brought to justice following their final brutal clash.
The chance to rekindle the tribal camaraderie and blood-fuelled adrenaline the Headhunters had once lived for presented itself when Championship side Cardiff City were drawn away to Chelsea in the fifth round of the FA Cup on February 13 2010.
The Welsh club’s own hardcore group, the Soul Crew, enjoy a formidable reputation and relished the prospect of invading west London.
In the deluded minds of the Chelsea old guard, getting stuck in to the Cardiff mob was a matter of defending national pride.
The scene that unfolded was a perfect storm of football violence — punch-ups and brick-throwing in broad daylight as terrified families cowered in the carnage.
Marshalling the bloated and blowing Chelsea soldiers that day were Andy “Nightmare” Frain, 46, and Jason Marriner, 43.
Dad-of-three Marriner, of Stevenage, Herts, was yesterday jailed for two years and banned from football grounds for eight years having been found guilty at Isleworth Crown Court of playing a “pivotal role” in organising one of the biggest ever violent clashes between football hooligan “firms”.
He was due to be joined by Frain — who was last seen arriving at court swigging from a bottle of vodka — but his sentencing had to be postponed due to illness. Frain, of Chelmsford, Essex, has pleaded guilty to violent disorder and is due to be sentenced later.
Frain and Marriner have previously been jailed for seven and six years respectively in 2000 after being secretly filmed plotting violence during a BBC programme by investigative reporter Donal MacIntyre. Frain discussed his involvement with the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 while Marriner had close links to Ulster loyalists.
Andy ‘Nightmare’ Frain … last seen at court with vodkaNational Pictures
On Thursday, 13 other Chelsea fans were jailed for offences of violence after the Cardiff game and received sentences of up to two years in jail. One of those was Ian Cutler, a 50-year-old builder from Wednesbury, West Mids, who has football-related convictions for violence dating back to the 1970s. He was seen kicking and punching a man lying on the ground and given 14 months and banned from football grounds for six years.
Judge Martin Edmunds QC told Cutler and other defendants they were “old enough to know better”.
On Monday, Terence Matthews, of Morden, Surrey, and two others pleaded guilty to affray. A judge warned them they face jail when sentenced in May.
A now slimmed-down Matthews, 50, was once accused of being the “Fat Man” who rammed a bottle in a barman’s face at a pub near Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge ground.
He was jailed for four years for affray in 1986 but, to the outrage of police and victims, was acquitted of the bottle attack. He later served a two-year jail sentence for assaulting a police officer. Det Supt William Lyle of the Metropolitan Police said of the violence on the day of the Cardiff match: “Nothing like it had happened since the 1970s. One heavily pregnant woman in a car became very stressed by fighting hooligans.
“There was CCTV of a father shielding his two children as missiles were thrown over their heads. We were prepared for trouble but nobody could have foreseen that.”
These fresh convictions have ripped the heart out of the Headhunters’ hierarchy who, in their heyday, became infamous for inflicting their own brand of torture.
In their “manor” of London’s trendy King’s Road they would administer the notorious “Chelsea Smile” — so-called because victims’ faces would be SLICED from the edges of the mouth to the ears.
To hurt or even kill the victim, he or SHE would then be STABBED in the stomach so the face would RIP when they screamed.
But with the arrival of all-seater stadiums in the early Nineties, football hooliganism was all but stamped out. The shaven-headed, hate-filled hooligans got older and there was a lack of wannabes waiting to fill their shoes.
In recent years the Headhunters became nothing more than a myth.
The group faded away after MacIntyre’s documentary exposed the remaining hardcore members.
But the cup clash with Cardiff last year proved too much for the now paunchy monsters to turn down. All the old crew were back for the reunion — Nightmare, Marriner and the Fat Man too.
Scene of terror … punch-up in 2010National Pictures
Police insisted on a noon kick-off but the first signs of trouble came in the morning when more than 100 Chelsea yobs marched on North End Road, splitting into two groups with military precision to attack Cardiff coaches.
Smoke bombs went off as the rival hooligans clashed before police took control.
The court heard this week how Chelsea fans then downed up to seven pints of lager and snorted lines of cocaine in pubs as they prepared to face their Welsh enemy after the final whistle.
The thugs jostled on the Fulham Road. A group of Cardiff fans broke away and made their way to the King’s Road, where they were met by the Headhunters.
More than 200 yobs then fought a running battle for the next quarter of an hour, hurling missiles and traffic cones at each other.
Bricks were thrown at police. One officer had his jaw broken and lost four teeth after being hit in the face with a rock.
The police quickly launched Operation Ternhill to identify the thugs and collected hundreds of hours of CCTV footage.
Seventeen hooligans were named to police in just two days last July following an appeal in The Sun.
A total of 96 people have been charged over the riot so far, with more than 60 having already pleaded guilty to offences of affray and violent disorder.
mpuDet Supt Lyle said: “A high number were in their thirties, forties and even their fifties. The oldest one was 55. A lot of them went because they knew there was a high possibility of violence.”
In February this year 27 Cardiff fans received sentences of up to 14 months in jail. A second batch of 18 more were given similar terms.
Brave telly investigator Donal MacIntyre was in court yesterday.
Thugs from the Headhunters firm attacked him and wife Ameera last year in “revenge” for some of their gang being convicted as a result of his 1999 report. A member of the gang James Wild, 47, was later convicted for the attack.
MacIntyre said: “They beat my wife up when she had a brain tumour. I’m here to see justice done. I’ve been running for ten years and now enough is enough.”
WEDNESDAY 13 + SUPPORT @ CONCORDE 2, 6TH MARCH 2013.
Leaving my abode at 6:30 and wheeling down Brighton seafront in, I just couldn’t sit still. The drizzling rain and icy cold didn’t stop me from hurtling down towards the venue, eager to see a band that I had been awaiting their return to the Sussex since Oct 2012. Upon my arrival I met up with a close friend of mine [Captain Morgan] whom has loved WEDNESDAY 13 since the age of 11, including many other blood hungry fans lurking around outside including the usual drunken weirdos! So, after I’d gotten myself the usual I was ready to hear some good n loud stuff from the first support ORESTEA, a five-piece, South East UK Rock band, continuing their ‘uplifting energetic musical approach’. I was somewhat a little surprised as to lovely the vocals were, powerful, empowering and inspiration were my first immediate thoughts. Although the structure of the band is a little to soft and basic for my taste, I felt the front-girl (Lisa Avon), presented us with a great show! Their most well-known songs are their self-release debut EP, ‘Shadows Of Yesterday’, and their 2010 release ‘Your Own Mistake’ – Official Video here – www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8jyhGx93fQ, Twitter : www.twitter.com/orestea, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/oresteaband~
When the first support band had ended, I headed off to get some air, another drink and chat with others about 2013’s future line-up of gigs and festivals. Although the second support of the night wasn’t far behind so myself and my fellow head-thumpers (Rowan and Captain Morgan) made our way to the crowd gathering by the stage to get a good view. As the music started, there was a series of loud cheers from the barriers in front of the stage noting that SISTER, ‘The sleaze/punk influenced metal outfit’ from Stockholm in Sweden, slowing mooched out in front. Their incredibly Gothic Ramone-like style was almost overwhelming as the screamed loudly at their hyper gathering. I was very impressed by the overall enthusiasm of the band and how the guitarist’s (Lestat) riffs were super fast! The drumming by (Cari) was making everyone around me thrash which in history of gigs, is always a good sign, but the backing vocals from all the members, including main vocalist (Jamie), really was the bath-bomb in the bloodbath! Some of my most liked tracks of the night included, ‘Too Bad for You’ and ‘The Unlucky Majority’. SISTER’s YouTube Channel : https://www.youtube.com/sisterofficial, Twitter : https://twitter.com/SISTER_official, Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/sisterband~
Even though I was psychically exhausted from waving my arms around, me and my friends were really pumped for seeing highlight of the evening ..WEDNESDAY 13. After I relaxed in my chair for a few minutes, the intro music (Death Arise) to The Dixie Dead, (WEDNESDAY 13’s new album), crept up slowly onto the audience, making us all scream in horrific passion. For those who don’t know this band very well, or have heard of them, I can tell you now, they are really amazing live and put on a terrifically terrorizing show! Their music genres between horror punk and psychobilly rock, which personally are my favorite sounds to rave around to at home, muahahaha!! So they began the insanity with ‘Blood Sucker’ motherfucker! My favorite song fro The Dixie Dead ‘Get your Grave on’ was played after and I must admit I went a little fan-girly when half-way through the show they played ‘I Love To Say Fuck’, after all it is my 4th ‘most played’ song on Itunes! Then, after a few other tracks (of which I was too pissed to remember), ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ was played and Wednesday 13 sang it brilliantly! It made the crowd go wild, front and back of the crowd, creating a small mosh for a few minutes.. was tempting to drive into hehe! After my frantic headbanging and spinning in my chair, the gig came to a gory/sweaty end, if which I almost fainted driving outside. All in all, a pretty fun frightening night and I definetly hope to see WEDNESDAY 13 again in the near future! ALSO I RECOMMEND SEEING THEM AT A VENUE NEAR YOU!!! Here are the tour dates for March 2013 starting from yesterday : The Fleece – Bristol [Thursday 7th March]TONIGHT! More dates here – http://wednesday-13.com/?page_id=2~ Come back soon guys!
385 Willesden High Road is tucked away behind a row of dilapidated 19th century houses, its entrance obscured by high locked gates and a walled yard. But 385 is a treasure trove of reggae history. It’s called Theorem, Music Village, and it’s where we’re recording several artist interviews for Reggae Britannia. As we arrive, there’s a band in the studio rehearsing a romantic Lovers Rock number, there’s a man up a rickety ladder painting the walls and another mopping up from an all night dance in the ‘functions room’ with its damp lino and garish red felt walls.
T-Jae, the tall soft-spoken proprietor of what was once called BBMC (the Brent Black Music Cooperative) helps us with our camera gear. He’s got coffee brewing in the kitchen beside an open can of condensed milk. Before T-Jae’s time this was a leisure centre filled with rattle of pinball machines and the click of snooker balls – now replaced by the drum ‘n bass of reggae rhythms leaking from the studio.
We’re here to interview Dave Barker, one half of the Dave and Ansell Collins vocal duo who set the teenage mods alight, back in 1971, performing a novelty number called ‘Double Barrel’. Dave’s a quietly spoken man with a hint of a stammer. He tells us how, when he first came to this country (and he stayed here ever after) he peered out through the window of his BOAC plane as it banked over the smoking chimneys of the snow-covered houses below and wondered ‘how come they have so many bakeries in England?’ On the drive from the airport he was shocked at seeing white men digging the road and taking out garbage: ‘Wow man, that was strange, you didn’t see those things in Jamaica’. Nor dogs wearing winter vests, nor steak and kidney pies, nor that little sparrow he spied pecking the top off a milk bottle. He can’t help himself: Dave sings a refrain from Matt Munro’s ‘Born Free’ and segues into ‘Summer Holiday’.
Dave arrived in the U.K exactly ten years before Theorem opened its doors to top British and Jamaican reggae artists passing through. Today, there’s the legendary Max Romeo sitting on bench in the winter sunshine, his grey locks neatly tucked into a woolly beret. In 1969, Max brought his wicked song ‘Wet Dream’ to Britain and its risqué lyrics – which got it banned in clubs and on the BBC – made it an anthem for skinheads in dance halls all across Britain. He sings a few lines, diffidently explaining how it caused an ‘upstir’ among the rebellious youth of the time. He’s a little ashamed of it now because, by the mid 70s, Max had embraced the wisdom of Rastafari. That was when he wrote and recorded some of reggae’s most powerful and memorable music in the Black Ark studio of Lee Scratch Perry: ‘War In A Babylon’ and ‘Chase The Devil’. When those songs arrived here, first as pre-releases and then remixed by Island Records, they inspired our fledgling roots reggae bands and then the punks and then Bob Marley too. Max intones a few lines from ‘Chase The Devil’, an ironic, cautionary tale that has been covered or sampled by dozens of musicians – including Jay-Z in ‘The Black Album’ – and was featured in the video-game Grand Theft Auto.
Dave Barker and Max Romeo – by Irfhan Mirza
‘I’m gonna put on an iron shirt and chase Satan out of earth’ he sings. ‘I’m gonna send him to outer space to find another race’. Max explains: ‘The devil is the negative within the psyche. Chasing the devil means chasing the negative out of your mind.’ There are people wandering in and out while he speaks; musicians carrying drums and guitars into this studio that’s cold as a morgue, or dropping off an amp or a heavyweight speaker, or they’ve come to pay their respects to the master, with a hug or a high-five.
T-Jae comes sauntering by with a piece of carpet under his arm to help our sound recordist dampen the ‘live’ acoustic of the room (yes, we still have a sound recordist on our crew) and he tells me that among the band members in the studio today is none other than Bigga Morrison. Bigga’s not a front man like Max, but a keyboard virtuoso and music director of renown. Reggae royalty. The band take a another break for a smoke in the yard and Bigga, immaculate in pin-striped suit and brogues, describes growing up in this country as a second generation West Indian: ‘My parents had experienced troubles and threats on the streets, back in the ’50s, with the Teddy Boys and such, but they wouldn’t discuss those things because they wanted to keep you free from the pressures. But as we grew up, we took our message and our fight onto the streets with the roots and culture music we played in bands like Steel Pulse and Aswad.’
Later during the interview, I asked Bigga to show us how the British reggae producers, back in the early 1970s, added violins to the Jamaican imports to make them sound ‘more classical’. Unfortunately, he’s lost his glasses and so can’t read the score. Tee Jay’s on hand to send for a replacement pair. Bigga fills in time by playing us a delightful new track by his band the Skatronics, but when the glasses arrive, they’re all wrong for Bigga. He wears them anyway, and peers astigmatically at the music for ‘Young Gifted And Black‘ which is layered in symphonic-style strings. Bigga (educated at Trinity College of Music) explains how Jamaican reggae gradually transformed into a British musical experience, first through the dub sounds and conscious lyrics of hardworking roots groups like Aswad and then by the bands that went platinum: the 2 Tone crowd, UB40 and The Police. Bigga’s being called back to rehearsals now, so we break for a late lunch. It’s a choice of The New Golden Duck Chinese Take Away or the Caribbean place half a mile up the road. We do the walk and settle for salt fish and akee. Or rather, the others do. I choose the goat curry on plantains and soon regret it.
Bigga Morrison
Back in Theorem, Bigga’s at the keyboards and a couple of pretty female vocalists are delivering more saccharine Lovers Rock. And that’s where we see Big Youth, in among them, gyrating his hips to the pounding bass and chugging upbeat of the guitar. He’s chaperoned by a petite Italian lady from an artists’ agency called Roots Rockers. She’s Trish, and she’s exhausted because they’ve only just returned from a nightmare flight from Spain. Trish is a miracle of calm and efficiency in the maelstrom of the struggling reggae business and it’s clear all the artists adore her. Trish has offered us the opportunity to interview Big Youth, the toaster who excited British reggae fans with his revolutionary, rasta-inspired lyrics in the mid ’70s. He’s on top form today, his wiry body twisting and swaying in the interview chair as he sings lines from ‘Hit The Road Jack’, telling me how the great Ray Charles called him up one Christmas-time to admit that Big Youth’s version was just ‘the best’. ‘Big Youth stole the scene,’ he concludes. Modesty isn’t one of Big Youth’s virtues. But I can vouch for his status, and integrity. I first met him insideRandy’s Record shop in Kingston Jamaica back in ’77. He was checking out the sales of his album – visiting these record stores was about the only way an artist could tell how many were selling. He was as big a name as Marley at the time, and revered both on the island and over here. We met again – by chance – in Lagos, Nigeria, when he was on the run from some unscrupulous promoter. He’s older and greyer now, but with no loss of energy, showmanship or sharp humour. And the red, gold and green implants in his front teeth are still there.
The filming days at Theorem haven’t only been productive for our ninety minute programme, they’ve also been enormous fun. Maybe it’s the familiarity and affection the artists have for this building, or maybe it’s what they call ‘the spirits’ of the house: a combination of all those sounds and experiences imbedded in the cracking plaster walls, the creaky floorboards which once the feet of hallowed artists trod, or the reverberating bass you can hear down Theorem’s honeycomb of corridors.
We’ll be back here later in the week to interview the fiery, bubbly Lovers Rock singer Sylvia Tella, from Manchester; and Tippa Irie who came to fame DJing for the Saxon sound system, and maybe Dennis Bovell, the multi-talented producer/song writer and bass player, who did so much to anglicise reggae music in this country. Oh, and Trish says Dennis Alcapone’s coming by, the dapper, bowler-hatted vocalist who brought a whole new style of toasting to these shores with songs like ‘Guns Don’t Argue’: ‘Don’t call me Scarface, my name is Capone, C-A-P-O-N-E!’
For him, we’ll haul our equipment boxes down the dark corridors of Theorem (we never could find the light switches, thriftily hidden away in recesses above door frames). Because we’ll place him in a room, behind the studio, which is every reggae fan’s dream, an Aladdin’s cave of antique tape machines and mixers, and an expansive crimson casting couch. The wood-trim Rainderk desk dates from the early ’70s when Reggae first exploded onto our pop charts with songs like ‘Young Gifted And Black’, bringing an upbeat musical thrill not just to those of Caribbean origin and the packs of skinheads who followed them around the country, but to the whole nation. This mixing desk was donated by Pete Townshend of The Who. It has made history since, recording reggae artists like The Wailers, Gregory Isaacs, Aswad, Janet Kay, Maxi Priest … and so many more.
The traffic’s slow on Willesden High Road as we leave the studios and T- Jae waves us into the evening gridlock and shuts the gates. Back-in-the-day, Theorem would be filling up with dreadlocked musicians and their natty entourage, ready for another all night session. Sometimes it still does, but with the proliferation of cheap home studios and a music industry in crisis, it’s a whole lot quieter now. No sessions tonight. Just the rattling pipes, the whispering corridors, the vacant studio and the ghosts of British reggae history.
385 Willesden High Road is tucked away behind a row of dilapidated 19th century houses, its entrance obscured by high locked gates and a walled yard. But 385 is a treasure trove of reggae history. It’s called Theorem, Music Village, and it’s where we’re recording several artist interviews for Reggae Britannia. As we arrive, there’s a band in the studio rehearsing a romantic Lovers Rock number, there’s a man up a rickety ladder painting the walls and another mopping up from an all night dance in the ‘functions room’ with its damp lino and garish red felt walls.
T-Jae, the tall soft-spoken proprietor of what was once called BBMC (the Brent Black Music Cooperative) helps us with our camera gear. He’s got coffee brewing in the kitchen beside an open can of condensed milk. Before T-Jae’s time this was a leisure centre filled with rattle of pinball machines and the click of snooker balls – now replaced by the drum ‘n bass of reggae rhythms leaking from the studio.
We’re here to interview Dave Barker, one half of the Dave and Ansell Collins vocal duo who set the teenage mods alight, back in 1971, performing a novelty number called ‘Double Barrel’. Dave’s a quietly spoken man with a hint of a stammer. He tells us how, when he first came to this country (and he stayed here ever after) he peered out through the window of his BOAC plane as it banked over the smoking chimneys of the snow-covered houses below and wondered ‘how come they have so many bakeries in England?’ On the drive from the airport he was shocked at seeing white men digging the road and taking out garbage: ‘Wow man, that was strange, you didn’t see those things in Jamaica’. Nor dogs wearing winter vests, nor steak and kidney pies, nor that little sparrow he spied pecking the top off a milk bottle. He can’t help himself: Dave sings a refrain from Matt Munro’s ‘Born Free’ and segues into ‘Summer Holiday’.
Dave arrived in the U.K exactly ten years before Theorem opened its doors to top British and Jamaican reggae artists passing through. Today, there’s the legendary Max Romeo sitting on bench in the winter sunshine, his grey locks neatly tucked into a woolly beret. In 1969, Max brought his wicked song ‘Wet Dream’ to Britain and its risqué lyrics – which got it banned in clubs and on the BBC – made it an anthem for skinheads in dance halls all across Britain. He sings a few lines, diffidently explaining how it caused an ‘upstir’ among the rebellious youth of the time. He’s a little ashamed of it now because, by the mid 70s, Max had embraced the wisdom of Rastafari. That was when he wrote and recorded some of reggae’s most powerful and memorable music in the Black Ark studio of Lee Scratch Perry: ‘War In A Babylon’ and ‘Chase The Devil’. When those songs arrived here, first as pre-releases and then remixed by Island Records, they inspired our fledgling roots reggae bands and then the punks and then Bob Marley too. Max intones a few lines from ‘Chase The Devil’, an ironic, cautionary tale that has been covered or sampled by dozens of musicians – including Jay-Z in ‘The Black Album’ – and was featured in the video-game Grand Theft Auto.
Dave Barker and Max Romeo – by Irfhan Mirza
‘I’m gonna put on an iron shirt and chase Satan out of earth’ he sings. ‘I’m gonna send him to outer space to find another race’. Max explains: ‘The devil is the negative within the psyche. Chasing the devil means chasing the negative out of your mind.’ There are people wandering in and out while he speaks; musicians carrying drums and guitars into this studio that’s cold as a morgue, or dropping off an amp or a heavyweight speaker, or they’ve come to pay their respects to the master, with a hug or a high-five.
T-Jae comes sauntering by with a piece of carpet under his arm to help our sound recordist dampen the ‘live’ acoustic of the room (yes, we still have a sound recordist on our crew) and he tells me that among the band members in the studio today is none other than Bigga Morrison. Bigga’s not a front man like Max, but a keyboard virtuoso and music director of renown. Reggae royalty. The band take a another break for a smoke in the yard and Bigga, immaculate in pin-striped suit and brogues, describes growing up in this country as a second generation West Indian: ‘My parents had experienced troubles and threats on the streets, back in the ’50s, with the Teddy Boys and such, but they wouldn’t discuss those things because they wanted to keep you free from the pressures. But as we grew up, we took our message and our fight onto the streets with the roots and culture music we played in bands like Steel Pulse and Aswad.’
Later during the interview, I asked Bigga to show us how the British reggae producers, back in the early 1970s, added violins to the Jamaican imports to make them sound ‘more classical’. Unfortunately, he’s lost his glasses and so can’t read the score. Tee Jay’s on hand to send for a replacement pair. Bigga fills in time by playing us a delightful new track by his band the Skatronics, but when the glasses arrive, they’re all wrong for Bigga. He wears them anyway, and peers astigmatically at the music for ‘Young Gifted And Black‘ which is layered in symphonic-style strings. Bigga (educated at Trinity College of Music) explains how Jamaican reggae gradually transformed into a British musical experience, first through the dub sounds and conscious lyrics of hardworking roots groups like Aswad and then by the bands that went platinum: the 2 Tone crowd, UB40 and The Police. Bigga’s being called back to rehearsals now, so we break for a late lunch. It’s a choice of The New Golden Duck Chinese Take Away or the Caribbean place half a mile up the road. We do the walk and settle for salt fish and akee. Or rather, the others do. I choose the goat curry on plantains and soon regret it.
Bigga Morrison
Back in Theorem, Bigga’s at the keyboards and a couple of pretty female vocalists are delivering more saccharine Lovers Rock. And that’s where we see Big Youth, in among them, gyrating his hips to the pounding bass and chugging upbeat of the guitar. He’s chaperoned by a petite Italian lady from an artists’ agency called Roots Rockers. She’s Trish, and she’s exhausted because they’ve only just returned from a nightmare flight from Spain. Trish is a miracle of calm and efficiency in the maelstrom of the struggling reggae business and it’s clear all the artists adore her. Trish has offered us the opportunity to interview Big Youth, the toaster who excited British reggae fans with his revolutionary, rasta-inspired lyrics in the mid ’70s. He’s on top form today, his wiry body twisting and swaying in the interview chair as he sings lines from ‘Hit The Road Jack’, telling me how the great Ray Charles called him up one Christmas-time to admit that Big Youth’s version was just ‘the best’. ‘Big Youth stole the scene,’ he concludes. Modesty isn’t one of Big Youth’s virtues. But I can vouch for his status, and integrity. I first met him insideRandy’s Record shop in Kingston Jamaica back in ’77. He was checking out the sales of his album – visiting these record stores was about the only way an artist could tell how many were selling. He was as big a name as Marley at the time, and revered both on the island and over here. We met again – by chance – in Lagos, Nigeria, when he was on the run from some unscrupulous promoter. He’s older and greyer now, but with no loss of energy, showmanship or sharp humour. And the red, gold and green implants in his front teeth are still there.
The filming days at Theorem haven’t only been productive for our ninety minute programme, they’ve also been enormous fun. Maybe it’s the familiarity and affection the artists have for this building, or maybe it’s what they call ‘the spirits’ of the house: a combination of all those sounds and experiences imbedded in the cracking plaster walls, the creaky floorboards which once the feet of hallowed artists trod, or the reverberating bass you can hear down Theorem’s honeycomb of corridors.
We’ll be back here later in the week to interview the fiery, bubbly Lovers Rock singer Sylvia Tella, from Manchester; and Tippa Irie who came to fame DJing for the Saxon sound system, and maybe Dennis Bovell, the multi-talented producer/song writer and bass player, who did so much to anglicise reggae music in this country. Oh, and Trish says Dennis Alcapone’s coming by, the dapper, bowler-hatted vocalist who brought a whole new style of toasting to these shores with songs like ‘Guns Don’t Argue’: ‘Don’t call me Scarface, my name is Capone, C-A-P-O-N-E!’
For him, we’ll haul our equipment boxes down the dark corridors of Theorem (we never could find the light switches, thriftily hidden away in recesses above door frames). Because we’ll place him in a room, behind the studio, which is every reggae fan’s dream, an Aladdin’s cave of antique tape machines and mixers, and an expansive crimson casting couch. The wood-trim Rainderk desk dates from the early ’70s when Reggae first exploded onto our pop charts with songs like ‘Young Gifted And Black’, bringing an upbeat musical thrill not just to those of Caribbean origin and the packs of skinheads who followed them around the country, but to the whole nation. This mixing desk was donated by Pete Townshend of The Who. It has made history since, recording reggae artists like The Wailers, Gregory Isaacs, Aswad, Janet Kay, Maxi Priest … and so many more.
The traffic’s slow on Willesden High Road as we leave the studios and T- Jae waves us into the evening gridlock and shuts the gates. Back-in-the-day, Theorem would be filling up with dreadlocked musicians and their natty entourage, ready for another all night session. Sometimes it still does, but with the proliferation of cheap home studios and a music industry in crisis, it’s a whole lot quieter now. No sessions tonight. Just the rattling pipes, the whispering corridors, the vacant studio and the ghosts of British reggae history.
Can the UK’s ‘toilet circuit’ of small music venues survive?
From Punk Rock,Ian Dury, The Police, U2, Madness, Coldplay to PJ Harvey, Amy Winehouse, and countless other big British rock acts started out playing tiny pubs and clubs around the UK. But with many of these venues closing, who will keep the rock’n’roll dream alive?
Will another coffee shop bring in £ billions, tourists, radio play and record sales worldwide, that so many British bands have done for the UK. Small pub curcuit is the first step to a carreer, and artform, that british people hold so dearly to their hearts. The Government war on pubs and alcahol consumption will have its casualties, and British music is suffering severely. Every person that comes to the UK to see a band will bring on average around £500 to the British economy. The translates to £millions every year. Bands didnt start their career, at Wembley arena. Are we going to hand over the entire music industry to 5 minute kareoke singers and make Simon Cowell a bit richer
The Bull and Gate in Kentish Town in north London. Its closure is partly due to the city’s music scene migrating eastward. Outside the capital, things are even tougher. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The Bull and Gate in Kentish Town in north London is, in music-business vernacular, a “toilet venue”, where the stage can just about accommodate a four-piece band, and the dressing room contains a solitary grubby mirror. But the term does this place a real disservice, both in terms of the ornate Victorian splendour of the main bar, and in the roll call of names who have played in the 150-capacity back room – among them, Madness, The Clash Coldplay, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Muse, Blur and the Manic Street Preachers.
After three decades of hosting gigs here, the landlord and landlady are selling up and retiring. The Bull and Gate has been bought by the brewery and pub company Young’s, who are apparently set on turning it into a gastropub (“We don’t feel that having a live music offering at the pub alongside our plans to serve food is viable,” went one company statement). The venue’s current music promoters, a four-person outfit called Club Fandango, will stage their last show on 4 May, which will be preceded by a special run of gigs, likely to feature notable alumni of the Bull and Gate, to be titled Play Your Respects. And that will be that: yet another small music venue shutting its doors, adding to a list of closures that extends across the country, and threatens one of British popular culture’s most inspired inventions: the so-called “toilet circuit”, on which no end of hugely successful musicians have taken their first decisive steps.
In London, as with most matters reducible to hard cash, things are not as bad as elsewhere: here, the story is partly about decline, but also a migration of venues to the east of the city, as ongoing gentrification pushes live music out of its old north London stamping grounds. But beyond the M25, things look grim. The national Barfly chain, which had venues in Brighton, Birmingham, Cambridge and Cardiff, closed most of them between 2008 and 2010. Such famous places as Leeds’s Duchess of York, Newport’s TJs and Leicester’s Princess Charlotte have either been converted to new uses or left to fall into disrepair.
Others are surviving, but struggling: the people in charge of the renowned Hull Adelphi have expressed serious doubts about its future, and venues such as the Tunbridge Wells Forum are now staffed by volunteers. Four or five years ago, the music business clung to the idea that even if sales of CDs were being squeezed, people’s appetite for ticketed live events looked to be increasing. That may hold true for bigger venues, but at the bottom of the live hierarchy, a new rule seems to hold sway: if people now expect to get their music for nothing, they increasingly think that the same ought to apply to watching new bands, no matter how promising they might be.
Twenty or so years ago, when I was a young music writer, I spent most of my evenings in these places, keeping myself going on lager and cigarettes, watching endless bands and occasionally finding music worth evangelising about. It’s a life I still miss, when I used to keep the company of some of the people whose drive and enthusiasm still keep the milieu around small venues alive today – people such as Simon Williams, the one-time staff writer at the New Musical Express who went on to found esteemed independent record label Fierce Panda, before also extending his activities into gig promotion and eventually rooting Club Fandango at the Bull and Gate.
Sitting in an alcove in the pub’s main room, Williams and his business partner Andy Macleod briefly rhapsodise about triumphant Bull and Gate moments (when Coldplay played here in April 1999, says Williams, the queue extended down Kentish Town Road, and they were “just too good”). They also talk me through the events of the last few years: their attempts to buy the Bull and Gate to use as a venue and company HQ, and a quest to secure sponsorship which included a pitch to the makers of an iconic energy drink built on the rebranding of the place as the Red Bull and Gate: “We said to them, ‘You can just paint it, like you do with Formula 1 cars – it’s the greatest tag-line of all time.'”
They have now found a new venue in Dalston, but the imminent closure of the Bull and Gate evidently still hurts. “It’ll be appalling when it actually goes,” says Williams. “I’ve been coming here since 1986, when I was doing a fanzine. That’s a long time. We’re absurdly romantic about this place, and absurdly loyal.”
“Once it becomes a gastropub, that’s final, isn’t it?” says Macleod. “That 33 years of musical heritage just disappears. It’ll all feel really sad.”
Coldplay on stage at the Bull and Gate in London in April 1999, the night they signed their record deal. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianThe squeeze affecting small venues, they tell me, is down to a tangle of factors: among them, the transformation of urban neighbourhoods such as Kentish Town, the rise of free gigs where the band get a cut of the bar takings, and a music industry that now gets involved with up-and-coming acts at an absurdly early stage. “There’s no money in new bands, we all know that,” says Williams. “But now, with the hyper-speed of things in the music industry, you get in touch with a band who might be doing their first gig, and it’ll be, ‘Talk to our manager, who’s got to talk to the lawyer and the agent.'”
Purely to be seen to be doing their job, they tell me, a band’s representatives might now demand a guaranteed fee of anything up to £75. When the costs of a night at the Bull & Gate come in at least £200 before any musicians have been paid, that threatens the whole viability of the enterprise, not least when every promoter fears the turnout music industry lore knows as “two men and a dog”.
Tonight’s bands draw a combined crowd of around 40. First on are an unremarkable-looking quartet called Civil Love, who play a surprisingly accomplished version of the melodic genre some call power-pop. Next are Evil Alien, a part-electronic band from Birmingham who have driven down to play their first London show, pulling in talent scouts from record companies and a smattering of curious booking agents. Last, bless them, are a White Stripes-esque duo called I Like the GoGo, who send me running from the room with their somewhat irreverent treatment of the Dexys Midnight Runners’ song Geno.
Back at the bar, I talk to the Bull and Gate’s landlord, 70-year-old Pat Lynskey, who speaks with the wry detachment of a man who has seen a few generations of musicians and drinkers come and go, and will soon be spending his first summer in over three decades well away from beer taps and time bells. “I think in the last five years, technology has not been good to us,” he says. “Prior to that, people had to come and see what was on, and they’d stay for the night. Now, they can check everything on their phone before they leave. And if they don’t like it, they won’t come.”
History records that the Manic Street Preachers played at the Bull and Gate on 17 October 1990, when they had just put out an almost-ignored record titled New Art Riot, and were trying desperately to get the attention of the weekly music papers, and again on 17 July of the same year, in even less auspicious circumstances.
“We were on after this really weird folk band, who were Russian or Ukrainian, I think,” says their bass player and lyric writer Nicky Wire. “We walked on stage, and the first thing I said was, ‘Fuck me – no wonder so many Russians kill themselves’, to a very bemused audience. We did about five or six songs. It was a bit of a thrill to play there, because it was always on [1980s and 90s TV staples] Rapido and Snub TV. It did feel like a really good gig to do.”
He recalls the shabbiness of the kind of places the Manics once played, but also the romance they embodied. “There was definitely a ragged glory to it. You felt you were treading the boards of heroes, because nearly everyone we loved had done the same thing.” He mentions vividly remembered gigs at the Leeds Duchess of York, the long-gone Buzz Club in Aldershot, and Southampton Joiners, where the boss of the Columbia record label paid the band a visit, and their career-securing contract was thereby confirmed.
The 200-capacity Joiners is now battling to survive, which leads me to pay a visit the night after my trip to Kentish Town. Having never been there before, I’m thrilled to find a toilet venue par excellence: a bar whose furnishings extend to two apparently paleolithic sofas, a disused subterranean dressing room – flood-damaged, it seems – covered in graffiti left by visiting musicians (“Razorlight – I want to torture you slowly and let you die in a lot of pain”), and an abiding sense of everything being held together by simple goodwill.
“The chances of us closing are massive,” says the venue’s manager, the imposing but genial Patrick Muldowney. “Every Monday morning, we see what bills we can pay – and some weeks, we don’t have enough money, simple as that.” Recent benefit concerts by the Vaccines (toilet circuit graduates who will soon play the 20,000-capacity O2 arena in London) and the singer-songwriter Frank Turner have brought in much-needed funds. But times are unendingly tough: whereas he could once depend on even local bands drawing in at least 30 paying customers, Muldowney says the figure is now closer to 10. “It’s a two-thirds drop-off,” he says, with a grimace. “So it’s massive.”
As in London, Southampton now sees regular free gigs in standard-issue bars and pubs that are financed by sales of drinks, something made easier by a recent legislative change that got rid of any need for an official music license for venues that hold up to 200 people. For the Joiners, that kind of event is pretty much impossible: it has an over-14 license for its music room (an integral part, says Muldowney, of its ethos), and a much more thrifty culture. “The difference between us and a pub is that 50% of our crowd won’t buy a drink all evening,” he says; the Joiners’ head band booker, Ricky Bates, also points out that whereas lesser venues will offer little better than a “karaoke PA”, the Joiners prides itself on an estimable sound system, but it needs a paid engineer to work it.
Tonight’s headliners are the History of Apple Pie, who play indie-rock built on a mixture of sweetness and noise, and are at the end of a 19-date tour punctuated by nights spent at Travelodges and the odd recuperative stay at parents’ houses scattered around the country. Before them, I watch a local trio called Imperatrix, who are bedevilled by colds and flu, and by the fact that their drummer learned their songs a mere 12 hours before. They deliver a performance full of very familiar ingredients: brief flashes of promise, gauche repartee and the sense that with enough visits to venues like this, they might just discover who they actually are.
On my way out, I’m given a Joiners T-shirt, covered in an A-to-Z of the bands who have played here – from the Arctic Monkeys to the Zutons. Next to the door is a list of forthcoming attractions, featuring names that instantly convey the mixture of bravado and creativity that often courses around places like this: the Dead Lay Waiting, Our Lost Infantry, Burglars of the Heart. And a potent thought once again hits home: what a profound pity it would be if the toilet circuit was allowed to rot away – leaving endless free music and ad hoc gigs, but no dependable means via which musicians can been transported away from their home turf, towards something bigger.
“It gets under your skin, doesn’t it?” says Muldowney, by way of a goodbye. “You fall in love with places like this.” Counting in a steady stream of people at the door, he looks firmly in his element, though he views the future with an uneasy mixture of hope and uncertainty. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he says. “We’ll certainly be here in a year.”
UK toilet circuit landmarks past and present
1 Leicester Charlotte (formerly Princess Charlotte; capacity: 200)
Hosted Oasis, the Libertines, Muse et al, but closed in March 2010, to be developed into student flats.
2 Newport TJs (capacity: 350)
A legendary venue where, in December 1991, Kurt Cobain is said to have proposed to Courtney Love. Closed in 2010, and has fallen into disrepair.
3 Cardiff Barfly (capacity: 200)
Part of a chain of small venues that hit the buffers between 2008 and 2010. Hosted future US stars Kings of Leon on their first UK tour.
4 Leeds Duchess of York (capacity: 200 officially, 300 on a good night)
Put on gigs in its cramped back room by such future stars as Nirvana, Coldplay and Pulp. Now a branch of menswear giant Hugo Boss.
5 Manchester Roadhouse (capacity: 200)
Still in business. The entire membership of future Mercury Prize-winners Elbow have worked here; singer Guy Garvey was once the barman.
6 Hull Adelphi (capacity: 200)
In a former housing terrace. Has struggled to survive, but will, with luck, celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2014.
7 Glasgow King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (capacity: 300)
A survivor, and one-time platform for such future stars as Florence and the Machine and the Killers. Famously where Creation records boss Alan McGee first saw Oasis in May 1993.
8 Southampton Joiners (capacity: 150)
Now fighting the prospect of closure; current indie stars the Vaccines recently played a benefit show. Local legend claims that Jimi Hendrix played here en route to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.
9 Oxford Jericho Tavern (capacity: 180)
A heartwarming story: after a spell as part of the student-oriented pub chain Scream, reopened as a music venue in 2005. It was once a home from home for Radiohead.
10 Tunbridge Wells Forum (capacity: 250)
The toilet venue that was once a (public) toilet. Still in business, 20 years old, and staffed by volunteers.
11 London Kentish Town Bull & Gate (capacity: 150)
One of the most renowned toilet venues, and now set for closure. Has hosted Madness, Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Muse, Coldplay and hundreds more. Set to become – why, of course – a gastropub.
Unhappy: Kimberley Vlaeminck claims she only wanted three stars
Kimberley Vlaeminck claimed to reporters and her family that she had only asked for three stars and he inked the rest while she was ASLEEP at his Tattoo box studio in Coutrai, Belgium.
She threatened to sue Toumaniantz for £10,000 to cover the cost of removing the permanent inkings.
However, a week later she confessed on TV that she had asked for all the stars but had lied about it as she was afraid of how her father would react.
He is still unrepentant of his earlier work and posted on his Facebook site: “I have done 25 face tattoos since Kimberley’s case, and don’t feel I did anything wrong during the Kimberley affair.”
Once upon a time tattoos were almost exclusively worn by Jailbirds, millitary, Bikers or Skinheads. Over the last 10 years they have become major fashion accessories to pretty girls. Websites like Suicide girls, based in the USA have found beautiful tattooed girls and posted them across the world. From the tramp stamp on the lower back, girls are now covering themselves from head to foot. Everybody has the right to do whatever they want with their body, but this horror shows how a tattooist can completely change a persons life. Is it time that tattooist need to become subject to legal regulation worldwide.
Watford (in red) and Harrow (yellow) skinheads at Butlins, Clacton, in 1968.
Philip Ellisdon has sent in this picture of the Watford and Harrow skinheads on holiday at Butlins, Clacton, in 1968.
He said: “There were 20 of us – ten from Watford, ten from Harrow and Wealdstone. I am the one on the floor in the centre, third from the left with the striped shirt on.
“I had just won a reggae dance competition sponsored by Trojan Records, the big reggae record company at the time.
“The local guys are there, red are Watford, yellow are Harrow and Wealdstone. Next to me was Steve Hickman, behind with the white braces is Keith Munday and to his right is guy called John Warby who was a last minute replacement.“Keith and I were born next door to each other, nine days apart, and are still friends today.
“In the front are Nicky and Charlie, and with the jacket and white socks is John Galley or Layo as he was called then. He was from Ruislip, but a friend I met at Butlins two years earlier. The rest of the boys were not in the photo – they were all at the bar.
“In the early days, all skinheads wore white socks. One day I went to the Co-op at Gade House with two friends, Barry Preston and his girlfriend at the time, Linda Howarth, to buy a new pair of white socks and they had sold out.
“I bought red socks, just to be different on the dance floor, then a few of my mates also bought the red socks and that was our Watford identity, not always welcome in some places like Wembley or Golders Green, as they knew where we came from and we were not always welcome.
“The prize at Butlins was a lifetime membership to the Trojan Record Club, a big gold medallion, a certificate and an invitation to dance in the next round at a club in London – but I never went.
“I used to dance in many clubs around our area and got to know loads of people from all over the place. Sometime we were welcome, sometime you could be classed as being ‘too flash’ and someone would take exception and start trouble. Time for us to leave.
“We use to dance in clubs in Hemel, Harrow, Greenford, Kingsbury, Ealing, Slough, Windsor, Wembley, Golders Green, Tottenham, Stevenage, Welwyn Garden and, of course, our own stamping ground, the Watford Top Rank, as it was in those days.
“The Top Rank was a safe haven for us, we could wear our red socks, be as ‘flash’ as we liked and dance all night with very little trouble. I had many regular girl dance partners who were great friends. I even met and married one, my wife Lori, and we can still mix it at a 60s/70s disco.
“In the skinhead days, you would never go out with a hair out of place. Tonic suits, Ben Sherman shirts ironed, Levi turn ups measured and pressed, Florshiem Imperial shoes shining, Doc Martin boots polished – everything immaculate, everything ready for The Top Rank. For us, this was the centre of our the universe in those days, a place where all the factions of Watford council estates congregated and because they either went to school, played football or supported Watford FC together, mostly they became friends and were Watford Boys as one.
“People used to travel from all the aforementioned places to spend a Saturday night “up the Top Rank”. It was amazing, how we all became friends, and my wife and I are still friends with many of the people we first met there.
“Many of the ‘faces’ from those days are still around the Watford area. A few are members at my golf club, West Herts. They have not changed, still smart, still looking like a ‘face’.
“The ‘ace face’ at the time was a guy called Roy Rumble. He was the best dancer around by a mile. People use to stop and watch him dance long before John Travolta could even walk.
“He was an inspiration to all those people who wanted to dance, me included, and for such a small guy, he could also look after himself if anyone started on him for being ‘too flash’.
“The Top Rank was open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday nights. They even opened a club on a Sunday night in later years after the skinhead era.
“The good days were gone and 70s music and clubs diversified into the suedehead and glam rock eras, so we all grew our hair down to our shoulders and moved on, an era gone, but certainly not forgotten.
“The music still lives and the memories flood back.”
Watford and Harrow skinheads, Philip Ellisdon has been in touch with more information about the skinhead and mod scene in Watford during the 1960s, and how it started.
He said: “This is a photo of Mick Colvin and myself at Butlins in 1967.
“Butlins was like Spain is now. It was fun and affordable. Too many stories to be told now, but a great era, lots of style and lots of fun.
“Notice the small turn ups on the Sta-Press trousers, another skinhead fashion if you could not afford Levis, but the obligatory braces and haircut – which was expensive till a mate of my Dad started to shave it for me.
“In this picture it’s grown a bit and the skinhead haircut did not compliment my forehead, as in the song Dr Jimmy from Quadrophenia: “You have to move with the fashion or be outcast”.
“Great film, the Who are my favourite group, great words from Townshend and an understanding of a generation that I think most can relate to, no matter what era they grew up in. All the generations have had the same growing pains.“There was a mod scene. The Trade Hall in Watford, which has been featured a few times in the Nostalgia section over the years, was famous.
“Many of the groups, The Who, Small Faces and the like, played there. I watched them through the windows with my mates, standing on beer crates as we were either too young or too skint to get in.
“There has never been a lot written about the skinhead days, only bad stuff, but it was a brilliant era, we had the Motown on one side and the reggae on the other. We liked both. The dancing was varied and everyone danced as you did not need to be a gymnast to dance in them days.
“We had the skinheads, hippies and rockers, all three factions and Watford had a place for them all – the Top Rank for the skinheads, Kingham Hall for the rockers and the Watford Tech for the hippies.
“We use to race around Watford on Vespas and Lambrettas. I was born and lived in Waterman Close, as were my friends. There was 12 of us all around the same age, born in or around Waterman’s, all living within a few yards of each other. Keith and I were next door neighbours and we had council garages at the bottom of our gardens where we kept our scooters and where all the others in the Close with a scooter would hang out.
“Watford had some infamous characters during the skinhead era. The first skinhead I knew in Watford was a guy called Gary Armstrong, who unfortunately is no longer with us.
“We were up the Top Rank one Thursday night when someone came in and said that Gary was down the Red Lion (now the Toby Carvery, where they use to have a disco sometimes) with a load of skinheads.
“We had no idea what a skinhead was, so we jumped on scooters and went to see what it was all about. When we got there, Gary, a style guru and a mod, (a Small Faces lookalike with glasses) was now a shaved head skinhead. Unbelievable.
“We were all basically young mods, seeing Gary and these guys from London’s East End, with all these smart clothes and shaved heads, some in Levi’s, Doc Martins, Ben Sherman shirts and Harrington jackets, some in tonic suits, Fred Perry’s and Florsheim shoes with white socks.
“These guys were so cool, we spent all night talking to them about the clothes, quickly realising that to become a skinhead was not cheap. Most of the gear was from the USA and no way we could afford it, but a shaved head we could.
“The next day, being Friday, pay day, Steve Hickman and I went to the A1 barbers in Carey Place, recommended by Gary, for a No1 haircut. The place was packed, but five minutes later, we were in the chair and in the blink of an eye, we were skinheads.
“My Mum went mad, my Dad thought the short, back and sides was a bit extreme and I got a lot of stick back at work, where I was a trainee panel beater.
“Within a week, Watford Top Rank was full of skinheads and pretty soon, during the late 60s, the Watford Top Rank became a infamous venue, with people coming from all over the place to spend a Saturday night ‘Up the Top Rank’.
“There were many “faces” during that time. Some became known for their style, others for their ability to take care of themselves, should the need arise of course, which, on a Saturday night, it did.
“There was always a chance of some “aggro” taking place, especially when gangs from outside Watford chose to visit and try and claim territory within ‘the Rank’.
“Roy Rumble danced and people watched. Outsiders would usually make some comments and it would all kick off, but as with generations before and since, this ended in trouble and being a skinhead meant you had to stand your ground.
“Watford Peace Memorial Hospital, as it was then, always had a busy Saturday night, especially being so close by. Many of the nurses who lived in also frequented the Rank, so sometime you got the personal service and an escort to the hospital.
“But in those days, there were very few knives, hardly any killings and in many cases, friendships were born out of the ‘aggro’ and I can speak from experience there.
“Getting blood down your white Fred Perry and your Tonic mohair suit was not part of the evening’s plans. You don’t look so cool with a nose bleed. It’s the guy who gave it to you who is the hero.
“Hope this gives you a brief insight to an untold era in Watford.”
Patsi Whelan-Archer, formally from Whitwell Road, in Garston, read Mr Ellisdon’s letter about Roy Rumble last week and has sent in some more information.
The 61-year-old, now living in Sutton Coldfield, said: “I remember him very well. As your article said, he was an amazing dancer.
“I used to go to the ‘Rank’ on Thursday and Saturday nights and Roy was always first up on the floor and always last off.
“We all loved him and looked up to him because he really had an amazing presence; he was his own man.
“I remember him stepping forward to help me when a lad was trying to force me to dance with him when I’d said ‘no’.
“Roy decked him and there was no more problems, even the bouncers respected him as they, and everyone, knew he was a trouble stopper, not a trouble starter.
“All Roy wanted was to dance and for everyone to be happy around him. I will never forget Roy Rumble – a lovely, lovely man.
“I now live in the Midlands and when I read your article it brought all the wonderful memories of the 60s flooding back. Does anyone remember ‘The Trade’?
“I saw the Who and many, many amazing bands there, and was asked out by Rod the Mod aka Rod Stewart, but thought he was a bighead and refused! Oh well, no regrets eh?
Erin Donnachie: Erin’s interest in Music started at a young age learning piano and later singing in choirs and jazz bands. It was when she was approached by Gianluca and Gavin to join their band that she adapted to becoming a strong rock vocalist.
Gavin Williams: Gavin picked up a guitar at 17 years old after idolizing legends such as Slash and Black Sabbath since he was quite young and formed a band with his best friend Gianluca before forming Life on Standby.
Gianluca Demelas: Gianluca asked for a drum kit for his Christmas after seeing a friend learn drums and dreamt of being like John Bonham. Through school Gianluca jammed with Gavin and the two soon formed a band which became Life on Standby.
Liam Walker: Liam (originally a guitarist) has an interest in blues and John Mayer. Liam joined Life on Standby as the band’s bassist while he was still in school.
Biography of Life on Standby:
Life on Standby is an Alternative Electronic Rock band who formed in Greenock, Scotland in 2011. Since their formation, the four piece have released two EP’s ‘Set the Sail’ and ‘Masquerade’ as well as 3 singles. However since the release of ‘Masquerade’ the band have climbed up the ranks of the Scottish live music circuit from playing the Glasgow O2 Academy and Garage Main Stages to Headlining King Tuts Wah Wah Hut and sold out Oran Mor. 2014 has been a big year for the band, being invited to perform with bands such as Marmozets and The Hype Theory, Life on Standby were invited down to the Red Bull Studios in London to record a live track and video while observed by Alternative break through band Don Broco, which ultimately led to their first ever performance on English soil at Download Festival followed by a very successful first UK tour. Life on Standby are now looking forward to releasing their debut album in March 2015.
Live Shows and Tours:
Past Venues: (2011-2012)
Garage Attic (Glasgow, Scotland) Garage G2 (Glasgow, Scotland) Word Up (Greenock, Scotland)
Oran Mor – Sold out Headline show (Glasgow, Scotland)
PJ Malloy’s (Dunfermline, Scotland) Download Festival 2014 (Donnington, England)
Recent UK Tour: (Oct 2014)
Green Room (Perth, Scotland) Eagle (Inverness, Scotland)
Nice N Sleazy (Glasgow, Scotland)
Lomax (Liverpool, England) Lounge 41 (Workington, England) the Victoria Inn (Derby, England)
Future Live Events: (2015)
Audio – Glasgow, Scotland: Fri 30th January
Lounge 41 – Workington, England: Sat 7th March
The Swan – Stranraer, Scotland: Fri 13th March
The Green Room – Perth: Sat 14th March
Fanny by Gaslight – Kilmarnock: Sun 15th March
Reviews:
“Incorporating snatches of electronica affords them an eclectic variation on their hard-chugging, contemporary sound, with front woman Erin Donnachie’s spirited performance lending them a streak of punk edge” – Jay Richardson, The Scotsman.
“One of the best unsigned Alternative Electronic bands in Scotland” – Daily Mail.
“Definitely a band to look out for” – Duncan Gray, Triple G Music.
“Life on Standby were the standout act of the night, such a mass of raw energy and emotion” – Underground Uncovered.
“One could perhaps argue that Greenock’s Life on Standby don’t fit the usual mould of a Download Festival band, but don’t be fooled by their electronic leanings. Behind the synths and front woman Erin’s soothing vocals lays a body of eclectic, crunching riffs that will shake off any Sunday hangover.” – Daily Dischord
“SINCE forming in 2011, Life on Standby has emerged as one of Scotland’s best unsigned alternative electronic bands.” – Evening Times.
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