Originally I am from Gateshead. Felling to be precise, born
in ’64. I come from a folk music family; my dad was a singer who actually sang
with Liam Kelly from The Dubliners, while my mam saw Bob Dylan at The City Hall
in 65 or 66. I was hearing folk music from 4 or 5 years onwards and by age 8 or
9 I was into Bob Dylan and Lindisfarne, stuff like that. I had a couple of
older cousins; John Hird around 3 years older and formed The Prigs, and Grahame
who is 8 or 9 years older. He is the real musical success in the family, Grahame
Cusack, he had 2 sessions in 80 and 81 on John Peel and released a single with
his band The Monoconics. John and
Grahame started to play the music they were into to me, originally John liked
Richie Blackmores’ Rainbow which I couldn’t abide; Graham was into more experimental stuff like
Tangerine Dream, Krautrock stuff. When I was 11, I got an acoustic guitar, but
all I did was learn a few chords. About a year later John got an electric. In
early 77 he and a few mates decided that they wanted to start playing music.
They had been influenced by The Damned, I was just turning 12 to 13 in August
77, so the music that appealed to me was not the straight punk. I never liked
The Stranglers, the only Pistols song I liked was Submission, and I never
liked The Damned. To me it didn’t sound much different from a speeded up Slade
or Sweet. I liked the slightly more experimental stuff; I was really keen on Oh
Bondage Up Yours! by XRS, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I would say Christmas Eve 1976 listening to John Peel, which
was the start of the first Festive 50, was a life changing event for me. He
played ‘Anarchy in The UK’ for the first time on British radio. It
didn’t particularly do anything for me but what really did was Richard Hell and
The Voidoids ‘I belong to the Blank Generation’. I thought that was one of
the most amazing things I had ever heard. In ’77 when New Wave album came out,
the ones that got me were the American ones rather than the British. Patti
Smith is still someone I adore ‘Piss Factory’ was on there, ‘Shake
Some Action’ by The Flamin’ Groovies and then Marquee Moon I got,
everybody bought it because the 12” single, never had one before.
As for making music, I still had this acoustic guitar, I
could play Bob Dylan, ‘Fog on The Tyne’. I couldn’t do anything
experimental or challenging, but a couple of mates I knocked about with we
decided we wanted to form a band in 78, after I’d bought myself a cheap
telecaster copy for £20 second hand. We eventually called ourselves Pretentious
Drivel. What had really started influencing me through ’78 was The Gang of
Four, The Mekons, Essential Logic, Wire; post punk. Subway Sect’s Ambition.
Stuff on Rough Trade and the more experimental labels. Stuff I love to
this day. Me, a friend called Chris and
a friend called Rob, all couldn’t play so we were trying to be as experimental
as possible; this involved tape loops, recording telephones, stuff off the
telly, wacky almost atonal noise and drone stuff. We originally called
ourselves The Modernists. It was the name of a book I’d seen in a second hand
bookshop at the bottom of Westgate Road, bright yellow hardback book with The
Modernists in blood red. The book was about painters, but we didn’t know
anything about that. We just liked the name. It sounded awkward.
My mam could get us photocopies of stuff from the school
where she worked. In those days it was important to get your name known. There was band
graffiti all over the town. ! When Eldon Square was being done up, painted in
massive green letters was The Chris Grey Band. Totally obscure. My mates saw
them once and they were fabulously
terrible. They had someone playing the saxophone, somebody else had a guitar
but couldn’t really play it, a drummer and the singer stood there with his
duffle coat fastened right up as people were throwing pints at him the whole
time. Probably because of this, we thought that what was important was to get
lots of publicity, get your name known. My mam photocopied lots of flyers with
‘The Modernists are coming’ on and we stuck them up with sellotape in bus stops
and the record shops round town. We weren’t playing gigs as we couldn’t really
say we had enough songs. We had weekly practises on a Sunday, where we just
made horrible, wailing feedback noise with 2 guitars, a bass and lots of tapes.
Then what happened in early ’79 you started to get this ‘mod revival’. When
Chris saw Secret Affair, Purple Hearts, The Modernists written upstairs on the
number 1 bus, we swiftly changed the name to Pretentious Drivel.
Because of how young we were, we couldn’t go to gigs at the
Poly, the University or the Mayfair. We would see bands at the City Hall, but
that was commercial stuff, not what we were into, but being aged 14, we
couldn’t get in to licensed premises. One place we used to go was Spectro Arts
by Worsick St Bus Station going down to Pilgrim St; it’s pulled down now. It
was so totally Arts Council seventies; it would have performance artists, photo
exhibitions, sculpting, painting and they had a performance space there. They
would let anybody in for about 30p. Once there was a bloke on stage with hot
water bottle on each foot and every time he moved his foot it made this ridiculous
quacking sound. He was in a white boiler suit with a violin and he was running
around playing this and making this squawking sound. A lad who used to hang
around with us from Sunderland, Pete Sumby had a pencil in his pocket and wrote
on this brown paper carrier bag ‘Pretentious Drivel’ regarding the performance.
We thought that is the name of our band.
We used knock around together on Saturdays; we’d to buy our
records from Listen Ear but we were not trendy enough to hang around outside. We’d
hang around Days of Hope, the socialist bookshop that now is between the Bodega
and The Tyne Theatre, as we were all lefties and anarchists. We were supporters
of an organisation called International Marxist Grouping, who had sponsored a
Rock Against Racism single with The Proles and The Condemned on it. We never
changed the world but we all found we had a mutual affection for quite obscure
noisy post punk music.
One time we bought a drum kit from a second hand shop
in Gosforth. We didn’t have a drummer, but we bought the drum kit just in case.
We’d set it up and occasionally have people come and play with us. That lad
Pete Sumby came and played with us for a while, as he was a big Scritti Polliti
fan I’d never heard ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ until I met him and I thought it was
fantastic. Pete was also into improvised
music and he didn’t agree with playing in bands that did rehearsed to try and
be proficient, so he left. We were completely musically inept; we didn’t do
verse chorus, verse solo. We had 2 chords and would play the same thing with
lyrics over the top. If you’ve ever listened to The Swell Maps bedroom tapes, Whatever
Happens Next, it was a bit like
that you know. There were three of us in the band at the time; me, a lad called
Chris Dixon, and a lad called Rob Gosden. Sadly I haven’t seen either of them
in over 25 years.
As well as Swell Maps, I loved The Raincoats first album and
The Mekons . We used to write to them, 36 Richmond Mount, Headingley, Leeds and
they’d write back. These days I’m friends with John Langford now 35 years on. That’s
one of the wonderful things about social media, you can get in touch people you
used to idolise as a teenager and rediscover they’re just normal blokes.
I work with Rob Blamire and Paul Harvey from Penetration.
They’re mates. Rob and Pauline are
lovely people. Same as Johnny Brown from The Band of Holy Joy who, as Johny
Fusion in Speed, was the best punk singer I ever saw.
Pretentious Drivel managed to get a singer, Carol Rushbrooe,
who was a friend of a friend; a really good singer. She played saxophone
properly in a youth orchestra, so we thought ‘oh its kind of Poly Styrene and
Laura Logic combined, that’s great!’ We were supposed to make our live debut in July 1979
upstairs from The Garage with The Prigs and Hepatitis (who were kind of like a
Talking Heads type art rock band; quite a bit older, a bit of a draw). We were
organising it as a fundraiser for this organisation we were in Revolution
Youth, which was an IMG front. We just thought it would give us a chance to go
on strike and skive off school and that. We had this gig organised and then
Chris discovered that that was when his parents had booked their bloody
holiday! Friday the 13th of July or something! They booked because
it was cheaper than going in the school holidays so we didn’t get to play!
We ended up playing our first gig on October 3rd
1979 at a community centre in Whickham. We were invited by friends of
friends not because of our talents or
reputation, but because of what we could bring to the table; we all had
amplifiers and a drum kit. For transport we relied on our dads and mine worked
for the council so he had a van so that was fantastic. We played this gig, the
four of us, noise and drone, we went down like death at a birthday party, awful.
So we decided that what we were more interested in wasn’t playing live! Being
creative, what we called ‘practicing’. It wasn’t really practicing it was
extended jamming. We had two places; my garage or a Chris mam’s work. She was a
nurse and she worked at Newbiggin Hall health centre, probably been pulled
down. Upstairs there was a flat for nurses or whatever but there was nobody
living there and she got the key and said ‘why don’t you practice there?’ We
would make a point of doing it on a Thursday night when Top Of The Pops was on,
showing that we didn’t want to be commercial! We used to do it on a Sunday
afternoons as well. The good citizens of Westerhope and Newbiggin Hall noticed
there was noise coming from upstairs at the doctors on Sunday afternoons. Can
you remember what it was like on a Sunday then? You used to walk down Northumberland
Street the only thing that was open was RS McColl’s Newsagent. Unless you were
going to the chemist to fill a prescription, you couldn’t buy anything else in
the town!
We managed to get a little better. For instance we managed
to master barre chords! Chris was doing A levels at Newcastle College, there
was a kid in his history class who had moved up from Cambridge. A lad called
Andrew who was really interested in music but not just that he was a drummer. We
invited him along and lo and behold he was absolutely brilliant. Just playing
with him meant we turned from being this Rough Trade noise band we became like
the Bunnymen, Velvets, Au Pairs even Postcard Records kind of thing. We became
much more tuneful, more melodic.
Andrew was a brilliant musician but he’d just moved here
from down south and he didn’t know anyone, he could have had the pick of any
musicians in town but we were the first ones to ask. We continued with him for
two years and did about 20 gigs. Balmbras, Newton Park in High Heaton, The
Lonsdale, The Gosforth Hotel. Some of
the gigs were successful, some less so. Carol was sometimes in the band and
sometimes had other things in her life. It came to a point where we were going
to be leaving to go to university in ’82 and the last gig that we did, at Balmbras,
we got 2 encores! End of March ’82 It was great. We had the choice of saying
‘bugger it, we’re not going to go and be students we’re going to concentrate on
music, we’re going to try’ we talked about recording a demo but when it came
down to it me and Rob were more keen on getting away from home than we were staying
in a band. Rob went off to Manchester, Chris went off to Sheffield, I went off
to Ireland, while Andrew stayed in Newcastle and Carol, well I don’t know what
happened, I’ve never seen her. I believe she trained to be a nurse. We’d had 3
to 4 years of going from unlistenable atonal droning to being a not bad but not
particularly inspired or original indie band. If I am honest the stuff I liked
best was all the crazy wacky noisy stuff which I would have liked to have
continued with; improvised noise, feedback, found sounds and all that. If your
musical talent is so minimal as to be negligible, when you are trying to do regulation
type rock or indie, the results are so uninspired and limp, because you have
nothing new to add.
When the American author William S Burroughs used to teach
creative writing, he tried to persuade all his students to stop writing because
in his words “there’s more than enough books in the world anyway”. I thought
‘there’s more than enough bands in the world’ anyway. When groups who do
something interesting and challenging like The Comsat Angels never got anywhere
what chance did we have? I enjoyed making improvised noise more than I enjoyed
playing ‘real’ music. I would never say I was in a punk band, it was more post
punk.
To this day I never go and see tribute acts and I don’t tend
to go and see bands who have just reformed to go and re do some album. Take the
likes of Wire and Gang of Four who have had hiatuses in their career but have never
actually split up. Wire refuse to perform anything more than five years old. I
like bands that continue to push the boundaries and stuff and if I had
continued doing that I might have got somewhere, ha! I went to university and
went into another band there with a lad that ended up playing bass for The
Petrol Emotion and when they split up, not one of the O’Neill brothers a lad called John Marchini who was
only with them for one album. We had a good time at university being Velvet
Underground copyists, it was good, I enjoyed it like you know but I found the
limits of my talent were such I couldn’t write anything that didn’t sound
derivative. When I finished university I got rid of my gut air and amps and
kept my semi acoustic and every now and again I take it down but I haven’t
written anything I could call a new piece in about 20 odd years. I had a finite
amount of talent and don’t have any more.
My mate Dave says ‘football let’s you down but music never
does’. I couldn’t imagine a time between now and the end of my life when I
wouldn’t be looking forward to new releases or going to gigs. I went to see Lee
Scratch Perry with my son. Perry is ’79. He’s older than me mam! My son said
he’s kind of like a Rastafarian Mark E Smith, the shambolic figure that is
saying stuff that no one can understand ‘you are in the presence of genius
like’
We were very democratic in our song writing. We’d try
and get everybody to write the same number of songs and also when we played
live have the same number of compositions played. My all time favourite band
are Teenage Fan Club and on every album there are 4 songs by Norman 4 by Gerry
and 4 by Raymond they really are democratic.When it came to our actual songs; at first it used to be any
stream of consciousness nonsense that was scribbled down. We had a song called
‘Where is the ceiling?g’ which used to go on for like 12 minutes. It had quite
a complex bass line but just a two note guitar over and over again. The words
just fit in a sense around them because it didn’t have an actual structure. You
didn’t have to have syllables, rhymes etc it was just about anything. I
listened to Human Leagues Being Boiled and on the b side which
is supposed to be an instrumental Phil Oakey talks over the start and I thought
it was a brilliant idea so we’d be talking or read something out. Cut ups, you
know the way Bowie borrowed the Gysin and Burroughs way of doings; he’d get a
page from a newspaper and cut it up to find interesting phrases. We’d do stuff
like that, very pretentious and arty and all that.
We were having a laugh. Once you start to do more ‘chorded’
type songs we had to try and write songs and then they would just be very anti
establishment type things influenced by like how say The Fall were maybe not
put out as being intellectual as theirs! The things we avoided were love songs about lasses who wouldn’t go out
with us or we hate Margret Thatcher songs. That always seemed too obvious to
us. If we ever wrote about relationships it wasn’t ‘why doesn’t Mary Smith go
out with me’ it was more like ‘Why is society so oppressive towards women that
they feel they have to have relationships with men. ‘ Of course we were just a
bunch of middle class wankers you know. When I did my A levels at Gateshead
College the place was completely full of big hard lads who were in The Sham
Army who were on day release there. They would just go and persecute us, pseudo
intellectuals ha, ha. It’s just the way it was. I always looked for obscurity;
I always thought obscurity was a good idea like, probably because I couldn’t
play very well.
All I ever wanted, all I ever wanted was to release one
seven inch single. What I did instead I
went into writing. Both fiction and I write journalism. I’ve had a book
published so that’s alright for me; I’ve made some kind of mark. There will be
something in the British Library that has got my name on. Village Voice and it’s
about Percy Main Amateurs football club. I edit a Newcastle fanzine as well
called The Popular Side, so I am creative and I know that I am better
at writing than I am at playing. It was always sad though, my fingertips were
always used to feel rock hard from holding down the strings and that’s gone.
When you don’t pick your guitar up every day and when you do it starts to get
painful in the way it did when you first tried to teach yourself and of course
when you are not in a band you don’t have the motivation. Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m better as a
consumer than a creator of music.
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