Gig 013/014/015 Manfred Mann’s Earthband / Dr Feelgood / Hawkwind

Manfred Mann’s Earthband / Racing Cars
23 September 1976
Oxford New Theatre

Dr Feelgood / The George Hatcher Band

24 September 1976

Oxford New Theatre

Hawkwind / Tiger

25 September 1976

Oxford New Theatre

If I believed that sort of hocus-pocus I’d say it was the stars aligning or somesuch airy tosh, anyway in September 1976 I went to three gigs in consecutive days at the New Theatre and was in the front row for all of them. By the third night the security were giving me funny looks. The way it worked was we talk about a gig we want to see, someone agrees to queue up and buy tickets, and if the front row is available the job’s a good’un.

Manfred Mann had a few big hits in the 60s and Manfred Mann’s Earthband was a proggish update of the earlier group. They’d had a couple of modest hits, most recently a version of Springsteen’s Blinded by the Light. This was another one where I don’t remember anyone being a big fan but it was a gig so we went and frankly I remember almost nothing about it, except we went backstage and got autographs. Strangely I remember the support act Racing Cars a bit better, the singer was an improbable little baldy Welsh fella and they had a tune called They Shoot Horses Don’t They which became their only hit. Not really my thing mind.

Dr Feelgood on the other hand, this was one I really couldn’t wait to see. I’d been a fan for a couple of years, they divided opinion because when they appeared they were so unlike anything else on the scene that it felt quite confrontational. Short songs, no overdubs, in mono! Black-and-white covers where they looked like guys who’d been kicked out of the army for insubordination. You’ll hear people raving about Dr Feelgood’s back-to-basics authenticity, which is really to miss the point – yes they were true to the spirit of rock’n’roll, in that they cared about putting on a great show, and were every bit as attentive to their image as Roxy Music. A tall, authoritative, mean-looking singer in a shabby white suit who looked like the whole operation was on his terms and his terms only, and a black-clad manic bug-eyed guitarist who played rhythm and lead simultaneously and scuttled across the stage like a clockwork chicken. The bass player and drummer just looked like utter bastards. You wanna make something of it? They played for about an hour, a set with absolutely no spare flesh on it, all staccato chords and snarled vocals, minimal light show, sparse gear, no effects, not even a plectrum ffs! Didn’t say much to the audience and they certainly didn’t smile. By the encore they were going fecking nuts, the singer doing crazy press-ups and the guitarist a scissor-kicking whirling dervish. Their version of (what I now know to be) Jerry Byrne’s New Orleans classic Lights Out was probably the most deranged performance I ever saw, maybe rivalled only by the Cramps a few years later. You just didn’t do that sort of thing in 1976. Come to think of it, you don’t do it now either. Fantastic stuff.

The support was the George Hatcher Band, who played the sort of downhome shit-kicking southern boogie which was quite popular at the time. George was a good ol’ southern boy with long blond hair and a moustache. The rest of the band were from Birmingham (UK, not Alabama). Their guitarist was called John Thomas, which we found funny, and George had a regrettable air-guitar technique whereby he looked like he was pleasuring himself, which we found even funnier. Entertaining, not really in a good way though.

After the gig we went backstage and I got Lee Brilleaux and Wilko Johnson’s autograph on a ripped off album sleeve. I still have it.

And then there was grebo favourites Hawkwind, who’d been around a few years and were touring a new album called Astounding Sounds, Amazing Music. I didn’t think anything could top Dr Feelgood and was probably correct, though the Hawklords were very entertaining, singer Robert Calvert looking like a WWI flying ace via Lawrence of Arabia, all jodhpurs and scimitar. Apart from their hit Silver Machine I wasn’t that familiar with their oeuvre at the time, and I think they’d toned down some of their earlier craziness for a more cerebral approach; certainly there was no sign of Stacia, and they had a huge luminous-orange structure called Atomhenge onstage with them. It would have worked better at a festival but a good show nonetheless. Support was a group called Tiger, featuring renowned session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan, of whom I remember nothing apart from a rather pointless musical setting of William Blake’s Tyger Tyger. The next day was Sunday and I was happy not to go to a gig, at least for another week.