Gig 018/019 Dr Feelgood / The Stranglers / Loudon Wainwright III

Dr Feelgood / The George Hatcher Band
24 October 1976
Reading Top Rank

The Tyla Gang / The Stranglers / The Vibrators
15 November 1976
Oxford Polytechnic

Loudon Wainwright III
?? November
Oxford Polytechnic

The Dr Feelgood gig in Oxford was so good I had to see them again a few weeks later. This should have been even better, since unlike the all-seated New Theatre the Top Rank was standing only. A neo-brutalist slab opposite Reading Station, once inside it was a pretty decent venue with a sprung dancefloor and a balcony. We piled down the front and stayed there, close enough to touch Lee Brilleaux and be sprayed by sweat as Wilko Johnson skittered across the stage. In the event a lesson was learned here: the set was more or less the same as the Oxford one – if I hadn’t seen it before I might have been similarly blown away, since I had it lacked the element of surprise. The same moves, the same craziness, they had the show down to a tee as you might expect, which made what had seemed crazy now look a little contrived. More recently I discovered that by this time there was considerable tension between Wilko and the other group members, and he left a few months later, but they were too professional to let it show. Dr Feelgood could replicate the same manic intensity every night; I on the other hand could never experience that initial thrill again. It was a good gig and all that, but I left sadder and wiser. And still only 16. Sigh.

Never mind, the punk thing was becoming more real every day. Around this time I bought the first UK punk single, New Rose by The Damned, from an Abingdon record shop called Listen In Company, having heard it on John Peel’s show. This was what it was about! Fast, noisy, fiercely intense, no flab, referencing cool stuff like the Shangri-La’s (‘Is she really going out with him?’) and the New York Dolls (the guitar riff nicked from Jet Boy). There was also a great record called I’m Stranded by Australian outcasts The Saints, another work of scuzzy genius. I played both to death at great volume, heaven knows what my parents made of it. When it was announced that The Damned and the Flamin’ Groovies would play Oxford Polytechnic I almost hyperventilated. Then it was cancelled, but there was another punk-ish gig coming up at the same venue, featuring The Tyla Gang, The Stranglers and the Vibrators, which was still pretty exciting

No sitting cross-legged on the floor for this one, we were straight down the front (in those days we were always down the front if possible). The Vibrators were slightly disdained on the punk scene for being a bit older than most of the other acts, they were probably about 26 or something. The fact that they could obviously play quite well was a bit of a giveaway, you could tell that they had probably been wearing lionel blairs and indulging long hair and long guitar solos not too long before. For all that they had some good tunes, notably neglected classic Whips and Furs which has one of the all-time great power-pop basslines.

I’d read about The Stranglers, like the Vibrators they were a bit older than most of the punks but they weren’t particularly trying to disguise this, nor to adopt the look, though Jean-Jacques Burnel became one of the original punk pin-ups. In the event they looked sleazy, a little diseased and very scary. The guitarist was a skinny, scowling presence, his battered Telecaster sounded like it was being played inside a metal dustbin; the keyboard player had a moustache and played ornate psychedelic countermelodies which could have come from 60’s LA (I didn’t know anything about The Doors in those days); the drummer was a grizzly-looking old fella; and the bass-player, blimey! A lithe, unsmiling character, with an undeniable gallic beauty which hinted at acts of depravity in a Breton dockyard. He played the most extraordinary rumbling melodic basslines, his Fender Precision the lead instrument much of the time. He and the guitarist stalked the lip of the stage like pox-raddled members of a Victorian press-gang, glowering at anyone who dared to make eye contact. At one point some punkish characters looked like they were about to invade, only to back off sharpish when the snarly pair loomed over them. The songs were like nothing I’d ever heard, not all fast and not all short, mainly minor-key and darkly melodic. There were strange, lurching grooves, complex arrangements and semi-spoken lyrics which seemed to be about things like rats and death – something for everyone really. By the end of their set I could hardly breathe.

It was always going to be hard for The Tyla Gang to follow that but they were good nonetheless. Sean Tyla was an imposing character, a burly balding veteran of the London pub scene with Ducks Deluxe, you wouldn’t want to mess with him. When a glass was thrown at the stage in a cretinous approximation of punk behaviour he looked like he was ready to kill (which is fair enough, I’ve had it happen to me and it’s horrible). They played a rocking set including their Stiff single Styrofoam, and it rounded off the evening better than the Stranglers might have done, dispelling to some degree the pall of evil menace left hanging in the air by the meninblack. In the end only one of these three acts made it big, for a few years rendering the pop charts a darker, scarier and more exciting place.

A week or so later it was Loudon Wainwright III, about whom I knew almost nothing though some of my friends rated him. After the Stranglers the prospect of a beardy old bloke with an acoustic guitar wasn’t very exciting. Loudon turned out to be quite entertaining, in a sour, misanthropic way, performing comic songs about suicide and rejection. I’m never too sure about applying contemporary sensibilities to critique artistic output from years ago, but even at the time his tune Hardy Boys at the Y – aping David Bowie’s vocal delivery – was rampantly homophobic, and the song about his infant son Rufus is a Tit Man is a boorish snigger of male resentment. While I’ve no idea what sort of character Loudon was in real life, some form of poetic justice would seem to be served by son Rufus becoming a celebrated gay performer, and daughter Martha dedicating a song to dad entitled Bloody Motherfucking Asshole.