Gig 022/023/024/025/026 Burlesque / Be Bop Deluxe / Chapman-Whitney Streetwalkers / Roy Harper / Frankie Miller

Burlesque
29 January 1977
Oxford Polytechnic

Be Bop Deluxe
30 January 1977
Oxford New Theatre

Chapman-Whitney Streetwalkers
5 February 1977
Oxford New Theatre

Roy Harper
10 February
Oxford Polytechnic

Frankie Miller
2 March
Oxford Polytechnic

A cluster of gigs none of which I was too bothered about at the time. Burlesque were one of those acts who signed a record deal and were almost immediately out of fashion. They certainly weren’t punk, nor prog or hard rock, in fact they didn’t really fit anywhere and consequently weren’t very successful. The closest comparison would be with art-school smartarses like Deaf School (another out-of-time act) or Roxy Music, with added jazz chops. Dressed in Army Surplus gear echoing Bryan Ferry’s GI-Blues style, and playing tunes referencing 1950s Hollywood films stars and old-school dance trends, they put on a show and were pretty good, in front of a fairly sparse audience. Singer/saxophonist Ian Trimmer and guitarist Billy Jenkins continued to feature on the London pub scene for years, and in the mid-80s one of my groups briefly shared a record label with Billy. His release Scratches of Spain wound up the jazz purists something rotten.

Be Bop Deluxe were another group whose time was nearly up, though they’d had a decent run. They had graduated to the New Theatre and were wearing smart business suits, promoting their fourth album Modern Music. I think their best was already behind them. I remember almost nothing about this gig, except in the bar before the gig we saw several footballers from Oxford United, plus Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. I wish I could say they were hanging out together, but as John Cooper Clarke likes to say, you can’t have everything – where would you put it?

Streetwalkers were the group put together by Roger Chapman and Charlie Whitney after the demise of their successful bluesy prog group Family. Chapman sung like he was gargling marbles. Again I remember very little about the gig itself, I think we went backstage and they group were quite amiable. However two other things stick in the mind from that evening. First, when I got back to my moped someone had bust open the top box and stolen my crash helmet, which was a right pain, I had to get a taxi home, then buy a new helmet. My dad was fuming but too kind to insist that I pay. I never thought about it at the time but I realise now that my family got by on a very modest income. The consolation was that also in the top box and left untouched was a copy of Buzzcocks’ self-released Spiral Scratch ep, bought earlier the same day. I still have it and these days it must be worth, ooh, £35 at least – that’s not the point. The point is it’s brilliant. The other memory is that one of my friends had snuck a cassette player into the gig and made a recording. Listening back the next day, Streetwalkers sounded good but were frequently drowned out by some clown in the audience singing along, loudly and wildly off-key. I’ll never be able to hear My Friend the Sun the same way again.

In 1977 I wasn’t too excited about grouchy old-wave troubadour Roy Harper, so I was surprised to enjoy the gig more than I might have expected. Memories are inevitably hazy. There had been a story in the press about how Roy had contracted a disease by giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to one of his sheep, which led to certain audience members going ‘baaah’ between songs. This was funny, until Roy made it clear that in fact it wasn’t funny at all and if it carried on he was going to deck the culprit. Roy was in no sense punk, but his oppositional rattiness struck a chord and I later became fond of his work.

Frankie Miller was a blues-soul man who had made a few decent records, nothing revolutionary but some good tunes, and some righteous anger for the common man. He cultivated the image of – and quite possibly was – a Glasgow hard man, in the manner of Alex Harvey without the theatricality. Once the gig was under way we were quite encouraged to see that he was playing to type as he seemed a bit pished, rambling about how he wanted a hit record so he could buy ‘yin o’ thae wee hooses in the country’. A fellow weegie in the audience kept shouting ‘ye’ll be wantin’ a bricklayer Frankie’; Frankie wasn’t in the mood for banter and told him to shut up. A comparison could be made with Graham Parker, who was drawing on the same sources, but Frankie’s tunes were a tad more generic, and the group didn’t swing like The Rumour, plus they were all a bit older, wore lionel blairs and looked like off-duty coppers. About halfway through the set one of my friends swiped a setlist from the stage and as each song ended we shouted for the next one on the list, whooping loudly as the group duly launched into the number we had ‘requested’. This was uproariously funny until Frankie started to look very fed up, at which point we desisted in case he should decide to jump off the stage and put the heid on us. We were too scared to go backstage.