Gig 030 The Damned / The Adverts

The Damned / The Adverts
17 June
Swindon Brunel Rooms

The Damned can now play three chords, The Adverts can play one – hear all four of them! Brilliant! A proper punk gig! Back to the Brunel Rooms for this one, it was a Friday and I took the train from Reading where I was doing a day-release course at the art college as part of my apprenticeship, meeting up with my friends at Swindon. One of the best things about this gig was the hanging around outside the venue and watching various punks, or ‘punk rockers’ as the tabloids liked to call them, turn up. ‘Oi got thrown out of three pubs!’ boasted a lad with pvc trousers and a necklace made out of barbed wire. Judging by the accents they seemed to have come from all over the West Country (not that oi had anything to feel superior about). ‘You shoulda seen the Clash at Bristol, bloody magic!’, ‘Oi’m gonna get on the stage oi am!’, ‘bloody bouncer troied to break moy baaastard arm!’

I thought the punks looked fantastic. My colleagues at the print factory gave me a hard time just for wearing drainpipes and having short-ish, spiky-ish hair, which wasn’t even dyed. On one occasion when a pudgy greasy-haired lad called Gareth, whose trousers were as wide at the ankle as they were at the waist, was taking the piss big time I made the schoolboy error of snapping and pointing out that he wasn’t exactly Britain’s best-dressed man himself. ‘At least oi don’t look a proize cunt’, came the Wildean riposte. In those days and in that setting the cunt-word wasn’t particularly shocking – in a normal day you’d hear it four or five times before morning tea-break and it was usually the equivalent of ‘silly sod’ or something similarly innocuous. Still, welcome to my working week: 8am-5pm for four unbroken years, with one day a week at college during term time. There were blokes who had been there all their working life and some of my contemporaries would have done the same if the factory hadn’t closed a few years later. England in the 1970s could be grindingly conservative, if not yet Conservative.

I suppose this was one reason why I felt I drawn to punk, which at least gave the impression that another world was possible. Contrary to what the media would have you believe, at least in the early days every act had a unique character and possessed a sometimes spectacular imagination which often transcended their musical ability, to the annoyance of older rock lags. The Adverts were best known for having a glamorous, sulky-looking ‘rock chick’ on bass who couldn’t really play. In fact Gaye Advert’s playing was no worse than the rest of the group, and in any case that wasn’t the point. Possibly as a result of having grown up in rural Devon, singer TV Smith took what would now be considered a meta approach to the punk movement, observing as an outsider while fronting one of the most innovative acts. Their excellent if rudimentary debut single, One Chord Wonders had him commenting on his own group’s performance at a disastrous gig; in Bored Teenagers he addressed creative stasis: ‘We're talking into corners, finding ways to fill the vacuum; and though our mouths are dry we talk in hope to hit on something new’; and in their best-known tune he assumes the eyes of executed murderer Gary Gilmore. Sure they were musically primitive, but because they hadn’t yet learned ‘how to play’ their tunes bypassed conventional structure and sounded like nothing else, staggering, jerky rhythms, speeding up and slowing down all over the place. Despite their punkish appearance – lots of black, leather trousers, heavy eye make-up – the music didn’t lend itself to the pogo and the audience didn’t seem to know quite what to make of them.

When The Damned appeared I was right at the front, and as soon as they hit the first chord I was propelled on to the low stage and promptly shuffled off to the side, from where I watched the rest of the gig, close enough to reach out and touch Captain Sensible (which might not have been a good idea). The Damned could really play, particularly guitarist Brian James, and they put on a great show too. As with all the punk acts there was something of a cartoon element, and the four personalities – guitar hero, hooligan, nutter, vampire – could easily have been made into a kids’ TV show, but there was nothing contrived about it, that seems to be just how they were; more than forty years later Dave Vanian would perform a high-profile gig in the guise of Nosferatu, shaved head, pointy ears and all. They were just too idiosyncratic to be co-opted into a movement, and were thus shunned by the punk Stalinists, no great loss as it turned out. Listening back to their first album the debt to the Stooges is obvious but at the time I and most of their audience didn’t have that frame of reference, the Stooges’ albums being only available as expensive imports and never played on the radio. They thrashed through the album, the singles and a couple of new tunes in about 45 minutes, and it was wildly entertaining. This was probably the first time I had seen a crowd go properly mental, and this was more than a performative gesture: there was a sense of communion created by the awareness of the hostility they would face once back in the ‘straight’ world. To display affinity with what was considered a subversive, anti-monarchist, anarchistic movement was to risk a kicking. The fact that such a stance was at best (e.g. The Clash) inchoate and in the case of The Damned non-existant didn’t matter to the tabloid-reading goons. What the hell, it was worth it, at least for a while.