Gig 033 Motörhead / The Count Bishops

Motörhead / The Count Bishops
6 August 1977
Aylesbury Friars

While Oxford was a musical desert, at least if you were into punk, everyone who was anyone played Friars in the small and sleepy Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury. It was on the circuit, all the punk acts, played there, Iggy Pop had made his comeback there earlier in 1977 with David Bowie on keyboards, and Bowie himself had debuted Ziggy Stardust there in January 1972. To this day the only existing officially commissioned sculpture of Bowie stands in the archway leading to where the Civic Hall, which hosted Friars, used to be. As statues go it’s a bit rubbish, but you can’t have everything.

I went to this gig on the Honda along with Phil, who rode a Puch Maxi if I remember rightly, and we had arranged to meet some of our bus-bound friends there. This involved a round trip of more than 60 miles, and it felt like a voyage to the other side of the world. About 20 miles in we stopped in the genteel town of Thame to compare notes, buy chips, gawp at this hitherto undiscovered place, and generally to marvel at our ridiculous escapade which would soon take us across the border into the badlands of Buckinghamshire.

This wouldn’t have been quite so daft if I had been a big fan of Motörhead – truth is I wasn’t that bothered. They weren’t punk but were acceptable to punks because they were fast and loud and had attitude, plus the Hawkwind legacy seemed to fit if you could pin them as grebos rather than hippies. In fact Lemmy was more of an old-school rocker who had fallen hard for Little Richard first time round and sought to replicate that sort of primal craziness in a rock format. Motörhead nailed it with their first single Motörhead, from the album Motörhead. (Regrettably it wasn’t on the Motörhead label but as I keep saying, you can’t have everything.) Whatever, it was pretty magnificent, more punk than punk really, rumbling bass like distant thunder exploding into the most extraordinary racket: almost too fast, growled vocals, drums all over the place to the point where the whole thing nearly falls apart at the end of the short guitar break. The B-side City Kids was good too, though at other times they veered towards the sludgy end of heavy rock which I didn’t much care for.

If one thing swung it for me it was the support act The Count Bishops, another of those revved up r’n’b acts whose Speedball ep I’d liked a lot, and whose more recent single Train Train was ace. Original frontman Mike Spenser had an almost fundamentalist vision of the punk/garage aesthetic but had left to form his own group the Cannibals, to be replaced by Dave Tice who was a more routine bluesy shouter. They played a decent set including cool stuff like The Standells’ Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White, even if their predictable take on Fleetwood Mac’s Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight tended toward the oafish. I don’t think Mike Spenser would have countenanced that sort of carry-on.

Motörhead opened their set with a delicate, semi-improvised piece based on the writings of Lebanese philosopher Khalil Gibran. Only kidding! I don’t remember what they opened with but it was fecking loud, and I only know that because the whole set was loud as feck, possibly louder than feck. They were just the three of them, Lemmy thrashing out chords on a Rickenbacker bass and the drummer seeming to hit about twice as many drums as there were on his kit. The experience was not unlike a physical bludgeoning, and one of my friends saw fit to enhance the experience by sticking his head inside a PA speaker. In for a penny and all that. An entertaining set if a bit too close to heavy metal for my taste.

That just left the business of getting home. The last bus had gone, leaving my friends to spend the night in Aylesbury bus garage, where I think they slept in a phone box. Phil decided to stay with them while I hit the dark, lonely, drizzly road, which seemed to go on forever. After almost an hour I saw the glow of Oxford, which was at least familiar, though I lived about twelve miles further west. As I rode through the town centre drunk people were spilling out of hideous nightclubs, brawling and vomiting in the road, pissing in doorways. My warm bed, in my parents’ quiet, modest house, in my boring village, had never seemed so appealing.