Gig 034 The Cortinas / Chelsea / The Pop Group

The Cortinas / Chelsea / The Pop Group
12 August 1977
Swindon Brunel Rooms

I went to this one on my own, partly because I lived closer to Swindon than my friends and had a moped, mainly because The Cortinas and Chelsea were second-division punk acts and none of my friends wanted to go. I wasn’t exactly desperate to see them myself but I was up for anything vaguely punk at this point.

Having arrived early I was surprised to see a bunch of nondescript spotty youths appear onstage. The singer was impossibly tall and gawky, the guitarist was a scrawny little bloke, all five of them completely lacking any punk styling yet somehow managing to resemble the Bash Street Kids, they seemed to have just stumbled out of a provincial youth club. The first tune was a standard punk thrash which I think was called Hypnotism by Radio; then it got more interesting. They couldn’t really play very well and the tall guy couldn’t sing to save his or anyone else’s life but they made a decent stab at Jonathan Richman’s Pablo Picasso and T.Rex’s Solid Gold Easy Action, plus a number of originals which were just very odd, off-kilter attempts at funk. There was some James Brown, some free jazz skronk, certainly not your standard punk repertoire. They finished by playing the thrashy punk tune a second time, and then wandered off to widespread indifference. Apparently they were called The Pop Group, and I assumed I’d never hear of them again.

Chelsea had been around almost since the first rumblings of punk in London, singer Gene October being one of the original faces on the scene. Along with the Cortinas they had just released a single on Mark Perry’s Fast Forward label. It was called Right to Work and I didn’t think it was very good, a dull repetitive tune with unimaginative lyrics, and from what I remember most of their live set was hardly any better. They played a song called Pretty Vacant, only this was a different Pretty Vacant and not as good as the other one. There aren’t many groups who can do that Stooges thing of extending one repeated riff across an entire three-minute tune and keeping it compelling, and Chelsea weren’t among them. In fact there was probably only the Stooges, and even they felt the need to move on after two albums.

The Cortinas’ single was a little better by virtue of being fast and rowdy, even if it was more or less punk by numbers. They were from just down the road in Bristol and were another odd-looking bunch, one guitarist a proto-rock star and the other looking like the swotty geek who does other kids’ homework. The singer was a chubby lad with a quiff who would have looked the part in one of those rock’n’roll revival acts favoured by the punks’ sworn enemies the teds. They managed to generate a modest amount of pogoing and gob, and down the front I spotted The Pop Group’s little guitarist on the shoulders of the very tall singer, the pair of them shouting ‘fatty potato!’ at the pudgy frontman. After a while I twigged that this was an amusing corruption of – and probably improvement on – Fascist Dictator, the title of the Cortinas’ single. They were all obviously mates from Bristol, though after a while the singer grew tired of the heckling and chucked a pint of beer over the odd couple. In its way it was, I suppose, comedy gold. The Cortinas’ second single, Defiant Pose, was notable for having on the picture sleeve a photo of a lad throwing up in a suburban kitchen.

If I’d had to bet on one of these acts to make a lasting impact, to be honest I wouldn’t have bet on any of them. The Cortinas’ rock star guitarist went on to be in the post-Mick Jones incarnation of The Clash, and the bass player became and I think still is a well-regarded artist. Chelsea carried on, improved a bit and are still going, and my friend Greg likes them so fair play. And The Pop Group – funny how things turn out innit.