Gig 036/037/038/039/040 George Hatcher Band / Wreckless Eric / The Stranglers / Barclay James Harvest / Dr Feelgood / Mink de Ville / Chris Spedding / New Hearts

George Hatcher Band / Wreckless Eric
23 September 1977
Oxford Polytechnic

The Stranglers
26 September 1977
Oxford Polytechnic

Barclay James Harvest
16 October 1977
Oxford New Theatre

Dr Feelgood / Mink de Ville
20 October 1977
Oxford New Theatre

Chris Spedding / New Hearts
27 October 1977
Oxford Polytechnic

Another bunch of gigs best described as variable. The George Hatcher Band were headlining the Polytechnic’s Freshers’ Night. That southern fried downhome boogie thang had enjoyed success with a certain UK crowd a year or two earlier, as evidenced by the popularity of Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers, and the ubiquity of cowboy boots and hats during the summer of 1976 (not guilty m’lud). Maybe the election as US president of Georgia boy and Marshall Tucker fan Jimmy Carter also had some bearing on it, I dunno. By Autumn of 1977 the whole thing was starting to look a bit tired, I’d seen the GHB a couple of times already and it was never really my thing in the first place, but that wasn’t why I went to this gig. I was more interested in support act Wreckless Eric, who had released an interesting single on the Stiff label called Whole Wide World, plus it was a gig and as mentioned I’d go to see almost any old rubbish if my friends were going. Even if we didn’t like it we’d enjoy slagging it off so it was a win-win situation, at least for a while. Wreckless Eric was a small man who played a Woolworths guitar and sang short, odd songs in a nasal estuarine accent. When someone in the crowd asked him where he got the guitar he said he’d nicked it, seeming quite pleased with himself. The group were an odd-looking bunch altogether, the drummer being one Ian Dury, already known from Kilburn & The High Roads and who had also released a single on Stiff, Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll. The bass player was Denise Roudette, an elegant, tall black woman who seemed to be wondering what she was doing there, and on sax was a scruffy character who turned out to be Davey Payne from the Kilburns, soon to be a Blockhead. There were tunes with titles like Brain Thieves and Personal Hygiene and the whole thing was oddly appealing, despite it being difficult to imagine Eric having an enduring career in rock’n’roll.

Since I’d last seen them almost a year earlier, The Stranglers had become a big chart act which meant that tickets for their gig at the Poly were available only to students. I went anyway and ended up paying through the nose to buy a ticket from a tout. When they appeared on stage Hugh Cornwell immediately went into a rant about how they had been conned into playing this gig and they don’t do elitist events; it turned out I should have gone backstage, they had been letting town kids in for free through the dressing room. Consequently one of the great surly groups were even surlier than usual, bashing out their set in a rather perfunctory manner as if they couldn’t wait to get away from this rancid seat of bourgeois entitlement. Inevitably the impact of seeing them the first time was diminished by familiarity. While they undoubtedly had some good tunes and conveyed menace like no other group, part of their appeal was a certain ugliness, probably their best-known tune at the time being Peaches, a tuneless, dissonant, misogynistic lurch. There was also a song called Ugly, a similarly tuneless racket about murder combining misogyny with antisemitism – something for everyone really – sung by Jean-Jacques Burnel, whose voice is a thing only his mother could love. And Bring on the Nubiles, which even as a 17-year-old with no concept of sexual politics I knew was garbage. I guess you can’t crave the dark side and then complain that you find some aspects distasteful, but I’m happy never to hear those particular songs again.

If ever a group found itself hopelessly unfashionable overnight it was probably Barclay James Harvest. Around this time we would often go to gigs and bump into Dude and Gol, a couple of lads who had been in the year above us at school. They were what I have come to think of as archetypal prog fans, quite affable, probably spent all their money on records and gigs, lank hair, bumfluff moustaches, didn’t worry too much about sartorial matters, personal hygiene questionable; would it be unkind to say they weren’t exactly beating off the girls with a stick? Nice enough guys all the same, Dude and Gol (I never knew their real names) maintained that punk was a passing novelty fad and ‘serious’ music would soon enough regain its rightful place. In the case of many of the top prog acts – Pink Floyd, Genesis, Rush – they were right; where Barclay Jim were concerned, not so much. I don’t really know what I was doing at this gig since it was emphatically not my thing and I wasn’t particularly familiar with their repertoire. All I remember is being near the back of the gods, and a bloke behind us kindly explaining to his young son about how this whole thing worked, what the roadies were doing, who played what etc. He mentioned that the keyboard player Stuart Wolstenholme was affectionately known as Woolly, which I ungenerously muttered should have been the name of the whole group. In fact I kind of enjoyed it at some level, it was craftsmanlike, melodic and unchallenging, and something of a relief from most of the stuff I chose to listen to. It was not unpleasant, not what I was looking for at the time but y’know, what’s the opposite of ‘not unpleasant’?

Much more my thing, just a few days later, was Dr Feelgood. This was one of my college days at Reading, so the plan was to go straight from Didcot station on the moped. Problem: on returning to my moped I discovered that some schmuck had syphoned the petrol and nicked the fuel pipe. After forelornly pushing the wretched machine round Didcot I arrived at a garage where, purely by chance, an ex-schoolmate was working. He was able to replace the fuel pipe and fill up the tank, and while we hadn’t been great mates at school – to be honest I thought he was a bit of a dork – he shot up in my estimation. Several years later I learned that he had been convicted for child pornography. Aaaanyway… I arrived at the gig in time to see support act Mink DeVille, whose hit Spanish Stroll was and remains one of the greatest singles of that whole era, a seemingly effortless minimalist evocation of New York attitude worthy of Pomus and Schumann or Lieber and Stoller, with a slinky groove and a fabulous blast of ill-tempered Spanish toward the end. Willy Deville and the group looked fantastic, like Lower East Side hustlers, or at least what I imagined Lower East Side hustlers to look like. Regrettably the audience weren’t having it and Willy, a notoriously difficult character, became seriously ratty, glowering at various punters slouched in the front stalls like he would readily cut them if they wanted to make something of it. I was glad my seat was towards the back of the stalls. Since I had last seen them Dr Feelgood had lost guitarist Wilko Johnson, who along with singer Lee Brilleaux had been the public face of the group, not to mention their only songwriter. Logically they hadn’t tried to replace like with like, and John Mayo was a capable guitarist, but something had forever been lost. They went on to make some decent records and have chart hits, and were still unquestionably a top-end r’n’b group, but the new original material was weak by comparison with the Wilko songs. Brilleaux’s preposterous palm-tree jacket, which would have looked embarrassing on anyone else, was some compensation.

Chris Spedding was and is a pretty cool guy despite having been a womble, looked good in leather and played a slick set of updated rock’n’roll, not much of which I vaguely recognised apart from his hit Motor Bikin’. He’d played guitar with just about everyone and been an early champion of the Sex Pistols so had some punk cred. It was a bit of a thrill to see him. Support was a group called New Hearts, who were about my age and looked a bit mod-ish, and tried hard but didn’t really have the songs. They had the air of bandwagon-jumpers, desperate to make it whatever it took. Their singer would be back in another guise a couple of years later. A good gig, only made better by Oxford United striker Peter Foley’s presence in the audience.