Gig 050/051 Steeleye Span, Ian Dury & the Blockheads/Whirlwind

Gig 050
Steeleye Span
Oxford New Theatre
12 February 1978

Gig 051
Ian Dury & The Blockheads / Whirlwind
Oxford New Theatre
25 February 1978

Steeleye Span at the New Theatre was something of an antidote to the punk chaos of the previous night. I think I only went to this one because a friend’s brother had a spare ticket, but without being a big fan I’d always enjoyed the Span’s tunes when I heard them on the radio (usually John Peel) and their hit single All Around My Hat was agreeably jaunty. Not punk though is it? Unless the travails of a 19^th century crofter facing starvation due to the enclosure acts are punk, which come to think of it maybe they are. Whatever, there wasn’t too much pogoing and gobbing, and the audience stayed in their seats which allowed Maddy Prior to cavort in the aisles during the encore. A pretty good gig.

Since I had last seen him playing drums with Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury (& the Blockheads) had released a hugely successful album called New Boots and Panties, and were now a proper headline act with major chart hits just around the corner. There was something irresistible in the combination of almost Steely Dan-level musical sophistication and Ian’s estuarine music-hall schpiel. As well as being a unique, Dickensian and slightly sinister frontman he was, as one of his songs would have it, a clever bastard: at once lewd and sweet-natured in Wake Up and Make Love With Me, wistful in My Old Man, in Billericay Dickie he evoked rank filthiness without using any actual profanity, for which lack he amply compensated in the intro to Plaistow Patricia. For all the lyrical invention, musically it wasn’t so much my thing; the Blockheads were excellent, seasoned musicians who could nail a jazz-funk groove with the best of them, but when they turned to more straightforward punk stylings – which in theory they could play in their sleep – it wasn’t really happening, lacking the nervy intensity of the best punk acts. Somewhere between funk and punk was a tune called Sweet Gene Vincent, a three-chord rock’n’roll homage which was pretty good but again sounded like jazzers trying and not quite managing to cut loose, again not quite cutting it despite Ian’s uproarious delivery. Easy tunes aren’t necessarily easy to play well.

In this respect they could have learned a lot from support act Whirlwind, ‘lovely teds’ as the girls on their merch stand described them (I swiped the poster after the show). At the time there was a much-reported tribal antipathy between punks and teds, which I found slightly strange – I knew about the punks but where had all the teds suddenly appeared from? In Oxford there were a handful who drank in the Queens Arms in Park End Street, slightly sad-looking old (30-something) lags who probably worked on the production line at Cowley, all beerguts, receding quiffs and pissy trousers. Maybe in the Kings Road it was different. In any case it wasn’t an issue on this occasion, just as the Blockheads weren’t really punks, Whirlwind weren’t really teds, just young guys who looked the part and played old school rock’n’roll (not – and this is an important distinction – rockabilly, which had a more countrified vibe and required an acoustic double bass). Whirlwind stuck to the driving Eddie Cochrane four-to-the-floor style rather than the more swinging ’billy approach, and did it really, really well. They also had, in Nigel Dixon, one of the all-time great overlooked frontmen. Tall, slim and unshakeably cool with luxuriant quiff and immaculate Gene Vincent-style croon, Nigel was born to the role. Apparently he had cut his teeth on the Uxbridge scene – you would expect nothing less. A few years later he would form Havana 3am with Paul Simonon from the Clash, bringing together the two coolest men in UK rock’n’roll for one heavily stylised and pretty decent album combining a rocking Johnny Burnette vibe, elements of spaghetti western, mariachi and reggae with a visual ethos based on 1981 American outlaw film The Loveless. If you need an ethos (and you do), then this is one of the best, completely out of whack with the baggy/grunge vibe of the time and all the better for it. Nigel Dixon died tragically young; it’s a stretch to think he could have been up there with the legends – Elvis, Gene, Eddie, Chuck, Jerry Lee, and Nigel from Uxbridge – but he could certainly have been the English Chris Isaak and I could imagine him performing cameos in films by Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismaki. If only.

Going on at 7.30 as support at a still half-empty seated theatre, the gig was always going to be an uphill struggle for Whirlwind though they toughed it out – I just wish I could have seen them in a smaller venue. The New Theatre’s inappropriateness as a rock’n’roll venue didn’t impact so much on the headliners, as for the most part the Blockheads’ sophisticated groove didn’t require craziness on the part of the audience, and the theatre was well suited to Ian’s, erm, theatricality. Enjoyable, from a distance.

After the gig a few of us went to nearby Exeter College where Siouxsie & the Banshees were playing. No hope of getting in, this was an exclusive student event, but we listened outside on the pavement for a while and it sounded excellent, confrontational, intense, and would probably have been the better gig that night – hey-ho.