Gig 062 The Flamin’ Groovies / Radio Birdman


The Flamin’ Groovies/Radio Birdman
Oxford College of Further Education
10 June 1978


For a couple of years I’d been a big fan of the Flamin’ Groovies, notably their early 70s punk-anticipating garage rock albums Flamingo and Teenage Head. More recently they had undergone something of a makeover, re-emerging in 1976 with new anglophile singer Chris Wilson, the outstanding single Shake Some Action and an album of the same title, which referenced more classic sources such the Beatles, the Stones, the Byrds, the Pretty Things, and hummed with a deliciously warm, valve-y jangle. It’s hard to imagine now but, the recent past being so much more old-fashioned than the distant past, the Beatles and Stones were largely considered hopelessly démodé at the time, disdained by punks and prog-heads, ignored by almost everyone else. Glen Matlock was allegedly thrown out of the Sex Pistols for liking the Beatles; clearly the likes of Paul Weller, Squeeze and Generation X were huge Beatles fans, but they didn’t shout about it at the time.

 

Garage punk, on the other hand, was well in vogue with a certain crowd by virtue of not having been very popular in the first place. It was this crowd who were drawn to the Flamin’ Groovies, and among them were Australian support act Radio Birdman, about whom I knew nothing at the time of this gig. If I had I might have paid more attention. For what it’s worth I remember them looking pretty cool and sounding hardcore, fast songs, noisy guitar, not too much emphasis on melody; listening to them now the Stooges influence is blatant but not many Brits were aware of the Stooges in 1978. This turned out to be their last gig until a reunion in the 1990s, and as far as I know they’re still going and are highly regarded as founding fathers of Australian punk. (Ok main man Deniz Tek is in fact American, let’s not quibble.)

 

Nor were many Brits aware of the Flamin’ Groovies, however they had attracted enough press attention from the likes of ZigZag magazine, plus a few plays on the John Peel show, to attract a decent crowd. (In France on the other hand they had been a big name for a few years, fitting as they did a particularly Gallic conception of rock’n’roll. Several years later when gigging in France I would often be in conversation with guys who enthused about ‘le rock garage, ze Stooges, ze Cramps, ze Flammin Groovies’.) In the more trend-conscious UK they didn’t quite fit the zeitgeist but I thought they looked fantastic, all bowl-cuts, leather waistcoats, aviator shades, corduroy caps, classic guitars, matching Fender amps backline. Eschewing the bowl-cut was Cyril Jordan, one of the great bald blokes in rock’n’roll with his famous plexiglass guitar. Regrettably, these days he seems to have taken to wearing a syrup onstage, though the transparent guitar has survived.

 

They sounded fantastic too, a wall of guitars sonically mirroring the silver Fender amps. To be honest they were almost a purist 60s covers band before that was a thing, performing Feel a Whole Lot Better, Please Please Me, 19th Nervous Breakdown and a bunch of other classics. Strangely they didn’t play their best-known original Shake Some Action, despite it being the equal of the covers, and the audience shouting for it. Maybe at some level they thought it unworthy of such exalted company, if so they were wrong. ‘Les puristes, bah!’, comme disent les Français.

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