Every gig I ever went to

I’d been playing bass for a couple of years, and in the Spring of 1978 I joined a group in Oxford, fronted by my friend Mark, which became The No. I don’t intend to say much about The No, or any of the other bands I’ve played with, because it’s impossible to be objective, and because being in the group I didn’t really see the gigs. These days I wouldn’t make any great claims for The No, except that we were young and snotty, good musicians, and played fast, melodic tunes which might be bracketed somewhere between punk and power pop. We had some good songs, and Mark was a great frontman. We used to squabble all the time, that’s just part of how it is. Our regular gig was the Oranges & Lemons pub where we developed something of a following. In the Autumn we acquired a manager, who happened to be Social Secretary at the College of Further Education, which meant we got to play support slots for name acts there.    The first was with local legend and chart act John Otway, who I ...

Wilko Johnson left Dr Feelgood at the height of their fame, which at the time seemed like a perverse decision. It later – actually much later, in the form of personal testimony – emerged that he didn’t get on with the rest of the group, was difficult, cantankerous, and worse than that, university-educated and teetotal. Hindsight would suggest that Dr Feelgood in their original form had already peaked. Their last album with Wilko, Sneakin’ Suspicion, was patchy, and by far the strongest song, Paradise, turned out to be the one that caused the split since Lee Brilleaux – a much more authoritative singer than Wilko – refused to sing it due to what he felt were overly personal lyrics detailing the guitarist’s complicated  vie affective . Given that Wilko was the only songwriter and himself not particularly prolific, that was that; irreconcilable differences, your honour.   So Dr Feelgood recruited a new guitarist (see Gig 039) and Wilko eventually got his own group together, and s...

  I might have said in an earlier post that The Jam were my favourite group, and perhaps that particular week it was true, but the punk group whose records I adored to the point of distraction were Buzzcocks (as Pete Shelley insisted, not  the  Buzzcocks). I was still blown away by their debut Spiral Scratch 4-track ep, which even now sounds like nothing else on earth and was streets ahead of the competition in almost every respect, taking guitar/bass/drums/vocals somewhere very strange yet strangely accessible, erudite Beckett-referencing lyrics tumbling over themselves like an overloaded fruit machine disgorging its loot. Following the departure of Howard Devoto it might have been reasonable to assume that the game was up; subsequent singles and the first album suggested something quite otherwise. Where Devoto sang about sex in an oddly dispassionate and sexless manner (and would continue to do so, eventually straying into worryingly icky territory), Shelley brought som...

Gig 070 Tom Robinson Band / Stiff Little Fingers Oxford New Theatre 23 September 1978 Gig 071 Carnival Against the Nazis 2 Brockwell Park, Brixton 24 September 1978   When an act graduated from college gigs to the New Theatre they’d pretty much made it, inasmuch as they had reached a mass audience; from here they might go on to even greater things – or conversely they might have already peaked. Sadly for the Tom Robinson Band, who now had a chart album and a high profile in the media but would never have another hit, the latter fate awaited. As mentioned in Gigs 41 and 55, Tom was impressive in so many ways: brave, principled, radical, an advocate for gay rights who refused to comply with the prevalent stereotypes: Tom absolutely didn’t do camp. Problem is, if we’re being honest, camp was part of rock’n’roll from before the start, and lyrical allusiveness, sartorial flash and physical sensuality was integral to the experience. In this sense Little Richard wasn’t a world away from L...

Gig 068 John Otway Aylesbury Market Square 13 August 1978 Gig 069 Reading Festival 25 August 1978   ‘Get ready for the festival, for the festival is only once a year.’ Josephine, by John Otway   Oh ok, if we must. I’d spent August bank holiday weekend at Reading Festival the previous two years and been variously blind drunk, soaked, muddy, threatened with violence, cold, sick, bored, and almost brained by flying cans full of dubious liquid content. Half the acts I didn’t much care for, and back then there was nothing else to do except maybe buy a hot dog or some cider. There had been some good moments – I’m thinking Eddie & the Hot Rods, I-Roy, Van der Graaf Generator, Thin Lizzy and a few others – but there was a fair amount of tedious noodling, phallocentric guitar pleasuring, boorish misogyny and general dullness. The Carnival Against the Nazis in May had been a magical transgressive moment but in general by the late 70s the counterculture had become very conservative, ...

Gig 067 The Jam Swindon Brunel Rooms 4 August 1978   Around this time The Jam had appeared to be struggling a little. They had released two albums, the first of which was well received but the second had received a lukewarm response in the sneary, fickle music press. I thought it was dead good, Paul Weller’s developing songwriting was more expansive than most of his contemporaries, referencing for instance Liverpool poet Adrian Henri along with the obvious Who, Beatles and soul influences. Even Bruce Foxton’s two rather clunky contributions had a certain charm. But that was almost a year ago and since then Weller seemed to have experienced writer’s block; the single News of the World was another Foxton composition and frankly not all that (although it enjoys a second life as the theme tune for Mock the Week) and the follow-up was a cover of the Kinks’ David Watts, though the b-side A-Bomb in Wardour Street was encouragingly snotty and in-your-face. Difficult third album syndrome an...

Dire Straits Oxford Polytechnic 2 July 1978 The Motors Oxford College of Further Education 7 July 1978   The Clash and Bowie was quite enough excitement for one week but a gig’s a gig so Saturday night I went to the Poly to see those no-hopers Dire Straits, for whom excitement wasn’t really a selling point. Not that I didn’t like them, I’d seem them earlier in the year (Gig 048) and thought they were pretty good in an undemonstrative way, perfectly enjoyable, obviously never going to make it big. They just didn’t fit anywhere in 1978; for a start the guitarist/singer was an old balding bloke who looked like a teacher (I checked, he was 28 and yes he was – or had been – a teacher) and didn’t seem remotely charismatic nor particularly cross about anything. But boy could he play guitar, eloquent cascades of melody defining the songs, in which the vocal line was semi-spoken rather than sung. He evoked JJ Cale, Clapton, Ry Cooder, maybe the more lyrical blues guys such as BB King. Alrea...

David Bowie London Earls Court 1 July 1978   Blimey, Tuesday was The Clash, Friday was David Bowie, I was on a roll here. I’d last seen Bowie almost exactly five years earlier, since which time he’d released six albums, at least three of which were mind-blowingly innovative, and collaborated on the two albums which launched and defined Iggy Pop’s solo career. Fey and otherworldly as he may have been, he knew how to put in a shift. If anything the punk revolution enhanced his standing, even if the Gumby tendency probably considered him a bit of a poof. He moved in different air, did his own thing and the rest of us could only gawp; notwithstanding the likes of Ultravox, Magazine or Siouxsie and the Banshees, his influence would remain largely unacknowledged for another couple of years, after which those excitable new romantics just couldn’t contain themselves any longer.   Talking of whom, I imagine most if not all of those who were to become the Blitz kids attended Bowie’s Lon...

The Clash/The Specials Aylesbury Friars 28 June 1978   Everyone raved about The Clash. The press adulation was off the scale, they had amphetamine intensity and political militancy, no question they were the big punk act once the Sex Pistols had imploded; personally I just didn’t think they were all that. Their one album at this time had its moments, notably those where they sounded a bit like Dr Feelgood e.g. Janie Jones, and their take on Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves was charming if a little ham-fisted, but I found much of it rather plodding, back-of-a-fag-packet lyrical agitprop welded to predictable chords. Perhaps they weren’t taking enough speed. That said, the subsequent single Complete Control (produced by Lee Perry, not that you’d know) was a cracking record, as was Clash City Rockers, and White Man in Hammersmith Palais, released a couple of weeks before this gig, was something else again. Lyrically it was streets ahead of their contemporaries, a rumination on betr...

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 the...

The Pirates Oxford College of Further Education 2 May 1978 The Lurkers Oxford Cape of Good Hope 11 May 1978 The Pirates were a right bunch of old lags, having originally been Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and scoring hits in the pre-Beatles era, notably British rock’n’roll classic Shakin’ All Over. In the wake of Dr Feelgood a number of rocking r’n’b groups had appeared and maybe the Pirates felt they had a point to prove to the upstarts, anyway they’d been playing the London pub circuit for a couple of years to wildly enthusiastic responses and reviews. This was another gig I was dead keen to see. The house lights go down to the sound of thunderclaps and a storm at sea, three figures take their places on the darkened stage, a piercing guitar intro and the stage lights illuminate three 30-something blokes dressed as, well, pirates, ripping into a ludicrously pumped-up reading of old chestnut Please Don’t Touch. They play for an hour and never let up, and it’s preposterous in the way that...

Carnival Against The Nazis – X-Ray Spex, The Clash, Steel Pulse, TRB Victoria Park, Hackney, London 30 April 1978 Let’s talk about racism, because you really need an old white bloke spouting off about this important issue. Actually someone should have talked to me about racism back in the 70s but no one did, not really, I had to figure it out for myself and to be honest I didn’t really know what racism was, which is strange because I was a witness to it almost every day. At the time of this event the National Front were gaining in acceptance and influence, the Black & White Minstrel Show was still on prime time tv, racist epithets were common currency: it was no big deal to hear such language, on television, at work, on the street and among some members of my family. If I had a pound for every time I heard the expression ‘Enoch was right’, well I wouldn’t be rich but could certainly have afforded a better motorbike. (I should stress that, while they were hardly campaigners against ...

Wreckless Eric / The Tourists Oxford College of Further Education 8 April 1978 Since I’d last seen him Wreckless Eric had become moderately well-known, acquired a proper group and released an album. He was still a scruffy little guy with a nasal estuarine voice, scrubbing away on the same Woolworths Top Twenty guitar I’d seen him play last time round. At one point he broke a string and swopped the the cheapo guitar for a rather beautiful red Rickenbacker, which I would have thought was perverse if there hadn’t been a whiff of contrivance about it. Opening act were The Tourists, a competent and unobjectionable power pop act, whose singer looked like a new-wave Julie Andrews. A little later she and one of the guitarists would make the smart move of ditching the group and go on to massive success as Eurhythmics, but no one could have imagined this at the time. To be honest I spent most of the evening trying to cop off with someone so I don’t remember much more than this.

Elvis Costello & the Attractions / Mickey Jupp Bracknell Leisure Centre 1 April 1978 I didn’t fall big time for Elvis Costello’s first album My Aim is True – it had its moments but the laid-back, easy-rolling Californian vibe provided by Clover wasn’t my thing at all. On the other hand I thought 1978’s This Year’s Model, recorded with the Attractions, was the absolute dog’s bollocks, possibly the best album of an exceptional year, arguably Elvis’s best ever, and still a big favourite today. Hooking up with the Attractions, Elvis had gone from being a purveyor of tastefully groovy country-rock to the frontman of the world’s most verbose garage punk combo, ? and the Mysterians if they’d swallowed a thesaurus, turned down by Nuggets for exceeding the word count. Riding the punk wave, his scattershot rattiness seemed to encompass everything from the National Front to the cosmetics industry. It’s a brilliantly cohesive album, seeming to feature very few overdubs, just an exceptional gro...