Roadrunner once

Everybody has performed Pablo Picasso, but it’s Roadrunner that really made the difference. As you can tell, I need to say something about Jonathan Richman today. Trouble is, I haven’t got another lifetime in which to say it. But I have to try. Jonathan Richman had one great thought and it was worth hanging on to…Late at night. Out on the open road. Alone in the modern world. Driving with the radio on. Aged 18. Free. This is how it’s always going to be. It’s a moment in your life you know you’ll remember forever. And, clearly, I do. I can appreciate it as much today, aged 50, as I could when actually experiencing it along the byways of Staffordshire in the summer nights of 1977. A rare coincidence of being and feeling alive. And the soundtrack to this would be something like Spanish Stroll by Mink Deville, Whole Wide World by Wreckless Eric, Less Than Zero by Elvis Costello and First Time by The Boys. Plus, of course, that song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers that described it all. Roadrunner. Going faster miles an hour. Released, or rather re-released on the wonderfully named Beserkley Records at this time, the end of June, 1977. In the middle of the Punk explosion. That Jonathan Richman was considered to be part of the Punk scene is as difficult to understand now as it was then. For starters, he was 26 and far too old. To even begin to understand, you have to know the story of Punk. It didn’t just come from nowhere in 1976/7, though it felt much like that to most of us at the time. Punk had a heritage that was both American and British. Even The Sex Pistols played songs from 60s bands like The Monkees and Dave Berry. The 60s were not the problem – that was the hippies and nestheads, everything they represented and the control they exerted. And we all know Joe Strummer wanted to go even further back to the 50s and become Eddie Cochrane. I’ll leave the British story for another time. The American part of this heritage is what concerns us here. Understanding Jonathan Richman depends on knowing that the American story splits into three strands. The first, as represented by Iggy and the Stooges and MC5, was the garage band scene – essentially, bad-ass hippies on acid progressing the darker side of the beat group explosion. It’s exemplified by the bands on the 1972 LP collection, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, compiled by Lenny Kaye, soon to be part of Patti Smith’s band. The cover notes in the gatefold sleeve were among the first to describe ‘punk rock’ bands like The Electric Prunes and The Seeds. The MC5 took this music to the extreme with Kick Out The Jams. Then Iggy and the Stooges took it further with Funhouse and Raw Power. At the very same time, the second strand was the sole province of Andy Warhol’s house band, The Velvet Underground – the ultimate, inside-out, negative image of Californian peace-and-love psychedelia (on the surface). A very strange mixture of Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico, The Velvets combined progressive rock with art-house antics, avant-garde noise and folksy doo-wop harmonising. The influences of Punk are curious indeed. Utterly unsuccessful at the time, The Velvets produced a spate of seminal LPs which were to gain them a retrospective credibility for being so single-mindedly ‘unhippy’. Although some of their songs were more complex than anyone thought (as musicologist and ex-Passage frontman, Dick Witts says in his biography of the band, The Velvet Underground), many were simple constructions that newly formed Punk bands could copy and include as covers to add credibility to their 1977 sets. Buffalo Johnson’s Punk band, Trash, performed a very passable version of White Light, White Heat. Now, aged 18 in 1969, an impressionable Jonathan Richman became infatuated with The Velvet Underground, leaving his home town of Boston for New York, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to break into their scene as a musician. He returned to Massachussets. Not long after, Lou Reed and the Velvets followed him, having themselves failed in New York. They actually found their audience among students in Boston. The sound that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground then adopted was to be the sound that Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers would take forward when they formed in 1970. In retrospect, this sound has been described as proto-punk garage rock. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Listen to What Goes On and New Age from The Velvet Underground Live With Lou Reed, Vol 1, then to She Cracked and Hospital from the first Modern Lovers album, produced by ex-Velvet John Cale, and you’ll find it hard to disagree with me that there isn’t a great deal of difference between Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. They’ve been trying to sound like each other on and off for the last 40 years. It was just that Jonathan Richman took time to emerge. As for Roadrunner, it first emerged as a single in the States in September, 1975. Then again in October, 1976, when that first album, The Modern Lovers, was eventually released after four years. Ironically, this was around the time that the third and final strand of US Punk heritage was kicking in. Although Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers had nothing whatsoever to do with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Talking Heads (although one founder member, Jerry Harrison, left to form the latter), it was this awakening, with its early vinyl releases, that led to the lumping in of JR with Punk. There was hardly any new vinyl around, so having an early release meant you got your record played in all the right places, wherever Punk was mentioned. So, Jonathan Richman got to ride the wave and make it first in the UK, just as The Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads did. And, so finally, Beserkley released Roadrunner for the first time in the UK, because we’d been listening to the import for the previous six months. It wasn’t till even later in the summer that they released the first Modern Lovers LP in the UK. They obviously knew something we didn’t. It would soon become clear. For Richman was ready to release his next album on an unsuspecting public - Rock’n’Roll With The Modern Lovers. Here were whimsical songs about leprechauns, insects and abominable snowmen. Was it Steve Hillage and Gong all over again? Then came his biggest UK hit, Egyptian Reggae. After this, JR never again left his own version of Narnia. Though he did leave a bemused Punk and New Wave audience in his wake. I never saw Jonathan Richman live, though I did hear him. He came to Bradford University in 1978. I was refused entry by a bouncer with whom I’d had a recent disagreement. While I stayed outside, Bingo, Sparky and Max Jingoff went in, saw him and even talked to him afterwards, sitting on the edge of the stage. I sat outside and listened. It was late at night. The stars were shining. I was alone in the modern world. Aged 18. And free. And that’s the way it’s always been.


Roadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive past the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio onI'm in love with MassachusettsAnd the neon when it's cold outsideAnd the highway when it's late at nightGot the radio onI'm like the roadrunnerAlrightI'm in love with modern moonlight128 when it's dark outsideI'm in love with MassachusettsI'm in love with the radio onIt helps me from being alone late at nightIt helps me from being lonely late at nightI don't feel so bad now in the carDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerThat's rightSaid welcome to the spirit of 1956Patient in the bushes next to '57The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quickSuburban trees, suburban speedAnd it smells like heaven(thunder)And I say roadrunner onceRoadrunner twiceI'm in love with rock & roll and I'll be out all nightRoadrunnerThat's rightWell nowRoadrunner, roadrunnerGoing faster miles an hourGonna drive to the Stop 'n' ShopWith the radio on at nightAnd me in love with modern moonlightMe in love with modern rock & rollModern girls and modern rock & rollDon't feel so alone, got the radio onLike the roadrunnerO.K., now you sing Modern Lovers(Radio On!)I got the AM(Radio On!)Got the car, got the AM(Radio On!)Got the AM sound, got the(Radio On!)Got the rockin' modern neon sound(Radio On!)I got the car from Massachusetts, got the(Radio On!)I got the power of Massachusetts when it's late at night(Radio On!)I got the modern sounds of modern MassachusettsI've got the world, got the turnpike, got theI've got the, got the power of the AMGot the, late at night, (?), rock & roll late at nightThe factories and the auto signs got the power of modern soundsAlrightRight, bye bye!

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

The road less travelled by

Writers, artists, often talk about the muse in their lives. Others dismiss the idea as some kind of shape-shifting or mental displacement. I’ve always been open to the idea. I’m not superstitious, but I prefer to protect my muse while at the same time publicly recognising her and the role she plays in my life. Last night I dreamt about my muse. She’d just had a baby and needed to get back from work to attend to its needs. We were at our place of work together, a large corporate entity, trying not to let it dominate our intended activity – which was, at last, after a very long time apart, to spend some time together. I won’t deny that there was an element of sexual anticipation. Yet, as ever, tenderness was the most important expression of our relationship – a soft understanding of mutual need. As I helped her with some household tasks while she attended to her baby’s needs, I ran the back of my hand down her cheek and said, ‘It’s good to spend some time together.’ Then I awoke, with an unusually full reflection of the dream. My muse only appears at times of my life when there is a fork in the path. It’s as if she’s there to remind me that there is an important choice to be made. In guiding me, she is ever herself – a calm combination of a will to love, with a quiet, unshakable, inner confidence about who she is and what she stands for. I’ll be watching and listening closely to see what this means.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Nopane in my brain

Lester Bullock, more famously known as Dillinger, is 56 today. How did I get to Dillinger and why is he still running around my brain? We can all post-rationalise and say we were into reggae in the lead-up to Punk. Truer to say that some of us were into Bob Marley, the first reggae ‘crossover’ artist. I first noticed Bob Marley on my Sunday morning paper round. At the age of 15, I was delivering two heavy, Sunday paper bag loads for 50 pence, to bulk up the 75 pence I got for my five-nightly, five-mile evening paper round. While I was baiting a dog and jamming several newspaper supplements through a rusty letterbox one cool November morning, a front page caught my eye. It was taken up entirely with the front cover to Natty Dread, the newly released LP from Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was the most beautiful LP cover I had ever seen. Buying the LP would have been beyond the pale (and cost over two weeks’ ‘wages’). I wasn’t yet that experimental. My meagre record collection contained albums by David Bowie, Status Quo, T Rex and Elton John. Disco, soul or black music of any kind was not for me. I lived in a quiet, traditional, mostly white Midlands county town in which it was normal to poke fun at people with dark skins. I hadn’t realised that Eric Clapton’s hit, I Shot The Sheriff, was a Marley cover. There had been Ken Boothe. But, even when Everything I Own reached number one in 1974, solitary reggae artists still seemed like novelty acts on Top Of The Pops in the early 70s. A few weeks after I saw the Natty Dread cover, however, we had Rupie Edwards’ Ire Feelings at the top of the charts. Something was stirring in me, but local conditioning and peer pressure kept it down. But not for long. By 1975, I was actually attending gigs and literally feeling the bass sound run right through me. Now, the whole world was talking about Bob Marley. I didn’t get down to London to see Bob Marley and the Wailers live at the Lyceum in the summer (my big trip was Led Zeppelin at Earl’s Court instead), but I was aware of it and rushed out to buy Live! when it emerged in December. A few months later, even The Rolling Stones had included a reggae cover version on their LP, Black and Blue. Reggae was officially OK if they said so. Then, the fledgling Virgin record company made what seemed a brave decision at the time to release The Front Line, a promotional LP of various reggae acts, including U Roy and The Mighty Diamonds, pushing these bands into appearing at the Reading Rock Festival in August. At the time, I remember thinking this was a bad idea. I attended the three days of this festival with Buffalo Johnson and a couple of other mates. The two reggae acts were literally canned off by heavy metal fans who had come to see Rory Gallagher, Ted Nugent and Black Oak Arkansas. I wanted them off, too. It was the right time, but wrong audience, wrong place. Punk was around the corner. John Peel was playing dub reggae. The old order, exemplified by the Southern Man Lynyrd Skynyrd brigade, was slipping away. I was faced with a choice that took me several months to make. The fact that I chose Punk meant that I brought reggae with me. The tie-up between Punk and Reggae was certainly odd. Even Bob Marley thought it strange at first, though he ended up releasing Punky Reggae Party as the B-side of Jamming in 1977. He could never understand why Punks desecrated themselves with safety pins and ripped clothes. In Jamaica, people were striving to get away from such things. It was only when he made the rebel connection that congruence became possible. Punk and Reggae were anti-establishment. Both were resistance movements in the heart of Babylon. Dope and weed were associated with hippies and the old order, but their prevalence in the Rasta-related reggae world meant that it was OK for Punks to indulge in an underground way. Which they did. Especially at the Roxy Club in London’s Covent Garden, the major showcase for Punk acts in the first six months on 1977, when they were banned from playing most everywhere else. The music press regularly reported the goings on at this den of iniquity. For us, in the provinces, it was our vicarious taste of the action. We would be told the playlist of host DJ Don Letts – in between the acts of adrenalin aggression from the likes of Wire, Buzzcocks and Adverts, Letts would play all the latest Jamaican 45s. In our remote Midlands hideout, we’d hear of acts like Big Youth, Culture, Lee Perry and Junior Murvin, the latter with his Police And Thieves. And, naturally, we wanted to hear what was happening. John Peel played more of it. Then The Clash finally emerged on vinyl and championed it, with their cover version of Police And Thieves. Marley was touring again and about to launch his best and most popular LP, Exodus. I’m hardly likely to forget it, as it was released on 3rd June, 1977, my 18th birthday. The Sex Pistols were number one in our hearts with God Save The Queen during Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. I was in the middle of my A level exams. My parents were splitting up. The first love of my life was not responding. I was exploding. I spent some of the summer of 77 recording whatever dub reggae John Peel played. And this I took with me to Bradford University at the end of September, thinking that I would be the only white person in this new universe to like Punk and Reggae. I was wrong. I very quickly met Martin, Graham and Alan, who liked both. Martin had Live! He’d played No Woman, No Cry on the mornings of his A level exams. Graham loved dub. Alan had Virgin’s Front Line LP. And, right at that very time, there emerged a single by a Jamaican artist called Dillinger, called Cokane In My Brain. Martin bought the single. He was the only one who had a record player. That’s how I got to Dillinger. Cokane In My Brain/Buckingham Palace/Ratnam Pizer. And after that, we didn’t need no fertilizer. A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork...

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Andy and Jeff

Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark is 50 today. A very underrated band, OMD – definitely worth a revisit for people like me who like to see where the sound of today actually came from. They were a celebration of electronica, managing to avoid the label of New Romanticism yet riding on the wave. Their lush sound was ahead of its time. As singer, McCluskey himself brought intelligence to his lyrics and passion to his live performance. I saw OMD as a singles band – Joan Of Arc, Souvenir etc. These came at a very troubling time of my life. But I hear them today and can face that time with equanimity. I did and will always associate OMD with Enola Gay, however, their crowning moment. After visiting Hiroshima a couple of months back, it obviously carries an even greater significance. But OMD were more than a singles band. They are also remembered for albums like their first eponymous LP and Architecture and Morality. Their biggest selling LP was Sugar Tax, from as late as 1991. Somehow, that passed me by. I was beneath the surface with David Sylvian. I never realised that McCluskey was the force behind Atomic Kitten and their number one single, Whole Again, in 1998. A reformed OMD performed gigs to celebrate thirty years as a band in 2007/8. Where was I? In New Zealand or Cuba, or simply somewhere down the garden path looking for messages.

It shouldn’t be this way, but most of my generation (and those following) know Jeff Beck only for the party perennial, Hi Ho Silver Lining. It’s hard for me to believe that Jeff Beck turns 65 today, just a week or so after Chris Spedding. They seemed to serve different generations. For me, Jeff Beck was definitely the previous generation. OK, that didn’t stop me liking Hendrix and The Doors. And I grew into music with The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Eric Clapton, Beck’s contemporaries. He was one of the famous trio, alongside Jimmy Page and Clapton, who played guitar in The Yardbirds. It’s strange how things happen. There’s The Jeff Beck Group, with Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and others. Then just Beck working with Stewart. Beck has a car crash and leaves music for a year. Stewart joins Ronnie Wood and The New Faces. Stewart’s career trajectory changes. Beck’s goes underground. Everybody remembers The Faces. They become John Peel’s favourite ever band. Not many people remember Beck, Bogert and Appice. Yet, Beck’s guitar prowess lived on through many solo projects and diversion into jazz rock. To those who know, he is one of rock’s top 10 great guitarists. Hey ho. Every cloud…

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

How little we need to be happy

June 2009 marks 25 years of the solo career of David Sylvian, whose music has made a major contribution to settling the serotonin and other neuro-transmitters in my brain over half my lifetime. It had seemed like a brave and cruel decision to ditch Japan at the height of their hard-won fame in 1982. Hard on the band, hard on the fans. But, for Sylvian, fame was the problem. With a lifetime of interior travelling still to do, fame was an exterior journey he was not prepared to take. Being voted the world’s most beautiful man had seemed like the last straw. When Brilliant Trees emerged, however, Sylvian still had much of his loyal retinue. Red Guitar was a Top 20 hit. It was to be his only one. For, with his first solo album, Sylvian had jumped in the deep end and most Japan fans either couldn’t swim or found that the water would not support the weight of their bodies. The music was too philosophical, profound, inward-looking. The jump from the thoughtful pop of The Art Of Parties to the avant-jazz of Weathered Wall was cavernous. From this point on, by his own contrivance, Sylvian was ‘hiding in backwaters’. To find him, you had to be on a similar inward journey. I remember how, late one morning in June 1984, I asked permission from my employer, an antiques dealer in London’s Mayfair, to take a couple of hours out to go and queue outside HMV Records at the junction of Oxford Street and South Molton Street. The first so many hundred copies of Brilliant Trees had been autographed by the man himself. On my way around the corner from Bond Street, I remember encountering Griff Rhys Jones pushing a small child in a pram. The first series of Alas Smith and Jones had just run on the BBC. Our eyes met as I joined the end of the queue. I was very excited. That sense of anticipation and heightened consciousness has remained with me whenever it’s been time for a David Sylvian music release over the last quarter of a century. His very personal journey from the edge of pop to the jazz avant garde has been one I’ve been very willing to accompany him on. We’ve had a lot to share. And he’s been a good listener. I’ll have much more to say about this long-standing relationship. But, in the meantime, occupying various rooms in my head, here are 25 for the 25. My favourite is Camp Fire: Coyote Country from the Gone To Earth album of 1986. It doesn’t even feature Sylvian’s voice, an instrument in its own right – just the most sublime piece of Robert Fripp guitar work I’m ever likely to hear. There’s a special crystal-lined corridor in my mind that’s purely dedicated to it. The only piece of music that’s ever approached it was the version of Threnody For Souls In Torment I heard Fripp play in Coventry Cathedral a month back. But that’s typical of David Sylvian’s collaborative work. He contains the genius of so many others, just as they contain him. His next LP, Manofon, due out in September, I eagerly await. And I look forward to our next 25 years together.

A New Career In A New Town (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Nightporter (from Gentlemen Take Polaroids LP, 1980)
Ghosts (single from Tin Drum LP, 1982)
Forbidden Colours (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from soundtrack of film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, 1983)
The Ink In The Well (single from Brilliant Trees LP, 1984)
Words With The Shaman, Part 2: Incantation (from cassette LP, Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities, 1985)
Taking The Veil (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Before The Bullfight (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Camp Fire: Coyote Country (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Upon This Earth (from Gone To Earth LP, 1986)
Maria (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Mother and Child (from Secrets Of The Beehive LP, 1987)
Premonition (Giant Empty Iron Vessel) (with Holger Czukay - from Plight & Premonition LP, 1988)
Pop Song (single from Pop Song EP, 1989)
Heartbeat (Tainai Kaiki) (with Riuchi Sakamoto – single, from Sakamoto LP, Heartbeat, 1991)
Pocket Full Of Change (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Cries & Whispers (with Rain Tree Crow/ex-Japan members, from Rain Tree Crow LP, 1991)
Thalheim (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Café Europa (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
All Of My Mother’s Names (from Dead Bees On A Cake LP, 1999)
Linoleum (with Tweaker – from Tweaker LP, The Attraction To All Things Uncertain, 2001)
Late Night Shopping (from Blemish LP, 2003)
How Little We Need To Be Happy (from Blemish LP, 2003)
The Librarian (with Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit – on their Out In The Sticks EP, 2005)
A History Of Holes (with Nine Horses – from the Nine Horses LP, Snow Borne Sorrow, 2005)

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Lost friend

I ought to say something. Buffalo Johnson is 50 today. We were friends from the age of 10. At the age of 29, he married my little sister, his second wife. Today, estranged from me as well as her, but not their three, fantastic teenage sons, Buffalo Johnson is half-way through his fourth divorce. They say he looks like Henry VIII. He’s certainly acting like him. Two wives to go. Fortunately, nobody has been beheaded. Except, perhaps, Buffalo Johnson himself – who has suffered from severe depression throughout his adulthood, but these last ten years in particular. It cost him his career. It’s lost him three wives. And our friendship. But, then, I was never a very good friend. Any more than he has been a very good husband. It all makes me wonder…how we come into each other’s lives and what purpose we serve there. According to his father, I was a kind of beacon of achievement for Buffalo Johnson at a time when he was going off the rails. Buffalo Johnson was certainly a kind of leader for me during my teens. He seemed to know his own mind when I never did. He had the well-paid Saturday afternoon job at Tesco while I went to see Wolves. He could afford all the David Bowie, Lou Reed and Velvet Underground albums. I had to record off the radio. We attended our first music concerts together…Status Quo, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Genesis, Rolling Stones, Reading Rock Festival, Knebworth. Dated our first girlfriends together. Ironically, I ‘lost’ him when he chose the risky membership of a local Punk band rather than University. He chose a new clique. I had to find new friends. Including the best-looking girl in the sixth form, who also shares Buffalo Johnson’s 50th birthday today (happy birthday, Lesley, wherever you are - I know that you, too, like Buffalo Johnson, were suffering mentally, even in your early 20s). By the time I had made my way into Punk at 17, he was too deep. I went to University. He got married in December, 1979. It all went quiet. Then, in early August 1979, I met him and his wife at an Adam and the Ants gig at Newport, Shropshire. The next time I saw him was in the summer of 1981, when I had given up life as a trainee chartered accountant and was about to spend a month travelling around Europe on Interrail with Sparky and Blind Ray. His first marriage was over. Buffalo Johnson had plaster casts on both forearms and I never twigged. When I went to live in London with Sparky and Ray, I’d pick things up with Buffalo Johnson during Christmas breaks back home in Stafford. It was all heavy drinking and slot machines. By 1984, Buffalo Johnson would occasionally come down to London for the weekend, kipping on the sofa, much to Blind Ray’s objection. Things were not right. Buffalo Johnson was describing himself as an emotional cripple, then drowning the thought with twenty pints a night. Being his size, he could take it. At the bar, he’d order one to drink, while waiting for his change, then bring back the round. I couldn’t keep up with him. I rarely tried. When I did, it ended in vomit and stitches. I still have the scars to prove it. Then everything started to go right for him. I was stuck in Brixton, on the dole, writing hopeless novels, working in a Nigerian grocery, six nights a week till midnight and not getting paid. He had been snapped up by an up and coming IT company. He was a hot computer programmer, someone who could take new systems into companies and bed them in. It was 1987, big bang. And, for Buffalo Johnson, big bucks. The next thing I knew he was marrying my sister. For our friendship, it all went downhill from there. Big houses in Twickenham and Manchester. Buffalo Johnson never there. My sister bringing up young boys by herself. I have this particular memory of Buffalo Johnson going berserk at my little sister because she had folded over a pair of his socks at the top, so that the elastic was going. He had lost his sense of priority. When my sister divorced him early this century, we all wondered if he would survive. He has hospitalised himself in a sanatorium more than once. I don’t know how he has managed to persuade two other women to marry him since. His close relationships have been a disaster. But his sons, my nephews, are fantastic lads. The eldest, Sam, now studying sound engineering at Bolton University, looks like a perfect cross between Buffalo Johnson and me. It’s uncanny. Like I said, I don’t understand what we bring to each other’s lives. And then I see Sam…I feel like I also ought to say that Ray Davies of The Kinks becomes a pensioner today. Many more lazy Sunday afternoons to you, Ray. But my thoughts today are with Buffalo Johnson, in California with his brother, though we may never speak again for years.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Hello, my darlings

One of the first memories I have of TV humour as a kid was Charlie Drake. Today was Charlie’s birthday. He died in 2006, aged 81. I was barely at school when I first noticed this diminutive, red-haired slapstick joker – probably in The Charlie Drake Show. Every show featured a long sketch with an orchestra in which Charlie appeared to play all the instruments while simultaneously conducting. Eventually, there’d be one scene in which he was waiting for his cue to hit the triangle with a single strike, but would always miss it. Everybody aged 6 or 7 thought this was hilarious. It got us through our own turbulent music lessons at school (I always opted to play the triangle). His catchphrase in this show was Hello, my darlings. But I never realised until today that this represented his response to the fact that, being small, his eyeline was invariably at the height of the breasts of any woman he might come across. I feel I’ve learned something and, as a result, am defragging my memory banks. Do I remember The Worker, in which Charlie went for a new job in every episode, but it always ended in disaster? Do I remember that he actually had some musical hits? He certainly recorded a lot. The Top 10 hit Splish Splash was actually a cover version of a Bobby Darin tune. He even had a hit in the States with My Boomerang Won’t Come Back. As late as 1975, the recently post-Genesis Peter Gabriel actually produced a Charlie Drake single called You Never Know. Yes he did and no it wasn’t a hit. What makes me laugh today, however, is that one of the mostly unsuccessful films Charlie made was called Mr Ten Percent, in 1967. Although this is a phrase that is habitually used to describe financial sharks and swindlers, it has been adopted today by Gordon Brown, in an attempt to smear the leader of the opposition. Now, whenever I clock David Cameron, all I’ll be able to see is Charlie Drake. Hello, my darlings.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

A very influential pensioner

Chris Spedding turns pensioner today. Quite something for a rock, pop and jazz guitarist who had already reached that milestone in the eyes of the up-and-coming of 1976, half a lifetime ago. Back then, if you were over 21, you were too old for Punk. So the likes of The Vibrators, Chris Spedding’s backing band at the famous 100 Club Punk Festival in September 1976, and with whom he released two singles for Mickie Most’s RAK Records in November 1976, quickly became persona non grata. Yet I saw The Vibrators twice in the first six months of 1977 (without Chris Spedding) and I liked them. I was happy to walk around with a little badge with a red ‘V’ on it. After all, the sound of The Vibrators was the sound of Chris Spedding - a driving guitar grind, which somehow recalled Chuck Berry and 50s teens. And I, and many others, had a history with the bloke. I can trace the success of his single, Motorbikin’, in July 1975, as the very beginning of a change in my musical tastes. It was a dull time for music. The excitement of glam had gone. No more Sweet, Slade, Glitter, Mott or Sparks. It was all about waiting around for the next Rolling Stones tour, Led Zeppelin gatefold LP or David Bowie outrage. Motorbikin’ sounds tame now but it was a fast-paced pop single for its time, making a mockery of offerings from Wings and ELO, cutting a different note to the drive of Status Quo. It said that pop could be something different, more energetic, with bite. It paralleled the pub-rock movement which was making Dr Feelgood the cult band of the day. I bought Back In The Night around the same time as Motorbikin’. They went well together. In 1976, I still hadn’t finished with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator. And David Bowie was very much at the centre of my universe. But Chris Spedding and Dr Feelgood led me onto Eddie And The Hot Rods, the true bridge to Punk for those who had come from the rock route I had. So, by the autumn of 1976, when The Sex Pistols were first outraging the nation and getting banned everywhere, record companies were in a huge hurry to get Punk records out there. And, even at the age of 32, Chris Spedding was in demand. He could play. He’d been playing in bands since 1957 and had worked with the likes of Jack Bruce, Nilsson, Roy Harper, Lulu, Dusty Springfield and John Cale. This man had influence and credibility. He’d played on Brian Eno’s Here Come The Warm Jets. He was a customer of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren at their Seditionaries boutique on London's King’s Road. He actually produced the first three-song demo by The Sex Pistols – Problems, No Feelings, and Pretty Vacant - which led to their first single release in November 1976 (he denies playing on the demo). Yet it was his collaboration with The Vibrators that ended this street-cred. Nobody wanted a pop song called Pogo Dancing (it was still two years before The Buzzcocks were to prove that Punk could go pop). It was a slip that the early Punk glitterati never forgave him for. Yes, there was Motorbikin', but we still remembered he was a Womble, in a furry costume playing his trademark Gibson Flying V on a tour around the very same time. He was everyone’s guitarist - and fledgling Punk was very exclusive. The Vibrators had started out as Chris Spedding’s backing band. They played the 100 Club Punk Festival. They were one of the first to play the infamous Roxy Club in London's Covent Garden, open for the first six months of 1977 only. They ended 1977 by playing support to Ian Hunter, solo after Mott The Hoople. But they were influential. Stiff Little Fingers took their name from a Vibrators song. And The Vibrators are still touring today. Singer, Knox, is 63. Almost as old as he looked in 1977. But Chris Spedding had shed his Vibrators mistake and moved on. He escaped to America and, by 1980, he was recording an album of his own again, ironically entitled I’m Not Like Everybody Else. He’d certainly played with everybody else. And that’s how it’s continued. Paul McCartney, Tom Waits, Roxy Music. Now he’s playing blues rock with his own band, Click Clack, at the age of 65. Tonight, he’s live at Nottingham Arena on Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds Tour. So, happy 65th birthday, Chris. It’s thanks to you that I…

Postscript: In late 1976, very few Punk records had been released, so, in order to believe that something was happening, we had to extend the genre to New Wave. Interestingly, below are the first 10 Punk and New Wave singles in order of date of release. The Sex Pistols were actually 7th or 8th into vinyl and not the first in the UK. With Blondie, a band we did not really begin to recognise until mid 1977, there is some dispute over whether X Offender was released on this very day, June 17th 1976 (or December). And the first Ramones single passed most of us by. Also, while we were listening to Eddie And The Hot Rods’ new Live At The Marquee EP, we weren’t sure whether The Saints were Status Quo on speed. Some people will dispute this listing. Where is Iggy Pop or Patti Smith? In reply, I’ll say this: Iggy Pop and Patti Smith were neither Punk nor New Wave, any more than Lou Reed or the New York Dolls were before them (largely an age/generation thing). Iggy was an influence, who outlasted those of his generation such as the MC5 and Velvet Underground, to have an important presence throughout the Punk and New Wave era and beyond, into parody. In 1976, I saw Iggy as a Bowie acolyte. I'm not even going to mention Jonathan Richman or Television, both of whom had singles in 1975. You can't be included in a movement before that movement has begun. For their part, bands like The Stranglers, Talking Heads, The Jam and many others after them - were passengers who surfed the New Wave. But, like them or loathe them (and I liked The Stranglers, seeing them twice in the first half of 1977), they were important to the movement at the time. The following songs and their B-sides you heard at every Punk gig or gathering you went to, because they were the only records available. You have to remember that so much of this hinged on whether The Sex Pistols, the leaders of the movement, would get a UK recording contract in 1976. Had they not succeeded, none of the Americans or Australians would have made it in the UK either and Punk would have fizzled out before it started, instead of becoming the inspiration for a whole host of movements which followed it, from the Ska and Mod revival, to Post-Punk and New Romanticism, early 80s pop and every Indie band since. So, the influence of Chris Spedding is there for all to see. You’ve earned your bus pass, Chris…

FIRST 10 PUNK/NEW WAVE SINGLES

April, 1976: The Ramones: Blitzkrieg Bop/Havana Affair (Sire) US release

June, 1976 or December, 1976: Blondie: X Offender/In The Sun (Private Stock) US release

September, 1976: The Saints: I’m Stranded/No Time (Fatal) Australia release

October, 1976: The Damned: New Rose/Help (Stiff) UK release

November, 1976 Chris Spedding and The Vibrators: The Pogo/The Pose (RAK) UK release

November, 1976: Richard Hell and the Voidoids: (I Belong To The) Blank Generation/(I Could Live With You) In Another World/You Gotta Lose (Stiff) UK release

November, 1976: The Vibrators: We Vibrate/Whips And Furs (RAK) UK release

November, 1976: The Sex Pistols: Anarchy In The UK/I Wanna Be Me (EMI) UK release

January, 1977: The Stranglers: (Get A) Grip (On Yourself)/London Lady (United Artists) UK release

January, 1977: The Buzzcocks: Spiral Scratch EP (New Hormones) UK release

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

Padstein

The photo that leaps out of this blog was taken on my 50th birthday last week by Debbie in Rick Stein's Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall. I don't think I've ever been happier. Seeing and hearing Rick Stein talking about his life and work in Padstow on TV last night helped me relive the moment. I for one am not fed up of TV chefs. I like Rick Stein, just as I like Jamie Oliver and Ainsley Harriott. OK, I don't like Gordon Ramsay or Delia Smith and I simply can't abide Anthony Worrall Thompson. You can't have everything. But you can have a great 50th birthday with the people you love.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk

...on the other side of 50

Should I stay or should I go? The discussion is over. As I jump from one personal decade into another, I have to acknowledge that things can change. Especially if they need to. So, this is where I continue my exploration of inner worlds and outer meanings. This is where I link Hugh Laurie (50 today) with Rock The Casbah (27 today). I leave the world of business to the world of business. Having earned the right to be 50, I now have my own place where I can just be myself without answering to anyone. I'll keep you posted.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk