Incendiary Device

I’ve been writing about the causes and effects of Punk. One rarely mentioned influence is humour. An important and often overlooked element of it all is the people who brought a smile to our faces towards the end of a very grim decade. It was more than the names of the bands or band members, though these were massively attractive in their own right. For some, the humour detracted from the seriousness of the message and the impact. It was plain for all to see when The Sex Pistols toured with The Clash, The Damned and The Heartbreakers at the end of 1976 that Captain Sensible and his crew were just not serious. Yet, for many of us initially put off by the violence of The Sex Pistols and the earnestness of The Clash, The Damned were the way in. Not that the Captain wasn’t political. He was originally a member of the Green Party. Even recently, in 2006, passing 50, he formed his own political entity, the Blah! Party. In his launch statement, he said: ‘Politics is dead. The British public aren't voting because the parties are totally ignoring their opinions. At the moment, the only real method of mass protest against this is by not voting, which is why voting figures continue to fall. But we believe that voting is an important part of the democratic process, and we want the Blah! Party to be the party of protest: a channel through which the people of the U.K. can vent their dissatisfaction at nonsensical everyday things, and protest against the government and the current crop of political parties.’ Now, it’s very hard to take someone seriously who wore a ballet tutu on stage. But somebody had to do the nonsensical thing back in 1976. We needed the fun that ought to be part of life when you’re 17 or 18, when you don’t really care about voting. To make a splash, The Damned were more than happy to forget the message and cover themselves with foam or margarine for a newspaper or album cover. Ray Burns, aka Captain Sensible, had been trying to make his mark on the music business for some years. As I’ve said, Punk, and therefore Punks, had history. They didn’t just arrive out of nowhere. Although it does, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that Captain Sensible ended up topping the charts with Happy Talk in 1982. Already 22 by 1976, he had to get a move on. And he’d started his musical career as part of Johnny Moped’s band. Paul Halford, aka Johnny Moped, was and remains a mysterious figure. Throughout his admittedly short-lived career as an unlikely Punk icon, Paul Halford had trouble holding on to his job in a cardboard box factory. In 1975, Halford, Burns and a bunch of Croydon mates managed to record but not release a single called Disco Girls. By mid-76, they were calling themselves Johnny Moped and could say that they were around at the birth of Punk in the UK. You only had to look at Paul Halford and you’d burst out laughing. Unprepossessing was the word. Yet you soon forgot this when you heard the vinyl or saw the band play live. Not that they had any vinyl until the summer of 1977 – today’s date, in fact. Incendiary Device/No-One is still considered a Punk classic. The growling voice and hard-driving rhythm was the best that the Chiswick Records label - second only to Stiff Records in re-launching the careers of never-has-beens - had to offer. Ray Burns left after weeks in 1976 to form The Damned. But he introduced his replacement, Slimey Toad, who had played with Damned drummer Rat Scabies in a band which had had a residency at a mental home. Johnny Moped first really came to the notice of the Punk press through being one of the early bands to play live at London’s Roxy Club. Indeed, their debut on vinyl was their live contribution to Live At The Roxy WC2 album in June 1977. But it wasn’t as good as Incendiary Device. John Peel championed it and it became number 15 in his Festive Fifty of 1977. One critic described it as moronic punk ‘n’ roll. OK, the lyrics wouldn’t win the Germaine Greer prize for poetry (Walking down the road with my incendiary device/Looking for an ear to blow it up with gelignite/Stick it in her lughole/Watch it blow her head apart/Stick in her lughole/Stick it in her other part/My device is nearly ready/Grab her neck and hold her steady/Stick it in her), but its energy enabled Martin and me to bounce off the corridor walls of our halls of residence in Bradford a few months later. It may well have been beer-sodden pub-rock, but it gave us what we wanted. But Paul Halford wasn’t giving his band members what they wanted. He wouldn’t give up his job in the cardboard box factory, which tended to get in the way of recording and releasing their first LP while the Punk boom was still on. To get their singer to a recording session, the rest of the band had to kidnap him from his workplace. Once, they painted him all green so he couldn’t go back. The paint didn’t come off for weeks. On another occasion, they found him queueing up to get into one of his own gigs to see himself. The band split. After the band split, that’s when they decided to record the album. That was Johnny Moped for you. Halford was persuaded to gig some more, to great acclaim. They reformed for a couple of well-received gigs at London’s Roundhouse. In March 1978, they even released a second single, the wonderfully titled, Darling, Let’s Have Another Baby (only Johnny Moped could have got away with the lyric I’ll be quite happy/To wash and change his nappy; you can see Paul singing this with his wife, Brenda on a recent YouTube clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtCo2nxh1XA). This was quickly followed by an ignored classic of an LP, Cycledelic. The Guinness Encylopaedia Of Popular Music names it as one of the best 50 Punk albums of all time (personally, I’d struggle to name 50 Punk albums!). And I still hadn’t seen them live. When the chance came to see them support Adam and the Ants at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street in early April 1978, I couldn’t resist. Max Jingoff and I cancelled our lectures for a couple of days and hitch-hiked our way there and back. It was a fabulous gig, riotous and energetic, number eight in my all-time top 25 gigs. Johnny Moped was an eccentric. Both Punk and the world of cardboard box manufacture would just not have been the same without his humour.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk