Part 19: 1979 A broken heart, a teenage Neneh Cherry, Money, BBC peado's and White Mice.

Juliette broke my heart, what I thought was a budding romance, to her was just a passing dalliance, she moved on romantically while travelling on the Specials Tour, but I hid my pain and we remained friends and occasional colleagues.

 I had a panic call from David Cunningham because his new Single on Virgin had entered the charts and they had to do 'Top of The Pops' the following day. Two things panicked him, one it would be impossible to recreate the track in a studio that night and he didn’t have anyone who could play drums and had a current musicians union membership.

(For clarity TOTP rules were that musicians could not mime to the record that had charted, they had to re-record it in a studio under supervision and then mime to that recording of the track. )

I called Virgin and got the low down. What they did was book a (compliant) studio and when the Union rep turned up they would see the band setting up a bit late and the Promo guy or girl would then offer to take the Rep to dinner at a nice expensive restaurant down the road, with the promise of being back in time to watch the end of the recording and mixing and take away the master tape. While they were out Virgin simply delivered the original master tape and the engineer set it up on the desk. The band packed up leaving the engineer to look like he was doing the final mix when the rep got back. I’m sure everybody knew what was going on, but the game was played out every time so that the rep could never be accused of complicity. My MU membership still had a month to run so I joined them at the studio and performed twice on 'Top of The Pops' while MONEY was in the top 10. There’s a link here to some more footage but as one show had the voice over of Jimmy Saville at the beginning and end and the other had Dave Lee Travis, the full original footage was lost by the beeb, once they were both found guilty of serial paedophilia and assault.




The last job I did for Dick was to tour manage on The Slits/ Prince Hammer and  Creation Rebel/ Don Cherry tour in the September.  Don had brought his family, partner and daughter Neneh . I’m sure it’ll all be documented in correct detail elsewhere but I had a good time, spent some time with Don's Family. I walked around Edinburgh in the dead of night with Sue from Better Badges and was highly unimpressed with the rather misogynistic version of Rastafarianism that I was presented with by some of the band. Don Cherry on the other hand was a true revelation, I think his one string African guitar pieces will be my enduring memory of the tour. Dick was running the Eccleston Street office with Linda Nevill now, she was also managing the Gang of Four, I was now just an occasional visitor.


We got the Mo-Dettes master tape of White Mice back to London in late October and agreed to let David do a final mix, a better ear than me or the engineer and now a track record of mixing well for radio. June Kingston produced all the artwork for the sleeve and labels, possibly one of the most original bits of artwork of its era. There was always tension at Rough Trade about the Mo-Dettes, neither 'radical feminist' enough nor 'art schooly' enough, they ran a good path, aligning with neither the Slits or the Raincoats, but I’m pleased to say that Geoff Travis and a couple of others at the label weren’t swayed, the bands credentials of early association and involvement with the Roxy, The Clash, The Pistols movie and so much more gave them as much right ( if not more) to be on the roster. Once we had pressings I would spend days on end in their offices ( usually with Daniel Millar who was busy promoting his Silicone Teens releases ) packing up promo copies and press releases for the best of the music press and the alternative radio shows. I spent evenings chatting up journalists, wanting a maximum amount of coverage to go with the single release and took a young Giovani Dadomo out to Paris with me and the band to a gig at Le Bains Douche, an acoustically awful old tiled swimming pool with a water tank and underwater chess games.

It wasn’t hard getting underground fanzines and Inner London press coverage for the release, they already loved them, part of London's punk aristocracy . Tom Vague wrote: “The Mo-dettes formed out of the Vincent Units-Tesco Bombers, who squatted with the Raincoats on Monmouth Road off Westbourne Grove; originally as the Tesco Bomberettes at the Chippenham pub in Maida Hill, of 101’ers fame. The Swiss singer Ramona and guitarist Kate (Korus, formerly of both the Slits and the Raincoats) took over Joe Strummer’s old ice-cream factory squat in Paddington*; and Kate and the drummer June worked on ‘The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle’. The Mo-dettes bassist ‘Mad Jane’ Crockford went out with Mick Jones, Neal Brown of the Vincent Units, and bit off  some of Shane MacGowan’s ear at the Clash ICA gig. They also supported the Clash when they weren't named as ‘The Clash’.”

The problem was more about how to get the more mainstream press and regional recognition, so I worked on Sounds, Melody Maker and New Musical express and the teen magazines, specifically, which led me into social areas that I hadn’t had much contact with before. Rick Rogers was always a friend to me, advice, support and contacts (and some very boozy late nights at Dingwalls and elsewhere.). We got support slots with Madness, The Specials and The Selector, opened for Nina Hagen and the Psychedelic Furs as well as headlining across the usual club circuit in their own rite.

White Mice was released in December 1979 and made number one in the 'trade charts’ of Lightning Records in the Christmas week. In the January the Alternative Charts from Lightning went into the mainstream music press and while Spizz Energy’s ‘Captain Kirk‘ was now No 1, White Mice stayed in their  top ten for about 6 weeks. I wanted to promote the single across the UK, Europe and out in the USA with a view to getting a decent advance for an album release, more crumbs from the table of the multinational music industry.

Audio Here


* Toms description of taking over Strummers rehearsal studio is inaccurate according to Kate, The slits Modettes and many others actually rehearsed in the basement of the house where Kate and Paloma lived. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 18: A night in the cells, meeting Mo-Dettes and a close shave with some Hampstead fascists.

Image
  There were two more notable shows with Wayne and the Chairs that year. The band didn’t have a big enough following to sell out the London Lyceum and John Curd, the promoter, suggested that we share a bill with The UK Subs, who similarly wouldn’t have drawn enough of a crowd on their own. It was a mistake, Wayne was greeted by cat calls and what I can only describe as homophobic and  Transphobic abuse by the Uk Subs crowd, and throughout the show they threw beer cans, half full glasses and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, at the band, I joined the stage crew clearing up the debris between songs. One can that hit Wayne direct, she picked up and hurled back in the direction it came from but it was impossible to see where the worst offenders were, I walked around the crowd and evicted at least three of the offenders. We were please to get out. The rest of the UK shows went without much incident until  weeks later, the last date on that UK tour was at Brighton Univ...
Read more

In search of a dream Part 8. Assorted stories, visitors and some night time surprises.

Image
  Meigan fayre was very special. They held more of them, bigger crowds, more music, better stages, but this first one was really a fabulous achievement, not a rock festival but an arts event, driven by the best of motives, offering hope and brotherhood at a time of immense change in the world. It brought together free spirits, thinkers, dancers and activists.  Not so much a microcosm of that first free Glastonbury festival which inspired so much, but more like the Beckenham arts festivals that Bowie helped put on, where I first met him, pre superstardom. You don’t find these events often nowadays, especially not free, every little festival thinks it needs big name headliners and are   basically business enterprises. Many of those who came to visit me ended up staying in the area, others came for some respite, short stays and some for recuperation from the rigours of city life. Miriam would visit off and on as would others of my closest old friends. Two of my sisters v...
Read more