Rockabilly years

In the mid to late 70s a new generation of music lovers was growing up of which I was one. I lived in a squat (Although we actually paid rent - it was £9.00 per week for an entire house in Hove, Sussex) and didn’t have much interest in the products being churned out by an effete music industry. We would pick up vinyls in charity shops and car-boot fairs) I developed an interest in old juke-boxes and set about discovering original records to fill them up with. You could buy classic tunes for pennies.

The same generation was not interested in propping up the consumer culture by buying ready-made and packaged “Entertainment” It was a lot more fun and satisfying to start your own band or support local groups who had something relevant to say. Thus was born the “New-Wave” and “Punk” culture. Thanks partly to Malcolm McLaren’s genius adoption of the situationist philosophy Punk became the prominent genre but in fact there was a whole swathe of styles and types explored and exploited. The entire back-catalogue of music was rifled and re-invented

In April 1980 I started a shop “C.O.D.” (cash on delivery) at kensington Market, Kensington High St where there was a stronghold of fashion and music sub-cultures - some really great shops - Johnsons, Rock-a-Cha, Cuba. I would trawl Brick Lane Market on a Sunday before dawn looking for 50s and 60s clothes, records and paraphernalia on Saturday mornings I’d be at Swiss cottage Market or Kingsland Road Waste and at Portobello Road on a Friday.

There was a thriving club scene at that time spearheaded by Chris Sullivan and Ollie Maxwell, Steve Strange, Rusty Egan and a small tight coterie of “in the know” cool leaders of fashion - everybody knew everybody else at least by sight and the New Romantic crew, rockabillies and other types tussled with each other through design and retail, music and dance and across night-time London in a multitude of mushrooming night-clubs that appeared and disappeared with startling rapidity.

At that time vintage clothes and cars were being tossed out everywhere and the canny few who appreciated good quality design and style had a field day scooping up treasures.

The photographs here are of Brian Setzer’s  “Stray Cats’”  first British visit where I saw them at Gossips in Soho, Dingwalls and in Brighton. Buzz and the Flyers another New York band played Dingwalls in Camden and the Meteors the original Psycho-Billies from the U.K. played at the Marquee Club, Wardour St, Soho.

Peter Doherty Artwork ...where the music, writing and art collide

Brighton's best hope … The Piranhas

if you lived in Brighton or Hove in the late 70s when Punk and New Wave was the only visible and vibrant example of "culture"around, then you couldn't miss THE PIRANHAS.  They rehearsed as did most local bands in the basement of The Resources Centre (known as The Crypt) and they played all the local pubs in the area.

Johnny Helmer

They were the Brighton band most likely to succeed and did in fact break into the charts with ska song TOM HARK. Reggae and Ska were a major influence on the town's music scene at the time while Punk was hitting all the headlines.

The Piranhas

 The Piranhas even got to tour with the Jam and a picture here shows music mogul Pete Waterman back-stage with song-smith "Boring" Bob Grover at the Demontford Hall if I remember correctly THE DOLLY MIXTURES a three girl outfit were also on the bill that night. 

Dick the drummer

Apart from Tom Hark the song that stands out in my memory was "I don't like my body …. it looks like an advert on an Oxfam poster, sex is its hobby, drop it in the slot like bread in a toaster …. " or something like that.

Reg the bass player

I guess that Boring Bob must have been the quiet genius behind the lyrics although it IS only a guess and Johnny Helmer stood out as a perfectly effective and sweet faced front-man. The two characters in this gang who stood out for me as personalities were Dick the irrepressible drummer and Reg the bass player who along with Johnny, actually had a bit of time to say hello and have a giggle. 

Bob Grover with Pete Waterman and friend at the Demontford Hall Leicester

All of the band were of course local heroes for a good length of time and were I know thoroughly nice chaps.

They didn't become Brighton's answer to the Beatles or even the Sex Pistols but you couldn't ask for a more entertaining bunch of musicians to discover in some wind-swept sea-front pub and I hope that they are still out there knocking out ska tunes and some of their own idiosyncratic songs.

"Boring" Bob Grover

 Heres's to you all guys ! You cheered up the 70s for me.

Rock & Roll Museum *2 - "Brighton"

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The Rock and Roll Museum includes a sizeable archive of photographs of musicians taken from 1976 − 1980 from which the eight pictures shown here have been selected. I lived in Brighton ( well Hove actually) from 1974 − 1980. I moved there straight from school into a job as assistant stage-manager at the Palace Pier Theatre for the Summer season with Music Hall at The Palace a veritable “end of the pier” show and which was indeed the last production to ever grace the boards of the Victorian theatre with its silver coloured turrets standing a third of a mile from the shore at the far end of the main pier which remains standing to this day. The theatre has sadly gone and even in 1974 music hall or variety shows were long past their sell-by date and the pensioners to whom such entertainments mainly catered were too thin on the ground to sustain the two shows daily seven days a week for which a hard working assistant stage-manager was paid the Equity minimum wage of twelve pounds.

I augmented my wages by working in the Victoria and Albert bars at the front of the theatre and stayed in a hippy household in Hove where a diet of brown rice, good hashish, Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart was all included for about six pounds a week. In addition to the usual duties of calling performers from their dressing rooms, operating an ancient lighting board and shifting scenery I assisted the aged star Sandy Powell with his conjourer’s routine and performed under the lime-light as stooge for Rubber-Neck Nat Jackley who had made a brief dim impression on a new generation as “Happy Nat” the tour-guide in the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”. By mid-August Brighton had had enough of the “traditional sea-side entertainment” and scenery and performers, crew and all decamped (being the operative word) to Great Yarmouth for the final weeks of the season at empressario Jack Jay’s Windmill Theatre.

Ian Loughler

I bid a sad farewell to the pier with its Dodgems, Ghost-train, Helter-Skelter and tattooist and youthful new-ager that I now was ingested a chunk of Siberian Red Ginseng to fortify me for the long trip up to the Norfolk coastal resort.

Midnight and The Lemon Boys

There didn’t seem to be much of a future in music-hall so I signed up for a year foundation course at Epsom School of Art where I learned the basics of photography, video, silk-screen and took an interest in conceptual and performance art, I developed the usual lively art school social life and an abiding passion for the Velvet Underground then by 1975 moved back to Hove to begin a three year fine art course at the Brighton  art college; “Combined Studies” was a pioneering course which catered for fine art students whose main concerns did not include painting, sculpture and printmaking.

Dick Damage at The Alhambra

Along with new approaches to art around that time music was undergoing seismic changes; Jefferson Airplane converting to a starship was not enough; an entirely new generation was picking up guitars, Operation Julie, a massive undercover police operation was closing the lid on the pandora’s box of LSD that had liberally supplied cheap light shows to the hippy culture and cheap amphetamines once more became the drug of necessity for those young people who wanted to go out at night to trip the light fantastic.

Dick Damage and The Splinters

A swarm of new bands appeared often along with their audience powered by the powder and speckled blue pills. Rock and roll of the 50s and 60s had been fuelled by the speed supplied by the legitimate pharmaceutical industry; in postwar America there were as many as 17 million prescribed uppers by their doctors and Britain had as usual followed suit. The mod and skinhead cultures had notoriously cruised down to Brighton on their parents’ pep pills and now you could with some accuracy divide the new music into Punk that were speeding and New-Wave who probably weren’t.

The Vandells at Hangleton Festival

Between 1976 and 1980 my favourite Brighton venues were a pub on the sea-front called The Alhambra where local bands invariably played and the Crypt in the basement of The Resources Centre - a tiny, cramped Cavern like space where I saw Crass and The Buzzcocks and which provided rehearsal space. Notable among local contenders were The Piranhas, The Depressions, The Vandells, The Tecniques, Laughing Gas, Wrist Action, The Chefs (later Helen and the Horns), Dick Damage and The Splinters, Peter and The Test-Tube Babies, The Hot Gates, Smeggy and the Cheesey Bits, (later King Kurt)  Joby and The Hooligans, The Ijax All-Stars, The Lillets, Ian (The Hat) Loughler, Midnight and The Lemon Boys, The Poison Girls, Billy Richards and probably a whole load more. The Piranhas I believe came closest to “making it big” and had a successful single “Tom Hark”. All of the above were marvellously entertaining, exemplifying all that was best in the local music scene and trod a line somewhere between Punk and New Wave with a measure of Reggae, Garage and Rock and Roll.

The Pirhanas at The Crypt

In 1980 I moved to London and the era ended for me. The Sallis Benney Hall at the Art College and Sussex University along with The Top Rank Suite, The Dome and The Brighton Centre hosted bigger Internationally known acts. The Rock and Roll Museum will attempt to do justice to this provincial wave of talent in coming issues. Included here are eight photographs …. many more are promised over the coming months. I can be contacted via Professorro@Gmail.com.

Wrist Action