Monday 28 January 2013

I'm with the band

A slight smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the stingingly cold night air. The floor of the back of the transit van where I sit feels icy, even through my trousers. My back hurts, leaning against something hard and unyielding, its corner poking into my shoulder.

There are six of us – no, hang on, actually there are seven of us, trying to ‘snuggle’ down between amps, drums, guitar cases, backdrops and bags of leads and pedals, behind the cab, hoping to catch a little bit of sleep as the vehicle we’re travelling in rumbles down the motorway in the bleak early hours of a winter morning.

The guitarist, drummer and bassist, and their three girlfriends, one of whom is me, make up six. The vocalist and his girlfriend are sitting in the front with her brother, the informally appointed roadie. The seventh person in the back with us is a ‘fan’ who is cadging a lift back home after the gig. When everyone was packing up at the end of the night - always a long-winded and frustrating business - he’d asked, “Any chance of dropping me off in Hull?”  (or wherever it was).  With the band’s badges on his lapel glinting in the streetlights as he’d made his request, the bass player and self-appointed spokesman for the group could not have refused. However, the detour for this additional passenger takes us an hour out of our way back home and it feels like an eternity when we’ve got another 150 miles to go. But this often seems to happen at gigs; there is always someone in the van travelling back with us who hasn’t travelled out with us, and usually it’s someone who smells strongly of sweat and dope and farts, with long limbs and a bulky rucksack, taking up precious space and time. And space and time mean more than anything on the home-bound stretch, because everyone is knackered, hungry, dehydrated, cold, squashed up, uncomfortable and grumpy. Everyone just wants to get home as soon as possible, longing for deep sleep in a warm, soft, bed. But at least nobody can accuse the band of being ungenerous in that respect.

It was the early 1980s and this became quite a frequent event for a while as I travelled with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band to an assortment of venues up and down the country. We usually tried to get back the same night, which in reality meant arriving home just as the sun was coming up.  A few times we stayed over, like once in a damp squat – a condemned terraced house with no plumbing (ironically it was in Bath) - and another time on the floor of tiny council flat in a high rise in St. Helens. That one had plumbing but, by strange coincidence, the toilet was broken. We had to use the bath.

My memories of those days are a melange of odd moments and images. From being stopped and searched by the Mets as we travelled home through South London, to seeing a cow giving birth as we ventured through the Cumbrian hills on the way to a gig near the Windscale (as it was then called) nuclear plant. From hearing rumours that British Movement skinheads were going to storm in and give everyone a kicking at Grimsby (they didn’t), to paddling in the sea before a gig in Fareham. There were the unkempt crusty/hippie children climbing on top of the van at Stonehenge, where tales of Hells Angels with knives made the place feel distinctly unwelcoming and the schedule got so far behind that in the end the band didn’t play anyway. And there was the punk in Burnley who was ‘wearing’ a condom, attached to his face between safety pins (one in his lip, one in his nose. It was quite a look.) It turned out he was the singer in one of the support bands, whose only memorable number was a re-worded demolition of Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’ endearingly entitled ‘Fuck Off Everybody’.

I remember the inter-band arguments, the waiting around at soundchecks, the sharing of bags of chips with chilli sauce at The George Robey, the listening in on fanzine interviews, and the way only Northern punks sported moustaches… Strangely enough, perhaps, the thing I probably remember the least about is the performances. They were good, though.  Of course.

So where are they now? The bassist founded a record company, the vocalist and drummer are fine and I met them again a few years ago, and the guitarist… well, he’s in the kitchen right now, making me a cup of tea.

23 comments:

  1. Ha! Outstanding.

    A punk rock love-story without the herion and stabbings (far as we've been told).

    That's a pretty cool way to do your courtin'.

    Please tell me that cover of C'mon Everybody was pressed at some point in time.





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    1. Ha ha, we weren't exactly Sid and Nancy...
      It didn't feel all that cool at the time, either!
      But all good experience, and like many things, makes the anecdotes for the future.
      We're racking our brains to think of the name of that infamous support band now. I'll update this if we remember.

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    1. Thank you...
      The memories of those days do seem to get a little bit fonder with the passing of time, though!

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  3. Oh, I love it. Your love was forged in the torrid furnace of low-down dirty rock'n'roll! You must remind him of that next time he drops a wet teabag on the floor, or absent-mindedly breaks wind while stroking your hair on the sofa. Mind you, after all those nights in suspension-free vans and crab-ridden squats, you've probably faced far worse together.

    And I genuinely laughed aloud when I came across 'Fuck Off Everybody'. Punk wit and wisdom at its most nihilistic.

    My squeeze also served his time in the trenches (got as far as the Rock Garden and the Tramshed in Woolwich), but I was more the Yoko Ono figure in that particular outfit. As I'm still regularly reminded to this day....

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    1. Thank you... I remind him (and myself) of those times whenever I feel our lives heading down the slippery slope of middle-aged domestic tedium. You can take the girl out of low down dirty rock'n'roll but you can't take... etc
      I'd really love to read about your similar experiences too, some time... Yes?!

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    2. I'll try and squeeze a post out of it all!

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  4. Magnificent! I spent some time in 77/78 traveling in the back of a van with a band I knew from Leeds and your descriptions of the discomforts involved ring very loud bells and are resurrecting long forgotten memories. The one thing you didn't mention that really comes to mind when I think of the hours spent bouncing around amid amps and instruments, is the overpowering stench of exhaust fumes coming up through the floor, though perhaps we just had a particularly crappy van. Can't have been very healthy really can it? I still shudder if ever I happen to spot an orange Salford Van Hire vehicle on my travels.

    I'm with Kolley & e.f. by the way, let's get 'Fuck Off Everybody' to number one. I know I won't listen to Eddie's original in the same way from now on.

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    1. Bloody hell, yes, how could I have forgotten the exhaust fumes?! Bouncing about is right, too - no seats, no safety belts, just crammed in amongst the equipment. That time we were in Cumbria we struggled to get the dodgy hire van up the steep hill, and the drummer's gf got all panicky ("we're going to crash! We're all going to die!") It's a wonder nothing awful happened on all those long journeys really - I expect you feel the same!

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  5. The first thing I thought on reading this wonderful piece was 'Where can I get a copy of 'Fuck Off Everybody'? It seems I'm not alone. The second thing (sorry) I thought was that your evocation of travelling with the band is just fabulous, C. I'm laughing about those northern punks with their incorrect moustaches. I'm hoping for further road memories in the future.

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    1. Ha ha - that song... as in the other comments, it's just waiting to happen, isn't it?! The one thing that can be said about Condom Face and his band was that the memory of him and that song have endured. Who'd have thought at the time that we'd be talking about that 30 years on?! So all credit to him for that, if nothing else...

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    2. Tis funny how some things stick in the memory. I expect he's a merchant banker now.

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  6. That was magnificient C...I could almost smell the 'sweat and farts'....a cup o' tea love...rock 'n roll!!!

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    1. It's always the bad smells that we remember, isn't it...?!

      Thank you!

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  7. Nice, post!! You could write a post on each of your gig adventures! 'Fuck off Everybody'....amazing!

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    1. But they didn't feel like adventures at the time - it's funny isn't it, how things change in retrospect. I'll have a dig around in my memory banks anyway!

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  8. All very familiar - except the "Northern punks sporting moustaches" part! Craziness.

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    1. I thought it might resonate with people!
      Yes (and to Singing Bear too) - those Northern punks. Preston Warehouse in particular, I seem to remember. Full of moustaches.

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    2. Punk or not...suave is non-negotiable.

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    3. :-) At least they weren't wearing high heels, e.f.

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  9. Thanks all for lovely comments!

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  10. I remember sitting on something ice-cold in the back of the van coming back from supporting Cabaret Voltaire in Sheffield in the early eighties. Pulling back the blanket revealed a pile of plastic bags of frozen chips that our drummer had purloined from the club's kitchen freezer!

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    1. Oh no! - stopping for chips on the way home seems pretty normal but that is taking things a bit far... Drummers, eh?! (Should have been chicken drumsticks, really. Or something battered...)

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