Ted Leo and a band close to home

I may be biased, but “strive to survive causing least suffering possible” has to be one of the best maxims for life that there is.  You just can’t fault it.  Without realising quite what a lasting impact it would have on many people, anarcho-punk band Flux of Pink Indians chose these words for the title of their seminal album. I shared my roots with members of FoPI in our small local punk scene of the late '70s (a Hertfordshire market town's equivalent to the Bromley Contingent!) and was especially close to them at the time when they recorded it and first showcased the ‘Strive...’ set at gigs up and down the country.  So it really warms my heart when I hear that their 1983 release is still often referred to with reverence by fans old and new around the world.  Bands like Flux and Crass may not provide the kind of music I'd actively choose to listen to so much now - at least not for its own sake - but perhaps that's partly because I was just so immersed in it all at the time.  And because I'm not quite such an angry young thing any more ;-)   

Anyway, about 6 or 7 years ago a very cool friend introduced me to the music of US band Ted Leo & the Pharmacists and I was immediately struck by their accessible, anthemic, punk/power-pop/ska/rock sound and Ted’s heartfelt vocals, all of which tick the right boxes for me now.  Songs like ‘Me and Mia’ and ‘Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?’ are well worth a listen if you’re not already familiar – and their general melodic-with-an-edge style sometimes makes me think of early Jam.  I also knew that Ted Leo was a prolific and renowned song-writer as well as a man of integrity, unafraid of coming at things from a political angle.   Ok, so now you may be thinking: what’s that got to do with Flux of Pink Indians and ‘Strive To Survive Causing Least Suffering Possible’?

Well, apart from the fact that I like it as a typically strong, catchy track in its own right, I was just amazed to hear a certain reference in the lyrics of ‘Ativan Eyes’ from Ted's 2010 album 'Brutalist Bricks’.  When I first listened to this and heard him sing "We strive to survive causing least suffering possible - the Flux of Pink Indians gave me words for that"  (around 2 mins 9 seconds in) I couldn't believe it.  I know it probably doesn't mean a lot to anyone else but it means a lot here!  Boy, is my heart warm now :-)

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists:  Ativan Eyes

(A special 30th anniversary edition of FoPI's ‘Strive...’ with extra tracks, including the live set from the Feeding of the 5000 gig at Shepherds Bush Empire 2007, is released on One Little Indian 2nd September 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.

Dancing through dark times

At an age when my friends and I should have been enjoying the most hedonistic time of our lives, there was something dark and ominous looming over us like a monstrous headmaster ready to dish out discipline at the merest hint of any mischief: the threat of nuclear war. 

For me - and maybe for you too?  - the early '80s were schizophrenic in the extreme.  On the one hand there were 'Protect and Survive' pamphlets dropping through our letterboxes and, a little later, visions of a post nuclear apocalypse would be beamed into our living rooms via programmes like 'Threads'.

Even the children’s author and illustrator Raymond Briggs, best known for his wonderful books ‘The Snowman’ and ‘Fungus the Bogeyman’, stepped into this terrifying territory and haunted us with ‘When The Wind Blows’.   And ‘Only Fools And Horses’ parodied our deepest fears of imminent nuclear conflict with an episode entitled ‘The Russians Are Coming’ in which the hapless Trotters build a fallout shelter at the top of a tower block.  This was not so far from reality – anyone could buy DIY shelter kits through the Sunday supplements, which carried adverts for them as if getting one was on a par with purchasing a new shed.   With one of these safe havens in your back garden you could relax in the knowledge that when World War III kicked off (which it was definitely going to at any moment) you’d be protected against radiation by a few layers of lead, dirt and concrete and some strategically placed cushions.

On the other hand - perhaps as a direct response to the above - there were a lot of bright  and creative things going on behind the scenes.  However, the mainstream took colourful frivolity to an extreme, and seemed dominated by a culture (if you can call it that) of bubble perms and padded shoulders.   Frothy bands like Bucks Fizz (pun intended) topped the charts – their name, their look and their songs all summed up this strange, frilly party atmosphere.  They may as well have been singing, “Let’s all fiddle while Rome burns!”  On the surface it was all primary colourrs and lipgloss, and I can’t blame anyone for wanting that escapism.  If I’d been into plastic pop and not into punk – or at least the ‘anarcho’ element which one area of it had evolved into -  maybe I could have remained ostrich-like too, and emerged from the sand a few years later, blinking incredulously while asking, “Did I miss anything important?” 

It wasn’t just about nuclear war.  There were dozens of other political issues to worry about and to rail against.  (Life was ever thus.)   For a short time I was right in the thick of it, immersed in a scene in which fanzine writers interviewed bands less about their musical influences and more about their stance on fascism and veganism.  Record sleeve artwork no longer exposed us merely to horrific fashion crimes, but instead to the horrors of crimes against animals and the inhabitants of third world countries.  Although… speaking of fashion, the faded black shapeless uniform of protagonists and followers did suggest an almost criminal lack of imagination. (With the exception of Rubella Ballet, who brought a much needed splash of dayglo to those murky days.)  

Around ’81/’82, when I was most involved with this particular musical movement, I was at art college and, not surprisingly, many of my illustrations reflected the burning issues.  My portfolio at the time included collages of mushroom clouds, strange drawings of women bound by bandages and barbed wire, and a lot of black and red.  I was even commissioned to do a picture of balaclava-wearing activists carrying puppies and guinea pigs for an Animal Liberation Front flyer.  One of my favourite artists of the time was Sue Coe, whose uncompromising and often brutal, bloody imagery made my spine tingle.

Of course, I still had some fun; skiving off college and travelling halfway round the country in the back of a hired Sherpa Van with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band was not without its lighter moments.  There were nice people around and good gigs and sometimes a very genuine sense of connection, especially in the face of this cold-hearted world we were kicking against.  And the causes were very real; I cared deeply about both human and animal rights, the divisive effects of the Thatcher government, the miners’ strike, police oppression, poverty, sexism, racism, etc.   It’s easy to feel downhearted about the notion that we didn’t make any difference – but in a small way I think we did, and maybe I’ll write more about that another day.

Meanwhile, it seems strange now to think that I actually spent some time in my late teens giving serious consideration to what I’d do when the four minute warning was sounded (eat chocolate? - snog the first person I saw? - slash my wrists?) whilst at the same time Top Of The Pops gave us fluffy pink-clad dancers flashing vacuous grins to four minute pop songs.

And here’s a song which, to me, absolutely sums up the feeling of the time with both its dramatic arrangement and poignant lyrics:

The Passage: Dark Times



First Post The Past

On wondering how to start this I’ve been partly inspired by reading Philip Leslie’s blog, The History of Philip Leslie, (Philip is the talented author of 'The History Of Us' published by Legend Press last year) and decided to go through my old art college portfolio.  So I’ll be posting a few images here from the days of Letraset and the Grant projector… (let me know if you had experience of the latter; so few people seem to remember them.) These will be in no particular order but it seems fitting today to post this original image which was used in the sleeve art for Flux Of Pink Indians’ ‘Strive To Survive Causing Least Suffering Possible’ (originally released on Spiderleg 1982).  Fitting because Andy Smith with whom I was good friends throughout Art Foundation and who later went on to join Flux, died on 4th February 2011, so this picture just connects me to both Flux and college days and therefore him too.  (And I do have another rather close connection to Flux which will remain undisclosed for now.)

I seem to remember that I had a bit of a thing about potato prints at the time but doubt I would have done too well as a wallpaper designer.  And what is that strange-looking box whose knobs are being twiddled by the Anne Diamond lookalike?  Oh, it’s an eighties TV set.  That’s… Progress.