Out of Leeds comes a throng of rock bands whose music is
as dark and twisted as the times they’re living in: The Sisters Of Mercy, The
Three Johns, Mekons, Gang Of Four, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Si Denbigh’s
similarly drum machine-driven March Violets. They’re largely forgotten now, but
in their time the Violets get music-press front covers, record sessions for
John Peel and Janice Long, and release a succession of 12-inch singles, the
best of which (Snake Dance and Walk Into The Sun) deserve to stand shoulder to
shoulder with She Sells Sanctuary, Bela Lugosi’s Dead and Alice as classics of
the time.
For Denbigh it ended as quickly as it began with him
being fired from the Violets and falling into The Batfish Boys. They’re a Goth
swamp-rock band with inspired and unhinged lyrics that mutated into a deranged
hard rock outfit, pre-dating Zodiac Mindwarp and the ‘grebo’ movement that
briefly brought hairy-arsed rock into the indie charts. But while acts like Pop
Will Eat Itself went for laddish comedy, Denbigh favoured genuinely clever
word-play and comedy of the dark and demented kind. Never hip, never embracing
the Goth or the grebo tags the press tried to put on them (“I had lived in
Norfolk for a bit and there a grebo was a greasy knobhead who pretended to have
a motorbike but didn’t. They had a helmet. And were a helmet…”), The Batfish
Boys ploughed their own furrow, signing with Motorhead’s label GWR, touring
with UFO, before falling into the deep ‘where-are-they-now?’ wormhole of 80s
alternative rock. The Batfish Boys are a perfect example of the great unwashed
and un-hip acts that other magazines refuse to remember because they’re too
busy trying to rewrite the past. Weirdly, it has fallen to the likes of Classic
Rock magazine to remember these acts: the Goths, psychobillies and sleaze
rockers that populated the 80s.