Madre mía lo de Alan Horne y los nazis...
Texto extraído de: http://www.jonsavage.com/punk/edwyn-collins/
“It was Paul, in 75 or 76 who had made friends with these gay guys and told me that flared trousers were going to be out of fashion soon, its going to be straight trousers. Being arty, I’d been into Bowie, and hence Lou Reed, and Iggy and the Stooges, and hence interested in punk rock. It was about the time Nick Kent’s New York piece came out. I felt alienated cos I was fifteen when we moved from Dundee to Glasgow, I had this accent. At that time Edinburgh was the cultural centre and Glasgow was more earthy. I was ridiculed cos I had this east coast accent.
“I bought a pair of plastic sandals and plastic glasses, and a sixties jacket, and went to the precinct in Argyll Street, and everyone looked at me and laughed, and I quite liked that. In 76 I started wearing straight trousers in earnest.
“By this time I had bought the Jonathan Richman album, and thought I was quite smart, I’d bought this black shirt and stencilled Berserkely on it. I went to where he worked, and he wore flares and a Noel Edmonds type centre parting at that time, so I was a bit disappointed. He didn’t print the cartoon. The next issue, Stephen and James put in an advert, saying, A New York group forming in the Bears Den area… in issue three or four, Tony let us do this article on Glasgow record shops and their attitude to punk. The best shop was a place called Graffiti, where a guy called Scott MacArthur worked, and where Simple Minds and the Jolt hung out. The Johnny and the Self Abusers concerts were happening at the time, and I never saw them, but I was aware of them. I was doing a graphics and illustration course at the college and there was a guy there called Peter MacArthur who later took a lot of photos of Orange Juice. He was a Johnny and the Self Abusers fan. We supported them, Stephen, James and myself when we formed the New Sonics, later on. Their set at the time was Janie Jones, not the Clash song. Pablo Picasso, not the Jonathan Richman song. The chorus went, all the girls think you’re an asshole, Pablo Picasso. No thought, no effort, they just wanted to be a punk group. The biggest influences were Genesis and the Doctors of Madness. Their big rivals were Rev Olting and the Backstabbers. They were from Blackhill, a terrible depressed area. Their magnum opus was a thing called Blackhill, which sometimes lasted ten minutes, like Sister Ray. Feedback, and Rev Olting would do an Iggy Pop, stripped to the waist, smash glass into his chest and roll about screaming Blackhill! over all this cacophony. They were more interesting than Johnny and the Self Abusers, and all their material was their own. It later surfaced on the record that Stephen put out. They became James King and the Lone Wolves, and Rev Olting became a soul boy again. Turned his back on punk. When we first met him he had a swastika in magic marker all over his face at the Damned supporting Marc Bolan.
Stephen meanwhile had got this job in one of the branches of Listen, being their token young punk amongst all the hippies…
We saw the White Riot tour, Stephen liked the Clash, I liked the Buzzcocks and the Slits and the Subway Sect. They were so horrendous, I couldn’t believe they were getting away with it. I helped the Buzzcocks and the Slits with their gear. The Clash were kind of semi-professional, and the Jam were very professional for that time. We thought we were on that level so we started taking it a wee bit more seriously then as the New Sonics. Later on in 77 this old time Glasgow show biz character, Mr Flaherty, who called himself Disco Harry, who was into the Travolta look, he ran the punk club, the Silver Threads, in Paisley. Glasgow had peculiar licensing laws, so they couldn’t have the concerts in Glasgow. So we’d all commute out to Paisley to see Generation X and the Buzzcocks, and the Crabs and the Prefects. The audience used to average about forty in there.
Was there much violence?
Just cosmetic violence. I never saw any, except people looking to beat punk rockers up.
Was there a lot of that?
All the time, yeah. If you wore straight jeans you would be chased, laughed at, or ridiculed.
In 78 we played there ourselves, supporting a group called The Shock, who faded into obscurity. Later we were on the bill with Steel Pulse, Simple Minds the first time they were called the Simple Minds. They’d started writing more serious songs but still with other people’s titles, like Chelsea Girl.
What were you playing by then?
I think we wrote Felicity then. We did, We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together, which went down quite well. But we were really bad. The first concert we did, Stephen was the singer.
There was a punk rock festival organised by this guy called Gerry Atric, had a band called Gerry Atric and the Pencils, with the Backstabbers, The Shock, ourselves and The Subhumans headlining. It turned into a kind of Altamont, cos they’d got these Hell’s Angels as security, who didn’t like the punks. They didn’t like the lead singer of the Shock when he smashed up the grand piano either, so we never got to go onstage, but we’d got paid forty pounds, and we scarpered in a taxi while all the mayhem ensued. About 1980 Arthur Haggerty organised this thing in Maryhill, a run down area full of neds who were into Showaddywaddy. All the neds jumped onstage shouting Showaddywaddy! and grabbed the microphone off me. They liked Stephen’s rather primitive drumming. They told me, you’re going to get stabbed after this concert, pal. They chased us all into the dressing room, except one poor punk who was caught outside and kicked to a pulp. They had to bring police and an ambulance, and that was how we got out. There was so much animosity from these Showaddywaddy fans.
Were you aware of what else was going on with punk?
I never went down to London myself. Stephen went down a lot. Stephen knew Alan Horne through the record shop, Listen. He’d met him through Alan’s fanzine., We’d done a fanzine ourselves in 77 called No Variety. James wrote political pieces. When the Scotland football team were going to play in Chile in the stadium where they’d had the executions in 74 during the military coup, James wrote about why they shouldn’t do this, which ended with the line, will you wipe the blood from their football boots, Willy Ormonde? There were also retrospectives on the Troggs. I wrote a retrospective on the third Velvet Underground album. Stephen always wanted to be very hip, and Teenage Depression came out the same week as White Riot, so he had two contrasting singles reviews of them. He wrote, go fuck yourself, masters, fuck off with your pathetic old rock band. This is the only teen record that matters: White Riot!
Alan’s fanzine was called Swankers. He’d done it solely to annoy his flatmate, Brian Superstar. They’d come a seaside town south of Glasgow, a popular resort near Ayr. Alan called himself Eva Braun, and his friend the Slob, and he wrote about himself and Brian Superstar and this girlfriend character Janice Fuck. There were other characters that they knew and didn’t like, cos he was involved with the British Movement, called Bandy Waterhole.
There was another fanzine, Craig Campbell’s, called Trash 77, which he started when Tony D moved Ripped & Torn down to London. Trash 77 was quite popular, sold lots of copies, but we only printed twenty of each issue of No Variety, and left it at that. Inside the cover [of T77] it had a picture of Auschwitz, with Jewish people lying dead, with the caption, “Good Carnage, But Not Great Carnage”. There was a bigot’s quiz. full of racist shit, and the picture of Brian Jones with the SS uniform, with Brian Superstar’s head over this…
Then he started taking it a bit more seriously, and I met him at the Bowie concert in 78. He wanted us to do a punk/reggae version of Springtime for Hitler, and he’d come on in lederhosen and sing it.
Where did all this Nazi obsession come from?
He’s always been obsessed with nazis. When punk came along, and he saw Siouxsie, and with the Bowie thing at Victoria station, Alan was a huge Bowie fan… he wasn’t anti-semitic, he just liked the graphics and the uniforms. I thought it was silly. Stephen was very intolerant of anyone wearing swastikas, but he tolerated it in Alan cos Alan was also very camp. Alan insists that all the ideas he had then are the ones Morrisey has now, and because he’s adopted, he thinks Morrisey must have been his lost twin. Rita Tushingham, that whole frame of reference.
Was there much National Front activity in Glasgow?
No, but Rock Against Racism was very trendy.
Wasn’t there a magazine called Chickenshit?
Yeah, that was Bandy Waterhole’s magazine. Now he was genuinely racist. He came from a small town, never really seen any black people, not seen any other cultures apart from this very anal retentive, Scottish thing. The Protestant work ethic, uptight people.
By 79 none of us wanted to be associated with punk, because of bands like Sham 69 and UK Subs coming up. All the neds.
Were there any punk clothes shops in Glasgow?
No, not till much later. There was Paddy’s Market, where you could buy just about anything. Lots of shirts for 10p… Beatles fan club records. Nobody had a clue what they were selling. Not many youth went down there, so we bought all our stuff there.
When did the Postcard thing start?
The country influence was mainly James Kirk.
When did you change from the New Sonics to Orange Juice?
79. We had a whole load of new ideas, and we thought that the name Orange Juice would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, amidst all the punk names. I didn’t think of any of the connotations the name would have with freshness, or anything like that. Stephen liked it because he thought there was a psychedelic thing going to happen, and he thought, wash away the acid trip with orange juice. I wasn’t thinking of that. Alan liked it. We were briefly a three piece, and I asked this little hippy guy to join as a bass player, David McClimie, and Alan thought he was perfect. He thought he was like a little girl.
Posted on October 29, 2008 at 3:43 pm
