Devo, The Adicts, Benjamin Clementine and Motörhead.

If you read this with any regularity you may have noticed, perhaps with some disdain, that you are here far more regularly than I am. I apologise. The whole point of a blog is to be regular. 'Regularly and in small doses' writer Tony Fletcher once advised me about blogging and it looks like I have completely ignored him.

If I have an excuse it's not because I've been spending time with the telly. Although I was of course glued to it last night watching the Mercurys. Benjamin Clementine, eh? 

Benjamin Clementine graciously invited the other eleven nominees up onto the stage with him after the announcement that he'd won. It was a genuinely moving moment, topped only when he almost broke down honouring those affected by the atrocities in Paris.

The attraction of the Mercury Prize is that it is about what is happening NOW. There is little thought for posterity in the judges'  voting which is a good thing; they always go for what feels right precisely at the time of voting. This accounts for Gomez beating Massive Attack or The Verve, Roni Size trouncing Radiohead and of course famously M People triumphing over the combined muscle of Blur, Pulp, The Prodigy and Paul Weller. If anything - and I have to confess to preferring Clementine's cheekbones over his voice -  this year's winner pipped the others to the post because of his Parisian backstory. PJ Harvey's win in 2001 was partly because of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea's connection to a grieving New York.

I was due to go to Paris the weekend the atrocities happened. My brother had  never been to Paris and is a massive fan of Motörhead who happened to be playing at the Zenith that weekend in the 19th Arrondissement. 

Motörhead went on to cancel the show despite the venue initially claiming all shows there would go ahead.

I'd booked the tickets, Eurostar and hotel months before and we'd both been looking forward to seeing Lemmy barking out Ace Of Spades as well as doing a quick once around the beautiful city. As I travelled down to London to stay with him on Friday night, the news bulletins started coming in and by the time I arrived at his in Cricklewood, it was clear that even if we did get there, our weekend in Paris would be a very different one to the one we'd planned. 

I'd booked the tickets, Eurostar and hotel months before and we'd both been looking forward to seeing Lemmy barking out Ace Of Spades as well as doing a quick once around the beautiful city. As I travelled down to London to stay with him on Friday night, the news bulletins started coming in and by the time I arrived at his in Cricklewood, it was clear that even if we did get there, our weekend in Paris would be a very different one to the one we'd planned. 

In the end, after a day spent watching the driving London rain whilst checking Twitter, Facebook and BBC updates (and watching Spectre - more international terrorism, thanks), we gave up and I travelled back home. I felt the luckiest man to be alive and shortly to be able to see my family. The target could just as easily have been the show we were due to attend. 



Going to a gig is such a magical, freeing thing to be able to do and to know that something like that can happen in a the capital city of a country whose entire ethos is based on liberty is truly tragic. My sympathies are with anyone affected by the events.

To briefly sink to bathos: that's another reason why the blog never happened. 

Other reasons are that I've been travelling. I went to L.A. for the first time in 20 years to conduct interviews for a book I'm putting together on Devo. For those of you who aren't sure what I'm talking about, just click on that link and watch the clip for their film (produced by themselves incredibly in 1976) and you'll get a sense of just what a remarkably odd, influential and yet always melodic group they were. 

I struggled picking a photo of the band that encapsulates them because they changed their look with every album release.  However this one (despite being a mirror image of the actual picture I think) does it better than most as it features not only their legendary Energy Dome hats, but also their collective facial expression, self designed clothes and also, remarkably, self designed fabric behind them. Sweating the small stuff, that's what it's all about.

I'm not going to band on about Devo now though, because I suspect I'll be bringing the subject up again in the course of the next few months. Suffice to say, that both founder members Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were incredibly gracious with their time and also brilliant fun. Plus, visiting Mark in his office/studio was a bonus because it looks like this:

This roman amphitheatre style office on Sunset Boulevard was originally built in 1967 by a plastic surgeon. Mark painted it green ostensibly to offset the gold tinted windows but really I suspect because it makes it entirely Him.

While I was there I also had the opportunity to do a little shopping. Blimey, there are a lot of second hand record shops in L.A. I think I went to all of them.

I took this shot outside Gimme Gimme just after emerging with my mate Jason (who shares my vinyl addiction and knows every record shop in LA) laden with albums including Sly And The Family Stone's There's a Riot Going On ($1!) and Mandrill's first album ($15). I was jealous of this passer-by, partly because she'd found a trolley to match her top but also because I needed something to cart my booty around in.



On the flight back I had an odd serendipitous experience: The overhead lockers on VS23  were all stuffed full of hand luggage and I was trying to add mine to it at the eleventh hour. Sat next to my window seat was a middle-aged man who looked all toothy and charming  - a bit like the actor Phil Davies. 

He stood and offered to move his coat and make room. 

"haven’t got anything fragile in there have you?” he asked about the Amoeba Records bag I was shoving in on top.

“Actually, yes, I’ve got a couple of vinyl records ..”

His eyes lit up, “Really? What you got?”

As I finished loading the locker and sat down next to him I prepared myself for his deflated reaction to the ancient obscurity in the bag.

“Well, I was in Amoeba earlier today and I found an original copy of a record by Patrick Fitzgerald”

“Patrick Fitzgerald!” 

I don’t usually write the word ‘exclaimed’ but there is no better verb to  describe how he repeated the name. Fellow passengers’ heads turned. He continued, “what, the punk troubadour? Safety Pin Stuck In Heart? Genius!”

If you want to hear what my fellow passenger got so excited about here it is

The Virgin check-in person had not only sat me next to the only person on the flight to have heard of Patrick Fitzgerald but quite possibly the only person in L.A. to have hear of him. 

“What a treat to sit next to fan of punk wave,” I replied , “Pleased to meet you, I’m Ben, “ I said offering my hand.

He took it and gave a toothy grin, “Kid.”

It turned out that I was sitting next to the drummer from Clockwork Orange-clad punk chancers, The Adicts.

Kid is the fella sitting on the far right. He's actually much cooler looking than this pic gives him credit for.

He proceeded to tell me some amazing stories about his early life, growing up in a family where dad was the entertainment promoter for military bases where the itinerant family lived. Kid - or Michael as he was then known - would often wake up in the morning and discover members of The Kinks or whoever had played the previous evening, sleeping sitting room. 

I must confess to having been almost entirely ignorant of the band's work other than their Alex Droog-look, but listening to the stuff on Spotify the songs are witty and pretty powerful, kind of like early Adam And The Ants without the whips and leather. What was genuinely inspiring to hear from Kid (still can't quite resolve that name with my 50-something fellow passenger) is that their longevity and popularity has earned them a real respect from fellow bands young and old. They now headline punk festivals all over the world and  have a seriously devoted fanbase. Lemmy's a fan apparently.

Kid had been in L.A. writing and recording new stuff with his brother Pete Dee and singer Monkey who both live there now. Kid has remained true to the band's hometown of Ipswich and was returning there to wife and kids. "We're still popular because we're still the same - I mean, no offence, right (he points at my shaven head) but we've all kept this (pointing at his own) and Monkey still looks the same in his make up. But when I get home, I'm not Kid anymore, I'm Michael Davison, just out walking the dogs..."

And so we sat there, two fellas of a certain ago talking about music and enjoying the inflight hospitality. Kid seemed remarkably adept at persuading the initially reluctant staff to keep us refreshed, something he put down to the 35 years of punk rock international travel he's had.  It struck me that like The Adicts, Devo could in theory have gone on without pause given that their image was about costume and disguise too.

The reformed Devo in the noughties. Older, wiser..

And that's all pop music is isn't it? Just dressing up and making up songs. Some artists use  their own life experiences like Benjamin Clementine, others dress up and sing about imaginary events people or invented worlds like Motörhead, The Adicts or Devo. Jerry from Devo was at Kent State University when State troopers opened fire on students protesting against the US invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. His friend Allison Krause was one of those killed and he witnessed it. The trauma part inspired Devo. 




Let's hope the events in Paris last weekend go on to inspire something positive.

Crossing Aung San Suu Kyi with The Adverts

Finally caught up with Punk Britannia this week. People were telling how good the John Cooper Clarke documentary was but I’d not recorded it. I tried to watch it while we were in France but the iPlayer said Non. A shame, but I’m sure they’ll show it again. 

Last night I watched the final part of the main documentary (prudently Sky+d before we left) and Cooper Clarke’s name was mentioned in some footage of a 1978 Radio One playlist meeting. “Boring!” said a boomy male voice, which sounded like Dave Lee Travis’. Oh, the irony. How many other vinyl hopefuls that afternoon would go on to have a BBC documentary made about their life 35 years later? Certainly not Captain and Tennille. 

Everyone was smoking furiously in the meeting. Even the scary looking woman chairing it, who looked liked a cross between Miss Trunchbull from Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Myra Hindley. You could imagine her sat in front of the guillotine, knitting. To her right sat the Hairy Cornflake himself, resplendent with a cigar in a fug of smug. Further irony: it turns out that Lee Travis had been a World Service beacon of hope for Burmese national heroine Aung San Suu Kyi during her house arrest.. And he was one of the lucky ones invited to meet her during her visit to the UK this week. It  would be easy to make a flippant comment here about how bad life must be to perceive DLT in this way, but hey, maybe if you are a political prisoner with every appeal being ignored by your government despite having a Nobel Peace Prize, the last thing you need for entertainment is John Peel playing The Fall. I don’t know if he was doing Snooker on The Radio on the World Service back then but whatever broadcast ideas the bearded breakfast bore had come up with, they clearly floated Aung San’s boat.

Most of the three Punk Britannia documentaries had footage I’d seen many times before and anecdotes I was very familiar with. This is not a criticism of the show but of my own punk new wave obsessiveness. Grundy, Winter of Discontent rubbish bags in Leicester Square, Jubilee riverboat arrests, Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated?  All the punk wave tick boxes were ticked. But I was still glued to the screen.

John Lydon is now the opposite of what he was in 1977, all too willing to laugh and joke and talk about his ‘art’. It was great to see Bruce Gilbert and Colin Newman talking about how radio completely ignored Wire despite the press being all over them. And what an amazing anecdote from Gang Of Four whose At Home He’s a Tourist was scheduled for Top of the Pops as long as they changed the line ‘And the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket.’ The BBC (yes, them again!) didn’t want a ‘disgusting’ word like rubbers on a family show. The band suggested changing it to ‘packets’ but the producers said it would have the same meaning. In the end the band jettisoned the show and another group whose single had stalled at the same chart position for two weeks were given a slot in their place. Sultans of Swing subsequently started climbing back up the charts and Dire Straits’ career was made.

Punk was great for career failure. The other documentary from the season I caught up with this week was We Who Wait, the TV Smith documentary. Again, you can imagine the Radio One playlist meetings after The Adverts had had their heyday. Lee Travis would have been less inclined to allow democracy than the Burmese authorities. But the documentary managed to be completely life affirming. TV - or Tim - Smith came up from Devon with his girlfriend Gaye and they reinvented themselves as punks. Gaye went on to become the female punk icon a year before Debbie Harry and the band signed to the punk label Stiff and toured with punk icons The Damned. (Best tour poster of all time incidentally) Within months they were on Top of The Pops and in the charts. Their debut album Crossing The Red Sea with The Adverts is now acknowledged as a classic. Actually, I’d argue that it’s quite flawed having gone back and listened to it again this week. Despite what luminaries like Jon Savage say, half of it is great tunes, all of it great words but somehow it doesn’t hang together as a whole.

After that it was pretty much downhill all the way for TV Smith. The band went through a Spinal Tap sized list of drummers, made a decent follow up that was given the worst sleeve of all time by RCA, split up, all the subsequent bands he formed failed and he spent the 80s on the dole. However all through this Gaye stuck by him, despite having given up music right after the Adverts split. She is interviewed throughout the documentary and comes across as the perfect partner: intelligent, supportive, full of humour and empathy. No wonder Smith managed to stick it out. Like the song and title of the documentary, he waited and when Atilla The Stockbroker (I know, I know) suggested he just go out and play on his own, sans band his career transformed. He now runs everything himself, plays all over the world to an ever growing crowd of devotees and appears completely artistically satisfied. Living proof that following your dream can eventually come good. 

No doubt Aung San Suu Kyi would have something to say about that.