Did you start rebelling in your teen years?
Yes, it was not rebelling but it was my most troublesome years. I got home from my washing up job. I’d given up ideas for a career. I was 17 and I was paid just enough for my debauchery. Back to the house I was kind of squatting in with a mate of mine. He passed me a cigarette that I can only describe as quite long in shape. He put this thing on the Dansette and said ‘Right. Smoke that and listen to this.’ It was The Pink Fairies ‘Do It’ and I’ve never stopped listening to it. That track is the blueprint for punk. Certainly you’d get Captain Sensible of The Dammed to admit it. I reckon if you’d take that track to John Lydon and said What do you reckon to that Johnny?’. He’d probably say ‘Yes, I was aware.’ The only thing was that they made that in February of ‘71 and punk didn’t start picking itself up to mid 76. It was a great thing when you were 18 years old and didn’t want the checked shirt mellow stuff.
A few years later you had your first forays into the music industry with Plod, or The Mighty Plod. You were glam rockers weren’t you?
Yeah. When glam rock came along like when Mick Jagger once said ‘Generally an Englishman doesn’t have to be asked twice to put on make-up and a dress’. So off we went like a load of plumbers in bacofoil [laughs]. Dressed up playing in these pubs and clubs where half the time you had girls screaming at us and the rest of the time we were chased down the road by people who thought we were homosexuals and thought we needed to be beaten up. Honestly it was the best time of my life playing the great working class playgrounds of East Anglia. Leeds is one of the few other places we played in. We played the Fforde Grene twice, and The Staging Post.
Apparently, Johnny Cash played Fforde Grene.
It was big, like a Working Mans Club. It looked like a pub but it was a Tardis, just on the corner getting down in Harehills.
Rough area.
It wasn’t a piece of cake then. You went down that slope and went round the corner. The landlord was a bit of a roughhouse as well. A bunch of old Teds got up on the stage and danced with us. This wasn’t recreationist. This was proper old money Teds from the first time around . They would have been 40 and we were all skinny boys in late teens early 20s. So they got on stage and said [adopts Yorkshire accent] ‘Can you play Rock and Roll? You better fucking play it son or you will be fucking dead!’.
You recorded too.
I wrote a song called ‘Neo City’ because I thought it’s got to be futuristic. Before punk happened I thought that you’d had wearing greycoats and beards and can’t go back to the sixties. So I thought you had to go space age. You’d go to a machine and get your bacon and egg pill. All the usual things, the jet packs. My idea of the future was taken from The Jetsons. ‘Neo City’ was about that love had become an old-fashioned thing. You’d just meet this chick you’d like and taken your leisure pills and gone off to Neo City. It was a mundane working class yobbo’s idea of the future. To my amazement people now think it’s quite good.
It rocks.
We’d done a lot of road work and we were young lads. The drummer was only 17 or 18. I think I was 21. We rehearsed and rehearsed it as we thought ‘Crikey. We’re off into the studio. We better practice.’ When we had the opportunity to record in a proper studio in London we thought we better not cock this up. It was early January and we didn’t have any gigs. So we went into the hut where we’d rehearse and played the 6 songs we were gonna do all the way through every night for two weeks.
So when we went into the studio and we were points perfect. Six tracks in one day, we put the overdubs on and everything. We kind of got signed on the spot and of course nothing happened. In fact the tracks lay in the vaults for ages and what you hear is what has been rescued. The engineer said ‘Where do you come from why aren’t you known?’ We said, ‘We’re from Essex’ [laughs]
And now ‘Neo City’ is on the Velvet Tinmine compilation and I think the rest are on vinyl.
Yes, an Italian label brought them out. Not everyone in the band thought we were on the right track, not even me. Remember it was 1975 and glam rock was pretty much dead. I was starting listening to a lot of French stuff and some of the other guys got interested in jazz. We were one of the last human jukeboxes. Bands don’t do that nowadays. In those days the four of you got together, learned the charts, played where you could and did covers. It meant you did lots of different styles of music you didn’t just become an indie band. Good training.
So you later started doing music yourself that is now known as the DIY approach with The Cleaners from Venus.
I didn’t know the mechanisms of the music industry. I’d now made a record and knew how to write songs. It had seemed that every approach I’d had with the music industry ended in disaster. I thought that I couldn’t wait for people to phone up and tell me things were going to happen. So I decided to run my own little music industry and just put things out myself. And how do you get it? Well you phone up or come to the door and we mail it to you. They said ‘How many do you expect to sell?’ I thought if we’d sell 200 that would be quite successful. You certainly regard that a success if you were making teapots. You wouldn’t have to sell 50,000 to be a big hit.
We made cassettes and portastudios had just been invented so it was possible to do it. We got to the point where record companies actually got in touch with us to sell this stuff. We said ‘Sorry, we don’t deal with record companies.’ At one point Lol, from the Cleaners, who was a real anarchist said ‘Should we be taking money for this stuff?’ I said ‘What? We give it away?’ So we came up with a compromise, music for groceries! That would be a direct swap, music for food. But we realised that if it was over a long distance there could be perishables involved, all the implications of someone posting a cauliflower. So we couldn’t have that!
So we took in bits of money and that’s how The Cleaners from Venus ran for a while.
Your work in The Cleaners from Venus is really popular now and ‘Only A Shadow’ was covered by MGMT.
I didn’t realise until someone said. I said to my daughter and her friend who are teenagers ‘Have you ever heard of a band called MGMT?’. They said ‘Yeah! They’re really hip.’ I said ‘Oh, right. Is it good if they cover one of my songs?’. They were like ‘No way!’ So we went on YouTube and looked it up. Did they look at me with different eyes? No, they still thought I was a stupid git, who hit lucky!
MGMT did it exactly the same as we did it. I’ve emailed Andrew VanWyngarden and got a friendly email back. When I did that track I thought it was really good and liked it. I played it to people at the time, around 1983, and they thought ‘Yeah, it’s alright. Not among your best.’ I went ‘Oh, right.’
Listening to both versions highlights that in a different environment, with better luck, you could have been massive.
Yeah, but it’s perfectly as useless as being ahead of your time as being behind your time. I’ve been both. You’re talking to a guy who joined a prog rock band at the beginning of punk! [laughs] Whatever it was I’m the Alfred E Neumann of pop. Whatever it is I’m going to get it wrong. Except I’ll think it’s funny. A lot of people in pop music take themselves too seriously.