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| Me looking pretty fucked after travelling to London |
There was no live music scene to write home about in Colwyn Bay during those times unless you liked boring bland blues bands and that awful new wave of spandex metal rubbish. So entertainment was garnered from further afield. We went to Finsbury Park in London to see The Damned celebrate their tenth anniversary. Our quest to get there started around midnight on the day of July 26th 1986 when the National Coach driver refused to let us on because we were punks; even though we’d booked tickets. This is how the story unfolded…
My sister Emma, Ade Brunskill, Helen The Hair, Wayne The Bastard, Edi Filmstar and myself stood there, open beer cans in our hands, in our punk attire as the coach pulled up, the doors swung open and the driver took one look at us and flatly refused to let us on the coach!
’But we’ve got tickets!’ – he wouldn’t be budged, we weren’t getting on his coach and that was final. They call it judging a book by its cover, and we were the pages he didn’t want to read. There wasn’t much we could do, violence would’ve proved this bigot’s presumption right and landed us in the cells and not in London, so we sloped back to the flat and regrouped.
Thankfully, Helen had a credit card and she forked out for train tickets; we would successfully fight National Express for our money back later, but first we had a gig to get to. I think it was only Helen who managed to get any sleep on the journey down, the rest of us were pretty much cream crackered by the time we emerged into the London sunshine. Today was all about The Damned, a band I loved so much, enough to have their name tattooed onto my wrist next to a flaming love heart! [I’ve since had it lasered off, but my love has not diminished; although it has been tested with the latest album!]. The Damned were all things to me through my teenage years, my mates were not into them in school, preferring Sham 69, or Crass, or the Oi! Scene – I too went along with all that, but it was Vanian/Sensible/Scabies/Ward who always topped my charts. Dave Vanian’s guile, Captain Sensible’s exquisite guitar playing, Rat Scabies is still the best drummer I’ve ever seen, and Algy Ward is the best of a long succession of bassists the band has been through since.
This Finsbury Park gig was over two days and rumours were rife that the two years departed Captain Sensible would be making a guest appearance. He did, but we got the wrong day, and despite the hopes of 20,000 people chanting the old chestnut, ‘Sensible’s a wanker’ he didn’t show up on our day. We were however treated to a superb opening, Plan 9 Channel 7 was orchestrated before blasting into the full song and we all went bananas! Lot’s of ‘newer’ stuff was played, Eloise, Street Of Dreams, Is It A Dream, plus new tracks off the forthcoming disappointing ‘Anything’ album. I remember Limit Club (love that song), Stranger On The Town, then the finale of LA Woman, Smash It Up (the whole tent erupted) and Love Song. The encore, I think, was Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, followed by New Rose and ending with Lust For Life.
The opening band were Electric Bluebirds, I don’t recall much of these, although The Proclaimers seem to spring to mind, followed by the rockabilly Restless. Wayne’s interest in psychobilly bands would drag us to many gigs and to many albums, with the likes of King Kurt and Guana Batz being favourites, but Restless were pretty mediocre.
Dr And The Medics however, were far from mediocre. The drummer got up on stage and started with a great beat, soon followed by the guitarist and bassist as they formed an ace riff, then The Anadin Brothers (two girls) alighted the stage with their unique dance moves, before The Doctor himself (or Clive Jackson as he was called in school) appeared and had everyone in the audience in the palm of his hand. The attention he commanded was immense, the perfect MC, the ultimate band leader, the conductor, The Doctor!
We had their Happy But Twisted EP in our collection and would soon be buying their Laughing At The Pieces debut album, from which most of their set was made up. I do recall a rubbish version of Paranoid, and then an apology for making it to No.1 with Spirit in The Sky – The Doctor then announced that
‘This is the way it should’ve been played’ and they launched into a much better sped up version that kept the majority of punks happy in pogoville. Hard to imagine at the time that forty years from now The Damned would still be in existence and celebrating their 50th anniversary.
