I've got lots of interesting music stuff from the late 70's and early 80's that I'll put up as time allows. Click on the cuttings and they should enlarge Let's start with this....The first ever UK magazine devoted solely to rock and heavy metal, masterminded by Geoff Barton. These days there are probably as many rock mags as there are magazines about all other sorts of pop music combined.
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From Kerrang 3 (1981) the first ever full length articles about Raven. And...Venom. (So I'm to blame for Death Metal! Eek!)
The following are all from Sounds circa 1979-82. The paper was a lot less self-consciously hip than the NME and I was encouraged by my editor Geoff Barton to come up with locally based stories and reviews. As a result, the North East was far better served by Sounds than it was by the NME, Melody Maker and Record Mirror, all of which had local correspondents (who also all worked on Bedrock, the BBC Radio Newcastle show I produced!) but had nowhere like the extensive Tyne, Wear and Teesside band coverage that Geoff allowed me, some of which is included below. A big hello to my pal Rik Walton who took most of the photographs that went alongside my Sounds articles.
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| This was actually the first piece I wrote for Sounds and got me off and running. |
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| 17 May 1981 |
Soft Boys
Newcastle
Humour's a funny thing, as I think Billy Connolly once remarked. Rock 'n' Roll can be such a po-faced business that anyone who isn't intense or who attempts to walk over conventions, laughing as he goes, is all-too-often dismissed as a charlatan or a would-be all-'round entertainer. Cries of "Smart-aleck," from those who recognise that an idea is supposed to be funny but can't see the joke. The Soft Boys provoke just that reaction.
The reviewers of their Can Of Bees album have either failed to "get the joke" or have tripped over themselves in some sort of doublethink, where because the song lyrics are "clever" it follows that they "don't communicate". Communicate what, I wonder?
The Softs have their own frame of reference that doesn't really fit in with anything else currently doing the rounds. Like the best song of the set, "Leppo And The Jooves", which songsmith and main vocalist Robyn Hitchcock (who looks like a less-degenerate Nick Lowe, incidentally) explains thus: "Leppo is a character who's pursued 'round the world by the Jooves. Each day they catch him and let him go again because they don't want him for anything. And this keeps happening day after day." Or "Return Of The Sacred Crab" about a girl who sees an apparition of her lover as a seven-foot giant silver crab in a restuarant car and he offers her a cigar.
It must be stated that The Soft Boys are not a "comedy" act. You don't come away rolling with mirth. They're a Pop Rock band, roughly akin to, say, The Records, who can move along quite smartly. All five can sing and it's probably in this area that they're let down as the harmonies can be a bit off and Hitchcock's lead vocals sometimes don't end up where they should. Some more work on this, maybe.
These lads are going to have a hard time of it. The album is one their own label so they don't have any backing. They aren't part of any recognisable movement or fashion of the moment and are extremely unlikely to be tipped as anything remotely resembling "The Next Big Thing". Keep pushing against the current Boys, and I'll have my bees canned.
Ian Ravendale
Chelsea/ The Dickies (whose section of the review must be in the cosmic ether somewhere)
Newcastle City Hall
Chelsea play your standard bash no worse but certainly no better than hundreds of others for whom the world stopped turning after the first Clash album. It's no wonder the place is full of kids. And anyone over the age of 15 would laugh Gene October and his puerile rabble rousing off the stage. "Are we gonna smash this place up tonight? C'mon smash it up! Smash a few seats!" screams October in his role as king of the kids. So, a few would-be demolition experts oblige him. Security naturally intervenes and October inquires if the crowd are going to "let a few bouncers tell you what to do". They sure are when it comes to ripping the place apart. After the band have gone through their paces and trooped off, October re-emerges with one of the City Hall staff to survey the wreckage and gets a cheer for his pains before being, apparently, escorted off the premises. I hope the damages are stopped out of his Giro. Prat of the year? Could be. Not the sort of bloke to introduce to your friends. The Dickies you could take anywhere. Even your granny would like Stan Lee, Chuck Wagon and the rest.
Ian Ravendale
I've written lots about Whitley Bay's Tygers Of Pan Tang over the years, going from the first ever national article about the band in Sounds in 1979, right up to today and the sleeve notes for a re-issue of the Noises From The Cathouse album. The following is lifted from a John Sykes fansite, as I don't have the copy of Sounds that it was originally published in. The paragraph in italics at the start is written by the editor of the site, who seems to like the article. Reading it back now, I'm fairly happy with it, although there are a couple of eggy bits-'Beatles and Stones' and 'thank you Judith' (that's Judas Priest by the way) amongst them. The red type comes from the site.
The following Michael Nesmith article from ON 2 was one of the first bits of print music journalism I ever did. I'd edited and written for comic fanzines before this and did reviews of albums and gigs for the Bedrock radio show which I wrote beforehand and then stumbled my way through live on air. I've only recently unearthed this article and while I remember very clearly all the events in it I'd completely forgotten the stuff about two weekly music papers expressing interest in publishing the piece (rather than just the NME) and also Let It Rock monthly magazine actually agreeing to do so but then going out of business.
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| From Out Now 7. I don't think I wrote the intro paragraph. This was a written version of a radio interview. I did several subsequent radio interviews with Eric, including one I recorded on a tape machine I borrowed from Radio Newcastle's Day Shift programme. He spots the name on the case and says to his band; "Ere! It's Dave Shit!" Now why didn't I use that rather than Ian Ravendale when I started with Sounds.... |
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| From Out Now 9. Another radio piece turned into an article. The magazine had a new editor and after this saw print my condition for carrying on writing for Out Now was "No silly editorial asides". |
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| From ON 3. One of things the mag had in common with Bedrock was an interest in local bands. Kip had a track on the Bedrock All Together compilation that I liked. When Kip disintegrated songwriter Brian Burness put together a new outfit called Deep Freeze, who put out a couple of very good indie singles. So, I wrote about them too... |
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| From Out Now 9 (1978) |
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| From Out Now 10 ( 1978). I'm still Ian Penman in print at this point as writing for Sounds is still a year away. |
Out Now 11 carried the original of the Debbie Harry article that I recently updated that appears in this blog's Nostalgia section. Play compare and contrast! Pics, I'm pretty sure, by Rik Walton. Out Now 12 (which I'm not in) was the final edition of the magazine.
addition to Sounds, NME, Melody Maker and Record Mirror that ran from 24
March-23 June 1979. Content-wise it tended to feature the poppier end of the
market although I did write about Rush, Status Quo and Thin Lizzy for the
paper.
I'd recently started writing for Sounds, things seemed to be going OK so I got in
touch with Pop Star Weekly to see if I could do some North East based reviews
and articles for them too. Unlike Sounds they weren't interested in the local
bands but did want me to cover gigs by touring bands, along with the occasional
article.
Even though in appearance it looked more like Record Mirror, PSW was
probably launched to jump on the Smash Hits bandwagon. SH began life as a
monthly in November 1978 and took off so quickly that within four issues it
turned fortnightly. Smash Hits was glossy, contained song lyrics along with short
superficial articles and was aimed squarely at the pop audience. Pop Star
Weekly fell between it and the serious weeklies, ending up being too similar to
Record Mirror, the poorest selling of the weeklies, which was undoubtedly its'
downfall. When the paper ceased publication after only three months Pop Star
Weekly was incorporated into RM.
Sounds didn't like their journalists to be seen to be writing for other (music)
papers so for Pop Star Weekly I became Rick O' Shea, a name I used again
when writing my weekly pop column for The Sunderland and Washington
Times. I wrote in a different style which was more appropriate to the somewhat
younger PSW audience.
The paper gave me the chance to explore other types of music that wouldn't
have fit in Sounds. Hence reviews of disco acts like Hi-Tension (complete with
what must be one of my favourite closing sentences; "Nice musicians, shame
about the music") and Gonzales. And an article about Child, a band from Leeds
that were doing their best to assume the teenybop crown recently vacated by The
Bay City Rollers.
The weekly music papers had very tight deadlines and in those pre-email days
I'd sometimes have to ring reviews in. So there's a few clunkers that were
undoubtedly caused by PSW's secretary mis-hearing what I'd dictated. Rush's
drummer Neal Peart becomes Neil Pert, the occasional sentence doesn't quite
make sense and Thin Lizzy's Moore and Gorham were "in symphony" rather than
"on timpani" which is what I wrote.
I suspect I wasn't Pop Star Weekly's only journalist that was moonlighting from another
paper under an alternate moniker. Say hello to Gay Abandon, which, while not being a name I'd have chosen myself, is almost as good as Rick O'Shea.
