CHAPTER EIGHT - 1979: The Game is (Not) Over

You obviously worked with Nag and Bendle for a while, but you were saying they’d already released a couple of singles before you joined. They also did a cassette album before called Permanent Transience.

And, later, Music And Movement, which is a live cassette, I think. We did a couple of compilation tracks as well. One was put out by Fuck Off Records and another was put out by Protag. The one on Fuck Off was a 7" EP called Angst in My Pants, also with The Instant Automatons, Danny and the Dressmakers and all that West London crowd. When we did the Detailed Twang reissue, through Overground Records, the CD version has got those tracks as bonus ones.

You may have already noted this, but had you heard any of The Door And The Window stuff before they asked you to join?

No. I hadn’t heard anything. Until I met them at that gig where DAF supported The Fall at the London School Of Economics, I knew nothing of them.

Fair enough. So, this now takes us up to 1980 and the gigs?

Yeah, but to tie it in, because lots of things were happening at the same time, it’s hard to think of the chronological order. What happened was that, as I told you, after The Good Missionaries I was a bit disillusioned with being a singer and a frontman, which is why I did the drumming. I enjoyed it and it was more about being part of the group. The pressure wasn’t all on me to come up with the goods. But, after playing with The Door And The Window for a while and talking more about music and feeling more revitalised, I started getting the ideas for the songs on Snappy Turns. While I was playing with The Door And The Window, I started putting together the music for what became Snappy Turns.

What inspired the direction for Snappy Turns, then? There’s a return to a more melodic approach on the album.

Yes, but less of an Alex Fergusson-type melody. When you look back at it, it’s almost like a forerunner to the 1983-84 thing with Felt and the TV Personalities and all that. It’s like a type of pop, but an innocent pop, or a DIY pop. It’s still got the pop sensibilities, because I’ve always liked a good tune. If I find a good melody, I’ll use it. I’m not scared of that. I don’t want things to be atonal for their own sake. So, something like the title track, “Snappy Turns”, still has that DIY quality underneath. Potentially, you’ve got “Snappy Turns” as a nice singalong pop song, but my drumming’s still a bit rickety and there’s all that, which was influenced by Nag and Bendle. I’d been surrounded by all these people who could sometimes be more professional, especially when going to the studio, like Surrey Sound Studio, where everything was more professional. Then I found that through working with Grant Showbiz at Street Level, where the toilet was horrible and just a hole in the floor, the feel of that studio itself was great. This encouraged you to have a go at trying things out. Out of that came Snappy Turns, the “Whole World’s Down On Me” single, the “You Cry Your Tears” single [with Dennis Burns, on NB Records, 1980], which I think is genius and one of the best things we’d ever done. That studio, and Nag and Bendle, inspired all that sort of stuff. It was a refreshing way to make music. Because Nag and Bendle at the start, like The Desperate Bicycles, were the pioneers of the real DIY scene. They were photocopying the sleeves, putting everything together themselves with the stamps and little labels. It wasn’t like the Rough Trade way of doing it! It was true DIY music. Being with those sort of people was really exciting for me. It was like going back to the roots.

Did you feel that you’d found your niche with those people?

Yeah, I did, because, going back a little bit (not far back, only a few months), when Vibing Up The Senile Man came out, the album was rejected by so many people because they saw punk as being what Buzzcocks and The Clash were doing, or Stiff Little Fingers and Siouxsie were doing. All those bands recorded in professional studios and everything such as the tuning was right, and they had songs, and suddenly I came along with, to them, this atonal mess. In a way, Vibing Up The Senile Man came out before the audience existed for it. A future audience had to find this album. So, it was only in 1979 when I met Nag and Bendle, who said they loved the album. They said it was the best album ever and I thought these are the type of guys I should be working with. Instead of thinking it was an anomaly, some people thought it was fucking great. I needed that. I needed to work with people who were really into that.

You’ve long maintained how disillusioned you were with everything, but you said yourself before there was a free-for-all at the time, and that there was room for everything. When I look back at those years, and maybe it’s to do with our age difference because I was looking at so-called punk groups on Top Of The Pops and whatever, but it was all genuinely exciting for a twelve-year-old. You made a valid point that it was a really vibrant and fertile time where there was room for everything, including Buzzcocks and The Door And The Window, Danny And The Dressmakers, Cabaret Voltaire, Lora Logic, X-ray Spex and so on, but that’s the beauty of this period. Why did you feel so disillusioned when you said you were seeing all of these groups later who came out of it, such as Aztec Camera and Echo & The Bunnymen? Punk created this incredible space for all kinds of groups to start.

I think I know what you mean about me claiming I was so disillusioned.

It created this big space for so much, though.

I know that, but I ended up, and it does sound a bit silly, because The Good Missionaries were touring with The Pop Group, and it’s hard to put across now, in retrospect, but I was known as Mark P., Sniffin’ Glue editor, and there was a pull on me to champion punk and I felt lost. It’s hard to believe now when you think I’m still making music, but I really felt that was it for me [at the time]. I thought it was over. I mean, Nag and Bendle laughed at this, but this is true and they reminded me of this, in 1979 I was talking about joining the army.