I’m the last to join. They’ve been meeting up since May, and now it’s August. They weren’t going to have a drummer. They considered a drum machine – had been playing around with a Mini-Pops Junior drum box, in fact – then changed their minds and put an ad in Melody Maker that mentioned Kraftwerk and The Velvet Underground, and specified ‘no hi-hats’.

I liked Kraftwerk and the Velvets, and never used a hi-hat, so that seemed fortuitous. I phoned up the number and someone called Marco, who said he was the guitarist, answered and we chatted away very merrily about all sorts, and arranged to meet up. I met Marco and singer Gary at the tea shop at High Street Kensington Tube, just round the corner from where I lived, and then got invited up to Marco’s house in Harrow a few days later so the other two – Mick and Mark – could get to meet me.

[...]

The four of them were already close friends when I joined in mid-1978, and all four of them lived in their families’ homes in Harrow or Ruislip. I came in as the ‘other’. A few years older, the only girl, the only one who didn’t live at home with their parents. And they all had, individually and collectively, a very different aesthetic to mine. I turn up at Marco’s house in Harrow for that first meeting wearing my zebra print jeans, a neon pink string vest, and a white leather jacket. Waist length red hair, Cleopatra eye make-up, and high-heeled boots. Definitely ‘other’. It didn’t take long before I followed their lead and started getting my clothes from the old warehouses in Pinner and Ruislip – striped short-sleeved shirts with button-down collars, a loose round necked collarless Beatles jacket with big buttons and black vinyl trim, tight legged airforce blue moleskin trousers with pearl buttoned back pockets. I kept the shiny high-heeled boots – though also bought some little flat pull-on winkle pickers that never lost the smell of rotting apples that vinyl gets when it’s been left in a damp warehouse for 20 years.

We had a few band gatherings at Marco’s, then decided (well, I suppose they decided) that I was in, and that we’d better make some music together. We started with an all nighter at Halligan’s Heap on Holloway Road, which then became something we did regularly. We got a cheap deal: the eponymous Halligan gave us the key and left us to it, nipping off to the pub for a different sort of lock-in, no doubt. We knew that we had to get to the rehearsal studio before 11pm so he could get to the pub on the corner before last orders, that was a crucial part of the deal.

We’re now at our first proper rehearsal. There are already songs that Mick, Gary, Marco and Mark have started work on. One of them is called “Fond Affections”. It has a lovely melancholy synth line that sounds a bit like whale song (not that I’ve heard a whale sing, but still) and mournful lyrics. I try a few different drum beats with it, but nothing feels quite right. In the end, I stick to a steady heart-beat bass drum rhythm with my right foot and a gentle bit of tambourine shaking. It’s all it needs, so that’s the way it stays. The boys in the band express approval – they seem glad to have found a Moe Tucker inspired drummer who doesn’t feel the need to fill every bit of space. There’s a very different song called “Rema Rema” – fast and beefy, with a repeated riff and rhythm that builds and builds. I put a big beat rhythm into the mix and it feels like we’re there already. This one has Marco on lead guitar, as ever – that great big rich Gibson guitar sound with his Marshall amp on overdrive, all distorted by his state-of-the-art microphase guitar pedal and WEM Copycat – and Gary on rhythm guitar playing a repetitive little riff filched from a funk song. Mick’s voice is rich and resonant on this one.

It might not be that evident, but funk is quite a big influence on us. James Brown, Parliament, Bootsy Collins – it’s all in there. In disguise, maybe – but there. Especially the big bad Bootsy bass. The other influences are perhaps more upfront: the Velvets and Nico of course, Can, Kraftwerk, and Eno. Some of us like dub, especially Augustus Pablo. Some of us like Link Wray. Most of us like soul, jazz and big band swing. I think all of us like Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound, and Motown. The big divide in points of view is on our peers. I’m close friends with Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle, who Mark also loves, but Marco hates. He’s all for sound experiments, but there has to be a tune in there somewhere to keep Marco happy. His ideal band is early Roxy Music, who managed to merge musical experimentation with a pop sensibility.

And so it goes. All-nighters at Halligan’s become a regular fixture. New songs start in very many different ways. Sometimes there’s a lyric – “Bound For Glory”, for example, which develops into something that has a fantastic great wash of guitar feedback running over and through it, so we always refer to it as the “Feedback Song”, which sticks. Sometimes I start a drum rhythm and Mick, who is usually standing close to me, picks it up on the bass. Often I’m trying to copy something I’ve heard by Jaki Liebezeit, Can’s drummer, and I can’t quite pull it off, but it sounds OK. This is how some songs emerge, with me doing a kind of poor girl’s “Halleluhwah” that the others join in on. Or Mick starts a line on the bass – bass guitar as lead instrument is a feature of our music – and I pick up on it and make a drum pattern, usually on floor tom and snare, which is my favourite combination. No hi-hats needed. Sometimes Mark turns on his ARP synthesiser and some interesting noises come out, and that’s the start of something. Being analogue, there was of course a great big complicated thing of knobs and dials and sliders, and writing down the settings so the sounds could be recreated. Mark is allegedly also going to play organ – but the organ, a Vox Jaguar, is currently little more than a box of bits found in Lloyd Johnson’s warehouse. It’s supposedly being repaired, but that turns into a big fandango involving some hippies in Frestonia (a self-declared independent republic on Freston Road in Notting Hill).

There are songs – pieces of music – that are driven by the rhythm rather than a melody line, and songs that weave around a particular keyboard sound. There are even some based around a guitar riff. We decide that the five of us will co-own everything; we’ll all be credited on all the songs. We are all present in the creation, so are all part of the process, and it doesn’t matter who is in the driving seat for any particular song. It is an acknowledgement that music is about the whole sound, not just a tune and a lyric which is the usual songwriting definition. This way, we will also just pick the best things to play or record at any given time, as we are all equally committed to everything.

We’ve been rehearsing together for a good few months, but haven’t played in public yet. In a way, we’ve been happy not to perform live, just staying with the writing or rewriting and remaking of songs, music, noise, sounds or what you will. There’s a lot now. We’ve already done some recording – at first at Halligan’s with a Revox, and then (more ambitiously) in a basement studio in Portobello Road, armed with singer Hazel O’Connor’s TEAC four-track. Hazel is going out with Banshee Kenny Morris, so that’s the connection there.

And when I say basement, I mean really a basement, almost a cellar. There’s a wooden hatch in the street – the fag end of Portobello Road, by the Westway flyover – and down we go into a dingy space that becomes our home for a week. My little Pearl Maxwin drum-kit is set up (in the middle of the space rather than right at the back), and the guitars and amps and keyboards are in place. Marco and Mick have recorded before with The Models, but the rest of us haven’t a clue. And we’re on our own, no one to engineer. Marco takes charge and works out where the mics should go. He explains about bouncing down, so the four tracks can actually become more than four. There are cups of tea and cans of Pepsi and crisps and biscuits, and the fug of cigarette smoke coming from everyone except Marco. Later in the day, someone would run out to get cans of beer and curry patties with chips wrapped in newspaper.

Here in our little den, we record everything we’ve got.

69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-Life Tales From The Fag-End Of Punk, Porn And Performance by Dorothy Max Prior is published by Strange Attractor. Read Claire Biddles's review of the book in The Wire 465. Wire subscribers can also read the review online via the magazine library.