The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

Article published in Sounds, 3rd May, 1980

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up | “Are you a pop group . . . ?” The Hotel Virago peers down an aristocratic Concorde of a conk at the five young men in front of her like we’re a six inch run in a brand new pair of silk stockings.

“Because if you are,” she continues in a voice not so much a touch pound note as straight out of a Sotheby’s sales room, “you can’t stay here. We’ve had a bit of, erhm, trouble with pop groups before.”

I don’t particularly fancy kipping on a Dundee street and a momentary panic grips me cerebrals. Mensi however doesn’t bat an eye.

“Us, miss? No miss! I can honestly say we’re not a pop group.” A colossal butter wouldn’t melt between my legs’ smile spreads over his kisser. “That’s one thing we’re not.”

Bodicea’s soon swayed by his stable boy charm (Mensi writes in my note book) and room keys are distributed, but the good spirits engendered by a hazardous car ride from Dumfries and this latest coup soon take a dive when Mensi bells Warners for the week’s chart placing for the Upstarts seven-parts-superb second album ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place’.

Following in the feeble footsteps of the single of the same name, the album’s dropped a not-so-sweet 16 placings down to number 70, after realising a high of 54. Not exactly the stuff maroon Corniche convertibles are made of

Mensi goes spare. “They promised us big displays, big promotion, everything,” he snarls, “and what did we get? Fuck all. Warners gave up on us after ‘I’m An Upstart’, every time we’ve had a single chart after that they’ve been surprised.

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

We put a single out, right, and the fans buy it into the charts and then nothing. There’s no push when it’s needed. Look at the way EMI have got behind the Rejects. Well you can print this: WE ARE LOOKING FOR A NEW COMPANY . . .” he softens up slightly. “Warners don’t believe us.”

Other things conspire to suggest that Warner and his brother and the other powers-that-be in the Angelic Upstarts universe -have given up on the the band.

First there was my comedy of errors journey to Dumfries with the world’s only sane snapper, Tom Sheehan. We arrived in Glasgow on schedule at six only to find the next train to Dumfries went at ten past ten and arrived several pints after closing time.

If trusty Tom hadn’t shelled out 45 quid for a cab we’d have got to the gig as the cleaners were leaving.

NOT THAT the gig itself was organised that much better than the Yanks’ rescue raid on Iran. The Stagecoach venue is in the middle of nowhere, the Upstarts were playing its first ever Monday night gig and weren’t due on till 11.30.

Golden mile

In other words as long as you didn’t have work or school in the morning and had a car or cab money or bottle enough to hitch hike home it was hunky dory.

25 spikeys made it and savoured every sweaty second, but for a band who can generate enough power on stage to light up the Blackpool Golden Mile for the summer season it just didn’t seem right.

To top the lot through lack of suss, or managerial pressure, or even through pure spite, the tour sees the band playing kharzies and bus stops throughout the week and nowhere Fridays and Saturdays. Sensible, huh?

Some pop performers, y’know ones that give the impression they don’t go to bed at nights, they just nail themselves up on a cross, would have used the string of misfortunes surrounding the Angelics since last summer to turn this feature into a moan-a-minute guide to modern day punk martyrdom.

Thankfully Mensi is too much of a fighter and a joker for that. Throughout the Stagecoach gig he was cracking funnies like ‘Sunderland la-la-la’ and ‘Stand back and let the girls see me, fucking hell, I’m good looking’.

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

I didn’t know whether to ring up Hughie Green or Hammer Horror films. Honestly he’s got a face like a sack of potatoes. A Marplan survey I commissioned at the far better attended Dundee gig revealed that 20 per cent of the audience thought he was ‘ugly’, 25 per cent ‘very ugly’, 15 per cent didn’t know, and 38 per cent thought he was ‘a muppet’ (of the two per cent who found him ‘okay’ two were relatives and one was holding a white stick).

No wonder he was reduced to squeezing drummer Stix’s khyber and remarking “I’m only here for the queer.” Yet this blight on the name of humanity has got the nerve to claim that yours truly is the paper bag job!

The naked ape

And this about a man who, if the NME is to be believed, has made this band what they are today. Bah.

THE NEXT DAY was stuffed full of references to an alleged resemblance between me and the legendary cartoon character and was taken up mostly with a battle of wits between my good self and the obviously insane Mensforth who, you may not know, was actually the inspiration for Desmond Morris’s best seller ‘The Naked Ape’.

Tuesday morning, six of us squeeze into the sardine tin comfort of a hired Leyland Princess. Mond takes the wheel as if he’s driving a Formula One at Le Mans for a chaotic journey to Dundee, pausing only for a walk-about in Edinburgh so Mensi can search unsuccessfully for a Scotland soccer strip to wear at the gig tonight, which me and him eventually locate in Dundee after the hotel debacle.

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

Clutching the ghastly garb like a villain grabs a bag of swag, the finally placated Mensi is easily persuaded to settle down in a near-by nosherie for a natter.

Tommy Mensforth is 23. A big powerful man with manic eyes and a quick-fire grin. He wears his hair sensibly cropped and today sports boots, jeans and a denim jacket over a Lonsdale sweat shirt.

All this conspires with his Desperate Dan chin stubble to suggest he’s the sort of shithead who’d smack you in the mouth soon as look at you.

The impression belies the constant quip on his lip and his own deep and genuine humanity, a real sense of right and wrong that fuels his committed championship of youth and working people — so many worlds away from the play-time ‘rebellion’ of the McCullough/Wough Twade axis.

He still coughs up coal dust from the three years he spent down the pit following in father’s footsteps. On stage Mensi is transformed into an avenging fury, all passionate protest and rightful wrath.

At times his face twists into expressions that’d guarantee his enemies sleepless nights for years. Mensi’s lyrics, charisma, and, yeah sod it, message combined with Mond’s sledgehammer guitar make the Upstarts one of the hardest, realest and rockingest groups going.

Crease up

As far as I’m concerned them and the Rejects personify punk rock in every way I ever understood it. Every time I hear Billy Idol singing ‘Wild Youth’ I crease up, y’know.

That’s why I’ve been so perplexed about their recent track record, never more so than with the single, ‘Never ‘Ad Nothin’, that had everything going for it, power, choon, punching hooks, and heartfelt lyrics which to me summed up the mood of the late Seventies / Eighties generation of kids raised for the dole queues and dead end jobs and desperately searching for a way out.

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

And yet it wasn’t the monster hit that it deserved to be and that would have elevated the band’s status overnight to something approaching the importance of what they could and should still become.

LOTS OF THINGS conspired to ruin things. A virtual airplay ban caused by the ‘controversy’ of the lyrics. The difficulty in getting gigs their reputation had seen to. The indifference of a mainly middle class media mainlining on masturbatory mind-games.

The lack of push, planning and foresight from the people supposedly engaged in ‘breaking’ the band. All this and more set the band into a downward spiral that’s still dogging their every step and that recently enabled one out-to-lunch IPC hack to paint them as manipulated bit-players in a rapidly failing farce.

Anyone else would have jacked it all in. Not Mensi. “Awl, I do get depressed,” he confides aptly munching on a fairy cake, “but there’s gotta be a light at the end of the tunnel. I believe we are a band who stands for something worthwhile.

Last night another soldier

For punk rock, which is a form of working class rebellion, a way of making kids think a bit more, the way the Sex Pistols made me think. “And there’s still plenty to rebel about. We’ve just written a brilliant song, ‘Last Night Another Soldier’, about Northern Ireland and the pointlessness and waste of young working class kids getting killed over there.

We’ve still got something to say. “And they say punk’s dead,” he sneers. “How can it be when there’s new blood all the time? Even last night, them kids really enjoyed it. I dunno why I get depressed, that’s what it’s all about.

And I think it’s realer now than ever. The Pistols turned out to be a bunch of wankers and so many of the others were posers. Now you’ve got us, and the Rejects are up there in the limelight adding more fuel to the fire . . .”

But what about the people who reckon you aren’t getting any message over? That you and the kids are just being duped by Sounds to sell papers?

The Angelic Upstarts | All Washed Up

“Listen, we must be getting across because we’re getting asked on a programme in Newcastle called Friday Live next month to talk about police violence and to play.

For us to play in Newcastle is practically unheard of. We’re also doing a programme called Alright Now in June, and Something Else later on, talking about violence so we must be getting through to somebody.

Sounds were just the only ones who recognised us as a real punk band, and me as being unbelievably good-looking.”

I CRINGE AND consider the trouble with the filth that’s followed the Upstarts since their pig’s head beginnings, the band’s championship of the Liddle Towers case, their constant run-ins with the Northumbrian police, and their greatest triumph — playing to a grateful crowd of convicts inside Acklington Prison.

We share a bitter laugh about the recent Liddle Towers repeat with the Jimmy Kelly verdict — the Vice claimed that Kelly’s ribs were broken while they were trying to revive him and the court believed them.

I wonder if the band have had less trouble with the rozzers since moving down to Wood Green last year.

“You’re joking. Now listen, I’m no angel, I’ve got a record as long as your arm” — for nicking close on 50 cars in ’73 and GBH on an Iranian student who pulled a knife on him in ’76 — “but every time I’ve done a crime and I’ve got caught I admit it and take the rap. But the other night in Wood Green I got nicked because of me accent.”

Sunderland

Mensi is outraged. “The night before Sunderland had played Chelsea and some Sunderland lads had smashed the window of this Kebab place. I was walking clown the road talking with some lads and the cops heard me accent and said I was the bloke who did it. I said leave it out and went to walk on and this copper hit me in the face and kicked into the car. I’ve been clipped and slapped by the polis before but never punched.”

The case comes up on May 1. I’m reminded of the last court case the band were involved with, the ‘Shooters In South Shields’ kerfuffle that led to Mensi’s brother-in-law and the band’s former manager Keith Bell both getting sent down.

Bell was a self-confessed ‘former gangster’ whose reputation was enough to maintain order at the band’s early chaotic gigs in South Shields and surrounds. But Bell’s relations with the band were never really happy.

One time he locked them all in a room and told them to write a song supporting the IRA. They refused. Last year they drifted further apart and eventually the band sacked him in favour of Sham’s manager Tony Gordon.

Bell didn’t take redundancy lightly. He and his cronies engaged in a campaign of terror against Mensi’s family, including threatening his mother, smashing her windows, and burning down Mensi’s sister’s stable containing a horse and equipment worth over 4,000 quid.

In response Mensi’s brother-in-law and others paid Belly a midnight visit with a sawn-off shotgun in the course of which one of Bell’s henchmen got shot in the legs.

Shotgun Solution

The story is immortalised in ‘Shotgun Solution‘, and Keith Bell is seeing four-and-a-half years’ worth of porridge in Durham Jail.

Says Mensi: “I wish I’d never seen his face now. All that crap about him keeping the peace at our gigs. He used to start half the trouble, him. The only time I ever felt threatened was at Wolverhampton” (when NF supporters smashed up an Upstarts gig last June) “and then he got smashed to fuck.

Outside his own territory he couldn’t live off his reputation and that’s what he’s found in Durham. He hurt a lot of people, helped put ’em inside, and now he’s been done over twice and they’ve had to put him on Rule 43.”

LIKE SHAM, last year Mensi tried to argue against the fascist inclinations and/or fashion-following of some of his hardcore skin following by aligning himself with RAR, although like me, he now finds himself totally disillusioned with not only RAR but the left-wing parties in general.

Anti-Nazi League

“The only good thing about Ska,” he reckons, “is that it’s done what the Anti-Nazi League couldn’t, but I dunno. It’s getting really hard for me to distinguish between Labour and Tories now — they all grind you down.

And the SWP are a fuckin’ joke, they never talk about real issues.

“But half these BM kids aren’t really Nazis. A lot of them have got grudges against blacks but for most of them it’s just gang war, with skin-colour instead of areas, except the blacks are a lot more together, and the BM kids are looking for an identity. They’re being used by people who aren’t working class and who are against the working class.”

The gig at Dundee Marryat Hall is a perfect conclusion to my sojourn with the band. There are ten times as many punters here tonight as the night before, and all of them make like they’ve got electric eels up their backsides for the duration and have to be held back from the stage by a row of linked-arms.

South Shields

Mensi, the wild-eyed boy from South Shields, feeds off their frenzy and roars out his pain and his protests, seemingly growing bigger and wilder before our eyes and eliciting huge cheers from the crowd when he puts down Thatcher or the BM.

To his left stands Mond, stock-still and statuesque dealing out heavy layers of fast, furious, frenetic guitar while little Stix keeps the beat, hidden at the back, and new boy Doncaster Glyn Warren, veteran of Decca Wade’s post-Upstarts big-in-Yorkshire band the Kickstarts, looks just a shade nervous, though he’s got less cause to worry here than he did at his debut at the Wood Green Lordship rubadub three weeks ago.

Right now the band are playing better than they ever have before. They’ve elbowed all the dodos (except ‘Can’t Explain’ rip-off newie ‘Capital City‘ which ain’t a lot of bottle) and hit just about as hard as good old King Arthur’s Flying Pickets. ‘Police Oppression‘, ‘Never Had Nothing‘, ‘Their Destiny Is Coming‘, ‘Lonely Man‘, ‘Upstarts,’ ‘Teenage Warning‘, ‘Liddle Towers‘ and as many others again, testify to their power and importance.

Real Punk

I’ve only seen one other band come near to tonight’s gig this year and that was the Cockney Rejects. And once more I’m convinced that these two bands do stand for something fresh and new and vital and alive.

That they are Real Punk bands. Probably the first of a new kind of band because they aren’t hype, and they aren’t trendy, and they really do walk it like they talk it.

They’re exhilarating, frightening, aggressive, optimistic, spirited, meaningful, dangerous, a right evil racket and above all pure rock and roll energy, pure 100 per cent proof rebel music.