Monocled Alchemist

Punks from the Peak District. JAI journeys into the wilds of Derbyshire and discovers BLITZ and the VIOLATORS

Article published in Sounds, 6th March, 1982

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills | FIRST I set off into the rolling hills of Derbyshire to New Mills to interview BLITZ. New Mills is the unlikely nucleus of a new punk explosion that’s already sired the likes of Attak, Ak-Ak, PMT, the Violators and first and foremost our heroes Blitz, whose second No Future single ‘Razors In The Night’ has smashed into the independent chart with a bullet. And to think 18 months ago they were a dedicated but unknown hardcore punk band called X5 Rhythm . . .

New Mills is an amazing town, straight off the set of Last Of The Summer Wine. It’s surrounded by lots of green (I suppose it’s scenic) nothingness and about a million(ish) cows posing around in fields with varying degrees with nonchalance.

The interview takes place in Nidge’s front room where I sit surrounded by the band – Carl (vocals), Nidge (guitar), Mackie (bass) and Charlie (drums) —the line-up since July ’80. Over the last six months they’ve had really good press, (only in Sounds, naturally) so I decide to start with the tough ones.

So, wishing I’d had a pint or so of Pernod beforehand and hoping my mouth would work, I take a deep breath, turn crimson and stutter . . .

After the Mayflower gig Gal Bushell said that you hadn’t given 100 per cent, is that true?

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills

Nidge: “We didn’t give 100 per cent. We’d all been drinking too much before we went on, we tried to keep it down but it’s hard to stay away from the bar — it’s boring.”

Mackie: “The sound was bad too. It pisses you off when so many bands are on stage before you that when you get on everything’s fucked about and you’ve got to arrange it all in front of the crowd. It makes us look daft. But a lot of PA companies don’t do their job properly. They just want the readies then fuck off.”

Nidge: “Yeah, but we admit we’ve got to do better. Must try 100 times harder — get it right every time.”

Mackie: “You’re fighting a losing battle half the time, though. Like when the stage’s so small and people keep falling over it. If you were dancing at the front and the back pushed you broke your kneecaps.

“Mind you, I wouldn’t like to play at a festival or something, that’s just like a conveyor belt with bands on it. That’s just a hippy thing, a festival. People say we should do these Right To Work things and CND gigs. But we did a Right To Work gig and they were all communists. Really, they were all paranoid. They treated me and this lad like we were National Front, as if we would do that gig if we were NF!

“It was ridiculous, like we had this MP talking before we went on, big speeches and all that. So it’s like a trade union meeting but with a drum kit in the background. It looked like he was our support act.”

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills

Nidge: “Two lads who were with us were chucking Union Jacks about. Well, it wasn’t even Union Jacks, it was red, white and blue bunting like they have at a carnival. But a bleeding great mob of the crowd charged forward shouting ‘NF are here, let’s do the bastards’. That’s what I mean, they’re paranoid. It’s crazy. They’re a bit OTT in their reactions.”

ARE YOU signed for any more records with No Future?

Nidge: “No, we just sign for them as they come.”

Mackie: “We’re not tied, they just say ‘time to do another single’, so we do that and sign for that. We sold 20,000 of the last single and we’re doing a tour soon, we hope to do at least three dates in Scotland.”

What other recordings have you done?

Mackie: “What, all of them? Well, the first tape we made was a five track, (‘Escape’, ‘F**” U’, ‘Youth’, ‘Bleed’ and ‘Criminal Damage’) at Drone Studios in September ’80, but looking back it was crappy.

After a few more gigs and some better material we went in Hologram and recorded the ‘All Out Attack’ EP which we sent to 12 companies, but only three replied. No Future offered to release it as an EP with a first pressing of 1,000.

Then we did two tracks on ‘Carry On Oi’, ‘Nation On Fire’ and ‘Youth’. And we’ve just released our new single, ‘Razors’ and ‘Never Surrender’.”

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills

What about the next Oi! album?

Nidge: “I wasn’t very pleased with our tracks on the last one, we did two guitar breaks and Martin Hooker used the bad one, the one that was out of time.

“We did five guitar overdubs and backing vocals too. I don’t believe in all that crap where a band goes into the studio and lays a track down as fast as they can and says ‘This is the way punk should be’. You’ve still got to pay £1.10 for their single.”

Charlie: “I’d like to do those tracks again on something else, but it was pretty good publicity.”

Mackie: “It’s all it’s for, to give bands a start, they shouldn’t really have established bands on it.”

Nidge: “People think we’ve made a lot of money, but when we played with the Partisans we had to borrow their gear. People write and say ‘When you play round here can we support you and use your gear?’ and we say yes, what we’ve got, a bass cab and a snare. I haven’t even paid up my guitar yet, it’s going to be repossessed.”

Can you see yourself changing?

Nidge: “Well, I’ve been into punk now for five years; I can’t see myself changing now.”

Mackie: “Yeah, I don’t know about you two but I agree with Nidge, I couldn’t change, the only way I can see us changing is getting better at playing our songs.

“When you start doing shit, that’s the time to pack in, unless you want to go on and do something else, but I don’t really want to. I wouldn’t like to do something for the sake of it, just to be in a band, I’d have to have my heart in it to do it.”

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills

Charlie: “Some of the things we play are different, like ‘Your Revolution’ and ‘Bleed’, but they’re still punk.”

Nidge: “If we released ‘Bleed’ as a single, people would think it was a progression, but that was one of the first things we did.”

Carl: “I don’t want to be driven into a corner, musically or ideologically. A lot of these Manchester bands think they’re being really avant garde but they’re not, it’s all been done before. Like they all want to be little David Bowies, but it can’t be Christmas every day.”

Carl: “I want to write subversive songs and get to Top Of The Pops.”

Nidge: “SHAM got pretty high with ‘The Kids Are United’; they should have carried on dong stuff like that. It’s got to be catchy. But people think that once they’ve been on TOTPs they’ve got to change and play stuff that’s different. They usually just end up f***ing themselves up.

Mackie: “It might be pressure off the record company. I mean, there have been a few punk bands on TOTPs but not recently, there’s a big gap between the Rejects, the Upstarts, Sham and say, the Exploited.

Nidge: “But soon I think you’ll start seeing bands like Vice Squad and Chron Gen.

Carl: “You’ve got to infiltrate the media.”

Nidge: “There’s a big market for this stuff, a lot of people want to buy it, it’s just getting to know about it. The media will have nothing to do with it and not everybody reads the music papers. If you didn’t read Sounds you wouldn’t have heard of us.”

Mackie: “The only time other papers write about punk or Oi or anything like that is when there are riots attached to them.”

The Blitz | The Violators | Run To The Mills

Do you have any riots and things down here? (You never know, maybe a few sheep occasionally freak out.)

Mackie: “What, a riot? No, we couldn’t get one together, though we have been known to rip up a few beer mats in the pub. No, I mean, that’s the only time the rest of the media acknowledge that punk exists, when they’ve got something nasty to write about it.”

‘I can’t see any reds underneath my bed/But the Nazis in my letter box are messing up my head/ You tell me I’ve got rights, even though I’m poor/ But you’re behind the police when they’re knocking down my door.’

(‘Propaganda’)

Carl: “You look at the papers and they say things like how worried they are about the red threat and all that crap. But you’ve got a bigger threat from the right wing in this country.

“Everybody’s life’s run by fascists, ‘cos that’s the people who control this country and they don’t have to come out and say they’re fascists, all they’ve got to be is in the Conservative party.”

Nidge: “Someone put Thatcher there, but no-one will admit it. You go round asking who voted Tory and they all say ‘I didn’t’. The Tories must be the only party who got into power with no-one voting for them.”

Carl: “She told loads of lies, she says we’re going to have these concessions, so they get loads to vote for them. Then they introduce the concessions — about £2 for the average idiot.”

Mackie: “All the ones who voted for them.”

Carl: “Then they say ‘We’ve no more money’ and they cut Social Services and things. But they still spend millions on bombs.”

‘Propaganda — you scare me to death.’ (‘Propaganda’)

The Violators

NEW MILLS is a bizarre town in the Peak District full of hills, pubs and a rather incestuous local crew who’ve got the happy, not to mention rare, knack of forming good bands.

The most famous are Blitz, the most commercial are THE VIOLATORS who’ve now been together for two years. Helen, their pretty, dark haired singer, and Coley, the chief guitarist, came down to my home of Stockport last week where we shivered in the cold and discussed the band.

Helen: “Stylesey (guitar) and Matchi (bass/vocals) were in a practice band called Dismal Sports before they formed this band. Me and Coley teamed up with them first and Ant the drummer joined later.”

Coley: “This isn’t the original line up. First we had Gouldie (a Buxton legend) singing and Tommy of Ak Ak on drums (laughs). But the less said about that the better. Gouldie was always pissed and Tommy had no sense of rhythm.

“You’d spend all day trying to teach him one song and he’d just’ve got it right so you’d say, ‘Alright let’s do it all the way through now’ and then he’d forget it again. If he got excited he’d give up playing and just have one stick going.”

Country Fit For Heroes

At this Coley grins manically and does a one armed Animal Muppet impersonation.

With all these high-level musical problems now sorted out, the Violators have been in Hologram Studios doing two tracks for a single with No Future. Both songs, ‘Gangland’, based on the film The Warriors, and ‘Fugitive’, are longer than their two showcase tracks on ‘Country Fit For Heroes’, with Helen taking the main vocals.

You might remember her track on ‘Country’ — ‘Die With Dignity’ saw her referred to in Sounds as ‘a poppier Siouxsie’.

Coley: “I suppose people are going to say our new single is pretty commercial, but if you’re in a studio, you should use it. I get annoyed at all those bands who just go into a studio and whack it off. I wasn’t pleased with the pressing on ‘Country Fit For Heroes’, it lost a lot of bass and drums.”

“Yeah,” agrees Helen, “but I think rather than just go by our record, people should come and see us live.”

A DIFFICULT task as their gigs always seem to be being cancelled. “People must think we’re lazy bastards,” apologies Helen, “But we want to do loads of gigs, we’re playing in London Skunks on March 5, I’m nervous about that, we’ve never headlined before.

“The first gig we did was in the Panache Club, Bradford, with Discharge. We weren’t meant to be playing so we had to pay to get in. But we always seem to get a good reception which is encouraging. I just want to play gigs all the time.”

Have you ever been abroad?

Sandy and full of ants

Coley: “Yes, Berlin. It’s dead sandy and full of ants, there’s all these lorries going up and down full of sand, I don’t know where they’re taking it. And there were thousands of ants dropping out of trees and things. I don’t like the people much though.

“This country’s good, but a few things need changing, some of the laws are stupid and the police have too much power. OK, the SUS laws been thrown out, but it’s still no different if you’re out after 10 and they think you’re up to no good. If it’s a cold night you get coppers outside pubs thinking, ‘I’ll make a nick and get back in the warm’. They’re meant to be here for our protection, but even innocent parties are made to feel guilty.”

Although the Violators feel very bitter about the way the Government has shagged up so many people’s lives, they don’t believe in anarchy, or rather don’t believe it would do any good.

Helen: “I would like to see everything shared, communism as it should be, pure. Not Russian communism, but I know it could never happen, you would still have leaders and workers. You get all those kids with ‘anarchy’ written on their backs, they don’t realise they would be the first to go. It would be awful, martial law, no-one going anywhere, no music. Cities would become closed communities, like Quatermass.”

Coley: “It wouldn’t be like Crass want, all peace and love, It couldn’t work, what would they do if someone with a sub machine gun came on their little farm and blasted them to pieces? It’s a nice dream, a fashion, something nice to sing about. And if you have an A in your name you can draw a circle round it.”

Future plans

WHAT HAVE you got planned for future?

Helen: “Well we’ve been in touch with BPM Music who are trying to find us a manager and we’ve got another two singles and an album to do for No Future.”

Coley: “And I’m trying to get on the same government scheme as Matchi, painting bogs and things.”

Such ambition . . .