Steve Keaton gets banned from a pub with PETER AND THE TEST TUBE BABIES
Article published in Sounds, 1st May, 1982
PETER TEST Tube is incredulous. “F***ing hell, this is exactly what’s it’s all about,” he bleats. “This is exactly f***ing it!” The barrel bodied barman is unmoved. “Out you go, mate,” he says, “I’m not having no punks in ‘ere!” The protesting singer is unceremoniously ushered towards a pair of peeling doors.
The other Test Tubes, obviously hardened to this sort of treatment, are less upset and offer calming noises to their chum. Life, I conclude, is an ironic affair. You try to organise an interview with a bunch of ‘ooligans whose current EP is titled ‘Banned From The Pubs’ and the first ruddy pub you go in chucks you out. Pretty dumb, huh?
Why, it could almost be the creation of my own pathetic hack imagination. Still, it’s a good way to start a feature, me thinks while being ejected out into the street. “F***ing hell . . . ” continues Peter as he bounces onto the pavement.
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THE TEST Tubes are a splatter rock band, who like contemporaries (they’ll hate the comparison) the Exploited and Charge lack finesse and originality.
They blunder and roar and attempt to compensate for their artistic shortcomings with explosions of callous crudery. They’re simian rockers who’d be utterly forgettable were it not for their penchant for fast food lyrics.
See them and thrill to their many gormless gems — they could almost be the perfect punk parody band if only it weren’t for their obvious (and confusing) sincerity, and Panzer-tank muscle.
Peter scratches his leopard-print barnet and scowls. A look carefully designed for a hard-as nails appearance. He doesn’t strike me as a happy fellow, he grumbles and moans incessantly behind a countenance that’d sour yoghourt.
“I’m glad you had to pay to get in!” he growls as we meet after the gig. His manner is dominated by obnoxious bravado and he clearly enjoys the idea of being a pain in the buttock of the press.
“I’m not posing for your photos, you boring old c***!” he snorts, posing for our photos. The facade is barbed but not it transpires insurmountable. Eventually we find a tavern that doesn’t seem to object to punk cash and much argument then follows as they debate the purchase of refreshment.
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Talk about noisy beggars! I feel sure that at any moment some uppity landlord will rush into view and turf us all out again. It’s enough to get you paranoid. “You owe me a drink now” declares Pete shoving a lager onto the table. “I bought that!” He bought me a drink! Headway!
The Test tubes are, to employ an overused phrase, a motley crew. Apart from the bolshy Peter there’s Chris (aka Trapper) their loud, lanky, bespectacled bassist, Derek, a superbly manic guitarist and Hoggins (Hoggins!) the drummer. He’s their fifth. He strikes me as Brighton’s answer to Les Patterson. He’s drunk and dribbles with a machine gun rattle of a laugh.
The Test Tubes are not the sort mum would ask round for Sunday tea. They’re so scummy they leave a ring around the table. With alarming eagerness the humour-herberts await my first question.
The songs, boys, they’re quite individual aren’t they. What with the funny lyrics and stuff . . . who writes them?
“I write the funny lyrics,” says Derek flatly. “They’re so funny I have to keep throwing them away.”
“I wrote ‘Up Yer Bum’ in 45 seconds”, declares Peter proudly. “Me and Derek write most of the songs except for the ones that go well over the top — Chris writes them.”
“I’ve written loads that were well over the top but this lot wouldn’t use them” confirms the bassist.
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Are you not that interested in writing, how shall I put it, serious songs?
Chris is outraged: “They’re all serious! They’re all social comments!”
Peter: “We write true stories, right. Like ‘Transvestite’ is a true story, (it’s the torrid tale of fellow who thinks he’s onto a good thing, until he gets home and finds rather more than he bargained for) it happened to me! You might sit there and laugh but it’s not funny when you think about it.”
“No ask us another question, “sniggers Chris, “ask us . . . what’s in the future for us!”
I’d rather you told me about some of your songs, I counter.
Chris: “Quite honestly we just do a bunch of piss-takes. We’re not serious about anything. Politics is a load of crap.” Crap, I’m to learn, is one of Chris’ very favourite words.
Peter: “Yeah, you get all these groups going on about politics and atomic bombs, right?”
Chris: “Being on the dole, the police beating you up . . . ”
Peter: “Now, I think that’s a really good thing to write about, right — ”
Chris (becoming agitated): Well I don’t. I think it’s crap.”
Peter: But when 101 punk bands sing about it there’s no point. It loses the message.”
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EXPLETIVES FILL the air as Peter and the bassist become involved in verbal fisticuffs. Aren’t you, I boom trying to make myself heard, in danger of becoming something of a novelty band?
“Bollocks,” replies the singer. “The band to laugh at is the one who comes on singing, ‘Let’s beat up the SPG ‘cos I’m on the dole.’ That sort of stuff is really boring.”
Derek: “Look. We just want to please the whole audience. The people who want to dance to the music can jump up and down at the front and those that just want to watch can stand at the back and be amused by the lyrics.” He smiles satisfied at the simplicity of it all.
Chris: “We just want to have a laugh really.”
I take it then that you have indeed been banned from all the pubs in Brighton?
Chris: “Yeah, we’ve been banned from everywhere. Brighton’s crap. The only gigs we get there are at the Top Rank, and then we’re always supporting someone else. We’re trying to organise a No Future (their label) gig down there with Blitz and the Partisans.”
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Derek: “After four years we’ve just got this bad reputation down there. When someone find out it’s us on the other end of the ‘phone down it goes. Slam. There’s no place at all to play in Brighton, so we do gigs all over the country, real useless ones. But then I’d rather do a real shitty gig somewhere than stay at home and watch telly. It used to be alright in Brighton but we had a lot of skinhead trouble.”
Peter: “No we didn’t!”
Chris: “Stop mentioning skinheads!” Things go unusually quiet all of a sudden. Skinhead trouble is obviously a sore point, their silence speaks volumes.
Peter: “Ask us what influenced us. Hoggins doesn’t like punk at all, he likes U2. Don’t ya?”
Noggins: “I like everything but I don’t like too much of anything.”
Chris: “Oh, that really makes sense!” The drummer suddenly shakes with laughter. A disconcerting sight. “I mean, I’ll listen to anything (burp), I’d listen to Beethoven. It don’t matter to me.”
Chris: “Why don’t you ask us about our private lives? How nice we are?”
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Peter: “People think just ‘cos we have funny lyrics we’re not a hardcore punk band, but we’re just as hardcore as Blitz, only we’ve got a bit more suss about what we write. We write about things that happen to us, like being banned from the pubs.”
Derek: “We like to go out and get pissed and make idiots -)f ourselves, and then we write about it.”
YOU’VE BEEN together for quite some time now, all of four years. Has your attitude altered? Does it still feel the same when you get up on stage?
“Yeah, I think so,” says Peter. The question is really, why did we form the band in the first place, right? And that’s because it was good fun — and it still is. If it ever gets boring we’ll just give up.
“I think we’re much better musically now, because we’ve had such shit drummers in the past, they held us back. But now we’ve got good drummer and we know what we’re doing. We know where we want to go as well.
Derek: “We’re the only punk band in Brighton that have stayed together longer than three months, We’re only punks that do it full time. The whole set’s our lifestyle. We all live together (in a place called the Anarchy Ranch) the set’s all about that.
“We’ve been through all the old shit,” declares Peter scowling more fiercely than ever. “Support shit bands in shit venues and we’ve been together f***ing ages! We’ll get what we want because we wont take no shit from no one.
The rest of the band explode into mock applause. “Strong speech”, they chide. “You tell ’em.”
Chris the bassist adjusts his spectacles. “Well come on, “he whines” haven’t you got any more questions?”
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