Monocled Alchemist

BOB BEASLEY discusses the good and the bad with the 4-SKINS

Article published in Sounds, 29th May, 1982

The 4-Skins | For A Few Hollers More | IT’S BEEN A year now since their Southall gig-come-riot but despite what a lot of people would like to think, the 4-Skins are going from strength to strength. They are currently signed to Secret Records for a year and have two singles and an lndie No. one LP firmly under their belts.

For the fact freaks among you, here’s a quick run down on who does what in this nifty little combo.

On vocals there’s twenty-one year old Russ Abott look-a-like and British Rail worker, Tony Cummins, (a.k.a. Panther).

On the guitar it’s the jobless ex-drummer, John Jacobs, who clocks in at twenty years.

Then we have bassist Tom McCourt, (twenty one and an engineer), who I later find out is the main off-stage voice of the band and finally the terminally silent van boy, eighteen-year-old Peter Hammond.

The 4-Skins are gathered around a table in the dressing room of the Blue Coat Boy pub in North London with some boisterous friends. Most of the early talk centred around singer Panther’s newly acquired Mac Curtis haircut, with jibes like ‘you should be in the Shakin’ Pyramids’ flowing thick and fast. I start to panic and decide to throw in a question before the tape runs out.

The 4-Skins | For A Few Hollers More

How did you come to sign with Secret?

Tom: “No-one else wanted to know. They was the only ones to offer us anything. We used Clockwork Fun as our own little label by them to do ‘One Law For Them’. We got the money off Secret and done it ourselves. But when we done the second single, (‘Yesterday’s Heroes’), and the LP we signed a different contract.

“We tried to do a tour to go with the release of the LP, but out of two weeks we only got one date. All the other places didn’t want to know or said they’d ring us back. Places like Bristol Granary would take any other band but not us.”

Do you think this is because of the reputation that the old line-up had or do you think it’s the name?

Tom: “I don’t think it’s the name so much, I think it’s a funny name. It’s only meant as a laugh.”

Why did you put one studio side and one live side on the LP?

Tom (again): “Because there was copyrights on five of the tracks and the only way we could get round it was to do them live. It was copying Sham but it was something we wanted to do.”

The 4-Skins | For A Few Hollers More

Panther: “Also, it creates a good atmosphere because people listen to the record and say ‘Look what I’m missing out on, this group are great’. We’d like to assure our little following that no matter how much we get banned, we’ll always play gigs and they will be able to come and see us. As long as we can get studio time and put out records, the bastards won’t grind us down.”

Mass hysteria and excessive clapping then breaks out and the interview degenerates into disorder for a few minutes, before I restore order.

Back to the LP, would you say it was a lack of new material that made you put a live side on?

Tom: “No, we’ve got enough songs, we just wanted to do it like that. We wanted to put the old records on that hadn’t been done properly before. Like, I thought ‘1984’ and ‘Sorry’ were rubbish on ‘Strength Thru’ Oi‘. We produced them ourselves and they was produced again after we’d gone.”

THE CONVERSATION then turns without rhyme or reason, from ‘Strength Thru’ Oi, to ‘Plastic Gangsters’, the first track on ‘The Good, The Bad And The 4-Skins‘, I decide that the best plan is to let the band carry on talking, without any prompting by me.

Panther: “We got slagged off by the music papers for doing ‘Plastic Gangsters’. They said we were going in that direction, but it’s just a piss-take. It’s just a big joke.”

John: “It’s obvious it’s a joke because none of the other songs on the LP sound anything like it. You name a type of music and we’ll have a bash at it.”

Panther: “And we all like different types of music too”.

Tom: “Panther likes really useless music”.

Panther: “I’m into Killing Joke and Theatre Of Hate”.

John: “I’m into Madness.

What do you like Tom?”

Tom: “60’s soul”.

The 4-Skins | For A Few Hollers More

Once again Peter remains silent. Why did Steve Pear leave the band?

Tom: “We had a group and it was going to be Panther singing, Steve and John on guitars, me on bass and Pete on drums. We had about six or eight rehearsals and all Steve wanted to do was wait six months and come out like The Clash. We said we’d play the same music as before and build on it but he didn’t want to know.”

What about Garry Hodges?

Tom: “Personal reasons really. There’s nothing else we can say. We all like the geezer but he done some silly things and the group just split up.”

Panther: “I’d just like to say, if Garry Hodges wanted to come back and talked it out with the band I’d leave tomorrow.”

Tom: “After hearing that, all I can say is let’s ring up Hodges. See you later Tone.”

Once again laughter sets into the room and once it starts, it’s hard to stop it. But I manage (after a while).

Tom continues, “Garry Hodges was the focal point of the band, but he weren’t the only member”.

Panther: “I was the roadie at the time and I thought I weren’t going to miss out on a chance like this. Garry kept saying I was eating the band’s money.”

Tom takes this cue to explain the eating capabilities of said vocalist. “We were playing Sheffield and the owner said, ‘we’ve got all this food here’. They had all these cream cakes, cups of tea, rolls and lagers. On one arm Panther had balanced three rolls and a cup of tea. On the other arm he had a pint of lager and about six bits of cake.”

The 4-Skins | For A Few Hollers More

John: “We had at least two days supply of food to go up to Leeds and back. We got out at a garage and Panther got in the back. When we pulled into Leeds at the gig, our manager said, ‘Here Panther, go and get us some sandwiches out the back, and Panther says ‘Well, I ate them! So he says ‘Ok, get us some ham ones. There’s two packs of them.’ I was hungry so I ate them as well’ he replied. So our manager says, ‘Ok, get us one of those pickled onions’ and Panther goes, ‘I was that hungry I had to eat the whole jar of them’.”

THE BAND CARRY on with more stories about Panther’s partiality to anything that’s free, but after a while it gets too much and I have to return to some serious questions. My next move was to bring drummer, Peter Hammond, in to the conversation but he had already decided not to say anything all night. So it’s back to Panther.

You’ve had a bit of criticism in the music papers recently because they were saying that your voice isn’t as good as Garry Hodges. Do you see this as a personal attack on you or as a general criticism of the band?

Brian Ferry

Panther: “When I went to the audition I thought I was Bryan Ferry but they said, ‘Don’t sing like that, shout. That’s why my singing is awful.”

Tom: “No-one’s given him a chance, but our records still sell alright. In Manchester these kids said ‘I like the live side of the album, ‘Garry Hodges is really good’. They thought it was Garry singing. The people who give him stick all the time are comparing him to Hodges, but why compare him to Hodges? He ain’t Hodges, so why compare them?”

I suppose live gigs are still hard to get?

Panther: “We can get gigs but we need a promoter because people are scared, after Southall, that their pub’s going to get burned down and you can’t blame them. If you own a pub you’re not going to let a band play there without something to cover the insurance.”

Tom: “We phoned up Keighley Funhouse and they asked if we were doing a gig for the Bradford seven, (seven Pakistanis who got done for petrol bombs) and I said ‘No, not us. We’re not into politics at all’ and he says, ‘Oh, we can’t have you then’.

“No-one gives you a chance. The only way we can get gigs is to cream people’s arses and say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll do this sort of gig for you, but we never done anything wrong in the first place so why should we do gigs to clear ourselves.

Rock Against Racism

After Southall people were saying, ‘Go and do Rock Against Racism, but why? We never done anything wrong.”

Panther: “It would have made us out to be wrong if we started doing gigs for political parties”.

Tom: “Even if we changed our name, it’d still be so-and-so, alias the ex-4-Skins, they were at the Southall riot”.

Your following still seems to be largely a skinhead one.

Panther: “The trouble is that the punks that like us are scared to come and see us because they think they are going to get beaten up by the skinheads, and we are a genuine punk band”.

Tom: “There’s never any trouble though. When you go up north it’s all punks and skinheads together. They’ve got it more sussed out up north.”

Do you think you can get the punks to your gigs down south?

Tom: “We’ve always said that if the punks don’t have the bottle to come because of what they read in the papers, then they’ll never come. They just think, 4-Skins, trouble band’. Then no-one wants to come.

“Punks don’t want to come, some skinheads don’t want to come. In London they all stand there watching you play. A few dance but not many. London is a doss-hole.”

Panther: “Our next single, ‘Seems To Me’, is all about London and how all the clubs have shut down and there’s no gigs to see”.

Tom: “It’s going to be a double A-side. The other side is ‘Norman, Get On Your Bike’, about Norman Tebbitt saying if you want a job, get on your bike and look for one. If geezers ain’t got a bike to ride, they’d wear their legs away, wouldn’t they? We’ve got loads of new songs. There’s one about this bloke, Bill Stickers, who’s always being prosecuted, which I think is a shame.”

Would you say your music’s changing?

Tom: “It’s still about the same, but it’s progressing a bit. We’re still as raw as we used to be. We try tunes out in rehearsals and if we like it, we’ll do it. The most commercial thing we’ve done is ‘Yesterday’s Heroes’, which I hate. I think we made a mistake there. We know the problems, so for the next single we are getting a very good producer to do it.”

So you’ve got an LP out, another single on the way, what other things have you got lined-up?

Tom: “We should be playing Dundee, Newcastle and Durham soon, but I don’t know about Europe. We can’t get gigs here so we might as well go somewhere else. It would probably be easier to get gigs in places like Germany.

“We’ve got loads of songs written and our next LP will be better than the first one. When we done the first one, we weren’t keyed up enough. You need someone in the studio to say, ‘do this again, do that again. It’s not a brilliant LP but it’s done alright for a first attempt. More people are interested in us now.”

Just as I was leaving the Skunx Club, John Jacobs cornered me and said, “Could you just put in that we’d like to say thank you to my mum for supplying us with food since we’ve been going?” Consider it done.