Monocled Alchemist

GARY BUSHELL visits the land of the free with the ANGELIC UPSTARTS

Article published in Sounds, 26th June, 1982

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts | WE’RE THE working class army, we’re nobody’s army except our own.”

Mensi an advance guard from Tommy Mensforth’s barmy prole army made an unceremonious first landing in the Americas at the end of last month, touching down in New York not to the sound of hostile artillery fire but the quickfire rattle of Decca Wade funnies.

“Look at her, man,” the diminutive dipstick drummer shouts as we swagger through airport security. “She’s got a face like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle. Oi, luv, have you got a sister called Cinderella? Hey, see him Gal, he’s got a face like a welder’s bench.”

“Where’s yer clothes?” snaps the object of his derision, an irritated security blimp with eyes like poached eggs and skin that’s greasier than a Kebab House kitchen floor.

“I’ve got none,- says Decca.

“None? How long you here for?”

“Six weeks, we’re touring, like.”

“Six weeks? Godamn boy, is this some kinda muvva-f***ing joke?”

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

The blimp is quivering like an over-ripe volcano, poached eggs wobbling fit to fall out of his fat face. Decca collapses in hysterics and for a moment I’m sure he’s seen all of the US he’s ever gonna see. But the Michelin Man just waves us through in disgust, and, safely in the airport lobby, Decca disintegrates into another giggling fit.

“HEY MANN,” Mensi explodes punching my arm like Superman demolishing a steel girder. “We’re HERE, it’s great this, innit tut?”

But you’ve forgotten yer trunk, Mens, I crack, harking back to his Elephant Man past and eliciting a stream of feeble body blows from the, ahem, ‘bellicose ox of a singer’ (© Valac Van Der Veene)

“Hey, mellow out man,” chimes in bassist and token Londoner Tony Feedback, drawing on his old Mod vocabulary.

“Shut it, Feedback,” snipes Decca, “You’re worse than a dose of pox. Take no notice of him, Gal, his mother fed him on goat’s milk, that’s why he keeps on butting in.”

God only knows what the Yanks made of this tanked-up task force, but we were having the time of our lives. And the hilarity count doubled when we met our driver. ‘Killer’ was the guy’s name, so he had to be at least seven foot tall, 20 stone and covered in tatts, right?

True to all the best Brian Rix farces, Killer turned out to be two farts over five foot with arms like sparrers legs and Charles Hawtrey specs.

Natch we soon learn the logic behind his murderous moniker – the minute we get in his van and win a 40 minute “what’s a lane?” ride to the Hotel lraquois, roughly as deadly as trying to shoot Niagara Falls on yer granny’s washboard.

I left my heart in San Francisco, my liver in Times Square and a pair of adenoids somewhere in the Bronx . . .

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

The Iraquois has a famous John Lydon haunt for a bar called Magillacuddy’s, so the Upstarts‘ first taste of the States is the piss-water beer and a dramatic shot of Thatcher bearing the legend ‘Wanted for murder and torture of Irish prisoners’.

Now Mensi’s disapproval of the IRA is well-known and I was certain we’d be bang in the centre of a bar-room brawl before you could say deportation.

But the Irish-American bar staff hold nothing against the British working class and Mensi soon discovers plenty of common hatreds.

“Thatcher should be lynched,” he bellows,” she keeps the working class down.”

“I’m not interested, man,” says Decca, “I just wanna live me own life.”

“And that’s why she’s in power!” Mensi explodes in exasperation. “Because people like you don’t bother to oppose her. She’s evil, man. She’s the figurehead for her class and that class is against our class. Because of the Falklands people are forgetting there’s three million, probably four million people on the dole.”

Not that Mensi shares the detestable trendy lefty attitude to the Falklands war.

“Look I’m anti-war, but when you’re threatened by fascist force you’ve got to fight back. You can’t let ’em walk all over you. If the call-up papers came I’d fight, though I doubt if they’d have me cos I’m too much of a disruptive element.

“Don’t forget it was all the Tories fault, they’ve been selling arms to fascist governments for years.

“But I don’t agree with what the Sun says about Benn. He’s not a traitor. This is a democracy, he’s got the right to freedom of speech. The working class won freedom of speech in this country. Thatcher’s class never wanted us to have it.

“People slag me off for going on about the working class, but I’ll go on about it as long as class exists. The middle class NME wankers might put us down for it but they’ve never known what it’s like to be poor.”

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

Concurring heartily with Mensi’s ‘Fascists-off-the-Falklands, Thatcher-out-of-office’ line, I can’t help noting that with the mess Labour are in, the latter doesn’t seem so likely.

“Aye”, says Mens, “Labour need to get their house in order. Up North they’re still strong. Where the workers are well-organised Labour’s still strong. Half the reason the fascists attract kids down South is the working class aren’t strong there.”

Interesting though this Robin Day style debating is, it’s holding up the progress or Mensforth and my good self to our own Timmy Sommer’s radio show where we’re both wanted for interviews. So we foolishly set out to find our own way there and within minutes we get more lost than Atlantis. So what do ya do? Ask a policeman . . .

THE THREE COPS lean lazy but arrogant against the street corner chewing matchsticks, nightsticks and side-irons all too obviously there.

“Whaaaa,” the first guy drawls sarkily three times as I ask him directions.

“Hey he’s taking the piss, man, let’s go,” says Mens.

“You sure you don’t want Queens?” his chubby colleague snortles.

And it dawns on me that they’ve booked us as as gay because of our short hair. When I explain to Mensi it’s all I can do to stop him charging back after them.

“F”*”ing hell, let’s do ’em Gal,” he fumes. But Mens, they’ve got guns.

“Aye but they’re WIMPS! Do I look like a f***ing poof? We could’ve smashed ’em to f”*””.

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Mensi’s still going up the wall by the time we’ve (inadvertently) bunked the tubes and arrived at the radio station. But under the soothing glare of media attention he’s soon back to his normal big-headed self.

“Bet you didn’t think I was this good looking did ya Tim?” the poor deluded fool boasts. Tim humours him and asks him, somewhat pointlessly you might feel, to try not to swear on the air. Thankfully Tim’s tough on him and pulls him up about the Upstarts’ appalling pop’n’synth-ridden last studio album. I hope you’re not going to use them here, he says.

”The only time we’ll use synthesisers here is to hit Bushell over the head with,” the fool replies.

“The synthesisers were a big mistake. We’ve stuck em up Bushell’s arse. And now we’re here to play PUNK and demonstrate we’re NOT fascists.”

Unfortunately the interview then descended into the sort of profanities that made the Anglo-Saxon language what it is today — dead; with Mensi trying to attract punkettes along to tomorrow’s debut gig at the Peppermint Lounge (aka The Pep). He spent the next half-hour off the air pursuing the same hopeless aims with any woman foolish enough to ring the radio station. Trunk calls, natch.

Mobbing up with the rest of the entourage back at the hotel, we decide to check out the Pep, re-opening tonight apparently after moving and renovating. But when we get there there’s queues of liggers, posers and butterfly collectors debasing themselves, awaiting to be vetted by the trendy gaff’s bouncers who all seem to be suffering from the delusion that they’re Sylvester Stallone. Not exactly da streets man.

Totally put off, me Mens and Decca do the off and blag our way into CBGBs where the Bad Brains are playing (see a recent Jaws) and there’s gen-u-ine New York punks and skins to talk to. Much more like it.

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OUR SECOND day in New York opens to news that only John the tour manger/sound man had pulled the night before. Decca is disgusted.

“Hey man, you better soak yourself in Domestos for 24 hours,” he advises. “She’s the one per cent even that can’t kill.”

“We’re soon joined in the bar (breakfast as usual) by several of the Clash, also staying at the Iraquois. Much banter breaks out, with Joe Strummer explaining to Mensi that Mensforth Hill wasn’t a pop at him, honest. And though Mens acts hurt there’s no disguising the respect he still has for the man who first launched him (and me) into punk.

Indeed later that night when that mental midget of the jet set, Ross Halfin graces the gig with his pissed presence, Mensi has to be physically restrained when Halfwit slags the Clash for selling out.

One liner of the morning:

Decca: “Hey, Joe, why d’you do a runner?”

Joe: “I just thought what the f***. . . “

The Upstarts spend most of the day trying to soak up as much of the world’s fastest and ficklest city as humanly possible. There’s skinny Decca, solid Mensi in his pink Fats Domino t-shirt, Mond doing a Clint Eastwood with his shades and silent appreciation, and last and newest addition to the South Shields clan, tin-ribbed Tony Feedback (ne Morrison, formerly Tony Perfect in Upstarts occasional support band Long Tall Shorty).

“Look at you, Feedback,” quips Decca. “You’re like a gypsy’s dog, all ribs and pricks.”

But Tony is unmoved by the urine-extractions. Perpetually good-humoured the ex-Mod with the permanent grin and blinding peroxide hair hails from Tulse Hill, South London and is the baby of the band at a humble 21 years of age.

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

Like Decca, he’s love-sick and won’t even look at women, preferring to dream of his girlfriend at home (Is that okay, Tone? When do I get the fiver?).

TOURIST TIME over we turn up at The Pep for the soundcheck. Things aren’t encouraging. The stage is still covered in wet paint, PA problems means the soundcheck takes over four hours, and we find out tickets for tonight’s show will set the punters back £5.50 apiece. Talk about mortgage mentality, John.

Mensi sits in a corner strumming Mond’s guitar — he’s just learning, and plans to play rhythm on stage soon. First song he learnt was ‘Soldier’ — natch — this moving tale of a British working class squaddie/pawn dying in Ulster being close to the Mensforth heart. He strums and sings; and for a moment stays serious.

“I’m 25,” he says, “26 this July. The band’s been going five years now and I’m still an angry young man, we’re still going strong despite being frequently depressed. Performing cheers me up, the band’s my life — if we ever give up all that’s left for us are the North East dole queue doldrums.”

Unlike most original punk bands who were art-students playing at being poor, the Upstarts really were kids off the street, or rather out of the pits and off the shipyards. Mensi’s common sense socialism and Mond’s solid powerhouse’ guitar made them one of the most important protest punk bands ever. And their heritage includes four albums rich in humanism and righteous wrath.

Unlike many of today’s moronic ghetto-brains who think being a punk means spiking your hair up and wallowing in the Indie Charts, The Upstarts have always appreciated the importance of aiming for the heart of the beast — the national Top Thirty, the TV, the radio, anywhere they can get their message over to masses of people.

For after all, a socialist rebel like Mensi needs by definition to communicate with as many working class kids as possible. Where the basic of logic of this falls flat on its face is when in order to make these important connections the band start to water down their music.

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

Such compromises may be acceptable when they’re natural, ‘from the heart’ moves — but when they’re blatant shots at air-play that FAIL, like the Upstarts’s feeble last album then they deserve the vicious two-star mugging I gave them at the time.

I wondered if desperation had finally over-taken the band —what other motive could there be for such an album? Certainly none of them would admit to liking it.

Tony: “I don’t like the album at all, l thought I’d joined a punk band.”

Decca: “There’s only two good tracks on the album, ‘Soldier’ and ‘Brixton’. But the way I look at it is the first four albums we did were all for us, it was about time we gave EMI one.”

Mond: “It had to be done just to show we could make a commercial album if we wanted to. It just wasn’t a very successful experiment.”

Mensi, as usual, is the most vociferous. “I didn’t particularly like the musical direction of that album. But there’s four members of the band not just me.” (Strange when you think no one sticks up for it).

“I just see it like when you go on holiday. You go for two weeks not the whole of your life. We just fancied a change. Obviously we didn’t want to repeat ourselves.”

It certainly wasn’t popular.

“Only one kid came up to me at a gig and said he liked it,” Mensi admits, probably referring to some unfortunate deaf kid. “But I’d still do it all over again. It was our fifth album — we went there for a holiday.

“But the new stuff we’ve done is much stronger. Live, we want to be powerful and that’s what the new stuff’s like. Pure punk power. We’ve recorded a hell of a lot of strong new material.

“When we get back home we’re gonna finish it off and bring out 14 new tracks for a cheap price about September and it’s all real Upstarts punk except for one acoustic track.”

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

THAT’S A version of a Polish Solidarity folk-song given to Mensi by a British Solidarity worker.

The lyrics are emotive stuff; “We the shipwrights and the dockers/Here we stand and behind us every worker hand in hand/We’ll have independent unions/Free from Party minions/Nothing will deter the Polish working class.”

The band recently donated a track to the ‘Wargasm’ compilations in similar vein — ‘Victory For Poland’; a demo they were so pleased with they didn’t bother re-recording. “My heart is still in punk,”

Mensi affirms. “Not just the music but the whole way of life. Some skins slagged me off for wearing Farahs in the 100 Club. But punk isn’t what you wear, it’s what you think. And my thoughts are still PUNK, the lyrics on the last album were as punk as those on the first.

“Never mind what Crass say, we ain’t rich pop stars. Arthur Scargill means 100 times more than those c***s ever will.

“People slag me off for going on about politics, but political events effect the working class more than anyone else, and you’ve gotta stand and shout for your rights.”

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

Any regrets Mens?

“No, I’m enjoying meself. Would have liked to have been more successful . . . I’d like our songs to be heard and recognised by more people. It’s great that there’s so many Upstarts inspired bands about, it makes it all worthwhile. I just wish they’d play punk on the radio but then our attitudes are so different to most people in the business it’ll probably never happen. I didn’t want to come in here last night because the people weren’t like us . . . “

As he speaks the area we’re talking in gets taken over by gyrating ballerinas. This isn’t looking good. As we suspected ticket prices limit the gig to just a few hundred people, including Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, and Beano King Paul Young.

To be honest it’s just about the worst I’d ever seen the Upstarts, but it wasn’t their fault. The PA was crap, and John the soundman had to literally fight Pep security men to try and get the show listenable.

Still most of the people there seemed well acquainted with the band, and those I spoke to loved every minute (one even asked me what a herbert was — made my day), as indeed all the Upstarts’ US audiences everywhere seem to have done.

Because you see even a duff sound can’t stop the Upstarts indomitable spirit shining through. The power’s still there. Mensi is still possessed of the same manic intensity that first endeared him to me.

Decca is one of the top three drummers ever to come out of punk, Mond’s his usual stoic solid self, and Tony’s well into it all, pushing himself forward and vying for the eyeballs that Mensi once held by right.

Tonight’s specials included ‘Two Million Voices’ for “that slag Thatcher — we’ll never surrender to her”; ‘Last Night Another Soldier’ “for our soldiers in the Falklands”; and ‘White Riot’, specially for Strummer I reckon, “a song about what’s happening in our country”. An impressive show, and a triumph against all the odds.

Mond is staggered. “Six thousand miles away and they still know all the words.” he says, pleased and surprised.

The Angelic Upstarts | Upstate With The Upstarts

NEXT DAY, my last day in New York, I spend mostly with Mond and Decca, whose dad, not that surprisingly, is a club comedian up north (“my ambition” says Dec, “is to get him to laugh at one of my jokes.”) Mond’s ambition is to have bacon sarnies every morning.

There seemed no better way to end this article than to let these fine upstanding members of the band have their say about the reprobate Mensforth.

Decca: “Oh Mensi, yeah, did you hear he was going into acting? They’ve offered him a bit part as a stand-in for Lassie. He’s got a face like a rat-catcher’s dog. I tell you, man, he makes Boris Karloff look healthy.

“And I tell you he’s got some money. I think his mum bought him Monopoly at the age of two. He can hear a pound note drop at 50 yards with the wind in the wrong direction. If you tell him he looks like Burt Reynolds he buys you drinks all night. But if beauty was skin deep, he was born inside out.

Mond: “And he’s getting so fat now, he can’t get in the bath. He’s gotta wait till dark and go through the car wash.

Decca: “I’ll tell you what says it all. A kid came up to me last night and said. ‘Your singer’s not got much going for him. He’s ugly, and he can’t sing. He just shouts and he doesn’t do that too well.’ “

Very definitely to be continued . . .