Winston Smith raps to city babies GBH
Article published in Sounds, 28th August, 1982
GBH | Ratrapping | A Friday afternoon. Colin’s sitting room, somewhere in Birmingham . . .
Jock, are you worried that by starting off with a five star album, you’ve got nothing left to . . . strive for?
“No, it’s Garry Bushell whose given us five stars, nobody else did . . .”
Wilf: “It gives us something to live up to, which is difficult, or could be difficult.”
But if the next one gets less it’s going to make it look . . .
Jock: “Yeah but that’s just the reviewers though. As long as we’re pleased with it, and as long as the kids we know are pleased with it, then that’s alright.”
Colin: “Because we’d never release anything we weren’t happy with.”
Could you tell me what ‘Slut’ from the album is about?”
Colin: “Women”.
Somebody else (whispered): “Lovely women”.
What sort of women?
Jock: “Women we know . . . ”
Wilf: “Loose women.”
Jock: “Yeah, women we know, exactly.”
GBH | Ratrapping
Is it against them then or what?
Wilf: “No no, its just about them.”
Colin: “It’s just a fun song about women.”
Jock: “It’s just like . . . we know a lot of dirty women, so we thought we’d write a song about them . . . ”
Do you prefer doing songs like that to more serious ones like . . . ‘No Survivors’ for instance?
Colin: “Yeah yeah.”
Jock: “I prefer ‘Slut’ to ‘No Survivors’.
What I mean is that kind of song.
Jock: “Yeah. It’s not . . . yeah I suppose, yeah it’s ‘sexist’, you’d call it sexist wouldn’t you?”
Yeah. (Probably).
“Well, I don’t look at it like that, as if we’re trying to put women down, it’s just that some women are like that. So I’m not a sexist. Much.”
Conversation turns to the fairly healthy success of the ‘No Survivors’ single . . .
Wilf: “Number 63 that got to. We were on the verge of a Top Of The Pops appearance.”
(Aha!) Would you do Top Of The Pops?
“Yeah I think we would. It’s a hundred quid isn’t it.”
Jock: “We wouldn’t be able to play our instruments on it though, which is stupid.”
Wilf: “Besides that, (the hundred quid) there’s loads of kids who can’t get to see you at gigs and that. And people are always moaning how Top of The Pops is crap because of the bands on it, but it’s never going to be any good unless decent bands do go on it.”
Wouldn’t you demand to play live?
Wilf: “We’d prefer to do it live, but if we couldn’t, we can’t.”
Colin: “We’d feel like a load of idiots just standing there miming.”
Ross: “I wouldn’t want to do it.”
You wouldn’t?
“No.”
Jock: “He would. We’d drug him, crucify him to the mike stand . . .”
Ross: “I wouldn’t.”
Wilf: “We’ll put a jarful of sulphate up his nostrils, stand him on stage.”
GBH | Ratrapping
Would you refuse?
Ross: “Yeah.”
Wilf: “If he refused we’d do what Status Quo did when their bass player was ill, make a dummy like.”
Jock: “I’d like it to be a live video, rather than just stand in the studio like pricks.”
Colin: “Yeah, and be on stage and look like pricks!”
If you were to have a hit single could you imagine yourselves getting into Jackie and magazines like that as pin-ups? (Laughter).
Wilf (chucking): “He probably would, Colin, our photogenic vocalist!”
Well?
Jock: “No, bollocks. No.” Would you do things like that if they asked you?
Colin: “Stoney (Mike Stone at Clay Records) wants us to do it.”
Wilf: “I wouldn’t want to go in things like that.”
Jock: “Well he doesn’t want us to actually get in Jackie, he just wants us to get as much publicity as he can for us . . . So he can make money out of us.”
Wilf: “He doesn’t want us to get more commercial, he’d just like us to get more commercially accepted. I wouldn’t mind us being commercially accepted, but we wouldn’t go out of our way to be accepted.”
Jock: “If people accept our music that’s okay, but we’ll never change it to suit anyone.”
It’d be weird though wouldn’t it? I mean the first teenybop hard core punk band . . .
“Oh no, oh no,” (amused by the thought). Colin: “I think Motorhead have got quite a good balance. I mean they’ve still got the fans they’ve had for ages.”
Wilf: “They’re commercial in the fact that they get Top 40 singles, and all that sort of thing, but they’ve still got their sort of rough, hard-core image . . .”
GBH | Ratrapping
I was interested to hear you (Wilf) on the phone compare GBH with The Exploited, because I’d never thought of you like that before. You didn’t mean musically did you?
“No, I didn’t mean like that, I meant in a wider spectrum.”
Do you mean you don’t take things too seriously?
“Yeah. We’re into it as sort of, er, punk for a laugh and a way of life rather than trying to change things.”
What do you mean by “punk as a way of life”?
Colin: “Well, when we played in Holland some kids came all the way from Newcastle, and I think that’s really good like.”
Wilf: “Yeah, we’d never met them before even, they just turned up.”
Colin: “And there were some skinheads from Scotland supposed to have come ”
Was this a tour of Holland then?
Colin: “No, it was just one gig so promoters could see us and get a tour for us.”
Wilf: “So we should be going back for a tour later in the year.”
There aren’t many bands apart from you, who’ve never used ‘anarchy’ in their imagery or songs etc are there?
Colin: “There’s no point in it, Crass have said all there ever is to be said about anarchy.”
Wilf: “I mean, no matter what any band says, singing about it isn’t going to change it at all. It might change people’s viewpoints, you know, make people think a bit, but it’s never going to change anything, politics like you know?”
Jock: “It depends on the way you feel really don’t it?”
Ross: “It’s alright for these to slag ’em off but I like ’em. They changed my point of view when I first bought their record . . . “
Wilf: “Actually that’s another thing about our band, everybody’s got different viewpoints on everything haven’t we?”
Jock: “I think that’s good.”
Ross: “Well, when we got slagged off before for something that either I said or he said like, it got taken as GBH as a whole like.”
Jock: “That’s what I don’t like in interviews, when one person in the band says something, not the band as a group of people.”
Wilf: “I don’t think we’d ever do that, have just one of the band doing an interview, cos everybody’s got their own say in this band, and they’re always going to get slagged off for it, which I always do . . .” (Laughter).
Colin: “It’s like Vice Squad have got isn’t it? People don’t see Vice Squad, they see Beki Bondage.”
GBH | Ratrapping
Do you ever listen to quiet or slow music at all?
Ross: “Yeah. I’m a rhythm and blues freak like, f***In’ Buddy Guy and Little Water and people . . . Great!”
Colin: “I used to like Joy Division . . .”
Wilf: “I listen to a lot of heavy rock stuff, like Motorhead obviously, and Tank, and I like a lot of Iron Maiden stuff . . .”
Jock: “Yeah, I like Iron Maiden.”
Wilf: “It’s not the sort of thing I could get into though cos, like it’s completely different scene really, but musically . . . “
Jock: “I don’t think you have to get into a scene, you just like the music . . .”
Wilf: “Yeah, that’s what I mean. This is our scene, like punk, but it doesn’t stop us liking other kinds of music you know?”
That Heavy Metal / Punk crossover thing seems to have died out now doesn’t it?
Jock: “Yeah. . .”
Wilf: “Not really, I suppose the coverage of it has. But I think it gets overplayed a bit, the Motorhead comparisons and all that kind of thing.”
There is a similarity (between GBH and Motorhead) though isn’t there?
Wilf: “I suppose there is, but we haven’t deliberately tried to cross over to a heavy metal audience or anything, it’s just happened.”
Then again, I went to see Tank the other week and there were quite a few punks there, though at the same time there weren’t that many heavy metal fans, because HM’s a very snobby scene . . . And I suppose punk is too really, in that people won’t go and see certain bands because they say the wrong things . . .
Colin: “It’s like that Janis, this bird that lives down London. She used to come and see us all the time but now she won’t pay more than £1.50 to see anyone, she’s got well into the Crass syndrome . . .”
Wilf: “I think too many punks have got into the politics more than the music.”
Ross: “Well up here like, if you had Crass playing one night and the UK Subs the next, you’d get the same audience at both gigs.”
Wilf: “I suppose that’s cos you get less choice of gigs up here though anyway.”
Do you think you’ll ever record a slow song?
Jock: “If it were good, yeah, good and powerful . . . ”
Wilf: “We could do it, but I dunno, it just suits our style more, doing fast and powerful stuff.”
Ross: “Whenever we start off something that’s new slowly, we just think ‘f**k it’, and end up going fast again.”
Colin: “Like ‘Passenger On The Menu’, that took ages to write. It took even longer to record.”
Colin: “Who was that band that came out with ‘you can’t come out of Discharge gigs whistling the tunes’? Was it? Well that’s f***ing bullshit cos you can.”
Ross: “What? I’m always sitting on the bus going up to town sitting at the back singing ‘Ain’t No Feeble Bastard’ or something and everyone’s looking round . . .”
How long have you been together now? (Well, nobody’s asked before).
Wilf: “Two and a half years. Our first gig was on cup final day 1980. That was a prostitutes’ benefit gig.”
Jock: “And we didn’t get any credit.”
Wilf: “No, we didn’t even get any freebies . . .” (laughter).
Jock: “Free gonorrhoea and syphilis . . . ” (More laughter).
Were they at the gig then?
Colin: “No, they were outside . . .”
Wilf: “They were at work . . .”
Jock: “We didn’t see any.”
Wilf: “Couldn’t even find one.”
Jock: “It was with the Poison Girls and the Nightingales wasn’t it?”
It’s going back a bit now, but why was there that dedication to feminists with ‘Big Women’ on the first single?
Colin: “Cos we played this Rock against Racism gig or something, and it was run by these feminists, and one was saying ‘what were the lyrics to that ‘Big Women’ song?’ And when we told her she wasn’t going to pay us. I think we got our £10 in the end though.”
Jock: “It was just to get up their noses.”
Wilf: “It was just a piss-take really, it was nothing serious. I mean we’re not really sexists you know? We don’t put women down, we just tie them down.” (Merriment all round).
Colin: “Oh, Wilf’s cracked a good ‘un!”
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