Monocled Alchemist

VICE SQUAD bare all to WINSTON SMITH

Article published in Sounds, 30th October, 1982

Vice Squad | Skin Deep | BLUE-HAIRED STEVE from Derby sits quietly to the right hand side of the stage by the mixing-desk, and watches happily as Vice Squad perform. The smile on his face gives no indication that by making the journey to Leeds University tonight, he’s almost certainly lost his job.

Steve is an enthusiast with a capital ‘E. He’s already taken one entire week off ‘sick’ to see Vice Squad play at Keighley, Liverpool, Preston, Retford and Middlesborough, and a warning had been given; if he wasn’t at work today he’d be fired.

But unfortunately, he won’t know if he’s lost the job for quite a while yet, because tomorrow, along with his good friend D.R., Steve is off hitching down to Brighton, and the day after that the Isle of Wight; to see Vice Squad . . .

Mark of Vice Squad: “They’re nice up here. There’s quite a few of them that are following us about this time, and y’know, we try as hard as we can to get them in, but some of the promoters up here are such bastards . . .”

Dave: “Yeah, you say look, this kid’s travelled a hundred miles, he’s got a sleeping bag, and they say ‘oh no, so we have to pay for them to get in. It’s costing us a fortune, our guest list.

“There’s a few kids who have probably seen the last 30 gigs in England.”

Mark: “We know most of them, but there’s only a few who’ve seen that many. I mean you try sorting that out on a guest list, you know? You try saying ‘we want a guest list of 30 cos they can’t afford to get in.

“The promoter just tells you to f*** off and we end up having to pay.”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Beki: “Well if someone’s paid their coach-fare and bought their food you’ve got to let them in.”

Dave: “The last British tour we did it was totally out of our hands, the ticket prices were ridiculous, like three, three and a half quid . . .”

Beki: “There were people up in Liverpool who had to go back home because they just couldn’t afford to get in.”

Dave: “Our old manager was the main bastard in that, but this time we’ve been able to keep the prices down.”

Vice Squad have only recently returned from a month-long stay in the USA; a month that saw them out-drinking Discharge, being ill on Sunset Boulevard, stealing flags from graveyards, pushing the Discharge van along roads in Canada because someone forgot the petrol, and like uh, basically having a bloody good time.

Dave wallows in the memories . . .

“We had a brilliant time . . .”

Shane: “When I got to New York I didn’t want to come home . . .”

Dave: “The thing is like, Los Angeles was brilliant, New York was brilliant, but the bits inbetween were very wearing, cos you had to drive 500,000 miles to the gigs . . .”

Beki: “We went down well in the redneck bars; they were all going ‘Heey! Vice Skwaaand!’ and doing disco dances to it all.”

Shane: “This is what’s really ridiculous about all that stuff in Sounds about how we went down badly, I mean in six weeks we only failed to get an encore twice!”

Dave: “And those were in Canada anyway, and they’re all lumberjacks anyway so who gives a toss?”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Shane: “So I don’t know where Sounds get their information from but its a pile of shit. They said the same about Chron-Gen as well, and they went down well when we were there.”

“Inaccurate” reports in Sounds have obviously angered Vice Squad, and one of the biggest areas of discontent seems to be a report by American correspondent Tim Sommer, alleging that the band treated their support bands in a less than friendly manner.

Dave: “For most of the tour we had two American bands supporting us —Youth Brigade and Social Distortion from Los Angeles, and we got on brilliantly with them.

“They did most of the tour with us, we had parties every night, got completely paralytic with them. Social Distortion were really brilliant, they’re a really shit-hot band and we got on I really well with them.

“A few of the bands that supported us on one-off dates, like the Nihilists, they were quoted as saying we were nasty to them in New York, and that’s a load of bollocks.

“They just supported us on one gig, we didn’t say a lot to them, but even then we were still standing at the bar chatting to Yanks until four o’clock in the morning afterwards, until we went back and had a few more drinks at the hotel.

“We only had two hours sleep because we were chatting to all these kids cos it was one of the best gigs on the tour, so we were staying behind, chatting to everyone.”

Beki: “And they knew all the words, especially in LA. There were like 20 girls down the front who knew all the words and were doing all the backing vocals and all the harmonies, and they were really good, they really liked it.

“It’s like when they said I was being snobbish at a Subs gig down the 100 Club. I was pissed out of my head wandering in and out of the bloke’s bog all night! I wasn’t being snobbish, I was absolutely paralytic!

“All the Gonads were chasing me in and out of the toilets all night long; how was that being snobbish?”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Dave: “It’s really annoying. It’s really a bastard when you open a paper and think well, what’s happening now? And you read all these things about yourself and you think eh, I wasn’t there!

“It’d be good if we didn’t give a toss, but we do unfortunately. We get quite upset by it.”

Returning to the lighter subject of America for a moment, how, I wonder, do UK punk bands generally go down over there?

Beki: “They either love you or hate you, nothing inbetween. People either say ‘you’re English!’ And they love it, and ask you ‘what’s it like in London! What’s the 100 Club like?’ cos they’ve read all about it in Sounds and they get really excited, or they go ‘we don’t like you, you’re English and you’ve got a head start.’

“Well that’s all rubbish. We’d say don’t take us as English, take us as a band leave it at that.”

Dave: “They’d say ‘oh, we don’t need English bands here, I mean all they’ve got to do is get their own bands together, which they are doing, and accept English bands as well.”

Most people over here don’t like American bands, I mean apart from the Dead Kennedys . . .

Beki: “It’s because they’re not in the same situation as English kids, they’ve got money. I mean there was a band out there with a dirty great video camera! How many kids do you know on the dole who’ve got dirty great video cameras? It’s a totally different attitude over there.”

How about the rednecks, were they alright?

Beki: “They were alright to us funnily enough. They though we were cute English people; they’d buy us drinks, offer us illegal substances . . .”

Dave: “At the gigs it was alright. The only problem was when they drove past us in cars, they’d all shout out ‘how much for yer arse boy?’ I mean they all thought we were as queer as hell, just because we had dyed hair . . .”

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But surely the rednecks hate gays don’t they?

Dave: “Yeah they do. We got a lot of abuse.”

Beki: “They’re very small-minded.”

Dave: “The number of times we got asked if we were queer and how much we wanted for it was ridiculous . . .”

Beki: “And in New York they’d pop out of manholes and go ‘HEYY! Can I go widchoo?’ You’d say go away, and they’d try and sell you opium and things whenever you’re walking down the road. Yes, all of them! They’re all round the bend, the lot of ’em!

“There was some in the middle of this park in New York, and one’s going ‘hi, my name’s Ralph and I’m an asshole!’ Then his mate runs up and says ‘wanna buy some coke?’ “

DOWN THE front, everybody is going crazy. Loony after loony climbs over the ample stage-defences, struggles past the security, and ends up on the boards with the band for a few fleeting moments before he finds himself being hurled, or indeed hurls himself over the barriers and back into the crowd where he joins the queue, to end up doing the same thing all over again . . .

Vice Squad are playing a fine, if not staggering set, and with her quite excellent, sweetly tuneful voice, Beki is serenading the savages with an impressive cool-professionalism which only falters in the most strenuous of situations . . .

The songs are attractive, powerfully melodious creations. Some of them, like ‘Last Rockers’ and ‘Resurrection’, are works of absolute genius. Disappointingly, a large amount of the subtle power and emotion present on these numbers in their recorded form is lost tonight; lost in a blur of speed . . .

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Someone is pulled out from the lunatic crowd. It’s DR, and in the middle of her 37th Vice Squad gig, she’s been crushed against the barrier, and her nose is engulfed in a sickly layer of bubbling blood. Beki holds up the show to tend to her wounded follower, and the invaders carry on invading . . .

Beki, I’ve heard you might be making a single with Colin from Conflict?

“I want to do one with him, I’ve got to work out with EMI whether they’ll let me do it or not.

“See, Conflict don’t want to do it on EMI, and EMI are funny about royalties, because the royalties I want to go to the Animal Liberation Front. But I definitely do want to do it.”

Will it all be about animals?

“Yeah, it’s all for animals. I was thinking of doing a factory farm one, a pet shop one, anything. There’s so many different abuses you could do. We’ll see how it goes.”

Weren’t you planning to discard all your leather stuff at one time?

“I’m not actually throwing it away, but when it wears off I just won’t buy any more. It’s a bit difficult to discard all of a sudden anyway, because people get an image of you and they get all upset if you don’t look like what they expect you to look like.

“It’s going to be difficult, because it’s not as obvious as not eating meat is it? I think that my jacket should last forever though, cos leathers do last a hell of a long time.”

Are you aware that quite a few people say they really like your records, but aren’t so keen on your gigs?

Mark: “Yeah, I can understand that. It’s because it’s a different thing.”

Beki: “Our gigs are usually riots anyway. My voice would be alright if I stood still, but I dance about and get out of breath so I go . . . HHHWEEAL! Make horrible screeching noises . . .”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Mark: “Yeah, we could probably all stand still and play, the same way we do with the records, but . . .”

I don’t think it’s that you play badly or anything, it’s just that maybe there’s not enough variation from the records . . .

Mark: “Yeah, possibly . . .”

Also there’s a lot of girls who don’t like Vice Squad, they seem to get kind of jealous . . .

Beki: “Yeah, that’s funny, because all the ones I know all think we’re great, and we get on really well with them; and I mean, in America all the girls were really nice to me.

“I mean like here you’d get the odd ones, where her bloke comes along and leers and she gets the hump but that’s his fault not mine.

“The majority of girls I meet I get on really well with though, and they really like the band.”

WHAT DO you think when Radio One won’t play your singles, especially the current one (‘Upright Citizen’) which had a great chance of becoming a hit?

Beki: “The words aren’t wimpy enough for them, they don’t like hearing anything that’s insulting to them, or a bit about reality.

“It doesn’t always make you happy though does it, just getting into the top 40. I can see what you mean, but it’s not the be all and end all of it.”

Are you happy with the stature you have now?

“I’d like to get bigger, but not so that I turn into a big superstar or anything.”

So how big would you like to become?

“Big enough for what I say to have a lot of influence on a lot of people . . .”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Mark: “Big enough for it to be a professional show every time, not like some of the gigs we’ve been playing on this tour. It’s just completely impossible, some of the places have been such holes. It’s completely beyond a joke.

“You can play one place that’s terrible and practically impossible to play, and then you’ll go on and do another one that’s laid out almost exactly the same but they’ve got it sussed, and that’s how it should be.”

How do Vice Squad feel about the continual criticism of them for being on EMI records?

Mark: “If they say ‘we don’t like you because you’re signed to EMI’ we just ignore it, because that’s daft, I mean what’s wrong with it? If they’ve got reasons to say what’s wrong with it then fair enough.”

Dave: “If it was something like when the independent labels started coming out in ’77, at least they had something going for them, but now I mean Secret are no longer independent because they’re owned by Virgin, and they don’t even get in the indie-charts anymore . . .”

Mark: “And most of the others are distributed by Pinnacle, which is so big that it can’t really be independent distribution . . .

“Because the whole idea of it, the indie charts and that, was independent distribution, which is one of the reasons we signed to EMI. The independent distribution happened and we were still getting letters from people in Scotland three months after the singles were released, saying ‘where can we get your single?’ ”

Dave: “We had to send them out to people ourselves because they couldn’t get them.”

Mark: “Whereas with EMI they’re all over the country within a week which is what we want. If a single comes out you want people at least to have the opportunity to buy it, even if they don’t.”

Vice Squad | Skin Deep

Dave: “No record company’s a charity. Some of the deals the independent companies are pulling these days are ridiculous, they make the majors look like saints.

“These days there are so many punk records coming out, all the independent labels are banging out as much as they can, and I mean most of them know it’s rubbish. I can’t name names but labels will say ‘God, this is rubbish, it’ll sell, and out it goes.

“A couple of years ago people would buy any punk record that came out, because they were so few and far between. You’d just buy it and make your own mind up, but now there’s ten or 20 being released a week.

A lot of labels just bang out any old crap, y’know, sort of stick a Mohican on the front and that’ll sell 10,000, which is depressing. People will buy a record by looking at the cover without even listening to it.

“People aren’t thinking for themselves, which is what everybody should be against. I mean in ’78 and ’79 it all got really stagnant and it just died, because all the main bands in some way disassociated themselves and there wasn’t a lot coming through, so it was dead in that manner, and now its dead in another way because there’s hundreds of bands about and . . .”

. . . And the vast majority are just crap.

Dave: “Yeah, I mean, well. You said it. There’s just millions of bands and no ideas. Everybody just wants to copy everyone else, use exactly the same riffs, and if they do anything slightly different, everybody’s worried that their audience is going to bugger off or something.”

Bollocksy music

I’ve been wondering when this is all going to die off. I mean the current popularity and overkill . .

Dave: “Unless people start coming up with ideas its not going to last long. I mean there’ll always be a need for bollocksy music, you know, hard fast rock ‘n’ roll that people can get into or get off on, and I hope we’ll always be playing things associated with that.

“But you’ve got to have some ideas as well. You can’t just turn it into total thrash and forget about the music.”

Mark: “You ought to go to America and see how depressed you get.”

Dave: “Yeah, you get these five piece bands and they are technically excellent, they could piss all over us any day of the week you know? And you think to yourself, ‘I wonder what these are going to sound like’, and you know exactly what they are going to sound like after you’ve been over there for a week.

“They just play as badly as they can, they play so far below themselves, its just ridiculous.”

Mark: “There could be some brilliant American punk bands, but not in the present climate.”

You speed up a lot of your songs live don’t you? They’d sound a lot better slowed down, most of the tunes are getting lost in the speed.

Dave: “Yeah, I agree. Then again we’ve got such a long set these days we’d be on for an hour and a half if we didn’t speed them up. No, it always happens to an extent, it happens to all bands, even bands like the Stones speed songs up live, but with punk bands it happens more.

“Because if you play a song every night, you just get so tight that it does naturally speed up if you’re playing a fast song. I always think it’d be better to get more energy in the pace of it. more power rather than speed.”

Mark: “Yeah, well every now and again they get ridiculous and we slow them all down again . . .”

Like tiny balls of fire

UNDER THE brightness of the spotlight, the pathetic lumps of mucus flying towards Beki look very much like tiny balls of fire.

The crowd enjoy spitting. One young thing enjoys it so much in fact, that as he leaps victoriously onto the stage, he gobs at Beki straight in the face, from no more than a foot away. She battles bravely on regardless . . .

But Beki’s only human, and when the song ends, the persistent heckling from the ‘show us yer tits’ kids that has punctuated the spaces between virtually every number, proves too much for her. She storms off, both upset and angry.

After the show, Beki dejectedly talks of shaving her head, of not being able to wear what she likes to wear any longer, and she means it.

If only that audience could see what they’re doing to her. Mind you, I don’t suppose they could comprehend such things anyway . . .

Mark: “It is really depressing that people don’t think about it. People that shout things like that aren’t there to listen to the songs really. They’re just there because it’s just another punk gig, let’s go along cos we’re punks’ . . .”

Dave: “Well they’re not even punks if they’re going to shout things like that are they?

“They’re not the sort of people we want there. I mean there’s no difference between her and a bloke singer. I mean in Bristol in ’78 when we formed, there were so few punks there was only about half a dozen to choose from, and she was the best singer and it just so happened that she was a girl.

“She’s a better singer than most blokes, or girls, and that’s it. So for someone to shout — show us parts of your anatomy, seems very silly.”

Mark: “That’s not what she’s there for, it’s not what we’re there for, and it’s not what most of the crowd are there for. Its just a minority.”

Broken nose

Backstage, Shane, Dave. Mark and Beki are worrying about their most devoted of fans, the now hospitalised DR.

DR has got herself a broken nose. But this, I feel certain, isn’t what troubles her sleep tonight. No, the only worry on her anxious mind is Brighton. Nose or no nose, she’s going to be there . . .