Gavin Martin probes the dark secrets of a dubious affair
published in NME, 13th February, 1982
Secret Affair | Clandestine Removals Of The Past | interviews have, I’d venture, changed considerably since the group’s heyday two years ago. Then the vitriolic outbursts of frontman Ian Page were easily construed as clarion calls for lost teenage souls.
Quickly hailed as one of those dreaded ‘spokesmen for a movement’ (alongside Pursey, Weller and Strummer) Page’s eloquent prose invariably backfired on him. He’d issue forth for the standard hour or so and then writer’s would hurriedly resign Secret Affair to the dumper —media whipping boys, chief perpetrators of the reactionary Mod fraud; – Soho slummers, symbolic of Thatcher era thinking . . . and so on and so forth.
Now, Page is considerably more cautious, protective of the group’s history, having realised that it’s not all a game of real life pied pipers and, hey you guys, we’ve got a living to make. Ian Page was 19 when Secret Affair came out with all those fanciful notions about youth finding themselves, a ‘Time For Action’, a time to do a ‘New Dance’. He’s now 21, enjoys listening to Eno and classical music and reading books. His sentences are often punctuated by a nervous burst of laughter.
He’s still greatly suspicious of the media, rock journalists in particular, and while he eventually assumes his natural position as the group’s spokesman, he spends the first 15 minutes of the interview pacing the room in a tight fitting mismatched jacket and trousers.
Secret Affair have just completed their third album and I meet them at a cutting room in London’s West End a few blocks from the hallowed edifices which house Radio One. The record is their first without drummer Seb Shelton who has since joined Dexys Midnight Runners (“He never drank or smoked and he was always very keen on keeping fit so I’m sure he’s very happy there,” says Page, sincerely). It’s also the first record the group, just back from a year in America, have made away from the glare of public scrutiny.
“One thing America taught us was that we were able to walk onto a stage without one person in the auditorium knowing who we were and still get a reaction. In Britain we’d been conditioned to believe that we were popular only because we were at the head of a new fashion movement.”
Secret Affair | Clandestine Removals Of The Past
IT’S BEEN said that criticising someone as obviously dedicated as Ian Page is like criticising a bloke for being a plumber. Rock ‘n’ roll is his trade and even if rock ‘n’ roll is identified and symbolised by a repressive neo religious fervour — ethically corrupt and hallmarked by a series of insular and dead-ended platitudes — perhaps there’s no point getting worked up about it because it’s not really all that important.
But there again so many people seem to fall for the old rock plots over and over again and writers such as Barton, Bangs and Hoskyns seem to invest these diseased notions with a certain seriousness. So I can’t help feeling indignant about it sometimes and the first two Secret Affair LPs get me on my hobby horse as much as anything.
Just when the Pistols had cleared the boards there was Page and co regurgitating the old lies — rock rebellion, the street, the kids, the night and the cults. Their latest press release says the group suffered a decline in favour because of the ‘punk credibility backlash’ —whatever the hell that was.
“We came around the same time as The Specials which brought out two movements at the same time and the whole thing was geared to who was going to go without. For the kids on the street it was obviously easier to be a skinhead than a mod. There was a lot of weak bands around but we sort of took the brunt of it, labelled the joke of the year. I mean don’t you think we were treated unfairly?”
Maybe it was just desserts for the way you encouraged violence in your music.
“Violence!?” he screams aghast.
You remember: “I’ll slash the face of open summer / Crack glass in the faces of pretty young lovers.” (‘New Dance’).
He brushes it off with a tut. “I don’t think that was really violently orientated. I don’t know that it inspired anyone to violence. It was an expression of rage, someone who was confined and restricted by the environment they find themselves in. So, it’s time to do a new dance.”
And this new dance, what does it consist of Sniffin’ glue, rioting or taking part in voluntary service?
“I think it’s the idea of something new. It’s moving, not staying fixed in one position as I felt the music scene was doing at the time.”
Every cult gathers like leeches around a figurehead they can regale and use to fend off mutual insecurities, someone they can blame if the going gets tough. The relationship between Strummer and the punks, Pursey and the Shams or Dammers and The Rude Boys have been fraught with uncertainty, role and ego confusion: a two way mirror of conceit and deceit.
Secret Affair seemed to welcome this soul destroying, mob handled, hunt the brain cell mentality when they called their first LP ‘Glory Boys’ and put a poem dedicated to the East London gang of the same name on the back cover (the kindest thing anyone could say about the verse is that it acted as an inspiration to Robert Elms’ when he was doing the honours for Spandau Ballet’s ‘Journey To Glory’).
Didn’t they sense the danger in encouraging the Glory Boys?
Secret Affair | Clandestine Removals Of The Past
Page: “The song we first put together was ‘Glory Boys’ and the idea was something like the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ album. A united theme runs through it; we gave ourselves a basic concept. We were putting the songs together and at the same time going to these places and seeing the mod revival happening. The similarities between what we were writing and what was happening were so potent that by the time we played The Bridge House in Canning Town the kids were automatically attracted to us.
“The parallels between that and the punk thing were strong — it was just a really nice idea, the community atmosphere or whatever. But inevitably it loses its identity when it becomes a big money-spinning concern or a film like Quadrophenia. It changes from a bunch of individuals to a bunch of faceless people in a crowd, a real Catch 22 situation.”
Exactly my bone of contention: how long does it take to realise that all your rock dreams and mythology are rubbish? All it’s ever given us is junkies, cabbages and phoney social workers. It’s a world which is sensibly shunned by new age music stars who see music inextricably tied with fiction, nightclubs, cinematic imagery, literacy and spiritual allusions — people like Adam Ant, Martin Fry and Kevin Rowland.
Secret Affair preferred the allure of the crowd, safety in numbers and the safety of heritage (they have at least six rewrites of ‘My Generation’ in their repertoire).
Page: “There was always the chance of danger, but I think it was more evidenced in the gathering of huge mobs of skinheads than it was at our gigs.”
Cairns quickly picks up the gauntlet and charges into allegations about poor wee mods being victimised over and above the brute force of the skinhead faction by the media. Whether or not his interpretation of history is as dodgy as I suspect is immaterial, I’m just amazed that a grown man can judge everything by the metre of youth cults, that the cut of the cloth or the hair should have that much relevance or uniformity.
The Pied Piper turned before he got outside the city gates but the damage had been done already.
Page: “It’s a shame because the potency of some of the earlier songs, the potency of the fashion and the movement really did seem to obscure a lot of the other points we were trying to get across. It turned even the most innocent of things — just wanting to write an ordinary song about an ordinary situation so that it was interpreted in a certain way. I can see now how it happened.”
SECRET AFFAIR went to America to escape from media derision and mob dangers of playing in Britain. They also brought in drummer Paul Bultitude, who’d just recently departed from failed powerslop outfit Advertising and who, even more recently, had been helping fellow Advertising member Tot Taylor set up The Compact Organization and in particular Mari Wilson And The Imaginations.
Secret Affair | Clandestine Removals Of The Past
Bultitude says his main musical influences lie in ’60s pop trash and he has no time for concepts; evidently this has helped precipitate a swing in the band, away from the vagaries and complications of youth anthems and cliches towards a refinement of the three-minute single with the ultimate aim being a number one single.
All these young mods, 12 and 13 year olds, they keep popping up year after year, what keeps the fascination alive?
“I think it’s the dancing and the clothes; well, the clothes are really great and they’re easy to wear. But one thing depresses me talking to them. They all seem so concerned with saying the right thing and doing the right thing. What I’d like to see happen is kids progressing from it, just using the basic style and concept to develop and progress. But it’s stayed stationary.”
Page welcomes the diversity of new pop music. He is attracted by the significant revival of the song.
“People forget that 150,000 people bought ‘My World’. I’m sure there was all sorts of people who bought that, people who’d never heard Secret Affair, didn’t know they were meant to think of us as a bunch of tossers but simply bought it because they liked the sound of the record.
“What mystifies me is that people still judge us in terms of two years ago. The same things are being said and the band aren’t getting the chance to express themselves in terms of now. Obviously we’ve made mistakes but I think it’s time to re-evaluate the band in terms of now.”
SO SECRET Affair have made a new LP, it’s got a lot more humility in the songs than before, English wistfulness rather than a manic post-amphetamine punk desperation. The group themselves admit it’s not that much different from their last two and personally I’ll never buy it or listen to it again. The best song on the collection is ‘Lost In The Night’, the single —a clean hewn, pristine guitar jangler — archaic as hell but with a certain potency and bite which sees it through.
They quietly complain of lack of promotional and financial interest from their record company — Paul and his cousin Denis Smith (the group’s bass player) carry out painting and decorating work to supplement an irregular income. Somehow, a certain kind of dedication (resignation?) keeps them afloat.
Ultimately Ian Page reminds me of Jake Burns —constantly whinging about the obvious, looking for the right things but in the wrong way, intelligent but without many of his own ideas, but a helluva nice bloke for all that.
And Secret Affair, well they’re just a small part of a larger story — the story of rock ‘n’ roll. And opinions are only opinions but I think it’s one of the worst, most stupid, pathetic stories I’ve ever heard.
“Bollocks to it, we’re just trying to make a living out of music mate,” says Dennis. Fair play to you sir.
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