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| Pic courtesy of plainorpan.com/tag/guitar-chords/ |
This is where it all started for me. Well that is not entirely true, I never bought this edition, owned a copy or even saw one at the time, but every young punk rocker knew about it. Sniffin' Glue was the primal punk fanzine, edited by the legendary Mark Perry The ethos of punk was that you didn't need to be Jimi Hendrix to get a band together and make great music. You just needed to know a few chords and off you went.
When I saw the Ramones in 1977, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I got into punk and all everyone said was "you just need to learn a few chords on the guitar and you can get a band together. My sister had a Columbus Les Paul copy and my brother had a copy of "Play in a day" by Bert Weedon (in 1977, the only guitar tuition book). I got it and started to try and play the chords. The first song? When the Saints go marching in. The second, the rather racist ditty "The old folks at home". Mark P put easy chords in Sniffin' glue. Bert Weedon put difficult chords (for me) such as F in. As I didn't really want to play "When the Saints go Marching in", I moved straight onto the "Old folks at home". I didn't really bother to read the lyrics, I just spent hours trying to strum the chords. I'd never heard the song, which didn't help. Now, I never start to learn a song until I've got the melody and structure in my head. It may sound pretty basic, but I had no clue.
My band mate Pete told me that the chords A, E and G were easier to play, and had been on the front of Sniffin' glue. The second song we wrote was called "Political warning". It started with me strumming the intro to "The old folks at home" for a couple of bars. We then stopped and Pete screams "Politics, it's OK for the old folks at home" and we went into and E A G progression. The lyrics were a diatribe against everytthing the we saw was going on that was wrong in Britain. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan was in its dying days, Thatcher was leader of the opposition, but it seemed unlikely (to me) that she'd win. Pete and I believed that old people had it cushy. We had mass unemployment. the country was going down the pan, the National Front were pushing racism (which we fundamentally opposed), and we felt that as the Pistols had said "There is no future, in Englands dreaming". It is almost funny, if it wasn't tragic, that young people today feel the same. I thought I'd never own a house or have a decent job in 1979 when the band formed. To me, the band was the only way out of the mess I saw myself to be in.
When we were writing our first songs, in late 1978/early 1979, they were very nihilistic, but accurataty summed up the way we felt. But we passionately believed that we could put a great band together. How hard could it be? Pete bought a bass guitar, I bought an amp and we sat in my bedroom every night practising and writing songs. The first challenge was to get a drummer. We went to see The Fall at the Electric Ballroom and met Dave Edwards and his girlfriend Mandy Spokes. We met a few times and we had our first reheasal on 14th Feb 1979. By then, we had seven or eight songs. We thought that it would be simple to get them into shape to do a gig. We started frantically rehearsing. Dave was older than us and had a job. Although Dave was keen, he was a complete novice. He'd not had lessons. The joke was that he only knew two beats, which we called Dave beat 1 and Dave beat 2. We'd just tell him which of these to play and what tempo to play them at.
All of the songs were pretty dodgy and we were pretty bad at playing them. We decided that Pete should sing all of the songs. Pete was mates with Charlie Harper of the UK Subs and we blagged a gig supporting them in Derby. We also blagged an interview with a fanzine called Xpert-I. We felt it was happening. Three weeks before the gig, disaster struck. Dave and Mandy were returning from a rehearsal and three idiots ambusged Dave and threw him through the window of WH Smiths, then when he ran away, they threw him through the window of a Jeweller. Dave was seriously injured. The gig was off. We did the interview with Xpert-I. Pete was drunk and obnoxious, and the interview was a hatched job "The only thing more immature than their music is their sense of humour". The band fell apart.
At the time, I felt that we'd been deluded. We'd all fallen out big time. I desperately wanted to be in a band, so I joined a covers band on bass (Pete had left his bass at my house and as we weren't talking, he hadn't come to get it). The band were playing songs like "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones and "Help" by The Beatles. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but I was playing with people who could play and it sounded a million times better. At Xmas, I bumped into Pete. We agreed to give it another go, but do it properly. We junked all of the songs and started again, I quit the covers band. It had been a huge learning curve, but I actually had the tools I needed to make The False Dots a proper band. By the end of the year, Pete had gone and we had pretty good line up.
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How hard was it? A million times harder than I dreamed when we started. You have to just keep plugging away. But the band did. And our next gig is on Friday 16th October at Nambucca on the Holloway Road, near Archway. It should be a blast.
On Monday I was a guest on the Griff Griffiths show on Rock Radio UK. I told a couple of stories about the early days of the False Dots and played a couple of tracks from our new album. Have a listen
www.mixcloud.com/GriffGriffiths/griff-rocks-280926-roger-tichborne-andy-last-jen-brown-o-drag-mp3/
