Published 2016. Shindig! Magazine.

New Roads

From the rigid order of a British New Town to the chaotic birth of punk, founding member of the Damned, Brian James, talks blues, jazz and the importance of attitude with Greg Healey.

“I was born in Hammersmith but my parents moved to Crawley when I was about nine. Crawley was a new town and most of my schooling and life as a teenager was there,” says Brian James of his formative years in that particularly British experiment in post war town planning. “I was Brian Robertson then, long before I changed my name to James to avoid confusion with a Thin Lizzy guitarist.”

By the time Brian moved to Crawley it had already grown well beyond its original village base, spurred on by Anthony Minoprio’s ambitious early master plan and a judicious amount of central government intervention. What might sound like a life consigned to exile in a far off place, where everything from pubs to churches was carefully prescribed and freshly built, seems to have been rather fortuitous. Not least because the New Town of Crawley was perfectly positioned on the A23, the old London to Brighton road. “Me and my mate, we’d go onto the A23 and one would stand on one side of the road and the other on the other side, and we’d stick our thumbs out. And whatever car picked one of us up first we’d either go to Brighton or London. I would’ve been about fourteen or fifteen. We’d go to see whichever bands we could. Not so much in Brighton, but definitely in London, there was always something going on.”

Although the lure of London and Brighton was great, Crawley, south east England’s very own answer to Brasília, had plenty to offer. Alongside the straight roads, colour coded neighbourhoods and generous civic amenities, there was one particular place which, although less famous than its metropolitan equivalents, played its own humble role in the music revolution of the 1960s. “I used to go to this place in Crawley called the Starlight Ballroom, and you’d have like the skinheads doing the moonstomp round the place, and then the next thing they’d maybe play a bit of Tamla or something, and then Hendrix would come on, or the Who, or the Move. I’d go down every week and see whichever band was playing. It could’ve been the Tremeloes or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, it didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to see how these bands played live, if they could cut it. You know, is it going to sound like the record? Is it going to sound better than the record? What are they like, what else do they play?” Even Hendrix did a gig at the Starlight, playing to an audience of 900 on the 15th of October 1967 as part of his second European tour. 

By this time Brian’s thirst for new sounds, and Hendrix in particular, had already taken him far and wide. He’d first seen Hendrix several months earlier, in the March of ‘67, when he attended a private performance at the Marquee for what was possibly the recording of a special for the German TV show Beat Club. Hendrix commenced his first UK tour immediately after this, supporting the Walker Brothers. “I went everywhere after Hendrix. I guess I must’ve seen him about eight or nine times. The first time I saw him was at the Marquee in Wardour Street. A mate of mine saw an ad in the paper or something. It was a video shoot for ‘Purple Haze’ and he had all his gear set up. And once they’d done that he said, right I’m going to play for you people and he did his set. It was like wow, because we just weren’t expecting that. We just wanted to see him in the flesh, this fucking guy who’d arrived from nowhere. It was really something else. When Hendrix came along he really stood out from everybody else. I mean, previously, I’d been listening to guitar players like Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds and Clapton a little bit when he was playing with John Mayall. These players, they were all great players in their time. For me Clapton went down hill after he split from John Mayall. He lost that edge, that bite, that emotion. But then John Mayall got Peter Green in. And it was like, Peter Green? Who’s this guy? Fuck! He’s even better than Clapton. But then Hendrix arrived. Forget about all the stage act of playing behind his head and setting fire to it, that was all bollocks. You know, as a player he was fantastic. You couldn’t describe his playing because he encapsulated all these different styles into what he did. You could hear all that soul stuff, you could hear country stuff, you could hear blues. And he’d obviously been turned on, by people like Pete Townsend and Jeff Beck, to the feedback kind of thing. And of course then he got hold of Roger Mayer, the guy who was making all the effects boxes for these guys, and if he wanted to create a noise, Roger would create it for him.” 

Brian’s initial interest in music was sparked at the age of fourteen when he saw a local band, Monty Cavan & the Kingbees, play through a set made up of songs from the first Rolling Stones album and a few numbers from the blues man Howlin’ Wolf. Eventually buying a guitar with help from his dad, Brian started his own band with a few mates from Crawley. “I had a band called the Blues Crusaders, kind of but not really named after Crusade, that 1967 Mayall album. We were a blues band,copying the white blues players who were copying the black blues players. So we were like third generation. And that’s when I first started getting my chops together. I met this drummer, a guy called Malcolm Mortimer. He was only fourteen this kid and he was this fantastic drummer. He turned me onto jazz, him and his dad. People like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, Miles and all these wonderful people.”  

With so much happening musically, and in particular Hendrix’s entrance onto the scene, it was only a matter of time before the constraints of twelve bar blues proved too restricting. Interactions between a multiplicity of styles like jazz, R’n’B, psychedelia and even African percussion, began to make itself felt in Brian’s musical world, just as opportunity knocked. “Eventually we teamed up with these other people, a singer and a guitar player. But we wanted to do something different and move on from the blues and what we were doing with the Blues Crusaders. The singer, a guy called Dave Blackman who was also a big jazz fan and turned me onto a lot of stuff, was heavily into the jungle drum type thing – people like the percussionist Ginger Johnson – much more coming from Africa.”

The band had some influential contacts, made through the singer Blackman and his friend John Kennet. “We had the attention of Tony Stratton-Smith, who was managing Genesis, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and also set up Charisma. He was helping us get gigs. He didn’t want to manage us or anything like that, but he liked us and wanted to help us out – he was a very nice man. Anyway, one thing led to another. We had our highest gig coming up, supporting King Crimson at the Lyceum. We were trying to think of a bloody name and someone said, how about the Train? And we thought fuck it, that’ll do. That was when they had the all nighters at the Lyceum. Chicken Shack were also on the bill with us. King Crimson had just had a big hit with In The Court of the Crimson King. It was fun. Really it was just a gig, and those things have never thrown me. Once you’re on stage, even if it’s a titchy little place, if you’re doing your thing it don’t matter. We kind of did a bit of our own material. It’d be things that would originate out of jams and some stuff like that. And David Blackman, he’d write a few lyrics.”

By this time the smörgåsbord of influences had expanded to include the experimental meanderings of Soft Machine. However, Brian is very specific about which version of this band he preferred. “My favourite time seeing Soft Machine was when they were a three piece with Hugh Hopper, Mike Ratledge and Robert Wyatt. They got Elton Dean in on sax at one point, but for me then it got a bit more normal jazz. A lot of the English jazz people had a peculiar sound about them, which was quintessentially English and didn’t take chances like your heroes like Coltrane and that. But I found the second line up of Soft Machine, once Kevin Ayers had gone and Daevid Allen had gone, that was the most inspiring bit. And they were fucking loud as well! I don’t know if they got it from touring with Hendrix or what but they were so loud. I mean Ratledge and Hugh Hopper would have double Marshall stacks and you’re kinda straining to hear Robert Wyatt. It was mostly instrumental and then it’d drop down and Robert Wyatt’d do a bit of scat singing, which was the high point for me. I was waiting for that to happen because he was so good at it and he was such a sensational drummer as well. But you had to get centre stage so you could listen and hear him properly.”

Although Train weren’t invited by Stratton-Smith to join the stable of artists at the newly launched Charisma Records, an opportunity did arise from elsewhere. “John Kennet had links to some shady people around Tin Pan Alley and he got us a one off deal with Beacon Records. He had a song that he wanted us to record, which was called ‘Witchi Tai-To’. And we didn’t want to put the name Train to it because it was this poppy almost kind of Red Indian chant type deal. So we came up with the name Taiconderoga, which was the name of an old Indian tribe. The A-side was this ‘Witchi Tai-To’, and “Legs” Larry Smith from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band had put out a version at the same time, which pretty much eclipsed our version,” explains Brian. 

“I didn’t like ‘Witchi Tai-To’ but it was an excuse to get into the studio. It was the first time I’d been in one. That to me was what it was all about. We weren’t going in there to be pop stars. Didn’t even want to be fucking pop stars, we loved music too much for all that. That’s why we changed the name. But it was good going into the studio. It was some place down Denmark Street, Tin Pan Alley. We were just being told what to do. I hated the thing that I was in there making a good sound on my amp and then I’d go in the control room and it’d be nothing like it. And I’d be like, what happened to my sound? It’d trickled through this lead from that room into this room and changed. It’s a little off putting when you’re a big big music fan and you go in your first recording studio and you’re a little bit oooooh boy. Its fantastic but it’s really fucking weird.”

The Jimmy Pepper song ‘Witchi Tai-To’ may not have appealed to either Brian or the British record buying public, but the b-side would find an appreciative audience elsewhere in Europe. “I got told many years later by Malcolm the drummer that the b-side, which was called ‘Speaking My Mind’,was a bit of a hit in Germany. I didn’t have a clue.Dave Blackman put his name as the writer when in fact it was the whole band that wrote it. It was like that old thing of Alan Price and the Animals, where he put arranger and he cops for everything.” 

The ‘Witchi Tai-To / Speaking My Mind’ single was released in the UK on Beacon Records in 1969. It came out, with ‘Speaking My Mind’ as the a-side, in Germany on Metronome Records, the Netherlands on Pink Elephant, Spain on Belter Belter, and Italy on Stateside, in 1970.

Notwithstanding his time in the studio with Train/Taiconderoga and the release through Beacon, an ever restless Brian was already looking to pastures new. “Shortly after that my tastes began to shift. I was at a party and someone put on the album Fun House by the Stooges. I was like, listen to those drums, they’re so tough, and of course then Iggy’s voice came in. And for once it wasn’t the guitar that turned me on it was the drums and the voice. I found the first Stooges album after that, in an import shop somewhere, and I started getting into their guitar a little bit. But also what turned me on on Fun House was the sax player, Steve Mackay, blowing away like crazy. To me it was like this is fucking jazz going on here with these guys. And it had that attitude. That’s the key word, all the way down the line: attitude. It was obviously being sung and played from the heart.”

As the 1970s got underway the burgeoning prog rock scene and the oncoming sequinned storm that was Glam left Brian cold. “I was running out of bands that I wanted to see. There wasn’t much about, but on an underground level you had bands like the Pink Fairies coming along. And yeah, ok,they weren’t as musically proficient as otherbands, but when it came to attitude… You didn’t know what they were going to be like. One gig they’d be absolutely terrible, drunk or stoned out of their bleedin’ heads, the next they’d be spot on.  But they were always up there doing it.”

The influence of the “attitude” of the Stooges and the Fairies had a huge impact on Brian, and this would inform his next step. Again, a couple of fortuitous personal connections seem to have played a part in how things panned out, at least in the short term. “I got a band together called Bastard, and Boss Goodman, the Pink Fairies’ road manager-come-everything-really, used to help us out, along with Pete Adams from Greasy Truckers, the music promoters. We didn’t do ourselves any favours with that name getting gigs though. In fact we didn’t get any! So it was down to doing free festivals like the benefits under the flyover at Ladbroke Grove.” The connection to the Greasy Truckers also led to a brief jaunt into the countryside for the bucolic eco-themed mayhem of the Trentishoe Whole Earth Fayre in North Devon. Here Bastard joined a bill that included such luminaries of the counter-cultural scene as Hawkwind, Magic Muscle, Keith Christmas and Norbert the Guru. Incidentally, the website ukrockfestivals.com has it that attendees of this festival, in the summer of ’73, bore witness to a now infamous set by Muscular Pinkwind, a spaced out agglomeration of Magic Muscle, Hawkwind and The Pink Fairies.

By the October of that year it was all change as foreign shores beckoned. Bastard’s singer, Alan Ward, was offered a chance to move to Belgium to work at Europe’s first twenty four track recording facility by his employer, Morgan Studios of London. “It was a case of either breaking up the band or going with him. When we split England to go and check out Brussels it wasn’t like we were leaving anything behind. There was nothing really going on. The glam scene was starting up and that just reminded me of the early 60s where you had people dressing up like pop stars, people writing their songs, people producing them. And on the other hand you had your horrible Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer and all that verypompous stuff.”

This was a perfect move for the band, mainly because of the scene there, as Brian explains. “On the French language side in Belgium they were really into Iggy Pop and the Stooges and Lou Reed as a solo artist, they knew all about that, whereas in England nobody knew who they were. Bastard got a regular slot at a place called the Cafe Floreo, so there were plenty of gigs.” 

In 1974 Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal tour came through Brussels. This proved to be a pivotal moment for Brian in his quest for the thing that sociologist Sarah Thornton broadly calls subcultural capital: the desire for differentiation within a subcultural grouping as well as from the mainstream. In short: he cut his hair. “At that time I had long hair and was wearing my leather jacket because I always associated with the rocker clothes. I looked around me and I thought, I look just like everybody else in here. But you’ve got this guy up on stage with cropped, dyed hair and he looked great. He just looked like him, not like anybody else. I thought, that’s it, I’m cutting my hair. Once I cut it I noticed that I had some whitecoming through, even though I was only young. So I thought, fuck that, I’m gonna dye it.”

By 1975 Bastard had pretty much petered out because “people were getting married and not really caring anymore”. Back in England, however, “there was a scene by then” and on a trip home to Crawley to see his parents Brian saw an ad in Melody Maker. What followed, his meeting with Mick Jones the future founder of the Clash, would lead to the formation of the early punk band the London SS and, eventually, the formation of the Damned. “When Rat turned up at London SS that was it. He had total attitude. It’s always drummers for me – that play with me as a guitar player and the bass to hold it down. That was the essence of the original Damned too.”

End.