| Of all the myriad legends that
surround the original punk era, few can surpass the true story of
The Gonads, the first and arguably the most determinedly underground
of all punk bands. Forming in 1974, they were then five 16 year old
schoolmates who built up a strong following among kids their own age
with their boisterous brand of Slade and Faces influenced rock, chaotic
stage performances, down to earth attitudes and chirpy Cockney humour.
Through-out 1975, the band’s support
slots with the Heavy Metal Kids, The 101ers and the Sensational
Alex Harvey Band were completely ignored by the music press.
But here are my notes from that year:
“Gonads! Gonads! Gonads!” It is
the long hot summer of 1975 and four teenage tear-aways are playing
a barnstormer of a gig in Charlton’s Antigalligan pub.
Tattooed yobboes, surly rockabililes, left-over
skins and suedeheads, pub rockers, and unreformed Slade, HMK and
Mott fans mix in a surging sea of sweat and lager. The band is them
and they are the band.
In the pilchard-packed audience are such
notables as Pistols-to-be Cook and Jones – who, if you asked
them today, might just admit that Anarchy In The UK bares more than
a passing resemblance to the Gonads old set-closer Antigalligan
Last Bell.
Other soon to be notorious herberts in attendance
included the very young Coming Blood, two of Ian Dury’s roadies,
various members of Squeeze and one Michael Fitzsimmons (who even
then was never known to buy a drink.)
More impressive is the presence of Tucker
and his Ruckers, the pride of The Valley, a bakers dozen of iron-limbed
terrace warriors acting as the group’s legion of horror. No
claret and blue scarf would be raised here this day.
The band are as tight as a gnat’s fore-skin
and louder than a Bernard Manning belch.
The lead singer is strangely beardless and
that very first line-up would be largely unknown to today’s
Gonads connoisseur: Mark Gladding (guitar), Al Strawn (bass), Chris
Culmer (cowbells), Peter Lunn (drums) and Zoe Bailey (hand relief).
Steven ‘Si” Spanner and Clyde Ward were not to join until
a year later. While the songs they played will be familiar only
by legend: “Rucking All Over The World”, “Rob A Bank”,
“Stroke My Beachcomber Baby”, “Filthy Rich”,
“Red Robin Blues”, “Ripper’s Delight”,
“England’s Glory”, “Pink Tent”, “Darling
Harold”, “The Ballad Of Reg n Ron”, “Charlton
Salt” and “Big Balls”.
At the time I wrote ‘This band will
go nowhere’. How wrong I was. For it was only two years later
that they played their first gig outside Charlton (also their last
gig outside of London until 1997!) when they set off on their legendary
acoustic tour of South London curry houses.
After the Pistols signed to EMI, record
companies from Virgin to Jet were queuing up with offers but sad
to say football trouble proved the band’s undoing. Gal Gonad
and Si Spanner were arrested during a pitch invasion at a Charlton
Millwall friendly. The ag spilled over into gigs. The band tried
heroically to defuse the tension, but following a series of shock
incidents including the brutal gang rape of Spanner by a Lions supporter
called Emily and her three uglier sisters, the Gonads grabbed the
offer of an American tour from New York Dolls manager Malcolm McLaren.
It wasn’t until they stepped off the
plane and sobered up that they realised that he hadn’t meant
the USA but Latin America. Dumped and penniless the Gonads had no
option but to fulfill their contractual obligations while Talcy
Malcy nicked all of their ideas and claimed punk as his own.
So while Gonads-influenced punk stormed
the UK charts, the band were playing everywhere from Bolivia to
Argentina – a country they were to flee leaving behind a £75K
bar tab, thus inadvertently setting off a wave of anti-British feeling
that was to culminate in the Falklands War.
Back home in 1977, the Gonads formed their
own Scrotum label and released their first single ‘Stroke My
Beachcomber, Baby’. They also unsuccessfully approached Charlton
striker Derek ‘Gypo’ Hales for management. When he turned
them down, for a laugh they accepted a management offer from a local
character called Dodgy Dave Long who immediately decided the band
should stop gigging and “hold back until the time is right”.
They held back for three years during which
time Gal Gonad began writing for Sounds under a pen name and made
the Cockney Rejects stars. Spanner killed time doing session work
for Van Halen, reaching those tricky notes Eddie couldn’t make.
Long meanwhile was flogging Gonads originals such as ‘Two Pints
Of Lager & A Packet Of Crisps’ to his other band Splodgenessabounds.
Outraged Gal and Spanner replaced Long with
Garry Johnson who famously lived “in an ‘ouse in ‘Ackney
with an outside loo”.
They reformed the band with a new line-up
in June 1981 and the rest is history. Their classic recordings like
I Lost My Love To A UK Sub (based on a true story) and Punk Rock
Will Never Die cemented their legend as the greatest Oi! band of
all time.
Christine Cousins, 1989
|
The Gonads first formed in 1976 out of the remnants
of Pink Tent, a seriously nutty group of teenage rock and Monty Python
fans with situationist ideas above their station. We got together
at school in Lee, South East London in 1970 and sstarted writing comedy
sketches, then graduated into a sub-Dr Feelgood boogie band playing
mate’s houses, parties and pubs. There were a few Gumbie-inspired
street happenings outside the Tigers Head which are best forgotten.
The original Gonads played a few pub gigs in Charlton, which is
where guitarist Clyde Ward joins the story, and released Beachcomber
on our own Scrotum label before breaking up in early 1978. The tracks
referred to in the mythology are all actual songs.
When the Gonads reformed three years later they were just Gal
and whoever happened to be around and up for a laugh. Steve Kent
co-wrote most of the early stuff with Garry, Mark ‘Captain
Oi’ Brennan was a frequent Gonads offender.
Our first recorded track was Tucker’s Ruckers on Carry On
Oi, followed by the Pure Punk For Row People e.p. Back then in 1981
we described ourselves as a socialist street punk band. We ran the
Anti-Nazi League phone number on the back of the e.p. (along with
ones for Alcoholics Anonymous and Beki Bondage) and supported the
Prisoners’ Rights organization and the League Of Labour Skins.
Gigs were few and far between. We did play acoustic sets in curry-houses,
we did rocked-up music hall covers in pubs with Frankie Flame and
performed as the Gonads at the Bridge House, Canning Town, but never
played outside of London.
The Business played on many of the early Gonads tracks, then Splodge
and the Blood. The Cockney Rejects backed Gal on the Total Noise
e.p.
Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and UFO were all in on the Gonads caper
and volunteered to play on a couple of numbers behind the backs
of their record companies, but sadly the idea never got past the
late night hotel bar stage. Only two of us ever slept with Christine
Cousins.
The Gal Gonad/Steve Kent alliance went on to perform as both Prole
and the Orgasm Guerillas. And Gal played guitar on Lord Waistrel’s
song Reg & Ron, but his only serious oi-oi input at this time
was as manager of The Blood (1984-5). In 1985, he co-wrote and sang
on Hop Off You Frogs by The Bizarre Boys.
The Gonads weren’t to exist in a concrete form again until
1990 when Gal teamed up with old buddy Clyde Ward and Colin Blood
(Cardinal Jesushate) to record the original versions of Lager Louts,
Alien Culture and British Steel.
We jammed a bit, but nothing serious happened until 1996 when
Gal and Clyde recorded the Lottery Song and the as yet unreleased
Mystic Meg. A year later, we recruited Casanova Kev on bass and
the hardcore of the new Gonads was born to record our comeback single
Oi! Nutter b/w (What’s The Story?) England’s Glory.
In 1998, we toured the USA with Rockin’ Dave on guitar and
the Romulan on drums (see gig pix elsewhere on this site). The rest,
as they say, is hysteria….
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