Starstruck in the Presence of Lee Kerslake: Scotland Calling

27th April 2019

Glasgow O2 Academy

Named for the Clash song, I imagine, Scotland Calling is an all-day music festival celebrating all things punk; this being the sixth consecutive year it has been held in Glasgow. Previous headliners had been The Damned, Sham 69, The Toy Dolls (!) and The Buzzcocks. The Exploited had also previously headlined (back in 2015), and the Edinburgh based bunch were again top of the bill this time around.

Wife was working this particular day, which meant I was left with the usual shopping/housework list to plough through before I was allowed out to play. With the result it was after 3pm by the time I finally arrived at the venue.

Waiting in the queue to be searched for knives, drugs, Buckie or whatever, I could tell someone was on stage from the discordant racket from within. “That's Peter and The Test Tube Babies” quoth the guy behind me in the line. That he had been able to recognise anything from the distorted noise filtering out from the venue, impressed me no end.

Peter (Bywaters) only has one remaining original Test Tube Baby these days: guitarist Derek Greening; with the rhythm section presently filled out by a brace of, what would we call them? Test Tube Embryos?

Peter is a cheery, well-nourished, balding bloke who grins a lot whilst on stage – certainly not your archetypical punk. But then again, back in the day, the band always appeared to bring a light-hearted touch to their business. Never quite taking themselves too seriously. And we were presented this afternoon, with such tongue-in-cheek delights as Never Made it To the Bog on Time and Up Yer Bum.

The band sounded excellent, and this fact had me pondering that a vital ingredient to original punk rock performances was the fact most of the performers could barely tune their instruments, far less play them. An aspect which would long have been lost; since forty-odd years of playing would have honed the musical competence of even the most tangentially talented musician.

Peter Bywaters

Bywaters offers residential English language courses in his other life, I believe.

PATTTB guitarist Derek Greening - and probably Peter's least flattering snap.

PATTTB Incomplete set list

Never Made it to the Bog on Time
My Unlucky Day
Spirit of Keith Moon
In Yer Face
Up Yer Bum
None of Your Fucking Business
Maniac
Banned From the Pubs

If PATTTB did not take themselves too seriously, the same could certainly not be said of the next act: Conflict. The sole remaining original member these days is singer Colin Jerwood, an uncompromisingly angry young man back in Thatcher's Eighties, he remains so, as a middle-aged man. The only problem is, because he does not do song introductions, and his lyrics (and there are a lot in each song) are all barked out so quickly and unintelligibly, we have no idea who or what he is being angry at. But certainly something appears to have seriously irked him, for he kept up in impressive tirade throughout his band's allocated three quarters-of-an-hour.

Not quite my drug of choice, but it was certainly an interesting experience to be briefly exposed to the sort of music I would never generally go near.

Colin Jerwood - Conflict

Gav King

Jerwood's Nike Swoosh/Just Fuck Off t-shirt was one of the high spots of the day.

Throughout the set Jerwood and King attempted to out-pout each other. King won on points.

As with Conflict, the present UK Subs' line-up houses a sole heyday survivor – in this case the venerable and venerated Charlie Harper. And one has to say, whilst the rasp has mellowed from that occasion I saw him perform Stranglehold on TOTP, Charlie certainly does not sound like a 75-year old bloke. Perhaps it is that impressive tuft of grey hair, but neither does he look like a chap three-quarters of the way to his telegram from the Queen.

My impression of their set was that the band ran through pretty much the whole of their 1979 debut album Another Kind of Blues. There are 17 songs on that collection, only one of which reaches the three minute mark. And the show this evening did appear to consist of a seemingly endless rat-a-tat of short sharp shocks.

The Subs'song with which I was totally familiar was the aforementioned Stranglehold; although there were at least two very similar sounding ones performed before we reached what was their biggest UK hit. Their set was rounded off with a few more recent tunes, including Limo Life and a fine sing-along called Warhead.

What struck me about a number of the band's songs – particularly the couple where Charlie blew on his harmonica, is how R&B influenced they sounded. And it reminded me that Mr. Harper was already a seasoned muso on the London pub rock scene when the punk winds first blew through the streets of the capital.

Charlie Harper

UK Subs - Glasgow 2019

The outfit I had really gone along to see though was The Macc Lads. I had sort of been in on things at the start back in 1983 when, following an intriguing article in Sounds music paper, I had sent off £2 to Muttley for a copy of their Best Music cassette. This was, if not the band's first ever release, then pretty darned close.

It contained decidedly rough renditions of five of the songs which would appear on their debut album a few years later, but also a delightfully obscene rendition of The Monkees' Theme, reimagined as Eh Up...Macc Lads.

“Here we come. Muttley, Beater and Styx.
We drink Boddington's bitter, and we smoke Number 6”

ran the opening lines of the decidedly family-unfriendly re-write.

The cassette came with a personally addressed hand-written (in felt tip) letter from Slob the Roadie; who thanked me for my purchase, but doubted the Macc Lads would ever come to Livingston (where I was staying at the time), as he doubted there were any burger bars here. And, to my recollection, he was correct on both counts.

About twelve years or so ago, when I transferred all my vinyl and cassettes onto my mp3 player I sold the tape, plus letter, on eBay to a girl who claimed to be The Macc Lads biggest fan (?Charlotte). I rather regret selling it now, but console myself, that it probably went to a good home.

Two things which struck me when I first listened to the tape - apart from the impressive profanity quotient, was that even through the primitive recording it was apparent the guitarist could play a bit.

And secondly: that these guys were actually really funny. For whilst on the surface they appeared to be residing at the extreme end of the Oi culture – Bernand Manning, The Musical, perhaps - there was rather more going on, I felt. I was/am sure there was more than an element of parodying the typical beer-swilling, pussy-chasing Northern lad. Mining the same vein as Viz magazine, I suppose. The band would, of course, utterly deny there was any irony lurking beneath the swearies.

Unfortunately in the PC Eighties - the height of alternative comedy and Rock Against Racism - their too-near-the-bone satire was taken rather too literally, and the band were derided in (most of the) music press, and banned from playing a number of venues across the country.

The joke ran its course, and the band (after a number of line-up changes, and a fair few albums, it has to be said) fizzled out in the mid 1990s. But a tentative one-off reunion at the Rebellion Festival a few years back, led to a full scale sold out reunion tour – which I suppose, it could be argued, this appearance formed part of.

Tonight was all I expected it to be: funny, silly, profane and, occasionally, not a little bit embarrassing. Seeing these middle-aged codgers still singing about beer, fannies and more beer, as if they were still in the spotty teens did seem more than a touch incongruous.

But, I suppose, if Scotland Calling is about anything at all, it is about growing old disgracefully.

I noted the Macc Lads' roadies covering up the monitors with polythene sheets.
I assume beer and electricity do not really go together terribly well, for it appeared
to be the done thing to toss the last few inches of one's drink at the band.

Muttley McLad goes under the name of Tristan O'Neill in his real life.

The Macc Lads - Glasgow - April 2019

The Beater (or Geoffrey Conning, if you prefer)

Most of the folks appeared to enjoy the Lads' schoolboy humour, although the two girls in the centre of my pic appear less than amused.

Macc Lads Set list

Buenos Aires
No Sheep 'til Buxton
Miss Macclesfield
Gordon's Revenge
Torremolinos
Doctor Doctor
Barrel's Round
Charlotte
Bloik!
Julie the Schoolie
Blackpool
Fat Bastard
Do You Love Me?
The Lads from Macc
Sweaty Betty
Fluffy Pup

I had never regarded Manchester band Slaughter and The Dogs to have been anything other than a very brief footnote to the Punk Wars. They had been there at the outbreak certainly; both acting as support act to the Sex Pistols in 1976, and appearing on that seminal Live at the Roxy album in 1979.

Before this evening I do not think I could have named a single one of their tunes, yet I noted they were headlining the North West Calling version of this event in June. So clearly they had been doing something right over the last forty or so years.

That being said, rather like The Macc Lads at the start of their set, they toiled a touch to engage with an audience clearly here to see the headliners

And whilst they certainly have a few punky-thrashy tunes in their locker, I think it is probably fair to say the band's collective heart truly beats to the rhythm of early Seventies' Glam Rock. Their choice of covers – by the likes of The Velvet Underground and New York Dolls - would certainly suggest so.

Many of guitarist Mick Rossi's riffs, and not a few of his mannerisms, appeared lifted straight from Mick Ronson's performance in D.A. Pennebakers' 1973 Ziggy Stardust movie. And, of course, the band name itself is an amalgam of the titles of a Davie Bowie album and a Mick Ronson album from that period.

Dan Graziano and Wayne Barrett - Slaughter and The Dogs

Slaughter and The Dogs - Glasgow 2019

Mick Ronson

Wayne Barrett

Jean Jacques Burnel

I think this is Mark Reback

Slaughter and The Dogs - Glasgow 2019

SATD Partial set list

Runaway
Who are the Mystery Girls?
We Don't Care
I'm Waiting for the Man
Quick Joey Small
I'm Mad
Situation
Where Have All the Boot Boys Gone?

And so to our headliners: The Exploited. Fronted by the larger than life Wattie Buchan – a cartoon character straight out of an Irvine Welsh novel.

It is hard really for me to make much in the way of comments on the band's performance. As, (other than that terracing chant Sex and Violence), I am totally unfamiliar with their stuff. With the inevitable consequence, all the songs sounded exactly the same to me. Each an uncompromising musical boot-in-the-balls with a scary, mohicaned Begbie screaming into your face.

Even their “hit” Dead Cities, which I learned to my great surprise recently, the band had performed on Top of the Pops, was utterly indistinguishable from both the song which preceded it and the one which followed it.

Six or seven songs into the set came along a slightly different sounding one – Alternative, I learned – this one driven along by some neat Stranglers' type bass work. I could get into this, I thought. But immediately thereafter, we were back on the noise production line, so I decided my punk threshold had been reached and took my leave.

Wattie Buchan

Wattie invited his hero Charlie Harper to help out on one song - no idea which one.

The Exploited - Scotland Calling - 2019

It had been a long day. But five name bands (I had given The Angelic Upstarts a miss, in favour of feeding my face) for under thirty-two quid represented good value for my cash I felt. But The Macc Lads aside, whom I noted are returning to Glasgow in November, I rather doubt I would be seeing many of these chaps again.

I missed the first four bands, and took my prandial break during Angelic Upstarts.
But I rather think I would have struggled with ten hours plus of punk rock.