The Ned Wood Archive

There’s a brand new dance but
I don’t know its name

Pall was the first one back after Easter. Term hadn’t started, but he was back in the flat having grown tired of his old dears. It gave me the chance to go into his room and have him play some of his vinyl. He’d got the other big room at the front and the single bed looked so pitiful in the middle of it. A couple of posters on the wall. Arty ones, not music ones like mine. Bomberg at the Fruitmarket. A Bridget Riley Exhibition somewhere. Plus a postcard of Hockney’s swimming pool. I think he had one of Pete’s old chairs there, but not much else. A couple of mounds of clothes and the rest of the room taken up with stacks and stacks of records. Twelve inch and seven inch. Whether there was a system to the stacks, I don’t know. But Pall seemed to know exactly where everything was. Gav’s room at the back was even sparser. Just a bed, I think. I never went in. No need.

Anyway, Pall had all of this post punk stuff. He had Bowie and Ultravox and Buzzcocks and stuff like that, of course. But he also had new stuff. Some of it I already knew about. Stuff I’d heard when I was in London. Stuff like the Mekons and the Fall and the Gang of Four. But he’d got loads more besides.

The Mekons were brilliant. Where were you was a classic. Shimmering, ringing accelerating chords. Galloping drums. A dance of violins. Spoken vocals. An intriguing story. Then gone. Pall had more of their stuff. The first single was totally amateurish. Someone¹ said they had a world of ideas and no interest in musical competence. It certainly sounds like each member of the band is playing the first thing that they thought of. Apparently Rough Trade wouldn’t distribute it because it was so bad. Probably also because it was anti-punk. The lyrics were one in the eye for the Clash.

They kept churning out singles, each one different. Snow was slow & hesitant with a jerky stately keyboard sound and a simple but effective solo. Teeth was faster but also both grand and ominous and itchy all at the same time. Work all week was a bit mainstream though. A bit lame. Still I guess if you’re going to change your style with every release, sooner or later you’ll come up with something naff. Like Bowie going through all those incarnations and happening on fascism for 15 minutes. (Or Pete doing the opposite: going through all of those crazy reinventions of himself and accidently coming up with a noble one.)

And I read once that Andy Gill’s guitar playing in the Gang of Four was one part Jimi Hendrix, 2 parts Wilko Johnson. Personally, I think it’s better than that. It’s so sharp and spiky. Crashing through the speakers ringing out freedom through feedback. The first two singles and their album were excellent. Well constructed, especially when compared with much of what else was being put out. And they had great rhythmic grooves under Andy Gill’s guitar and their trademark double vocal line approach – different melodies complementing each other like a conversation. Or an argument.

As for the Fall. Well, you may well know ‘em. You may not know ‘em. And if you don’t know ‘em, I really don’t know where you been.

Pall had all this other stuff, too. Delta Five, with a slashing Gang of Four like guitar and shrieky Kleenex vocals. Girls at Our Best with jolly ringing chords like the Mekons Where were you and a rocking bouncing rhythm. The Au Pairs: meaty and beaty; more scratchy, spiky guitar and screamy Poly Styrene / yelpy Essential Logic vocals. And more besides. New bands were coming along like LRT buses – you miss one, another one is along in a minute. Perhaps we all had to get some of this stuff out of our system. Clean the pipes, clean the fridge, clean the drains, the guts, the bowels, whatever; so that we could go full steam ahead with the Bunnymen, the League, the Droppies, Joy Division. Perhaps some of these bands only wanted 15 minutes of fame, only wanted the wonder of one (near) hit. Just to prove that they could do it. But, at the end of the day, these are nuggets: worth keeping – and not just for their rarity value.

Nessie started to come round and listen to Pall’s stuff, too. She was getting into it as well. Like a lot of folk, she was getting more open minded. That’s what happens when you leave home and go to university. In fact, the decent universities teach you to be more open minded. To think for yourself. At school they just get you to memorise stuff. Some teachers, like JJ, do it imaginatively. Some treat you like a drummer and tell you over and over again in the hope that some of the information might sink in. Some treat you like a drum machine and try to punch it into you.

And once or twice Kat came along with Nessie and sat and listened. They were both into that year zero outsider stuff like Nessie’s Kosmische Musik, so it was no surprise that they both got some of the Pall Music. Like the Cabs. Not so much the industrial noises, but the beauty they created with the eerie insistent synth vibes, deliberate beats, Kraftwerk clicks, and occasional melodies of the first EP and the faster rhythmic rocknroll groove of Nag Nag Nag. And PiL. Pall had that album in the metal canister. Of course he did. All those sharp slices of guitar, dub beats, and wild careering Lydon wails. True Outsider Art. Like Pall said, this was year zero stuff. All these bands thought they could change the world and set about doing it with vinyl. Well, we all thought we could change the world. We were young.

There were so many new bands coming through back then. That was the beauty of music in those days. New sounds to get into every day. If you missed one, then, just like LRT buses, another one would be along in a minute. Some of the bands lasted, some only needed their 15 minutes and then disappeared again.

And we talk about all of the gigs coming up. The Only Ones at Tiffany’s. Magazine at the Astoria. The League at George Square Theatre. The Teardrops at Valentinos. What luxury to be able to walk from the flat to the gigs. A couple of them just five minutes away. Of course I was most excited about the Only Ones. Nessie was excited about the Human League. Pall was excited about the Droppies but he kept going on about the support act for Magazine. A band called Josef K.

Josef K. After the character in the Trial. I’d been introduced to Kafka by Annie back in Southampton. He was hilarious. I loved the Trial and the Castle and Metamorphosis. That was the one she had me read first. She told me what they all meant but most of that went straight over my head. I did like the pair of comic characters he put in each book, though. The two guards in the Trial. The assistants in the Castle. The drifters in Amerika.

Josef K came from over by Craglockart – the other side of Morningside. Pall heard them first, probably on Peel. They sounded different from everyone else. Chance Meeting has skittering guitars, like insects running across your chest and Paul Haig’s plaintive vocals, struggling to cope. All in all the effect is mesmerising. The B side Romance is a little punkish. They had another single out later that year – August. Radio Drill Time is eerie like Erasurehead: pumping bass rhythm and drum beat, sharp spiky guitar slashes, disinterested vocals. Wonderful.

But “Chance Meeting” by Josef K. How could they fail with that name for the band and that title for the single? They always threatened to get big, but never did. Kinda Funny.

1. Bob Last ↩︎