Things I've Found In The Back Of A Drawer - #3 in An Irregular Series

 

Back in 2019, during Blaugust, I manged to make "Introduce Yourself Week" last the whole month. I wrote a series of posts, going through my musical life, from the age of about twelve up to what was then the present day. If you read any of those and (Even more unlikely.) of you remember any of what you read, some of what follows may sound a little familiar but this time it comes with documentary evidence!

While I was sorting through some papers a few weeks ago, I came across a photocopy of a review of a gig the band I was in for a couple of years in the mid-80s played. By chance, it's also the one and only gig for which a poster also still exists. Even more extraordinarily, I know for a fact that the whole thing was recorded by the venue on video because they tried to sell us a copy for a tenner at the end.

Unfortunately, we were all either too mean, too broke or too cool to buy one, so if there are any copies out there, I don't have one and I've never even seen the footage. Probably just as well. As I remember, not only did I have to read most of the lyrics off some bits of paper by my feet but I came in at the wrong time in one song and then blamed the guitarist for it at the end. It wasn't my finest performance.

But apparently, as a band, we were very professional. I find that hard to believe but here it is in print.

There we are. Bottom of the bill, as usual, something that will come up for discussion later in the post. I don't know the exact year this all took place although, as we're going to find out, I do know the day and the month, but it has to have been the mid-80s because the headliners, the Flatmates, only formed in 1985. They became the prime movers in Bristol's shambling/C86/twee scene and I wouldn't have thought they'd have been headlining until that got into full swing in late '86.

The gig was at the Tropic Club, a wonderfully sweaty back-street venue in the center of the city. All the touring indie bands played there at some point or another. I saw a bunch of bands there although I'd be struggling to remember all of them forty years later. I might try sometime, though.

The gig was a fundraiser for Bristol Dogs' Home. I assume I knew that at the time but if it wasn't for the poster I never would have remembered. I imagine that's why they were taping it and selling the videos although that's something that definitely went right over my head back then.  

The name, The Boomer Dukes, has unfortunate connotations now that it didn't have at the time. The guitarist, who was also the band leader and main songwriter, was flipping through a book at my house when he came across the Fred Pohl story "The Day of the Boomer Dukes" and decided on the spot that that was what we'd call ourselves. 

Prior to that, we'd gone by "God's Bits of Wood" and "Louie's Friends Uptown", along with some other names I forget. The Boomer Dukes didn't sound too bad by comparison. My suggestion of "Our Wives Look Best To Us",  a qoute by Jaime (Or possibly his brother Gilbert...) Hernandez  from Love and Rockets, never got serious consideration. 

Last time I wrote about this, I found the image of the poster online. It was - and as far as I know still is - the only evidence on the internet that the Boomer Dukes ever existed. What I didn't realise when I posted  that image a few years ago is that the original poster is part of the Bristol Museum collection. It's Object No. TD5314 and it was donated in 2012 by Rocker, the Flatmates drummer. I do like to think of us being in a museum...

 

Looking at that poster and the good cause it's promoting, I have to say it's a great pity we weren't playing as our previous incarnation, the Android Pups. Both the aforementioned guitarist and myself were in that band, too, and so for a time, I think, was the other guitarist. I really ought to be able to remember the line-ups but we did swap people in and out a lot.

As I posted, excitedly and with great astonishment back in 2022, there's some solid physical evidence for the existence of the Android Pups in the form of a few photographs and a couple of pages in a book. And I knew more must exist somewhere because I can very clearly remember two gigs we played in the late 70s getting capsule reviews in two of the leading music papers of the time, NME and Sounds. 

We also got a brief mention in a round-up of Bristol bands that ran in Melody Maker, the third of the big inkies of the day. It was an odd time in retrospect. Unlike now, when every band in the world - almost literally - has every show from their first public performance shared on social media and immortalised on YouTube, apart from that one time, no-one ever filmed any gig I was at. 

And yet, if you happened to be in a band when punk was just getting going, there was an extremely good chance you'd get your name in the national press. There were stringers in every city scouring the clubs and pubs for anything with spiked hair and a ripped tee. Neither of which, as a matter of record, anyone in the Pups was sporting by late 1977. 

I have long wished I'd kept copies of those reviews. I guess I thought I wouldn't need to because I had all the editions of the music papers they appeared in but it turns out that, after several decades, "all" is more like "a selection".  I do still have a stack of NMEs and Sounds but even though I've spent hours going through them, looking for a mention of our name, I've never been able to find anything. 

It seems I must have mislaid a bunch of copies somewhere along the way. Most likely, they were among the dozens I lent to the aforesaid guitarist, only for his father, an antiques dealer, to use them as packing material without asking anyone if maybe they were still wanted. Not that I'm bitter. 

After I came across the Venue review, which I remembered but was absolutely certain I'd never see again, I thought I'd have another go at finding the others. Once again, I couldn't find anything in my brittling stack of music papers. An internet search brought up plenty of copies for sale at highly inflated collectors' prices but without knowing which one I needed, that was going to be prohibitively expensive. A check of local library online resources gave me nothing. 

But then I saw a link to an unlikely source in the search results: the Internet Archive. I've used the archive plenty of times but only ever for online history. I was unaware it also kept digital scans of physical media. But it does. It has a smattering of copies of NME from the early seventies but there are complete runs of the exact period I was interested in - 1977 to 1979.

My memories of all of this stuff are shockingly vague but I went to University in the fall of '78 so any gigs the Pups played while I was still with them would have had to have been before that. I don't believe we started the band until late '76 at the earliest. And the Internet Archive's search function is capable of finding every mention of a name in an individual edition of those archived copies, so...

I started at the beginning of 1977 and began working my way through. I was getting very used to the "No matches found" message so it gave me something of a start when I got to the September 17 edition and there was a hit. 

As you can see from the image at the top, the review I remembered is of a gig featuring a bunch of up-and-coming punk bands from Bristol, the city where I was living back then. I'd completely forgotten it was billed as a "Punk Festival". That makes it sound like some sort of outdoors event, when what it really was was half a dozen bands in a hut on a council estate.

The Barton Hill Youth Center, somewhat bizarrely, was one of Bristol's prime punk venues in the heat of the revolution, mostly I think because a lot of the proper music venues were very wary of booking punk bands because of their (Mostly unjustified.) reputation for violence. We ourselves put together a bill of very low-level bands in what I remember, possibly inaccurately, as a Scout Hall. I do remember a skinhead band called the White Mice playing and one of them breaking a reinforced glass window in a door, possibly by head-butting it, so perhaps the reputation wasn't as unjustified as all that...

As the review says, we were bottom of the five-band bill. I have no idea who told the reviewer we "refuse to play higher." I think it was far more likely no-one ever asked us. As for the part about being "too young for a garage", three of us would have been eighteen or nineteen, which probably made us older than several members of other bands on the bill. 

The musical notes are pretty accurate, though. For our first three gigs, of which I think this might have been the third, we had a friend of ours on keyboards. He had a beard, absolutely unthinkable for the time, and sang in a deep growl. We played three of his songs and all of them sounded either like Captain Beefheart or some kind of swamp blues. 

We also had a song of our own about the death of Bessie Smith, which we played at with a disturbing blues-cum-post-punk lurch, although that might have been later. Anyway, we were hardly anyone's idea of a teenage punk band, which I'm guessing is why a couple of the Pop Group found us amusing and briefly liked to see us propping up the bottom of their bills. I think we supported them twice and got asked to do it a third time, in London, which whoever was supposed to be in charge at the time (it was never me.) turned down because they thought it was too far to travel. 

What with all of that and the set-closer, a hypercharged version of the children's folk classic Puff the Magic Dragon, the words changed to be mildly obscene (I'd like to claim that had nothing to do with me but I think it was a group composition.), we must have been a strange proposition for an audience expecting to hear three-chord ramalama.

We did only use three chords much of the time, though. With the exception of our three-gig keyboard player, all of us were just learning our instruments. The guitarist, as can be seen from the Boomer Dukes review almost a decade later, got to be very good at his. He was still playing bass back in the Pups days, though. I was the guitarist then and three chords was about my limit. 

By the time we found ourselves described as being almost too competent for our own good, I wasn't playing guitar any more. Nor was I writing  many of the songs. I was singing someone else's words and not really having much idea what they were about so I put most of my energy into posing. I was quite keen on stagecraft by then, which is possibly how I came to be approached to front the last band I joined. Sadly, that one never made it out of the rehearsal room so there's no lost press coverage to be found.

Still out there somewhere, though, is that small mention in Sounds. I remember it being about the same length as the snippet we got in the NME. The reviewer was someone who went only by the acronym RAB. 

He was Sounds main stringer for Bristol and the West at the time and he had clearly seen the Android Pups play more often than he cared for because he described us as "the worst band I've ever seen" or something like that. He did throw us a bone at the end, observing that we must have something, though. 

Or I think he did. I know we weren't all that upset. Really, we were happy just to be mentioned. It didn't have to be anything good.

If I ever track it down, I'll post it, good or bad. Just for the record. I doubt that's going to happen, sadly. The Internet Archive doesn't have a collection of Sounds back issues I can sift through and I'm not at all sure when the gig took place. 

I know it was at the seminal Dugout Club, where the Bristol Sound that later gave us Massive Attack and Portishead among others was born, although for sure there was no-one from that movement playing above us the night we were on. I think it might even have been the last gig we played as the Android Pups, too. It was certainly close to the end because I remember us playing a song I'd written that I'm not sure we ever played again. 

It was called "Somebody's Little One" and it was a Ramonesesque, punk-doo-wop tirade against the then-fashionable habit of wearing an actual dog collar around your neck. The canine sort, that is, not the ones that make people mistake you for a vicar. Why I was so dead set against it I have no idea. I think it looks kinda neat now.

I'm of the feeling that everything about those days that's likely to surface has done by now. And it's more than I would have expected. I certainly made absloultely no effort whatsoever to preserve anything. I wish I had. 

But as I've said before, my only real regret from those days is that we never made a record. We could have, easily. Everyone else was doing it. Without that, it's nice that there's some visual and textual evidence, anyway.

Now if only that video would turn up, somewhere. 

Then again, thinking about that evening, probably best that it stays buried.