Tony James and Neal X in the Cramps period ..X tunes to Human Fly chord ready for another 1 note riff.....
Dirty Degville Himself... at an early rehearsal at pindock mews... love that Eddi C
mike... Brum City Dolls meets Pink Flamingos... A Star
Tony James Degville and Neal X Desperate Living in Dub stylee
CHAPTER 2. X Days
I spent the next 6 months scribbling ideas in a notebook sitting in a coffee bar.. on my own.. dreaming..
I had always loved those books about 60's groups, about the 2 i's coffee bar in Soho, imagining that the groups just happened to form there.. I guess I had this fantasy vision that I could just hang out in a coffee bar and somehow would be absorbed into a new scene!.. I found this coffee bar one day by just setting off for Belgravia (up market I figured) and just chancing upon this coffee house called "the village" in Shephards Market, the place where all the hookers hung out.. I guess I thought the name was a sign, after the Village in the Prisoner TV series! It even had a basement - wow could be a club I thought!.. I would faithfully go there every day, drink coffee and read Colin Wilson books, willing it to happen!... it was like a scene from the Prisoner ..a little world unto itself., they must of thought I was mad, pretending I was in the 60's!.
But you had to go through it.. there was no easy route to success, a personal cleansing to great anew.... maybe it was reliving the 60s dream... but Malcolm Mclaren had taught me well...step 1 create a scene.... your group comes out of that creative pool....
Unbelievably by chance I found Neal X thru a small ad in Melody Maker! He had blonde hair and the right look and he could actually play the odd Thunders lick...He was in and I explained the coffee bar dream..
We spent the next 9 months scouring the streets for a singer.. just like in those pop movies we continued to hang out in coffee bars, in hairdressers, in local clothes markets in Soho, Kings Road, even Richmond where the Stones started ,hoping a star would walk by... it was hoping for magic... Anywhere I thought creativity lived.. Small ads were hopeless for the star singer I dreamed off.. he did not exist in the conventional sense of singers.....you immerse yourself in the scene and... it happens... Neal and I became a familiar sight in coffee bars all those months in London... we started to know the street.
We went to gigs too, to see if by chance someone else was out there doing it... one night someone told me about this little band playing at London's Embassy club.. there were only 3 people there and afterwards I had to speak to the singer, Andrew Eldritch if he would leave his group The Sisters of Mercy to join us in the new vision... he was great, but he had his own vision and we became friends and kept in touch through his rise to Goth god..... Andrew faithfully sent me every Sisters single, in the post for the next 6 years.. and then in1989 Eldritch was to return the favour and invite Tj to join his group.....irony
There's a tape of Tj working with Annie Lennox who lived just down the road, who went on to form the Eurythmics... Mick Jones had suggested her and we jammed about one afternoon... she had a brilliant voice but I didn't want a girl singer!... right Tony, good perception .....one of the songs we jammed together surfaced years later as a huge hit for the Eurythmics...
It seemed hopeless but we kept the faith... its like a rock and roll test ..can u believe enough to achieve
greatness..
Then by chance TJ and Magenta were shopping in Kensington Market one day
...when there dancing in his shop YAYA was Degville...hair made of
coloured feathers. to Cochran and Suicide... this freak, weirdo,
we'd seen no one like him... but he was for real, thats what so many people
forget.. its not as if I contrived the people... found kids and told them what to
be... no it was literally walking the streets looking for stars.....We wrote a
movie and then played out the parts.. Degville was wearing 6" stilettos and
clothes he made himself .....he was a vision of the future.. remember X and I
looked very Dollsish/ Cramps at that time... here was something new...real...
Degville had the hair colour and the heels and the attitude!! ..it was he who had
the look we needed...YA YA his shop was to become our base, just like SEX was
to the pistols ..we spent our lives in that shop... it was everything...
the
center of the sputnik universe, they were great times.
A nightmare started because
now we were 3....
We started rehearsing at Magentas Pindock Mews house in Maida vale in the spare
bedroom... so cramped.... Sid Vicious had left a lot of vibes in that
house, god - 3 people had died there! ....Thunders, Nolan and Steve Jones
all stayed there on and off still at that time... this ground had history
babe... I
remember one day we went to our local pub and Bowie was standing there,
they were filming part of his video at our pub... he didn't realise that the bastard
sons of ziggy were staring at him from across the road...the band with no
name yet ...but extra ordinary looking was born...
We rehearsed over long weekends, Degville coming down by train from
Birmingham... I used to go to Euston station on a Friday nite to pick him up..it
was easy to find him because everyone in the station was looking at
him!......the set at that time consisted of all covers...Personality Crisis,
versions of The girl can't help it, stones songs..tried Memo from
turner..old Tamla Motown..a song from the movie the Loveless...we
wrote a song ourselves called Wang wang wang...bout dicks or something..a
horrendous racket..I remember Magentas mum coming to see her and we were
rehearsing in the flat, she looked as if hell lived there...all were played with
regular Bass guitar ,Xs zebra skin travis and a good old 808 drum machine that
the Boomtown Rats manager Fachtna O'kelly gave us...the tapes from
then are wild but sooo rough.. Degvilles vocals a mad scream of sub Cramps
and Devine..but I knew we had something, Mick Jones kept me at it, kept
me believing all the times i just wanted to give up.........
We sat around and watched Pink Flamingos, Performance, Clockwork Orange,
Blade Runner, Desperate Living and She Male porno movies as
inspiration... listening to Alan Vega doing Ghost Rider and endless
Dub Reggae.and Elvis.....it formed the basis of the groups
manifesto..outrage and Sci Fi in dub with movies and computers..We lived the
life John Walters imagined, hanging out in video arcades at nite at Kings
cross, walking with Hookers, dressed to kill and we were hip to everything that
was happening then, the world of information was less dispersed not split into
thousands of tribes like it is today....Fatchner also bought the band a 4 track
tape machine, the first portastudio, it changed our lives.. the very one that
all the early demos would be created on....we owe him a lot.fatchner, u believed
in us and gave selflessly to our cause...it was that machine that was to create
the Sputnik sound.........