CHAPTER 5. The Anton Moment...
Like Michael Caine at the end of the Italian Job, where all looks lost, I said "hold on lads. I've got an idea... "
OK lets get realistic... where is our head at.....I was growing up and had lyrics and ideas bursting ready to go... what if Prince was a rock band... sorta Zeppelin with a groove and sexy lyrics... the next day there was me and Neal writing songs again and by chance we met this singer at a party who just looked great and his name, and this was the clincher, his real name was.. Anton Michael Rock... a star if ever I saw one... had this great deep sexy voice and looked like a man god...his father was Jamaican but he was white and had lived in Canada but now London...girls fainted when they saw him... I remember going to a Terence Trent D'Arby gig at Shepards Bush Empire with Mary Vango the mother of Terence's baby with Anton... well girls came up to Anton and asked for his autograph... I'm not kidding... he looked like a star...TJ had the dream again...could I do it again (Billy-Gen X, Degville-Sputnik, Eldritch- Sisters... Anton???)...
Weeeell we started rehearsing, found a great girl drummer called Sovra Wilson Dixon who was this tiny pixie like girl but she was sooo talented... and we wrote and rehearsed 7 songs... we even hired Nomis studios and invited all our friends to a party and the band played... Anton was a star... I thought we were a groovy Zeppelin with pop tunes and - everyone in the Business hated it... I even sent a video to the old Gen X manager Bill Aucoin who had stopped managing Billy Idol... he said he thought Anton was too camp! and so did Dave Ambrose who signed Sputnik... it was like no one could see what I could see... we even played a gig in front of a live audience at the Orange Tree, a little place where new bands played... we took all the equipment in my friends van... roadied myself... well the way I saw it... there were girls screaming when we came on... we played a cover of the Beatles "come together" and 2 of our own tracks, "Cosima Von" (about Cosima von Bulow) and a song ironically called "Bitch"...the audience loved it... there were girls screaming..... I thought it was great and..... everyone else hated it... Janet SP came with her new boyfriend and hated it, even Sovra our own drummer hated Anton and said just cos he looked like a god didn't give him the right to be a star (er... hello.I thought... maybe I've gone mad), even Neal chickened out and left the project... even Mick Jones was so so about it...there is a video of all of this stuff and I still think its great and they are all Philistines!... hah
Well I continued for a while... Tony Hadley came by one day to help out in the studio and we made some demos, recording a version of a track we'd written called "if girls were like men"... I tried other guitarists, lots of other guitarists, advertising and asking people... it was all too scary again... I tried out girl keyboard players...
I looked to Mick Jones again, and we even starting writing songs together... Mick loved my adult rock band idea... we wrote the songs imagining that someone like Jack Nicholson was to be the singer, or even Mick suggested, use Val Kilmer who Mick had met when he was in L.A last!... we wrote about 10 tracks together, all recorded on my little tape player at the SSS studios, great songs, but it all seemed like such an uphill struggle... every morning I used to go to Primrose Hill to walk the dogs with Penelope and drive her mad talking about the project, saying it was too hard, it just wasn't working...
I needed a distraction...
Then I had lunch with J.F Cecellion who was head of EMI at the time and..a great Sputnik fan... and we had an idea... Sputnik the Next Generation... we were on (you can read about this on the spinoff page here
So I continued with my quest for this adult rock band.....
Neal X then left me to work with Marc Almond who is delightful and I
always really liked and so I was happy for Neal... the real Sputnik seemed
a million miles away, in another space and time... little did I know that in
cyberspace...fans and believers were already gathering...
Anton Michael Rock
contemplates stardom
Anton and X in the rehersal/
gig at Nomis studios
Sovra on drums, Tj on Bass
Tony Hadley gives Anton
some pointers at the SSS studios...