Paisley Punk & Groucho Marxist Records

Punk, initially a London phenomenon, was by Summer 1977 filling the pages of the three main English weekly music papers, Sounds, Melody Maker, and NME. As the infection spread countrywide in successive waves through the late 70s, its provincial sproutings were often written off in dismissive terms within the review pages of these mags. Youthful gunslingers (Parsons/Burchill) and ex-fanzine scribes (Adrian Thrills, Johnny Waller, Danny Baker, Ronnie Gurr) apart, it’s safe to say that even the more proficient/professional dribblers (Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, and Mick Farren to name but three) were at times an unholy combination of frustrated or part-time musos themselves, and when called upon to review DIY or punk vinyl from “the sticks” tended to be more than a little patronizing from their Safe European Home of IPC Towers. What said scribes missed (after all, they had already been a little too old for this punk lark but swam with the prevailing current until it was time to return to sickly reverence of all things Dylan/Stones/Beach Boys et al—y’know, real music) was the local aspect of these small, 1000-only 7” singles that were primitively recorded, eccentrically packaged, and barely distributed beyond local record stores and London’s obligatory Rough Trade. These provincial uprisings really began to get organized in 1978/79, ie, long after the London cognoscenti had written off punk and “moved on.” Since the 1960s most of the UK’s music industry had been centered on London, but punk opened up alternatives in what became an increasingly regional movement, with the DIY ideology inspiring bands to build their own local infrastructures, to set up gigs, and to release records themselves instead of heading wide-eyed and lemming-like toward London’s bright, and unforgiving, lights. Paisley, a large Scottish town 11 km west of Glasgow that owes its name to the Kashmiri pattern of curving shapes found on silk and cotton fabrics, is one such example. Initial punk stirrings in the major Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh made waves in Paisley, and the latter benefited instantly from an ill-judged “Punk Ban” imposed by Glasgow councillors, which shifted activity to more discerning locales.

The first punk activity in Paisley was probably provided by FIRE EXIT, who played at the Technical college, and local band the SNEEX, who enterprisingly hired their Renfrew school hall for regular Thursday night gigs. (SNEEX grew out of The PENCILS, who played an infamous gig at aforementioned Technical College with SHOCK and Rev Volting & The Backstabbers, which ended in a riot. PENCILS’ founder Gerry Rodden also led FIRE EXIT). At this point the local Socialist Workers’ Party, led by printer Tommy Kayes, began hiring the TUC Club in Orr Square, Paisley, which succeeded in drawing out nascent talent such as XS DISCHARGE, MOD CONS, and MENTOL ERRORS. XS DISCHARGE consisted of Paddy and Charles “Chik” Doherty, twin brother offspring of Irish immigrants who had settled in the Elderslie district of Paisley, on guitar/bass, plus various stand-in/pick-up drummers. The twins began playing music in the early 1970s, mainly old Irish rebel songs and then Bowie and Alex Harvey covers in various half-hearted outfits like Zenith, Phoenix, and Lonely Road. Chik: We had been true altarboys in thechapel so the priest let us rehearse there for £1 a week… little did he know we took it out of the collection plate. Tommy Kayes soon moved onto forming a Paisley chapter of Rock Against Racism (RAR) in 1978. Chik Doherty again, in response to a recent quote on an internet message board that recalled Paisley RAR and Groucho Marxist as basically “a culture clash between slightly older politicized hippy-remnant anarchists and local no-prospects punk kids who just wanted to make a record and wind up the police as a bonus”: Tommy is a voice forpeople who have something to say but haven’t got the bottle to say it…you can make a stand against anything and, as far as Paddy and I were concerned, perfect…underground anarchy. We printed it and flyposted, to raise people’s awareness in Paisley to what was going on in Brixton, Solidarity marches, miners etc…Tommy was grassroots Trotsky, still is…
Tommy Kayes himself (from It Ticked And Exploded fanzine): To me, RAR is doing something positive for Paisley. Alternative Paisley is just an idea rather than an organisation. It’sjust a concept of things happening underground.

The cash and ideas for RAR to move into record production came from Wullie Harris plus some technical know-how from Bob Last of Fast Product. The first record to appear under the Groucho Marxist banner was the Spectacular Commodity 7” compilation EP in 1979, featuring SNEEX, POEMS, XS DISCHARGE, MENTOL ERRORS, and MOD CONS. Recorded in 5 hours at the Mad Buyer studio in Glasgow’s East End, it sold quickly, despite reviews like this, from NME: “Recorded on what may be one of those old wax cylinder machines…the EP’s massive drawback is its absolute and total joylessness, although this may be seen as a plus by those who carry that crazed twist in their eye.” The first thing that strikes the listener, in modern times when many bands share the same homogenous digital production whatever their geographical location, is the youthful innocence and definite regional identity that shines through. Whilst Scottish bands had as distinct and unique an edge to their sound as those from Ireland, Liverpool, Manchester or, to a lesser extent, London, the Paisley groups here marked out a defiantly shambolic and irrepressible style that set them apart from even Glasgow or Edinburgh. XS DISCHARGE’s “Machete Shuffle” (with stand-in SNEEX sticksman) is a chaotic one-take and SNEEX, in “Radiomania,” bash out an almost 60s-garage-slash under a standard anti-Radio One/John Travolta teen-rant. (Gerry Rodden of FIRE EXIT claims this song as his own. SNEEX guitarist Graham Thompson is the guy with the pudding bowl haircut in the movie Gregory’s Girl, alongside Claire Grogan of Altered Images.) The POEMS “Posters On The Wall” is a gloriously inept dirge directed at advertising, ditching the ’77 blueprint for two-chord art-minimalism. The POEMS claimed origins in Glasgow and included Rose McDowall on drums, pre-Strawberry Switchblade (the latter name came from a fanzine edited by James Kirk of Orange Juice), whom Joe McGlynn of FEGS/DEFIANT POSE remembers pounding away on the skins while 8 months pregnant during an open air gig on the bandstand at Glasgow’s Broomielaw, on the river Clyde. Expanded to a trio, POEMS managed a more assured EP called “Achieving Unity” on their own Polka Records, but an earlier 1979 LP was shelved after the master tapes were lost prior to pressing. MENTOL ERRORS’ “Irrelevance,” a tight Roxy Club-era ramalama tirade about the vacuity of the wife/the 9–5 drudge/TV, has a recording quality that suggests it was done seperately from the rest of the EP. Lastly, MOD CONS “Buildings Of The 70s,” a paean to urban newtown (de)construction, is a youth club white-reggae limp. A five-piece formed in October 1978, an earlier incarnation (including a FIRE EXIT bassist) known as ANKA SVENSON made it to London in early 1978 for a demo recording and a Roxy Club gig with Billy Karloff, The Mistakes, The Plague, and Muvver’s Pride.

Inspired, other Paisley bands soon sprang from the woodwork, including URBAN ENEMIES, STILETTOES (with a male and a female vocalist), the FEGS, and DEFIANT POSE. The FEGS (shorthand for notorious council estate, Ferguslie Park) were a classic bedroom punk band consisting of brothers Kenny (vocals) and Joe McGlynn (guitar), Paul (aka Lamps; bass), and MENTOL ERRORS drummer Eddie Cochrane filling in on drums. Infamous for a gig in their back garden (rapidly terminated by the police), the FEGS enjoyed only a haphazard existence thanks to vocalist Kenny’s brushes with the law, continuing briefly after his incarceration as a trio, even managing to play in Whiting Bay on the Isle Of Arran shortly after The Lurkers had been the first punk band to play there. His brother Joe first got into punk via the inevitable glam rock route and remembers buying a £1 ticket to see the Jam at Glasgow’s Zhivagos Club from a local punk selling them from his ice cream van in Foxbar, Paisley The salesman was Johnny Grant, who moved down to London soon after with a pal who became a model for Kings Road punk boutique Boy; Grant formed the Straps. The FEGS were formed in 1979 when McGlynn began roadie-ing for the MENTOL ERRORS: who were one of the few local bands gigging regularly around the West Coast. They would play anywhere, to anyone, and in some very scary places, lyingabout the type of music they played. At this point, local fanzine Disease (originally Torn To Threads in November 1977, a 5 page/25 copy limited edition that morphed into A StagnantPoolOf Disease before shortening the moniker by issue 5) noted a preponderance of cover versions in the sets of most Paisley bands.

Along with Tommy Kayes’ gig-promoting, Paisley’s Listen record shop soon became a local hang-out. McGlynn again: It was apparently owned by two brothers whose rich parents bought them the shops [there were separate branches in Glasgow] to keep them off drugs, very hippie-type aura to begin with, then the punks invaded. Picture a rougher version of the shop in the movie ‘High Fidelity’. If you think the staff in that shop were musical snobs, it’s fuck all compared to Listen Records. Big John of The Exploited worked behind the counter, as didmy brother Kenny, although they weren’t the snobs I’m referring to. The FEGS lasted just long enough to contribute to the Ha! Ha! Funny Polis compilation EP before Joe McGlynn joined DEFIANT POSE, a five-piece punky-mod band doing mostly covers (Undertones, ATV, etc.) at the time. He remembers them rehearsing in an attic above the George Bar in Paisley town center, the flat squatted by an associate of Tommy Kaye from Northern Ireland known as “Big Mal” and allegedly on the run from paramilitaries there. Initially, McGlynn played in both THE FEGS and DEFIANT POSE, until the Ha! Ha! FunnyPolis EP, when his brother was jailed for attempted murder and the DP gig became full-time. Their manager, one Nicky Gentile (McGlynn: well-intentioned, but not clued-up enough for our chosen profession, but he did put some of his seemingly endless supply of money where his not-inconsiderable mouthwas, and bought the band some gear) promptly sacked the vocalist and both guitarists, the classic DEFIANT POSE line-up consequently solidifying around McGlynn (guitar/vox), Crawfy (bass) and Callum Reid (drums).

By this time (1980), Tommy Kayes’s efforts to liven up his locality resulted in the Ha! Ha! Funny Polis compilation EP, the second Groucho Marxist release and probably the best-known to this day, thanks to improved distribution and the national notoriety garnered by Kayes’s successful campaign aimed at winding up the local Plod. Subtitled “Four songs about the local polis and other forms of nastiness,” XS DISCHARGE, URBAN ENEMIES, DEFIANT POSE, and THE FEGS each contributed one raw, spirited three-chord rant about Paisley law and order, centered around the Mill Street cop shop and Chief Superintendant George Mutch, who spluttered indignantly to Sounds and the Paisley Daily Express, which helpfully ran a front-page article on the EP in January 1980: “If these people have any complaints regarding the conduct of any of the police, why don’t they let us know about it? I wonder if they’re really rebelling against anything or just publicity seeking.” Wullie Harris responded: “There’s a real antagonism between punks and the police, who are fuming incidentally…far from being ‘the final thrashings of sour-faced country punks stuck in 1977,’ this EP is a natural development of a strong local punk scene which started in 1976 and is still going strong.” Recorded at Sirocco Studios in Kilmarnock during an all-day session, the bands ran through their tracks a couple of times. Joe McGlynn remembers: As you can imagine with twenty or so young, restless musos hanging around all day, a few ended up pretty zonked waiting on their turn. The guys running the place must have been pretty demented with all of us, plus entourage, stuffed into one or two rooms, getting pissed. The Defiant Pose track also has a whopper of a mistake or two that were kept. Chad coming in at the wrong time on the second or third line and me whacking my knuckles on the edge of the guitar where a chord is supposed to be. There’s a big blank space somewhere if you listen. Urban Enemies came in and did things note-perfect and showed us all up on their turn. Basic engineering was provided by the resident Sirocco staff, with the bands plus Tommy Kayes and Wullie Harris adding their two-pennyworth. McGlynn again: The funniest part was watching XS Discharge recording ‘Lifted,’ as they were completely out of it and couldn’t stop laughing. Their run-through was the version used as it was the funniest take, albeit unintentionally. We were in the control room laughing at Paddy, who, in turn, was pissing himself at us laughing at him.

On the EP’s release, Paisley RAR wallpapered the streets with Ha! Ha! Funny Polis posters, which drove the local filth to distraction and, according to XS DISCHARGE’s Chik, desperation, paying stray punks £5 a head to join ID parades in a vain attempt to flush out the culprits while cautioning/harassing others for brandishing XS D tee-shirts and badges. Behind the scenes they were hunting for Tommy Kayes’s elusive and clandestine printing press, but, always one step ahead, he moved location constantly and the flyposting merely increased in quantity. Eventually the Chief Inspector held a press conference inviting the punks to go to the pig station and relate their grievances “in complete confidence”. Chik: Result? The flyposting increased! Kayes himself noted in It Ticked and Exploded that “If you’re laughing at the police, it really seems to be destroying their authority, it really disturbs them.”

Paisley Punk & Groucho Marxist Records

by Mike Clarke

Click to see reviews of the open-air
festival on the notorious Ferguslie Park Estate

In the wake of the Ha! Ha! Funny Polis furore a similarly titled package tour was mooted (Chik remembers “the four bands cramming into a transit van to play in Northern England, somewhere”; McGlynn recalls it as the Leeds F Club) whilst both Robin Gibson, of local fanzine It Ticked And Exploded, and Groucho Marxist funder Wullie Harris managed to blag themselves column inches in London music weeklies Sounds and NME, the latter under the pseudonym Harry Longbaugh (he later quit after several of his articles were credited to fellow Scot Johnny Waller, formerly of Fife’s Kingdom Come fanzine, who served as the current features editor). This canny bit of self-marketing led to decent coverage of two ambitious Paisley RAR events, the first of which was a large open-air festival on the notorious Ferguslie Park Estate, wherein the usual suspects were joined by bands from Glasgow such as Liberty Bodice, The Zips, Alleged, and The Dyelatiks. (A special commemorative fanzine was also produced for the occasion and in the existing photos someone is apparently filming the event. Anyone got a copy?) Persistent rumors of both torrential rain and imminent phalanxes of charging riot police thankfully came to nothing (Ferguslie Park later made the news in the 1990s over a series of political scandals involving local gangsters, missing public money, laundered drug-proceeds, death threats, smear campaigns and vote-rigging—all “alleged” of course).

The main gig of the proposed Ha! Ha! Funny Polis Tour featured all four bands venturing into the dubious wastes of a Youth Club on Glasgow’s (equally notorious) Easterhouse Estate. By reputation “a journey to the Heart Of Darkness,” far from being greeted with the sight of grinning skulls on sticks, the bands were instead gleefully booed offstage by an audience of local scallies between the ages of 7 and 14, hyped up on a combination of Mars Bars and Irn-Bru. Sounds: “The Ha! Ha! Funny Polis backdrop was last seen being dragged around Easterhouse by a bunch of kids followed by a police escort at 3 in the morning.”

The Ha! Ha! Funny Polis EP itself, despite ritual patronizing reviews in the national press and though less gleefully amateurish and individualistic than the debut EP, wins out through its sheer verve and immediacy. Recorded live in one day again, this time at Sirocco Studios in Kilmarnock, XS DISCHARGE once more borrowed SNEEX drummer Ian Andrews for “Lifted,” the almost endearing tale of police brutality. DEFIANT POSE shambolically urge local youth to “Fight,” the FEGS posthumously decry the local cop-shop in ‘Mill St. Law And Order,” and URBAN ENEMIES, noted for their on-stage uniform of striped mohair jumpers and “the ultimate fat kid street gang member…playing bass” (Sounds) play a lighter, more melodic punk reminiscent of early Outcasts, with plenty of SLF-tuneage and plaintive “whoah whoah” vocals, only let down by the painful “because we only wanna rock’n’roll” refrain on the chorus. As with the first EP there is none of the calculated pretension you might have expected from a similar project originating in London or Manchester. With traditional DIY constraints ever to the forefront, the bands simply plug in and play, first or second take, overdubs/polishing irrelevant. As a whole, the record benefits from a collective theme, and reflects the dynamic, rabble-rousing vision of Tommy Kayes himself. Joe McGlynn remembers driving down to London’s Rough Trade with Kayes and Harris in a car crammed with boxes of the single: “We were stopped and searched in an underground carpark by Special Branch (the IRA were busy at the time), they opened all the boxes and I thought our time was up, but they let us go. I don’t know what they were looking for, maybe they didn’t know what ‘Polis’ meant, ha ha. Arriving at Rough Trade, the Spizz Energi single ‘Where’s Captain Kirk?’ had just been released: strangely, that was the name of the top cop in Paisley whom our record was dedicated to. Good old Rough Trade, they took every single copy, agreed to distribute them, AND paid us in cash!”

Summed up by Tommy Kayes as “high energy revolt” (It Ticked And Exploded), XS DISCHARGE remained a core duo throughout their existence, borrowing drummers from SNEEX or DEFIANT POSE, losing others to, variously, married bliss/illness/the Orange Lodge. Barred twice from Paisley Tech, their one concession to political comment on 1980’s “Life’s A Wank EP” was “Across The Border,” written about Northern Ireland. This, the third release on Groucho Marxist, evoked a standard, patronizing, NME review: “A stubborn refusal to stray even an inch from the tenets of ’77 has already caused a sell-out of the first pressing…. one day their devotion to dogma will be rewarded with a revival.” Paisley bands were generally dismissed by their Glasgow contemporaries as “trapped in an endless punk time-loop,” but the curious thing in hindsight about “Life’s A Wank” (though this is probably due also to the change in perception over time) is just how little it sounds like a standard ’77 dole-queue rant. Whether down to a more expansive, brittle production, there’s more than an element of the first two PiL albums (particularly the second) influencing the crystalline guitars, accentuated snare and reedy vocals of “Across The Border,” “Confessions,” “Frustration,” and “Hassles.” NME noted in the earlier, abortive Easterhouse gig: “XS DISCHARGE came on and made the event seem even more like entertainment for dissident refugees hiding out in the sewers of a Dalek city. They have the tattered clothes and subterranean-life white skin and though they’re highly derivative of PiL, it all sounds bleak and dismal instead of haunted and rhythmic.” In short though, despite a natural progression from their earlier efforts, XS DISCHARGE simply didn’t take themselves seriously enough to turn the PiL influence into some portentous “lost post-punk classic,” but legions of younger punks digging in the used record bins in the following years would at least hear something different from the three-chord/fuck-the-system punk-by-rote conjured up by the band name and record title.

Click here for a gallery of more photos

The last Groucho Marxist release came in 1981, a double-header from DEFIANT POSE: “After The Bang” b/w “Someone Else’s War.” Coupled with a 1982 practice tape featuring tracks like “Day Goes On,” “Hello Boys,” “Lookin’ After You,” and a raging cover of the SUBS’s “Gimme Your Heart,” the two-headed single reveals a tight, punchy outfit, again moving away from standard three-chord punk into a more Jam/Purple Hearts suited ‘n’ booted vintage Who/Mod-stomp, but combined with the snap and urgency of the rockier tracks from “London Calling.” This trio of Joe McGlynn (guitar/vocals), Crawfy (bass), and Callum Reid (drums) was the seminal DP lineup and followed the single by signing up

Destroy

with Scottish agency Regular Music. Support slots with the Chords, Exploited, Killing Joke, and more followed, but just as they began garnering column inches in the likes of Sounds (they also produced their own, epononymous zine, unrelated to this author’s own rag), Crawfy packed up and left without a word, and McGlynn disappeared for 2 years to, as he put it, “pursue my criminal career.” Come 1983 he and Reid recruited Davy Cameron of local third-generation punk band DESTROY for a new line-up, only for Reid to leave due to that old chestnut ‘”musical differences” (he preferred Rush, apparently). Next to fill the drum-seat was Blair McDonald (aka Preacher) and some recording ensued until Davy took the same road as Callum…. Rush! And in the same band as well! (McGlynn). The next, short-lived, DP incarnation was in 1986 but after a less than memorable show at Paisley’s Paris Disco a year later, McGlynn killed the band off. Blair McDonald, whose brother David Tennant is the current Dr. Who on BBC Television, moved to London and became CEO of Sony UK. After a short-lived band called THE UPRISING, McGlynn put his guitars under the bed and went back to 9–5 work, except for a brief fling doing sound and then 2 nd guitar for jangly shoe-gazers The Close Lobsters in the early 1990s.

By 1981 the initial Paisley scene had grown older and begun to fragment. A fifth EP, another compilation provisionally called Pissing In The Wind and featuring DEFIANT POSE, FALLOUT, DESTROY and URBAN ENEMIES, was recorded but never released, possibly because it was deemed below-par. The Bungalow Bar, as well as a regular platform for local bands, soon became part of the national tour-circuit, hosting everyone from the Skids/Angelic Upstarts/Exploited/Cockney Rejects/Discharge to Wah! Heat/Tenpole Tudor/Theatre Of Hate.

 

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EPILOGUE

Chik of XS DISCHARGE is now in a Glasgow reggae band called MAN AT THE WINDOW, with Tam O’Malley of MENTOL ERRORS. The URBAN ENEMIES apparently took up golf. Tommy Kayes has a print shop in Glasgow’s East End. All four Groucho Marxist records command both decent prices on the punk collectors’ market and a ghostly afterlife on internet blogs that far outstrip any posterity accorded (or not, as the case may be) to the journeyman-journos who once panned them in the pages of Sounds, Melody Maker, and NME. Paisley’s Bungalow Bar has long gone, but was recently resurrected in both physical and virtual form in response to a still-healthy and thriving local scene. DEFIANT POSE are also back, and the last word goes to frontman Joe McGlynn: “Fast forward to 2002 and we were offered a gig, went to the studio to rehearse as much of the old stuff as I/we could remember and came up with a set of 14 songs with the line-up of Chad (vocals), me and Polo alternating between bass and guitar, plus Callum (drums). The one-off gig at Bhudda in Paisley, Xmas 2005, whilst raising a few quid for the local hospice, was a funny sight to see fat/bald/drunk 40-somethings have a right good pogo and, to my surprise, the past meant as much to them as it did to me. Meanwhile, we’re currently in Blue Cat studios getting it together, hoping to produce a document that the music deserved but never delivered. Could be perceived as indulgence, but to me it’s just part of my personal list of Earl’s things to do before I die. I don’t give a fuck if anyone likes it or not, as long as I’ve done it the way I always had it in my mind to do.”

 

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Many thanks to Chik Doherty, Davy for the CDs/fliers/photos, Warren at Vicious Riff, Peter Don’t Care for the scans, and especially Joe McGlynn, without whom this would never have happened. For more information on old Paisley punk, check out www.viciousriff.com.

 

Click to enlarge any of the record sleeves.

 

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