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Meet the Punk Postman: Interview with Vic Godard
by Anna Battista
Prologue
"Could you please check if you have any albums by Vic Godard and Subway
Sect?"
"Well…let me see…" the kind shop assistant at Rough Trade Shop in Talbot
Road, London, patiently scans the what's-in-stock pages on the computer in
front of him, "…no, I'm afraid, not, we've sold out what we had," he sadly
announces, "but right now we have…" he pauses, building some expectations
"…we have TICKETS! Yes, TICKETS for his gig!"
"Is he doing a gig?"
"Yeah! He's playing on 29th November at a place near here!"
"Is he still playing?" an innocent looking guy who was rummaging in the
punk section of the shop chirps in, turning towards us.
"YES! And it's going to be fantastic! Amazing!" the shop assistant goes,
beatifically rolling his eyes to the heavens, resembling for an instant one
of those statues of saints you can still see in old churches in the South
of Italy, with waxen complexion, cheeks inflamed by their love for God,
eyes forever looking at their Creator in visionary ecstasy. The shop
assistant keeps on praising the event for a while. He's definitely reached
a new state of bliss, perhaps nirvana, and that only by announcing that,
yes, Vic Godard is still doing his thing.
A beginning
"RRRRRRRRrrrasta Girl!" a fake punk with a broad smile, but not too many
teeth shouts at me outside Notting Hill subway station. "Hey, Queen," he
goes, pointing at my Jamaican hat, "would you like to have any?" he offers
me some of his spaghetti steaming from a take away Styrofoam container.
"No, thanks," I politely answer, smiling, perhaps he's spotted my hunger.
"Then, do you want a smoke?" he goes, raising two fingers holding an
invisible joint to his lips and pretending to be smoking. "Er…" I pause,
"Not now, really, I'm waiting for somebody, you see…" I show him a rucksack
near my feet, "OK, then…" he shrugs his shoulders and remains silent for a
second. Then, still smiling, he tells me his name, where to find him in
case of desperate "need" and finally rushes to mingle with the rest of the
Saturday crowd flowing from the underground steps and going towards
Portobello, where Italian and Spanish tourists are clogging up the stall
galleries looking for bargains they'll never find. It's true, I'm waiting
for somebody, somebody who's late, but who finally arrives in his car,
stops outside the tube station and picks me up. "Nice to meet you, Vic," I
shake his hand once I'm in his car and, while I'm beaming because I'm
finally meeting one of my heroes in flesh and bones, ex-Subway Sect's
singer Vic Godard, he drives me far away from the madding crowd.
"I was thinking, have you seen that Julien Temple movie?" he breaks the ice. This
is crazy: I just wanted to ask him about The Filth and The Fury, Temple's
movie about The Sex Pistols. "That's an amazing movie!" I enthuse while
images of the movie quickly flash through my mind, "but I think the
director should have mentioned Subway Sect as well," I add. "But he
mentions us!" Vic reminds me, "In a way he mentions us. Remember that he
underlines the fact that there was so much talent in the audience. That was
us, he didn't have to actually name the band, because everybody already
knows what he's talking about. Besides, the movie is about The Sex Pistols,
so they couldn't show footage of other bands." "Oh well, I suppose I don't
care about whom the film is, I wanted to see some footage of the Subway
Sect as well!" I cry like a little petulant brat. "But as Subway Sect we
were never really filmed," Vic explains, "I think we were only filmed three
times in the punk era. There's a German documentary about us, then Don
Letts did films of us on tour and there is another video about Subway Sect
as well, but there aren't others. That's it."
I'm still skeptical; I just
wanted to see Subway Sect included in Temple's film, so I change the topic
and tell Vic I recently saw ex-Aztec Camera Roddy Frame playing in Glasgow
to an audience of Postcard Records veterans totally in love with him. "I
met Roddy Frame through Edwyn Collins because he was a good friend of him
and when we were doing the album Long Term Side Effect (Tugboat, 1998),
Edwyn suggested to get him playing on one of the tracks, 'Cold London
Blues'," Vic reveals, then continues.
"And I met
Edwyn in the early '90s. After starting working at the post office, I
recorded some songs with Paul 'The Wizard' Baker. He had a four track in
his bedroom, that was where we first did demos for 'Johnny Thunders'. I
sent the demo to Geoff Travis and he suggested to get Edwyn to produce it,
so he sent me around to Edwyn's house. I think it was 1991. That's when I
met him. When he covered Subway Sect's 'Holiday Hymn' with Orange Juice in
the early '80s I thought it was awful, now I quite like it. I never liked
it when I heard it originally. Maybe it was a really bad tape. I remember
hearing it in a hotel room, on a cassette. Somebody played it to me on one
of those tiny cassettes player, so maybe it was just bad quality tape! But
I like the version of the song that is on Orange Juice's Postcard CD." Vic
pauses, before remarking "I really like it NOW."
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
"I'm used to carrying weights," Vic smiles, taking my rucksack with all my
stuff and carrying it for me, while I get a hold of my microphone and mini
disc to record him as we walk along a London park near the zoo. Vic's so
skinny that I'm concerned about him being able to carry my big bag, but he
reassures me, indicating the sack hanging from his shoulder, "I'm a postman!
I'm used to this." Vic has indeed been working as a postman for the last 16
years. "Are postmen into music in Italy?" he asks. "They don't have a lot of time to do that, I guess they work too much." I reply. "I work from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m., so that's not that bad," Vic explains.
"Actually things aren't really that good in Italian post offices: a lot of
people work on short term contracts and are fired after only a few months…"
I add. "We have a lot of short term people at the post office here as well, at the
end of three months they have to go. And Securicor is taking over the post
office as well…" he adds, shaking his head.
Vic is actually in good company working at the post office, since other musicians also work there. "The
Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers works with me. Of the band who's going to back
me up in my next gig, three of us are postmen," Vic confirms, "but Paul
'The Wizard', the keyboardist, finishes working at 7 p.m. and we start at 5
in the morning, so by the time he's finished his working day it's nearly
our bed time…" Vic smiles. It is with these postmen and musicians that Vic
has recorded his latest album. Entitled Sansend (Motion Records, 2002),
the new album is actually penned by Subway Sect featuring Vic Godard since
it's a collaborative project with several other musicians.
Recorded with Vic's friend Nick Brown, Sansend also includes, apart from The
Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers and Paul 'The Wizard', vocalist Chantelle
Lamond and special guest Larry Marshall, who does the vocals on the track
"Heavy Heavy Heavy Load". "The new album took a long time to be recorded,"
Vic explains, "but that's because we only really worked on it on Sunday
afternoons. If you were only working about five hours on Sunday afternoons
on something, it would take you at least a couple of years to do it. We
found a fantastic violin player who lives near me, Phil Martin, who's in
the band now. The Bitter Springs didn't play on the album, but their
singer, Simon Rivers, did the lead vocals on one of the songs and he wrote
it as well. He actually wrote the bits that he sings and I wrote the bits
that I do. Though we had different singers and two different violinists, I
mainly did the whole record myself, just by playing the tracks into a
computer."
"Throughout his career, Vic often played with different musicians
while recording albums or playing gigs. I wonder if he ever had problems
organising the sessions. "Oh, no," he shrugs, "I never have any difficulty
in anything that has got to do with music. When there's music involved, I'm
always in a good mood. If I'm in a room where music is produced and I'm
involved in the process, that will be really fine by me." Though, as
stated, Sansend is released under Subway Sect's name, "It doesn't sound
anything like Subway Sect," Vic points out, "…hopefully not!" he exclaims
and continues. "The old stuff is different from what we're playing now. The
lyrics aren't that similar and the music is quite a bit different. Having
said that, a lot of the guitar playing is exactly the same as it was. I
haven't changed my style at all, but now everything on Sansend is
controlled by the beats, whereas in the punk era we never had this
consistently as we had different drummers and it was only when we got Bob
Ward in as a drummer, that we became listenable. I used to write songs on
the guitar during the punk era, now I'm writing them on a piano, that's the
big difference from the punk period."
In a way Vic has also changed the way
he records his songs: "I've got a four track, a mini disc four track, so
that I can record demos in my front room. I never use Edwyn Collins' studio
because it's too far away. I live in Kew and he lives in West Hampstead. It
takes me an hour and a half to get there, so about the time I get there,
I'm sort of exhausted from the driving! Driving in London has become
terrible. In the mid-90s, I could drive to his studio in less than an hour,
but now you'd think yourself lucky if you got there in an hour and a half
because there are so many more roads and schemes. Where I live there is
no underground on Saturdays and Sundays to Kew Gardens and you have to get
a bus. And this has been going on for a year by now. Besides, the studio
where I was working with Nick Brown has been taken over by other people,
but, luckily, he's now got his own studio in his house, near where I live,
so that's where we're going to work from now on."
As announced by the devoted shop assistant at the Rough Trade shop, Vic
played a gig on 29th November in London at The Tabernacle. "The Bitter
Springs backed me up and Scottish poet Jock Scot did a couple of tracks
with us as well," Vic lists the line-up, "The band who played with me isn't
really on Sansend, except for two of them, and the violinist Phil Martin
and Nick Brown the producer were added to The Bitter Springs for the gig.
Actually, there was also another band on, The Trojans featuring Gaz Mayall,
they had a reggae night in the '80s, but they did their set after us,
because there was a party after midnight."
Though Vic is planning new gigs,
he doesn't seem to be too worried about rehearsing: "We don't need a lot of
time to rehearse. We have quite a rough and ready sort of approach. We
could go along and do a gig even as we are, but it would be sloppy. What
we're doing now is trying to learn more songs, we want to do as many songs
as we can, that's why we're rehearsing, we don't want to just do the old
numbers because we already know them. What we're doing now is working on
learning the tracks from the new album, though during the gigs we'll also
play a few of the old tracks. But we're not really learning anything that
we don't know unless it's on Sansend. We're not going to play anything by
The Bitter Springs because there's not enough time as there's another band
that has got to play. When we are going to do other gigs, we'll have time
and The Bitter Springs will be able to play their set with me. They have a
new album out, so I'm looking forward to playing their new record with
them."
Apparently, there will be quite a few chances for The Bitter Springs
to play also their tracks because more gigs with Vic are being scheduled.
"We're carrying on playing gigs also in January because the album is coming
out again in January," Vic reveals, "We're doing this because we hope that
the shops that haven't taken the album when it came out will take it after
Christmas. So we're going to keep on trying to do gigs. Actually, we aren't
really going to re-release the album, but we're going to try and get the
shops who didn't take it to buy it," Vic corrects himself.
"The whole story
about the album being rejected by the record shops puzzles me a bit, so I
ask Vic to explain me what's going on with music distribution in London:
"When the album was released, none of the shops had seen good reviews of
it. They simply said 'No, we can't take this'. We actually got good reviews
of live stuff and we got great reviews of Sansend in Uncut, Mojo, Q. All
three of them did good reviews, but when they did it, no one could get the
album in the shops because the shops hadn't taken it! We got a few orders
on the Internet and that did help. So now we're hoping that once the shops
see the reviews and how good they are, then, some of them will hopefully
take a couple of copies. Things are getting better all the time for me, but
I'm not the only one who has got a distribution problem. It's not just me,
it's any band which is not on a major label. There's not many independent
record shops left, everything is owned by the same people, they own TV
stations, shops, radio stations, so if you're not actually on their books,
they'll say they'll start losing money if they play or buy your record."
Getting airplay also seems to be difficult for Vic. "XFM said
Sansend was too avant-garde," Vic sniggers, "But I have one supporter on
another radio station: Robert Elms, who works on London Live, which once
was called GRM. Robert plays my records regularly, but they're not allowed
to play more than three records an hour, so they don't play that much
music, the radio programmes are mainly talk. There was a music session on
that station until about five years ago. But when they changed their name
to London Live, they became more talk-based. The only time I ever got an
interview on radio was on that station because Robert's a big fan of mine.
So as long as he's got a job there, I can get some airplay! He's always
played my records ever since he was on that station. I bet his boss doesn't
like him!" Vic concludes, laughing, before asking me, "Is it easy to have an
independent record label in Italy?" "No, actually the situation is quite dramatic, because once you release the records you never manage to find anybody keen on distributing you, so you
end up selling your MP3s on the Internet, and getting depressed because
you never seem to manage to sell the actual product." I quickly explain.
"Hmm, it sounds even worse than here…" Vic somberly comments.
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
Alain-Fournier's novel Le Grand Meaulnes is a story of lost innocence and
missed opportunity. The main character, Augustin Meaulnes, spends his whole
life trying to recapture the magic moments grasped while visiting a
mysterious domain. Enchantment, frustration and discomfiture characterise
the novel, which is a hymn for the departed days of youth. Rumours say that
Subway Sect took their inspiration from French novels, but Vic only used to
mention in interviews Le Grand Meaulnes as his favourite book of all
time, and, in a way, Subway Sect's story can somehow be compared to
Fournier's novel. The story of the band is a story of loss, a story of what
could have been achieved and was never grasped.
Formed in 1976, Subway Sect managed to enter the Olympus of punk rock
thanks to that long gone Monday in September of the same year, when they
played the first night of that two days stint passed to the history of
music as the Punk Festival at The 100 Club in London. Their line up
included Vic on vocals, Paul Myers on bass and Rob Symmons on guitar. That
Monday, right after Subway Sect, there were two other bands, The Sex
Pistols and The Clash. Mark Perry's fanzine Sniffin' Glue hailed Subway
Sect as "real punks," writing in a review of their first gig, "The Subway
Sect hit the stage first and had all the intellectual wimpeys cringing in
horror and yapping about how the band couldn't play etc. … They chew gum
on stage and look vacant. The four songs they did were great."
Subway Sect's first single, "Nobody's Scared", came out in March 1978,
followed by a second one, "Ambition", in December of the same year.
Unfortunately, by that time Bernie Rhodes, Subway Sect's manager and also
manager of The Clash, had already sacked the whole band, apart from Vic. At
that time Vic was living on the dole with the rest of the group. When
Rhodes sacked the band he increased Vic's wage to fifty pounds a week,
which, in those years, was quite a sum of money.
Many years have passed
from that day which destroyed Subway Sect; would Vic make the same choice and
leave the band behind if he could go back in time? "Oh no, definitely not!"
he raises his bushy eyebrows and vigorously shakes his head, "If I could go
back in time, I would get rid of Bernie Rhodes first thing!" He laughs, "We
should have stayed well clear of Bernie and tried to manage ourselves as
Subway Sect. Bernie's problem was that he sacked the band!"
"Were they
pissed off?" I ask. "Yeah, they were really pissed off. I coped with this
by just avoiding seeing them for a couple of years. I think that if we had had
a manager that was only the manager of our band and not the manager of
another band, things would have been different. At that time we were at a
tax loss situation, like when you get too many expenses against what you're
earning. When Bernie had to pay taxes and didn't have any money, he just
paid us with whatever The Clash earned, it was really a small wage, and put
it against the expenses. I don't think we had some good tracks at the time
but I think that if Bernie hadn't been involved we would have probably had
an incentive to actually improve. We weren't really going anywhere, but
with Bernie it was really obvious that we weren't."
Some of the punk-era friends Vic had are invariably lost now in the folds
of time. "I did a gig with Siouxie and the Banshees in 1979, that was the
last time I saw them. Some members of Subway Sect now come to the gigs, but
I've never seen the drummer again, Bob Ward. He used to live in Beckenham
in the East End and we used to meet in a rehearsal place in Camden. We got
him by putting an ad in the Melody Maker. We auditioned a lot of drummers
and he was the one we thought was best, but he wasn't really a friend of
us. It would be great to get together again, I don't even know if he's
alive or in jail or what he is. But it'd be good to see him because he's
the only one that I haven't seen from those times."
"I still see The Sex Pistols' drummer Paul Cook, and, before he died, I was also in touch with
Nils Stevenson. About the members of Subway Sect, well, I delivered a
letter to one of them, Paul, the bass player, this morning, he was on his
way to work when I was on deliver on Downing Street. I also see Rob
Symmons, the guitarist, he used to work around the corner from the studio
where we were recording, that's why he does backing vocals on the new
record and he's going to come to the gig as well. But the rest of the band
never learnt how to play the guitar, as they never touched it since 1977,
though Paul Myers did a year in The Professionals in 1978. But he never
took up the bass after that neither did Rob get into music again."
At the beginning of the '80s, Subway Sect's sound changed and became more
jazz and swing oriented, tuxedo and bow tie replaced the grey suits of the
punk era. Were the fans pissed off by this change? "Oh well, I didn't
really have any fans," Vic candidly admits. It's a statement I refuse to
believe, but he insists, "I didn't really when I did that. The people we
were playing to at the gigs really loved that stuff. We did one tour when
we supported Bauhaus in Liverpool and we really had problems since the
audience hated it. But in all the other gigs on that tour people
loved it. There were skinheads that used to dance about to our stuff in the
early '80s, we never really went down bad when we were doing that stuff. It
wasn't as if we were doing punk stuff and then we started doing jazzy
things. The thing was that when we were doing punk stuff, they were
throwing things at us, bottles and everything and when we were doing the
jazz stuff, they really loved it, so I thought 'Wow! They like this!' It
didn't seem to me as if they hated it at all, actually they seemed to like
it more than anything else we had ever done. One of the tracks, 'Hey Now
I'm In Love,' was even chosen by Capital Radio as record of the week at that
time. It was the first time our stuff was getting played constantly on the
radio in London and I had never had it before, so it was a big success for
me!"
At present, most of Vic Godard & Subway Sect's releases are out on James
Dutton's Motion Records. Vic's first release on Motion Records was the
glorious compilation 20 Odd Years: The Story Of Vic Godard and The Subway
Sect (1999) that contained all the classics. The collection is divided in
two CDs, the first one more grim and punky, the second more gentle and
swingy, incarnating the next impersonation of Subway Sect, when they
returned at the beginning of the'80s in their new swingy and jazzy attire.
Carefully compiled, the double album unfolds the story of the band and of
Godard throughout the songs, 'Nobody's Scared', 'Ambition', 'Enclave',
'Split Up The Money', 'Vertical Integration' 'Johnny Thunders', 'Stop That
Girl' and 'T.R.O.U.B.L.E.', just to mention a few of them. "James did a really good job with the re-releases of Subway Sect's records," Vic states, "The sound was so bad in the original records. All that stuff didn't sound like the way we sounded as a band, nowadays with a computer you can
actually recreate roughly what it sounded like then. So you can really hear
it for the first time as it was."
Through the record label site, Motion
Records often asked Vic's fans to provide lost recordings or pics of Subway
Sect to include in the re-releases. "It took a long time to put all the
material together," Vic remembers, "We had to get different tapes from
different places and we were always hoping to get better tapes of the older
stuff. We never got a hold of the master copies of a lot of the old
tracks," he pauses "To tell you the truth, I don't think they exist at all!"
Motion Records has also been releasing reggae records which are real
masterpieces of the genre, from King Tubby to The Skatalites, from Augustus
'Gussie' Clarke to Lee 'Scratch' Perry and to the latest compilation Never
Forget Jah (The Early Years '76-'86) by Peter Broggs, "Motion did a good
job also for what regards the reggae stuff, the records released by Motion
were not available on CDs, they were only available on singles," Vic
reminds me, "but if you only have a pile of scratched reggae singles, it
might be worthwhile to get a better quality product, such as any of these
compilations." Reggae DJ Don Letts, more famous for his films on the punk
era, recently released a compilation, Dread Meets Punk Rockers Uptown
(Heavenly, 2002), that anthologises the records he used to play at the Roxy
Club between 1976 and 1977. "I don't keep in touch with Don Letts, I
haven't actually seen him for years," Vic reveals, "The album he released
was quite good. But I haven't been listening to a lot of reggae stuff
recently. I've only got that record by Sean Paul, 'Gimme The Light', which
I love and think is the best reggae record for ages. Actually, it's not
even reggae, it's a sort of New York style of reggae, it's more a hip hop
record. Have you heard that Busta Rhymes remix of that?" Vic asks me,
"That's good as well."
Vic also released records with Scottish record label Creeping Bent.
Creeping Bent's band The Secret Goldfish co-wrote with Vic their single
"Somewhere In The World" and released a split single with him. Later on,
The Leopards and The Nectarine No.9 worked with him together with former
Creeping Bent fellows Adventures in Stereo, who actually recorded
another version of Vic's "Nobody's Scared", released on the Bentboutique
compilation, which also contains two tracks sang by Vic, "Make Me Sad" and
the Lou Reed cover "She's My Best Friend". The latest Creeping Bent
compilation on which a track by Vic appeared ("Nothing Is Easy") is
Nouvelle Vague (Creeping Bent, 2002). "Creeping Bent's Douglas McIntyre
had a singles club and rang me up to ask me if I could do a track for the
club and I did two of them," Vic tells me how he got in touch with Creeping
Bent's managing director. "If I do gigs in Scotland, unless we're doing
gigs as part of a tour, it's quite difficult to get a whole band up to
Scotland, since it costs a lot and you have to be paid a lot to do that,
that's why I use to work with Scottish bands in Scotland, because they're
already there and the only person that has got to move is me…it's similar
to what Bernie used to do with me…" he mumbles. "But they like working with
you!" I exclaim. "Oh yeah, we both like working with each other, I love
working with The Leopards!" he admits, "And I did gigs with The Nectarine
No.9. I did a great gig with them at the LSE a couple of years ago. It was
really good. I've played with them more than once. I first met Jock Scot
when he was playing with them. I would definitely love to do a gig in
Scotland."
Vic has also another connection with Scotland: he's collaborated
with writer Irvine Welsh on a major project, a musical play. "It is
entitled Blackpool and was staged in Edinburgh in February and March
2002 at the Queen Margaret University College, directed by Harry Gibson and
in collaboration with the third year company of the college," Vic explains.
"Working with Irvine was fantastic. I'd do it again anytime, though
Irvine's always so busy, so I don't know when it will be possible. It was
really good. He emailed me the transcript and I tried to transcribe his
words into songs. We're going to do at least one of the Blackpool songs
during the forthcoming London gig and an LP will be done out of the
musical."
And talking about LPs and CDs, I wonder what's in Vic's record bag today:
"I've bought two records tonight, Christina Aguilera's and Naughty By
Nature featuring 3LW's 'Feels Good ('Don't Worry Bout A Thing)'. But what I
wanted wasn't in the shop: I was looking for the new Jennifer Lopez
record, have you heard it? It's fantastic!" "Do you like her stuff?" I ask,
totally amazed. "No, not normally," he replies, "but I like the new one, because it's
based on old beats. Otherwise I like R&B, hip hop and compilations. I
have millions of comps. I have a lot of CDs with different tracks by
different people. In the end it's a marketing ploy, but I like albums with
different singers, I don't think there are a lot of artists I could listen
whole albums of. But I've been listening to Bob Dylan's last few albums, he
sounds like a skiffle band, he's simply fantastic!"
Go back to the beginning. Find a new beginning.
"This is Camden Town," Vic announces while driving. "You see, those are the
first shops of Camden, that's the Jazz Café," he adds, pointing at the
buildings we see along the way. "At the time of Subway Sect, we used to
rehearse in Camden Town and we used to crash in a rich suite further down
the road." Listening to Vic talking right now is a bit like going around
with Guy Debord on one of his missions around London to draw the umpteenth
psychogeographical map. London can be a lot of different things to a lot of
different people, but right now London is a city of possibilities in which
Camden Town suddenly assumes another value, a value given to it by
memories.
"You know that design tycoon Sir Terence Conran?" Vic asks, "He
used to live downhere, his son was one of The Clash's roadies, so we used
to crash out in his house. It was one of these huge houses down here and it
was at a walking distance from where we rehearsed in Camden. We used to
walk down there and try to get money out of Bernie Rhodes! Unsuccessfully…" "Subway Sect's aim seems to have always been trying to get money out of
Bernie Rhodes…" I interrupt. "Oh yes!" Vic confirms, "And Bernie made crash
any band that he got over up to London in Terence Conran's flat. At one
point he was managing an all female French band call The Lous, who took
their name after Lou Reed. We went on tour with them in 1978, I don't know
how Bernie got involved with this French girl band, but we did a tour
called 'The Great Unknown Tour' with them all around Britain, after The
Clash started getting quite big. Well, Bernie made them all sleep in there,
they were all crashing on the floor. Also half of The Clash was sleeping
there. Terence didn't live there because he was divorced, his wife Shirley
Conran, author of the book Superwoman, lived there most of the time. One
day Terence Conran came back. We were meant to be using only one part of
the house and there were all these people using his favourite room so he
slammed the whole lot out and we could never use that again. The Clash even
had their office in his house at one point!" Vic keeps on driving and
recounting his story, then at one point he stops and indicates a row of
beautiful white houses on the right side of the road. "There!" he exclaims,
"It was one of these houses, see these white places with the balconies, it
was one of them!" "It looks so posh!" I remark. "I know, it's a lovely
place," he says. "John Nash designed these houses. As I told you, we didn't really
live there, we only used to crash there, if you went to a gig and you
missed the last bus, rather than walking all the way to were we lived, we
could just go in there till the morning."
Since Vic has mentioned The Clash, it doesn't seem inappropriate to ask him
about them. Bands like The Clash are seen as icons by their fans, rather
than human beings. How were they perceived by Subway Sect? "We actually
used to share the rehearsing room with them, so you couldn't really see
them as icons, because we spent with them a lot of time. We saw The Sex
Pistols as icons originally, but then when we met them they were just
ordinary blokes…" he pauses, then continues, "I mean, to tell you the
truth, they didn't behave in an iconic way, so that's what stopped you a
bit from thinking about them as icons. But the only reason we started
making music was seeing The Sex Pistols, that was the only reason why we
started learning how to play instruments."
In Julien Temple's movie, Johnny Rotten speaks in a very human way of Sid Vicious, as he actually remembers how he tried to save him from heroin. In the same way, when The Voidoids'
Richard Hell wrote a review of Alex Cox's movie Sid and Nancy, he pointed
out, "One could wish that the social structure and its values … could have
been implicated some for the depressing fate suffered by Sid and his girl.
Because it was fate. Sid's whole identity was self-destructive." "Sid was a
really sensitive person trying to play the part of a real thug," Vic
remembers. "He taught me the first three chords on the guitar, he taught me
how to play 'Chinese Rocks' on the guitar, that was the first time that I
could actually strum those chords on the guitar in the rehearsal place one
day. I think you might say old Sid started me off as a guitarist!" Vic
exclaims. "He once said on Radio One that his favourite bands were Abba,
Subway Sect and The Ramones! That was the best thing that had ever happened
to us! You didn't have any respect for all the other people who said they
liked you, but if Sid said that, then you'd really thought you'd made it!"
"Vic smiles, recollecting. Sid Vicious OD'd in 1979. What happened when Vic
heard about his death? "I was into heroin myself at the time," he admits,
"so I was a bit insulated from it all. You are when you're on heroin,
because all you're thinking is how to get the gear for that day." "How long
were you addicted?," I ask. "Too long!", he exclaims and stops talking to think,
then continues, "From when I was about 19 to maybe when I was 30 or roughly
around that age, maybe 32, I'm not really sure. The best thing about heroin
is that it is really good to give you a grasp of how much money is worth.
That is the best thing that it did for me, it taught me how to live on
nothing at all. When you're on heroin, all your money must go into heroin.
If you spend one penny on something other than tin foil or heroin, it seems
sacrilegious. So everywhere you go, you have to bunk fares, because you
think 'I'm not going to pay a 1.60 pounds fare to do this, I could use the
money to buy the gear.' Now, I know how to live: as a postman I'm very
poorly paid, so I know now how to live onto next to nothing quite well!"
"How did you get clean?"
"I got on methadone. That is illegal in Italy, isn't it?"
"At present heroin users can get methadone in Italy, but it's not enough."
"What do you mean, they also use?"
"Yes they do."
"So, you don't have heroin on prescription in Italy?
"No, we don't."
"You see, I got clean in a clinic in London, and actually there were more
Italians than English in the clinic. There weren't many other people from
other countries, so I've always thought that other countries had better
laws and maybe in Italy they had more draconian laws."
Vic pulls his car in King's Cross railway station parking lot. "A while
back I had to catch this train to Glasgow and I was really stressed out
because I couldn't manage to park the car," Vic tells me, "In the end I got
the train by the skin of my teeth. You know, it's very expensive to leave
your car here. I spent a fortune when I left my car here for 24 hours when
I went to play to Scotland." We keep on chatting about this and that, about drug laws and politics in
Italy before a car park assistant in a fluorescent jacket taps on the
windscreen. "Are you dropping somebody at the station, Sir?" the guy asks Vic. "Yes, she's got to get a train," Vic politely answers. And that means that I have to stop recording our conversations.
Beginnings.
Beginnings are tricky things. For the Gospel of John in the beginning there
was the Word, for The Slits, in the beginning there was rhythm and for
Greil Marcus, author of the seminal book on the alternative history of the
20th century, Lipstick Traces, in the beginning there was "Anarchy In The
UK". But beginnings are exciting. The writer Alexander Trocchi never seemed to
be happy with one beginning, he would find thousands of new beginnings to
tell his stories, he never seemed to be content enough with one beginning.
The real problems sometimes are conclusions, because that's the point in
which you have to come to an end. That's why music is great, because in
songs there is never a conclusion, songs have an outro.
Outro
Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Dark…Flashes of sudden light alternate to
segments of dark in the tunnels pierced by the train. What if the train or
the London underground were time machines, what if their movement through
space would set off a displaced movement through time and they would turn
into means of transport through a dream like the motorcycle in André Pieyre
de Mandiargues's erotic novel The Girl on the Motorcycle? Well, then the
train or the underground could freely run through time and might go back to
an era of safety pins, rebellion and transgression. They would go back to
that night at The 100 Club. The Sex Pistols. The Clash. Anarchy and
"Anarchy In The UK". The Slits and Siouxie and The Banshees. DIY and
fanzines. Sniffin' Glue and heroin. Majors and independent record labels.
The dole. Bernie Rhodes. "Nobody's Scared" and "Ambition". Camden Town.
Subway Sect and Vic Godard.
Sometimes a melancholic sense that particular moments of epiphany that we
experienced can never be retrieved overwhelms us and makes us think that
the best parts of our lives lie behind us, not ahead. But new beginnings
are the secret. Right now Subway Sect and Vic Godard's new beginning is
Sansend. Tomorrow his new beginning will be a new gig. Then another
beginning will follow. Then another and another. And Subway Sect will keep
on living and playing.
Issue 12, January 2003 | next article
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