The Unpoppermost of the Toppermost

 

In Shock and Awe, I talk about this period just before glam, when the values of The Underground  are in the ascendant. Albums are where it's at and consequently singles sales droop dramatically - it takes a lot less sales to get in the singles charts than it did during most of the Sixties, and a lot less than it will once again when the T.Rex Slade Sweet Glitter boom takes off. 

One odd side effect of this is that there's a period when a lot of hairy 'n' heavy groops have hits - strangely, some of these proggy groups still do bother to put out singles, even though the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd have completely spurned such commercialist ploys. Family, for instance, get to #4 with "In My Own Time". 

From January 29th 1970, the Top of the Pops episode above might well be the nadir's nadir in terms of this unpop-as-pop phase. There's really nothing at all here for the teenyboppers - no pretty faces to scream at (they're mostly covered in face-fuzz), no fruggable beats. As for melody, all that's on offer is  some really runny AM radio oriented gunk (on this show Edison Lighthouse and Brotherhood of Man)

(Be warned, it's one of those "Banned" TOTPs on account of Jimmy S**ille presenting.)

Just look at the line-up

Blodwyn Pig - Same Old Story

Arrival - Friends

Rare Bird -Sympathy 

Chicago - I'm A Man

Jethro Tull - The Witch's Promise

Mary Hopkin  - Temma Harbour

Shocking Blue - Venus

Badfinger - Come And Get It

Jonathan King - Let It All Hang Out

Brotherhood Of Man - United We Stand

Canned Heat - Let's Work Together

Edison Lighthouse -  Love Grows (where My Rosemary Goes)

S**ille seems ever so slightly embarrassed about the week's offerings, referring to how they have all sorts on the show,  which is now 45 minutes long, including "avant-garde music, fire guard music, pop music". 

He introduces the opener Blodwyn Pig as "a touch of the avant-garde"

Rare Bird similarly seem to discomfit him. 

The gulf between the beardy proggers (the antic grimaces of Ian Anderson!) and the AM Radio pap is enormous.

 Arrival, who I'd never heard of, are somewhere in between Underground and middle of the road - a sort of Laura Nyro-ish people-come-together type singalong. 

Jonathan King would represent pure bubblegum except it's a cover of a really great Sixties garage tune from several years earlier by The Hombres - "Let It All Hang Out". Not a great cover version: it comes over as a few-years-tardy spoof of psychedelia, especially with the hippy coat King's wearing - like a premonition of Neil from the Young Ones. 

The only really exciting song, a single that could stand alongside the mid-Sixties flood of great singles, is Shocking Blue's "Venus", which is a bit like "Hello, I Love You" delivered from within female sass rather than from a predatorial outside. 

Although the Chicago tune is surprisingly dynamic. Enhanced mightily by Pan's People raving it up during the percussive breakdowns - which resemble that middle bit in "Whole Lotta Love". And thank goodness we don't have to look at the band's ugly mugs. 

I do like the semi-animated still images that accompany the Canned Heat song but the tune itself is  pedestrian choogle. 

Then, oddly, despite this sort of semi-video having been played, Canned Heat appear on the show, giving away singles. Why didn't they just mime in the studio? 

I suppose some would say, "what about Badfinger?"  But to me they are that sort of warm, well-made, grown-up "pop" in the Macca / Alan Price et al zone. They are no Shocking Blue, that's for sure. 

The only black music on the show is the interstitial sound of The Meters. 

calling the Aylesbury massive (Friars and the Underground)

 

These look well worth checking out if you are in the area and fancy a bit of a local music history from those who were there (including Kris Needs from whose Facebook came these flyers) and were instrumental in founding Friars

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Revival of this earlier post on  Aylesbury as a hot spot of post-psychedelic progressive Underground action.... c.f. its total switch to New Wave by the time I started going to Friars to see bands (total switch?... well, not quite, as you'll see)

ZigZag, Jan-Feb 1970

Gobbing was still a problem at venues in 1983!

Friars Aylesbury was where I saw my first three real gigs (not counting a local band in Berkhamsted Town Hall). 

Crossing the county line between Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, I went first to see The Slits in April 1980.  I don't remember the venue people handing out this leaflet. But with the next two gigs -   Adam and the Ants (just on the cusp of breaking into the pop charts) and Killing Joke, both in the winter of 1980 - leaflets requesting the audience behave itself were thrust into hands at the entrance. 

I shouldn't imagine that pleas to the punters to refrain from violence were necessary in bell-bottomed 1969, when Friars opened offering "atmospheric levitation by the Home Counties Heads" (does that mean "there'll be people in the crowd you can buy hash from"?) and "flowing projections by OPTIC NERVE" along with bands like Heavy Jelly, Rare Bird, and Mandrake Paddle Steamer. 

Check out the last lines of the flyer below: 

"head sounds by andy dunkley

lights by optic nerve

nice people by nice people

Give peace and music a chance,

You know it makes sense"

"Shadow of the Hierophant"? "Icasus ascending"? "Dik Cadbury"?

How much things would change within just a decade! By 1980 you could go to the venue with the expectation that bovver might occur within...   

Friars was the nearest major venue to me. Well, there was also the Dacorum Pavilion in Hemel Hempstead -  but for some reason I never saw any groups there, even though New Wave groups were a regular fixture (Wreckless Eric played there, Elvis Costello no less than four times between '78 and '82).  I remember Friars as a large and rather characterless hall -  and from the outside, not particularly prepossessing either. Mostly I recall that the volume of the music seemed brutally imposing -  my ears were ringing the next day. Mind you, back then my delicate shell-likes were actually delicate - virginal when it came to amplification and big sound systems. 

The whole experience of going to a gig then....  afterwards you knew you'd been through something. It was intensely physical  - the impact of the sound, the jostling crowd. I don't remember any outbreaks of violence or even the feeling that things could kick off. But there was a palpable sense of tension, especially with Killing Joke. 

At the Slits, the Nightingales played support - abrasive, dirge-like, tuneless, my first experience of the wall of noise aesthetic. I seem to remember the singer had his back to the audience for much of the performance.   Perhaps at that point  they were still very much in the mode of precursor group The Prefects. Indeed in my memory I was convinced it was The Prefects that I'd seen, but looking it up on the Friars website, I realise that it was very-early-on Nightingales (the flyer puts "ex-Prefects" under the name). 

(An eternity later, a good ways into the 21st Century,  I would see - in fact, be on the same bill as - The Nightingales at a theatre in Switzerland (I did a talk based around the glam book). By this point the 'Gales were plying a sound that was heavily pre-punk and post-psychedelic Underground in flavor, at times recalling The Groundhogs. This was a great surprise to me having not kept up with their output since the Vindaloo Records days). 

Talking of the Groundhogs, it seems that the very first gig at Friars Aylesbury, in June 1969, they played along with Edgar Broughton Band and the Pretty Things.  It doesn't get much more Underground than that.

That debut Friars show was recreated as a 40th Anniversary for the venue.

Another surprise revealed by looking up the Slits show: Creation Rebel played. No recollection of that at all!  Could Adrian Sherwood have been at the mixing desk? The kind of thing that I'd now dearly like to have experienced - and evidently did. But probably at that point, reggae - even dubbed up - might have been a bit too mellow for my metabolism.

Now I had no idea about this at the time but Friars is something of a legendary venue, in large part because of David Bowie's famous gig there in '72: a cusp moment in his career, the threshold point for when Ziggymania really ignited.    

Apparently, Friars played a similar role in the rise of other artists like Cockney Rebel - something to do with it being in the orbit of London but sufficiently far out (about 40 miles) that the crowds didn't have the too-cool impassivity of London audiences (spoiled for choice when it came to seeing bands). If you lived in and around Aylesbury, a gig would be an occasion: the audience was hip enough to be open to something new, but not so blasé as to be incapable of fervour.

In 1980, though, I was unaware that Friars had any kind of storied history, let alone this whole hippy era, Underground reputation. It had transitioned completely from Old Wave to New Wave by the time sixteen-year-old me turned up there.  

Adam and the Ants and Killing Joke were very exciting, but The Slits were slightly disappointing. By the time I saw them the sound had gotten a little loose, just one step too far on from “In the Beginning There Was Rhythm” and well on the way to the unraveled feel of that second album.

Of course I was thrilled to see them. 

Looking at this flyer, I am surprised to learn there was a cool record store in Hemel - Old Town Records (if I ever journeyed to Hemel, which was infrequently, it was because they had a slightly bigger and better record-stocked W.H. Smiths). And that there was a similar shop in Aylesbury called Earth Records (that certainly sounds like a hippy era establishment). We were actually well served in Berko - there was an independently owned record store, J&J Records, small and poky but stocking plenty of punk and postpunk (that's where I got all three early Scritti releases, where my brothers got their Crass and Discharge records). Probably if I went foraging further afield in those days, it would have been to London and the Virgin Megastore. But it's odd to have never even known about these vinyl bastions in neighboring towns. But then I suppose, how would one have known?

"Specialising in head records..... No Straights" !

"No Singles" - that is Progressive Doctrinaire!

I remember Killing Joke's support UK Decay being excellent - tribally proto-Goth, not that this is how I would have thought of their sound then. But only faint, glassy-guitar traces linger of the other support, The Passions. 

Of God's Toys, the support to the Ants, no residue remains.

 

"Aylesbury - the geographic centre of England, and according to some, the rock centre of England".

 A Bucks TV (!) special. 

Attention Phil Knight!, Jet Black pops up, denying the suggestion that The Stranglers's show at Friars was any kind of cusp moment in their rise, scoffing at the notion that the band received a warm response from the locals.  

According to this Bucks TV program, in 1972 Bowie deliberately brought a bunch of visiting American rock journalists to see him and Spiders from Mars play at Friars, rather than a London venue, because he had played there a bunch of times (as an Underground artist) and knew the reception would be much more fervent. 

Famous Aylesbury rockin' residents 

Pete Frame, former editor of Old Wave era ZigZag moved to Aylesbury and it's from his cottage there that he started doing the Rock Family Trees. 

                                                                           

Native son Kris Needs, later to be editor of ZigZag himself in its New Wave era, ran the Mott the Hoople fanclub The Sea Divers from his Aylesbury home.  He was also in a punk band (see magazine cover further down) called The Bucks. 

Valac Van Der Veene - guitarist in New Wave groop Rikki and the Last Days of Earth, also writer for Sounds. 

My brothers and I found about 30 empty record jackets for this album on the pavement in Oxford Street - no disc inside any of them - and took a bunch home. Always wondered what it sounded like. Well now I know....

Marillion - Old Wave that came after  New Wave - formed in Aylesbury.

                                                     Marillion were part of a UK prog rock revival scene in the early '80s, groups like Pallas and Solstice (from Milton Keynes)

"The Chilterns Music Explosion Part Two" !

Marillion's earnest Old Waveism on the same bill as a parody of hippie undergroundizm.

Marillion's debut single "Market Square Heroes" inspired by a/ Aylesbury's Market Square and b/ a local character called Brick, who appears to have been something of a Citizen Smith type, a "would-be revolutionary with all the necessary charisma and presence of a leader without direction or goals, just a sense of frustration and anger"

New Wave era  Aylesbury produced one of those city / county - based compilations that were so rife during the punk and post- era

Featuring bands like Anal Surgeons and Ken Liversausage  and the Vice Creems

Aylesbury even had its own rock magazine - Aylesbury Roxette. 

Front cover star Kris Needs, fronting his band The Bucks.

John Otway - just seems quintessentially at the cusp point of Old Wave and New Wave. But where's Wild Willy Barrett? 

 

They brought The Roxette back in the 21st Century - hark at the noo-wave-for-oldsters nostalgia lineup

More on the Friars / Roxette / ZigZag nexus in this interview with Pete Frame by Kris Needs at his Substack - occasioned by the 2026 rumours that Frame had died, hearsay dispelled by this "I'm very much alive thank you very much" piece 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Now why did I never go to the Hemel Pavilion?  Easier to get  to than Aylesbury - train and then a bit of a walk - and a succession of bands I might have liked to see.... 

Not the Priest but the 'Cocks for sure... 

The cool modernist interior that I never saw. 

Not so impressive exterior

I guess any venue in the country, you could track this shift from Old Wave to New Wave, but in the case of Friars, its initial identity was explicitly a space for headz and progressive sounds.  So it's a bit like if  UFO or Middle Earth had survived and then reinvented as something akin to the Roxy. 

But most venues don't have a music identity per se, they just go with the changes. Whatever gets people in the door, gets them drinking.

Look at the 100 Club... wasn't it initially a trad jazz haven? (Albeit under a different name). Then, as 100 Club, a mid-1960s mod spot. Then it has the punk association... but in the 1980s it also was a place - on one particular night - for Northern Soul diehards. I saw the Wolfhounds there in 1986 or '87.... and still it goes on.  

The other local gigs I went to....  

Bow Wow Wow at St Albans City Hall in 1981 (supported by the awful Wang Chung - who brought a huge gong onstage)

Killing Joke at Queensway Hall in Dunstable, 1983