THE SCARS

The Scars - Part 1

Home >> Punk Bands >> The Scars >> Part 1

Below is a piece submitted by Robin Saunders some 3 years ago! Its a great piece of writing with wit and some biting observations. Its a pleasure to finally get it up on the site and present it for your enjoyment.

Ever heard of the Scars? Not many people have but maybe you are one of the few who bought their Fast Product label single “Adultery/Horrorshow”. If you did it might well have been because you had heard the other releases on the label (Mekons, Human League, Gang of Four) and found them interesting.

Unfulfilled potential. There was a lot of it about in the Punk era. How many bands produced one great single and then disappeared without trace? Don’t know about you but it always left me feeling cheated – thinking that there ought to be more. How many bands had albums worth of great songs that we never got to hear? Of course, there is always the other side of the coin. Record companies in their greed for maximum ‘Back Catalogue’ profit have been churning out piles of mediocre CDs by mediocre punk bands in recent years – bands that never even had that one great single in them. The Scars were among the lucky ones that did make an album. But more of that later.

Anyone explain the Sounds letter above from 21.01.78

Edinburgh, like most other major cities in the UK that are not London, is a small pond when it comes to music. The Punk Scene was late in taking off here (1978 – it takes a long time for the ripples to reach us in the frozen North). Everything quickly divided into a number of warring cliques. There were the Pub Rockers trying to play their Stones-derived R & B fast enough to keep up (The Valves were the top dogs in that kennel. Not a patch on Matt Vinyl & The Decorators but whatever happened to them? Exactly!). Then there were the Thug Rockers flirting dumbly with fascism (no names but you know who I mean). There were the lumpen Punks like myself soon to become short-haired hippies and hitch up to the Crass bandwagon. Biggest of all was the Art College trendy crowd. The Rezillos went for the lowest common denominator here and made some money out of it. The rest of the Arties would soon have to make the choice of either the Peacock Display of ‘New Romanticism’ or the Gloomy Raincoated-ness of pre-Goth misery. Thus in the midst of an explosion of creativity and freedom we all found our little pigeon-hole and played the Safety in Numbers game. The Scars however, despite being a part of the Art crowd, always managed to be a little different.

Standard drill for Punk gigs was to get on stage (if any) in your Sunday Worst and be loudly incompetent for 20 minutes while drowning in friendly phlegm. Not the Scars – they had ‘Stage Gear’ – there was even a suspicion of make-up, the hairdos were not regulation, they were out of uniform, they could play their instruments and not in the accepted 1234 Ramonic style. They did not obey the ‘1977=Year Zero’ Command paying explicit homage to old “Glammies” such as Mick Ronson and Cockney Rebel. They were openly literate looking to poetry, smart authors like Ballard, Burroughs and Burgess and Hollywood Film Noir for inspiration. They had a sense of the theatrical – their gigs were worth looking at, not just another bunch of ugly scruffs feigning boredom. At times they could be terrifying. The song “Crash” featured a real treat with singer Rab rolling around on the stage, jerking and screaming like a torture victim having a seizure. Musically they specialised in short guitar figures played over thunderous bass riffs – in the same vein as late Joy Division and Crisis but with real power. Paul the guitarist even indulged in the heretical (for the time) practice of improvising on stage. Many years playing classical guitar gave him a range that was astonishing – sudden explosions of screaming, grating factory noise. After 50 years and more the electric guitar is a tired old cliché. It takes someone special to make it interesting again. For me there is only Hendrix, James Williamson the Stooge, Steve the Pistol and Geordie from Killing Joke. Paul from the Scars really was in that league.