Blitz

How did the band start, where, when and why? How did you come to choose the name?
A couple of months beforehand, I’d gone for an audition out of the Melody Maker classifieds, with a band of pot head pixies playing space music with lots of twiddly bits. I didn’t get the gig, but someone in the band kept my number. Later he called and asked me to come along and jam with his new band. I did, and it was great. Afterwards the drummer and guitarist sacked the bloke, called me and that was the start of it. We got a girl singer, who was the ex-girlfriend of the other bloke.

We started off trying to sound like ABBA in order to earn tons of money on the “chicken in a basket” cabaret circuit, but after many months of rubbishing The Damned, Sex Pistols, 101ers, Ian Dury (we must’ve really hated them to keep going back, eh?) the catalyst was sitting in our Greenford flat, eating boiled rice and tomato ketchup watching Bill Grundy vs the Pistols. That changed everything.

Members of the band and instruments played? How old were you all?
Ruth Carr (from Mansfield) – Singer, Jez Hartley (from Leeds and Bridlington) – Guitar, Ed Butler (from Hull) – Drums, Big George Webley (Clapham Common and Uxbridge. I moved to Milton Keynes in 1978 and I love it!) – Bass and Keyboards. We all lived in a flat along the Greenford Road, where we rehearsed and got very thin indeed. Then we moved into Kevin St John’s house until the whole thing collapsed. We were all teenagers when it started, but we grew up fast!

Were you involved with any bands previously… type of bands?
I’d been in a fair few bands prior to this, one of which rehearsed at Slough College, alongside Gary Numan and his Toothpaste Army (a long time before he turned electric and still used a comb)

Influences?
Back then they were: loud music, having a laugh, getting girls, not playing shitty working mens clubs and not being part of the stinking progressive/regressive system.

How good were Blitz?
I’m not blowing my own trumpet but the Blitz were a huge cut above the norm; we’d been rehearsing for 6 or 7 months prior to turning punk. We were a really sharp outfit. We were writing classy pop songs like 10cc and Abba. Then in the evening we’d hop off down the Nashville and watch Joe Strummers 101ers, or Kilburn & The High Roads, or The Damned. I remember us all saying how shit they were, but we kept going back to see them.

It was Noel Martin from Menace who saved us. After our first song he walked up to the stage and said ‘You’re fucking great’. That was it, he was a big man on the scene, so we were ‘in’. Typically a band would start to play and someone would open up a half a pint can of Watneys pale ale, shake it, throw it at them so it would hit them on the head, cut their eye open and be fizzing around on stage. I must have seen that happen 15 or 20 times. A very intimidating atmosphere.

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As Kevin St John’s band, it was our job to stand in for any band who didn’t turn up, headline Friday Saturday and Sunday nights, as they were poser and foreign journalist nights, and they’d pay top dollar for any old tosh.

When we weren’t playing, we were serving drinks, collecting glasses, working on the door, checking bondage jackets into the cloakroom and chauffeuring Kevin St John to and from his house, all hours of the day. As for building a following, all the regulars became our mates and we had loads of fun playing our classic hits of never year, like “Pulling Wings Off Baby Sparrows” and “London Is For Tourists”

From when you started playing to when you stopped how did the club change – atmosphere/people etc?
The Roxy was a tragedy from beginning to end. It started off as a complete shithole and ended up as a tourist attraction, a home for fucked up misfits, somewhere for the nouveau riche to get a bit of street. It’s a Speedo swimwear shop now, or was the last time I went [Punk77: This was 2009 – now its a bread shop I think 2024], with the Mrs on our 25th wedding anniversary to visit the spot where we met, arhhh!

Any other places played?
Another notable night was at the Speakeasy in Margaret St. We played there a few times, but the last time, it got raided. Another shithole that was well past its sell date. Not like it was in the 60’s, or so I’m told. It was always wall to wall faces, Lemmy on the fruit machines, Sid Vicious puking up in a pint glass. This particular night there were loads of people just getting off on the band, which never usually happened, but we were loving it. And so were they it seemed, dancing there heads off, that was until the whistles started to blow, and suddenly our new fresh faced fans were fixing POLICE armbands on.

The whole place froze, and at that moment you heard the sound of pill bottles and chunks of silver paper hit the floor. Everyone was searched. We were there for hours, they took our drummer Ed out into the van to check through the van and all the amps were stripped down. It was a big big bust, but as I recall Kevin went back a day or so later to retrieve a cricket ball lump of a brown spicy smelling matter. He loved a spliff or dozen, who didn’t back then?

Above Blitz at The Vortex as a 5 piece with Paul Carpenter on bass and below rehearsing

We did gigs with Black Uhuru, it was the done thing in them days, a punk/reggae bill. It was a good mix. Except when some black geezer pulled a knife out and mugged me at Fulham Town Hall. When I told the promoter (a socialist worker type) what had happened he started ranting at me ‘You fucking racist!’ No No, I’m the victim of a crime mate!

One aspect of these gigs that never worked out very well was the jam together at the end of the show.

What do you remember of the recording night? Large crowd? No Crowd? Atmosphere?
As I recall, the only people in the crowd were the other bands who were recording, and their mates. Hence the lack of atmosphere on the record, as the last thing that anyone in a punk band wanted to do was cheer/clap/pogo to another band. In fact the album is a total disappointment, as all the bands featured were loads better than served up on this particular platter.

Was there any rivalry between the bands? Did you even know who was going to be on it?
There was always rivalry? I think it’s safe to say we all hated everyone else (a common theme in punk at the time). Obviously, there were inter-band personal friendships, but usually, it was always a case of, “We’re great and they’re crap”.

Were you involved in any of the mixing for the album. In fact were you involved in track selection at all? If not who was doing it all?
The whole thing was done by Kevin St John and someone from Sparta Florida, behind closed doors (with closed ears it seems going on the results), hence the shocking aural state of the LP. We were all devastated when we first heard it; an emotion that has only been compounded over the years.

The finished product – Some difference from the first Roxy album with no pictures of the bands and fans. What did you make of it?
Again, there was no input by the bands (as far as I know). Although the photo of the bog wall was very familiar. The truth is, the record was seen as a money making venture by Kevin St John and Sparta Florida, but boy did they get it wrong eh!

How come you never made a record?
We did! Strange Boy c/w Sod You, produced by Peter Yellowstone (who spent the session talking about his designer punk red shoes, that’d cost him a fortune – we were starving at the time) It was recorded at Borough Studios, which became Stock Aitken Waterman’s hit factory. Both tracks recorded and mixed in one day, then back to the flat to spend another week waiting in vain for stardom, eating bread and marmite, no butter.

At the time we were being wooed by CBS, Pye and Red Bus Records, and on the advice of some idiot(?) we signed to Red Bus. I have a cassette of the single, which never actually got released, and it still sounds kicking. It would’ve been a classic! I did see the sleeve once, in the record company office (situated in the same building as Hammer Horror in Wardour St) but never managed to get a 7 inch copy (which really pisses me off as in life I’m a completist and I know that thousands were pressed up, and then most probably pulped). We’d previously demoed three songs live in Covent Garden Studios for CBS, which are also very solid and nothing to be ashamed of.

Blitz’s unreleased demos courtesy of Big George:

1. Strange Boy – demo
2. London is for Tourists – demo

I’m not (too) proud of the fact that… I didn’t clean the bathroom mirror or mop the stairs, I stole a hippie’s cornflakes and a Swedish student’s tin of cold baked beans, puked up outside at 2am and toppled over a bunk bed for a lark (which has left me with the vivid memory of one of the drummers flying through the air telling me I was in trouble now!).

I was asked to leave, twice, but only remember sleeping on the coach once. Oh yes, and Kevin St John flew everywhere and stayed in a swanky hotel somewhere, he didn’t tell anyone which one. As a side note, Acme’s guitarist spent the entire tour, including the long long coach journeys twiddling on his sunburst Gibson Les Paul to the adoration of the rest of his band, and the amusement of everyone else.

How did the tour go? What was the reception like?
As it happens, every show was Fantastic. Barrowlands in Glasgow was about as good as it gets. Packed full of loud drunken herberts, screaming their heads off between songs, up for every band, fumbling the opposite sex, bouncing up and down from start to finish. The UK Subs were trying to find a way out of it.

That Charlie Harper is such a funny geezer; her Majesty really ought to knight him for services rendered. But their bass player and guitarist were at each other’s throats one saying ‘No No we’ve got a contract ..we have to do it!… If we blow this contract no one will ever trust us again…’ and the other saying, ‘But we’re the UK Subs, we should be on a percentage of the door and a guarantee’. Charley just accepted we’d all been screwed over big time, but what can you do?

How and when did it all end for Blitz and what happened to the rest of the band?
After the Roxy closed, Kevin St John’s need for a Punk Band seemed to pale into insignificance. The band went its separate ways, keeping in contact for about a day and a half (Ruth, Jez, Ed, if you’re out there…). I know that Jez worked in an amusement arcade in Scarborough and was a hospital porter just off Leicester Square for a bit, but I’m sure he must’ve done something else musically; he was a bitchin’ guitarist.

After punk I took an about turn. I wrote to Herbie Flowers (this countries most prolific session musician) asking for help. Gawdblesshim, he called me up and invited me along to a session he was doing with Justin Hayward and Jeff Wayne. Suddenly from being punk rock and hating everything about the establishment within a couple of months, I was sitting with people I’d spent the last few years hating, and it was great! I’ve never looked back, until today, and on reflection, I met some great people, but it was a pile of shit most of the time.

The reality of it was, we were never going to get anywhere. We were at the end of the movement, and even though Punk was making inroads into the mainstream, the chequebook bubble had burst leaving a lot of A&R executives out of pocket with only a band of musical beginners to show for it. George 2006

How good were they really? Last words to Alan Smith…I think I saw them about 10 times – I remember The Nashville in West Ken and The Moonlight in West Hampstead (16/5/78). Their set was:

The guitarist and George the bass player had a unique way of playing together – George often playing bass like a lead guitar and the two of them coming together and moving apart again like nothing I’ve heard before or since. This was only possible because of the high quality of their writing – forget ‘Strange Boy’ – that’s one of their worse tracks – ‘Miles Apart, Slow Song, Moving’ – stand up against the best songs of the time.

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Big George Webley became a composer and arranger and would go on to write the theme tunes for among others The Office starring Ricky Gervais and Have I Got News for You. He would release a World Cup song and was a presenter on radio before tragically dying in 2011.