Cane

A brief history of Cane by Kip – May 2005.
“I got together with drummer Dave ‘Pixie’ Parker in 1975, found bass player Steve Jefford and guitarist Chris Battersby and started rehearsing. We did a few of our own songs and covers of stuff like Mott the Hoople and Bowie. In 1976 I got straight into the Sex Pistols, Damned etc, and knew that I wanted to move into that direction.

New songs started to come together, one of the first being College Girls, which was written after a gig in early ’77 at Cassio College in Watford. On a very pissed night Pixie started coming out with the words and I put some chords to it. Other songs that came along were Teachers Pet, Cadillac Lady, D K Dance, Suburban Guerilla, Wormwood Scrubber and Dice. Cane never played Dice live ‘cos it was so different to the rest of our material, so how the fuck it got released as a single I’ll never know, it’s about five minutes long!

We started playing more gigs at pubs and stuff and hung out and played at Carey Place in Watford along with The Bears. I gave Lightning a ring and they came along to see us rehearse. I guess, like so many other labels, they were keen to sign anything that resembled Punk! They put us into Berry Street studios and we recorded some demos, ‘College Girls‘ being one of them, that Lightning managed to place on the ‘Streets‘ album. Unfortunately, Chris couldn’t cut the mustard and decided to leave. Cane did more gigs, one at the Red Cow in Hammersmith supporting The Doll and then went back to the studio to do the single. I was writing more of the songs by this time and somehow Dice came out as the A side.

I must say we were all pretty naive at the time, and Alan Davison, Lightning A&R and producer, didn’t push the band as he might have. A Lightning employee called Simon started to get us some gigs, top geezer, and we played with The Raincoats and a few others that I’ve forgotten. We did one more studio session which included Wormwood Scrubber and it felt like we’d hit a brick wall so I decided to move on. Then I joined The Vibrators.” 

Allegedly Kirk Brandon was once a member of Cane. This is true – but of another band called Cane from Torquay. Not this one! Interestingly the band also snaffled a full page in the glossy magazine called New Music – The Sound Of The Streets that was widely available in newsagents but nothing about the band other than a picture of them when they were a foursome and their name misspelled as ‘Kane!’

The band also secured some welcome publicity (depending on how you saw it) in the local paper when an appearance at a festival was canned over fears of rival punk bands’ fans clashing!

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