Dead Fingers Talk
Dead Fingers Talk were another band that collided with Punk Rock and who were both influenced by and shared common elements with it. Their origins were in the sixties and were originally called Bone before settling on the William Burroughs inspired name change. Moving down from Hull they played all the usual haunts such as the Roxy Club and garnered a fair bit of positive press about their live performances and debut album Storm The Reality Studios produced by hero (and fellow Hull inhabitant) Mick Ronson.
However, growing pressures with the age old musical differences, growing apart, a record label – Pye- that didn’t understand punk or how to market it and the thorny issue of success (and what it meant) did for them and they split. An interesting band worth checking out and that further proves just how broad and deep the Punk church was.
Dead Fingers Talk Facebook
Jeff Parsons, guitarist in Dead Fingers Talk, runs through the history of the band from its inception in wait for it…1969 right through recording with Mick Ronson, picking up a hitchhiking Genesis P Orridge, hanging out with Soo Catwoman and being on the same record label as Benny Hill before the band finally blew up. December 2005
We actually started with the line up that became Dead Fingers Talk in 1969. me, Rocky Norton Bass player. We advertised in the local paper for a drummer and a singer and these two guys, Tony & Rob, turned up and we hit it off straight away. Rocky was the son of a trawler skipper who had a big house about 15 miles outside of Hull and we literally got it together in the country. The band were called Bone and were at the tail end of Psychedelia and beginning of prog and metal.
My influence were The Who, Hendrix and American psychedelic bands. Rocky was a classic rock guy into Led Zeppelin. Tony and Rob were into VU, Stones, Iggy Pop, Donovan & Lou Reed. Original material and covers followed. We lasted a year then split up. We came together at the end of 1975 with same line up as Dead Fingers Talk.
Regarding the name. We weren’t particularly Burroughs fans. We liked the sound of it…a cool name. We still had all the influences of the earlier band – the driving rock sound – but Rob in the meantime had been listening to stuff like the New York Dolls and glam like Bowie and Bolan. He was the main songwriter so that kind reflected in the music.
Genesis P Orridge gave Rob the name Bo Bo Phoenix. We knew Genesis from way back when he was at Hull university. When we first met him he had a band in Hull and we were on our way down to do a gig in London. Genesis and a guy we knew as Dr Moses were hitchhiking to London and we gave them a lift in 1969. So we knew them from then on and G kept in touch.
There weren’t many places to play in Hull. There were no pub venues just the Arts Centre. It was working men’s clubs about 5 years behind the time featuring covers bands and cabaret clubs. So right from the word go we started playing out of town. What was lucky for us was that Rocky turned out to be particularly adept at bullshitting. He used to spend a day on the phone getting gigs out of town. We started playing in London right from the word go like the Greyhound in Fulham Palace road and all over the country. We used to publicise our gigs in the Melody Maker. We were pretending to be our managers. We all had alter egos. We used to ring up pretending to be a management company.
By the end of 1976 Rocky was morphing into a manager and we thought that whereas we 3 had moved forward musically he hadn’t so we got another bass player. At the end of 1976, we hijacked Andrew Linklater from a band that was still doing Wishbone Ash twin guitarry prog rock stuff. He liked us and we liked him and he joined the band.
For the first 6 months of 1977, we played loads of gigs in County Durham because the working men’s club scene up there was really different. They wanted to hear original bands and preferably a bit rocky. Rob by this time had assumed this semi-camp glam stage persona…a bit Bowie, a bit Bolan, a bit Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger. We still sounded Dollsy, Stonesy & Whoey so people into rock still liked it. We were still doing odd choice covers like Purple Haze and Schools Out and we became very big in County Durham!!
In July 1977 we moved to London because of the way the punk scene was going. We were seeing it happen from the music papers and a little bit on the TV and radio. I remember reading about it and being excited. Then I remember hearing Anarchy for the first time and being disappointed…this is not earth-shaking or going to change the world [Punk77: how wrong he was eh?!].. it sounded like a fairly standard issue rock band but with a singer with a bit of attitude. We had quite a few conversations on the subject and we thought our music was quite similar to this; it was muscular, energetic guitar rock and with not much tweaking we could quite easily fit into this.
I liked the energy of the Sex Pistols…The Stranglers album…this is good, songwriting was good, a bit Doorsy and keyboardy…liked the attitude and big bass sound. Damned…Liked New Rose and Fanclub; we took bits of both of those bands. I remember The Clash’s first and thought this is real good and it had loads of influences in it. They’re not just angry but there’s thought in there…I still liked bands like Be Bop Deluxe. I was a lead guitarist and wanted to play lead guitar. I wanted to wail as well!
At this time we all had fairly long hair except Rob who’s always looked the same and there were a few beards and moustaches still in there and a few cheesecloth shirts and loon pants still hanging about! We were up in County Durham at a fan’s house we used to stay at and Rob got his scissors out, cut Andy’s hair, and shaved his beard off and we were all amazed at the difference. So that was it we all like got our hair cut and shaved the beards off, went down to the Charity shops and came out looking a bit different.
In transition: Dungarees, long hair, beards and lumberjack shirts! Photo John Tygier?
Lost the shirt then!
We engineered being lumped in with the New Wave because we saw it was a way we could get record companies interested in us. We also thought our music had that kind of energy and aggression to it, so it wasn’t much of a leap to put us in with it. We quite consciously wanted to get on that bandwagon. We actually moved to London to Stoke Newington just around the corner from the Rochester Castle which we used to play a lot. We started getting a few reviews and interviews so that all helped.
We also got on with other bands and faces on the scene. By mid ’76 we met quite a few people; Laurie who married Dave Vanian and who had a friend called Debbie at the Fulham Greyhound. Through them, we got to know Pete Watts who had been in Mott the Hoople and he was putting British Lions together and he had a big house over in Acton and he let bands who were playing in London kip there.
Soo Catwoman
We met Adam Ant in his house and Mick Jones and we met Soo Catwoman who became a bit of a fan and she knew everybody and used to bring people to see us. I remember going to see Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers with her at either The Roxy or Vortex. She knew Debbie Harry and she actually gave Debbie a Dead Fingers Talk t-shirt and there’s a picture of Chris Stein wearing it somewhere. We even had fans for some reason from Holland who would come regularly to see us in London.
We finally moved to London in July 77. We obviously wanted to get signed and we saw lots of other bands around us getting signed and we began to get worried that maybe we would get left behind. A guy that wanted to manage us and kept pestering us and who we thought was a bit of a joke was Jaz Summers who went on to manage Wham and Yazz. Not many record companies were knocking at the door but Pye had been to see us and they became very keen to sign us. Pye obviously in the early 60’s had Kinks etc but in the intervening years they had become square and they were keen to get into the New wave and sign some punky bands. They had Cyanide and the Fabulous Poodles but essentially were still an old school company.
Pye in the sky? – This old school record company was slow on the Punk bandwagon! Adding to its past roster of the Kinks and Benny Hill it entered Punk Rock with a pisstake single by the Punkettes – Going Out Wivva Punk before adding Cyanide, Dead Fingers Talk and errr…. The Fabulous Poodles. Unbelievably they didn’t secure the rights to the name ‘Pye’ and it expired in 1980.
It got to the stage where they were the only company like making us serious offers and if we didn’t sign to them then noone was going to sign us. They were offering a nice advance – 3 album deal and some control i.e. we wanted the artwork done a particular way. We thought the Dead Fingers Talk writing was pretty naff but the compromise was we could have our mates artwork on the cover but they did the logo and layout.
Mick Ronson is a Hull hero who was in the Rats, then Bowie, Mott and Dylan. At the time he was wanting to get into producing and he was doing the Rich Kids album and the record company thought it would be a good idea and quite marketable of course they should put the guy from Hull with the band from Hull. It worked quite well. We had done some good demos in a 16 track studio in Stoke Newington called Decibel. Fight Our Way Out Of Here is from those demos because we didn’t think we could get it better in the 24 track.
Mick was a real nice guy; very accommodating. We had a lot of fun talking about the old days; talking about Bowie and Dylan but he didn’t understand the band. He was trying to get me to use his guitar and amp and everyday when we came in there would be little bits that he’s put on where he’d stayed behind like the night before. He plays the piano on Everyday and he also play a bit of guitar on the end of Storm The Reality Studios…the bit that sounds like the cat being strangled!
In some ways it was like he was trying to sweeten it but in others he was trying ideas. He’d play the track to you in the morning that you’d recorded the day before and you wouldn’t notice straight away and then you’d think ‘what’s that? I don’t remember doing that’. I think we got on too well with him. We weren’t well disciplined and it would have been better if we had had someone who drove us a bit harder. It got to the stage where the record company said to us you’ve been in the studio for weeks and weeks and we want the album.
The first four tracks on the album are actually recorded live to a two track machine one Friday afternoon. They were rough live performance mixes of of songs not road tested and we would come back in the next week and work on them on the 24 track. Over the weekend we got a telephone call saying we had no more time and they wanted the album. On the Monday Mick transferred the 2 track onto the 24 track and we did a series of overdubs. We couldn’t actually touch the vocals because they were on the two track. Rob’s favoured technique was to do 6 vocals and then pick the best bits out of each of them and treat the vocals like as a collage.
We did a marathon mixing session at Eden studios over in Acton and that was it. We were a bit disappointed and shocked at the time because the first 4 tracks we regarded as being very much works in progress. The only tracks finished were Storm, Can’t Think Straight, Everyday, Into the Future and We Got The Message‘. The rest was thrown together.
Nobody Loves You….When we first started back as Dead Fingers Talk in 1975 we had a lot of fans in Sheffield a huge boy fanbase and there were a lot of very like glam bisexual people and they used to follow us around all over and Rob was really good at soaking up influences – musical and cultural. When he was young he had kind of flirted with his sexuality and explored it and one of his best mates was a very gay guy.
Pye Studios – Photo Credits – John Tygier
He was pushing the boundaries. We used to do a song called Harry which was the centerpiece of the live act and it was like a piece of theatre. Rob used to adopt this persona of a redneck avenger to wipe out all the queers. It starts as a monologue about ‘Harry who’s the new man in the office, there’s something not quite right about Harry, I think he’s queer’ and on the word ‘queer’ it all burst into this huge punk thing. Rob used to have this pair of shears and flashlight and he was pointing people out in the audience.
It was a comment on the anti-gay attitude which we didn’t understand or agree with. Our way to tackle it was to satirise it. But a lot of people took it the wrong way. We had a good gay following who understood it but a lot of writers and audience thought we were advocating queer bashing and there was a lot of stuff in the papers about it. Old and gay was another facet of us looking at about how gay people were represented in the media and in people’s attitudes.
Why did we put material not road tested on the album? Well we had lots of stuff and the Decibel demos had staples of our live set and we should have put on the album. But when you’re in a band together for almost 2 years a lot of the material we’d been playing repeatedly and getting a bit tired of it. So when you’ve got new material you get to the stage where you get excited about the new songs and the old songs to you are old hat. But the fans who had maybe seen you 10 times out of those hundreds of gigs want to hear those songs.
We completed the album early 1978 between Feb and April. In essence, it comes across as a bit angry and bitter. The 2 track demos captured the excitement and rawness of the live Dead Fingers Talk but the 24 track was in hindsight a mistake. We were a bit green though we had done some recording but the stuff we were recording wasn’t sounding quite right and we couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong so we decided to try the new songs and see how they went and then of course the company pulled the plug.
I don’t think the album did very well. I don’t think it recouped its advance and we never got any royalty cheques. We got £50k off Pye.
We were shooting in the dark for inspiration because we didn’t feel what we were doing so far was hitting the spot. Rob was reading a lot of socialist literature including the ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’. He was going out with a Japanese girl from a rich family who incidentally is the girl in the ‘Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle’ with Steve Jones. That was Rob’s wife. She got the gig because she was living in the same flat as Julien Temple.
Punk77: Shinobu Kanai in the Rock ‘n’Roll Swindle during Loinely Boy. She was also keyboard player in Pheonix’s short-lived post-DFT 1979 band The Internationals, who recorded the unreleased single Here Comes The World/ I Killed Sid Vicious. Paul Gorman site
Rob was reading this stuff that was changing his political viewpoint and at the same time record companies were giving us large amounts of money with no particularly good reason and we were getting driven around in a big car because our manager had decided to buy a Jaguar XJS to take us to gigs in. The punk thing was obviously about bringing it back to the people and Rob was getting confused. Punk was anti all the stuff we were now getting involved in. Part of your dream for your band is that you want to be successful and part of being successful is getting a deal and getting your record out.
When we were recording the second album people would cultivate who they saw as the power in the band. Rob was the frontman, singer, charismatic and an absolutely dynamite stage performer’ He was compelling and riveting and I often used to find myself just watching what he was doing and the people loved it. People would say to him ‘You’re the star in the band; you don’t need these others’. This led to friction. I was emotionally immature at 25 and I could be a bit of a prima donna. I knew Rob was good so how could I divert attention away from him? There always was a bit of rivalry between us but we were finding it increasingly hard to work as a band.
Punk77: Love this picture!! Dead Fingers Talk Rochester Castle. Punk transformation is complete. Best way to divert attention from Rob? Wear a dress! Regardless this was pretty confrontational stuff – Picture Credit – John Tygier
Rob’s always been a bit of a neurotic character and he felt the pressure because he was the main songwriter and we were expecting him to deliver the goods. I wrote songs but not necessarily in the accepted style. One day he was moaning and I knocked off 5 songs in ten minutes. I’ll write some punk songs and they all thought these were great and I was horrified. I did it to prove a point and I said I don’t want to play this stuff.
Work on the second album began with us recording separately on different days our parts on songs. We were working with Steve Lilywhite and he produced the second single ‘This Crazy World’ and the stuff was starting to sound good. We got 4 or 5 tracks in the can but we had also got to the stage where we weren’t functioning as a band.
In the early days anyone could do it and you didn’t necessarily need to know how to play. You could get away with just having an attitude. Then there was like almost a move back towards musicianship and the bands like XTC and Magazine; those kind of bands started being talked about in the media and we felt we fitted more in that category. By early 1979 the songs were getting longer and we were doing mini epics again and the feel wasn’t so frenetic and in your face.
Add to that we were still on course to play the States and Canada, had a single about to be released and were working on our second album with a great producer; what could possibly go wrong?!
Fantastic photo again from the Rochester Castle by John Tygier
How did it all end? Basically Rob and the pressure. He did become a little bit unstable with his burgeoning socialist ideals, the business thing of the band and it was really getting to him. We were finding it hard to keep it together and there was friction. Another thing that accelerated the breakup was not touring the US. We had Max’s Kansas booked up and a few other gigs in the States and Canada and the visas didn’t come through in time and that didn’t come off.
So we just split up. I was mortified. We’d been mates since 1969 and Dead Fingers Talk since 1975 and a big part of my life was suddenly over. The last thing we did as a band was to sign a publishing deal, netting us a £10k advance, in the full knowledge that we were about to split up. Upon being informed of the split the executive who signed us uttered the immortal words ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’
We did continue carrying on without Rob. But without Rob Pye weren’t interested. Rob went and formed a band with Mick Rossi from Slaughter & The Dogs called the Monsters* (1980) and they did all right for a while but they were just a good band and that was it really.
Dead Fingers Talk live were greater than the sum of its parts and the chemistry was just right.
*After Bite Back he founded the band Monsters. He went down to Hulland met Bobo (Phoenix). He feels blessed to have been on a stage with Bobo, as with Howard & Phil, however he said unfortunately Bobo was a strange guy. He recalls that they got a record deal, and at this point he looked perplexed and said he didn’t want to speak ill of him. The gist being that maybe they could have gone somewhere if Bobo had wanted to. He wrote the next song Angels of the Night with Bobo, an amazing guy, a genius who in his opinion should be up there with Bowie. An Evening in the Company of Mick Rossi
Without doubt, Dead Fingers Talk was a superb live act with some great songs but as Jeff Parsons recalls elsewhere, the songs that a lot of people knew they were sick of playing. As such their debut album would end up featuring new untried songs leaving out such live centrepieces as Harry. In this respect, they share common ground with Adam & The Ants who also jettisoned songs for their debut.
Dead Fingers Talk certainly didn’t get the rub of the green with Pye but at least they got to record and leave something for posterity. The reviews we feature below are for once fairly accurate. The band was complex and had great potential and mentioning Magazine & XTC in the same breath doesn’t do any of them a disservice.
DEAD FINGERS TALK `Storm The Reality Studios’ (Pye) *** 1/2 Sounds 17.6.78
I’VE NEVER seen Dead Fingers Talk live, but you get the feeling from this record that they must go over well: the powerful presentation, sly stylisation and expert musicianship auger well for onstage performances. That apart, I still like this, a Mick Ronson production with especially finely rendered guitars and overall neatly balanced despite a bit of wateriness in the vocal department.
A very original mulch of material here, obvious influences but well-blended and interesting. The more I played it the more it got a hold on me. The `obvious influences’ are Lou Reed, but it’s no derivative drivel. `Electric City’ is a night time trip down the alleys of the sleepless wonder, with a hook which oddly resembles that in Free’s `All Right Now’. `Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay’ exhibits a smooth change-up of pace and Tony Carter’s stylish drumming; throughout the album he retains a light, bouncing touch which rescues some of the numbers from dreary monotony and elsewhere (notably `Old And Gay’) creates a breezy, unselfconscious, somersaulting rhythm which seems to inspire the others. BoBo Phoenix’s double tracked sly vocals complete the picture: `Old And Gay’ is a touch Tom Robinson (and John Lennon?).
`Storm The Reality Studios’ itself is a grudging, grunting stutter with a pop chorus, `Some people wanna fuck you up/some people just wanna fuck’. The rhythm section is out of the very best cock-a-hoop blues, from Bluesbreakers through to Cream’s ; `Spoonful’, incorporating the same odd melody strain that the latter band used so successfully.
Side two illustrates the worst aspects of trying to put a good live band on vinyl: long, well-acted numbers onstage can lose all impact. `Fight Our Way Out Of Here’ starts excellently with Hendrix licks and then degenerates into overlong, repetitious machinery-beat – automated rock. About four minutes too long and very destructive of an initial impact, slopping Bo Bo’s lyrics into stodgy lumps that stick in his throat. In fact, throughout his lyrics could have been given a finer edge by the production. `We Got The Message’ rehashes `Sweet Jane’, you’ve heard it a million times before and, depending on your mood, it’ll grab you or send you back to your Debbie Harry pics. The finale `Can’t Think Straight’ features a hook out of `Sunshine Of Your . Love’ and scatters Hendrix all over the place.
While I’ve picked up a great amount of respect for this band from this recording, the main feel is that there is a need to hone their cutting edge.
PAUL CHAUTAUQUA
Charles Shaar Murray NME 17.6.78
THE ONLY time I saw ‘ Dead Fingers Talk they were fighting a losing battle with the acoustics and the audience at the Astoria Theatre in Tottenham Court Road. “I know its a terrible gig, but it’s a showcase,” explained the man from Pye – which tells you more than you think about the way that people’s careers get screwed up in the wonderful world of rock and roll.
Still, they displayed presence and courage and ideas, all qualities that transmit themselves on “Storm The Reality Studios”. Both in form and in content, DF7s grasp of continuity is impressive: they’ve seized on aspects of youth culture that haven’t changed that much over the last decade, and expressed their perceptions in music that draws a straight tine from Jimi Hendrix (there’s a reference to “Purple Haze” in the last cut, and DFT have been known to do the song as an encore) up to the present day.
Between ’68 and 178, their power base of operations would appear to be ’72: specifically Bowie circa “Ziggy Stardust” and various incarnations of Lou Reed, a natural tendency of DFT’s, but amplified and extended by producer Tick Ronson, who made the journey from Hull and back himself several years ago. “We Got The Message” on the second side is to “Ziggy” what Badfinger’s “No Matter What” was to The Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”, and “Someone/Everyone” on the first side sounds uncannily like certain sections of Lou Reed’s “Berlin” – Bobo Phoenix’s acoustic guitar and voice evoking Reed’s “Oh Jim” with almost uncanny verisimilitude.
Guitarist Jeff Parsons ends up sounding like a cross between a very timid young Hendrix – certainly younger and more timid than Hendrix himself ever was – and Ronson himself, Rono having absorbed his mentor’s expertise at recording voices and guitars but displaying a weedier rhythm section sound than anything Bowie ever produced. So much for form. The content of the best of DFTs recorded material is considerably warmer than Reed’s. “Electric City” is as much a city song as Reed’s archetypes, but though Phoenix (the composer of most of the album’s material) makes no attempt to gloss over the squalor in which Reed wallows so obsessively, his city is still a place for optimism and idealism.
This somewhat starry-eyed quality overspills into old-time hippy-dippy love-yer-brother stuff on a few of the tracks, but – as a diametric opposite to the violence fetish of too much of the last few years’ rock and roll – that stuff lives better than it sounds, so it’s nice that DFT have their ideals in the right place, though lyrics like “For all we know know, we might not be alive at all /Just a dream in someone’s mind … my destiny slowly unfolds throughout eternity / express, through me, the power of the universes are purest yick whether it’s ’68 or-’78.
Elsewhere, Phoenix displays his compassion to better advantage. “Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay” laments the lot of the ageing queen, “Fight Our Way Out Of Here” points out “First we made flowers and now we make fists/they made money out of that, they’ll make money out of this”, while the apocalyptic tide track (which features effective usage of techniques unfortunately defused by overuse earlier in the album, like out-of-synch overdubbed vocal/guitar tines) lays it down even dearer: “Drinking gin and tonics selling punk clothes to the vulnerable/the image became the reality and everyone was so gullible/punk rock revolutions, don’t make me laugh/the people in control still know money’s where it’s at” before concluding “Some people wanna fuck you up/some people they just wanna fuck.” You can tell just by hearing this album – even if you didn’t know already – that DFT like to play Lou Reed songs in their set. Pity William Burroughs never wrote songs, because if he did, DFT”d be playing them too.
“Storm The Reality Studios” indicates that Dead Fingers Talk have a fair idea of what they’d like to achieve, and much of the materials that they will need in order to achieve it. If Phoenix and his boys can reach the heights of their best material with greater regularity, they will indeed be a band to reckon with. As it is, they’re good now and they’re going to get better. Keep tabs on’ em.
This Crazy World / The Boyfriend
Storm The Gates hadn’t sold well and the hunt was on for something more commercial for the band. Sessions had begun for the second album and tracks started to be laid down with producer Steve Lillywhite at the helm including this single that the band felt really happy with.
To my ears there’s a little too much guitar going on what with solos, twin tracked a la Thin Lizzy and so on and never really gets going. The B side Boyfriend is the pick with a sound, vibe and catchiness that Steve Lillywhite specialised in – think The Automatics – Tanks and The Members Suburbs.
This was it for the band. Escalting internal dissension and a Stateside tour that never happned did for them.
Great interview from the time from Record Mirror 24.6.78 that compliments Jeffs’s recollections. It was entitled ‘Necrophilia Mon Amour’ for some reason!
BOBO Phoenix, Jeff Parsons, Andy Linklater and Tony Carter are the vocalist, guitarist, bassist and drummer in Dead Fingers Talk.
They have been playing in that state for 18 months, and for a year or so before that with a different bassist. Originating from Hull, they now live in London, and have just released their debut album `Storm The Reality Studios’.
Sitting in at The Interview are Jeff and Andy. Both are friendly and talkative, particularly Jeff, and stress their views in dulcet northern tones. For two hours talk, lager and tape flow freely, and talk inevitably kicks off with their elpee, quite a gem by any standards, with Jeff taking the opening lines.
“Overall we’re happy with how the album turned out,” he muses, “We recorded it in four different studios though, and the one where we put down the bulk of the material, the first one, was the worst of the lot. It was like a cellar, and anybody coming into the place had to walk through where you were actually playing. The atmosphere was lazy and we took time off all the time to nip down the pub for a rest. When we finally made it to a better studio we really worked hard; it was more enjoyable too, cos you didn’t have people traipsing through-all the time, and you could actually stand up when you played.
“Mick Ronson produced it, and it was just a coincidence that we managed to get him. I had met him at a Phil Rainbow gig a few weeks before we decided to ask him, and we rapped for ages about Hull, cos we were from the same part, and music. When our manager phoned him up he must have remembered the name, because he said he would without even really hearing us.
“The only problem we had was that we had to go to Hull when the single was mixed by Mick and our manager at that time. It was released before we had even heard it, and we didn’t like it – we thought that there was too much echo and that. So we remixed it for the album, and let the single drop completely. “In the future, there’ll probably be more songs written by the band as a whole, rather than individual members,” continues Andy, “On the album we each had a song of our, own, although Bobo did the bulk of the writing because he’s happiest singing his own lyrics, but two of the songs, the title track and `Fight Our Way Out Of Here’ came about from jam sessions, before a gig. We find that those are the numbers which we do best, the group efforts. We should be doing more like that from now on, but when we could only rehearse for a couple of days a week we tended to stick to songs that somebody had already worked out, rather than jamming for an hour in the hope that something good would come from it. It was all down to economics really.”
“We had to be really careful with money – to even live. We travelled in a bus to save having to fork out for places to stay on the road, and had to stack all the equipment in as level as possible so that we could lay the mattresses on top. We had a little. stove too so that we could cook ourselves sausages and mash and things with a really high stodge content, because that was the cheapest way to eat.` Eh,’ says Jeff, accent deepening with the faraway look in his eyes. You could always tell when we had just come off the road, we’d all be walking around really spotty …” “We had some good times then, “adds Jeff. “Once we got to this club in Newcastle and started to bring the equipment in. They’ve got their own PA folks!) The owners just looked amazed, but didn’t say anything until we brought in the mixing desk. We began to set it up at the back of the hall, and that did it! This guy came storming over and told us that no way could we fix our organ up at the back of the hall – it had to be on stage with the rest of the gear! He thought it was some kind of synthesizer or something!”
Whilst they were doing the rounds of the clubs up north, punk was just establishing itself in London. Short trips down south were too impractical so they moved to Stoke Newington and joined the New Wave extravaganza.
“We never change the music -just the way we look. Bobo didn’t change, he’s had short hair and those clothes ever since we’ve known him, but the rest of us finally gave in to his nagging and cut our hair. We still kept in the heavier numbers, and we had been doing a lot of the material for a long time,” stresses Jeff emphatically.
“We try to get across as much melody as we can in the numbers, as well as the lyrical content,” interjects Andy. “We’ve always done a few heavier songs, a few light ones like The Boyfriends’ and of course, we’ve been doingHarry’ for ages now. For the uninitiated, `Harry’ is a song protesting against the persecution of gay people by society. In the form of a dramatic monologue over a basic backing track, Bobo takes the role of the persecutor, picking upon members of the audience as the persecuted. Chillingly effective, it is still the highlight.”
We’re lucky because we haven’t been labelled as jumping on the bandwagon or anything – even with the songs which bring comparisons with Tom Robinson, ‘Harry’ and ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay’.””Tom’s a good bloke,” declares Jeff. “He came to see us when he was still in Cafe Society and has helped us out by introducing us to people and getting us some support spots when we were starting down here.
Bobo knew him a bit better than us, and knew he wasn’t happy with his old band, so he asked him to join us. Tom had just started getting his own band together though, and I’m glad to say he’s never looked back since!”
Like TRB, Dead Fingers Talk take a political stand on a few of their numbers ~ do they think that politics have a place in music? “I think everything’s got a place in music,” ponders Jeff. “Love, politics … anything; it’s an ideal vehicle for somebody to get a message across. “I don’t think everyone wants to hear it though,” interrupts Andy. “There are the disco types, and the housewife market who just want to hear a good tune, with words as a kind of optional extra. “But” he concedes, “people do get off if you’re singing about something that they agree with, it’s like giving them a pat on the back.”
“I agree though, you can go too far into the political thing, and kill it. It’s like Leonard Cohen, he’s a good lyric writer but he’s always so depressive. But then groups like Kansas and Styx get attacked for having no content in their words, for having fairytale lyrics-that sound like they come from Marvel comics. “The thing is,” he concludes, as the tape runs out, “there’s a lot of people who like Marvel comics.”
TalkPunk
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