Eater

From Bedroom Fits To Stage  – Our heroes form a band!

Like with many bands our story starts off in a bedroom and in this one it’s the Radwans, Ashie and Luftie, in North Finchley London in 1975. The boys play together as a fledgling band with Ashie on guitar and Lufti on drums.

Andy Blade (Vocals) In the very beginning I had been happy to think of Eater as a fantasy to enjoy as and when I needed it. It was an antidote to school. My secret life in a parallel universe. The premise was simple; form a band, become famous, enjoy life. I never once expected self-delusion to collide with reality.  Andy Blade Chronicles

The next key step for the band comes when Ashie meets Beatles fanatic Brian Haddock (aka Haddon) at school. They are 11 years old. Eventually after some months have passed and Brian has passed Ashie’s cool test he is invited to join Ashie’s bedroom band. But what’s not the norm though is the speed this band of early teenage kids becomes real in 1976 and ends up at the forefront of the emerging Punk scene alongside the Sex Pistols, Clash and Damned.

Andy Blade (Vocals) My best friend at school was a boy called Brian Haddock, aka Brian Chevette, a wiry, oddball kid with curly hair and suitably developed sense of humour. We’d sit at the back of class dreaming of being pop stars, writing lyrics, …we’d named our imaginary group ‘Eater’ after a Marc Bolan lyric – ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex the eater of cars’ [from the song Suneye]. Andy Blade Chronicles

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I really loved Bowie. I liked Bolan and T. Rex. Stuff like that. Roxy Music. All that sort of mid 70s glam rock pop stuff. Bowie I absolutely adored. I thought he was a genius. And yeah, I kind of wanted to be Mick Ronson, I suppose, but without any of the talent. So then I met Andy at school who was very like minded, and we just kind of formed this imaginary band in our head, which sort of by a series of accidents became reality.

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) Now Andy was from a large family, seven kids in all, and lived in a big house in Finchley. He shared an attic room with his older brother Hass and younger brother Luffie. It was a large room and one got the feeling you could make a lot of noise there without annoying anybody too much. And indeed, that’s what they did.

They used to have regular gatherings, with friends, (including Brian) and called it the Bedroom Club. With an old Spanish guitar, a fake microphone and some pots and pans they started miming along to their favourite records.

Gavin Reid (below right with Andy & Ian in yer classic photo booth selfie from 1977) was friends with the Radwans and went to school with Andy’s brother Hassan. 

Gavin Reid (Friend) His brother Hassan was my age. It was a long walk to school from where we all lived and I happened to be walking with them. I started singing Bowie’s Starman and that was how we met because they invited me back to theirs to listen to the album. From there we listened to Lou Reed and then the Velvet Underground and all sorts of other stuff like Alice Cooper

The house had several floors and they had this tiny practice amp which they used to crank right it up to full and it would go waaaaaa and they said “our mum really likes it when the amp is distorted” and I thought I bet she does! They’re right at the top and she’s on the bottom floor and can’t hear it!

Andy actually asked me if I wanted to play guitar with them but I couldn’t afford one or couldn’t nick one. He says ‘try to think of a name’ and he was on a Bolan theme so I said ‘Children Of The Revolution.’ Obviously that wasn’t chosen.

In addition the friends have been boasting to their fellow school chums about the band, so the pressure was on to deliver the goods. This was given a boost by Andy’s brother Lutfi ‘liberating’ two guitars from a shop, though he was admonished for not stealing a bass and guitar! Andy was also involved.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) And there we were with a couple of really nice guitars that we managed to get his younger brother Lutfi to steal from the local guitar shop. We had to learn how to play them because we had told all these people at school that we had this band. Then of course there was only so long before they demanded to come and actually see us play. So we had to quickly learn a few chords and put some rudimentary songs together, so that they didn’t think we were just idiots.

Gavin Reid (School friend) Lufti grabbed the guitars, ran down the street and hid them in someone’s garden and kept running in case he was caught!

Andy Blade (Vocals) Lufti ran in the  shop to grab them, but I was right there helping, running away and keeping them. Brian wasn’t so brave and wouldn’t touch them.

Phil Rowland (Drums) I saw them rehearse at Andy’s mum’s house a few times and Andy’s younger brother Lutfi was the drummer; I don’t remember who played bass [no one as there wasn’t one].  I don’t remember them being very good either, but Andy was highly entertaining and good at self promotion. 

Andy, ever the kamikaze publicist, contacted the Finchley Press who then want to do a feature and ask the band for a photo shoot with guitars. The band feature with the attendant photo missing Brian because he was on holiday and Lutfi because he’d gone out for the day! Not to mention hands placed over the brand names, lest an eagle eyed employee from the music shop they’d been purloined from, was reading the local paper! Andy’s brother Hass and friend Rob stand in. This sets a precedent for the boys ambition and self-promotion.

Considering their age, these boys were switched on about the emerging punk scene. The ‘in’ for this was courtesy of the weekly music papers and a feature on the Sex Pistols. Courtesy of Andy’s brother Hass who lived in Manchester with Andy’s dad they hire Holdsworth Hall for £25 to put on a show and end up with the Buzzcocks supporting in Manchester on the 20th September 1976 which, when you think about it, suggested they either had balls of steel or were mad! To make it even more surreal they had no bassist and Andy’s brother Lutfi was on drums with suitably punky name Social Demise! They also had a stand in bass player.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) On drums was Social Demise, aka Andy’s brother Lufti. That was his one and only gig with us. We also had a session bass player who just arrived at the gig. This bass player was arranged from a local Manchester band and would meet us at the Holdsworth Hall, learn the songs in the dressing room beforehand and then play with us.

So you can imagine how that panned out. We were all sort of punky and there was this guy with really long hair and denim with Genesis badges all over his clothes standing in the corner desperately trying to play along to songs he’d only heard for the first time fifteen minutes earlier. It was quite funny.

The result was the bassist left the stage after two songs embarrassed at getting the songs wrong and the boys stumbled on in true first gig fashion.

Andy Blade (Vocals) I thought it was complete shit, I was in tears, literally in tears afterwards thinking, “What a fucking idiot”, y’know, in agony, thinking “What a stupid thing to do”. But Howard Devoto came into the dressing room afterwards and said, “That was fucking great, that was really, really good, I really loved it”.

We rehearsed probably for about a month/two months before the gig, something like that. We had no idea, absolutely no idea about anything outside of our little school kid world. Both me and Brian thought we could do gigs, people would turn up and they’d cheer and light lighters and wave them around, that kind of thing. We got quite shocked to find they actually chucked stuff at you, and jeered, especially when you started addressing the crowd as “You bunch of Northern wankers”, which we would constantly do, thinking this is something like a football match going on here, us from London, them from Manchester. It could have been a lot worse; it could have been a hell of a lot worse. https://punkygibbon.co.uk/bands/e/eater_interview.html

Likewise in terms of names, Brian Haddock aka Haddon had changed to Brian Chevette and Ashruf/Ashie had changed to Andy Blade. Much more punky!

Gavin Reid (Schoolfriend) Ashruf appeared at school one day with a chain with a little blade on it and he announced “From now on you’ve got to call me Andy. Andy Blade! I said “ok then” but thought he had cracked up.

What happens next is a total coincidence of events that changes peoples lives forever. Brian and Andy differ on the order of events but Jonh Ingham, journalist from Sounds, was compiling an A-Z on the new upcoming music phenomenon called punk.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We played this gig with the Buzzcocks in Manchester and then that’s how Jonh Ingham had heard about us. So he thought “right; ‘E’ I need to get hold of these Eater guys”. So he got in touch and asked when our next gig was and we were like ‘we’re not sure at the moment because there’s only really two of us!’ So that was why he came to rehearsals with Rat Scabies. Rat then put us in touch with Dee Generate and not long after Ian came along. 

Left – Rat Scabies. Right Dee Generate (Roger Bullen) auditions for Eater at Tracks Studio Acton 1976

Andy Blade (Vocals) Jonh Ingham had never heard of us, I just called him up at the right time re; a-z of punk’

Dee Generate joins in September 1976.

Dee Generate (Drums): The name came from a conversation with Rat Scabies, at the time the pop names were all very ‘up beat’, Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust, etc, and the other Punk names were all to do with peoples characteristics. Johnny Rotten, (John had green teeth), Sid Vicious (he was always trying to beat people up), Rat Scabies (Chris looked like a Rat and had scabies from not washing enough). I did not want to end up being called Sid Short Arse, so I tried to think of something different. I wanted a name that reflected a complete reversal of normal aspirations, a child of the 70’s, no morals, no ideals, no hope, just cynicism and distrust. The degenerate, a mirror image of social deterioration. Sounds deep, but in retrospect I think it was about saying ‘this (me) is what you (adult world) have made me’. I tried to live the image. Plus I was really into the Ramones and wanted to be like Dee Dee, June Bird interview

They were very Lou Reed influenced and the Bowie thing was very evident. Andy played more guitar and we had no bassist. We were really two rhythm guitars and drums. I said I couldn’t play that slow so it all got speeded up. We all agreed that it was better but it meant most of the songs were about 3 mins long.

I went to the 100 club Punk festival to see The Damned, saw The Banshees do the Lords Prayer with Sid Vicious on drums. I was already a punk before Eater, but no one called them selves that then, the press needed a label and they invented the term.

Dee Generate (Drums) “I don’t know anything about ‘punk’. I was just asked to join a band called Eater and I did. I was wearing a ripped up t-shirt at the time. They said “You must be a punk” and I said “oh yeah.” Sniffin’ Glue 6 January 1977

Dee Generate (Drums) Paul Flynn was never in Eater he was my mate from school and we were in a band when I was about 12 years old.

Next to arrive in short succession was a bassist in the form of Ian Woodcock.

Dee Generate (Drums): We put this ad in NME for a bassist and a load of knobs turned up and Mr Woodcock, he was very drab and spoke in this slow deliberate voice like he had some kind of mental problem. He said his favourite song was Johnny B Goode which in my opinion disbarred him from joining. But he was older and I think we all thought we might be able to tap him up for a few quid. I remember us, me Andy and Brian, saying that he would do till we found someone better. Ian later wore some mirror shades and was instantly changed into a ‘cool’ punk, at least that’s what he thought. There was a trend at the time for the bassist to be the straight guy and they usually ended up getting the sack. Things turned out different this time.

Andy’s recollections in his book suggest Ian was liberal with the truth when naming his influences as MC5 and Stooges on their introductory conversation. Ian remembers it somewhat differently, but whatever he was in.

Ian Woodcock (Bass): I was most influenced by R’nB music and by that I mean, Chuck Berry, Howling Wolf, John Lee Hooker and stuff like that. In the mid 70’s when everyone was into Bowie and Bolan, I was listening to Status Quo and ZZ Top.

I saw an ad in Melody Maker and went to meet Andy in Finchley. What was supposed to be an audition was actually a chat in his bedroom. He was heavily into Lou Reed and I was really not a fan of his or the Velvet Underground.

However, we both had the US import version of the Ramones first album, so knew all the words, which were included on the record sleeve. After that, the band met with me in Acton and we rehearsed for an afternoon and that was it, I was in.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) First time I saw Eater I thought they were crap. I answered an ad, I had to have an audition. Sniffin’ Glue 6, January 1977

Ian is the ‘old man’ at 17 and holds down a part time job and that makes a difference in band relationships. Think at school the difference two years makes between classes.

The introduction of Dee and Ian was a quantum leap for the duo to becoming a real band.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We were 15 years old. Not many people of that age would have would have been much better than us, so it was understandable that it was slow. But we very quickly got a lot better. I mean, as soon as Dee Generate came in, he sped us up because he couldn’t play the drums slowly. So he just sped up the tempo of all the songs quite considerably which made them sound better and made us able to actually play a bit. Then, of course Ian joined quickly after Dee and he could really play. So we went very quickly from being useless to being pretty good in a very, very short amount of time.

Within a month of that thing coming out in Sounds, we actually had the first full line up with me, Andy, Dee and Ian. And that was it. We were up and running. We literally started playing every three days; anywhere that we could.

Playing was also a new experience to Andy and Brian and who were beset by nerves given their age and the types of hostile/violent environment they were playing gigs to. However they had the support of some of the bigger bands on the scene.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Oh, yeah. I mean, initially it was it was just really crazy and scary.  The first gigs I was frightened and we all were shitting ourselves and being feeling physically sick with nerves and fear. I was genuinely frightened; I was just a little boy and really scared just being here, let alone playing to these people but that very quickly changed because the audience reaction was brilliant and people were fantastic with us at first. 

The first six months of Eater was brilliant; people just loved us and treated us brilliantly. All the other bands, in particular The Damned and The Clash, really looked after us and made sure that nothing bad happened to us. They didn’t need to do it. They just did it because they wanted to. It wasn’t cliquey to us. I guess they, being older, might say it was that but I wasn’t aware. I became aware of it later but for the first six months it was brilliant. It was like a huge band of brothers who were really supportive of one another, going to each other’s gigs and it just felt like a big gang. You were a part of this exciting new movement and we were all being relatively successful, and it felt great.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) When punk started, everybody was a nobody and we all got on very well. Of course things change, but people like The Clash, Vibrators, Gen X etc were all nice to us. However, no one helped us more than The Dammed. We were their resident support band for about a year, so we got to play in venues that would not have approached us directly.

Though Andy points out the divide between the big two punk bands and Eaters place as younger new comers.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Yeah, I was quite nervous around the likes of them. Whereas we’d joke and muck about with The Damned, Slaughter, whoever – there was always a certain hushed tone, reverence around The Clash and the Pistols. You didn’t interrupt and you only spoke when you were spoken to.

Ian soon moved into being the key songwriter of the band with Andy Blade, changing the original Andy/Brian dynamic of the band (Andy wrote 75% of the early pre Ian tunes) but writing some of the band’s best known and loved tunes.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I did most of the music arrangements for the new stuff we were working on. Andy would come to rehearsals with reams of lyrics. I would start playing something and he would say, ‘I’ve got something for that’, then we would start to put the song together. It was always a group thing

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Initially the first batch of songs was written by me and Andy and then when Ian joined he started contributing as well so Ian and Andy then started writing a lot together and I kind of  tailed off , because I found it hard writing songs to be honest with you. I wrote ‘Outside View’ and ‘Room For One’ and a couple with Andy of the earlier songs.

Then when Ian came, I had quite a large input on things like ‘Lock It Up’ and ‘Thinkin’ of the USA’ and stuff like that. But Ian came in being a real proper musician and he was just like coming up with stuff all the time. So it just morphed into him and Andy knocking songs off very quickly and easily. So I just kind of thought, oh, great, I can take it back seat and leave them to it so that’s how the dynamic changed in terms of the songwriting. 

The shift wouldn’t be visible to others until later

Gavin Reid (School friend) When the album came out I though what’s happened here? On the first single its Blade/Chevette but on the album its Blade/ Woodcock – didn’t notice it at the time. I thought Eater was Andy and Brian and that’s what it was, but then Ian gets half the songs and credits. What’s happened to Brian? Already there’s some shift.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Songs pre Ian were Paranoid Aftermath, Reflections, Outside View, Bedroom Fix, a vastly different version of Point Of View, Room for One and a terrible version of Come On by the Stones, which we only played because it contained three of the chords I knew and made the set seem longer.  🙂

Dee Generate (Drums) To start with we all got together in the little flat Brian had on the back of his mum and dads house and wrote together. I didn’t write anything except a few expletives on ‘Get Raped’. Later I wasn’t involved and Ian took a key role and they really started to do the band thing.

Preceding the Bill Grundy interview by a couple of weeks, which would definitely have put the kybosh on the affair, the teachers were either strangely switched off to the rise of punk in the media (it was billed as ‘Punks At the high school’ in Sounds) or were wanting to see the bands let the gig happen. It passes off without trouble, probably helped by only soft drinks and crisps being available! Its also featured in the Daily Mirror.

The latest – and youngest – punk rock band played their first gig in North London last night. Called Eater, their average age is just 15. Their drummer is Dee Generate otherwise known as Roger Bullen a 14 year old schoolboy from Caterham Surrey. Unfortunately his voice has not yet broken so he sounds slightly incongruous when he is talking about his commitment to punk. “Some bands might get accepted,” he piped ” But WE will never be acceptable. “His mum, Mrs Helen Bullen is fully behind him. ” I was a bit frightened for him at first, but now I have seen the band play I can see what they are trying to do.” she said.” I think it is great really. You should see him walking around – he looks like an old ragbag. Its so funny. Unfortunately we are having a bit of trouble with his school right now because he has taken so many days off. His headmaster doesn’t seem to understand about punk rock. Daily Mirror, 2^nd December 1976.

Next stop our heroes get a record label, records and punk stardom….

Caruzo was to bankroll and be the brains. Goodman was the talent scout/producer/sound man/van driver!

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) Caruzo Herbert Owen Fuller… was the twin brother of my childhood sweetheart Camellia. He was also an ex-Royal/Merchant Seaman who’d just come back to London after living for some time with his Japanese wife Naomi in Tokyo. While he was over there he did quite well as a club DJ and stuntman-actor. He had this Steve McQueen persona [and] had about £20,000 to invest in the project and loads of energy. My Amazing Adventures With The Sex Pistols

Originally to be called Rotten Records, as Dave tried to get Johnny Rotten interested, that soon fell away as Rotten declined the offer and even warned the young band against involvement with the duo. 

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I think Dave Goodman may well have been at the Hope & Anchor gig and spoke to us about having a record company, or about to have a record company, and would we like to be their first band and have a single out which of course was pretty enticing to us at our tender age. Even though loads of people, including Johnny Rotten, were saying, “don’t touch him with a bargepole”. “Don’t go anywhere near them. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I can throw him”.

But the fact that they were saying here sign this contract and you’ll be in the recording studio by the end of the month and your single will be out a month later was enticing. No one else was offering us that at the time and understandably we thought this could be our one and only chance of ever getting a record out. At that point, that was all we wanted; We were probably just 15, literally just turned fifteen. And it was like, if I get a record out, I’ll die happy. I don’t care what happens after that. If a record comes out with my name on it, that’s all I want. So when they waved the contract under our noses, we very willingly signed.

We all liked Dave and that was a big, big thing in our signing because we didn’t like Caruso who we thought creepy and wouldn’t have signed if it was just him. But the fact that he was in partnership with Dave who was a bit of a mixed bag but we all felt was a really nice guy.

Dee Generate (Drums) The ‘Label’ thing happened very suddenly and early on. It was very suspicious, and I was never comfortable with it. All the shit about backing from John Lydon, he was never involved. We signed our contracts under duress, with Caruso’s cab on the meter outside. He then invited all the parents to a dinner to get them to verify our signatures but none of us read the contract. We turned up in these long hippy wigs and big cigars and pissed about all evening. His wife got drunk and shouted across the restaurant that he had a small willy and he was useless in bed. Hilarious… Caruso was slime 

Ian Woodcock (Bass) In hindsight it was a bad move, as our record label, producer and management were all part of the same company.  No conflict of interest for them, but it was very limiting for us.  One of the problems with our ‘all in’ deal with The Label was that our royalty rates were very low. For record sales, 5%, for writing royalties 6% (writing royalties was an industry standard at the time)
 
By comparison,  Paul McCartney was getting 14%+6%.  Today, these rates for most artists start at 15%.  That’s not to say that we got paid any if that…

It was pretty unanimous that Caruso was dodgy.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) He did a bit of everything. I mean, he used to rent out van and PA and stuff out to various other bands.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Caruso was in his mid-twenties. He looked and sounded like a hippy, but you could tell he was nothing of the sort. He was too edgy and spiv like to be a proper hippy. There was an underlying threat of violence about him that belied the notion of any hippy ideals. Andy Blade Chronicles

Ian Woodcock saw it slightly differently, but it was again Dave Goodman who was the deciding factor.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) Dave Goodman helped us a great deal. He was a very good bass player in his own right, so he knew about the structure of songs. He had been producing stuff for a while, so had a good technical knowledge of how to connect all the instruments together in a listenable way. Not least, through his Sex Pistols relationship, he was well connected in the punk scene, although in reality he was a hippy. He was a very gentle guy and most people who knew him, liked him.

Dee Generate (Drums) We had interest from better labels, loads came to our gigs. Track Records would have signed us they were looking for a UK Punk band but we had already signed to The Label.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) It was only after when other much better companies saying, oh, you should’ve waited. You could have signed to us and actually got some money. I mean, yeah, I think if I had been 20 and someone had said, look, here’s the chance to get a record out I probably would still have leapt at it. The fact we were only 15, all the easier for them to hook us.

Initial rehearsals and demos are done in Dave Goodman’s dad’s shed.

Dee Generate (Drums) We recorded a demo in this shed at the bottom of Dave Goodman’s dads house that Dave had a little 8 track set up in. There was no kit so I played on two cardboard boxes.

True to their word though, The Label do record the band and the first single release from the band is ‘Outside View’ in March 1977. Written by Andy & Brian, but was actually recorded some months earlier in November 1976, it takes four months to set The Label up for its first release. It’s the fourth UK punk release behind the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy In the UK’, the Damned’s ‘New Rose’ and the Buzzcocks ‘Spiral Scratch’ ep. Not only that it’s played by John Peel on his show.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I think that day or a couple of days after it was released, we were playing the Roxy and we’d heard a rumour that John Peel was going to play it on his show.

So we were sitting outside in Dee Generates mom’s boyfriend’s car and we were sitting in this car listening to the radio, listening to the John Peel show and thinking, oh, well it doesn’t seem like he’s gonna play it. And then he not only played it, it was his record of the week. I think it was called John Peels Big 45 or something like that. We were just over the moon. It was like fantastic. I’ve made it.  I’m a rock star!

According to Dave Goodman though, they had tried to get Eater signed to a major label but without success, which let’s face it would have been near impossible. The Pistols were about to be thrown off EMI and no other punk band had signed let alone one barely just formed.

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) This first single ‘Outside View’ might only have had a white label on it when we sent it out in Dec 1976, but it still makes it the third UK Punk single to be released! We would have preferred to release it on a major label, but we just couldn’t find a sympathetic ear, believe me we tried! My Amazing Adventures With The Sex Pistols

Caruzo and Goodman may have been new to the record label game, but like their young prodigies they took to the challenge of promotion quickly identifying a target market for the band that would later cause a rift.

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) Caruzo and I used to print up posters and stick them up wherever we could. We had realised for instance, that the best target audience for Eater was school kids, so we took our product directly to them by advertising outside the school gates. During the Christmas holidays we had identified a dozen or so of the largest comprehensive schools in London and had gone round spraying EATER at the entrance, on the ground in massive letters. That way everyone had to walk over it for weeks until it faded. We also put “Outside View” posters up in close proximity wherever we could. It was a very direct form of advertising but it worked a treat. It meant that at least another 20,000 school kids would become aware of Eater and that was a start. My Amazing Adventures With The Sex Pistols

They also distribute numerous white labels targeting ‘movers and shakers’ with personal messages though some of them would raise an eyebrow back then and even more so now. At least none for Rolf Harris though!

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) Caruzo and I got busy setting the wheels of manufacturing in motion, and a short time and a few grand later we had a batch of white label promos to distribute to the press etc. I remember having to trundle down to the pressing plant in Hayes, Middlesex and bring as many boxes as I could carry home with me on the train. We spent the whole evening with Eater, who were encouraged to write personal messages on the records for the intended recipients, i.e. John Peel, Janis Long, Malcolm, Sid, Fluff, Wogan, Saville, J King, Tommy Vance, Nick Kent, Parsons, Ingham, Coon, etc etc. We just blitzed the lot. It seemed to work ’cause we had instant feedback. My Amazing Adventures With The Sex Pistols

Outside View quickly sells around 18,000 copies. The band are put on a wage by The Label and are on their way surfing the crest of the emerging punk wave with youth, naivety and blind enthusiasm.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We knew we were selling a lot of records, they put us on a wage from the offset, which was exactly fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence per week. I think fifteen pounds a week was the tax threshold at the time so it was a penny below the tax for the show. It sounds ridiculous now, but I think The Clash who were with CBS, were actually on thirty five pounds a week. So it wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds these days but that’s what we were on. So, yeah, we were always kept on a really bare minimum.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) We were paid £15 a week, which wasn’t a fortune, but enough to live on in the late ‘70’s.

The success of the first single enables The Label to expand so in early 1977 they rent premises and fund the band.

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label) … with the cash flowing, we bought Eater some decent equipment, a van and a PA. And we took a lease on a shop-cum-flat in Dawes Road, Fulham, yer poor man’s Chelsea. I started converting the basement into a rehearsal room cum studio space…My Amazing Adventures With The Sex Pistols

The band will practice here till they split.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) The studio, I mean the place in Fulham, which was basically a shop with a big basement and premises above it in Dawes road. Caruso and his wife lived in the rooms in the apartment above and the shop was basically The Label offices and the basement was the studio that we and other bands used to rehearse in. 

Gavin Reid (Schoolfriend) The Label HQ. There were a couple of Doberman guard dogs that were so placid that you could tap them on the nose with your knuckles. I met Dave Goodman there. Eater were in the basement rehearsing and I was in Dave G’s studio; well a little room with a mattress on the floor and a tiny mixing desk and cassette. There was a mike that went from the basement to the studio so Dave and them could talk. So in that room you couldn’t see them but hear them through the speaker.

The Label also branches out and feature in a March edition of the magazine ‘Music Week. The article quotes Fuller as saying that the company had a four-track studio where bands could cut new songs and “If we like them we are offering a one-year contract with a one-year option.” The Label would bear the costs of the studio sessions but wouldn’t offer artists any advance payments.

The article also observed that Fuller had a background in the Japanese Rock scene, and that the company had a base in Japan. Dave Goodman however has him as an ex Merchant Seaman, turned club DJ/stuntman with a Japanese wife called Naomi.

Meanwhile the band gigs frequently and often at the newly opened Roxy Club in Neal Street WC2. They are captured for posterity on Don Letts’ ‘Punk Rock Movie’ and also the Top 20 hit compilation album ‘The Roxy London WC2’ with ‘15’ and ‘I Don’t Need It’ which is released in June 1977, further enhancing their reputation.

Andy Blade (Eater) It helped our career enormously in that it confirmed our acceptance by the music press – who all reviewed the album. There were suddenly pictures of us appearing here there and everywhere. It was also a top twenty record, which gave us the pleasure of pointing this out, time and time again, to our mates at school, parents, siblings, etc etc. On the downside, our performance was hardly exhilarating – we could have done with a bit more of a sound check but It was very exciting having the mobile recording van parked up outside the club though.

The filming also features an extra member never to re-appear!

Andy Blade (Vocals) The pigs head was Dee’s idea. His stepdad was a milkman and he knew a butcher who he’d often buy animal parts from. He liked that kind of thing – you know what they’re like in Caterham. I couldn’t believe it when I walked into the dressing room and saw this…face, plonked on the table. I was in there for a full five minutes on my own with it, I felt sorry for the poor thing and started actually talking to it, it was a creepy moment. I contemplated putting some make up on it, it was looking a bit pasty, all the blood had long since drained from it’s face. But I didn’t, it seemed disrespectful. Ironically, chopping it with an axe later, onstage, didn’t. I love it at the end of that clip where instead of applauding, you hear the audience shriek as it get lobbed into the merry throng.

Live at The Roxy from Don Letts ‘Punk Rock Movie’
Note Dee’s mum, Glen Matlock and Arcane Vendetta in audience!

They also hang out there and avail themselves of traditional rock ‘n’ roll pursuits.

Andy Blade (Vocals) We were there almost every night for the three months Andy [Czezowski] was in charge. Everyone was out to get laid as far as I could tell. My secret? I never said no! Brian, Dee and I certainly made the most out of what was on offer. It was a playground of sex drugs and rock ‘n roll. Indisputably!

Nils Stevenson Feb7 1977 – Eater are the youngest group around. They’re still at school. Dee Generate, their drummer, is only fourteen, and a lot of people want to f**k him.” Vacant

Andy Blade (Vocals) My best experience at The Roxy was getting a blowjob on the fire escape. The Roxy  – London, Covent Garden. Andrew Czezowski & Susan Carrington

They go down well in the club which itself attracts a wide mix of people and strange antics.

Arcane Vendetta (Fanzine writer These Things) Eater – I got on well with them because we were around the same age. I loved them for their energy and the sheer unadulterated pogoing. There were ceiling pipes overhead and I wasn’t that tall but Christ you would hit those pipes with the top of your head and sort of land trying to smash the floor. There was no violence; sure people were slamming into each other and stuff like that, but it was just a laugh.

Dij & Pape were in the downstairs bar and they said ‘ere you lot guess what’s going on. There’s a bloke upstairs hacking at himself with a knife.’ We didn’t go up. We thought let him get on with it. Anyway we’re pogoing to Eater and there’s this fellow at the front and we’re pogoing wildly and there’s this hippy and basically he’s holding his hand out to Andy Blade and Andy licks it . Afterwards he tells me he thought it was tomato sauce. No Andy it was blood!

The band also pick up for a short time Lee Black Childers, flamboyant manager of the legendary Heartbreakers. Though he questions the contract the band signed, he doesn’t manage to change anything and Caruso strong arms him out of the picture. What he does give the band though is  kudos because Leee is very well connected and friend of people like Warhol, Lou Reed and key American names so if Leee is interested in the band they must have something.

As a young band it’s all happening fast; songs and gigs, record out, interviews, features, photos, nightclubs, fame. Photos of the band appear out at the Roxy club and gigs and a various assortment of band members and punk faces. Brian is loved up with Soo Catwoman, Dee in bed with a naked girl, Ian with JJ Burnel at the Nashville 1976 and Andy with Paul Weller and hero Lou Reed.

Dee says it in a nutshell

Dee Generate (Drums) We were amongst the first few bands; we didn’t need to define ourselves as part of anything; we were ‘it’ not part of it. The first gigs were really exciting and we got a mix of reactions from instant devotion to incredulity.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) When Punk rock took off it was brilliant; It was all my dreams come true all at once, very quickly. It was fantastic, exciting and fun. But obviously, it also had its downside as well. It’s great being ushered to the front of queues, getting free entry everywhere and being treated like stars, albeit very minor ones, but you also copped a lot of the unwelcome attention.

But at the age of 15. Thinking what I want to be is a famous musician and sort of three months later being that it messes with your head a little bit. And you do you do start to get a bit egotistical. You feel a bit cocky and you think like, oh, ‘I’m gonna be rich and famous now for the rest of my life’, which can happen obviously. But it takes work and concentration.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I never felt like an even minor star. I wasn’t a great one for publicity, so wasn’t the one who lead the interviews. Andy and Dee were much better at that. As such, I was rarely recognised and so had quite a normal life.

Gavin Reid (School friend) I don’t ever remember seeing Ian socially. Ian would go to the gig, do the gig and then go home. Very professional.

Brian didn’t socialise as much as Andy who was always at a party or gig and the drug intake that started with cider then cannabis then acid then other things. Brian didn’t get into that. Not quiet but he knew where to draw the line.

Dee is becoming the centre of attention in the band and as part of the teen appeal angle are featured in a May 1977 issue of Oh Boy! with Dee on the front cover.

Oh Boy! was one of a plethora of teen magazines at the time and was published in the late 70s and early 80s by IPC magazines. Targeted towards loved-up teenage girls, one particularly memorable feature aimed to entice the reader by claiming “If you dreams are of boys…We’ll make them come true!” Fresh from the freezer house indeed!

Click for larger images

Dee Generate (Drums) This all came about because I knew this woman who used to work for Midge Ure when he had his Slik band getting no 1’s. She had a contact at IPC, the people who did all these girlie mags. They asked us to do a session but we just pissed about and the one photo where I smiled got used. They tried to get us to pose with a giant safety pin and we wouldn’t but Andy tried to nick it and they got all snotty and kicked us out. We thought we had effectively ruined the shot but then it came out. We never did any more but they seemed to have hundreds of photos all from that session. They kept popping up in all the mags that they owned.

Gavin Reid (School friend) There must have been a bit of envy about the ‘Punk Panther’. The band had done nothing but there they were on the cover but more than that it was the drummer as on the cover not the lead singer. Then they get rid of him and it happens again with Phil Rowland!!! Why is the drummer always getting on the cover?

Ian Woodcock (Bass) We had originally planned to release ‘No Brains’ as a single. Our record company, The Label, was trying to get a publishing deal from Connolly & Connolly and they HATED IT! The Label told Andy and I to go away and write a commercial single. Looking back, this was a mistake, we should have released ‘No Brains’, as from a punk credibility perspective, it was a much stronger song.

It’s also during the recording that rifts deepen as band and label politics come into the picture resulting in Dee being leaving/being fired from the band.

Ian Woodcock (bass) Dee became unreliable. He would miss rehearsals and Dave Goodman had to work really hard on his recorded work. I wanted the band to be musically competent, that’s why we got Phil, who was and is a really technically gifted drummer

Brian gives some more detail

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We recorded everything very very quickly. That was part and parcel of why Dee Degenerate was ousted. Because on the day we went in and recorded ‘Thinkin’ of The USA’Dave decided that he wanted the drums to be different.

He came up with this quite complicated bass pattern between the bass drum and the snare that that we hadn’t been playing with. But when we went in to record it, he was like, right. Dee, I want you to do this and having just thrown it upon him there and then it took him a while to get it and to play it properly.

The whole time we were in there, you’ve got like Coruso standing there looking at his watch, watching the pound signs take over because it took quite a long time. I mean, he got it in the end and it sounded great and everything, but it took so long that they were like There’s no way we can record an album with Dee if he’s gonna take that long on every song; it’ll cost too much. 

Dee saw it differently

Dee Generate (Drums) I didn’t like the set up with the Label and Ian being critical of my drumming so they had this meeting at Caruso’s. I took some Mandies and drank a load of rum and turned up arse faced, which was hilarious, but they all got really pissed off. Ian particularly said I wasn’t good enough to be in the band. They said I was always pissed and took too many drugs. I left the meeting thinking that I’d sorted it all out, promised to behave, and practice more, and share my drugs, but the next day, I think, Andy phoned me and said I was sacked.

In actual fact the band had already got a new drummer in, friend of Andy’s brother Hass, Phil Rowland, and played a try out gig with him.

Andy Blade (Vocals) We knew Phil because he was mates with my brother, Hass.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We knew Phil because we’d already got him an audition with The Clash. When The Clash were looking for their new drummer, before they got Topper Headon and Phil auditioned with The Clash. So they knew that we knew him and suggested that we have a few rehearsals with him just to see how it goes. And obviously, it did go quite well because he’s a really good drummer. And then they organised this secret gig in Peterborough where we played unannounced, as it were, other than a few local posters advertising it. We played this one gig with Phil and it went really well and he played really well. And we were like, actually, yeah, this is quite nice.

Phil, as you’ll recall from earlier, was already known to the band from its earliest incarnation.

Phil Rowland (Drums) I started playing drums at school, when I was 15 I think at the suggestion of my mum who thought it might keep me out of trouble. My heroes at the time were, Slade, T.Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper etc. I wanted to play drums after listening to the first Roxy Music album.  I liked the whole Glam-Rock era  I had long hair, baggy trousers and platforms. I have to admit I also liked “Progressive Rock” and “Jazz Fusion” drummers like Billy Cobham and Carl Palmer. And then Punk happened… 

Andy gave my number to Joe Strummer who called me to audition for the Clash – I was too young and couldn’t hit the drums hard enough, but I got to play ‘London’s Burning’ with them about a dozen times.

I had been playing with some local bands in Finchley when Andy invited me down to Dingwalls to see them and shortly afterwards asked me if I wanted to audition. They were apparently unhappy with Dee. 

The firing of Dee is handled awkwardly.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We were just sitting at Dingwalls one night around this table chatting and drinking and stuff and Dave Goodman came over and said, right. You’ve got to contact Dee Generate and tell him he’s out of the band because we’re putting a press release out tomorrow about Phil being the new drummer.

So it kind of fell to me but in the end Andy said I’ll do it and we had to go into the office at Dingwalls and ask them to use their phone so we could sack our drummer. So Andy phones up and he’s just chatting and chatting and not getting round to actually telling Dee he was out the band. So in the end, if my memory serves me correctly, I ended up taking the phone off Andy saying look Dee I’m sorry but I’ve got to tell you you’re not in the band anymore. So I think he thinks it was my doing and choice and he’s never really spoken to me since.

In fact, like everything else when bands lose members, it’s a combination of many things but all had a part in Dee’s departure. For the Label; money. For Ian; Dee’s ability and for Brian and Andy a bit of jealousy.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I mean it wasn’t as black and white as that. I mean it was mine and Andy’s band. We started it. It was our baby. Then when Dee came along, to be honest, even though he was younger than us and smaller than us, he felt like a cool older brother, because he had this brilliant name, a really good image and he was really confident and everything. It was like, yeah, this is great. I love this. I think it’s brilliant that we’ve got Dee Generate as our drummer. It was really good. But it quite quickly got to the point where it was almost becoming like the Dee Generate band.

As Brian recounts though, if his hope was to go back up the band pecking order he was mistaken as Eater became dominated by musicians Ian and Phil while Brian and Andy slowly lost interest.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) In fact, one time this American publicist spoke to me and said,  we’re really interested in taking you to the States and organising a big tour and lots of gigs and television and we’ll throw a lot of money at this. But what we want is this, you know how the drummer is usually at the back of the stage. We’d really like Dee Degenerate to be right up front on the rostrum and the rest of the band around the back and we would need to change the name of the band from Eater to Thalidomide Baby.

They seriously said this. And it was at that point that I was thinking, ‘this really isn’t mine and Andy’s band anymore; it’s Dee Generate and Eater’. So personally, from my point of view it felt like I was now number four in the pecking order. It was Dee the star; Ian the musician and then I was sort of like bringing up the rear when this was my band. So I was a bit miffed about that.

So when it was suggested that he wasn’t a good enough drummer and we needed to get a really good drummer in, Ian was all for that for musical reasons because he was the proper musician and I was kind of well if Phil comes in and replaces Dee, then maybe It’ll go back to being Andy and me here as the mainstays of the band. But to be honest with you, it all backfired because it ended up being Ian and Phil’s band and me and Andy being dragged along by them.

I mean in hindsight, we should have just told them to piss off and just carried on with Dee Generate and this is no down on Phil; He’s a great drummer and a really great bloke but it was the wrong thing to do; obviously.

For Andy, it was initiated by Ian with Brian jealous of both Dee’s popularity and his relationship with him as Brian concurs above.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Ian’s biggest crime was to hatch and execute the plan to sack Dee Generate. His main argument was that his drumming wasn’t up to the job, but it was easy to see that he was quite jealous of all the attention Dee was getting from the press and everyone around us. We all were… [and] Dee’s extra-curricular, star tripping activities, not to mention the amount of drugs that were being chucked down his throat, or my girlfriends fondness for him, forced me to concur. I was still unhappy about it, though. Andy Blade Chronicles

Brian looking back on the time, admits his part in it and regrets it but makes the point that they all played a part to greater or lesser extent and wishes he could make contact with Dee all these years later.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I don’t blame him being bitter but it certainly wasn’t me and it wasn’t even really the band. It was like everything with The Label it came down to finances. They didn’t want to waste studio time and money on Dee struggling to record the songs quickly.

I’ve always known from the day that he thought I played a really big part in him being kicked out. I just thought it would be nice to actually put it out there, that it wasn’t me on my own. I never done it, Governor. I mean, I was part of it obviously but we all ended up doing it and it certainly wasn’t my idea.

Dave Goodman is pretty straight and concise on the affair and sees it more internal band related than driven by The Label.

Dave Goodman (Producer and The Label)Why did he leave?  As I remember it, Brian & Ian ganged up on him and Andy just went along with it.  They wanted their friend Phil Rowland who they thought was more of a muso type drummer. I tried to talk them out of it.  Malcolm McLaren thought they should hold onto him as he was one of their main assets.  Anyway, you know how bands can be. Punk77 Interview 20/1/2005

For Phil, replacing Dee was an opportunity.

Phil Rowland (Drums) One of the reasons Eater recruited me was to make their album. The three band members and their record company all told me that they had gigs and recording lined up and that their current drummer just wasn’t up to it. So I auditioned, they asked me to join the band and I said yes.

There were a few people who were disappointed he’d gone and girls loved him, but the band seemed to be happy with my playing. I had no idea until recently how much that had hurt his feelings. I was 17 and hadn’t been playing drums that long but I had been in a studio before and could play fast and in time and apparently that’s what they were looking for. I have always been far more interested in music and the art of drumming than I ever was in fashion or image so I didn’t give a shit about whether what we were doing was considered “Real Punk” or not. It was a great opportunity to get some real life experience. I wouldn’t say it was hard, I was having a great time, I lived to play drums and having the opportunity to do it full time was amazing. 

Either way Dee was bitter about the exit and reflects on what they lost but ironically, that really he had to go.

Dee Generate (Drums) They sacked me at the height of my powers. They lost their character, authenticity, became too musical, too dominated by Ian’s boring bass lines, played the wrong gigs, released joke records about yo yo’s, lost the audience, you name it went wrong. It did for me too; I just got out of my head all the time. With me in it they would have stayed chaotic, let people down more often, smashed up more equipment, played at variable tempos unintentionally during the same song all the time, and generally been a whole lot more interesting. They became better musically, more competent, but really boring.

Well after I got sacked I got into heroin and in a short time I had no drums, no friends and had nearly killed myself. That’s what happened to me after Eater, there was no one looking out for me I was an outcast. People started to get tired of me, throwing up on my shoes and nicking stuff from their houses. In the end I went home to sort myself out.

In November 1976 London Weekend Television had broadcast a documentary by Janet Street Porter on a new youth cult called punk rock that was sweeping the nation.  A year later Janet returned to the theme with another documentary entitled ‘A Year In Punk’ where she reviewed what had happened since. One feature was an interview with Dee Generate in the Roxy Club bar and at home, which manages to be both touching and a little sad as a bandless and already world weary 14 year old answers questions with some observations from his family.

Clip from the 1997 LWT documentary ‘Short, Sharp, Shock’.
Includes footage of EATER live at the ROXY playing ‘No Brains’ and from ‘Year In Punk’ from 1977

Meanwhile Eater carried on…

So it’s now July 1977 and the band have their new drummer Phil Rowland in the band and they go into the studios to record their first album with Goodman again producing. The band have pulled together a strong set of originals and covers that result in the imaginatively titled The Album and single Lock It Up. Both are released in October 1977. Lock It Up is released in 12” format featuring both it and the T Rex song Jeepster cover version inexplicably on both sides and just in case Top Of The Pops was to come a calling a promo video is made.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Come to think of it, there’s also a film we made for Top Of The Pops, should ‘Lock it Up’ have gone up instead of down the charts, I’d love to see that! I remember asking the label boss [Caruso] to bring some booze with him so we could loosen up a bit (first time filming etc). He bought along two miniatures of whisky! Our label should’ve been called ‘Cheapskate Hustlers’! http://punkrocker.org.uk/punkprofiles/andyblade.html

For Brian, the album was again done on the cheap, and argues that Dave Goodman’s limitations were shown though he unintentionally made a classic punk album. It was certainly an unusual choice of studio. Sound Developments in NW1 had opened in 1971 by Roger Sinclair and who’s primary goal was commercial radio. It had facilities for commercial jingles, voiceovers and orchestration! work

Brian Haddon (Guitar) The trebly overdubbed album. It was really odd. I mean, it was recorded in a studio that was mainly used for recording television adverts and stuff. It wasn’t a studio that many bands had used and like everything The Label did it was on a shoestring and on a real budget.

Everyone, including us, thought he was this really cool producer because he’d done the early Sex Pistols stuff which was recorded in a very basic way in four or eight track format. Because of that, it was really raw and exciting and sounded great. When he got us into this big 24 track television recording studio, I think it showed that he really wasn’t a very good producer or engineer at all when it came to that kind of thing. So he was just let’s try this and try to adapt and try a bit of this, try a bit of that and it was all so put that it just didn’t work for me.

I mean, it’s fine I’m fine with it now because I can listen to it now and think that the weird, trebly bass sound and all of that, it’s part of the quirkiness of it. It’s part of what makes it sort of slightly unique. But at the time, I hated it. I was just like, how can you make us sound so weird? That’s not what we sound like live. Whereas with the Pistols stuff, it did kind of sound like they sounded live. I can only put it down to the fact that when he did the Pistol’s stuff, it was recorded in an almost live way. Whereas when he got us into this studio, I think he thought he was going to get creative and I didn’t think it worked at all.

However the album has its admirers – from Henry Rollins to J Mascis to a new generation of kids.

Phil Rowland (Drums) People LOVE Ian’s bass sound. A producer I work with in LA just this year had an all girl punk band in the studio who told him they want the bass sound from the Eater album. That trebly guitar and bass is the sound of that record and it resonated with kids all over the world. Listening to the Eater album now I just hear everything that’s wrong with it, but that record means a lot to a lot of people in many different countries.

For Ian it was the studio and Brian’s equipment set up that meant he had to add more depth and which helped make that ‘sound.’

Ian Woodcock (Bass) – I can’t remember the name of the studio we recorded The Album in (it was close to Utopia studios), but it was a vast empty room and had a huge mixing desk and other equipment that the engineer, seemed to want to ‘max out’. Brian had bought a transistor amplifier, which sounded like a fuzz box, so I had to do guitar backing tracks with my valve Ampeg amps, to try and beef it up a bit. It was something that Dave and I had done on the singles, to try and get more depth to our sound. I used a combination of the Ampeg V4, which Mick Jones also used and a Fender Champ, which gave the ‘toppy’ sound to my bass.

A view shared by Phil Rowland.

Phil Rowland (Drums) There are a lot of over dubs. We sounded pretty raw live but everything sounded so dead in the studio. Dave Goodman made us sound more proficient than we actually were. Brian’s guitar sound was a bit of a problem; Ian would have to change the settings on Brian’s amp to get a decent sound out of it but Brian would get back on it and it would sound all trebly again!

I remember the Sound Developments studio in Chalk Farm being ok,not a real rock and roll hangout so the sound was a little flat. I don’t recall there being much ambience and there was no “live” room for drums.

We were all pretty clueless so we let Dave Goodman run the show.I think we all really enjoyed the process and it was exciting to be making some music. I think all band members would agree that the sound was cleaner and poppier than we wanted it to be or sounded like live.

Surprisingly, Andy Blade thought it did capture their sound.

It was close, just a hell of a lot cleaner. Debatable whether that worked though. Punk77 Interview 9/11/2004

And the guitar! Brian should have patented that ‘strumming a three bar fire’ sound he seemed to favour! Punk77 email 2020

The album also achieved a lot of reviews adding to the widespread publicity across the music press, national press and teeny mags the band had accumulated. The challenge for the band was the focus on their age which was a double edged sword. For Andy it rankled him.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Not surprisingly, the focus of attention was directed more towards our average age than our music but on the whole we were treated as a bit of a novelty. It pissed me off. The Andy Blade Chronicles

Andy on the whole was happy as long they were mentioned though he ‘…wished it was a bit nicer, that’s all”. He was scathing about fanzines calling them “ultra-elitist’ and epitomizing …the old regime and the old regime was the enemy. As simple as that.” Sniffin’ Glue and 48 Thrills were singled out for particular ire. However Andy’s a bit selective here because it was fanzines like ‘These Things’ and ‘Bondage’ which were very early proponents and supporters of the band going straight from gig to page.

The band didn’t help themselves though. Not only that they were treading a strange path. They were punk and playing to teen fans who probably liked the Bay City Rollers but singing about ‘getting raped’, dead girls in freezers and prostitutes among their subject matter. Appearing on the cover of Oh Boy! one week and then being interviewed for the music weeklies didn’t do them any favours. But as Brian recalls they acted like kids because they were … well kids in a grown-up world!

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Yeah. Fanzines loved us but the music industry and the media, TV, radio and journalists seemed to hate us and I’m not entirely sure why. I think possibly because our age played into it. Without a doubt, there were times when with journalists and stuff, we would be asked things and we would give a very flippant, childish answers because we were flippin’ children and I think they could have made a few allowances for that.

But they didn’t; they wanted to talk to me and get the same kind of answers back that they would get from Joe Strummer or John Lydon. But of course, how could I? I was fifteen, for God sake. I had barely lived and I had no reference points. I had nothing to talk about other than school and being in Eater. That was it. I didn’t know anything else. It was going to be at least another two years before I could even vote!

But I think you can add in a mighty dollop of jealousy. Here were four youngsters who had skipped the school of hard knocks and paying their dues and found minor fame. Who actually had some fucking good songs courtesy of Mr Woodcock and some fucking fine lyrics courtesy of Andy Blade and those lyrics stand up to many of their contemporaries. Who when interviewed though didn’t really take it that seriously which to music journalists in love with themselves is a serious crime.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) One of the reasons that we got stick from Journo’s was that they were so much older than us. You can imagine that you’re a mid-20’s cool writer from the NME, what can a 16 year old kid tell you? The reality is, what Andy was writing about was very poignant for people of that age & time.

“They (journalists) always ask stupid questions like ‘What does mummy think? ”What about safety pins?’ you know. They ask ‘What’s behind it?’ Stupid. There’s nothing significant or shocking about what we do. We just play for ourselves, to kids like ourselves. There’s nothing behind it.’ Ian Woodcock Sniffin’ Glue 6 Jan ’77

Phil Rowland (Drums) We did get a lot of stick from the press, some of it deserved and some not. I think our age worked against us. The music press at the time liked certain bands who were cooler than us. For the most part they didn’t like us. I always liked Andy’s writing he had some good ideas and a great sense of humour. It was a little disappointing, we would have liked them to take us more seriously. But having said that we were having too good a time to let it really bother us.

Gavin Reid (School Friend) The production on the later stuff improved but they were seen as a bit of a joke by the other groups. Little school kids who shouldn’t be there and that sort of attitude and once you’re labelled that, it’s difficult to shake off.

What times these were for the band. In nine months the band have gone from a prank to reality with a high profile with interviews and features, gigs, three singles and an album. They’re up there with fellow heavy hitters the Pistols, Clash & Damned and part of the first wave of the exciting phenomena of Punk Rock sweeping the nation and they’re average age is still 16! Their album is the third Punk album after the Damned (of course!) and the Clash and precedes fellow bands Buzzcocks and Slaughter & The Dogs albums by almost a year. They’ve also been featured on a Top 20 album.

The band are also happy with the Label and their progress as Jon Herlihy of Flicks fanzine recounts.

You’ve probably heard all the worst things about Eater, hope this shows another side, they try to play as well as they can, stretch themselves, the money they’ve been getting from the much-criticised ‘label’ company has been going on music gear rather than clothes, liggers parties, propaganda etc and they are refusing to compromise even though they want nation/worldwide recognition…they are sticking by ‘the label’ which has given them an excellent deal and musical freedom and lots of he right unsensational backing a new group needs, there’s a touring van promised and projected tour of America and Japan. Flicks 1977

So were they successful and were The Label being honest? Dave Goodman recounts how they impressed a Japanese company, probably from Polydor records.

Dave Goodman (Producer & The Label) Eater put on a blinding show and suitably impressed the Japanese record company representative who’d come to check them out. We decided to stage a bit of self-promotion. The Tokyo A&R guy was staying at a flash hotel near Marble Arch and we had scheduled a little trip for him through Hyde Park and on to the legendary Kings Road. We’d got our poster mafia man Tommy the Pill to concentrate most of the Eater posters in this area. 

We also conscripted certain friends and family to be present along the route, dressed in punk gear with ‘Eater’ painted on their backs and wearing Eater badges.

As Mister Music-Japan left his hotel he saw an extremely young punk of 12 or so, stroll up to the wall opposite and spray ‘Eater’ all over it. (This was Symeon, Caruzo’s brother.) The name Eater cropped up a hundred times more that day and the whole operation was a success.

You can’t fault the effort from The Label to make the deal but then Brian recalls how they found out that a deal had been struck with Mister Music-Japan and them not getting anything from it.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We also discovered something one day when we were in in Caruso’s office and he wasn’t around. We started opening drawers and files and things and looking in them and we discovered that they’d signed a licensing deal with Polydor in Japan. So all our stuff in Japan was being released on Polydor and selling quite nicely. I think they got quite a nice lump sum of Polydor for doing that in the first place but they didn’t even tell us about it. We had to then sort of say to them, ‘have you anything to tell us?’

We were like, well, Polydor Japan and they were like, ‘oh, it was gonna be a surprise. We were gonna, like, take you out for dinner and then tell you.’ It was really shitty and sneaky. I mean, it was like Del Boy and Rodney running a record company.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I had a huge argument with Caruso when I suggested that Andy and I should sign a publishing agreement with another company, if he wasn’t prepared to give us an advance. It got very heated and it wasn’t until we signed our deal with Polydor Japan that I realised why. I was the only one of us who was over eighteen at that time, so physically signed the contract, whilst everyone else had their parents sign.  It was at a big formal dinner in Soho, record executives from Japan being there.  When I signed the agreement (which none of us had seen before), it was back dated six months.  Clearly, our publishing rights had been signed away, without having the right to do so.

Another person not happy was Dee Generate as the cover for the Japanese release of Outside View features the new band line up for the song he helped write and played on!

Indeed the success of their records their meant there was demand for them to tour both there and in the States but ironically their age and not attending school scuppered that.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We had these two tours of America planned where we were very popular and sold quite a few records out there. We were also very popular in Japan and sold loads of records in Japan. So we were supposed to twice go to America and twice to Japan. All four of those tours, were cancelled and didn’t happen because of our age; we couldn’t get the visas because, we were still at school, but not attending. In Andy’s case, his mum was being taken to court by ILEA, the Inner London education authority, for non-attendance.

So we needed the okay of ILEA. And then obviously, they weren’t going to, on one hand, be trying to take his mum to court for non-attendance of school whilst in the other hand, the signing letters saying, we’re happy for these people to go to Japan. So that’s why it never happened.

Instead they were one of the first bands to tour Europe playing in Belgium and Amsterdam with the song ‘Holland’ being written as a result. While over in Holland they have a night off and manage to catch the Sex Pistols.

Dave Goodman, Phil Rowland & Johnny Rotten share a joke backstage at the Sex Pistols gig Arnhem Holland December 1977

Post The Album the band they were now in unfamiliar waters. While riding on that first exciting wave of Punk as it took off in what was fairly empty waters, they now were one band in a deluge. Their first batch of songs were out there on album and singles and while doing moderately well hadn’t catapulted them into the stratosphere. Now what had started as fun and a laugh became the serious business of ‘musical direction, ‘band direction’ and making money for the record label and the band (and label) weren’t equipped to deal with this. It also meant they needed to generate new songs ready for more singles.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) It did quite quickly start to get a bit cliquey once the albums started coming out, once The Sex Pistols started signing to different major labels every other week and the Clash signed to CBS and big advances were all being talked about. I think it then started to get cliquey but that initial first sort of six months was great and really good fun. Everyone knew everyone and were having a real blast and really enjoying it and the audiences were loving it as well.

Then it peaked and turned and the following six months was sort of tapering off. The atmosphere at the gigs was changing. It was getting more hostile and there were fights at most venues most nights (see NME letter 11.3.78 above). Then you had the teddy boys and the skinhead thing and there weren’t any more of these really exciting things that you look forward to and it started to become “what’s going to happen tonight?”

Ian Woodcock (Bass) It could be tough. We had a couple of punch ups in ‘the sticks’. But that was part of life in the ‘70’s. We got spat at, I hated it. I never saw it at a gig until the newspapers started reporting it, then it was everywhere.

There were also other dangers and predators about for young boys and, though Caruso gets a bad rap in this story, he did look out for his band as this story about Kevin St John, the gay gangster owner of the Roxy Club shows.

Phil Rowland (Drums) Around that time Eater played at the Vortex. After the sound check someone came up behind me and said something in my ear. Caruso Fuller, Eater’s manager told me that the guy was the owner of the Roxy and was up to no good and that I should stay away from him at all costs.

Not too long after, me and our roadie Tommy were dropping off some equipment at the Roxy late one evening, we went into the office and there was the same creepy guy from the Vortex. He was lounging in a chair, smoking a cigar with a young boy on each knee. Caruso was apparently right.

Phil also recounts another story again showing how much Dave Goodman was part of the band.

Phil Rowland (Drums) For the most part it was a lot of fun, I always thought Andy was a talented writer and we had some good shows. We spent a lot of time in the van going up & down the M1. One of my favorite Eater shows was in Manchester when Brian and Ian refused to go because we were late. We did the show with Dave Goodman on bass and our roadie Nick on guitar. We did a bunch of Pistols and Heartbreakers songs as well as Eater stuff.

For example they were still billed to be playing the Roxy Club long after its heyday sandwiched between a gay night and later punk no hopers. Add into it The Label trying to interfere with their look and sound. All this and they were barely on average 16!

Next to go was Brian as it had stopped being fun.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) And then we had The Label. By now, Caruso realised that there was quite an interest in us from teen magazines like Jackie, Fab 208, Just Teen and all that kind of stuff. So he was thinking there’s lots of money to be made here. So we had The Label wanting us to be a pop band and wear all these sort of like poppy coloured clothing and stuff and do all these photo shoots with girlie magazines and you had Ian and Phil wanting us to become more sort of R&B slash Mod. And me and Andy wanting to be moving more towards Bowie and Sparks and stuff like that. So what we ended up being, was some kind of weird amalgamation of all three and at the same time none of them. So it was all musically getting very messy and confused.

As Andy recounts in his book, Caruso and The Label wanted the pop direction

Amongst a host of other crimes, he’d decided the teeny market was such a lucrative one for us that he’d virtually given up promoting Eater anywhere else.. He’s recently hired a new publicity agent who was very busy arranging dates and tack events with poptastic groups also unlucky to be featured in the pages of Fab 208, Oh Boy! And Jackie. Because of him, we were on first name terms with the like of Flintlock, a sort of 5th rate Bay City Rollers, whom we’d gigged with. Andy Blade Chronicles

Phil Rowland (Drums) The Fab 208 show was part of Caruso Fuller and Dave Goodman‘s plan to capture some of the teen market. I honestly don’t remember where it was, somewhere in the UK for sure. I think we played our usual set to a crowd of hysterical screaming teenage girls which we all found highly amusing; we were the Bay City Rollers for 5 minutes. Some of them clearly knew about the band, they had magazines which they asked us to autograph, but I think most of them had no idea who we were!

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I remember doing a gig in Sheffield with Peter Powell and Flintlock. About 2,000 screaming 12 year old girls. It was awful and I was clear that we had to stay well away from that kind of commercial stuff.

Phil Rowland (Drums) I did those photo shoots as part of  the Label trying to widen our audience. I’m unsure how successful that was. In terms of the reaction to it i think it generated more scepticism and sneering from the punk crowd and the mainstream rock press who for the most part didn’t like us anyway, but the girls in my neighborhood were mightily impressed. 🙂

Before we give our heroes a hard time, though the roller skating feature is a little odd, take a look at the below and find the chiselled cheekbones and bleached barnets of the number one revolutionaries The Clash and pop punksters Generation X. Kid Reid from The Boys also appeared as a pin up in a similar teenage girls magazine Pink.

So to emphasize the surrealness of the band, they go from doing gigs to screaming kids at a pop event to then finding themselves headlining the still running Roxy Club to 50 punks covering them in phlegm.

Phil Rowland (Drums) We had two different audiences – Punks and teenage girls who saw us in Oh Boy! and Mates magazines. If we acted tough I don’t think anyone was convinced. We always went down well except for a couple of instances up north when we were booked into working mans clubs where they hated punk rockers.

A second album was having some early ideas

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Me and Andy were talking all the time about how Eater has moved completely away from what we wanted it to be. There was a batch of songs which were going to be the core of the second album. So that stuff like Debutante’s Ball, Holland, Typewriter Baby, Point of View and an early version of What She Wants. But then Ian’s and Phil’s influence came up with things like Reach for the Sky and Notebook and other songs that were all very much of a likeness in that sense. That was the core of what would have been the second album but I was thinking ‘I’m not sure I want to do this.’

We had ideas for the second album that were very different from The Labels. Me and Andy wanted the second album to be called What ever happened to Baby Jane and have Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the cover. With that classic garish still from it of an elderly Bette Davis. We wanted the album to kick off with that song I’ve Written a Letter To Daddy. If you watch the movie, you’ll hear it and its creepy and eerie and we really liked it. So we thought that be a great way for the album to start then crack into Holland or whatever. It was just tentative early ideas but me and Andy had an idea of what direction we wanted it to go in and it was very different to Phil and Ian and even more different from what The Label wanted. So it was obvious it was all going to be a bit of a mess so I was like ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’

With the growing gap between The Label and the band it’s probably no surprise that Dave Goodman’s view of the second album is drastically different and to be honest not borne out by the song titles described by Brian above!

Dave Goodman (Producer & The Label) We always thought that it was a question of time with Eater. They were so young to start with we just wanted to help them mature. Malcolm thought the same and, in some ways, put this idea into our heads. We gave them too much rope and in the end they tied themselves up with it. The second album was going to be a concept album about Sid Vicious called “Childhood” but apart from a few unfinished demos, it didn’t materialise. Punk77 Interview 20/1/2005

For Brian it was not just the band but also the changing audience

Brian Haddon (Guitar) In the months leading up to that, I was like, this is rubbish we’re playing to angry audiences that don’t seem to really like us much anymore; the people that did like us are too scared to come to the gigs because it’s such nasty atmospheres at them now. I wasn’t really enjoying it.

I wanted to have a rest because from the day that we started until the time I left we were gigging relentlessly. Even though we weren’t on tour as such, we would be playing two or three times a week and almost every week. Plus recordings and interviews and. Photo shoots and goodness knows what. On top of that also rehearsing and trying to write new songs so were doing a hell of a lot!

Gavin Reid (School friend) after a while he probably burnt out. They missed their schooling and exams and his family wanted him to have a proper job.

The result for Brian was the decision to leave the band he had founded and take some time off.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) So we had this massive tour lined up with Slaughter & The Dogs and another band Blitzkrieg Bop and I said to the band and The Label, I’ll do the tour and that’s it. They tried to talk me out of it, but I wasn’t having it as I’d made my mind up and it wasn’t a flash decision. I mean I didn’t really think about it a lot, but I wasn’t gonna change my mind.

It was a long and gruelling tour for some 30 gigs but I just enjoyed it and had fun. I was thinking ‘all I‘ve got to do is finish this tour and then then I can retire at the age 16!’

Though almost immediately his services were required elsewhere, though he held fast in his intent.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) I was shattered and determined that I was going to do nothing for at least a month and just sort of laze around and hang out with my mates to catch my breath. But I was immediately contacted by Menace and they were like “we really would like you to join. We need you now because we’re about to be gigging and recording. But I was like, “if you still want a guitarist in a month or two then get in contact, but at the moment I just really want two months off.”

After a couple of months off I joined a band called The Outrage. We didn’t do any gigs because they when I joined them, they had some recording time at RAC studios. So we basically went into the studio and sort of almost writing in the studios and recording demos and stuff.

Interestingly Noel Marin, the drummer from Menace, doesn’t remember Brian being offered the guitarist position as the band were still going at that time so could be bands have been mixed up.

For Brian that was basically it band wise. The Slaughter & The Dogs tour also sowed the seeds for the later split. Slaughter & The Dogs quit the tour in the end as did Blitzkrieg Bop leaving Eater to finish the tour.

Phil Rowland (Drums) We started a tour with Slaughter & The Dogs in 1978; a few days into the tour their drummer disappeared for a few days and I actually did one show with both bands. They quit the tour early and we did a few remaining dates on our own.

Meanwhile the band ploughed on with Ian and Phil believing Brian’s leaving was an opportunity.

Phil Rowland (Drummer) We all liked Brian, but we needed a better guitar player and he didn’t seem that interested in improving. I brought Gary Steadman in as he had a better sound but was more suited to his next band Classix Nouveaux.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I thought we should become a more mainstream rock/pop band. Brian left because we were putting a lot of pressure on him to improve. Gary Steadman had replaced Brian, so from a technical standpoint, we could play at a proficient level.

The person brought in to replace him was a friend of Phil’s reported in Sounds as ‘being a great fan of Eater from the start.’

Gary Steadman (Guitar) I got into playing guitar when I was about 8 years old. Had a few classical guitar lessons at school but soon got bored. I was first influenced by Jimi Hendrix and I realised that playing in a band was a good way of meeting girls! I played in a school band and auditioned Phil Rowland on drums for a band I was in but he wasn’t interested. When the vacancy for guitar came up in Eater, he recommended me. I hadn’t heard of Eater before I auditioned for them.

Gavin Reid (School friend) I’m walking down the road close to where I live and a car goes by. Andy is in it and sees me and he’s banging on the window. He tells the driver to stop and he then reverses to me, but unknown to him Andy has opened the door and bang! It goes right into the tree and buckles the door. The driver gets out and Andy goes ‘this is our new guitarist Gary’ and Gary is going ‘this is my parent car!’

They forgot they were supposed to be full time professional musicians and you need to get a work ethic. As soon as Gary joined they should have practiced all the hours and got ready for a second album.

All the challenges remained about direction, but with Steadman in the band it was business as usual with teen magazines Oh Boy! and Mates photo shoots for their teen audience. Click on the below for larger images

Gary was blissfully unaware of any dissention within the band.

Gary Steadman (Guitar) I wasn’t aware of a divide between the members. I think Caruso was just interested in making money and Dave was a big fan of American punk bands like the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers.

A single was released with the new lineup. Andy Blade had wanted Points Of View, one of the band’s earliest songs, as the next single but was voted down for What She Wants She Needs which duly sold disappointedly and, to be honest is a lacklustre affair. However the plan was to pick up back on the new album.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) We had a few songs already prepared, but we had planned to write when we were down at Rockfield. As I said, Andy always had reams of stuff, so a lot of it would have been putting a musical structure top it.

The end came without rancour and the surprise was that each of the band (bar Gary) felt the same way that it had run its course.

Gary Steadman (Guitar) We were working on some songs and did some recordings for a second album but the band disbanded after the lack of interest in the single.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) Phil was leaving to join Slaughter & The Dogs and Andy and I had had enough. There was no great falling out, just, let’s move on.

We were supposed to record our second album at Rockfield in Wales, but we split up about a week before the recording was due to start. As a deposit had already been paid, Dave Goodman travelled down with Steve Jones and Paul Cook to record the Liddell Towers single. They used the music that I had written for an ex Bay City Rollers session that I was working on.

Phil Rowland (Drummer) I don’t remember clearly how it ended; we were all fed up for one reason or another. Both Eater and Slaughter & The Dogs broke up around the same time and Rossi called me to come up to Manchester to play with his new band, which at that time was Rossi and Howard from SATD, Billy Duffy on guitar and Stephen Morrissey on vocals. That band moved to London without Morrissey and became Studio Sweethearts – terrible name, given us By Ken Pitt, David Bowie’s first manager.

Andy Blade (Vocals) I think we all knew the game was up. I don’t know how long Phil and Ian had been talking to other musicians about forming their respective new bands, but I was also planning my next move after Eater, hanging out with Brian James and various other musicians I respected who opened me up to a more eclectic tastes. I only wanted to pursue a direction that interested and inspired me. Generally speaking, that direction was too ‘weird’ for the basic rock band Eater had become.

At this stage the band were in disarray, Brian had left, and we were not really communicating. The ‘gang’ element had totally vanished, and both our label and producer were too busy working on other bands to care. My band- in the meantime – unbeknownst to me, were already planning their individual departures from my sinking boat, I presume, even before we’d started auditioning for a new guitarist. Only twelve months before, it was the most exciting time to be alive, EVER – what the fuck could have gone so wrong? Probably the flip side of whatever it had been (also incredible) that had gone so right. Punk77 November 2021

Enough was enough. On the way to a rehearsal at The Labels Studio in Fulham, I told Phil, Ian and Gary that I wanted to quit. Apart from the new boy Gary, I was surprised to find they all felt the same way. And so, along with the demise of punk rock, so too did Eater implode. There seemed little point in continuing with something which was once so vital, exhilarating and all-consuming. At the beginning I would’ve happily walked from one end of London to the other amp and guitar in hand, to get to a rehearsal. At the end, I had no desire to get out of bed and be driven to our own studio. What fun it turned it out to be. Andy Blade Chronicles

Gavin Reid (School friend) Andy needed his best mate  Brian and when he left I think he thought ‘what’s it about now?’ There’s three musicians now getting more serious and more of the others writing the songs and arguments over the direction. You can see the changing sound on the last single.

One of the first bands to form in the first wave of Punk were no more. The Pioneers of the letter ‘e’ had gone. If it was any plus there was now in addition to them…The Exile, Ed Banger, Essential Logic and the Edge – all one trick ponies disappearing into oblivion. Oh and Eddie & The Hot Rods still!

After Eater no member of the band did particularly well, except ironically Gary Steadman who found minor chart success with Classix Nouveaux and later joined Flock Of Seagulls. Gary is currently a music teacher and session guitarist.

Gary Steadman (Guitar) I did enjoy my time in band. I did play in a few bands with Andy Blade after Classix Nouveaux, but we failed to secure a record deal.

As you would expect, Ian was in demand, but none of the bands he joined really did anything and he retired from the music business.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) After Eater, I was in a band called Arthur’s Dialema with Gary Steadman and Bryson Graham (Ex Spooky Tooth and George Harrison). Then I was asked to join The Vibrators. I had been doing quite a lot of session work and tours with the likes of David Essex, Gary Glitter etc. After the Vibrators, Eddie and I formed The Shots, with Phil Ram on guitar. Finally I joined Empire with Mark Laff and Derwood. And that was it for me.

Brian, as we said earlier basically gave up Music but is now doing stuff on the sidelines and has released an album – check out his single Believe Me plus a version of Room For One and some more stuff. He’s also been performing numbers on Facebook.

Dave Goodman continued to squeeze out what he could from his early Sex Pistols recordings, but never got his production credit for No Fun. He also did some questionable licensing deals of Eater stuff and some strange Punks on 45 stuff confirming his loveable rogue status. He also stayed true to continuing his hippy dream on the island of Malta where he sadly died of a heart attack in 2005. He was fondly remembered. His partner Caruso Fuller disappeared in the early eighties with whatever was left but gave back the rights to the recordings to Andy Blade in 2021.

Phil Rowland joined the short lived Studio Sweethearts then the reformed Slaughter & The Dogs. He now lives in LA and works in the film industry but continues playing drums. Its 2020 and he still catches up with past members of the Studio Sweethearts when they are in town.

Phil was in the studio recently with singer Monkey from the Adicts, Kevin Preston (Prima Donna, Green Day) and Inge Johanson (Against Me, International Noise Conspiracy) with a4 Track EP coming in February 2021. He is also recording drums for several upcoming projects at his studio in Los Angeles while his current band The Noble Prix are on hiatus until the pandemic ends.

Roger Bullen, aka Dee Generate, occasionally plays his drums.

Andy continued on looking to start again doing some excellent work/songs with Brian James that should have been the making of them, some questionable hippy stuff with Dave Goodman available on Dave’s website, singing on the Friendly Hopefuls Punks on 45 single of which we’ll say no more before ploughing a very eccentric English music furrow.

And so the end

Andy Blade (Vocals) …Eater was nothing more than a childhood prank, a tall story inadvertently taken seriously. A secret game that got out of hand… Andy Blade Chronicles

But oh what a prank and what songs and adventures they made and had before musical differences and personnel changes pulled the band and friendships apart.

The Eater story is one of opposites, coincidences, mini disasters, chance and opportunities that all combined to create a successful band and label albeit for a while.

• 1976 – The band is started as a prank which leads to..
• The band featuring in the press
• The band get Dee Generate which galvanizes them both in terms of speed and look and attitude
• The band get a bassist Ian Woodcock – this is the pivotal moment for the band. From here will come Dee’s sacking BUT the band becoming tighter, more musical and a lot of the classic songs written. It will also be the beginning of the end for the band as Brian Chevette moves to the back of the queue in the band pecking order and the songs written post album reveal the band and its members are not going in the same direction
• The band sign to The Label – you can argue what if they waited for a bigger label but its just navel gazing. The Label got them out there with 3 singles and an album right at the start of punk rock. It was the band that ran out of ideas and steam. Lets face it Eater weren’t the Slits, Banshees or Ants who unsigned developed & changed from their early incarnations BUT who also lost out on recording great early songs/arrangements.
• 1977 – The band land on the Roxy Comp which makes the Top 20 album charts
• The band walk a schizophrenic tightrope between teen magazines and more serious music weeklies never seen before or again in punk rock
• The band get Phil Rowland – the band again become tighter and more musical but Phil and Ian will become the dominant musical force which though more professional will mean songs, though more musically accomplished, lose their edge.
• 1978 – The band lose founder Brian Chevette – Brian has his limitations musically and he’s exhausted.
• Diminishing record sales, lack of direction, no real new songs and a musical world leaving them behind means the band are happy to call it quits
• Jan 1979 For Andy and Brian they are just 16 when it ends.

There’s also the personal toll. Interestingly Phil and Ian seemed unaffected and at an early age seasoned pros. Ian is extremely level headed and so honest in his interview answers considering some of the things said about him and his role in the band over the years. It’s amazing to realise he was just 17 at the time when he was writing classic songs and doing sessions for others. Also, without him, you could argue the band would have never have got as far as they did.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) My thoughts on Eater now? It was great fun and I’m grateful to Andy for giving me the chance to join his band.

For the others there was definitely a personal impact on them. We’ve talked about the struggles Dee, aka Roger Bullen, had post Eater in his young life but what would he change.

Dee Generate (Drums) I’d change nothing really. I think that if we had stayed together we would still be in the same position, thinking about what could have been. We were too young to make it work. Maybe that’s what’s good about Eater, we never got old and boring well while anyone was watching anyway, and why we were the definitive Punk band.

For Brian and Andy it was the same. Where do you go after experiencing such exciting intensity of sights, sounds and experiences over a 2 year period in one of the most exciting musical movements ever and then find yourself, as Brian says, retired at the age of 16! Whatever comes next can only be an anti-climax. Because being in an up and coming band is a rush of imagination, innovation, band friends, egos, girls and illegal substances. For Eater they never had to pay their dues on the rock’n’roll circuit. Their was no gradual rise. Their success came swiftly over a period of around 9 months then a denouement lasting a similar period.

Andy Blade (Vocals) [Dee Generate] and I had merrily traded in our Innocence for self-indulgence a long time ago. Innocence wasn’t an adjective we related to much anymore. Our childhood was getting well and truly fucked up. We were too busy having fun. The Andy Blade Chronicles

Only Andy remained true to the cause, eschewing 9-5, eking out a humble existence as an antagonist -musician/writer – till the day he died (it’s a foregone conclusion) 🙂 To me, that’s the triumph! Punk77 email, 2020

Managers, Managers, Managers and… Where Did The Money Go?

The band Eater certainly had its fair of certain managers through their brief career but none really managed to advance the band or break the lock The Label had on them.

You could say that first up in the management stakes was Andy’s brother Hass who set up the gig in Manchester with the Buzzcocks. After that it was it was Suzi McEwan in the latter part of 1976.

Andy Blade (Vocals) She was working PR for Jennie Halsall, a great publicist from the 70’s and saw us at an early gig (she was friends with Erica Echenberg, who was taking pictures of us at the Hope & Anchor) and offered her services.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) I always liked her, but she wasn’t a management professional and was never going to get us a recording or publishing deal. Having said that, she had good PR connections with such as Alan Edwards and Jenny Hassel, so we always got good coverage in the music and other press.

We decided that Suzi had done as much as she could and as she had a ‘day job’ sometimes couldn’t be with us. There was only so much she was ever going to be able to do and as I recall, we were all in agreement on a change.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Suzi was very good right at the very beginning; she got us a lot of press and some decent gigs and introduced us to a lot of good people but she didn’t want to know once The Label got involved. Sensible girl.

After that very briefly was Rob Hallett again in the latter part of 1976 just after the band signed with The Label and Dave Goodman and Caruso Fuller.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) Rob Hallet was never really our manager. He was trying to offer his services and would come to virtually every gig. We had a sit down meeting with him and all our parents to talk about what he could do for us. However as far as we could see with our limited insight into band management he looked like a hippy and long hair and flairs just didn’t look right at that time so we binned him in favour of Caruso Fuller.

Andy Blade (Vocals) He was actually really clued in (he is now quite a big wig promoter), until he started an affair with Dee’s mum, whoops. He was sacked for refusing to get a haircut.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) He managed us for a very brief period, then just mysteriously disappeared. Probably scared off by the Label.

Rob at least made the pages of Sniffin’ Glue in January 1977 though not in a positive light.

Mark P Since the Pistols/Grundy thing exploded all over the nationals, EATER have had a lot of unusual publicity. Like the quotes from Dee Generate’s mum and their ex-manager Rob Hallett announcing the group as the band that’s going to take over from the Sex Pistols’ audience. EATER were going about things the wrong way., it wsn’t the lads fault, it was a case of bad management. Sniffin’ Glue 6 January 1977

Punk77 interviewed Rob and as the interview below shows, he’s a man of few words, but it’s pretty obvious what he thought of Caruso Fuller.

How did you come to be involved with the band
I was working with The Damned and was introduced by Rat Scabies.
 
What did you think of them and punk in general
I loved them and the whole Punk scene.

What did you make of Goodman and Fuller and their role with the band?
Dave was a nice guy, Fuller ……

How did you help the band?
I was manager and getting them gigs.

Why did you part ways?
Fuller!

Was there interest in the band?I had interest from Track and Virgin at the time but they decided to sign to The Label and fire me.

However Rob’s involvement with the band would have one more later twist.

In January 1977 it was reported in National Rockstar magazine that the young band was already having management troubles.

Eater hope to release a single ‘You’ on a new independent label despite serious management troubles.

Next up the incomparable Lee Black Childers (March-July 1977), denizen of drag queens, Warhol, New York scene and manager of the legendary Heartbreakers.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) Leee was a really lovely person. He lived in an incredible galleried, terrace house in Islington. The first time I met him was at a party at his house, at which Debbie Harry and Chris Stein attended.  He was ‘connected’. He took us backstage to meet Lou Reed at the Victoria Palace, arranged for Lou to see us at Dingwalls, but I always got the feeling he had ‘other stuff to do’. Apart from supporting the Heartbreakers, I can’t remember a single other gig he got us.

Andy Blade (Vocals) We supported the Heartbreakers at the Roxy; he tried valiantly to extricate us from The Label, and was the first person to give good advice…too late. He was also adored by the punk rock elite, so by association, Eater were slightly elevated above the ‘they’re just school kids’ snobbery, a little bit. If Lee Childers, Bowie’s former confidante, Lou’s best buddy, likes them then…..If Leee had got us out of the deal, and got us a major label like he wanted, who knows…but there’s always a ‘who knows?’ with the Eater story. He knew everyone in the right places. He was going to get a lawyer to look at the contract, but Caruso heard about it, and put the frighteners on him. Leee probably thought ‘this is too much hassle’.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Then came Lee who I thought was brilliant. We played several gigs with The Heartbreakers; Reading, Hastings, Dunstable and others. We were looked after properly for the first time, but obviously Leee was under pressure from Polydor/Track to get us out of The Label contract and at that point Caruso threatened to break his legs and so that was the end of that!  

At this period in time Rob Hallett had moved onto becoming an agent and was working with Leee Black Childers getting gigs for his bands The Heartbreakers and Levi & The Rockats. He is suitably terse on this subject as well and again who was to blame.

Rob Hallett (Agent) Leee and Gayle were my friends. I was the agent for Johnny Thunders and Levi. We had Track excited and Fuller fucked everything!

After this it was the end of Rob’s connection to the band, but he carried on as an agent and in the end turned out to be arguably the most successful of anyone involved with Eater staying in the music business.

Rob Hallett (Agent) I am still active in the music business and went on to work with many major Artists as an Agent, Promoter and Manager.

He’s very modest because the major artistes he talks about include the likes of Bon Jovi, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, Britney Spears, Usher, Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen to name but a few. See more about his fascinating history in music here.  

History suggests that if Leee could only manage a deal for a band with two ex New York Dolls with minor label Track which then went bust, how successful would he have been with a young punk band but its all moot now. In an article in a Teenage magazine after he left Dee revealed he’s been working with Lee on his new band that never materialised due to various issues which are covered in the Dee interview.

Amazingly though in what was probably the bands most productive period of singles, album, licensing deals and PR they had no one. 

It’s no surprise in hindsight that after the flurry of activity and natural impetus of the band culminating in the album that things slowly ground to a halt without a manager to direct their affairs. Caruso and Goodman had little experience in this area and were being diverted by trying to get money in by adding bands to The Label roster, leaving the band to their own devices and slowly imploding. The only thing keeping the band going was gigs plus their retainer.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) We had an agent who was based in Ipswich of all places that used to book us shows all over the UK. As I was responsible for paying their fees, I was always the one who called them and pushed for more work. I also used to cold call venues to meet managers of places we wanted to play, but invariably there were ‘Under 18’ problems or ‘yes you can play, but I can’t pay you’. We used to use the Count Bishops PA system. That was £25 a night, most gigs paid around £50, so we never made any money out of them. In fairness to Caruso, he allowed us to keep any gig money, but it would be small beer in comparison to the record and publishing income.

So Caruso kept the band but his asset was slowly falling apart under group dissensions and band direction. Things went on like this until late 1978 when the band took on Gary Steadman and they gained a new manager in the shape of Bill Kemp who was brought in by Caruso presumably because of diminishing return on his investment and an imminent new single and album in What She Wants She Needs. It was all too little too late.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) Let me describe Bill Kemp to you. Older guy, probably late 40’s or 50’s, always wore a trilby and a large overcoat. He had a broad Glaswegian accent and could quite easily play the part of the villain who comes down to London to break Arthur Daily’s legs in Minder. He looked just like that. The reality was, he was the person we needed in 1976!

He knew people throughout the music business, maybe not the generation that was just starting to make it’s way, but the decision makers. The first thing he asked us was, ‘what can I do for you’, I said ‘get us a gig at the Marquee’. Two days later, he’d got us a booking there. I met Bill after Eater had split up he gave me a really detailed analysis of what had been wrong for the band and what he could have done. Sadly, we met him two years too late.

Andy Blade (Vocals) He was an old tin pan alley type bloke on his 50’s – looked like Mr Magoo. that Caruzo somehow ‘found’, who enjoyed no success in the last few months driving the (Steadman era) Eater train. His biggest achievement in my eyes was buying me an acoustic guitar to write more songs on, which was handy…oh and he got us a good booking agent, which we never got to use.

Something that rankled the band was the money. It was common consensus that the band didn’t get their fair due.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) We did financially badly out of it obviously. Don’t get me wrong; we had we had a lot of fun and they did put our records out so fair play on that score. But we got ripped off financially without any shadow of doubt. And so did Dave. Dave Goodman wasn’t driving around in a Bentley and having an extravagant lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination and at the end of it all he walked away with nothing. It was crazy.

Gavin Reid (School friend) Andy used to go on about where the money owed from Caruso. Every year I saw Andy he would still be saying the same thing.

Phil Rowland (Drums) I don’t remember us having good agency deal either and having our record label as our managers was a terrible idea because we had no bargaining power. But what did we know we were just naive kids!

There’s also questions about Caruso and The Label being straight with their money.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Every quarter we would get these statements saying how many records had been sold and how much money we were due and everything, but then it would be offset against our fourteen ninety nine a week that we’ve been given, plus travel to gigs and food and stuff on the way to or from gigs and the bill was always quite large and if there was, for example, two thousand pounds worth of royalties due, there would always be sort of one thousand nine hundred and fifty pounds worth of expenses to offset against it.

Dawes Road; that was purchased. I’m pretty sure that all of that was financed on our record sales. So then of course Caruso sold up and disappeared to Japan with the proceeds. and not just ours; I know that Siouxsie & The Banshees thinks he owes them loads of money. Jimmy Pursey reckons that he owes him loads of money. So we weren’t the only people that he screwed over.

I’m no expert but if I was to take 1977 and 1978 and some basic ingoing and outgoings a different picture emerges. So Eater weren’t signed to a label with an advance that would then be used to pay for equipment, rehearsals, recording, marketing and the whole smorgasbord of associated costs.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) On a positive note, Caruso paid us all a £15 a week retainer, we had unlimited use of The Labels rehearsal studio and Dave Goodman on hand to record any demo’s we wanted to do.  

Jon Herlihy (Flicks fanzine) …they [Eater] are sticking by ‘the label’ which has given them an excellent deal and musical freedom and lots of he right unsensational backing a new group needs, there’s a touring van promised and projected tour of America and Japan. Flicks 1977

• Spaceward Studio 1 days recording plus 2 inch master tape £100.00
• Master Room London – 1 x single side acetate £15.00
• Spaceward Studio – 1 x 15 ips copy of Master Tape £ 5.40
• Spaceward Studio – 1 x cassette copy (£ 2.70
• Master Room – Mastering of record (Porky Prime Cut) £70.00
• Photography and record sleeve design £200.00

So on top of the above costs we need to add the following

• 10,000 records pressed @ 10 p each + VAT, which at that time was 12.5% £1,125.50
• 10,000 sets of records labels @ 4p + VAT £ 450.00
• 10,000 printed record sleeves @ 11p each + VAT £1,237.50
• Promotional posters (estimated cost) £ 100.00
• Adverts in music papers and fanzines £ 50.00

TOTAL COSTS (some amounts estimated but fairly accurate) £3,356.10

In 1977 records sold in the shops for 70 pence. So the wholesale price (what the shops paid us) was 35 pence each. So 10,000 x 35p = £3,500

So this gives you a profit of £143.90!

In those days (1977) Rough Trade didn’t exist so records would be posted out to indie shops by the Post Office. So there would be the cost of sending the parcels.

1977 was Eater’s best year for both releases and so money in on The Label.

Incomings
• 3 x singles selling lets say 100,000 copies so £35k
• 1 x album selling say 30,000 @ £1.25 to stores so £32,500
• 2 tracks on Roxy album – £??? – I suspect nothing
• Japan Licensing – £15k (guess)
• Italian Licensing – £10k (guess)

So around £95k

Outgoings
• Cost of singles £34k
• Cost of Albums (guess) @50p = £15k
• 4 x band members @£15 x 52 =£34,000

So around £85k meaning around £10k profit.

1978 was a much quieter year for Eater with just 2 releases.

Incomings
Two singles which I assume were less successful, so let’s say 40,000 singles sold so £14k

Outgoings
• 4 x band members @£15 x 52 =£34,000
• Cost of singles £13k

So 14k of sales versus approx. £47k of outgoings and a 33k deficit

So while 1977 saw what looks like a healthy profit of around 25-30k before any other payments, 1978 reversed that to give a deficit of some £33k.

It’s no surprise that The Label had to widen its stable of artists to enable cash flow and that they were pinning their hopes on a second Eater album Though band members clearly think it happened, its hard to see where any vast quantities of money would have gone.

Dave Goodman (Producer & The Label) I guess the band or maybe their parents got too greedy. The joke was we were paying them too high a royalty and not recouping costs. We had a lot riding on that second album and in the end we lost everything we put into the Label in the beginning. It was an expensive lesson but there were some great times and many happy memories. Punk77 Interview 20/1/2005

Something Ian disputes

Ian Woodcock (Bass) One of the problems with our ‘all in’ deal with The Label was that our royalty rates were very low. For record sales, 5%, for writing royalties 6% (writing royalties was an industry standard at the time). 

By comparison,  Paul McCartney was getting 14%+6%.  Today, these rates for most artists start at 15%. That’s not to say that we got paid any if that…

Andy pretty much recognized the Label was out of its depth.

I felt a bit sorry for him. After all, he had put in a lot of effort and a considerable amount of money into the band, but he’s proved beyond doubt that he had no idea how to do things properly. Andy Blade Chronicles

The trouble as well for The Label was the early releases again had been in a smaller pond. By now there were hundreds of bands and small labels fighting for the Punk Rock wallet and attention. Add to that The Label roster wasn’t strong with bands like The Front, Tribesman, LLoyd Ryan and his drum tuition LP, a Japanese duo and Bombers all destined for obscurity and low sales. If there’s a surprise, its that a major label didn’t look to take the band mid 1977 off The Label’s hands but the guess is Caruzo would have put paid to that!

Add in the changing punk scene, Eater’s records in 1978 not being particularly strong and the band fracturing it was bound to happen this way.

Andy continued to work with Dave Goodman in various guises while Caruso effectively absconded with the masters and continued to licence and make money from Eater up until around 2021 when he suddenly passed all the rights back over to Andy.

Journalist Jive
How The band Featured In The Press!
Click images for larger ones

The band secured a lot of press predominantly because of one being a punk band and secondly their age plus their drummer, Dee Generate, was only 14. Add to that some early controversial statements about the Sex Pistols being too old and suchlike and a band that actually had a certain punk something and you get the interest. The band were a bit like marmite – people loved them because of their age and snotty attitude (fanzines & teenage girl magazines) or used it as an excuse to critique them (mainstream press and fanzines). Either way it was a struggle for them to be taken seriously.

Where the band struggled was being taken seriously and not just as kids playing at being musicians. Having releases out certainly helped but as you can see from further below in this feature, they played a double game with the teenage magazine features and eventually splits in what direction to take both within the band and from their label did for them.

Punk rock had caught the attention of the main stream press especially after the Sex Pistols had sworn on live television. The Daily Mail picked up on the young age of the band and especially Dee and his mum which was to become a regular point of interest and featured them after they played a gig at Andy and Brian’s Manor Hill school in Finchley supporting The Damned.

While the mainstream rock press was slowly starting to feature Punk it was the rise of the fanzines, prompted by Mark P’ Sniffin Glue, that was paralleling the growing number of bands and provided an instant and pure punk fix to the growing number of fans. Hastily written, from the heart and extremely judgemental they were the mirror on the scene and gave publicity to the bands.

Bondage #1 December 1976 was the one and only fanzine produced by face on the scene and regular Roxy goer Shane McGowan. In this first issue he reviews Eater at the Hope & Anchor and has a good time.

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Zip Vinyl’s #2 March 1977 – Eater were one of the first bands to play abroad. They managed an early jaunt to Belgium and we learn that Ian doesn’t like Cherry Vanilla and Dee isn’t great at poetry!

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Eater had famously featured in an alphabetical roundup the precious year without even really being a band. By April 1977 punk was in full swing and often featured. The collage below was another roundup of key punk bands which of course featured our intrepid band of heroes!

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Oh Boy! May 1977 The start of the double life of the band and the fact that the Drummer Dee was heavily featured, certainly contributed to simmering tensions within the band and his eventual firing as the band were about to record an album. Their label – The Label – saw this as the band’s potential market.

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Live Wire #6 Fanzine June 1977 edited by Alan Anger (Alan Butcher). A clearly unhappy Dee lets fire at his old band, what ws wrong with them and what he’s going to do. Strangely Live Wire #9 a few issues later has a collage of pictures featuring Dee and fellow Eater bandmates by ex Eater manager Lee Black Childers.

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Meanwhile the band roll on and the album is released and they pick up publicity and reviews, though no interviews in the mainstream rock press. See Paul Morley NME review below.

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Into 1978 we go and the features dry up on the band as they don’t have any product to promote, so it’s some more teenage magazine features and front covers for Oh Boy! and Mates! It was always the drummer that got the cover shots!

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A lot of Punk books and glossy fold out poster mags came out in 1977/78 of varying quality and magazine books like the one below New Music – The Sound of The Streets was no exception. The books basically listed some bands with histories and pictures. Eater got a whole page but then again so did Blitzkrieg Bop. The next edition by the way was ‘Disco.’ Things like this though did however keep the bands name in the public eye.

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Another magazine book was this one which was actually quite good and was edited by John Tobler who at least has some pedigree as a journalist. Despite some factual errors, the last paragraph he writes about Eater was very true about the promise they never fulfilled. This was one was a guide to UK and US punk.

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Into the latter stages of the band and it shows with Andy Blade  – The band were being pushed by The Label to go more pop to hit the teenage market and for them to recoup their investment, Ian and Phil were more R&B leaning and Andy’s original dream for Eater had long disappeared and his original sparring partner Brian Chevette had left the band to be replaced by Gary Steadman. So they one more hit the teen mags.

Let’s finish off this page with a humorous cartoon history of the band written by Andy Blade, and illustrated by his brother Hass that featured in Spiral Scratch, a monthly magazine set up by Lee Wood owner of Raw Records.

Eater – Outside View/You (The Label March 1977)

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
 Bass: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Dee Generate

Andy Blade (Vocals) Our first single and a song I wrote most of the lyrics to at school whilst bored during a lesson. It is, as the title suggests, about feeling like an outsider, alienated from what we’re told is ‘reality’. I still feel the same way.

Brian Haddon (Guitar) Outside View, obviously, is a real favourite because it was the first thing I’d ever written and it was the first single which was my dream come true.

Dee Generate (Drums) Favorite song and why… Outside View is true Eater, first version with me playing.

Andy Blade (Vocals)‘You’ is  about a girl called Lisa Mell (who also gets name checked in various other eater songs). Brian and I loved her and desperately wanted to shag her, she was gorgeous! I thought if I wrote a song about her it might increase my chances…it didn’t. It has a line that goes ‘I just gotta find a way to get into your hood’ – this was way before rappers went on about ‘the ‘hood’ and I’m not entirely sure what I meant by that! She’s probably a bloated fishwife now.

Reviews in the music press were mixed.

I hate it, so I guess Eater have succeeded. Steve Clarke, NME, Mar 12 1977

The production is rather muddled. The song lacks sustained interest to the final blast, but full marks for energy and effort. This is what the New Wave is all about. It’s fast, cutting and terse. Great. Caroline Coon, Melody Maker, Mar 12th 1977

The Blank Generation’s Osmonds. If you’re heavily into freak-shows or punk, you’ll be amused by the bass line and maybe even grabbed a little by the usual savage guitar riff. Pete Silverton, Sounds, Mar 19th 1977

Actually, what they remind me of more than anything else are the Pistols, especially in the snotty spitting vocals. ‘Outside View’ is the better song, unusually well recorded, and remarkably devoid of any kind of weakness. ‘You’ runs a little out of breath towards the middle and eventually fails to hold your attention to the end. Jet Lag, Slash, June 1977

Dave Goodman was keen to point out its importance in punk history.

Dave Goodman: For the history books, Eater’s ‘Outside View’ was the UK’s third ever punk single, following The Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’ and The Damned’s ‘New Rose’. Malcolm McClaren loved the Eater single, and whilst we were sharing a hotel room on the Anarchy tour, he asked me to play it to him again and again.

The Japanese licensed release of Outside View on Polydor has a live cover shot of post Dee drummer Phil Rowland (who doesn’t play on the single) on drums from Barbarellas Birmingham. To rub salt further into the wound, the Japanese insert would also feature Caruso Fuller’s younger brother, Symeon, suspiciously looking like Dee Generate/one of the band!

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Thinkin’ Of The USA, Space Dreaming & Michael’s Interplanetary System -The Label June 1977

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
 Bass: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Dee Generate

Andy Blade (Vocals) This is about the boredom of living in a suburban town in the 1970’s and how, compared to the USA, England seemed such a dull, small place to be…three channels on TV that stop broadcasting by midnight, postcodes instead of snazzy sounding ‘zip codes’, pubs instead of all night bars, Diana Dors instead of Marilyn Monroe, etc. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of my complaints now though and I’d fucking hate to live in America….Senator Arnie, Prez Bush, Rumsfeld, TV preachers, Redneck mentality…please just fuck off and die!

Ian Woodcock (Bass) ‘Thinkin of the USA’ is my favourite.

Some would argue this was Eater’s finest moment. I don’t necessarily agree, but it comes close from its phased guitar intro to its ending in the past tense: ‘Gary Gilmore came from the USA’. A tale of the hassles at the time; The Roxy Club, boredom and the attractions of life over the water. The drum pattern devised by Dave Goodman, which Dee didn’t immediately get, was the catalyst to Dee’s sacking from the band. It’s also the start of the Blade/Woodcock writing partnership that would dominate the bands song writing from now on.

However this was not supposed to be Eater’s second single.

Ian Woodcock (Bass) We had originally planned to release ‘No Brains’ as a single. Our record company, The Label, was trying to get a publishing deal from Connolly & Connolly and they HATED IT! The Label told Andy and I to go away and write a commercial single. Looking back, this was a mistake, we should have released ‘No Brains’, as from a punk credibility perspective, it was a much stronger song.

Andy Blade (Vocals) No Brains was to be the Eater’s second single, right up until the release date, when The Label decided we needed something ‘less controversial’. It must have been the sleeve – with the band tucking into a pigs head in the middle of the road (I think Abbey Road) – that made the song ‘look’ more ‘controversial’ than it is. I still think it should have been the single.

No Brain’s was in fact recorded in March 1977 and ended up featuring on The Album in late 1977 crediting Dee.

Reviews were mainly positive about the A side.

Yuuuck don’t like the singer at all, Dee Generate sounds good on this though, worst of the lot this, like Outside View much better. Gabba Gabba Hey #2 Fanzine May 1977

Eater have the right credentials and the right ideas, but they’re not actually very impressive. Charles Shaar Murray, NME, Jun 4th 1977

Now they’ve learnt already. As a song it’s on a similar level to the last two, but the production lifts it. A great sleeve, and neat touches in the sound: judicious handclaps, reverb, phasing. Jon Savage, Sounds, Jun 4th 1977

As good as their first. If you liked that you’ll like this. Ripped & Torn, issue 6

It could pass for a new Seeds recording. It quivers with angry guitar and rants against the U.S.A. in stock fashion. (great HEY JOE riff in the middle, too), and represents a major step up for these guys, who could become a surprise phenomenon (though not if they keep cutting tedious drivel like the B-side here. Ken Barnes, NY Rocker, Jul/Aug ‘77

Another garbled classic of sub-teen depression. Good grinding distortion-torsion, vocals nasals, whining mush, just the way we like’em. Johnny Assai, Slash, Aug 1977

On The B side a fine raw version of Space Dreamin’ that sounds like it came from those ’76 sessions and a psychedelic track to boot which must have confused hardcore punky types and detractors alike that they could do something different! Another no expense sleeve from The Label, this time having some design on the front with our heroes wistfully gazing out while pondering the totems of the USA above their head. There’s even a back cover with some writing on it!

Andy Blade (Vocals) Space Dreamin’– Basically it’s about day-dreaming. Y’know, if something in life is irritating you, just switch off and dream about something you like. When I discovered that drink and drugs were far more effective in achieving this than ‘space dreaming’ I never looked back! These days I’d prefer to use my mind.

 Michael’s Monetary System – I used to write a lot of short stories, actually still do, this was one of them that we decided to set to music for a laugh. The idea of the story was based on a school friend called Michael Farley who, whilst we were out one night, made the proclamation that he didn’t have any money to buy any chips with but he did have a few buttons that had been pulled of his shirt in his pocket. I thought it would be a nice idea if shops accepted buttons instead of coins. The music was Ian’s idea, like a piss-take of Pink Floyd ‘Money’.

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Lock It Up/Jeepster -The Label

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
 Bass: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Phil Rowland

Andy Blade: “I ripped off most of these lyrics from a Gershwin lyric that was in a book my Mum gave me for my 16th birthday. She was probably trying to steer me away from writing songs called ‘Get Raped’!. I think it was called ‘Pleny Of Nuthin” or something like that. I liked it’s sentiment about people with too much money getting paranoid about it and having to lock it all away. So I stole it!!”

Released as a taster for their forthcoming album. Cracking song and a fine 100mph version of T Rex’s Jeepster. This release saw The Label enter the 12″ format market, though not sure why the 12″ should feature exactly the same songs on both sides though in reverse order!

Andy Blade recalls a short promo video being made for this (missing in action) should it have sold in sufficient quantities to catapult the band onto the popular weekly music show on the BBC, Top Of The Pops.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Come to think of it, there’s also a film we made for Top Of The Pops, should ‘Lock it Up’ have gone up instead of down the charts, I’d love to see that! I remember asking the label boss [Caruso] to bring some booze with him so we could loosen up a bit (first time filming etc). He bought along two miniatures of whisky! Our label should’ve been called ‘Cheapskate Hustlers’!http://punkrocker.org.uk/punkprofiles/andyblade.html

Some ok reviews

They’ve come up with their best record so far. ‘Lock It Up’ is quite catchy and snappily performed. ‘Jeepster’ is a farce. It only made me conscious of what a distinctive guitarist Bolan was. Pete Silverton, Sounds, Oct 8th

…reasonably lively – almost good compared to the hideous rehash of Bolan’s ‘Jeepster’ Ian Birch, MM, Oct 22nd

Eater – Debutantes Ball, No More, Thinking Of The USA, Holland (The Label 1978)

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
 Bass: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Phil Rowland

Andy Blade: Debutantes Ball – I wrote this after reading Diana Barrymore’s auto-biog ‘Too Much Too Soon’, which was also the title of a NY Dolls album – that’s why I read it. It was a great book tho’ and inspired me to write about her. She was a rich kid, a debutante who had it all but fucked it all up. In our song I had to spin out the syllables in ‘Debutante’s’ to make it scan so it end up sounding; ‘deb -u-tarnt-ays ball’. Brian’s solo on this is the funniest thing in the world. It makes Pete Shelley’s ‘Boredom’ riff sound like Jimi Fucking Hendrix!

Holland – I thought, after touring The Netherlands, that I’d better widen my lyrical topics so I wrote a song about Holland. A country so un-interesting that it’s entire population has been on drugs for the past hundred years.

A take on the Rolling Stones live album Get Your Ya Ya’s Out. Four live tracks recorded at Dingwalls London from April 28th 1978. Two new tracks and two old faves shows the boys playing well. However the fact that they were still playing small venues like Dingwalls meant they hadn’t really progressed. Available on coloured vinyl and choice of colour sleeves (Blue, Orange Red & Green) on 7″ and 12″ so The Label pushed the boat out there!

This 33rpm four-tracker was recorded at Dingwalls and sounds very live indeed, warts and all, as captured by the original Pistols producer, Dave Goodman. Schoolboy punk at its worst/best. Alan Lewis, Sounds, June 24th 1978

Eater somehow they manage to make an intimate den like Dingwalls (where their crime was committed) sound like the cavernous Earls Court when empty. Roy Carr, NME, June 24th 1978

1.2.3.4 Know what I mean? Andy Partridge of XTC, guest reviewer for MM, Oct 21st 1978

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Eater – What She Wants She Needs, Reach For The Sky (The Label – December 1978)

Andy Blade: A song about an ex-girlfriend called Beverly. A very strange girl that used to attend my Dad’s school for maladjusted kids in Manchester. Soon after this came out a chain of fashion stores opened called…’What She Wants’….there’s a bit of trivia for you.

With Brian Chevette gone, Gary Steadman took over guitar duties and co-wrote the A side song on this last single from the boys which sees them lacking the spark that originally set them apart. A different producer (in fact 2) didn’t help either nor did appearing in teen magazines with Gary Steadman. In fact add in the budget conscious monochrome sleeves with no picture of the band, which surely was crying out for a soft focus colour band shot for the teen market, and it was the worst selling single for the band and the end of the road.

Andy Blade (Vocals) As a single it was so different to the previous Eater singles, and a million miles away from the stuff I had been (and still was) writing on my own, outside the Blade-Woodcock partnership. I felt that I’d be laughed at/scorned if I insisted on presenting my new songs, or worse, accused of ‘wanting my name on the writing credits’, as Ian once quite correctly accused me of. How it had got to the stage that he felt it okay to talk like that, after it was he that joined my band, not the other way around, just shows how antagonistic it was getting. Punk77 November 2021

Gary Steadman: I listened to the single a few months back when I was playing it to a friend. He really liked it but I don’t think it was a punk song; more rock/pop. I thought it was ok. Punk77 July 2020

Take away the punk and like so many other bands at the time in the same position you are left with an average sounding rock band. Just two months after this release in January 1979 it was all over for Eater, one of the earliest of the UK’s punk bands to form in 1976 and still on average 17 years of age!

Eater have certainly calmed down here, no more shouting into heavy metal guitar, they sound a bit like the Radio Stars,  no complaints tho’ I think its a great little tune, a good bit of rock ‘n’ roll never hurt anyone, finger clickin foot tappin good. Twisted Reality 2 Fanzine 1978

A harmless ham-fisted splodge of tuneless bordum. Gary Bushell, Sounds, Dec 2nd 1978

More spikeheads change with the times and its requirements. The frantic throttle has gone, more care has gone into the production and the result is like junior Status Quo. Ian Birch, MM, Dec 2nd 1978

Reach For The Sky?

Andy Blade: Reach For The Sky – This is about Douglas Bader the famous no-legged pilot. I used to be really into WW2 mythology for some reason. Would you get on a plane if you knew the pilot had no legs? They should have squeezed him into a tank and told him to shut the fuck up moaning!

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Lyin’ To Me Again, Death Awaits (1985)

This has been added to the Eater piece as Andy had started talking to Brian James, ex of the Damned and Tanz Der Youth, even before the dust had settled on Eater. In fact in the news piece on the Eater split in Record Mirror December 1978 it had Andy and Brian working together and looking for a keyboardist.

It shows a different direction for Andy and more rockier and it’s a shame nothing more came of this union. Drumming on the tracks was courtesy of ex Generation X’er Mark Laff. Recorded around 1980.

Andy Blade (Vocals) Just prior to Eater splitting up, I’d been talking to Brian James quite regularly, I’d got to know him better because of his girlfriend Erica, who I was also still in touch with. I’d told him about the situation with the band, that everyone was unhappy etc, which he could relate to having left the Damned with a lot of acrimony.

He asked to see/hear some of the new lyrics/songs I’d written, so I gave him my tatty notebook. A couple weeks later he called and asked if I wanted to get together & do some playing at his & Erica’s in Kensington.

We spent the day drinking cans of beer, & trying out songs of his, with my lyrics, which I thought ‘wow he’s gone to all this trouble.’ Anyway it was a very productive day. I think we  worked on 4 songs, but chose Lying Again and Death Awaits Me…which as a track, was artistically a pretty bold song to do.. even more so to attract record labels, haha.

Death Awaits is generally about feeling sorry for myself, with the end of Eater/Punk rock – it kind of reflects the aimlessness I was feeling.

Lying Again is about a girl who kept standing me up; so I killed her. 🙂

So we recorded the songs with Mark Laff, who both of us knew, and who lived near me in Finchley. We rehearsed the tracks with him in the studio, me on guitar, Brian on bass, then he did his guitar after. The only other overdubs being Erica & his backing vocals on the ‘bom bom bom’ stuff 🙂

They shopped the tracks around a couple of labels without success and then Stiv Bators entered the picture.

Andy Blade (Vocals) We had another date booked for a get together, & then somewhere in-between that, I think he got a heads up from Stiv, and so that was that. It didn’t last long, but it was a creative little period.

Ironically, though Brian was looking for a lead singer, the one he always wanted was Stiv Bators. They had been friends since The Damned supported the Dead Boys in New York 1977 and kept in touch and finally came together via Stiv joining Sham 69 post Pursey in their guise as The Wanderers in The Lords Of The New Church. A Sham 69/Barracudas/Dammed/Dead Boys super group as opposed to an Eater/Damned/Generation X one.

The recorded output somehow found its way onto the 1985 Delorean release  – Best of Eater – as a free seven inch single by Lee Wood (one time owner of Raw Records) and was licensed from none other than our old friend Dave Goodman!

Eater/Various – The Roxy London WC2

Side one
Runaway Slaughter & the Dogs
Boston Babies Slaughter & the Dogs
Freedom  the Unwanted
Lowdown Wire
1 2 X U Wire
Bored Teenagers the Adverts

Side two
Hard Loving Man Johnny Moped
Don’t Need It  Eater
15 Eater
Oh Bondage Up Yours! X-Ray Spex
Breakdown Buzzcocks
Love Battery  Buzzcocks

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
 Bass: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Dee Generate

For Eater, The Roxy Club was both a place to hang out and to play, so it was no surprise they featured on the live album from the club. For Andy Blade of Eater, with two songs ‘15’ and ‘I Don’t Need It,’ a top twenty album was kudos.

Andy Blade (Eater) It helped our career enormously in that it confirmed our acceptance by the music press – who all reviewed the album. There were suddenly pictures of us appearing here there and everywhere. It was also a top twenty record, which gave us the pleasure of pointing this out, time and time again, to our mates at school, parents, siblings, etc etc. On the downside, our performance was hardly exhilarating – we could have done with a bit more of a sound check but it was very exciting having the mobile recording van parked up outside the club though.

How did the record come about? The record wasn’t to be a cash-in, but an aural document of what was going on in the club.

Barry Jones (Roxy Club Partner) We knew we were running out of time – the writing was on the wall – and we thought we’ve got to get this down. Who wants to be on a record? Everybody does! It’s not that we thought this was a historic event we had to capture – nothing like that.

Despite the Pistols, Damned & Clash being absent, what you get is a good cross-section of bands influenced by Punk; the Buzzcocks, Adverts, Wire, the Slits, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Slaughter & the Dogs, Johnny Moped, X Ray Spex, the Unwanted (Smak), Eater and the Boys. Though all agreed to be recorded, not all signed up and the Slits, Boys and Banshees pulled out for various reasons.

Indeed it became the first live album to make the Top 20 since the 1971 ‘Concert For Bangladesh’ recording featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and George Harrison among others.

Andy Czezowski (Roxy Club Partner) It encapsulated that moment in time 100%. The ability or lack of ability, the time and period and the movement and the energy is certainly caught. I think it’s magnificent for that. I don’t think I’ve even listened to the album since.

Barry Jones (Roxy Club Partner) It captured the spirit of the place. It’s a shame we rushed it. We should have had it longer so you could have got some real conversations. The best tracks by far on it are the Wire tracks. Always my favourites; the ones that blew me away. I was proud of it and I loved the look of it. Love what it said about a particular time in British pop history. It was accidental. We picked up something rolling by and helped it go somewhere. The timing was perfect.

Mike Thorne (Roxy WC2 Album Producer) Most Punk bands were ramshackle and couldn’t play. End of story. But competence wasn’t the issue – message was all. The album captures the time and place. Don’t forget that much of the Punk ethos was rejecting the smooth, virtuoso pop music of the time, which was often utterly vacuous – all it had going for it was technique, which was supposed to impress you.

At this distance, part of the pleasure in listening to the unashamed incompetence is hearing people just figuring out which way is up. We could get fancy and say that’s what all high-falutin’ art is about: discovery. I had some studio experience, so was able to catch the spirit of place and the sheer exuberance of it all on vinyl. There was a lot of energy to be bottled. The attitude and content was just right. No need to chase some illusory technical perfection. Also, remember this was a one-off live album, attempting to catch and convey a spirit, a time and a place.

And the last word to Ollie from the Unwanted who’s band debut gug ws captured for the album and who sums up perfectly the Roxy, the album and Punk Rock in just a few lines and reiterates Mike Thorne’s points.

Ollie Wisdom (the Unwanted) The album captures something of the chaos unleashed by the whole Punk thing you know. Suddenly there are a million bands and anybody could be in a band on a stage. It didn’t necessarily require any talent or musical ability. You could just go and do it anyway. Eventually cream rises to the top and the dregs float to the bottom. That’s where the Unwanted were. Pretty down near the bottom!

For Eater though at this stage they were on the up!

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Eater/Various – The Label (Sofa) – 1979

A1 Front – Hospital Case
A2 Eater – Outside View – Dee Generate on Drums
A3 Dave Goodman And Friends – Justifiable Homicide
A4 Eater – Typewriter Babies – Phil Rowland on Drums
A5 Bombers, The – I`m A Liar Babe
B1 Cash Pussies – 99% Is Shit
B2 Eater – Point Of View – Phil Rowland on Drums
B3 Front – Queens Mafia
B4 Front – Cold War
B5 Tribesman – Rockin` Time Dub

Designed by HAN-O-DISC and advertised as a ‘TRANSLUMAR DEFRACTOR DISC’ – this is actually two one-sided clear vinyls stuck together with the design/artwork sandwiched in-between. The design glows in the dark, is translucent and diffracts light.

A rather strange compilation from 1979, not least how much it would have cost to produce and the return back. Picture discs were pretty much a rarity, so this one certainly stood out but hard to know what market they were aiming for bar trying to squeeze a bit more out of the bands they had and generate some cash. Strangely missing was The Label’s foray into Japanese Pop rock. Ha!

The compilation mixed old and new and brought together some of  The Label’s singles. It also had extra tracks, so for Eater they featured with Outside View but also 2 unreleased tracks. Those tracks were going to be on their second album which of course never happened.

Andy Blade: Point Of View – Naive view of individualism, written with the first clutch of songs at school around 1974/5.

Typewriter Babes – There used to be a great late night programme called ‘Night gallery’ on TV, like the Twilight Zone…y’know, weird short stories, my all time favourite show (anyone with copies, I’d do anything for you!!). One of them was about these characters from a story an author was writing about for his book,  but they thought they were real and wouldn’t accept that they were just ‘made up’ along with their ‘made up’ life and that they could be killed off as and when the writer wanted to do so. The actual title is ‘Typewriter Babies’, as in ‘the typewriter’s given birth’…somehow it got changed to ‘babes’. A lot of people assumed it was about fancying secretaries!!

Eater – The Album (The Label – October 1977)

Vocals: Andy Blade | Guitar: Brian Chevette
Bass / Guitars: Ian Woodcock | Drums: Phil Rowland on all tracks
except No Brains – previous unreleased demo with Dee Generate on drums.

“Just so you know, the music scene I come from in DC were greatly inspired by those Eater records. The Bad Brains on their second ever show covered the Eater version of 18, or Fifteen, as you all had it. Pretty cool.  We all had those records. Debutantes Ball is one of the greatest songs ever as is No Brains. Please understand that those records were huge to us and I still play them. We heard you all, for sure” Henry Rollins Top 20 Punk Albums

With a mighty 16 tracks the eponymous Eater album continues the naming of the album ‘The Album’ on a label called ‘The Label’. Featuring four covers 15, Sweet Jane, Waiting for My Man and Queen Bitch, reworkings of earlier single bsides You and Space Dreaming and familiar song from the Live At The Roxy WC2 album, I Don’t Need It. It also adds in No Brains, which was was the proposed second single before Thinkin’ Of The USA was written as a more commercial tune.  It’s got some great packaging with an inner with lyrics. The album was was released in Japan and again Caruso took the opportunity to add his son Symeon to the sleeve (see pic below) and also in Italy.

Kicking off with the reworked You the band hurtle at pace through their repertoire of the time and it’s a classic punk rock album. The making of the album is covered in more detail here but in summary the recording was done quickly and cheaply in a studio where they made television ads. The sound of the band has and still does have arguments for and against, and its up to where you stand. As Phil Rowland points out, the sound on the album is one that bands still want to emulate.

Phil Rowland (Drums) People LOVE Ian’s bass sound. A producer I work with in LA just this year had an all girl punk band in the studio who told him they want the bass sound from the Eater album. That trebly guitar and bass is the sound of that record and it resonated with kids all over the world. Listening to the Eater album now I just hear everything that’s wrong with it, but that record means a lot to a lot of people in many different countries.

Quinn Powers How’d you guys get the rubber band bass sound? Always imitated never duplicated. Sounds like the strings were besotten with poo! Andy Blade Foundation Facebook post, 22.1.21

Again you have to consider that their average age was still 16 and no matter what people say it IS an accomplished album channelling anger, frustration, excitement, naivety, speed all in a rush of punk rock excitement.

It was reviewed by Paul Morley in the influential weekly music paper NME, 17.12.77 and who manages to critique every facet of the band and music while still having an underlying begrudging liking for it saying

Produced by Dave Goodman, who creates a jet stream sound that’s quite endearingly unique. It’s a new bubblegum sound, perfect in its irresistible vitality.

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Song breakdown by Andy Radwan.

You
About a girl called Lisa Mell (who also gets name checked in various other eater songs). Brian and I loved her and desperately wanted to shag her, she was gorgeous! I thought if I wrote a song about her it might increase my chances…it didn’t. It has a line that goes ‘I just gotta find a way to get into your hood’ – this was way before rappers went on about ‘the ‘hood’ and I’m not entirely sure what I meant by that! She’s probably a bloated fishwife now.

Public Toys
Ah, the pressures of fame! Please, God help us!! Dream on!!

Room For One
Brian wrote most of these words. It was supposed to be about a prostitute he would have liked to win the affections of although I’m certain he’d had no experience of such a thing at fourteen years old!

Lock It Up
I ripped off most of these lyrics from a Gershwin lyric that was in a book my Mum gave me for my 16th birthday. She was probably trying to steer me away from writing songs called ‘Get Raped’! I think it was called ‘Pleny Of Nuthin” or something like that. I liked it’s sentiment about people with too much money getting paranoid about it and having to lock it all away. So I stole it!!

Fifteen
Alice Cooper’s ’18’ changed to suit our ages as suggested by Jonh Ingham.

I Don’t Need It
I wrote this after school one day after being advised that I wasn’t to bunk off anymore or my Mum’d be fined and me sent to a ‘special’ school.

Anne
All about the joys of having sex with a dead girl and then burying her in the back garden when you’ve finished with her!

Get Raped
Dee wrote most of these lyrics with a little help from me. It’s about a girl we knew..a ‘shagrat’ as we’d nicknamed her who’d pissed Dee off for some reason. This was the worst fuck-off-insult he could come up with. The backlash was bad, we had womens groups and all sorts coming after us. It was very difficult finding a printer who was prepared to include the lyrics on our album.

Space Dreamin’
Basically it’s about day-dreaming. Y’know, if something in life is irritating you, just switch off and dream about something you like. When I discovered that drink and drugs were far more effective in achieving this than ‘space dreaming’ I never looked back! These days I’d prefer to use my mind.

My Business (one of my favourite tracks btw Punk77!)
A rather limp attempt to defend one’s right to do what you want to do. For some reason Chairman Mao gets a name check!

No More
‘No More Bedroom Fits’ was the original title. ‘fits’ meaning boredom. As a teenager, your safe haven is your bedroom. I wrote this whilst drinking cider, smoking fags, listening to Lou Reed and The Ramones on the stereo and feeling invincible for a  little while.

No Brains
A song about dumb people doing dumb things ‘coz they think it’s ‘grown up’.

Love and Peace
I’d put some acoustic guitar on one of the tracks and I was sitting in the vocal booth with the acoustic guitar, and when I was waiting – the rest of the band were all set up and Ian had his bass set up and Brian was there, just while we were waiting or Dave to do something – I started playing these chords and I started singing these words and just making them up, impromptu, and it was fucking brilliant, it was great, while Dave was trying to do whatever he was doing. And after he’d done it he said, “Play that song again, whatever that song was, just play it again and we’ll record it”.

And we tried to record this impromptu song, we’d never played it before in our lives, y’know, and it was not intended to be included on the album whatsoever. But we tried to do what we did, and even though it was …okay…it was nothing like the original thing we did. Which was really funny. And worked . I feel that the one we ended up with was, y’know, if you tried to do something that was spontaneous it doesn’t quite work out the same way. And it didn’t work properly, I don’t think. The original one was really funny. It’s like when you try to tell a joke the way you first tell the joke – spontaneously – it seems really funny, but if you try to recreate funny circumstances it’s not quite the same, and that was the case with ‘Love And Peace’. You got some gist of us fucking around the studio but it wasn’t quite the same. Punk Gibbon Interview

Andy Blade (Vocals) The track was a live jam, I didn’t think it would be on the album….I would have tuned the guitar if I’d known! The best thing about it is the ‘explosion’ – gained by kicking a Fender Twin really bloody hard! Andy Blade Foundation Facebook post 22.1.21

The Covers – Waiting For my Man (Velvet Underground), Sweet Jane Velvet Underground), Queen Bitch (Bowie) & 15 (Alice Cooper) – They were just songs by bands that we liked and I wanted to do versions of those songs. I don’t know if we did them justice or not. We tried. ‘Waiting For The Man’ is so obvious, …and it’s a song with the chords we knew and loved, so we had to do it. We could play those chords just fine.

Lou Reed came down to see us at Dingwalls once and we played ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Waiting For The Man’, and he thought it was okay, so if he thought it was okay, that’s all that matters really.  Punk Gibbon Interview

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Eater Album promo posters courtesy of Alyn at Punk Rock Posters

Punk77 has been quite critical of Dee in the past based on quotes from interviews and books so its a real pleasure to clear up some misconceptions, get another perspective on the band Eater, spend some time chatting and generally make the peace.

My thanks to Roger for the photos from his personal collection that are shown here. Roger Bullen Interview February 2005 – Punk77

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2. What sort of music were you into before Eater?
I liked Bowie, Iggy Pop, Hawkwind and The New York Dolls. I loved the drums in all the glam bands, and T Rex. I had this great Jimmy Hendrix single with The Stars that Played with Laughing Sam’s Dice on the B side that I played over and over again. My Dad had left all these Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich albums when he disappeared that I liked to play as well. I had spent my childhood at festivals with my mum, seeing old hippy bands, we were a little unorthodox.

3. When did you first hear about Punk and get into it? Were you actually into punk?
I went to the 100 Club Punk festival to see The Damned, saw The Banshees do the Lords Prayer with Sid Vicious on drums. I was already a punk before Eater, but no one called themselves that then, the press needed a label and they invented the term. I often said I wasn’t a Punk but what I was saying was ‘fuck ‘the label, it didn’t mean anything. Nobody then was saying let’s form a punk band, that was later, your Sham 69’s and Skrewdriver, and all that old crap. We were amongst the first few bands we didn’t need to define ourselves as part of anything we were ‘it’ not part of it.

4. How and when did you come to join Eater?
Rat introduced me to Andy and I went to a rehearsal and they said that they wanted me to join.

5. How much did you contribute to Eater in terns of constructing songs and image? How did Eater change with you joining the band? What were they liked before you joined?
I didn’t write anything except a few expletives on Get Raped. The songs were very slow before I joined. They were very Lou Reed influenced the Bowie thing was very evident. Andy played more guitar and we had no bassist. We were really two rhythm guitars and drums. I said I couldn’t play that slow so it all got speeded up, we all agreed that it was better but it meant most of the songs were about 3 mins long.

We put this ad in NME for a bassist and a load of knobs turned up and Mr Woodcock, he was very drab and spoke in this slow deliberate voice like he had some kind of mental problem. He said his favourite song was Johnny B Goode which in my opinion disbarred him from joining. But he was older and I think we all thought we might be able to tap him up for a few quid. I remember us, me Andy and Brian, saying that he would do till we found someone better. Ian later wore some mirror shades and was instantly changed into a ‘cool’ punk, at least that’s what he thought. There was a trend at the time for the bassist to be the straight guy and they usually ended up getting the sack. Things turned out different this time.

6. What were the early days like? I can imagine they must have been exciting? A young band, a new scene, lots of faces and places and hope. I’ve heard that initial demos with the band were done on cardboard boxes?
We recorded a demo in this shed at the bottom of Dave Goodman’s dads house that Dave had a little 8 track set up in. There was no kit so I played on two cardboard boxes. The first gigs were really exciting. We got a mix of reactions from instant devotion to incredulity.

7. I know Andy complains the Label may be wasn’t big enough for Eater or if they had a better producer it could have been different. But let’s be honest here. Most bands only got the chance to do 1 maybe two singles. Eater got a contract when they weren’t even a band. The Label financed 5 or so singles and an album. Other bands like Gen X didn’t get a contract till late on. Surely you were lucky to have had them and to have had them so early? What’s your take on this? How did the Label treat Eater? Were the Label and Dave Goodman good for Eater? If not why not?
We had done a load of gigs before The Label, so we were a proper band and they never helped us get any once they were involved. They did nothing other than a bad job of releasing our singles. Most of our gigs were down to me and Andy. Andy used to hustle people into letting us play, he was the sort of kid who could convince you to give up your last fag and let him borrow your girlfriend. I just got us loads of supports with The Damned.

We had interest from better labels, loads came to our gigs. Track Records would have signed us they were looking for a UK Punk band but we had already signed to The Label. The ‘Label’ thing happed very suddenly and early on. It was very suspicious and I was never comfortable with it. All the shit about backing from John Lydon, he was never involved. We signed our contracts under duress, with Caruso’s cab on the meter outside. He then invited all the parents to a dinner to get them to verify our signatures but none of us read the contract. We turned up in these long hippy wigs and big cigars and pissed about all evening. His wife got drunk and shouted across the restaurant that he had a small willy and he was useless in bed. Hilarious.

aid on for me. At the same time Ian and Brian were .out to get me. Then I was sacked. In short the Label screwed Eater and ruined it. There was this one gig when Dave made a Sex Pistols shrine on the stage to celebrate the release of God Save the Queen, this was just farce and stupid, I didn’t want to play. I thought we were being sabotaged and took my contract to a solicitor that Leee Black Childers l

8. What’s your opinion of Dave Goodman?
Dave was ok. I liked him, but Caruso was slime.

9. Tell me about the internal dynamics in the band. There was an obvious Brian/Andy link but how did the band function in terms of decisions and songwriting?
To start with we all got together in the little flat Brian had on the back of his mum and dads house and wrote together. Me and Andy became good friends and hung out together a lot at the clubs. Brian was still playing football for the school team so he needed his early nights. His mum and Dad only let him out on gig nights. We never saw Ian unless it was a rehearsal or a gig. I think he was studying business at some college in Acton.

10. How did this change as the months went by?
Later I wasn’t involved and Ian took a key role, they really started to do the band thing and I had my own circle of friends and just turned up for gigs. I didn’t like the set up with the Label and Ian being critical of my drumming so they had this meeting at Caruso’s. I took some Mandies and drank a load of rum and turned up arse faced, which was hilarious, but they all got really pissed off. Ian particularly said I wasn’t good enough to be in the band. They said I was always pissed and took too many drugs. I left the meeting thinking that I’d sorted it all out, promised to behave, and practice more, and share my drugs, but the next day, I think, Andy phoned me and I said I was sacked. I thought they would get over it, but then they said that they had Rowland already lined up. I thought he was a chump and just like Ian a grey and shallow clone of a million other bands. I still thought they would change their minds. When they didn’t I spoke to a friend at the NME and told them I had left.

12. Your mum was also an interesting character that seemed really into what you were doing and attending your gigs at the Roxy. What was her part in your role in Eater?
She was a mad hippy and really got into it but she had no role in the band she was just there. 

In addition to Dee’s mum was his granddad and sister Caroline all of whom featured in The Year In Punk

Dee: My Grandad was a profound influence on me, my Dad left home when I was 5 and I never saw him again until now. My Grandad lived with us for 20 years right up until he died at 97 years old, I guess he was the only male figure in my life who I respected. He really had a unique view of life and he cared about us all despite our excesses. He valued difference and non conformity and was really outrageous all the time, but he was also a deep and intelligent man. He would support us, even if he felt we were wrong, I think he felt we had the right to make mistakes, it was all about learning things for yourself. The rest of the family got involved in the Punk thing, I guess my mum got her 5 mins of fame also. Punk Rocker aka Nihilism On The Prowl

Stills from ‘Year in Punk’

It wasn’t just Dee or his mum who was into punk. There was also his sister Caroline (Pictured below left with Captain Sensible). Caroline lived life to the extreme but sadly died of a heroin overdose aged 27. A photo of her was used for the poster promoting The Damned’s Problem Child.

13. What’s your memories of The Roxy as you seemed to spend a lot of time down there either playing or being in the audience? What sort of reaction did you get?
Well we sort of owned the place really, I mean everyone in the scene Andy C, or whatever, made it so open, that I felt really at ease there, whereas other clubs were still just clubs. I really liked Don Letts and we got on, I really got into dub from listening to it down there

14. How did you get on touring with bands like The Heartbreakers?
We never toured with them. We didn’t tour with anyone, while I was in Eater, we just played single gigs.

15. How did you feel about the criticism that the band got from media people like Mark P in Sniffin’ Glue who put the band down as too young etc?
Well there another side to that that I won’t go into because I really liked the other person involved.

16. How did you get on with other bands? How did they treat Eater?
The Damned were my friends I still talk to Rat now. I knew everyone but we weren’t really considered too cool by the Pistols entourage. I met John Lydon later when he was in PIL and we sat up all night listening to music and talking and we got on, I was 18 by then and he could relate to me.

17. What bands did you rate then and what ones didn’t you?
Adverts, Subway Sect. The Pistols for the attitude. PIL were the best thing to come out of Punk.

18. In some interviews you have criticised the music of Eater? I found that strange as it has survived over some 25 years and still attracts fans from all over the world. Have you changed your opinion? What do you think of the music you were involved in now?
I am just bitter. Eater was ok for 1977 but I want more than that now. I hate nostalgia. I used to laugh at the blokes that wore the Teddy Boy suits and leathers up the Kings Road in 1977. I don’t really listen to punk. I don’t deny people the right to walk about in Punk uniform; you know tartan pants and a Mohican. But that’s what it is fashion. It’s not a statement of the magnitude of doing it in 77, when people wanted to slash your face for being different.

When I was in Eater I made my own clothes, we all did, except Ian who got his from BHS. I still listen to Jah Wobble because he has developed beyond PIL and he releases a few albums a year. Although early PIL are an exception to my nostalgia rule and I listen to them almost every day. Keith Levene still makes great music as well and I have all his stuff and speak to him occasionally. I really like Pigface Martin Atkins project, he was in Killing Joke, and he’s pushed things beyond the formula.

My definition of what is Punk now is something like Wolf Eyes the album Burned Mind. They are pushing it. I don’t like all these bands that reference 77 Punk, it’s just pretence and an excuse for not having originality or talent. I don’t want to listen to Eater sound alikes. Why should I? I’ve done all that.

19. Another thing that comes across from interviews and quotes from yourself is that Punk Rock had such a negative and destructive feeling to it. Do you still think this? What did you think of punk rock at the time?
Well after I got sacked I got into heroin and in a short time I had no drums, no friends and had nearly killed myself. That’s what happened to me after Eater, there was no one looking out for me I was an outcast.

20. The idea you get from commentators like John Savage is that you were tired of the whole punk scene in the end and was glad to be out of the band. How true is this?
People started to get tired of me, throwing up on my shoes and nicking stuff from their houses. In the end I went home to sort myself out.

21. How did you come to leave the band? Were you angry? You suggest that you were a large part of Eater and that losing you was a mistake. What do you think Eater lost when you were fired? Where could they have gone music wise with you on board?
They sacked me at the height of my powers. They lost their character, authenticity, became too musical, too dominated by Ian’s boring bass lines, played the wrong gigs, released joke records about yo yo’s, lost the audience, you name it went wrong. It did for me too; I just got out of my head all the time. With me in it they would have stayed chaotic, let people down more often, smashed up more equipment, played at variable tempos unintentionally during the same song all the time, and generally been a whole lot more interesting. They became better musically, more competent, but really boring. Ian went on to play with old man fake Punks The Vibrators, that says it all. Crap really crap.

22. Being 14 and having drugs and sex on tap is probably every 14 years old dream? The speed events must have moved must have been frightening and then for it all to end quite a shock? Did it take you long to get over it
At 16 I was on the dole, no qualifications, no money. I got a job sweeping in a printing works. I had drawn and painted though out my teens and during Eater so I took them to the local Art School and asked if they would have me. They did and after two years I was accepted to do a degree in Fine Art at Central in London.

23. Why didn’t you sort out another band straight away or is as the quotes say you were tired of punk?
I had this Band called the Dirty Works, but we just did drugs and sat about. Then I had a band at Art School called Lenny and the Lemons, but Lenny had acute stage fright and we could never play anywhere but his bedroom. I played guitar in that band but just invented the chords because I couldn’t be bothered to learn. My band now is really the best thing I’ve every done.

26. If you change things that happened regarding Eater what would you change and why?
I’d change nothing really. I think that if we had stayed together we would still be in the same position, thinking about what could have been. We were too young to make it work. Maybe that’s what’s good about Eater, we never got old and boring well while anyone was watching anyway, and why we were the definitive Punk band.