Menace

The origins of Menace lie in a very progressive rock band that featured Charlie Casey, Noel Martin and Steve Tannett who at school (the same one Johnny Rotten went to) had discovered a love of music. They went on to form a band with a keyboard player Norman Seabrook and were called Stonehenge. They had some success and played with Hawkwind, Thin Lizzy and a variety of others, even making some demos.

When an offer came in to play German Air Bases for a few months with regular gigs they jumped at it. Unfortunately, the singer also jumped ship. His replacement was a Canadian guy called Morgan Webster and Stonehenge duly set off for Germany to play 5 sets a night including rock’n’roll, rock and soul,

Their sound has slowly developed getting harder and leaner as a Dr Feelgood influence began to take hold and by the time they returned towards the end of 1976 they had taken the decision to lose the keyboard player, make their sound a lot harder and to reflect this, change their name to Menace. They also do one of the earliest punky sounding rocksteady/ska songs.

Some early footage in 1977 captures the band in transition from R&B to what we know Menace as today.

Filmed early 1977 Lord Nelson Islington

Now Menace could have sunk without a trace but for a piece of serendipity. They give a tape to Kim Turner, who is part of Miles Copeland’s small team of people involved in signing, producing and distributing punk records. Somehow Miles ends up down the Roxy Club, he sees Menace and having another band split up when he has studio time booked signs them up for two singles.

Into the studio they go and with the legendary John Cale of The Velvet Underground at the helm record 4 songs.

By now a harder more street punk look and sound was starting to come through and Menace & Sham 69 were the forerunners of this with songs complete with big bootboy terracy choruses. Sham and Menace played a fair bit together. Swelling the ranks of punks were now football hooligans and the return of skinheads brought with it an increase in violence.

Menace played all the usual haunts like the Roxy Club and Vortex but predominantly were London based which was to limit their appeal. They were self managed and also worked.

Menace and Sham 69 double bill at the Roxy Club – Photos Rita Pike

Into 1978 they went and arguably their peak was the release of GLC on Small Wonder records which still today is a minor punk classic which when played live causes the audience to invade the stage for mass singalong.

The dynamics of the band also were conspiring against them. It was always the three school friends and Morgan Webster and he was definitely apart from them. He was a real force of nature though but underlying drink and drug problems were beginning to manifest themselves.

Sham became very successful but at the same time attracted a right-wing skinhead following they couldn’t shake off and their gigs were marred by violence. They weren’t alone, The Lurkers and countless other gigs became battlegrounds and Menace was no different.

An infamous gig occurred on the Isle Of Sheppey where a full scale riot occurred according to the local newspaper

The other two tracks recorded in 1977 come out 3 quarters through 1978 on Illegal which is a surprise to the band and they manage to get some studio time and lay down 5 more tracks from their set.

And then suddenly that’s it. Morgan declared one day he didn’t want to do it anymore and the band tired of his unreliability, but unaware of his drug habit, didn’t try to dissuade him.

Menace are no more though they get two last belated hurrahs. Final Vinyl featuring Last Years Youth and Carry No Banners was released by Small Wonder in 1979. For some despairing of power pop, new wave and synth it’s a breath of fresh air and of the purity of 1977 punk. One of those was Garry Bushell who as a passionate believer that punk wasn’t dead was pushing his streetpunk/oi line as a movement and rallying the troops. Ironically 1979 saw success for bands that Menace had regularly played with like the UK Subs and The Members.

Menace meanwhile backed Vermilion as the Aces for a short while and again another belated single with the last 3 songs from the demos comes out on Fresh Records.

Against all the odds Menace reformed in the late 1990’s and is still going today with just Noel in the band still making the same righteous streetpunk noise.

Screwed Up / Insane Society
(Illegal Records 1977)

Classic pair of songs; simple, direct and insanely (sic) catchy. The front cover clearly sets out the band sartorially with its Doc Martens, painted boots and utilitarian street thrift clothes as the more street, second wave of punk along with Sham, Cock Sparrer and that ilk as opposed to the intellectual fashion-driven Kings Road crew. It also featured a band shot minus their faces, unusually. The back cover made up for that with a suitably moody posed shot of the band, again by Jill Furmanovsky.

Noel Martin It was kind of like someone else’s idea of art. It was going to be a band shot and then Jill said, “It would be good if we just got a picture of the legs. And what we’ll do is take the picture with the light shining from the headlights of the car.” She was a great photographer, but it was like, sorry, lads. No faces on the cover! You’re all too unfashionably ugly. I think that’s probably what it was.

Steve Tannett Screwed Up was a great little riff on one chord then A down to E. Very simple and the brilliance of how we did it with Menace in those first songs and Morgan absolutely giving it his all in terms of lyrics and vocal delivery. I think Noel and Charlie did put some lyrical input in and I’d say that a lot of the chordage and song structure was me as the guitar player and Charlie. But of course, with punk being what it was, we liked to put in the bootboy choruses, the big, ‘SCREWED UP’ and ‘INSANE SOCIETY’ shoutalong.

There’s a bit on Screwed Up, where I scrape the plectrum down the strings as part of the song that Andy Riff always refers to as ‘The Shave!’

Charlie Casey I wrote the music to Screwed Up on the bass and it goes, ‘da da da da’ but fast and that was the making of it. Morgan had written those words already and he honed it a bit. It was a love song really about a woman being screwed up, or that’s the way I saw it.

A lot of people preferred Screwed Up to GLC. I loved it! It’s a great bassline (laughs) and it sounds really, really bumpy using a lot of the bass end of strings. It was good fun and Morgan had those great lyrics. It’s great in its simplicity! 

The closest you’ll get to the real thing! Canada’s The Subhumans play Screwed Up in 1978

GLC / I’m Civilised
(Small Wonder 1978)

For the band’s second single, they changed labels to Small Wonder, a record label and shop, situated in Hoe Street, Walthamstow, North London run by husband-and-wife duo Pete and Mari Stennett.

Pete Stennett (Small Wonder) I think the original label couldn’t handle GLC and its lyrics because it was not going to get a lot of airplay so Menace came to us and asked if we would be interested. We thought it was irreverent with the band singing “You’re full of shit”

Now GLC is arguably Menace’s best-known and loved song and one that regularly features on punk compilations of the time, so it’s all the more strange that the band can remember virtually nothing about its recording or origins.

Charlie Casey It was like a football song in that it was very rabble rousing and we hadn’t thought about it, but it could sound like “Chelsea! Chelsea! You’re full of shit!” But Chelsea fans used to come to gigs, so no problem there. It’s serious but not political with a capital P. It was us voicing something against all the things we were against and the GLC.

Steve Tannett We were all wondering how GLC got written, if you look at the chords of GLC – A E – it’s not a far stretch to remember that we might have been playing it a lot slower when we wrote it. We used to write in the studio together in rehearsals.

I really, really like I’m Civilised. That wasn’t a fast punk song; that was a really good song and one of our best bits of punk writing because it wasn’t ‘1234!’ It was chunky, hard and well-constructed and Morgan was a brilliant lyricist. You can’t take that away from him. “Wake up do your time!” with the alarm clock. GLC was me, Noel and Charlie, in the ‘let’s have a big boot boy chorus’ type of thing.

Anyway, we recorded both single tracks at Berry Street studios and we did them both on the same session. It’s just off Clerkenwell Road and we had some fans come along, the St John Street crowd (The Firm namechecked on the back) because Berry Street was near where I lived, and those sessions had so much energy.

Sean Power Obviously the single GLC is one of the most iconic small punk records ever. If you didn’t have that you weren’t really a punk. It’s nowhere near like Anarchy in the UK, but it was a fucking fantastic song capturing the sheer energy of the band. Punk music is a lot of energy and for kids and teenagers of my age it was the nuts. The records are very sharp, quick and to the point. Punk records don’t linger. They are in, do it and are away.

I was in the recording studio all day long and the others came down to do the chorus – Steve’s brother’s friends. All of us screaming, “You’re full of shit!” doing the mob vocals. The studio was only walking distance from our house.

Small Wonder label mate Patrik Fitzgerald also appeared on GLC providing backing vocals. He had supported Menace at the Roxy on a few occasions and at the Vortex.

I Need Nothing / Electrocutioner
(Illegal Records 1978)

Following Screwed Up on Illegal and the one single deal of GLC with Small Wonder, Illegal suddenly, and without consulting the band, released the first Menace recording from June 1977, exercising their second single option.

Stranger was a feature in the music paper Sounds’ gossip column ‘Jaws’ in December, which featured a quote from Noel saying I Need Nothing had been released without them knowing, and that it had been dropped from their set months ago. And even stranger was the fact that they had dropped a song from their set, given they didn’t have that many!

If anyone was hoping to set the world alight with the single, they would be disappointed. There were sparse reviews in the press and fanzines for Menace’s latest oldest release. A pithy one liner eventually appeared in Issue 15 of Ripped & Torn in November 1978. “Hasn’t got the gimmick or the hook of either Screwed Up or GLC. A weak record.”

For Steve, the song’s origin, like GLC, was probably even older, and its b-side, Electrocutioner, is a fine Menace mid-tempo punk classic.

Steve Tannett I think for I Need Nothing we might have been playing around with something in that chord sequence from earlier, either before or as we were turning into Menace.

Last Years Youth / Carry No Banners
(Small Wonder 1978)

By the time this final single came out Menace had already split up, losing both singer Morgan in late 1978 and the Men from their name, to become Vermilion’s backing band as the Aces…(Men)aces geddit?! Both songs came from five songs recorded at Pathway Studio in October 1978.

No one can remember either how the demos came about, or who paid for them, but all agreed that the single was a tribute to the band and a thank you to the fans.

Pete Stennett (Small Wonder) I can’t remember why we put out Final Vinyl except we did the first one. I probably listened to it and thought it’s not bad we’ll put it out. It wasn’t as good as GLC, but it was OK!

Punk was like everything really. It had its day and gradually evolved; first it was three chord thrash, then it got more sophisticated in playing and writing, and then there were new names like new wave, but it was just rock ’n’ roll and it never stays static. 

As you’d expect, both songs on the Final Vinyl are up-tempo, straight ahead punk rock classics, with the pick being Last Year’s Youth with its unusually more wistful lyrics, but complete with the trademark insanely catchy shouty chorus. There’s also more maturity to the arrangement and production. Coming out so late in 1979, the song should really have been called The Year Before Last Year’s Youth.

Steve Tannett By the time we got to GLC we had done a lot of shows so were able to go ‘let’s do this or let’s do that’ and I was getting a lot of ideas coming through. When you listen to Final Vinyl, there’s lots of little guitar overdubs and I was heavily influenced on the guitar in that period by Mick Jones. I really liked his Clash touches, as in higher note things, so I nicked some bits from him. But we didn’t do a lot of overdubs. It was very much get the guitars down then double that, double that and double that. It was punk, so it was pretty much get it down fast!

The ‘goodbye thanks’ on the back, which is in Noel’s wife Barbara’s handwriting, included among others, the Rottin’ Klitz, Illegal, Miles Copeland, Sham, and of course, Pete and Mari of Small Wonder, who released the single on their own label. Also mentioned were fans of the band, who are what the song is about, including long-time friends Riff, Hoxton Tom and Sean Power.

Publicity-wise, this got a fair bit. Strangely, it was reviewed on consecutive weeks in Sounds. The second was on 16 June 1979, by Phil Sutcliffe.

.

The Young Ones / Tomnorrow’s World /
(Fresh Records 1980)

However not too many months into playing as just the Aces, their Menace history re-appeared and continued their trend of releasing singles after the event. This EP featured the final songs from the Pathway Studio demos from October 1978 that spawned the Last Year’s Youth and Carry No Banners final vinyl single on Small Wonder.

The A side was a cover of Cliff Richard’s The Young Ones, which as we’ve seen was in their set from the earliest days, and Live for Today and Tomorrow’s World meaning everything bar I like Chips and Punk Rocker had been committed to vinyl. The pick here would be Tomorrow’s World with its catchy shout, a long chorus and written by Charlie while at his mum’s.

Alex Howe was a fan of Menace and had been to see them a few times.

Alex Howe (Fresh Records) Charlie was working for me at Fresh at that time and I loved their version of The Young Ones, so it seemed like a no-brainer. I remember the amazing energy they generated live, hot, sweaty and LOUD, with kids pogoing and slam dancing all over the place.

None of the band can remember, though, how they came to cover the song.

Steve Tannett We made a conscious decision not to do covers. I don’t even know whose idea it was to do it. Why did we even cover it? What was the thinking? It wasn’t from our old sets. I dunno! Maybe someone asked us to do it? We didn’t even do it that well in my opinion. The chords aren’t quite right from the original, so we could have done it better, but I tend to forget about that song as being part of our output.

Charlie Casey I don’t know where it came from. I don’t think we were doing the song before and I haven’t got a clue whose idea it was. We might have done it in the old days where I could imagine we might have made it a little raucous and had a mock fight. It would have been nice to have it as theme music to come on to.

Chrissie Pepper: I had got into punk when I was fifteen in 1976. My dad lived in London and my mum lived in Northampton. I got sent to a boarding school but hated it and constantly misbehaved and got expelled. I came down to London every weekend and got into punk. I started going to the Roxy and Vortex and gigs at the Marquee and various places. I had one life where I was at school and another where I’d have my London clothes ready in a locker at the train station.

I’d been to a couple of Menace gigs before I first met Morgan through Ali in the summer of 1979 in the Hope & Anchor. I’d just finished school and was eighteen; Morgan would have been in his early to mid-thirties. We met through Ali. I ended up moving in with him in his bedsit on Upper Street close to the Kings Head.

Previous to me, he had been with a German girl called Leigh who was on the run. According to Morgan, she had been something to do with a German terrorist cell like Baader Meinhof. He was with her for quite a long time, but I don’t know I don’t know how or why that ended at the end of 1978.

I knew that Morgan had a drink problem, and it soon became apparent he had a drug problem. He had been on and off various types of opiates since he was a teenager.  Every day he would go get bottles of codeine linctus to stop going into withdrawal. Back then, you could buy it over the counter; but only one bottle per day per chemist. So each day he would find four chemists around Holloway Road, Tottenham and Finsbury Park and go get his bottles. It was almost like a full time job. He’d also go to the doctors and say he was a celiac to get opiates or downers like Valium. On top of that we were both drinking heavily.

I thought it was all very romantic and rock ‘n’ roll. The whole punk scene was full of people acting as if they were on something. Whether they were or weren’t, it all seemed very glamorous. We were a group of rebels and I thought I was superior to people who were straight. Like what idiot wouldn’t take drugs and drink and I would sneer at the straights? The arrogance of being a teenager is thinking that you know it all and that you are always superior to anyone else.

I held down a job but he never held one for very long. Often those would be as a commis chef.  For a while, both of us did some work for a guy called Leather John down Cross Street in Islington, putting studs in leather belts and wristbands.

He’d been in and out of borstal and prison since he was about fifteen. While in prison he’d learnt to be a commis chef as a trade. One story about his time in prison stayed with me. He was in Guelph prison, and they had something called the ‘hole’ where they sent you if you were really badly behaved. It’s solitary confinement, but it was a small dark cell that you couldn’t stand up in and had to shit in a hole in the floor. It was total isolation and sensory deprivation. He was repeatedly sent there.

He loved forming bands. He loved writing, drawing and music and was incredibly creative but he was an addict from very early on. He was messed up and his family were messed up. Both his parents were Scottish and had been professional actors. They met through acting, and my God did they do dramatics! Perhaps where Morgan got some of his frontman confidence from. They were divorced and both were alcoholics. He had a sister called Siobhan who was another big drinker, and she had a kid called Callum who was a cute kid of about three or four. He also had a brother Duncan, who played guitar and was the sensible one, distancing himself from the alcoholic chaos. Morgan was the eldest, but the family situation meant he didn’t get the support he needed growing up.

Having alcoholic parents would mean he was neglected and psychologically abused. Not deliberately, but as a side effect of their alcoholism. It’s no surprise he ended up anaesthetizing his feelings with alcohol or drugs because that was all he knew.

In 1971, he was arrested and charged with another drug offense in Canada but skipped bail. His mother encouraged him to go to England and stay away for 10 years until the warrant expired. All of this, of course, led to him being fucking angry and punk was a great outlet for him and he really enjoyed it, though he hated the fighting and the racist element and all that stuff that had started to creep in.

In Stonehenge and then Menace, Noel, Steve, and Charlie were inexperienced young men, while Morgan was older and more worldly. They couldn’t fully understand his life because it was unlike anything they had encountered before.

So we went for a holiday in the summer of 1981, and it was wonderful. I remember his mum saying, ”Why don’t you guys get married then you could stay, and you can get a work permit.” So we moved to Toronto in November, at which time it was really cold with fifteen feet of snow and all that. We got married at the end of December 1981.

The wedding was utter chaos at his mum’s house and she was rolling drunk. She was someone who drank every day out and the friends of the family were also the same and it was normal behaviour. I thought it was just funny and completely normal as we both drank.

We lived in his mum’s house. Siobhan was living upstairs with her kid. His mom was living on the sofa in the living room kitchen, and we were living in the basement. Everyone was drinking and it was utter chaos. Can you imagine it or what it was like being a neighbour? Fights and shouting and people trying to score drugs! It was nuts.

At some point in 1983, it all got too much, and I came back to the UK. We had spent so long together. It was lovely in some ways, but it was unlikely to end up well with two people with all sorts of problems. Morgan was not the bad guy; I had my own problems and was fully complicit.

Morgan came back soon after and tried to patch things up, but it wasn’t going to work, and I said no. He ended up living on the Packington Estate in Upper Street. I saw him then and he was in a right mess with substance abuse. I knew he was promoting gigs at the George Robey. Recently I found I still had some of his old notebooks full of punk, ska and mod bands’ phone numbers, including Suggs, Charlie Harper, Crass, Eater & The Slits and so on.

Then I remember him telling me that he was going back to Canada because his dad was dying which I think was 1984. I believe he came back here after that for a short while, but I’m not quite sure, because I then lost touch with him.

In 1988, when I wanted a divorce, I had to get a solicitor in Canada to find him so that he could file the divorce papers. When I spoke to him, he was incredibly paranoid and talked about having had a girlfriend or having a girlfriend, but that the FBI had taken her away and there was a plot against him.

Then, in 1991, while changing my son’s nappy, I received a newspaper clipping of his death notice from his best friend, Red White, who lived in Toronto. Red was a person whom Morgan had known from prison since his teens, and they had also been in a band together. I spoke with Red, who confirmed the details of how Morgan had died. He’d been window cleaning in Chinatown, scoring heroin off the Chinese there, which would be pretty strong and taken too much of that and all kinds of other things. So, feeling unwell, he decided to cycle to the hospital on his bike and got hit by a truck and then died in the hospital sometime after that. The toxicology report was pages long with all the stuff that had taken!

I thought I could rescue Morgan; I was gonna sort him out. I was eighteen and I knew everything. I had the power to rescue other people! How wrong was I?