JC Carroll The Members Interview Sep 2025

I’m not the biggest fan of your first album; I just couldn’t get into it. But I just can’t stop playing At The Coach House. I prefer the production, the sound of the guitars and I just love all the songs on there.

It’s a brilliant record. I found the tape in my archive, sent it to a guy in Bristol for digitization about four years ago, and had forgotten we’d even recorded that material. We were well-rehearsed and simply went in and recorded everything without much production. Steve Lillywhite, who produced our first album, just mixed it. The best part is, we made this before signing a record deal, so we actually own it now, unlike our other music that’s been with Virgin Records for decades. It’s basically the same album, but even better.

It captures the energy of the band with real immediacy.

Maybe we didn’t need producing; we were already playing well together. For our first album, there weren’t many overdubs or suggestions to change singing keys; we just played as we always did. I was genuinely impressed listening back, thinking it sounded great. I think we probably recorded it in a day or even less than that.

The band sound incredibly tight with some complex arrangements and lots of space for the music to breathe. Even the song Phone In Show doesn’t sound scripted and sounds naturally, off the cuff and very funny and rude.

It’s a really kind of strange mixture of music that was The Members. It wasn’t straight-ahead punk and it was a mix and that’s what we were. I’m really thrilled with the album and it’s a really brilliant document of the way we were. Possibly better than the first album? I think you might be right. What Steve Lillywhite did was put one guitar on each side and I don’t think there’s any guitar overdubs or anything. It’s just me on one side, Nigel on the other side and the drums and the bass.

I’d have to say that if you did that in one day. That’s pretty amazing to get that out.

Well, that’s what bands did. When we went into the studio later on and with our record deal, we spent a fortune. We had to go into a Virgin Records studio and spend 20, 30 grand or something like that. That was just as good. Even Sound of the Suburbs is pretty fucking good. I mean, it’s not that dissimilar to the final version.

There’s a really interesting thing about Suburbs, which is the kind of bone that I’ve always had. Originally, I only had two verses. When we recorded it, Nicky said, “Oh no, it needs another verse.”  So he wrote a third verse. Steve Lillywhite said to get it onto the radio, it’s better to be 3 minutes, 15 seconds. So he cut the third verse. But that version on the Coach House is the two-verse version, which is more or less all written by me. Nicky wanted to get on the publishing and writing credits so he wrote the third verse. So he’s on the writing credits to this day and he (his family) gets half the money. But for me, the two-verse version is perfect.

First gig

I played my first gig with the UK Subs at the Red Deer in Croydon. Then Nick and then Chris Payne joined after that one.

There’s quite a bit of detail in the fanzine in the record about your equipment setup to detail how the Members got their sound. You’re the twangy one 🙂

People really love the geeky stuff about the amps and the guitars. People love that shit you know, and  what makes the detail is, what it’s all about.

Well, it is kind of integral, isn’t it, to your sound and the way the songs come across. It’s really important, that kind of juxtaposition between crunchy, twangy.

Through 1978, you know, it’s fairly obvious that suddenly the Members start to get more press and it’s all remarkably positive. I think one of your earliest fans there was Garry Bushell. He came along and saw you and then also did one of your first interviews in July 1978.

He did an interview with us in Sounds and it’s quite interesting because I think that he came to see us and he really had latched onto the football terrace chorus part of our songs. He maybe even used the word oi in our thing, right? Not something that I’m really mad about but he identified this, kind of oi, kind of football terrace stuff in some of our songs. But later on, I think we were a bit too middle-class for the full blown oi. And he moved on to the Cockney Rejects and Sham 69.

It’s funny because there was you, the UK Subs, Skids, Ruts and the whole second wave of punk bands that were really making a mark. I mean, Virgin tended to hoover them all up.

It was quite interesting because what happened is that when the first wave punk bands got record deals, most of the managers didn’t really have that much ambition. All they thought of was signing their band to a major record label and getting a 30 grand advance. If you could get 30 grand of a record company, you’d done the scam and that was it. They didn’t really see further than that.

So in a funny way, the Pistols and the Clash, got their deals. They then seemed to spend all their time in a rehearsal studio smoking dope because they didn’t have to go and do gigs because they had wages. I think it was a bit like that. So what happened is there was a bit of a kind of vacuum because they literally they weren’t doing many gigs.

The UK Subs really kind of blossomed in the scene. We came along and we were, of course, from Surrey, like the Jam, Sham 69 and the Stranglers and us suburban bands came into London and started making a bit of a noise. But the first wave like, The Damned kept splitting up. The Buzzcocks weren’t doing that much. I think that once they got record deals and signed to big labels, they disappeared from the London circuit.

You definitely didn’t disappear from the London circuit because when I count how many gigs weren’t in London you did it was probably about one percent.

It was amazing. What happened is that I was working in a bank and I had a flat in Edgware Road and I had the amps underneath my stairs. Chris was working at Heathrow Airport as an electrician and he used to come up and pick up me and the amps and then we’d go out and do gigs. Maybe two or three a week in the evenings; anywhere there was a stage. It was a really exciting time because Dave Robinson, Stiff and Dai Davis, had set up this pub rock circuit and we fell into that.

But it was a great time to see bands, though. I mean, you could see bands all week at the Vortex and Roxy Club. Then we started getting punk at the Marquee, you know. Also, punk was quite a broad church. There were lots of bands that were a bit punk and there were lots of different styles. There was quite a variety,  like Wire and XTC and stuff like that started coming through and they were all quite art rock. There was the art rock side of it also which was good. Like on our record; it wasn’t all kind of Ramone-style music.

Where did the reggae come from in your music then?

I think that we were really one of the very first punk bands to play reggae and play it slowly and I just loved it. I said when I joined the band, I was obsessed with two things apart from punk. I liked surf music, like the Shadows and surf and reggae. A lot of young white boys were listening to reggae like John Lydon, and we were all listening to it because it was just completely different.  We loved it, and so we had quite a few reggae bits on the B sides of our first singles like Rat Up A Drain Pipe that Chris Payne wrote. It was a big part of our sound, because you couldn’t play really fast songs all night; you’d need the contrast.

I’d moved to London. I was working in a bank, living in a bedsit and travelling and everything that was in the song Solitary Confinement. Nicky Tesco started the band with this guy called Gary and they all looked a bit like hippies. He’d heard that I was kind of good and I was a songwriter andhe just phoned me up one day and said, “Do you want to join my band? Because we need somebody that looks a bit more punk.” I’d been the Camberley boy who had been going to the Roxy, I guess, and hanging out. So he asked me.  I don’t know why he did, but I think he only asked me because I looked more punk than the rest of the band.

I’d done an audition with the Art Attacks to replace Edwin Pouncey in the Art Attacks. I knew JD Haney, the drummer of the Art Attacks, from playing in his college band with him out in Egham in Surrey. I have a memory of attending an audition for Art Attacks and singing Neutron Bomb with them. That could have been a whole different world if I’d have joined the Art Attacks.

The Beggars Banquet Streets Compilation

Streets was fantastic. It was my first record. Beggars Banquet was only a record shop and they decided to get in on the punk movement. They had a rehearsal studio and they got in touch with a guy called Ed Hollis who was the Eddie and the Hot Rods manager. Ed was working with Steve Lillywhite and they had just done Do Anything You Wanna Do by the Hot Rods. It was Steve’s first production because Steve was bit like an engineer before then; he wasn’t a producer. So they phoned us and said they could get us on this compilation record. I think it was about four bands an a day who recorded a track.

Then there was a mini tour to promote it, which was really amazing, which was us, the Doll, a band called The Reaction, which went on to be Talk Talk and the guy that played the bass in the Reaction was Paul Gray. We did the mini tour with the Lurkers, the Doll, the Reaction and the Members. I think it was about four dates. But it was a really, really important record because I think it showed how wide the UK punk sound was. It was kind of lots of really weird, different kind of bands and a lot of people really love the record still to this day.

That was my first recording with The Members here on Streets, which was a great anti-National Front song.

Stiff Records

That came about through my association with Graham Parker.

What?

I’d met him in a pub in Bagshot when I was about 17 or 18 and we were just talking about music standing by the jukebox. I said, “My father’s got a four-track tape recorder if you ever do want to do any recording. He said “I’ve got some songs I need to record. So one day he came back to the bedroom and we put, I was a stereo, I think, and we put one mic on him and his guitar and one, I put my electric in the amp in the cupboard and we recorded a little tape. And he took it up to London and it sort of helped him move along a bit.

But we recorded Solitary Confinement with Stiff and it got record of the week in NME. Tony Parsons rather grandly said it was the best thing that Stiff had ever put out. It’s a bit of an overstatement, but it was the time when him and Julie Burchill were reviewing singles and it fitted into their idea of what music should be.

We were on this one-off deal. Yeah. They were a bit stupid because they fucking missed a trick there because the next record was Sound of the Suburbs.

By then everybody wanted us because what had happened was that we got record of the week in NME and we were literally playing, started to play bigger gigs and we sold out the Nashville in London. We’d have 200 people turn up to come to see us, so it was obvious that we’d got this huge following, and we were taking off. There was a bidding war and it was Radar Records, Virgin and another label. They probably had the Coach House tape.

1978 was a really exciting time for punk; it got a lot bigger. But in 1979, it really blew up and established punk groups got into the charts for the first time. So your Spiral Scratch and your Neat, Neat, Neat, never charted or anything like that. But Love Song and whatever the Buzzcocks put out and Generation X and all those bands, they got into the national charts, which was completely unheard of.

JC goes a bit controversial with The Damned’s Love Song!.

I played it once because we had Rat as a drummer for three years and we said, let’s do a Damned song. I’m a bit of a snob as a songwriter. I thought, this isn’t even a fucking song. You know what I mean? It’s not like clever lyrics put together. It’s just like sort of thrown away chords. I mean, that’s only me looking at it as a songwriter. You wouldn’t say, “Oh, this is a really well-written song that’s going to be a hit record.”

We all did coloured vinyl, you know, and it was written in our contracts, by the way, that you didn’t get any royalties on colored vinyl.

Well, I only started getting money back from them a year and a half ago. It’s because they set it up. They put you in an expensive studio and kind of wash the money from the advance back into their other company. Then make you do a video and that would cost like £20 grand and you’d have to be number one all around the world to get 20 grand back. They got you into debt very, very quickly.

The follow up to Suburbs was supposed to be (At The) End Of Term like a punky School’s Out but it wasn’t to be and there’s a bizarre story how the song was lost and found!

In 2012 JC Carroll of The Members was at a car boot sale looking for old musical instruments of which he collects. A seller, asked JC if he was in a band. Yes he said, he was in The Members. After buying an organ from the seller he took his phone number and asked him to call so I could arrange a time to pick it up. When he got there to collect it, the seller surprised him, “My son in law’s got a big tape of the Members – a master tape.”  Then went on to explained that his son-in-law’s father used to own a recording studio in London. A few phone calls and months later JC found myself looking at two 1 inch, eight track, Ampex master tapes of The Members recorded in June 1979.  

What was exciting about these tapes is there was an unreleased track on them a track called “End of Term” that was due to be a follow-up to Sound of the Suburbs. JC had found  the Holy Grail of Member-O-Bilia. The other three tracks were Normal People, Muzak Machine and a song called Gang War. The last three songs were recorded on the second Members album. JC had the tapes transferred onto a hard drive and opened them in his studio. It was a perfect time capsule – all the instruments and voices were clearly recorded on the tape. The songs sounded fresh and vibrant, full of youthful energy. This was The Members Mark 1 at the top of their game. ‘End of Term’  was to be the follow-up single to the massive chart hit ‘Sound of the Suburbs’ But needed to be released just before the end of term to have maximum effect. Because of delays in recording it was abandoned As a single.

The tracks on it are really good, actually. They’re really raw versions of stuff that went onto the second album. They’re really great. I mean, it was wonderful when I opened the file up on my computer and it was like time travel. You’re like, wow, I’m back in the rehearsal studio. You know, it’s great.

I liked End Of Term because I wrote it with Nicky and it was very much of its time. We didn’t really write that much together, believe it or not.

The only things we wrote together were that and a song called Working Girl. This song has Nicky’s character in it. He wasn’t the world’s greatest singer, but he was a great raconteur and talker and it comes across in the Coach House record which he’s brilliant on.

He was great on stage, too, and it was really sad that his health deteriorated later on in life, and he didn’t want to perform. So I did remix the song because I had the master tape and so I could remix it how I wanted it. So that was kind of interesting.

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