Enduring Spirit

On tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their eponymous debut LP, The Raincoats should be assured of its legacy if last night's gig at the Komedia in Brighton was anything to go by. Amongst the expected middle-aged audience was a healthy contingent of young people - and young women in particular - and they seemed to know the words to the songs as well as us oldies. Part of that may be down to the album's enthusiastic endorsement by the late Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love's Hole covering one of their songs; but even that was 25 years ago so I like to think it's more an enduring spirit that has been handed down through punk and riot grrrl and still has currency today.

The Raincoats were born from the west London squatting scene of the late seventies: inspired by The Slits, Gina Birch (bass and vocals) and Ana da Silva (guitar and vocals) started the band having met at Hornsey Art College. After some initial line-up changes, they became an all-female group in 1978 when they were joined by Vicky Aspinall on violin and Palmolive from The Slits on drums. They started from a point of little musical ability but were undeterred: as Gina advised last night, "write some lyrics, put them to a couple of chords - but be inventive." And The Raincoats were: at a time when so many bands were opting for rama-lama punk as a template, they were different and surprising; it was no wonder that disillusioned Pistol John Lydon was an early fan.

Only Ana and Gina from the line-up that recorded The Raincoats were present last night - Anne Wood and Vice Cooler were on violin and drums, respectively - as they played the original LP in its entirety book-ended with outstanding debut single Fairytale in the Supermarket at the start and songs from the Extended Play EP at the end. Still sounding angular and lo-fi but with uplifting harmonies, they worked through the tracks chronologically and it was a joy to hear songs such as Off Duty Trip, The Void and, my particular favourite, the Velvety nag of the discomfiting In Love, with its lyrics of turmoil: "I can't do a thing today/I can't see anyway/I haven't eaten all day." I last saw the band in early 1980 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden and it was such a treat to hear them live again, not in a nostalgic way but as confirmation that in the era of my youth there were people producing such distinctive and life-affirming music.

Charming and disarming in their interactions with the audience, the band were candid about the demands of playing live: Ana revealed the difficulty of getting their cover of The Kinks' Lola right (they did) and Gina, switching to guitar for a couple of songs, confessed that it was hard to sing when playing the bass. It was just this sort of honesty that made The Raincoats so refreshing and opened up the way in music for countless others. The honesty continued to the end of the night when Ana said, "This is the last song, we're not pretending, we have no encore, we have no more songs." And as they took a bow to rapturous applause, they were joined onstage by 'fifth-Beatle' Shirley O'Loughlin, The Raincoats' manager since the start.

Red Wine Smiles

There was a wonderful moment in the middle of The Lovely Eggs set in Hastings last night: in celebration of the band's anniversary, they play a couple of quick 'old' numbers; the thirteen-seconds-long Muhammad Ali And All His Friends segues into the twenty second burst of fury that is I'm A Journalist. The latter, singer and guitarist Holly Ross says, is for anyone who has a shitty job. After asking the audience who has a job they hate, they then repeat the song with personalised lyrics for a civil servant called Keith - only at a Lovely Eggs gig would this happen.

The Lancaster punk duo - Ross and partner David Blackwell on drums - have been around for 10 years, releasing four small-label albums, a raft of singles and gigging regularly to critical acclaim. But despite the connections and endorsements - Gruff Rhys has produced them, Chris Packham adores them - they have stayed faithful to their "we do exactly what we like" ethos and remain a true underground band. Having seen them perform at the Green Man festival in Wales last summer, it was a delight that one of the 12 dates on their UK tour was just down the road at the Carlisle, the rock pub on Hastings seafront.

"We like your town," they tell us of their first visit to the Sussex seaside resort. They have spent a lovely day eating Morrisons' sandwiches in Alexandra Park - they were surprised that it is just as bloody cold down here as it is up north - and having their tea in Super Pizza. They have their three-year-old son on tour with them and they'll be up again at six in the morning - so no moaning from the audience about gigs on a work night.

There are those in the boozy crowd who are new to The Lovely Eggs, but they are clearly captivated from the beginning by the clever, funny and touching lyrics and the sheer joyous racket that two musicians are able to make; wherever I look, I see smiling faces. Fuck It, I Just Want Someone To Fall In Love With and People Are Twats are instant singalongs and touch upon universal themes; and as if to prove the point, a twat wanders onto the stage towards the end of the set only to be sent away with a flea in his ear from Holly. With no fake encore (see their website and sign the petition), the hilarious and ever-popular Don't Look At Me - "look at us with our red wine smiles" - provides the rousing finale.

Earlier in the evening, local band The Sine Waves had treated us to a highly impressive collection of space-age surf punk instrumentals. With lab coats, masks and some interesting radiophonic sound effects, they seemed as though they had stumbled straight off the set of The Quatermass Experiment.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Looking at a feature in a national newspaper at the weekend, where mere mortals reflect on being caught in the periphery of a well-known photograph, I idly remarked that I had once been in a picture accompanying a gig review in the NME. Within moments it had been found on the internet and my kids were incredulously asking if the teenager in the photo was the same person as the middle-aged man sat before them. It was.

At the start of January 1978, Siouxsie and the Banshees played two consecutive nights at the Nashville Rooms, just around the corner from West Kensington tube in London, and I was there on the second night. The Nashville was an excellent venue: small, intimate and already revered as one of the few places that had hosted early punk gigs. I would later see The Ruts there – when there was a riot caused by fighting punks and skins – and one of the Psychedelic Furs’ earliest gigs.

Siouxsie and the Banshees did not have a record deal at the time but, like Adam and the Ants and The Slits, their music was familiar to us through the sessions they had recorded for John Peel. We had already seen the Banshees a couple of times: their gigs were always full but, provided you got there early and queued, you got in; there was no advance ticketing in the punk rock revolution.

I remember the night at the Nashville, well. The Banshees seemed to have developed from earlier gigs: the set still contained favourites Love In A Void and Make Up To Break Up, but the sound was starker, more angular, especially on newer songs such as Metal Postcard and Suburban Relapse. And they looked different: Siouxsie was Siouxsie, but the band was all dressed in black; there was not a hooped t-shirt to be seen. The word ‘Gothic’ was first used in connection with modern music to describe Joy Division, but I think Siouxsie and the Banshees can rightly be credited with inventing what we now think of as ‘Goth’.

In the photograph, I do not seem to have quite caught this new mood. There I am at the front, grinning at the camera. Smiling was not something I would do much of in the following years, as I firmly pinned my colours to the mast of gloomy post-punk. I had gone to the gig with my best mate, Ian. I was 15, he was 16. We had made the cross-town trek from south-east London and it is very likely that our mums and dads thought we were at each others’ houses - that old one. Ian is to the left of the man with spectacles in the picture. I can still recall that we were puzzled by his presence: in our youthful arrogance we thought, why would a middle-aged man be at a gig like this? That I still think of the music of the Banshees, Wire, PiL and Joy Division as the most remarkable I have ever heard probably answers that question.

It is an old saw that every picture tells a story, but what puzzles me about this one is the story it does not tell. When we look at the past, we are often guilty of compartmentalising events, constructing a linear narrative. But when we look at actual dates, we realise that our lives were not like that, that different episodes were actually concurrent. This photograph was taken on the 7th January 1978; a couple of days before that, I must have had my first day of six traumatic months at a new secondary school having been expelled from my old school before Christmas. There is not a hint of that trouble in my face: I must have been full of piss and vinegar - or something else.

Vive le Rock!

Thanks to the wonder of the world wide web, it is possible to carbon date the events and context of your earlier life with precision. Popular culture of the past is catalogued by a legion of obsessives who have documented the detail and minutiae of any niche area you care to investigate. Punk gigs are particularly well-served: enter the words “The Slits” and “Croydon” into a search engine and it reminds me that I saw them support Siouxsie and the Banshees on 9th October 1977 at the Greyhound; google “Buzzcocks Woolwich” and I realise that I was at Thames Poly on a Saturday night in March 1978; search “The Ruts Nashville Rooms” and I know that it was on 6th November 1978 that fighting between punks and skinheads made it one of the most terrifying gigs I have been to. Trying to pin down exactly when I saw Adam and the Ants at the Marquee in Soho’s Wardour Street proved a little difficult, however. I know it was either late 1977 or early 1978, but the Adam Ant website informs me that the band played the Marquee fourteen times in 12 months during those two years.

If I cannot remember or pin down the date of the gig, what I can recall is how theatrical and electrifying the performance was. The slow bass-heavy start of opening song Plastic Surgery was sung by Adam Ant from the dressing room behind the stage, his snow-white tanned face only emerging as the song burst into life. And with Sex Pistol acolyte Jordan as part of the set-up, and songs such as Deutscher Girls, Whip in My Valise and Beat My Guest sung by a leather-trousered and bare-chested Adam, the sense of a band pushing the boundaries of punk even further was inescapable. Along with Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Ants were unsigned to a record label at the time and they both eschewed the ram-a-lam-a sound that punk was quickly developing into in favour of doomy bass, icy guitars and a pop sensibility. This made them the two most exciting bands around at the tail end of ’77. The writer Stuart Maconie identifies Joy Division as being the first band about which the term ‘gothic’ was used in the music press; but he acknowledges that 80s' Goth undoubtedly began with the Banshees. I would say that Adam and the Ants, with their heavy S&M image, contributed just as much.

Whereas the Banshees signed a long-term deal with Polydor and immediately began a chart career with top ten hit Hong Kong Garden in the summer of 1978, Adam and the Ants released an unsuccessful one-off single on Decca, the puzzling and twee, Young Parisians. Although some of the live favourites were recorded for John Peel sessions, and Whip In My Valise cropped up on the B side of 1979 single Zerox, by the time I saw them play the Lyceum Ballroom that year there were new favourites: Car Trouble, Physical, Kick. But when the band released their debut album on independent label Do It in November 1979, only one of these songs was included and none of the early songs had survived. One number from the set of the Marquee gigs - Dirk Wears White Sox – was present as the title of the LP but absent as a song. The album received a lukewarm critical response and there was certainly a sense amongst many that Adam Ant had missed his moment. Although this was to be proven wrong (the events of the following year – the discovery of Burundi drumming, theft of the band by Malcom McLaren and Bow Wow Wow, reinvention as native American dandy pirate highwayman, world domination - are legendary) there has always been a sense that the wider world has been deprived of the pre-Prince Charming Adam and the Ants.

Which is why the first date, in Brighton last night, of a dozen gigs billed as ‘Performing Dirk Wears White Sox’ was such a joy. Sandwiched between a faithful run-through of that album and a closing version of Kings of the Wild Frontier (“this song means more to me than any other”), Adam and his current Ants treated us to an extensive selection of those punk era numbers. Plastic Surgery (“don’t go sitting in the sun/your face might start to run”) sounded fantastic and the two-minute tango (brevity was always the watchword) of Deutscher Girls reminded how unafraid they were to take musical risks back then. It would be a cliché to say that these songs never sounded better but in all likelihood, with a very accomplished band made-up of a bassist and a brace each of drummers and guitarists, they have probably never been played better: for all their originality, the Ants were a punk band.

Although he joked about his bouts of mental illness (“I talk a lot of rubbish, sometimes”), Adam himself looked in good shape. And with a nod to the sartorial side of punk, he was resplendent in Seditionaries' Karl Marx shirt to go with his, now customary, Stetson hat. And he was supported by some luminaries from those heady times: Seaford resident Jordan was in the house and when I was being bored in the bar by a drunk, he mentioned Theatre of Hate but took some convincing when I pointed out that Kirk Brandon was standing right behind him. The rest of the audience was pretty stylish, too, with a smattering of those tell-tale signs of a punk past: Kohl-eyes, Vive le Rock! t-shirts, leather and tartan. Some, however, got the era wrong: there were a couple of white-striped faces and one poor soul in a Stand and Deliver tunic.

The band were on-stage for an energetic 90 minutes and, of the eleven songs on Dirk Wears White Sox, Tabletalk, the saucy Cleopatra, and the humour of Never Trust A Man (With Egg On His Face) stood out as being the most remarkable. But finishing the set with the title track from the next album – the one that launched the Ants’ pop supremacy - I thought that when the band returned to the stage it would be to perform more of those chart hits; but with further proof of the quality of those earlier songs, they encored with deafening versions – Ant was now a third guitarist - of Zerox and Physical, two more numbers that never made it onto that debut album.