Personnel:
N: Nick Cash
P: Pablo LaBritain
AB: Arturo Bassick
E: Ed Case
A: Adrian Andrews
G: Gunta Andrews
O: Owen Carne
A: Since forming on Late ’76, the line-up has been fairly stable except
for a period in 1978 when Ed Case stood in for you. What happened?
N: Show ‘em Pablo.
P: I had an accident coming back from Sweden. This bone was very badly
smashed, the elbow was up here somewhere. Taken to hospital, they set it and
trapped the nerve in the set….. I was paralysed for a year. Came back, next gig
was at the Waterloo pub.
A: Wellington.
P: Yeah. Anyway, that’s what happened, it’s one of those things, a
trapped nerve. At one time they (the band) thought I wasn’t coming back.
A: Yeah, ‘cos I read this thing again about paralysis.
P: Well it was to an extent.
A: Does it still have any affect
now?
P: What playing?
A: Yeah.
N: Do you get any pain Pablo?
P: No, not pain. It’s a bit weak, it’s week. With paralysis all your
muscles, but I had electrical treatment for that. It’s alright now though.
N: That’s the only reason he wasn’t in it though.
A: Ed Case did some of the tracks on ‘The Biggest Prize in Sort’ didn’t
he?
N: Yeah, that’s right. I can’t remember which ones he did. I don’t think
even he could!
A: Some of the people that read ‘Strangled’ aren’t gonna know who 999
are, some will some won’t, but….
N: Quite a lot of them will.
A: Yeah sure. For some though, the first encounter with 999 would be
from footage Vienna (that was included as an extra on the S.I.S. released
‘Battersea Power’ video), that sees you legging it around the airport. How did
that come about?
N: Well what happened was that we were playing a gig in Vienna with The
Stranglers, one of those classical auditoriums. Anyway, there was something
wrong with the electricity and the manager of The Stranglers said that we
couldn’t play because there wasn’t enough power for the lights and the PA. But,
we said that we wanted to play because we’re advertised to play and there’s a
few people who wanna come and see us. But they said you can’t play, so we said
we won’t use any lights and a very small part of the PA….. we can’t possibly
blow it up! They said, you can’t play, end of story, So when the concert
finished I felt very upset because some people had come to see us, yeah, a lot
more people had come to see The Stranglers, but a few people had come to see
us. So, out in the foyer, as the people were coming out, I decided to play to
people. I just had a small amplifier and I played and got a very good reception
from it y’know and they filmed it and it was on TV and the TV Company were very
interested in this phenomenon, which is more like playing a punk rock gig than
a normal concert, do you know what I mean? And so I decided to do it all over
Austria, y’know. I just felt like doing
it, it had such a good result and it’s a good way of promoting a record.
I used to have big drinking contests with Hugh Cornwell and one night
we had a drink and he said ‘Are you gonna do it tomorrow?’ I said ‘Yeah, I’m
gonna do it at the airport’ an’ all this sort of thing and I went out and did
it at the airport. We used to go up to the police. Has it got police in it
somewhere?
O: Yeah.
N: I’ve never seen it, is it good? Anyway, people would interview Jean
and Hugh y’know and they’d say ‘Well, what do you think of this thing and
they’d say it’s fantastic, we love it, great, because they didn’t mind what you
did, they were alright. We got on with them very well really, but the roadies,
they really hated it that we were being upstarts about the whole thing. They
wanted to beat me up, but I think that Jean Jacques said they mustn’t!
A: The Finchley’s were out there weren’t they?
O: Dennis (Marks) was there.
N: He was alright, Dennis, it was a few of the other roadcrew that were
hired hands, ‘cos The Finchley Boys understood it all. We all used to drink in
the bar with them afterwards.
A: Whilst on the subject of the The Finchley Boys, Readers of
‘Strangled’ will be familiar with their story and a meeting of minds in the
Torrington pub in November 1976. 999 had the Southall Crew, what was their
story?
N; It just sort of happened the same way I suppose. Well, they came
from there, Southall, there were a lot of them from there. There’s a couple
here tonight y’know. There’s one called Colin Coles. You can mention his name
and another one who’s coming tonight called Billy Bollocks, they all had names!
A: What was the strength of the Southall Crew?
N: It was very strong y’know. Well it used to fill up the Nashville
Rooms. People used to come from Bristol and say (affects Bristolian accent)
‘Oh, I come from the Southall Crew!’.
A: You had a lot of trouble to start with when it came to Radio 1 as
far as airplay was concerned, particularly with the singles ‘Nasty Nasty’ and
‘Homicide’.
N: Mmm, that’s right.
A: What effect do you thing that had, firstly in the short term and
then in the long term to the fortunes of the band?
N: Well, it was pretty disastrous for us because we got ‘Top of the
Pops’ right , and they said, the BBC, that you’ve got to send up the lyrics.
They looked at them and said there’s no way you’re gonna appear on TV. They
sort of read about us, we were in The Sun and all that sort of thing y’know….
Accused us of all sorts of things we didn’t do and they just went ‘Shock!
Horror! Punk Rock! Too Violent!’ . But it was all anti-violence. I turned round
to the BBC and said ‘Look, last night you showed ‘Homicide in the Bronx’ with
Kojak and people are getting shot in that…. It’s ridiculous’. But they wouldn’t
listen to me. All of the Establishment became terrified of what this music was
doing to people and all the rest of it, y’know. So you got banned and people
wouldn’t speak to you when you went to do a radio interview! It went Top 40
(Homicide), but without the ban it could’ve passed over into the mainstream.
A: The thing about ‘Homicide’ is that it is the band’s anthem. Had it
got onto ‘Top of the Pops’, which at that time was such a powerful vehicle,
then 999 could have stepped into….
N: It was still a big hit for us though and a big hit around the world,
an underground hit. I mean, I even went to play over in Denmark last year and
there was like a load of other bands, Die Toten Hosen, Nirvana, David Byrne of
Talking Heads and I went out there in front of 250,000 people and played
‘Homicide’ and it went down really well, they knew it!
A: For 999, art has always been important, the whole visual thing, from
the artwork to the stage.
N: It’s that thing of theatre, when the music’s good and the people are
right, then you act in a certain way or I can act in a certain way and it comes
out in the expressions an’ that.
A: The first album, ‘999’, had its launch in an art gallery (as did The
Stranglers’ ‘Aural Sculpture’ six years later).
N: That’s right.
A: And the whole art aspect of the band was very well received.
N: Yeah, that’s right, we did an exhibition. The record company said to us
‘We’ll hand over loads of money to launch the album and we’ll have a big party,
go to a posh restaurant, invite some journalists and get drunk on Bollinger’.
But we said ‘No, no! let’s put on an exhibition, let’s get a few people down
here, people from bands,,, Knox was there, Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, Paul
Simenon and a couple of fans did some paintings that were put up and it was
like saying here’s another aspect to the musicianship, as musicians up to that
point had always been people with expensive cars, who took drugs and flew
around in jets. We were rebelling against all of that as were The Stranglers.
A: As far as I’m concerned, the raffle ticket logo is one of the most
striking images of the time and on the early sleeves, the clothing and shoes
were a far cry from what your contemporaries were wearing.
N: Well, y’see, I always dressed quite well. Before 999 I was in a band
called ‘Kilburn and The Highroads’…. We used to go down to Malcolm McLaren’s shop, ‘Let It Rock’, before
it became ‘Sex’ and we used to order our suits from down there, long before the
Sex Pistols came onto the scene and we used to tell him what we liked. He had
great access, Malcolm, to all sorts of things and clothing from Jamaica and
shoes from Italy and stuff like that, so we used to be able to go down there
with record company advances and get what we wanted y’see. Ian Dury was making
up boxer’s silk dressing gowns and things, so we had a great wardrobe in that
band. Everyone had a different taste, in fact I saw some photographs of it the
other day and it was like fantastic, the clothes were just fantastic and we used to get people like Glen Matlock
and Johnny Rotten at our gigs and they used to like what was going on. Y’know
we had an artschool background, Ian Dury and myself.
A: Did you study under Ian Dury?
N: He used to teach me, he was my tutor. So I’d always been into that
clothes thing. In the Kilburns what we really tried to do was to marry a hard
jazz with Eddie Cochran. We wanted something really rough, wild and English. In
a way I think, y’know, that stuff was more of a forerunner of punk than
anything else.
A: You weren’t on ‘Handsome’ though were you?
N: I was on that yeah.
A: We’re you in the cover photo?
N: Yeah I was on that, I play on that. I play on ‘New Boots and
Panties’ as well.
A: Really? As Keith Lucas?
N: That’s right. I don’t mind talking about it now. What happened was,
I used to mind because I fell out badly with Ian and I don’t really have
anything to do with him now y’know, but that’s a different story. But the thing
about it was that at the time we’d built up quite a following with Kilburn
& The Highroads, having done a lot of gigs and I felt that it was wrong to
go out as Keith Lucas ex- Kilburn & The Highroads, and pull in people that
way. So I changed my name to Nick Cash and we went out as 999 as something
completely new so that people wouldn’t dome from the Kilburn & The
Highroads gigs for us to get a start. I said ‘OK, I’m making a clean break, this is what I am doing , fuck that, that’s over’, it’s a
way of getting out of that and it also meant that Guy, Pablo and Jon at the time
wouldn’t have to hang on to my coat-tails, y’know, to be associated with that
has-been who’s trying to do it all over again. It was a good noble thing to do
I think.
A: Continuing on the Kilburn’s theme, to my mind 999 have always been
an R’n’B band, a souped up R’n’B band rather than a punk band, what do you
think?
N: Mmm…
Unknown: Surprise!
(Enter Ed Case)
N: We were just talking about you actually.
E: Oh! Fucking hell I’ll leave!
N: Where’s you wife?
E: At home in the warm.
N: The last time I saw you, I wet down to see ‘Buddy’ didn’t I? And
then you wenyt on a great big holiday.
E: A week in Cornwall!
N: Was that all it was? I feel good about this guy really, he was a
right bloody you he was. He used to smash everything up, didn’t yer!
E: Yeah, a few more and I’ll be on my way tonight!
AB: I saw both you (Ed) and Pablo play at the Marquee.
A: That was playing alternate nights wan’t it?
AB: Yeah, a week at the Marquee .
A: Having prized out of you that you were in Kilburn & The
Highroads, that takes me back to my point that basically 999 have their roots
in R&B. Would you agree?
N: No! (laughter). Arthur says we’re R’n’B.
AB: There’s a lot of tinges of R’n’B, but that’s more in the bass
lines.
A: It’s fucking R’nB!
N: Is that a bad thing or what. I mean….
AB: We suffered on the plantation, that’s what it was eh Nick?
(Arturo makes a move to leave)
N: Stay there Arthur.
AB: Why?
A: ‘Cos you’ve got the bottle of wine (laughs)
N: No, ‘cos you know about R’n’B….. I don’t.
AB: So says blind, one-eyed, homesick Nick Cash! (laughs)
A: Talking about R’n’B, that brings me onto the whole pub scene. You’re
here in The Swan now, which is the closest you’ve had recently to a regular
London venue. Now how does it feel to play pubs again after playing places like
the Marquee and The Astoria?
N: Awful, ‘cos at bigger venues you get much more to drink and more
food (laughs), more audience and er, more money, but you’ve got to come back to
these places because there’s nowhere else to play.
A: You mean you don’t like playing pubs?
N: I don’t mind it.
A: I mean personally.
N: I’ll play anywhere, you know just get on with it,
AB: Nick starts singing when the fridge door opens (gales of laughter).
That’s right Nick, you don’t care where you play, you’ll always give your best
won’t ya!
N: I’ll always’s give my best, yeah! They’ve enticed me down here
tonight with a few sausage rolls!
A: I like seeing 999 here because you don’t need a second mortgage to
buy a pint.
N: Yeah, that’s true.
AB: The Marquee’s a shit venue! Anyway, all bands start in a pub, The
Clash started in a pub. The journalistic notion of ‘They’re a pub band, they’re
going nowhere’ is crap!
N: Adrian, I started in a pub, Pub Rock is alright. No, it’s good if
you can go back tp playing pubs. I mean the thing about us Adrian, is that we
say we’re sort of like blues people or something like that and we can go out and
still enjoy the music. In pubs it’s just not so much of a hype really, it just
means something to a lot of people.
AB: There’s no hype no Nick, none at all.
N: It’s just by word of mouth. If Arthur goes down to a gig and gives
out a few flyers, more people come.
AB: There’s not many gigs to promote now.
A: You used to play the Marquee, now venues have a big problem haven’t
they. Why, is that the pay to play thing?
N: Yes, that’s very much a problem.
AB: Places like the Marquee have a ridiculous thing where the first
£500-£600 goes to the club before you’re percentage starts. And you can have
300-400 people at the Marquee and walk out with no money y’know. Whereas, we
can play somewhere like here, you get a PA for £70 and 100% of the door. That’s
why we play here and people like it because it’s pub prices.
N: Don’t say that otherwise all musicians will be down here!
AB: We just want enough money to fuel our kebab habits!
A: I saw Chelsea play at the Marquee earlier this year and Gene
October was talking about the PA costs and the club’s cut and so on.
AB: He was ranting that there were not enough Swedish boys on his
rider!
G: Can we print that!?
N: He said that as a Lurker.
AB: He don’t care, we always have a little joke about it. We left him
on the boat, when we came back from Cologne a couple of months ago, with no
passport, no jacket ‘cos he didn’t come down to the van when we had to get off
the boat and we knew that he was poking the purser’s porthole. So we left him
where he was!
G: At the recent gig at Fontwell Racecourse your introduction to
‘(There is no glory in) Mary’s Story you said that it was a tribute to a
friend. Can you tell us some more?
N: There was a girl we used to know and she was a punk type person. Her
name wasn’t really Mary, we had to change it in case her family heard the song,
and she lived on the streets of London and she died out there, y’know what I
mean, it was a very hard sort of thing. She did a lot of drugs and stuff and we
just decided to write a song to her. We always try to write songs that mean
something to us and y’know. Like that homeless thing, we did another song about
that called ‘Inside Out’ and we wrote that some many, many years ago and that
was taking a look at homelessness then – when did that album come out ’83 or
something?
A: No, ’79.
N: Was it ’79? Well we were looking at the problem then.
O: And now Phil Collins is doing it 14 years later.
N: Yeah!
A: You’ve had great difficulties getting a contract I know and for
somebody with a back-catalogue such as 999’s why have you had that problem?
N: Well, my sister is an advertising executive and she went to EMI the
other day and there was one of our CDs on the table and she just happened to be
closing this big deal and she said to the guy ‘Hey I know those guys’, he said
‘Oh, yeah, how?’. She said ‘That’s my brother actually, any chance of doing a
new album for them?’. He replied ‘No, no
we’ll stick to the back-catalogue, we can sell loads of those because all these
40 year olds are swapping their vinyl collections for CD, so we’ll put that out
on CD…. We wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole now!’. She said, ‘Why not, they’re really good and
they are still playing a lot of places, maybe if you stuck some money into some
good music that’s gonna last longer than what’s currently in vogue …… y’know
have you ever thought of sticking with something! Muddy Waters is still on your
books and 99 pull audiences of the same size in the States.’
A; That’s some good support!
N: I saw Muddy waters in New York not long before he died and I
recognized this thing, something in the music, music that lasts. As I watched
his performance, I thought yeah, we do a bit of that and whereas we were
talking about the fashion thing, important as it is and I would never deny
that, its still what’s in the music that counts. Now we’ve made this new album
(‘You Us It’) and you can speak to our fans who like the early stuff and they
say there’s something of the first album there and I think that’s because we’ve
been out, played all these gigs and spoken to loads of kids and we’ve lived
these experiences and that is our life. We know there’s no bullshit being told
to our management company or anything else and we made this record totally on
our own without anyone coming down to the studio and saying try to make it like
this or like that …. And that’s why it turned out so good.
A: The CD release of 999’s last studio album, ‘Face to Face’ in 1985, which unlike ‘The Early Stuff’ CD is
no reflection of 999’s live set or anything must have seemed like a kick in the
teeth bearing in mind the reluctance of EMI to entertain the idea of a new
contract.
N: Honestly Adrian, you get those things, those are cheap shots. Now I
don’t mind bits and pieces being re-released here and there because in that way
999’s music gets to be heard by more people and our audience grows.
A: A deal has now come through from Anagram.
N: Anagram, which is Cherry Red, yeah.
A: Is this for one album or can we expect a more steady output from now on?
N: It’s for one album, which is usually the case, unless you’re Phil
Collins. But I’m already working on the next one.
A: So you see this as a long term thing?
N: Oh yeah.
A: The album is a big departure, it’s a bloody fast album and it’s far
more in tune with your live performance that anything else. As you said
earlier, it’s more like a follow up to ‘999’ or ‘Separates’ than your more
recent studio output. ‘13th Floor Madness’, I dunno what you think
about that album, but I have to be in a certain mood to listen to that album.
N: Yeah, well it wasn’t a very good album was it! It was after…. We
were forced into doing it by the record company and we got a bit dissipated.
You see, Guy’s a very good guitarist and musician and he can play that sort of
soul stuff. Songs like ‘Book of Love’ were really quite good songs and they
showed that influence but many classic mistakes were made, like girl backing
singers, mistakes you make on an arsehole album.
A: So it’s not something that your particularly proud of?
N: Not proud of it now I listen to it.
A: How about ‘Face to Face’ (1985)?
N: Well, it was a very sad time for us as we had just left Albion, we
tried to make an album on our own and the bloke managing us, it didn’t work out
with him. So we went down to the studio and tried to make an album. But I put
that album on for the first time in ages the other day and then put the new
album on next to it and it’s much better, better atmosphere, better in all
respects. The end of the road with Jon Watson, that’s what ‘Face to Face’ was.
He did that album with his mate in a certain way and it didn’t work out because
999 was more of a collective thing with us just going mad together and making
mad sounds. Now we’ve been back on the road for a few years which has enabled
us to come up with an album which is similar in quality to the first album.
A: Was that by design?
N: No, it just came out that way as it should happen with music and now
we’re playing some of the songs live and they’re standing up well with older
songs like ‘Homicide’.
A: On the new album still…
N: Yeah
A: ‘Signed Dangerous of Hollywood’ asks us to ‘Remember Sharon’ that’s
Sharon Tate I take it.
N: I think so, it’s one of Guy’s songs. You see we’ve played in
Hollywood a lot so we’ve got a right to sing about it. That’s a song about how stupid and violent the whole place is really.
A: One of the most worrying songs on the album as far as I am concerned
is ‘Bye Bye England’, all about the gradual Americanisation of this country.
N: It’s all very tongue in cheek that one.
A: As a song it very much emphasizes the Englishness of the band. Now,
having established that you have a big audience in the States and Continental
Europe, you’re not gonna clear off are you?
N: No! What happened Adrian was that when punk started you used to get
people saying ‘You’ve gone to America! You’re selling out’. The Clash said
they’d never go to America, as an English phenomena you’ve gotta stay here. So
we went to our fans and said well, they’ve offered us a tour of America and
they said ‘Bloody hell, go!’ so we went. And we’d go again if we could and we
will. When we went there, what we found that there were a lot of young kids who
came to see us, knew the music and who felt the same as we did. We used to look
at the clothes they used to wear and we used to speak to them about the
problems they had and said Hey! Look its really great to come to America and
swap ideas and feel the same and understand that people are as frustrated in
this country as they are in our country, but people can change things and look
forward to better things. There is hope in young people you know. Here its been
smashed down again, but when you’ve got freedom of movement and freedom of
ideas and a cultural thing at a young level, its’s good to go there. I mean
you’re in a band, what are you supposed to do, say something down a microphone
or go out and play your music that the kids get off on then decide they wanna
go for it and do something similar. And we went everywhere, y’know, Yugoslavia,
all sorts of places that bands never go to and we’ve played and we’ve always
gone on stage thinking ‘Thank God these people are here’.
G: Have you ever played Russia?
N: No, we were offered to do Russia and we were gonna do it and then
the tanks went in. But we’ll do anywhere, we wanna play the whole world. I
mean, hopefully, we’re gonna go to Japan this year for the first time and we
really wanna do it ‘cos when we get to these places we always seem to connect with
the right people who know what they’re coming to see and have a great time.
A: America’s been a very good thing for you but it turned a bit sour in
1980 with the whole ‘Slam’ thing. What was the story there?
N: Yeah, we got accused of inciting people to murder, Adrian (laughs).
G: You!
N: Yeah, me personally by the LA Times, because the kids came down to
our concert and they used to slam dance and jump off the stage and stuff. Here
they used to pogo and that’s what they used to do over there, but I never saw
anyone badly hurt. To all the people we played to, I think that a couple of
people got a few loose teeth , no more. But specifically, they said that two of
the kids who were at the concert went out three weeks after we were there and
stabbed a chauffer and stole his money on Sunset Strip ad as they were 999 fans
it came back on us. Anyway, back here it got onto the front page of The Sun,
‘999 Slam War’ and ‘Punks Murder on Streets’, so The Sun decided to do an interview
with us and we did it in Soho Square and all this is true and they said you’re
really violent and people will kill in your name and we replied, we just play
music, come down and see us and you decide. They said, well can’t you be sick
for us or go and beat up that old lady over there. The Sun will make the news
and invent the story around it to sell their paper. I wrote to the LA Times and
told them that we were anti-violence and anti-racist and they had no right to
censor us because this is what the kids want. In fact, 999 were slagged off for
everything and yet we played some concerts over there and raised money because
we saw how bad things were in downtown LA and donated money, not a massive
amount bearing in mind that we were just a poor English band, but enough to
open gymnasiums during the long school holidays, so that the kids could go down
there and listen to a bit of music and do some sport and that went unnoticed.
But, the Mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, heard about this small English band
who did this and he declared a ‘999 Day’, seriously, and we’re now members of
the City of LA and there’s a plaque on my wall to that effect.
G: You mention that 999 have an anti-racist stance, do you think that
you yourselves and other bands should get together and make some kind of stand.
We’ve noticed increasing numbers of neo-nazis turning up to see punk bands and
causing trouble .
N: Controlling your audience is sometimes a difficult thing, but we
always stop playing if we see a fight, he culprits and say ‘We’re here for the
music!’ To which everyone says ‘Yeah!!’ making them look like arseholes! Also
we would have those people thrown out. Luckily, the technique of singling out
trouble makers for verbal abuse to make them feel small has always worked for
us and since the music is anti-violence and anti-racist our gigs don’t get used
as platforms for these people. Generally, we have a great empathy with our
audiences where ever we go and trouble isn’t an issue.