In answer to your questions, here goes………

I formed London at the end of 1976 by putting ads in the Melody Maker.  The first to join was Steve Voice the bass player and with whom I wrote some of our songs.  He’d been living in London for a few years but was originally from Andover.  Jon Moss was next but there was a problem, he was being tried out as a drummer for the Clash at the time and wasn’t happy.  I seem to remember that he didn’t really hit it off with Joe Strummer accusing him of crappy pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric!!  Jon wanted to leave but all his friends were telling him he’d be mad to walk out on a name band like the Clash but he was adamant so we drove down in Jon’s car to the Clash’s rehearsal studio in Chalk Farm and Jon packed up his drum kit.  When Strummer and Mick Jones got back they saw the empty room and realised that they’d have to find a new drummer.  The last member to join London was Dave Wight, who came from the North-East. and was an accomplished guitarist.  We didn’t play any other kind of music before punk but the band were musically pretty tight as opposed to other bands who were literally starting from nothing.  To be honest, although MCA pushed us as a punk band we considered ourselves more ‘new wave’ than punk..  We just happened to emerge during that exciting time, a bit like the Stranglers or the Buzzcocks or XTC did.

 I had never been in a band before and my influences before punk would’ve been David Bowie/Lou Reed/the Who/Rocky Horror Show/Mott the Hoople/Roxy Music/Sparks.Later it was the Damned/Pistols/Generation X.  The whole period was incredibly exciting.  Every night we’d go to a gig and I felt punk was very close to bands like the Small Faces/Kinks/the Who in the 60’s.  There was a real buzz in London during 1976/77 that the music was changing and that the dinosaur bands like Pink Floyd, Yes and Led Zeppelin had had their day.  Another side of it that attracted me was collecting the records.  Picture sleeves and limited editions became popular and it was fun to hunt them down.  I often used to go down to the Soho market (no longer there) and search through the record racks.  There was always this other guy doing the same, later I realised he was Paul Weller.  I built up an incredible collection and then about fifteen years ago, when I was really broke, I had to sell them.  I wish I hadn’t.

 To be honest I’ve never bought a Culture Club record in my life but I think that Boy George has a terrific voice and they are incredibly well managed and promoted by Tony Gordon and Jon Moss.  Jon was always good on the business side.  It’s quite possible that if George had never met Jon we might never have heard of him.  Jon was also quite good at detecting a hit.  I remember once being in his house in Hampstead when he put on a white label disc of Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? on his stereo.  After a minute I lifted the needle off and told Jon that it didn’t have a chance in hell of making it, that it was total crap.  Jon strongly disagreed.  Six weeks later it was number one in the charts!

 Very soon after we formed, our manager Simon Napier-Bell got us a three month UK tour supporting the Stranglers.  Their first album was selling well and they had a big single hit with Peaches, (I remember being amazed that they hardly ever played Peaches during that tour).  This meant that we were playing fairly big venues and as London were the support band we went on first.  For many people throughout the country we were the first punk band they’d ever seen.  Their reaction was good until about halfway through the tour the Pistols released God Save the Queen and the tabloids went punk crazy stressing the violence thing, particularly between Punks and Teds.

The audiences, fuelled by the media, changed.  There was quite a bit of violence at gigs and a lot of gobbing.  Steve and Dave would walk off stage with guitars covered in it and Jon’s drum kit almost had to be hosed down!  It usually happened during the first number which was always No Time.  I remember one gig in Birmingham where I walked on with a rolled-up umbrella.  As soon as the gobbing started I opened the umbrella up to protect myself.  I must’ve looked like a punked up Penguin out of Batman!  When I walked off stage at the end of the gig I couldn’t close the umbrella.  It’d gone rock hard with spittle!

 Simon Napier-Bell got us the deal with MCA.  He was really on the ball.  He got us into IBC studios in London in the middle of the night and we recorded our first single Everyone’s a Winner in about twenty minutes.  He then had fifteen cassette copies made up and got a motorbike courier to deliver them to all the main record companies with a note saying ‘This is London.  If you want to sign us call this number’.  It sounds incredible now but by midday quite a few record companies had phoned him.  The two best offers were from Virgin and MCA.  Virgin actually came down to see us play the Nashville in Kensington but signed the support band XTC instead!  So we went with MCA.

 In my opinion, London was musically more proficient  than most bands at the time (with the exception, perhaps, of the Stranglers and XTC) but I wouldn’t say we dumbed ourselves down to suit the times.  We just loved playing and Steve, Dave and Jon were first class musicians. When we started we sounded a bit like the early Who or Stones but the later numbers like Animal Games and Swinging London were heavily influenced by the Stranglers.  By this time the material was being written by all four of us and we had just done this huge tour with them.

Our manager was Simon Napier-Bell who had previously managed the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan.  While he was managing us he was also looking after Japan.  Later, of course he went on to manage Wham and George Michael.  He had some good ideas and he also produced all our records.  His assistant Danny Morgan had spotted us playing our very first gig at the Rochester Castle in Stoke Newington and Simon came to check us out at our next gig which was at the Roxy.  I think the incident about ‘ringing home to mum’ referred to Jon Moss who was still living with his parents.  Simon phoned him up one day and was surprised to hear this well spoken woman pick the phone up.  Simon was always encouraging us to be ‘oikish’ which wasn’t really in our characters so we’d fight against it.  We were far more interested in our music than striking some fake rebellious street-cred attitude.

 We did play the Roxy on a few occasions.  It was a club we had been to many times before.  I remember seeing Generation X there on one of the first nights.  It was good because there were only about eight venues in the whole of London where you could hear that kind of music then.  The audiences were always friendly.  It was very small, had a tiny stage, and people stood right in front of you.  There was a good atmosphere and always the chance of  members of the Pistols or the Clash turning up.  To the audience there was very much a feeling that this was our club.  You know, exclusively for new wave and punk bands whilst somewhere like the Marquee still had one foot in the old rock camp but to the bands it was just another venue that we could perform in on the circuit, so to speak.  I saw some great gigs down there.  Sham 69 and Cherry Vanilla with Sting on bass come to mind.  We played the Vortex once I think but this was later, well after the first wave of punk bands.  It was different to the Roxy, slightly bigger and more like a lounge bar in a normal pub.  We only played for about twenty minutes though.  There was a short somewhere in our backline and we kept getting shocks off each other.

The London scene in 76/77 was fantastic.  A different gig each night.  The main venues were the Hope and Anchor (where we played a lot), the Marquee (where we did our last gig), the Nashville in Kensington, where we often played with 999 (my favourite band at the time), or XTC, the Rock Garden, Dingwalls (where we supported Wayne County), the Roxy, the Camden Palace and the Roundhouse (where we did two shows at the end of the Stranglers tour).  Also the Red Cow in Kensington (where I saw the Jam in their early days).  It was quite a close network then, people tended to know everyone else.  It was very friendly.

  My favourite song is No Time as it was the one that opened our show.  I also liked Friday on my Mind and, of course, Everyone’s a Winner as that was our first single.  Siouxsie Sue was an excellent song written by Steve Voice.  It was originally called Susie Sue but Jon Moss suggested we change the title to Siouxsie Sue.  I was against the change but the others liked it.  The song had nothing whatever to do with Siouxsie, it was just a little tale of punks that Steve penned, it was a good number. Definitely popular with the fans who’d call out for it all through the set.   I liked our album Animal Games but on listening to it now on the Captain Oi! CD I think it was a shame that we didn’t slow one or two of the numbers down a bit.  It all sounds too fast and frantic.  When we started one of the things we prided ourselves on was that we were the fastest band around.  The nearest anyone else got to our speed of delivery was the Damned.  Still, the album was very representative of what we were doing at the time.  It was basically our stage act that we recorded immediately after the Stranglers tour, so it was very tight.

  Towards the end of 1977, Jon was particularly worried that we weren’t making hit records.  Our live act was always good and our gigs packed them in but this wasn’t reflected in the record charts.  Jon had an offer to join the Damned in place of Rat Scabies so off he went.  There was a bit of a delay because he had a bad car crash and was in hospital for a while.  When he came out he played one last gig with us at the Marquee in Wardour Street, that was filmed by an Italian TV company, and then immediately went off on tour with the Damned.  I went to see them play at the Roundhouse.  Jon looked very rock ‘n’ roll but not very happy.  I think he quickly realised that the Damned wasn’t for him and it wasn’t long before him and Damned guitarist Lu broke away and formed their own band the Edge.  After Jon left London the rest of us tried out a few drummers (including John Towe ex-Chelsea and Generation X) but eventually decided to call it a day.  I was kept on by MCA Records as a solo artist and made four more singles and then went to CBS Epic where I made my last record Hard Hearts Don’t Cry.  Steve and Jon played on some of these singles, as did Lu from the Damned.

The fans in London and the South were much more hip, much more aware of who the NME were calling the trendiest band that particular week and going along to support them.  The fans in the North were more friendly and approachable.  Some of our best gigs were in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Coventry and Retford.

I very much enjoyed my time in London but we were only together for a very short time, about a year.  At that time I very much wanted to write songs, make records and be in a band, so all those ambitions were fulfilled.  The main thing I really got out of punk is anything is possible.  Before punk it was very difficult to get a record made, then bands just started putting stuff out on their own labels.  The whole do-it-yourself culture is very much with us today and it all began with punk.  Look at television.  It is only my opinion but if it hadn’t been for punk you wouldn’t have had things like Live Aid, Big Breakfast Show, TFI Friday, Brookside, Reeves and Mortimer, the Young Ones or Bottom etc.  Punk opened doors all over the place.  These days people just find a way to do what they want.  Things are much better in that respect.  It’s hard to believe that before punk the only music shows on TV were TOTP and the Old Grey Whistle Test.

I remember we played Coventry on the Stranglers’ tour and then came back as headliners ourselves a few months later and were given this fantastic welcome.  That stands out in my mind as the best gig we did but there were many others.  The best thing about London was always our live stage show.  Part of the act was I’d come on with one of those sex shop blow-up dolls and throw it into the audience where it’d be tossed about above everyone’s heads.  That used to go down well but at the end of the night someone always nicked the doll!  We called her Randy Mandy and we got through dozens of them.  I believe Simon Napier-Bell had to open an account with one of the Ann Summers’ sex shops.  The boot of the hire car was always crammed with these plastic dolls with their permanently open mouths!

I loved 999, Generation X, the Damned, the Stranglers, Penetration, the Adverts, Elvis Costello, Pistols, the Clash, the Drones, the Jam.  With the exception of Blondie and Johnny Thunders, I wasn’t particularly keen on the New York scene.

(On how punks changed over 77/78....) Yeah, they changed a lot.  For a start their appearance.  Mohicans and safety pins came in in a big way.  Up until then the new wave image seemed to lean towards the mod thing of the 60’s which I quite liked.  Drainpipes, smart jackets, two-tone shoes, button down collars etc

I don’t keep in touch with any of London anymore.  We’ve all drifted apart.  The last time I saw Jon Moss was at my wedding reception about 15 years ago.  These days I write comedy books and scripts.  I wrote for Frankie Howerd for eight years and also for the TV show Birds of a Feather.  More recently I’ve written a play called Topless which is performed on the open top deck of a sightseeing bus driving through the streets of London.  We tried it out last year and it worked pretty well so we’re going to bring the show back again this summer.  I don’t know what Steve and Dave are doing.  I hope they’re still playing.  They are both very talented musicians.  

Best of luck and thanks for your interest.

 Miles Tredinnick (Riff Regan)