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The story begins with a trip to the UK...

Miles Copeland saw us play at one of the very last shows the New York Dolls did together or else the 1^st show David Bowie did as a solo performer. Miles basically looked at scenes like Max's where we were at home and CBGB’s which was a little bit more hardcore and said there is a parallel scene going on in London. He said "you have to come to London and be part of what’s going on there" and we said the bands a fluid unit and we don’t even know who’s free to travel. It turned out 3 of us could go. Cherry, our guitar player Louie (Cherry's boyfriend) and me and a friend who acted as manager. Miles said that’ wouldn't be a problem because his brother Stewart has a band called the Police and if we don’t mind them being our opening act they could play bass and drums for us. Cherry had a friend in London, an art dealer, so we didn’t have to worry about paying a lot of rent because he was glad to have somebody there. So we could survive if we lived on fish and chips and shared a pint. We do owe it to Miles.

I think we were caught up in a missionary zeal for the punk movement. Music was very dead at that time. Fleetwood Mac was happening here in the United States and there was nothing to be excited about until Max’s created this forum for people to bring in original ideas. Now what the New Yorkers call New Wave and what Londoners call punk are very different things. The New Wave movement in New York was very open when you think of bands like Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, Suicide, Pere Ubu and of course Cherry Vanilla. These bands were as different to each other as they were alike. It was originality and the willingness to experiment that was the furnace that fired Max’s Kansas City. We had expected the same when we came to England. Instead we found a punk movement with very rigid rules and restrictions, a dress code, behaviour code and music code. At first we were a little bit shocked but Miles was right we did fit in because of the incredibly aggressive energy level that we had on stage. We were much more of a power pop band in the sense of Blondie.

As you know from the reviews we definitely encountered significant resistance from the people who thought of themselves as punk spokesmen. At the Roxy Club there was initially a resistance but we realised this and so we worked twice as hard. The gig went tremendous. I think it was an eye opener to the kids who had gone to the 100 Club. They were following punk down a specific road and what they wanted to see was more steps and more steps and more innovation don a specific road that they considered they were building. That road was called punk. Tangents to that road to them was heretical, blasphemy and I think it was an eye opener to them to see bands like Cherry Vanilla and the Heartbreakers too who did didn’t stick exactly to that road but added their own elements and branched off in their own directions. So despite the fact that for a soft opening song or two we might get a little bit of friction by the time we were into our 3 or 4^th song we were a smash every time we played and rarely anywhere we played got less than 3 encores.. And I think that speaks a lot louder than the reviews from people like Tony Parsons and Julie. People who didn’t look at us like we were the real thing. The fact that we did so many tours. The fact that after the initial Heartbreakers tour we almost never opened for anyone, we always headlined because no one wanted to go on after us.

Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds - places like that all wanted to drink from the punk well and bands radiated out and played all over. There were times like at  Southampton we had to have bodyguards literally encase us in their bodies to get us off the stage at the end of the show because the audience just swamped the stage. We just put on great shows. You become a headliner when no one else dares go on afterwards. Great reaction everywhere, even when we played a biker club the Lafayette in Wolverhampton and Chester. We walked on stage and it looked like there was all Judas Priest fans out there and we thought were going to be ripped to shreds but they adored us. I think Cherry’s sexuality sort of disarmed them very quickly. We were just a really crunchy band playing flat out rock ’n' roll.   We used to double time the song 'Liverpool' at the end which isn’t done on the album It was high speed slamming rock ’n' roll and the audience loved the chaos!

Cherry though hated the spitting. At the Marquee they began gobbing and Cherry just put her hands up and stopped the band and said "You think you are being so cool spitting on us. Well let me tell you something if one more person throws one more gob up here I’m taking the entire band and we’re leaving the stage" and that was the end of the gobbing

In terms of set list and the band itself it should be remembered that when the Cherry Vanilla arrived in London she did not have a permanent band. She had been encouraged by David Bowie to convert her poems like ‘Pop Tarts’ into songs and she had a constant flow of musicians that helped her; consequently Michael Lamen wrote 'Little Red Rooster'. All these musicians that passed through her bands at different times wrote different songs for her. By the time I joined her the list of songs was by 7 or 8 different composers and the show was a bit of a variety act. It was all rock but in different colours spices and grooves and that’s the show we played at the Roxy.

When we landed in London and lived there Cherry was in love with Louie and he became the sole writer. Together they wrote an entire show and this was very heavily influenced by the punk bands we went and saw. We went from a crunchier, more rockier more Mott The Hoople type of show to the speed show that is the Cherry Vanilla album. The band that Sting and Stuart played in had more different grooves and more different feel. By the time the New York boys joined us we had become a very different band with a very different show and sound. A lot of the songs on the album were fast. Only a couple written by other guys. 'Foxy Bitch' and 'Little Red Rooster' still have that slower Max’s kind of feel. We were always a great live act and one thing I like about the 'Bad Girl' album is that it captures the live act very well.

We wrote pop song the way the Ramones wrote pop songs just we were a little poppier. An important point not covered by reviews is that Cherry’s work is very confessional in the style of Lou Reed in that they are very personal narratives about what happened to her; what she felt and her experiences. They are her diary and when you saw her on stage you got the sense that this woman is being very candid and talking about herself.

It was also very sexual! I think that is something we had in common. I think that is something that drew the band members together. That we were all very sexual animals and the aggressive sexual image had a significant amount to do with our bad press. I would find it very very difficult to name a single punk band that was sexual. We just reeked hormones and it was all of us onstage. Cherry being this incredibly beautiful female face with a fantastic body stunning legs and very very sexy. The other three guys in the band were straight and all studs and I was the gay guy so we were all flirting with every single person in the audience. I can’t say that Cherry wasn’t flirting with the lesbians. We were sexually stimulating every person in the house which was an alien experience for most people and for most punks. Nobody had the hormonal level we had on stage. We carried ourselves down the street as sexual animals which was very unpunk.

Sexual? Who?

I seemed to get on best with with bass players like Gaye Advert and Sting. JJ Burnel was another who though we didn’t see each other often we were like 2 peas in a pod. I was most fascinated with bands that could drive the audience the hardest like the Damned and X Ray Spex. I was on the Pistols boat ride – I was the American arrested – I’m in the Filth & The Fury but in the background you can’t really see me. I was in the nick that night. X Ray Spex, Gen X and Tom Robinson were all good friends and I was out every single night there was so much good music happening.

It wasn't all fun though. I was beat up 5 times. A rib cracked, beaten and robbed, once by Teds, once by football hooligans and once from just some anti punk. It was frightening to just walk down the street; It was scary. These things just made the punks nastier. It made us even more defensive. More bristly because it was dangerous to walk down the street. People could easily shout things at us and physically assault us.

There was alcohol fuelled violence but mostly it was not from the original punks. It was mostly from the suburban kids who came later and wanted to be punker than what we were. The ones that didn’t fake sticking safety pinks through their cheek but actually did because they hadn’t quite figured out how you could do that. Those suburban hooligans who came later were the aggressive and I remember one night outside the Vortex I got myself in trouble as someone walked by with pair of Vivienne Westwood pants on, obviously some young kid from the suburbs who had never been to a punk club before, and I had the misfortune to open my mouth and say 'oh £75 to be a real punk!' Well it was the stupidest thing I ever said and we got into a bit of a fight.

Being gay wasn't a problem either. Both at Max’s and especially at the Roxy I encountered the most fraternal cooperative, friendly, interacting between gays and straights that I have ever seen before or since. There were so many gay people at the Roxy who were just as openly gay as straight people are openly straight and nobody gave a damn. The whole point was to be who you are, what you are and nobody gave a damn. There were a lot of gays in straight bands outside of London. I got laid just as much particularly Eric's in Liverpool. Eric's was particularly fertile ground.

The end of the band? I have unhappy memories about this. Bad Girl sold around 50K and 'I Know How To Hook' was used on Dutch TV on a documentary about prostitution but we never reached any charts except in Holland. Essentially Cherry sent us home when we weren’t touring and stayed in London with Louie. Venus was solely the creation of Cherry, Louie and the producer in London. It was done with session men and it didn’t do well.  I went back to New York hooked up with the rest of the Cherry Vanilla band, fell in love with a woman, Sherri Beachfront, and got her to front a band called Get Wet and had a number 39 single. Later I got into experimental theatre.

Photos are a bitter memory for me. In that famous 'lick me' photo of Cherry I’m standing directly behind Cherry and could have not been more strategically eclipsed if you had placed her! But look at the Roxy cover. Do you see the piano on stage? What looks like one person standing to the left that’s actually two. That’s me dressed in an olive green jumpsuit taking the pickup out of the back of the piano. The head that you see bending to the left is Stewart Copeland taking apart his famous Tamlas. The picture is after our gig march 3rd 1977 and I think one of the two people sitting on the right is Ian Copeland. If you look directly above the piano you’ll notice that there’s a second head there above the piano and that's mine!  That’s the only picture of me at the Roxy that I have. I don’t tell most people because they think I’m making it up but I’m the only person to bring an acoustic piano down those damn stairs. How ironic that of all people the Police should be on the cover! It would make those punks grind their teeth.

Look...the Roxy and Max’s was a privilege to have been at.

Lets here it for Zecca...