How did you get the deal with Step Forward? Was it based on your performances after playing the Roxy? Did you get any money from them? What was the support for the band like from them.

DS: Yes, it was all based on Miles Copeland and Mark P. seeing us at the Roxy.  But we also had an offer from Jake Riviera at Stiff Records.  I still have his letter offering us a record deal.  We went with Miles and Mark P. at Step Forward and recorded at Polydor Studios in March 1977.  They put us up in a hotel during the recording of the first single and later Miles showed us a great deal of support and enthusiasm. He put us up at his home many times.  We used to enjoy hanging out at the Step Forward offices at Dryden Chambers with the staff and other bands (Chelsea, Sham 69, Squeeze, Menace, etc.).  I remember only one royalty check for sixty pounds from Step Forward.

You did two classic punk rock singles – Fascist Dictator and Defiant Pose. How well did they sell and looking back what do you think of them now?

DS: I have an idea that they both sold quite well, certainly as much as some of the other singles in the second wave of punk bands at that time.  I am proud of our first two singles and I enjoy listening to them today.  We could tell when we recorded them that they were pretty damn good. Not bad for a bunch of schoolboys from Bristol. 

NS: I think our second single is the best thing we released and our first single is an amazing achievement for such a young band. They are, as you say, classic Punk Rock.

Tony Parsons gave you a bit of a hard time in NME for the lyrical content of fascist Dictator. What did you make of that?

DS: I don’t remember there being too much confusion over the fact that the song was about an arsehole boyfriend, the type of jerk who got all the girls back in Bristol in those days.  Tony Parsons had a point that we were playing fast and loose with an incendiary word, but that’s the role of a journalist.  God knows there were some bands saying some bizarre stuff back in those days so someone had to call them on it.  I recall that he gave some other bands a lot harder time than he did us.

NS: Tony Parsons came down to Bristol to review the Television/Blondie gig we played on, and to interview us. He was speeding out of is head and a total wanker. He had decided to slag Television and heap praise on Blondie; not because he thought Blondie were great, but because everyone else had done the opposite! He then went back to London and slagged us off for living in roads that had trees in them – not “Punk” enough apparently. Wanker! PUNK IS NOT A STEREOTYPE!  Look at the bill we were supporting – how different could two bands be?

You did a cracking John Peel session with some great versions of your songs. What do you remember of it?

DS: We had a great time.  We couldn’t believe our luck.  John Peel liked us!  That was a real high point for us. I remember a great deal about it.  Big studios full of music stands for orchestras.  We set up our tatty little equipment at one and blasted through 4 songs and then left.  The soul group The Real Thing were recording next door and we chatted to them in the hallway.  Very nice blokes as it turned out.  I remember that the John Peel session aired the night before we started our summer tour with Chelsea and was quite a morale booster.

NS: I don’t remember a thing…

How did you come to get the deal with CBS? DS:  don’t remember too much.   Mumblings of what labels were interested in us.  I don’t think Miles Copeland wanted to put out albums on Step Forward. Since we had all quit or finished school, we needed some money to live on so it sounded like the right move.  Also, the Clash were with CBS (in the Epic division) which was probably alluring to us. NS: I imagine Miles needed some money to live on too…I remember signing the contract at Soho Square. Ellie, the head of press, had some Clash pants, which I thought was dead cool. They gave us the run of CBS’ back catalogue, thinking we’d only pick out a couple of things, and were quite perplexed when we started asking for the entire Miles Davis collection!

Were there any punkier tunes that you used to play that you dropped?

DS: Yes, quite a few.  I have demos and a live tape from the summer of 1977 and we dropped a lot of songs after that period.  We probably thought that they were hastily written and perhaps a bit formulaic punk songs.  We wanted to do better.  I have often wondered what sort of an album we would have made if it had been recorded in the middle of 1977!

NS: There were also a lot that we didn’t. We still had the fire and anger that made us a punk band; we just started to write songs that had stronger rhythms, and were more melodic. I think we dropped old songs that were inferior to the new ones for that reason alone.

How well did the records do with CBS and what was the difference being on a large label. Did they support you?

DS: We broke up long before anything came out on CBS and I have no idea how many records they sold. CBS did not support us, in fact they actively blocked us. I remember that they refused to release the album because they didn’t hear a “hit single”.  We were completely flabbergasted by this!  We could not understand why they signed this quirky, teenage Bristolian punk band and expected a hit single! It was this round of frustration with CBS coupled with our disappointment in the production of the album we had just made that finally led to us calling it quits. There were probably some other frustrations contributing to our break up.  We were pretty miserable with the state of things but we did not fall out as friends.  Miles Copeland managed to get us to reform for a show in London and Bristol when the album came out a couple of months later.  We dutifully did the shows but we had no intention of reforming.

NS: No discussion before we recorded. No idea of what we wanted to do. No input at all. They were useless really. Miles was no better. It was as if signing to CBS was an end in itself. They really had nothing much to do with us.

Looking back how do you rate True Romances. A very different version of Higher Education from your John Peel session on it? Cover by Hipgnosis who did the Pink Floyd sleeves. A record company decision?

DS: I tend to look at True Romances as a post punk record. It was recorded in 1978 and reflected our desire to make our music a little more complex and lyrical. We were trying to present songs of teen frustration and angst in a relatively intelligent and tuneful way. As I mentioned earlier, there was enormous pressure at the time for bands to branch out and build from being scrappy little punk bands. The album could have been more fun to make. The producer was not the right choice and I think it clouded the recording sessions right from the start. This may sound weird, but I think in a way it was quite ballsy of us to strike out in that direction when we could have played it safe. For many years hearing the album would remind me of the sad and frustrating last few months of the Cortinas, but I have since been able to appreciate it for it’s own merits. When you consider we were 16 and 17, the writing and the playing on the album is pretty good. I just think most people judged the album on the clothes we were wearing on the band shot on the back, for which my outfit was the greatest violation! I’ll never live that one down.

NS: Miles chose the producer – he owed him money! He was totally wrong for us. We did some recording with Will Birch from the Kursals. He was far more sympathetic to what we wanted to do, really inventive and artistically involved as a producer. We needed to make a record, not just record our live set. We knew this, but couldn’t articulate our ideas and didn’t have the technical know how to do it ourselves. Hipgnosis also did the defiant Pose cover for Step Forward – our choice. We wanted to stress the ordinary-ness of our True Romances. That’s why the kid leaning out of the window on the back cover isn’t a punk.

I think there are great songs on that record recorded really badly – something that happened later on with another record I was involved with…