If I'm honest I don't like interviewing punk celebrities because very rarely do they have anything new to offer. Over the twenty odd years they become like politicians eventually spinning out a well worn and often repeated yarn. I can't blame them though coz they have been interviewed so many times over the years. Yet here is TV Smith ..doesn't know me from Adam, yet takes the time to answer the questions  as fully as possible so  my thanks to the both of them and all the best to them  for the future.

I'd been writing songs since I'd been in school, where I had a band that sometimes played in the lunch hour! We graduated to booking local village halls and putting on gigs. When I moved to Torquay to do a year at art college there, I started my first "real" band, called Sleaze. It was pretty glam sounding, pretty dreadful actually, but at least all the songs were self-written, which was pretty rare in those days for a local band, and we got ourselves some gigs in clubs around the area and recorded and pressed up 50 copies of an album which we sold to friends. But it was obvious nothing was going to happen in Devon. Towards the end of the year I got thrown out of my own band, who'd decided they wanted to do cover versions. By then I'd met Gaye, who said she wanted to learn to play bass. We started to make plans to move to London and form a band there.

What were your influences musically and otherwise ? How did the band form and, apologies for this q but, how did you arrive at the names TV Smith and Gaye Advert and why ?

We were into all the usual pre-punk stuff: Iggy, Velvets, New York Dolls, anything with a bit of danger. Also, I liked some of the English glam/pop bands at the time: Bowie, Sparks, Roxy, Cockney Rebel. Gaye was into Zappa. Around then we also started hearing reggae for the first time, Lee Perry, Bob Marley. There's no mystery to the names. T because I'm Tim, V because it goes so well with the T. I think the Stranglers first started calling Gaye "Advert" when they put her name on the guest list for their gigs and didn't know what to call her, and it stuck.

 You had a very quick rise to fame perhaps too quick !!! Did it suprise you > the speed at which events happened ??

We didn't really think about it...we just got on with what we wanted to do, and the speed it was all happening just seemed right. It was only afterwards we realised it's not like that for everyone.

 To me you you seem to embody a lot of what was classic punk ?? A slightly  ramshackle amateur sound driven by fire and something to say with a classic  image.. Do you agree ?? You also seem to straddle the first and second wave without any problems ??  Did you regard the band as punk ??

We didn't worry about whether we were "punk" or not. You've got to remember that when we started playing the term "punk" wasn't even being used. There was debate going on in the music press at the time saying, "there's obviously some kind of movement here, what shall we call it?" We didn't care what they called it as long as we could do it without them trying to change it.

 You were quite pally with the Damned and Motorhead ?? You seemed to get  along with everyone ?? Do you think bands like the Damned deserve the retrospect slagging they always seem to get from contemporaries like Siouxsie  and Lydon. Personally early Damned for me was shit Hot. Was the scene as close knit as some people make out or was it very cliquey with people like the Bromley Contingent ??.

In London there can only have been a couple of hundred people in the first couple of months of 1977 who regularly used to hang around the Roxy club, so it was pretty natural that we were going to know each other. Personally I thought it was pretty cool that we were all doing this thing - lots of different types of music that had nothing to do with the established music business. I never had time for those who tried to make it "cliquey". For me, it seemed more like a refuge where anyone could go when they'd had enough of the boring music around at the time.

 You seem very conscious of yourselves in a band and how punk was going..... From One Chord Wonders to Safety In Numbers. How did you view punk as the months progressed thru 77-78 ? A lot of bands tried to make out they weren't  punk ? Ironically now it seems the other way now. Everyone in a band then  tries to make out they were punk !! Also a lot of people like Lydon , Siouxsie etc have seemed to have changed their minds about the past and accepted that they were part of an important and influential time in music . How do you see this period and the Adverts place in it ?

People forget we were there right from the start. All the bands who were playing at the end of '76/beginning of '77 helped form what's now considered "punk." But I think that as the media started to jump on the idea of punk through '77 -'78 it was safer for a lot of bands to say they weren't punk so they didn't get pigeonholed. One of the worst things that happened was that as "punk" became defined by the media, lots of bands started up who just copied the format, without bringing in anything new.

 Did you find it hard like a lot of other bands that when you weren't being angry and aggressive there wasn't much to separate you from other bands ? For  instance later Eater and Slaughter sound like just rock bands without any defining quality.

Being aggressive wasn't an important part of the mixture for me. I was just interested in expressing myself. But there was a kind of anger and energy in punk that separated it from "rock."

 You also seem to embody that 'We are in a band but we are also just part of the audience'. You were always checking out other bands down the Roxy .... From reading stuff you have written it holds a special place in both of your hearts... when did you feel it going a bit stale. What was the best bit about the Roxy ? What bands did you rate and what bands did you think

 mmmmmmm !! ?? It wasn't just us - you'd catch people from nearly all the bands checking out other bands at the Roxy. You knew you'd always see something different there, even if it was crap, and we liked being with other people who were looking for the same thing.

 You were an extremely popular band. How did the media react to the band ? Like The Ants you were loved by the fanzines but how did the general music media react to you ? I know Burchill and Parsons were particularly vindictive for no reason in the their book 'The boy looked at Johnny' What was their problem ? They were a part of the scene yet took a curious cannibalistic delight in feeding on its remains !!

The music press started out hating us. Our first ever review said we were dreadful. Later they started to understand. But Burchill and Parsons seemed to have some chip on their shoulder. At the time the fanzines were pretty prevalent, and they would generally support the bands on the scene. Burchill and Parsons thought they could walk in and with their sharpened critical minds expose the whole thing as just the same as what had been happening before. Maybe they thought this was "punk journalism" - actually they were just being nasty.

 In fact when did you think punk began to go stale ??

I'd say it had passed its high point when the Roxy closed in Spring '77.

 What do you remember of TOTP and no time to be 21 ??? I always remember that plastic dolly on your sleeve !!!!

We felt stupid and out of place miming in a television studio. Old Grey Whistle Test was OK because we could play live. The TV people had no idea what we were about: for example, that doll was hanging from my wrist on a chain. The BBC wouldn't let me go on with it because they said the chain was an "offensive weapon." They had to take it away and cover the chain with tape.

 When you were good you were brilliant a curious mismatch of slightly out of  time playing driven by an anger which I've already said. As far as I am concerned 4 classic singles musically and lyrically by itself is some achievement. The album tho was a disappointment. All the singles on it, No lyric inner. Were you running out of material because of the speed of the success ??? Were you being forced by the record Company to come up with goods fast ?? What did you make of Stiff Records ?? I know you weren't too happy with the way they exploited Gaye for the cover but in retrospect that cover is a classic.

I totally disagree that the album was a disappointment. I still love "Red Sea." As for putting all the singles on it - it didn't even have "Gary Gilmore" on it, for which we were heavily criticised at the time, but we wanted to cram in as much other stuff as we could, and got about all we could on before the sound quality would have degraded. (Aaah, vinyl!). And it HAD to have the other singles on because they were part of the message of the whole album, so we re-recorded them.

 Finally TV what are you up to now and what does the future hold for you  music wise ???

These days I'm touring round Europe playing solo gigs, trying to take the energy and spirit of punk with me. I've been making solo records since 1992. Every now and then I record with a band for a change. Last year, for example I made an EP of two new songs and two Adverts songs with a Finnish band called Punk Lurex OK (available from my website!!) and this year I've just completed a "Best Of TV Smith" recorded with the German band Die Toten Hosen which will be released in the Spring.