By the end of 1976 that Rocky was morphing into a manager and we thought that whereas we 3 had moved forward musically he hadn’t so we got another bass player. At the end of 1976 we hijacked Andrew Linklater from a band that was still doing Wishbone Ash twin guitarry prog rock stuff. He liked us and we liked him and he joined the band. For the first 6 months of 1977 we played loads of gigs in County Durham because the working men club scene up there was really different.They wanted to hear original bands and preferably a bit rocky. Rob by this time had assumed this semi camp glam stage persona...a bit Bowie, a bit Bolan, a bit Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger. We still sounded Dollsy, Stonesy & Whoey so people into rock still liked it. We were still doing odd choice covers like 'Purple Haze' and 'Schools Out' and we became very big in County Durham!! In July 1977 we moved to London because of the way the punk scene was going. We were seeing it happen from the music papers and a little bit on the TV and radio. I remember reading about it and being excited. Then I remember hearing Anarchy for the first time and being disappointed...this is not earth shaking or going to change the world .. it sounded like a fairly standard issue rock band but with a singer with a bit of attitude. We had quite a few conversations on the subject and we thought our music is quite similar to this...its muscular, energetic guitar rock and with not much tweaking we could quite easily fit into this. I liked the energy of the Pistols…the Stranglers album…this is good, songwriting was good, a bit Doorsy and keyboardy…liked the attitude and big bass sound. Damned…Liked 'New Rose'…'Fanclub'…We took bits of both of those bands. I remember the Clash's first and thought this is real good and it had loads of influences in it. They’re not just angry but there’s thought in there…I still liked bands like Be Bop Deluxe. I was a lead guitarist and wanted to play lead guitar. I wanted to wail as well!
The Record Deal We finally moved to London in July 77. We obviously wanted to get signed and we saw lots of other bands around us getting signed and we began to get worried that maybe we would get left behind. A guy that wanted to manage ups an kept pestering us and who we thought was a bit of a joke was Jaz Summers who went on to manage Wham and Yazz. Not many record companies were knocking at a door but Pye had been to see us and they became very keen to sign us. Pye obviously in the early 60’s had Kinks etc but in the intervening years they had become square and they were keen to get into the New wave and sign some punky bands. They had Cyanide and the Fabulous Poodles but essentially were still an old school company.
It got to the stage where they were the only company like making us serious offers and if we didn’t sign to them then noone was going to sign us. They were offering a nice advance - 3 album deal and some control i.e. we wanted the artwork done a particular way. We thought the DFT writing was pretty naff but the compromise was we could have our mates artwork on the cover but they did the logo and layout. Mick Ronson
In some ways it was like he was trying to sweeten it but in others he was trying ideas. He'd play the track to you in the morning that you'd recorded the day before and you wouldn’t notice straight away and then you'd think 'what's that? I don’t remember doing that'. I think we got on too well with him. We weren’t well disciplined and it would have been better if we had had someone who drove us a bit harder. It got to the stage where the record company said to us you’ve been in the studio for weeks and weeks and we want the album. The first four tracks on the album are actually recorded live to a two track machine one Friday afternoon. They were rough live performance mixes of of songs not road tested and we would come back in the next week and work on them on the 24 track. Over the weekend we got a telephone call saying we had no more time and they wanted the album. On the Monday Mick transferred the 2 track onto the 24 track and we did a series of overdubs. We couldn’t’ actually touch the vocals because they were on the two track. Rob's favoured technique was to do 6 vocals and then pick the best bits out of each of them and treat the vocals like as a collage.
We did a marathon mixing session at Eden studios over in Acton and that was it. We were a bit disappointed and a it shocked at the time because the first 4 tracks we regarded as being very much works in progress. The only tracks finished were 'Storm, Can’t Think Straight, Everyday, Into the Future and We Got The Message'. The rest was thrown together. 'Nobody loves you'….When we first started back as DFT in 1975 we had a lot of fans in Sheffield a huge boy fanbase and there were a lot of very like glam bisexual people and they used to follow us around al over and Rob was really good at soaking up influences - musical and cultural. When he was young he had kind of flirted with his sexuality and explored it and one of his best mates was a very gay guy. The song…in one way he was pushing the boundaries ..we used to do a song called Harry which was the centerpiece of the live act...and it was like a piece of theatre. Rob used to adopt this persona of a redneck avenger to wipe out all the queers. It starts as a monologue about Harry who’s the new man in the office , there’s something not quite right about Harry, I think he’s queer and on the word queer it all burst into this huge punk thing. Rob used to have this pair of shears and flashlight and he was pointing people out in the audience. It was a comment on the anti gay attitude which we didn’t understand or agree with. Our way to tackle it was to satirise it. But a lot of people took it the wrong way. We had a good gay following who understood it but a lot of writers and audience thought we were advocating queer bashing and there was a lot of stuff in the papers about it. Old and gay was another facet of us looking at it about how gay people were represented in the media and in people’s attitudes. Why did we put material not road tested on the album? Well we had lots of stuff and the Decibel demos had staples of our live set and we should have put on the album. But when you’re in a band together for almost 2 years a lot of the material we’d been playing repeatedly and getting a bit tired of it. So when you’ve got new material you get to the stage where you get excited about the new songs and the old songs to you are old hat. But the fans who had maybe seen you 10 times out of those hundreds of gigs want to hear those songs.
The Cracks appear We were shooting in the dark for inspiration because we didn’t feel what we were doing so far was hitting the spot.Rob was reading a lot of socialist literature including the 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists'. He was going out with a Japanese girl from a rich family who incidentally is the girl in the 'Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle' with Steve Jones. That was Rob's wife. She got the gig because she was living in the same flat as Julien Temple. Rob was reading this stuff that was changing his political viewpoint and at the same time record companies were giving us large amounts of money with no particularly good reason and we were getting driven around in a big car because our manager had decide to buy a Jaguar XJS to take us to gigs in. The punk thing was obviously about bringing it back to the people and Rob was getting confused. Punk was anti all the stuff we were now getting involved in. Part of your dream for your band is that you want to be successful and part of being successful is getting a deal and getting your record out. When we recording the second album people would cultivate who they saw as the power in the band. Rob was the front man, singer and charismatic and an absolute dynamite stage performer - he was compelling and riveting and I often used to find myself just watching what he was doing and the people loved it. People would say to him 'you’re the star in the band; you don’t need these others'. This led to friction. I was emotionally immature at 25 and I could be a bit of a prima donna. I knew Rob was good so how could I divert attention away from him. There always was a bit of rivalry between us but we were finding it increasingly hard to work as a band. Rob’s always been a bit of a neurotic character and he felt the pressure because he was the main songwriter and we were expecting him to deliver the goods. I wrote songs but not necessarily in the accepted style. One day he was moaning and I knocked off 5 songs in ten minutes. I’ll write some punk songs and they all thought these were great and I was horrified. I did it to prove a point and I said I don’t want to play this stuff. Work on the second album began with us recording separately on different days our parts on songs. We were working with Steve lilywhite and he produced the second single 'This Crazy World' and the stuff was starting to sound good. We got 4 or 5 tracks in the can and we got to the stage where we couldn’t continue functioning as a band and we decided to split up. We actually signed the publishing deal knowing this would happen and we took the money. In the early days anyone could do it and you didn’t necessarily need to know how to play. You could get away with just having attitude. Then there was like almost a move back towards musicianship and the bands like XTC and Magazine, those kind of bands started being talked about in the media and we felt we fitted more in that category. By the time we split in early 1979 the songs were getting longer and we were doing mini epics again and the feel wasn’t so frenetic and in your face.
The End How did it all end? Basically Rob and the pressure. He did become a little bit unstable with his burgeoning socialist ideals, the business thing of the band and signing a publishing deal with a 10K advance and it was really getting to him. We were finding it hard to keep it together and there was friction. Another thing that accelerated the breakup was not touring the US. We had Max’s Kansas booked up and a few other gigs in the States and Canada and the visas didn’t come through in time and that didn’t come off. So we just split up. I was mortified. We’d been mates since 1969 and DFT since 1975 and a big part of my life was suddenly over. We did continue carrying on without Rob. But without Rob Pye weren’t interested. Rob went and formed a band with Mike Rossi from Slaughter called the Monsters and they did all right for a while but they were just a good band and that was it really. DFT live were greater than the sum of its parts and the chemistry was just right. |
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