"I was idly searching around on the net the other day when I came across your  entertaining site. I was particularly taken by a paragraph from the Lee Wood interview as he pretty much sums up the very small history of a combo I was once a member of, and which has all but disappeared from history. Lee remembers: ""The one regret I have. I visited Spaceward studios one day and they played me a tape of a band called ""(sorry, I've had a mental block on their name. I'll let you know)"". The recordings were STUNNING. Especially ""Back In Pissheadsville Again. I approached them but they had a manager called Sue Black who only wanted them signed to a big label. In the end they re-recorded the four songs and released in on Miles Copelands label. The re-recordings are total shit compared to the originals."" The name that Lee has justifiably forgotten is ""Johnny Curious and the Strangers."" By the spring of 1977 we had saved up enough money--two of us worked in an MFI furniture warehouse--to book a couple of day's recording. I cannot remember why we chose spaceward but the four tracks we recorded sounded pretty good to us too. Sue Black worked for Click Records (who at the time had distribution rights for the great Tappa Zukie amongst others) and we signed with them and took her on as manager. We never found out how Miles Copeland got hold of the re-recorded tracks we made at Spaceward (again) at Click's expense (or rather Spaceward's as I don't think the billsgot paid--Click went bankrupt and disappeared soon afterwards as did we). We played a lot in London, memorably for me at the Roxy and the Vortex, and did two gigs with the Stranglers--Dunstable and somewhere else. When we played in the provinces things tended towards violence. The regrets I have (though I don't really regret anything):

1) agreeing to the silly name ""Johnny Curious and the Strangers"". I've never met anyone from that time who remembers the name and most people forget it again hours after I've told them. Maybe that's a good thing though.

2) signing with Click and Sue Black.

3) not giving those first recordings to Lee Wood.

You've prodded my memory so what follows might be a bit of a ramble but I'll try to stick with what might still be interesting. I haven't thought much about it since the 1970s so my memories are hazy and the different occasions sometimes blur into each other.

We became Johnny Curious and the Strangers sometime in 1976 after we had got together (with several name changes) in the horrendous new town Welwyn Garden City. Alan was still at school at the time, the youngest of us but by far the most musically advanced thanks to hours of playing along to Phil Manzanera, Mick Ronson and (he was young!) Jimmy Page. We were supposed to play a gig with the Sex Pistols early in 1976 when they came to WGC but I was away in New York at the time so we couldn't do it. We sat out that long hot boring summer playing stupid gigs, double bookings with cabaret artists and pubs a million miles away with two punters in the audience and the classic request, ""can you turn it down a bit--we can't hear ourselves talk"". We turned it up, of course--a horrible noise probably. Proper gigs were out of our reach, a ceiling that only ""chart"" or ""established"" acts could touch. When punk began to hit the headlines people started booing and throwing glasses at us, very nasty. We knew we were a part of it without ever having talked to anyone else associated with it. I think that's how it was all over the country. Three of us sang and wrote songs and we got quite a good set together. We were probably at our peak when we recorded a 4 song demo at Spaceward in Cambridge with ""Back in Pissheadsville,"" ""Stainless Steel Rat,"" and two others (the titles of which I cannot remember for now--one was definitely inspired by our discovery of the Television album). It was all downhill from there for lots of reasons but summer 1977 was the moment for us. Chas de Whalley from Sounds gave us two very good write ups and some guy from the Melody Maker fell in love with Alan's guitar playing after hearing the second lot of Spaceward tapes. We were featured in Sounds, their ""On the Crest of the Wave"" double-feature, the other act being XTC, who we supported later on at the Red Cow.

 Every week the press was on the lookout for the next new wave. Klick Records, a Jamaican reggae distribution company licensed by RCA, signed us up and made us full-time wage earners. Every Friday we'd go up to collect 35 pounds each from their office above a record shop in Portobello Road (pounding out the latest from Bob Marley or Burning Spear--I still own a valued klick edition of MPLA, a Tapper Zukie dub masterpiece of that year). It was better than the building sites and furniture warehouses we were used to at that time. For a few weeks we were booked into rehearsal rooms somewhere on the A1 just outside London. We came up with new tunes there and brushed up the old ones, because Klick wanted to produce an ""album."" At lunch we went everyday to this pub on a roundabout and listened to playlist hits like Carol Bayer Sager's ""You're Moving Out Today"" on the radio. With the radio you'd be losing your mind 'til John Peel came on later. They bought us clothes and new equipment. We had a hilarious afternoon shopping in the Kings Road, trying on all this bondage chic and shirts with zips all over them. Then we went up to Spaceward again to record the ""album"". Klick wanted us to change our sound, to make it more commercial. They cited Boston (!). They wanted ""Stainless Steel Rat"" to have a reggae beat. Actually it was a decent song but mostly because I'd borrowed the riff from a Nils Lofgren tune (""Keith don't go"") and changed it a bit and added lyrics that described New York and getting beaten up. Alan's guitar parts are what really made it though. You couldn't hear the words anyway but I'm sure they sounded interesting. ""Pissheadsville"" was Alan's and described a night at The Cherry Tree in Welwyn Garden City, the pub that gave us our first gig (and which was afterwards converted from a music venue into a beefeater and now, I'm told, a Waitrose but it's been many many years since I've been back). The recordings didn't really work out--the buzz wasn't there and the spark was gone. A lot of the material was at that time quite old and we had probably lost interest in it--looking forward to new things. We went boating down the Cambridge river one afternoon in canoes but it was as if we didn't know each other.

 Klick went bankrupt and disappeared but we made a couple more demos, one for RCA and one for who--I cannot remember. Some of those demos were pretty good in places. We recorded a song called ""I need someone like you like I need a hole in the head"" and we nailed a version of ""I'm a Believer"" based on the Robert Wyatt chord changes. The gigs were a million times better than the recordings for the most part. The Johnny Curious sound, at its best, involved two guitars chiming out power chords with plenty of gritty distortion, lovely witty basslines (courtesy of Bob) syncopated with the drums. It was high energy, very fast but with recognizable melodies, which Alan played on his guitar or we sung (solo or together). None of us had good voices but there was nothing unusual in that. We were all actually quite competent musicians, but very young and naive. You could hear the disparity in the recordings. Very well played, very tight, well rehearsed, everything chiming well and meshing, with this white-punks-on-dope singing over the top of it all. The NME reviewed the EP that Illegal put out in 1978 (even though we'd mostly disbanded by then). The reviewer assumed that session musicians had been used--actually a symptom of good playing and overproduction. They printed a picture of the cover. Completely hilarious. Klick had planned on putting the EP out in 1977 but never got to the release stage (because of bankruptcy). They had, however, hired a photographer (I bet he never got paid either) to capture our punky image. He took us down under the Westway and got us drunk but when that didn't produce the required effect he took us out to a canal somewhere and photographed us looking delinquent and snotty in front of some old warehouses. The EP contained four tracks from the horrible Spaceward ""album"" tapes but for some reason was cut at 33rpm--which shook John Peel only a little when he played it on his show. Total disaster. In addition to ""Pissheadsville"" there was ""Jennifer,"" a two minute chainsaw massacre, and on the other side Bob's ""In Tune,"" which perhaps rather pointlessly had a go at the hippy generation (his ""out Tune"" on the demo a much dirtier punk manifesto) but had great guitar (as usual) at the end, and my ""Road to Cheltenham,"" which was all echoing jangly guitars and a pastiche of borrowed (stolen?) pop tunes with lyrics moaning about those 1976 gigs. That's the one John Peel played, bless 'im.  

For the whole of that summer we played live gigs mostly in London several times a week. There were usually many other bands on the bill--four or five at least--certainly at the Roxy and the Vortex--and at different times we shared the bill with: Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Heartbreakers, who held court upstairs with the whole New York entourage (Rat Scabies too). The banshees were terrific that night but I don't remember how the Heartbreakers played. The Vortex was a place that people dressed for--the make up, spikes, lot of black--the sort of image the papers liked to catch--the Heartbreakers' entourage was really something--one of the women had thick fur all over and fur boots that seemed to have been cut from a polar bear. In the mosh-pit (?) at the front by the stage it was different, people getting in a mess, ""doing"" the notorious pogo, jumping up and down against each other working up momentum from each other's bodies--never saw it done better than at the vortex, except maybe at Clash gigs. We played on a bill with Adam and the Ants at the Vortex once--early in the summer--Jordan was there too. For the soundcheck he (Stuart Goddard) looked like a young soul rebel, oxford baggies and cool spex, but he dressed up for the gig, took off the spex and wore bondage black with a plaster across his nose. Tubeway army played a bit of a turgid set once--no synthesisers in sight though. I can't remember who else played at the Roxy when we were there--I remember someone playing Smoke on the Water in the dressing room--we sprayed our name on the dressing room wall (we did that everywhere, of course, the marquee, the Nashville, the Red Cow, the Vortex, Hope and Wanker, Roundhouse, streets all over England--we got hauled in by police for it one night in Cambridge when we were recording at Spaceward) and when the Roxy live album came out with the picture of the dressing room wall on the back, there was ""Johnny Curious and the Strangers"" written across it. The name made it but the music didn't. I had a good gig that time but I think I remember the others being fed up with it. We turned up for a soundcheck at the Red Cow once and they were filming for an episode of The Sweeney and wouldn't let us in. We played at the 100 Club supporting X Ray Spex. A lot of the audience were in the bog with Sid Vicious, who had taken his trousers off for some reason. We played at the Marquee in Wardour street several times (leaving our mark in the dressing room as usual--we saw that in a photograph at some point too). We supported Ultravox one week, Squeeze the next and on another, ignominiously, the band (whose name I've forgotten) who were to become Secret Affair. At a University of London gig we were supported by a pop group with a singer who sounded like Mario Lanza. Their manager had dressed them up in natty threads, all silk and bright colours. We didn't see them again 'til they reappeared years later as Spandau Ballet. We played a gig with some reggae groups at the Roundhouse, Aswad and Steel Pulse with the Bears (??can that be right??) and someone else--it was Punk and reggae together. Musically it didn't mesh. The bands were too different, the NME said--though it ought to have worked because in the Vortex and the Roxy between the bands the DJ (who was more than once John Peel) always played heavy dub and it seemed right somehow. But we had a great time in the dressing rooms and I've never seen so much cannabis smoked by so few in such a short time as on that night.

We played two gigs with the Stranglers out of town (but I honestly cannot remember where, maybe Dunstable and somewhere in East Anglia or it might have been Watford). They were great gigs, the Stranglers were all very friendly and the audiences were wild. In Dunstable they threw the seats at us once they'd ripped them out--a sign of favour in those days, of course, along with the bucket-loads of gob--try to keep a guitar in tune when it's covered in slimy green stuff--and mind the eyes. In Hertford, once, the objects getting chucked seemed harder, more pointy and were coming at greater speed than usual. We stopped the song and Bob gave a few stern words of warning for which he was rewarded with a volley of missiles and abuse, promoting his rather foolish: ""if you're so tuff lets see you come up here and do that!"" Big mistake, with the stage suddenly invaded by scores of very violent punk-haters (lots about in that year). Our roadies barricaded us in the dressing room when a fair fight seemed out of the question. Our own entourage escaped through the roof window before the police arrived. The Stranglers threw a party for their support bands in the Hope and Anchor after their summer tour, with strippers, a steel band, Hells angels, jam sessions and endless drugs and alcohol but I have extremely foggy memories of that. 

By January 1978 it was over. I met Alan in our lunch break (we both worked for the council by then: him cleaning the streets, me making tea for the dustcart drivers) and we agreed to pack it in. He had a baby daughter by then too (a dad and barely 17) and I think now he has a huge family. Bob too went in for a family life. Both carried on playing and I'm sure they still do. Ian has a small business with a recording studio, I think, making music for adverts and stuff. I bumped into the two Cowleys at a wedding quite by accident about 3 years ago. A Johnny Curious of a different kind reformed in the late 70s (basically Alan and others) and recorded two singles--one (""Someone Else's Home"") I quite liked. We also played on and off together in different combinations for two or three years after that. At one point I had a group with a brass section gigging around town.

I gave it all up completely in the early eighties. I lost interest in music generally for many years and it's only been in the 90s that I've been able to listen with enjoyment again to anything but modern jazz or avant garde stuff. This is probably the first time since the 70s that I've thought about it much at all. I've been increasingly nomadic since then. It's difficult to capture in memory, let alone in writing, the way events (especially those of 76 and 77) happened, the coincidences, the gathering momentum, the sheer absurdity of so much of it, the incompetence and disorder, but the wit and humour too, and bands unknown to each other going through similar situations who suddenly discover there are others like them through the medium of this thing called punk. Whenever I meet anyone who was around then, who felt part of it, they say that it was an exciting remarkable time but all over before the year was up, appropriated by more efficient powers or streamlined or whatever (I don't know about that--it was all over for me because the band broke up). Everyone has vivid memories. But no one (Lee Wood is not alone) remembers the name Johnny Curious and the Strangers. There's some poetry in that for me. I'm afraid the music has gone with the name. I don't think I've got any on tape or anywhere. Our manager Sue Black had all the master tapes (quite a lot of stuff) and she's long gone, a distant memory (I remember her place in Hamstead, we once sang ""White Riot"" out of her window to a couple of cops on the beat). So the tapes are gone too. Now you've prodded my memory I wonder a little about how that 4 track demo will sound to me now but I doubt if it even exists anymore. A nomadic life means you leave things behind and I have almost nothing material left from that time. I do still have a collection of albums and 45s but most of the 45s got turned into ashtrays by a house fire in the 80s.

Hope I haven't gone on too long, but there it is.

All best

John