Patrik Fitzgerald - Reaction

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The one thing Patrik was guaranteed to do was get a reaction that could swing both ways and often at the same time. Gigs came first by just turning up at a venue.

"They begrudgingly put me on because it was easy. It was just a guitar. I was an easy option between bands. I played the Roxy and Vortex and many other places. A fair amount of other places had also opened their doors to punk by then like the Marquee and Roundhouse. There was also a lot of other cross over places like the Deptford Albany putting on other bands. It was at the point when everybody put punk things. Shortly after I started playing.

I had started playing gigs on an almost daily basis and had progressed to playing huge venues as support act to people like the Buzzcocks, the Jam, the Police, U2, Sham 69, Ultravox, Hawklords, Steel Pulse, Roy Harper and others.

Read - Marquee Review 1979

Read - Live 10.2.79

I don’t know how I survived in some places. In a place like the Roxy or the Vortex a lot of people took to me because I had the bottle to go on stage and do something. It’s very different getting on stage with just a guitar and being little over 5 feet tall as opposed to being in a band with 4 or 5 people that looked hard with solid guitars that could crack your skull if you got out of line. It was weird. It was a scene for loners anyway so I think it would have been 50/50 who liked or disliked me. I think a lot of people would have liked to have been me on the stage because that’s the way it was.

The media reaction seemed like a funny joke and quite strange. Some of it was nice though some of it wasn’t. I was called a token cockney by Gary Bushell. People either really liked it or really hated it! It was then that I thought there was something there if I could polarise reaction rather than just get a mediocre reaction.
I’d get things like skinheads that didn’t agree with anything I sang about who nevertheless would want to protect me. There was a guy called Donald who was a nutter and one time he held the mic up to my mouth for twenty minutes when there wasn’t one. He was an absolute nutter and an animal and everyone knew so.

Barracking – I didn’t get that much thrown at me surprisingly. I did some gigs with Sham 69 because Jimmy Pursey took to me. I liked Sham early on when they played the Roxy and I always used to chat with Jimmy. They were the nearest thing to a top notch punk band and live they were superb. It was quite sad what happened to them. I had gigs with them and had run ins with their fans who were right wing skinheads from the same part of London as me and I would have to go into their dressing room and they would all grill me and call me a red or commie. It was quite scary doing their gigs but I got out alive.

Would you try to reason with them?
"I do get pissed off playing acoustic gigs where people just shout and shout. You can only put up with that for so long before you get driven totally mad. If I do gigs like that I’d rather go home and watch television...But I’m not gonna give up. I’m not made that way. I’m gonna keep performing until those people get sore throats from shouting at me. I’m not going to give up cos I still enjoy it. And it’s the only thing I got." NME 24.2.79
Heckler puts downs? I wasn’t very good at it. I did a tour with the Hawklords and their fans just hated me. I remember at one gig saying ‘look you can shout and chuck things and drown out my songs but I’m on stage for about 40 minutes and I get paid for it so who’s the fool?’ That was as good as it got with me. I’m not witty in that way. I used to deal with hecklers by directing songs directly at people and others that understood the songs would know exactly who I was directing the songs at. A surreptitious way of dealing with them. Non confrontational – I figured where does it go.

The Cockney Rejects in the film 'Rough Cut' talk about their methods which is they wade into the crowd and have a punch up. That’s fine but that’s the territory where you end up like Sham 69 and people coming along expecting to have a punch up. It’s no longer about you playing some songs.
   

I also appeared at anti racist concerts including the one at Victoria Park, Hackney with the Clash, X Ray Spex and Tom Robinson.

The Clash at Victoria Park just seemed like a publicity machine. Dressing up as army people was all a bit fake. The gig was a very separate entity from the rally and from a performance point of view I was separate from the rest of the days events. I walked up there from home got in and waited for everyone to arrive.

   

Victoria Park - Picture Denis O'Regan

 There were eighty thousand people there but it didn’t feel that different from playing the Roxy. There it was dark and you wouldn’t be that aware of people with the lights in your eyes. At Victoria Park it looked surreal. I wasn’t phased but it was a bit strange. ‘All those people why are they looking at me?’ I went down terribly. There were the skins down the front throwing darts at bands. They didn’t like me and I thought it was sad that the most vociferous people at the front at a rally against racism were racists. What’s the point of this? These are the guys who were having the biggest say here.  At the end of the day it was a great event having all those people there but it seemed all about publicity for the bands having the concert. There were lots of RAR gigs going on and they had the same effect, if not better than Victoria Park really.

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