The Plague

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Originally formed as early as 1976, The Plague were a punk rock band from South East London.  Early demos include the punky sounding  On The Dole, Again & Again and Nightmares. None of these however were released. The boys would go on to claim fame as the band who played the fabled punk mecca, the Roxy, more times than any other band.

 Gareth Martin - Rhythm Guitar & Vocals
Marcus Jeffries - Guitar & Vocals
Graham Robinson - Bass
Greg Horton - Drums

We started basically playing together at college. We had started listening to the very early Damned stuff and that, which we found quite influential. As Graham's dad was a kind of minister, he managed to swing us rehearsal space at his church in Bromley and we started meeting up there.

The way the first gig came up that gave us our first taste of playing was the college was holding a little dance come disco thing. This would have been mid '76. Graham started playing the bass with the Plague. When we did our 1st gig I think he’d been playing about 3 and half weeks. I remember something went wrong and his bass hit the deck and he was kicking it around like a football!
I suppose it really kicked off early 77, by mid 77 we were gigging twice a week. Wed play places like Battersea arts centre where in the early days we were the first punk band to play there. It turned into a regular thing. we got in with Battersea arts centre because they were doing a kind of play come musical called the food show, and because the punk thing was happening they said if you come along and supply some music for us when we go out to do the gigs you can have a 20min set to do your own thing, we really want to give it a punk edge and in return well give you free rehearsal space. That didn’t last very long as we ended up getting banned by the ILEA because they said they wanted a real punk band no hole barred we done this gig in a school that was basically for the parents and their kids and we done this song called '1, 2 Fuck You', they went berserk and we ended up with the gym teacher and his cronies trying to sort us out. The head master demanded a public apology which we refused to give so from that point it wasn’t a major headache but we were told we weren’t welcome to play in any IELA establishment from that point onwards.


 


 

 Kevin St John was into the Plague not so much musically but we always represented a very pro option for the nights when bands pulled out. If a band pulled out he could phoned us up in the morning and ask to coming along and do it and wed do it. And we pulled people in as well there was this crew from the early days, there were a lot of punks hanging out at I think it was the old swan in Battersea, and it was turned into a punk hangout. And we ended up with quiet a large following that were massively loyal and dedicated, came to every gig and we ended up calling them the Battersea mob. Even when we played places in Manchester and Coventry they were down there.
Did you get any stuff chucked at you?

 Yeah occasionally but not to any extent. We only had one major reaction when we played in Manchester coz we were perceived as a cockney band. We got the gig with Slaughter and the Dogs at Wythenshaw forum … we had flyers printed up and we'd been printed as the Plough. So there were all these flyers floating around Manchester with Slaughter and the Dogs, V2 and from London... the Plough! And I thought that’s great like a punk version of the Wurzels. So we went on stage and said  'We'ere not the Plough. We're the Plague.' We quite enjoyed it but it was very gobby, ridiculously so. At one point Graham went up and said 'fucking stop it' coz were pissed off with it and that just increased it tenfold. I had a t-shit with 'fuck' written on it and someone was trying to land a gob on the letters. Someone whacked me with a bag with some brick in it as I got near the end of the stage. So I went and grabbed my drink off the band and poured it all over their head. They were shouting 'cockney bastards' and chanting. We were giving it large, we got off stage and about 60 people come running over and we thought here we go and they said that was fucking great, that was really good we loved it. We really thought we were going to get our heads caved in. Seems funny now but it weren’t that funny at the time.


 

 After the Roxy closed we carried on. We did a gig where my dad worked which was a blinding gig, and a bloke from CBS records came down. That was at the Institute of Psychiatry in Denmark Hill in Camberwell London . And we put a gig on there with a band called the Heat. That was after the Roxy days and we absolutely packed the place out but skinheads turned up and it turned into an absolute bloodbath. And the man from CBS disappeared before we even got off stage. That was nasty. We also used to play at Toyah Wilcox’s club in Battersea called Mayhem. That was in a warehouse and we played there a couple of times. She was forever having a go at me for being too loud And a Prima Donna because I didn’t like turning it down. She was doing art and sculpting. That was before she started singing.
 
We used to play the Man in the Moon in the Kings Road and Poly Styrene from X Ray Spex turned up one night. They had just signed with Virgin I think. She wanted to do a song with the band and we just told her to fuck off. She wanted to do Oh Bondage Up Yours everyone knew it. It was on the Roxy album. They had put it out as a single but we didn’t bloody know it. She came up to us acting like the big star. That was quite funny.

One single in 1979 then another Out With Me All Night in 1980. Both however met with little success and in 1981 Gareth quit the band. Undeterred the band brought in a female vocalist and recorded some new tracks. But it wasn't the same and the band split for good.

In Love / Wimpy Bar Song  (Psycho then Evolution Records 1979)

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Above quotes from Marc Jeffries January 2006