Boy Oh Boy. It’s always nice to have a few words off one of the Boys and with a couple of special shows coming up what better time to catch up with Matt and see what’s happening. Ticket details and links are below the interview for their Lewes and London shows along with the posters with all the details.
Hi Matt. The boys have been announced as headliners at Resolution Festival in the 100 Club this coming January. Having been two years since you headlined there was it an easy choice to say yes to doing it again? It is a great line up as well with Last Great Dreamers and Menace playing as well.Hi Dom. We’re always happy to play at the 100 Club. It’s almost a New Year tradition for us to play there now. It will also be great to hook up again with special guests Last Great Dreamers who we shared a festival stage with in Norway last year.
It’s already announced as the bands only show in London for 2020 is that an easy decision to make with it being so early on in the year?
Not at all, we’re usually planning gigs a year or so ahead and there are only so many gigs we want to do per year in any particular city or country as we don’t want to overplay anywhere. But we are playing Brighton before the London gig as well as Rebellion in 2020 and there might also be one or two other gigs in the UK later next year.
London is an ever decreasing hotbed of Rock and Roll with venues and gentrification closing down places is it harder to find suitable places these days compared to when the Boys started?
Sadly, I think that’s the truth, which is why I have a soft spot for the 100 club as one of the few surviving venues in London that have been around since the beginning of British rock ’n’ roll. When we started out in 1976, there were probably 100+ small music venues and pubs in London where we could feasibly get gigs as a new band, I doubt there’s more than a handful now.
It seems like a whole new world out there for bands what with the internet being so instant and making the world a smaller place. Bands can record at home from anywhere is it a good or bad thing? there seems to be less chance of there being a community or movement like when you opened up your flat in Maida Vale. Have those kinds of days totally gone do you think?
The music business has always been changing. Other than live performance, income from music evolved from sales of sheet music to vinyl records, cassettes to CDs. and downloads to streaming. And even live performance evolved with the advent of music videos and once again with the arrival of the internet as well as audience smartphone recordings now all available online. The main problem now is that music is so easily available that it’s in danger of being taken for granted and devalued
Did you keep all the tapes from those recordings? Were there any particular people who impressed you who went on to great things in music that you could sense from the time?
I have some early Boys’ recordings that I’d mixed down to cassette but all the original multi-track tapes went missing at some point and I don’t know who took them. If someone had stolen them to sell on or release as a bootleg I think they would have resurfaced by now so either they were stolen to record over or maybe removed by one of the bands who didn’t want their embarrassing early efforts aired. Who knows?
Most of the people that hung out in Warrington Crescent went on to greater things, including non-musicians like Magenta Devine, but one person who did impress me was the new guitarist with Chelsea who had only just started playing. I showed him a few guitar licks and he picked them up so quickly I thought this boy’s going to be a great guitarist. His name was Billy Idol.
A little bird tells me that The Boys in 2019 have also been busy recording is there any details you could reveal about that?All I can say is that we’ve started recording and it’s sounding good – but at the moment it’s just new tracks with as yet no specific end-use and we’ll work on them and possibly more tracks in the New Year.
Going back to playing the 100 Club. Its such an iconic venue for many reasons its steeped in history and one of the only remaining places still standing. How does it stack up playing the 100 Club in 2018 or 2020 compared to 40 years ago and which of the venues hold the best memories and why? The Roxy, Marquee club when it was on Wardour Street. I guess the Hope And Anchor which is also still standing. Wasn’t that the venue the band made their live debut? What do you remember about that?
Funnily enough, we never played the 100 club back in the day. I think after the first punk festival there when an audience member was hit by a thrown beer glass, they were a bit wary of booking punk bands for a while. Me, and I think Cas and John were in the audience for that gig. I also remember our debut at the Hope and Anchor shortly after, as it was such a relief to get our first gig safely under our belt after all the rehearsing. Mick Jones, Gene October and a lot of other fledgeling punk rockers were at the gig.
The Roxy was special because it was so short-lived. It was open only a couple of months but it that short time it gave punk its own home and helped to turn the UK music biz on its head and give the fledgeling punk bans the upper hand over the record companies, who were suddenly all desperate to sign a punk band. Also, venues, radio stations, recording studios, newspapers and music magazines were all forced to open up their minds to the punk phenomenon.
Re the Marquee, I saw so many great bands play there that it was a privilege for me to use the same stage and tiny dressing room. I’m still angry about the Marquee being lost forever after the developers promised there would still be a live music venue as part of the new development. I went to the opening of that ‘live music venue’ which was actually the basement area of a Conran restaurant. It was packed with tables and chairs for diners and had a tiny cabaret-style stage that you could just about fit a grand piano on. What really annoyed me was the ashtrays (you could smoke in restaurants back then), which were embossed with the names of some of the great bands such as Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones etc that had played the Marquee, implying that this was where they had played.
When I go there (Hope & Anchor that is) I don’t know why but I’m always slightly taken aback how small it is. Again its got a lot of attachment to some bands history like the Stranglers and The Damned playing there. The 100 club seems palatial in comparison.
Are there any plans to play further afield again in 2020? the USA shows went down well and I know bands and fans were thrilled with the experience of hearing you guys play live. What about china is that due for a return visit or are you now banned?
We are in talks about doing another South American tour and also Japan plus a few other things in the pipeline. I’d personally love to visit China again and tour there properly as we intended last time but it would be risky as we don’t know if we are still banned and probably wouldn’t know till we arrived there.
As for the band will John be playing the Resolution show? It would be great to see him up there with you guys.
As you probably know John hasn’t been well for a long time. He is showing signs of improving. It’s a slow process so we don’t know if he’ll be able to be at the show but we do hope so.
I live in Swansea and the local museum recently had an exhibition to celebrate 50 years as a city and 50 years of music in the city and low and behold there is a feature from the 70s of Circles night club down the marina with pictures of yourself from when the Boys played on a Monday night. With a great bill poster advertising the show. Do you have any memories of that show which was bootlegged and the first Bootleg I ever heard of the band. Sounded like an electric night in an infamous local venue. Were they good memories of getting in a van with the band and togging it around the UK in the late ’70s.
With these memories in mind would you ever consider penning an autobiography? The Boys history is an exceptional one and would make for a riveting read.
I’d like to have seen that exhibition. Do you have any photos of that feature? It was indeed great fun touring in the 70s because in many cases we were the first punk band that anyone had seen so it felt like we were trailblazing. As to an autobiography, no plans at present but if I get bored maybe.
Lewes Con Club 10 January –Tickets
Resolution Festival (100 Club) 11 January – Tickets
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