Resurrection

Clamor of Time

Spinning Fury (Part 1)

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I was still at school when I went and saw Mott the Hoople at a pub venue called the Winning Post in Twickenham.  The gig was held in a big function room at the side of the pub with a sticky worn carpet and was a part of the regular West London gig circuit.  I queued up each week for the chance to see groups such as Status Quo, Caravan, Cockney Rebel, The Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Atomic Rooster, The Groundhogs, Barclay James Harvest, Thin Lizzy, Chicken Shack, Rory Gallagher, The Edgar Broughton band, Uriah Heep, Lindisfarne, Quintessence, Stray, Wishbone Ash...... all these iconic bands standing on the low stage a few feet in front of me.  Every week at school we would scan the gig adverts of Melody Maker to see who was on and then I’d rush there every Wednesday evening and wait with mounting excitement beside the humming banks of WEM P.A speakers, nursing a pint of lager for the whole evening.  When the bands finished, they disappeared into the hallowed “back stage” area we could only picture in our imagination, being much too in awe of the whole thing to actually attempt to meet any of the bands. I couldn’t have foreseen back then that six years into the future I myself would stand on that same stage at The Winning Post with my band Generation X and get signed by Chrysalis records in that very venue.  How dreams can come true.

I saw Mott many times and I loved them.  I bought all of their albums from then on and all the albums I’d missed from their earlier years.  I poured over every song and lyric.  Hunters style was to influence a lot of my work. There was a track on their album “Mott” called  “Violence”  where the lyric goes “its the only thing that’ll make them see sense...”. Motts explosive stage act was amazing to my impressionable schoolboy self but their live shows often turned to chaos, giving them a reputation for inciting real violence.   All grist to the myth in my mind of course.  It was playing with such dangerous fire but the vision stayed with me.  To complete the circle, I asked Ian Hunter, the singer of Mott, to produce Generation X’s second album.


The first Sputnik single Love Missile F111 revelled in its Clockwork Orange and Scarface samples and the violent overtones that those movies represented. The ominous voice samples gave the record such menace.  When I was at school I had also been to see A Clockwork Orange at the cinema and its depiction of a futuristic society sedated against the realities of random violence made it all look so exciting. It had seemed like the ultimate cool movie, and at that age you never think about the realities of someone hitting you over the head with an iron bar. It just looks so good on the screen and still does, just ask Tarantino. The images always stayed with me, especially as I went to Brunel University where the correction center scenes were filmed.  Every day at Uni I walked across that courtyard from the movie that I knew so well. I adapted one of the taglines of the movie into “A group who’s principle interests are Ultra Violence.....”


What looked so cool at the Mott shows and looked so cool in the movies came back to metaphorically hit me over the head when Sputnik’s shows inevitably exploded into an orgy of real violence and real people got hurt. Real people got arrested. Tours got cancelled. All our lucrative upcoming Japanese shows were pulled fearing that Sputniks might bring riots and destruction to Tokyo. Did it make me re-think and tone things down? Did it fuck.

This is the original demo of the song that came to be called “Violence is Funky”. The drum loop is a Yardbirds sample, sped up with that great guitar stab. I wonder if it’s Jeff Beck?  I love all the “Caster Troy” voices from the movie "Face Off" and the rising helicopter take off sound effects.  We were using movie samples again, without worrying about getting busted which is the only way to go.  A great driving groove. It's about movie violence or video game violence of course, but in the light of madmen with guns in the last few years I suppose it all seems a little naive sitting here listening today.  But then we were young and had no moral or responsibility panic button of being an “adult” and that’s the best way to make true Rock and Roll. Maybe the only way.

Funky Violence

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - The Band, The Myth! - Electronic Rock 'n Roll.

Funky Violence

Sputnikworld

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