Shrub Me Crazy
Stirring from rock’s tomb of oblivion, Midlands garage punk-Dada. Help!
“‘Blimey, we’ll be on Top of The Pops next week!’” THE SHEND
The Very Things
The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes REFLEX, 1984
‘S
HEND’ IS an Old English word meaning to put to shame, ruin and confusion. Redditch youngster Chris Harz first heard it on word-based TV panel show Call My Bluff, and adopted it as his artistic alter-ego. “I added the definite article ‘The’,” he explains, “as I was the only one.”
This striving for uniqueness would extend to The Cravats, the Beefheart/Pere Ubu-charged punks formed the day after bassist-voice Shend and his guitarist-vocalist neighbour Rob Dallaway saw The Stranglers play Brum punk nexus Barbarella’s on June 1, 1977. Recording two albums, seven singles and four John Peel sessions, Dallaway characterises their time as, “five years of bloody-mindedness, noise and weirdness… and spectacular career mismanagement. We didn’t stop doing stuff, we just needed a new vehicle.”
In 1983, that new vehicle roared into life. Shend and Dallaway initially toyed with the Electric Prunes-inspired name The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes, but went with The Ver y Things instead. Piqued by Dada, ’50s sci-fi celluloid and Nuggets garage primitivism, they resolved to turn on the tap of creativity and let it flow as it may. “We both had a love of ’60s garage band psych,” says Shend, who took over as frontman, “but rather than the American drawl, I decided to sing like Noël Coward meets Peter Cook meets Viv Stanshall, which suited Rob’s lyrics and me perfectly.”
The Very Things’ abnormal first single The Gong Man was released on Crass’s Corpus Christi label in late 1983. From then until early ’84 they recorded their debut album using a mobile studio at their 24-hour access rehearsal room in a soundproofed barn in Worcestershire. Some songs were pre-prepared by Dallaway while others grew from jams, with discordant surf guitars and Shend’s gnarly bass lines joined by drummer Robin ‘Disney Time’ Holland’s pounding back-to-front playing. “It was all entirely harmonious,” says Dallaway of recording, “although I was probably a bit bossy to work with then, with a ‘vision’ of how the album should be shaped, which was probably a bit annoying for everyone else.” Tension is inescapable on The Bushes Scream
While My Daddy Prunes, which remains rich with the scissoring sounds of psychosis, bludgeoning primitivism and Freudian terror. Samples from The Outer Limits, The Prisoner, 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space and more are stitched in, as is, seemingly, Radio 2 DJ Brian Matthew: strange, terminal songs involve the dead talking, nuclear disaster zones, Men In Black and other shouts into the void. Rumbling, grinding and full of dark mirth, it suggests a British version of The Cramps fronted by Leo Baxendale’s comic villain Grimly Feendish. Finished in early 1984, its sleeve featured a photographed-off-the-TV image from 1978 movie The Medusa Touch, of a priest praying his last as Richard Burton’s ESP-sociopath causes a cathedral to collapse.
The clangorous title song – sparked by a newspaper story about a landowner who burnt down his country pile when trying to rid it of moles, and still great for scaring the kids – was an indie chart success, and the band hit the road. Over the years there were three European trips, when they played Berlin with Crime & The City Solution, supported Michael Nyman in Vienna and stayed with Yello’s Dieter Meier in Zurich, visiting Dada’s birthplace the Cabaret Voltaire. “Young Disney is a force of nature. We called him Boy Chernobyl on tour,” says Dallaway (during gigs the drummer was able to get up and walk slowly around his entire kit without missing a beat). Shend, meanwhile, wore white gloves in honour of “Mickey Mouse, magicians and toffs.”
Then, in August 1985, The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes got a new lease of life when Channel 4 producer and fan Chris Phipps commissioned a loopily sinister black and white film of the song to be shown on pop show The Tube. Directed by Gavin Taylor, who also helmed U2 Live At Red Rocks and Queen At Wembley, the 16mm clip showed the group playing at the ruined Hulne Priory and lurking in a vintage Ford Prefect van on a suburban street of 1930s houses in Newcastle. One Billy Benson – a mystery man of whom Shend can only say, “he turned up for the audition with a plastic bag full of jam sandwiches and proceeded to eat them, even during the actual audition” – played the doomed gardener/father figure.
“It was glorious fun,” says Shend.
“At the time it was the most expensive film The Tube had shot. Tyne Tees were clearing out their cupboards in the ’90s and offered us the 16mm original to buy for a ludicrously large amount of money. We couldn’t afford it, so it was destroyed, apparently.”
John Peel remained a fan, but 1987’s taut, polished six-tracker Motortown would be the last album by the group. “I think it was hard to pick ourselves up after Motortown wasn’t the massive commercial success the label thought it might be,” says Dallaway.
Thereafter Dallaway and Holland formed Hit The Roof, while Shend formed Grimetime: as well as writing for the music press, he also turned to acting, appearing on Lovejoy, Casualty, Emmerdale and Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, among other credits. Since 2009 he has led a re-formed line-up of The Cravats and plays in “electrodada” outfit Anzahlung with Cravats bassist Joe 91. Disney Time is now a respected soul DJ. Could The Ver y Things rise from the tomb?
“I’ve been working on a new version of the old wheels,” says Dallaway, who also plays with his project Silverlake. “Same chassis, new bodywork, big engine, noisy. I’m ver y excited, but having to be patient, hoping it will be ready to unveil soon.”
The Shend, who is not involved with this new audio-visual chapter of The Very Things, remains upbeat. “As with all our projects we firmly believed, surely, this is the one that’ll lead to pop stardom,” he reflects. “We had a saying, ‘Blimey, we’ll be on Top Of The Pops next week!’, which one of us would say in a jocular manner at the time of every release, even when Top Of The Pops had long ceased to exist. I still do.”
The Shend’s book Rub Me Out is available at www.rotatorvinyl. bandcamp.com/merch