Ruck forever

“They made me a tape, and I’d thought, Where do the songs begin and end?” explains Hart. “I’d sung in choirs and knew you needed an intro, a chorus and maybe even a solo, but they were somewhat lacking in those things. I think I made them look a bit smarter, and also did the same to the music.” Within a few weeks, Emptifish had made their debut supporting Skeletal Family at Granny’s club – soon to be renamed Basins – a venue that stood atop the vast, brutalist Tricorn multi-storey car park in Portsmouth’s city centre, once voted the third most ugly building in Britain. Soon after, George, together with Ian and bassist Ricky, moved Monkees-style into a communal flat in a large, dilapidated Georgian building on Waverley Road in Southsea, where their twangy, early Beatles and Crampsinspired sound developed. Around the same time, each took on a special garage rock surname: George Wipeout, Ian and Ricky Sonic, Damian O’Delic. In the 1980s, Portsmouth, a large, predominantly white, working-class city housing Europe’s biggest naval dockyard, was in economic freefall, and the group’s back-to-basics rock’n’roll seemed to touch a nerve. “It’s odd,” says O’Malley. “Garage rock seems to thrive in ports. Chatham had Billy Childish and The Milkshakes, Liverpool had the Cavern, and Portsmouth had us. It was pure energy.” Throughout 1984 and ’85, Emptifish’s following grew, swelled by the patronage of fans like Wilko Johnson, and Portsmouth Football Club’s notorious ‘657’ hooligan firm, who found something alluring in the group’s dark, reverb-drenched wall of sound, while their ultra-sharp suits and Brylcreemed ’50s haircuts in turn quickly influenced the city’s terrace fashions. In late 1985 they cut an EP at the local Crystal

This month’s memory drawn from rock’s mangled subconscious: sharp but thuggish Wilko-endorsed surf-punk from Portsmouth.