Blue Gene Bop
This month’s phantom zone rumble: Brit-punk that would have hit harder had it arrived on time.
Chelsea Chelsea STEP-FORWARD, 1979
GENE OCTOBER reacted quickly to punk’s challenge. Having placed a musicians wanted ad in the Melody Maker in August 1976, he ditched the name John O’Hara and formed Chelsea. Although early Banshee and future Ant Marco Pirroni was initially tapped as the band’s guitarist, the singer settled on Billy Idol. Bassist Tony James and drummer John Towe rounded out the band, which first played live that October. When all three jumped ship to form Generation X, Gene got a new Chelsea together, who debuted supporting The Clash on Januar y 1, 1977 at new punk hub The Roxy.
Signed to Miles Copeland and Mark Perry’s Step-Forward label, the group’s debut release was the totemic Brit-punk 45 Right To Work. Regular line-up changes would cost them crucial time, however: despite Gene’s keen sense of the moment, Chelsea’s self-titled debut album didn’t arrive until June 1979.
When Sounds, then the most punk-friendly of the music weeklies, reviewed Chelsea, their assessment appeared below a five-star consideration of Joy Division’s future-pointing Unknown Pleasures. Giovanni Dadomo’s dismissive evaluation read, in full: “Give five monkeys a recording studio and sooner or later they’ll record Give ’Em Enough Rope. Chelsea are faster, cheaper and better looking [than The Clash].”
“Chelsea was not the hippest band in the world at that time,” laughs Chelsea’s guitarist James Stevenson, who teamed up with Gene in early ’77. “It took us a long time to get the
material together for the album. We never crossed over. I saw The Clash at the Lyceum in late ’78 and it was full of secretaries from the city, and I thought, This band have made it. Our audience was a punk audience.”
“We were what we were,” says a bullish Gene October today. “I don’t think Chelsea is a punk album. It’s ver y melodic. It didn’t even go near The Clash or the Pistols or The Damned, or anything anyone else was doing.”
Heard today and decoupled from its moment, Chelsea sounds refreshingly crisp, energised and ruckus-inciting, with Gene’s manly roar intensifying the across-theboard muscle. Opening on a high with the surf-harmony infused I’m On Fire, its case is further made with the foot-on-monitor vainglory of Fools & Soldiers and the bruised yet unbowed anthem All The Downs. Side two – as on The Clash’s first album – featured a rocked-up reggae cover. Jimmy Cliff ’s Many Rivers To Cross was a favourite of Gene’s since he first saw The Harder They Come. Parallels with Strummer and Jones are valid inasmuch as both bands were plugged into pre-punk rock’n’roll forms, and were intent on cranking them up into harder, more thrillpacked places.
The moodily-lit sleeve, with the bassist and guitar players looking like Rolling Stones, drummer Chris Bashford giving it some James Dean and Gene resembling Performance’s Chas Devlin, also had a classic, retro aspect. Did they have anything in particular in mind? Gene responds robustly, “No. [The Rolling Stones’] Aftermath you’re trying to say? No. It was done in the record company’s basement. Just rigged up a cloth against a wall, lined the boys up, lit from one side, half the face is lit, half isn’t.”
James, however, counters, “Gene wanted it to be like a Stones sleeve. The trouble with the sleeve was that when the bike courier took the artwork to the printers it was dropped on the ground and scraped. There were scratches on Dave Martin’s face. It was taken to the printers and Miles Copeland wouldn’t pay to have it redone. At that time, Miles didn’t have that kind of money.” James concedes that Copeland’s management charges The Police, featuring Miles’s brother Stewart, were a higher priority than Chelsea.
The Step-Forward roster at the time also included The Fall, whose Live At The Witch Trials was the label’s first album. Chelsea might have come second, but Gene remembers the late Mark E. Smith with fondness. “In the pub with Mark, he had a wicked laugh, big grin. He was very hard in his thoughts. He could be quite funny, but he didn’t show that side much. He was taking the rise a lot. He loved to sit and observe. (Adopts Mark E Smith voice) ‘Row-sche R-u-um-ble’. Industrial Estate, all good stuff. The Fall were great.”
As with The Fall, changes in Chelsea’s ranks weren’t far off. “After the album, Dave Martin [guitar] and Geoff Myles [bass] left to form their own band [The Smart],” recalls James. “I couldn’t face going on and left, and then thankfully got the call to join Generation X [he later played with Kim Wilde]. Gene, being the resilient character he is, put together a new Chelsea line-up and they went to America. If anyone had said I’d be talking about the album when I’m almost 60, I would have been amazingly flattered!”
Gene, who kept the group going and whose belief in punk is absolute, remains Chelsea’s only constant. On being told his band’s first LP was issued 40 years ago, he reacts with surprise. “Bloody hell. I last heard it years ago,” he says, before reflecting, “We wanted to write songs. That was the importance of [the first Chelsea LP] – actual musicians who wanted to write music, and an album that would last.”
“Chelsea was not the hippest band in the world at that time.” JAMES STEVENSON
Thanks to Matt Ingham at Cherry Red. Catch James Stevenson with The Alarm, Gene Loves Jezebel, Holy Holy with Tony Visconti and Woody Woodmansey, and, on occasion, Chelsea. Gene October’s current Chelsea play Brixton’s Hand In Hand on June 28 and Huddersfield’s The Parish on June 29.