Damned if you Do: From Punk to Eternity Vol. 1

By Alan Lee Shaw

A frank and honest memoir by the musician/guitarist/songwriter Alan Lee Shaw and his career spanning over 40 years. From humble beginnings in and out of the limelight, working with an eclectic array of characters from the Pop World: Kirsty MacColl, and Jools Holland to Punk Legends, DeeDee Ramone and The Damned to Russian avant-garde poets and European movies. Alan documents surviving the trials and tribulations from the hilarious to the quite simply bizarre Rock and Punk world of the 1970's, on to his turbulent tenure in the early 1990's reformation of The Damned as the band's main songwriting contributor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447723769

Book preview

Damned if you Do:

From Punk to Eternity. Vol 1

Damned if you Do:

From Punk to Eternity. Vol 1

Alan Lee Shaw

Publisher: Alan Lee Shaw

Copyright: Alan Lee Shaw, 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Alan Lee Shaw

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Edition: November 2021

ISBN 978-1-4477-2376-9

Publisher: Alan Lee Shaw

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of Rod Latter drummer and my compadre who helped me unconditionally at the start of my musical journey.R.I.P.

Photo courtesy of Ian Dickson.

Acknowledgements

For those who have helped along the way I salute you

and for those of you I may have missed out here

you know who you are.

Thank you.

In no particular order as follows:

Ian Dickson, Rod Latter, Ken Pitt, John Schroeder, Twink(John Alder), Robert Crash, Marc Zermati, Henri-Paul Tortosa, Dave Goodman, Andrew Lauder, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, Kirsty MacColl, DeeDee Ramone, Brian James, Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies, Paul Gray, Genesis P-Orridge, Paul Raven, Kris Dollimore, Barry Peter Hutchinson, Alvin Gibbs, John Towe, Steve Schmidt, Chris Sol, Steve Bye, Abe Fumiaki, Henrik Bech Poulson, Martin Deniz, Jonathon(Bunny)Trevisick, Steve Phypers, Ted Carroll, Frank Murray, Phil Lynott, Robbie Kelman, Carole Laganière,  Reggie Magloire, Jim Simpson,

Françoise Nonin, John Esplen, Mike Richmond, Geoff Stilwell, Lucy Hanna, Kristian Navarro, Dave Yowell, Dave Thompson, Moose Harris, Crispin,

Sebastien Marks, Rudi, Steve Kunde, Jock Fistick, Erica Echenberg, Sharon Farren, Rafter, Busty Duck, Da Hush, George Butler, Ralph Heilbutzki , Alexi Khvostenko, John Gonquin Nikolai, Graham Vulliamy, Richard Joseph,

Dennis Stow, Jimmy Miller, Alan G Parker.

Special thanks go to. Françoise Nonin and Barry Peter Hutchinson for their sterling help with proof reading and compiling this book

ALS London 2021.

Foreword

I first became aware of the existence of Alan Lee Shaw when I picked up a copy of the Physicals’ All Sexed Up 7 inch vinyl EP at my local record store in 1978. There was Alan, looking directly at me, complete with low-slung Gibson axe, indispensable sneer and, a mannequin of Queen Victoria hoisted up onto his shoulders on its front sleeve – and I thought ‘Yep, this guy is the real fucking deal.’ My instantaneously favourable judgment of Alan Lee Shaw was further enhanced when I got the record home and spun it on my turntable. Not only did this gunslinger look the part but his music proved to be as authentic as his cool image. I loved the garage rock-meets-New York Dolls-meets-Rolling Stones-on-amphetamines vibe to the 4 tracks I kept replaying over and over for the rest of the evening especially the title song and a wonderful piece of rock ‘n’ roll indulgence, entitled Breakdown on Stage.

That following year I had the pleasure of playing with the great man in 2 outfits – Brian James and the Brains (later name changed to Hellions), featuring ex-Damned guitarist Brian James – and with a revamped version of the Physicals. Alan and I played the clubs and bars of London with the Brains, as well as a memorably wayward European sojourn supporting the Police, the Cramps and the Beat. With the Physicals we did a couple shows opening up for Irish rockers Thin Lizzy. On both of these capers Alan, being a far more experienced gigging musician than I at that time, took me under his wing and showed me the proverbial ropes when it came to touring etiquette. When I joined the U.K. Subs in 1980 we stayed in touch and I kept track of his solo projects and of his time served with the Damned.

For me, Alan Lee Shaw is one of the great but sadly, largely unsung heroes, of the British rock scene from the mid-1970s to the present day. He has an excellent backstory as a songwriter, performer and the prime mover of a variety of bands, projects and of numerous records made. As I surmised when I first lay eyes on the man on that sleeve some 43 years ago, for me, he remains the real fucking deal.

Alvin Gibbs, Bordeaux France, 2021

I've known Alan Lee Shaw for what seems like eons, initially as his manager and then as a good and true friend for over thirty years. He's been through the rock 'n roll mill and this is his story, warts and all. I know you'll enjoy his book, written by someone on the inside track, someone who's not afraid to call out the shots. As honest and true as the day is long, I'm sure this will give Alan the wider recognition he richly deserves...

Ian Dickson, August 2021

Some musical collaborations are brief and some last a lifetime. The Mischief album Alan and I recorded back in 1998, together with my old UFO chum Jim Simpson on drums, falls into the former category, and is a bit of a lost treasure, if I say so myself. Our reference points collided perfectly - The Who and MC5 for starters - and lest we forget there was that Damned connection too. Alan's particularly rhythmic way of playing - always a favourite for me - turned out to be the perfect foil for my style of bass playing, and the whole project, put together in my attic and recorded in a tiny basement studio in Cardiff, was immensely enjoyable from start to finish. Perhaps one day it'll surface again, who knows...!

Cheers, PG.

(Paul Gray) August 2021.

About The Author

Alan Lee Shaw like so many would be musicians seduced by the intoxicating halcyon days of UK/USA 60s/70s Rock music gave up a promising career in Graphic Design at Art School in Cambridge England with a plan to embark on some kind of career in music and escape the UKs grey old depressed down at heel strike ridden early 1970's only to arrive head-long into the eye of London's 1976 Punk Rock Maelstrom.

Alan, finding his forte and creative voice in the embryonic howl of 1976/77 old school Punk went on to continue as a songwriter/singer/guitarist forming bands and having the privilege of working with many of his musical heroes and contemporaries recording many of the thrills, spills, near misses and simply the bizarre throughout his long and chequered career in this his book of memoirs Damned if you Do (From Punk to Eternity. Vol 1).

Introduction

As mid-seventies band names went, The Maniacs was pretty damned uncompromising. It was an age when the pub rock scene… as in, all the bands that made their living playing rock in pubs… was largely ruled either by Thingy and the Thingies, be they Sunsets, Rumours, Hot Rods or High Roads; by supercharged deluxe delights; or words that simply sounded good together. By comparison, the Maniacs felt like an unequivocal statement of intent. The only question was, how maniacal were they?

You needed to leave the house to find out. The name was all over the gig guides of the era, but press coverage was sparse and they’d made no records. And we’re talking the summer of ’75 here, so there was no punk rock grapevine to whisper the word, because punk rock itself didn’t exist beyond the handful of writers who were calling the likes of Springsteen and Nils Lofgren punks.

Nope, you had to put on your jeans and T-shirt, a pair of plimsoles and grab 50p, and off you went to the Bull and Bush, the Hound and Hedgehog, the Queen’s Head and Artichoke, buy a pint of Watneys or Fuller or whatever, and wait.

First impressions weren’t promising. They were probably a folk band. A folk duo, in fact. You saw the pair of them moving around the stage before the show began and… okay, there was a bit of the David Johansons about the blonde one, and a hint of Chris Speddings about the dark one, and they wore leather jackets. But again, there was only two of them. How maniacal could they be?

Almost fifty years of memory loss have erased most of what I remember about that night. But one remembrance remains. Actually, two. First, they were the first band I’d seen outside David Bowie who performed a Velvet Underground cover on stage. And second, they didn’t sound like David Bowie. Or folk rock or pub rock or even Nils Lofgren. Oh, and considering there were only the two of them, they made a helluva lot of noise. They sounded like the future.

Hindsight credits a lot of bands with the invention of what we would, eventually, call punk, and that’s without considering the Sex Pistols, who had just started gigging around this same time. Graham Parker’s angry soul, Dr Feelgood’s molten R&B, Eddie and the Hot Rods’ speed-racked beat, and more or less anything that Sean Tyla did.

The Maniacs, however, were in a class of their own. The blonde one… his name was Alan, I discovered later… thrashed his guitar and Lou Reeded his vocals. The dark one, Rod, beat his drums like a boxer, and without a single other musician or instrument on stage, they spat out more excitement than a dozen bands three times their size. In fact, you found yourself wondering why other groups even bothered with keyboards and basses and saxophones and stuff. Not if you could have, and exude, this much fun with just a guitar and a drum kit. A not-very-big one, either.

Oh, and in answer to the questions that hangs suspended in mid-air? Yes. They looked, sounded and behaved like Maniacs.

That was then… this is a couple of years later. The Marquee. The Pink Fairies, or a single Pink Fairy, drummer Twink with his new band and a single on the way. The Rings took the stage and there they were again, the blonde with a touch of Johansons about him, his mate with the shape of a Spedding. They were still maniacs, too, and when the Rings didn’t last, the Maniacs were back, only now there were three and punk rock was exploding, and they had a single out, too.

Another year… Alan was a Physical, in the studio with Paul Cook and recording my personal EP Track of the Year, Pain In Love, and Rod was an Advert, of whom too many grand things cannot be said. And over and over in the years that followed, occasionally together but more often apart, they appeared and reappeared across the spectrum. The Severed Dwarfs, the Lone Sharks, Brian James’ Brains who then became the Hellions…

When Alan rocked up in the Damned in the early 1990s, it really did feel as though a wheel had turned full circle. They’d been looking for a maniac for a while. Now they had one.

Now the maniac has written his story, about all the above and more, fleshing out the memories that we’ve been carrying around for the past fifty years, and flicking out others that are just as emotive. Opening for Hawkwind on the Space Ritual tour, signing with Ken Pitt - the man who discovered David Bowie. Writing with Kirsty MacColl, producing the Psychotic Tanks, doing this and doing that, and never letting go of the motivation that set him rolling in the first place. Which is perhaps the greatest achievement of all.

The music industry isn’t the most trustworthy of employers, and this week’s 5 star review is next week’s kitty litter liner. Maintaining even a modicum of your original teenaged enthusiasm probably takes more effort than conducting an entire career. Distractions distract, dreams disintegrate, the highest hopes become the lowest expectations. It’s the easiest thing in the world to forget what you went into it for, or what you hoped to prove or achieve.

But once a maniac, always a maniac, and reading Alan’s words in 2020-whatever really isn’t that different to listening to them in 1970-something. He still has a touch of the Johansons about him, he still looks good in blonde and leather, he still makes a helluva lot of noise.

I’ve known Alan for more than two-thirds of my life, and of all the books I could have written in that time but didn’t, this one was always near the top of my to-do list. Now I’m glad I never did it, because Alan writes his story like he writes his songs, and his songs are deathless. From Chelsea 77 to A Boy Like That, from Be Like Me to Not of this Earth, an iPod playlist without an album’s worth of Shaw songs is no kind of playlist at all. And a bookshelf without ‘Damned if you do’ isn’t a bookshelf.

Back in 1977, Alan wrote song called Ain’t No Legend. But he is. Same year, he wrote I Ain’t Gonna be History. But he made it, regardless. And, if you head on over to YouTube, you can hear the Maniacs play the Velvets, and it still feels like the future. Read on….

Dave Thompson

Delaware, September 2021

Dark Satanic Mills

Born in the shadow of Bradford’s huge imposing Lister’s textile mill in the 1950’s, I was to spend my early years up to five years old savouring the joys of living at the bottom of a gas lit cobbled street called Woodbury Rd, where the wood and the berries had long been covered over with two-up two-down dwellings with no hot running water and just an outside lavatory. These were houses originally built for the cotton mill workers of the burgeoning and unstoppable industrial revolution of the 19th century that was changing the face and fortunes of the western world at the time.

Fortunately, my time in this dark and cold place, where coal and pretty much everything else was delivered by horse and cart accompanied by the clip-clop of the old dray horse and the rattle of iron clad wheels on cobble stone streets, a design unchanged since Roman times, was thankfully brief as my father had enlisted back into the Royal Air Force. The RAF was the force he had joined in the Second World War

We were now a ‘forces’ family with all the bonuses that came with it, decent living quarters and the possibility of an exotic posting in some far-flung military outpost in the British Commonwealth. This was the reason that we were to find ourselves on a 4 hour flight to Cyprus, a beautiful island in the Middle Eastern end of the Mediterranean, below Greece and Turkey. Arriving in Cyprus just after the end of troubles with EOKA, a Greek Cypriot nationalist guerrilla organisation that fought a campaign for the end of British rule, I was transported into the world of Gerald Durrell's book ‘My family And Other Animals’, an existence a far cry from grey, old cold and damp post-war Britain. The endless shrub-land around our villa provided hours of pleasurable exploring, looking for lizards and non-poisonous snakes. Blessed with miles of empty beaches, I'd go with my parents on weekend afternoons to snorkel in the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean off the coast of Akrotiri, not far from our home in Limassol.

Coming from the bleak old 1960's Britain, with its endless cold and rain was a revelation, something which I took to with both hands and that was to affect my life forever. It's hard to convey and compare in a world of today's student gap year and readily available cheap round the world travel just how privileged we were, for it's true in no other circumstances would I have gone to live abroad at such a time.

Although pop music back then consisted of odd snatches of the Shadows from a scratchy old forces radio station, Cypriot TV and radio were still very much in the embryonic stages at the time and hardly worth perusing although I had learned to communicate in Greek from playing with our landlord's two sons who were of a similar age. Slight  snippets of news did filter through of the fledgling Liverpool Mersey sound and the Beatles in particular, but to be honest although I was drawn to the sounds of pop music it wasn't until we were posted back to the UK in the mid-1960’s that my taste for popular music began to take off.

Back in the UK

With my father being posted back to England, and more specifically RAF Martlesham Heath, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, I began my second phase as a teenager. RAF Martlesham Heath in 1939, at the outbreak of World War 2, became the most northerly station of No. 11 Group RAF, Fighter Command. Squadrons of Bristol Blenheim bombers, Hawker Hurricanes, Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Typhoons operated from this airfield, and among the many pilots based there were such famous men as Robert Stanford Tuck, and Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, there as Commanding Officer of 242 Squadron. Ian Smith, the post-war Rhodesian prime minister, was at Martlesham for a time. Sadly, by the time we arrived, RAF Martlesham’s glory days were long gone and the winding down of the base had begun in earnest years ago and only the living quarters were in operation for forces families. But there was still much to do for an inquisitive schoolboy and his mates! Exploring the old giant aeroplane hangars that were still in operation part-time for WW2 vintage fighter plane hobbyists and the restoring of the odd Spitfire. The old shooting range and outhouses where bits and bobs of old WD stuff was left lying around was never-ending fun to explore. A great pastime was to drive an old non road worthy 1940's Austin 8 my mates and I had acquired somehow my mates and I would drive up and down the deserted runways hiding the old crock in the bushes when we ran out of petrol.

I was at Kesgrave high school in Ipswich, which was not a considerable way away on my racing bike. Living on an old deserted WW2 fighter command base, one might think it a lonely, somewhat creepy existence, but being a bit of a loner and having an interest in old things and history, I was very happy. I also was quickly becoming aware of this new pop phenomenon called the Mersey beat and the Beatles (let’s face it, who could avoid them back in the day). I had acquired one of the new-fangled Japanese transistor radios, the first design that were well-made and came with a little light weight black leather fitted case with one single wire earphone. Not unlike many of my generation, I would listen at night in bed to the latest beat records on Radio Luxembourg and the embryonic Pirate Radio station Radio Caroline, both with a terrible intermittent signal and an awful tinny sound, unthinkable today but fabulously groovy and the only way to hear the latest pop music back then. There was no Radio 1 until 1967. I wouldn't say I was totally hooked on pop that comes later in the next chapter. Although really not quite old enough to appreciate them, the Beatles were clearly in the early to the mid-1960’s and indeed on to the end of that decade the band that ruled supreme in pop's firmament turning out masterpiece singles and LP’s with seemly effortless abandonment. I seem to remember Rubber Soul and Revolver resonating with me and my school chums and the girls, oh yes girls. One’s sartorial appearance had to be considered when in the presence of the opposite sex. My dress code was a mish-mash of Beatles/ mod. I remember having a brown corduroy Beatle jacket and grey moleskin mod shoes. Then, just as 1966 was in full swinging sixties mode, we were uprooted like so many forces families and my father was posted to Germany and off we went to set up sticks in BFPO 40 Monchengladbach.

Germany Calling

Much as I would  like to have referenced something far more cooler, like say LA's finest, Love’s single 7+7 Is from their De Capo album or something from the deep dark bowels of the Doors cannon or just about anything else from the mind blowing epoch making music of 1966, it had to be Chris Britton's tinnitus inducing, mind numbing Neanderthal major guitar chords and the Andover whine of lead singer  Reg Presley from the Troggs pop hit Wild Thing, the sound of which emanating from a tiny transistor radio speaker ripped through the brain down the spine to the loins of a pre-pubescent school boy in the music room lunch break of Queens School Rhinedarlen, West Germany.

Yes, I was a forces brat. Dad was in the RAF and I was at a forces school some way from where 1960’s rock history was being forged back home in good old Blighty. I had of course heard the early Beatles’ and Stones’ world changing records but there was something about the low-slung power chords and brutal sexy power that would eventually set my sails starboard on to punk and eternity.

I guess we all have a life affirming song (we are at pains to admit) that hit us like a bolt out of the blue, well this was mine as I swaggered between the school desks in the music room class of 1966. I had mischievously forged the signature of music teacher Mr Wainwright on a music room lunch time pass in order to get out of the way of playground bullies and general dweebs. As I couldn’t read music and barely claw anything but the odd guitar chord together. I was pretty much there under false pretenses, still when needs must, etc. Having at this point found a fellow school friend and as it was turned out a like-minded partner in my future crimes to music, his name being Rod Latter.

Rod was a year older and in the year above me, his father was the area manager for the NAAFI, a civilian of officer status. Rod was somewhat of a laconic louche figure, a hardened stalwart of many an overseas tour as far afield as Hong Kong and Singapore, where he got his first taste for alcohol, Tiger beer, drums and drainpipe jeans at 12 years old. Rod a talented pianist (grade 8) lived down the road from me in the somewhat more salubrious confines of the officers’ quarters which, as most German houses, had rather large cellars! A place which we were to commandeer as our rehearsal room.

1966 was a momentous time in a momentous decade of spectacular change in all aspects of society but as a gauche young schoolboy bystander, I was in retrospect, accepting of this scenario as it played out before my very eyes, never to be repeated in such a concentrated creative way arguable since. Being a creative type with no aspirations for the sciences or academia, I was drawn to the arts. I loved art. Pop art was a fave which was the happening movement at that time, influencing mod fashion and music. Rod and I, having found a bond in music, hitched our wagon onto all the sounds of the day and like many aspiring pop musicians our heads were full of pop dreams.

Rod was lucky enough to have caring musical and supportive parents who had bought him a drum kit and amplifier which were conveniently set up in the aforementioned cellar. Dark and dank, yet well organised like one would expect post-war German cellars to be, we nevertheless attempted to bash and crash about honing our chops. I specifically remember murdering Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man, mainly because the amp had an inbuilt vibrato pedal which worked well when copying Donovan’s vocal style on the record, yes, we had a mic as well! This amateur flaying around at our cellar rehearsal room continued as long as we could stand the coal dust and Rod’s folks and neighbours could stand the racket.

School was a bit of a blur of studying for GCSE's and dodging corporal punishment and in my time at school I had the lot. The ruler, the slipper, the slap around the head and of course the cane. Waiting outside Mr Lushman's, the headmaster’s, office for six of the best!