Mike Kennedy (aka Scrot Rot) adds...
My name is Mike Kennedy. I have been reading your article about the Tax Exiles. I’d just like to point out a couple of omissions from your article. I am the original guitar player with The Tax Exiles and I am the “Scrot Rot” pictured in the photos from the article from the Pontypridd Observer. Wayne Jones (pictured in the photo from Chapter Theatre) was a later addition to the band. He joined as a second guitarist not long before we played at the Palace, Mountain Ash – mentioned in your reprint of the South Wales Echo article – and this was his first gig with us. Actually the thing that sparked off the “punch-up” mentioned in the Echo article was the rather dim-witted Wayne chucking his guitar into the audience in response to the level of audience “gobbing”. We needed a police escort to get safely out of the place without being lynched. After this incident, I left the band because I was not prepared to gig with a fucking psycho in the band….
A few years after this, I ran into John Evans again and at his request I played bass on the “John Marlon” single “Sister Soul” and the b-side “Turn the Lights Out”. This was recorded in an old chapel in Cardiff that BBC Wales used as a recording studio. I think it was a good record and very different from a lot of the music around at the time. I remember that the piano player had a nice jazzy feel and John did his best Lou Reed imitation on the vocals. Nice site…
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Email Received on Monday 17th September 2007 |
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Hi Dizzy, Thanks for updating that. I have another article from the Ponty Observer post Tax Exiles. I’ll get around to scanning it and send it on to you at some point. I’m not sure when the Echo article was written, perhaps a visit to Cardiff library archives might solve that one! However, I would have been around the back-end of 77 or sometime during 78, so your info is about as accurate as it gets. I do have a cassette tape of the John Marlon recording, but it’s pretty poor quality as it was just a home-recorded 2nd generation tape that John gave me – I never received a copy of the single – never got paid for the session either! No recordings of the early Tax Exiles – we didn’t have the equipment. The dingy room mentioned in the Observer article was Kevin (Spider) the bass player’s mum’s spare room where we used to rehearse until the neighbours got pissed off. It was all rather basic & none of us had any money. Actually John probably did – he was a trained hairdresser before all this kicked off and was most interested in the look & image side of it, certainly at first. I’m still playing semi-pro in South Wales and also do a bit of electronic music. I’ve put some of the things I’ve been involved with up on Myspace if you’re interested: www.myspace.com/usofstatues http://www.myspace.com/theregoesmachoman I’m also involved in this: http://www.myspace.com/germcorporation and this: www.germcorp.co.uk amongst other things. I’ve just finished a project with TV comedy writer Boyd Clack where I helped arrange, mixed, mastered and played bass on Boyd’s songs. It should be released soon. I was sorry to leave the Tax Exiles, I used to write the original tunes to John’s words, but in my view getting Wayne on board was not a good move – although he was a half-tidy guitar player, in a sort of heavy metal style! Ran into Billy our manager a few weeks ago at a gig I was doing with “The Mighty Handful” at the Claude in Cardiff. Billy really had 7 shades of shit beaten out of him at the Mountain Ash gig, and it was either his own van or a van he had rented that was completely trashed during the riot. Mighty Handful are still doing Velvet Underground and all that stuff, so not a lot changes…. Cheers, Mike |
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