ANTI-SOCIAL

Birmingham

Rob Fern aka Bob Allcock & Cosmic Rob	Gabrielle Fern     aka Gabby Fern &     Lucy Nation	John Harris aka Johnny Harrison

Paul Cooper on 31st December 1977

Rob Fern	John Harris	Justin Broadrick	Gabby Fern

Afternoon Edition		Evening Edition
The above article appeared in two editions of the Birmingham "Evening Mail" on Thursday 2nd November 1978.

The above snippet appeared in the local Birmingham newspaper in 2009

For the VERY first time we can reveal the whole story behind "Anti-Social"

(The below story was written for the magazine "Record Collector")

Suicide Pact, Peel Approved Punks Discovered

For years it had been one of the unsolved mysteries in punk rock collectors circles. When Anti-Social’s 1977 single ‘Traffic Lights’ c/w ‘Teacher, Teacher’, which regularly commands more than £1,000 at auction, showed up in John Peel’s famed ‘singles box’ of treasured vinyl at number seven, the sound of the uninitiated gasping ‘who?’ was almost audible.

Details were sketchy and mired in minor league infamy. They called themselves ‘the world’s most violent rock group’. Their single earned a review in the NME from Paul Morley ("Archaic rock song sneered with incongruous, but violently necessary contempt"). Nothing else emerged until November 1978, when they returned to the pages of the NME. In an article by Sue E Sidebottom, they proclaimed their intention to hand over £15,000 to anyone who would volunteer to be beheaded live on stage via an automatic guillotine. The story was also picked up in the Birmingham Evening Mail, where Councillor Ted Shepherd, of the Leisure Services Committee, pointed out the pitfalls of this endeavour, as leaders of leisure service committees are wont to do.

And then, nothing, as perhaps befitted such a dastardly and distasteful media scam. In the intervening years, however, the record, which never had a picture sleeve, topped many wants lists, and was bootlegged (somewhat crudely – the facsimile mistakenly says 1978 and the label credits are wrong). Many collectors went to extraordinary efforts to track the guilty parties down. Dizzy Holmes of Detour Records, considered a dedicated sort even in the driven underworld of the punk vinyl obsessive, sent out over 60 letters to everyone in the UK with the name Bob Allcock, the credited songwriter. Nothing. Various leads turned out to be red herrings. Dizzy: "We found out the name of the manager. We sent letters to his old address and once again we got no reply. So we telephoned everyone who lived in the same street as him and were told that he died in a car crash. Yet another dead-end. My heart then said let it go but my determination wouldn't. So I telephoned back one of his old neighbours, who was happy to talk to us, and told us a few funny stories about this manager. Then he told us that the dead manager’s sister worked in a building society. So we telephoned every building society in the area only to find out to our horror that she had died a few months earlier. Something was telling us to give up! Not be outdone by this latest setback, we then wrote a letter to the manager of this building society so that they could pass my letter onto the grieving husband. After about two weeks of doing this a phone call came out of the blue. It was the dead manager’s, dead sister’s husband. We’d finally made a breakthrough. We had good chat with this gentleman and he told us that when his wife's brother died in the car crash, it was up to him and his then wife to clear out the house where he lived. To my horror, he confirmed that they chucked out boxes full of Anti-Social records."

That was where the story seemed to end. But now, following another crop-dusting mail-out by Dizzy, the full sordid story can be told.

In 1974 bass player Matthew Smith, a contemporary of Roger Taylor of Duran Duran, was a member of TBM  (Temporary Bench Mark - TBM was supposed to be the first mark a builder puts down when building a house). His band mates included Jon Buxton (guitar, vocals), who later formed Misspent Youth,  Hob on Keyboards, Dave Brooks on Guitar & Vocals and a drummer that no-one can remember. While Smith, then only 18, left and moved on to Maniac.

 Maniac featured older musicians Robert Fern (aka Bob Allcock; vocals/guitar) and drummer Johnny Harrison (real name John Harris). Harrison was, according to Fern, "a bit of a nutter", and on those myriad occasions when the pair fell out, he was often replaced at short notice by Pete Lynch, who crops up in the story at various points. Fern, for his part, was a classmate of Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler at Holte Grammar School in Aston. He had also played in Daisy May before putting together Maniac, who supported Iron Maiden several times.

Fern already had gigs lined up for the band, so Smith was thrown in at the deep end, without any rehearsals. This led to a series of small pub gigs around the Kingshurst area of Birmingham. The set comprised classic Beatles, Stones and Who covers, which brought a useful income and musical apprenticeship. Fern even managed to pull off a note-perfect ‘Voodoo Chile’ – played as if in a coma - when challenged to do so. Soon, however, audience requests changed, and they were increasingly asked for Pistols, Stranglers, Clash and Damned material by the tail-end of 1976. It was now that, at Fern’s behest, they changed name to Anti-Social.

In an attempt to escape the pub circuit, they sought support slots to touring bands in the Midlands. These included an appearance at Birmingham’s legendary punk venue Barbarella’s, where they made something of an impression. Halfway through their set, Fern ripped a hole in the paper boiler suit that comprised his stage costume, and squatted down on stage. After a few moments of melodramatic grunting, what appeared to be a fully formed stool was evident, which he smeared over his chest then propelled into the audience. The offending item was, actually, a half eaten burger covered in brown sauce that he’d been enjoying prior to performance. One young female was so taken with this spectacle that, oblivious to the provenance of the projectile, she took her clothes off and danced around the stage whilst smearing the retrieved article into her chest. We knew how to amuse ourselves in those days folks.

Other live moments of note included a set performed before the local Hell’s Angels chapter at a village hall in Banbury. They got out alive by opening their set with ‘Stairway To Heaven’, while unbeknownst to them, outside in the car park, fixer and money man Bob Green was tackling three of the bikers single-handed. As Fern points out, they never knew whether Green was "a two-bit gangster or a guy with a lot of contacts!" Other shows took place at the Holy City Zoo and Rebecca’s, as well as at Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton and Blackpool, where Fern, resplendent in see-through body stocking, managed to get himself locked in the toilet before the performance. Although Anti-Social were a ‘real’ band, Smith concedes that much of the attraction centred round Fern: "Rob was such an amazing guy. He was also an actor and a performer. He could whip a crowd up, and I wasn’t sure at times whether he was for real or performing. It made for a great stage show."

With a few more support slots under their belt they elected to record their debut single, at "ZELLA RECORDING STUDIOS", Edgbaston, Birmingham. The constant aggro had long since stopped being fun for Matt Smith (whose wife Carolyn Spence, incidentally, worked for Sounds) though, with the result that Paul Cooper was recruited to record ‘Traffic Lights’. The b-side had been cut a few months earlier when Smith was still a member. Cooper was subsequently replaced by Lucy Nation (aka Gabrielle Fern), the singer’s wife.

At a later show in Shard End, Fern performed a fake suicide using a theatrical knife that spurted blood. He hadn’t told the rest of the band, who, conscious of his problems with depression, though it was for real. Fern was suffering bouts of highs and lows – mostly lows, tempered, or accelerated, by drug use. The original idea was to stage his own suicide on stage, in which he would be disembowelled by Nation. They did indeed ‘fake’ this on several occasions, spraying the audience with animal entrails. However, repeat bookings were rare as club managers and promoters, with some justification, complained about the awful smell. This prompted Bob Green to offer £15,000 for any volunteer who was up for following through on the ‘suicide’ premise. The Department Of Public Prosecutions was less than amused and the band was immediately arrested. All of which was enough to see off Lucy Nation, who was replaced by a returning Paul Cooper, who remained until their final gig.

The curse of Anti-Social ran deep – but hopefully doesn’t permeate the lives of investigative journalists. Manager cum dogsbody Les Hemmings had indeed died in a car crash in the 70s – perhaps appropriately enough while delivering copies of the single to various shops. Their equipment and subsequent studio recordings were stolen, leaving behind only a tape of their planned second single, a version of Rolf Harris’s ‘Sunarise’ (the mind boggles). Their final gig came at the Kingshurst Labour Club, which ended with Harris playing a drum solo on an old man’s head, an offence for which he was later arrested and charged. He phoned Rob Fern the next day to enquire as to whether he was still in the band. To which Fern replied, "there is no band".

Fern, who later played in The Great Outdoors, left for Wales to pursue a more restorative and peaceful lifestyle, but has since formed a band with his daughter ‘Pik-C’, entitled Forgotten Flowers. He has plans for reforming the band as Anti-Social – The Next Generation. Let’s hope he gets nowhere near the burger stand this time around. Matthew Smith subsequently joined The Playthings, who would mutate into Swansway and Scarlet Fantastic, albeit without his involvement. Lucy Nation still lives in Birmingham, and Johnny Harris has disappeared off the radar. Incidentally, Lucy’s son, and Rob Fern’s step-son, Justin Broadrick, was a founder member of Napalm Death and appeared on the band’s debut album before joining Peel favourites Head Of David (one wonders if the great man ever knew the connection?) as drummer and more recently Godflesh, Jesu and Final.

 

 

'Rob Fern' as he

is today

Alex Ogg and Dizzy Holmes 2007

 2007