Saints and Sinners / Dead Vandals

Catalogue Number - NS 22

Label - Chiswick Records

Year Of Release - 1977

Quantity Press - 15000

Unknown who is who at this stage but rumour has it that 'Pripton Weird' was 'Jim Kerr'.

The gene pool that produced Jim Kerr, aka the Laird of Ardchullaire, for better or for worse. But, as Dave Thompson once wrote for British Punk Collector: “There are many people who, as they spin New Gold Dream further into soporific oblivion, still doubt whether a band so elegant as the Minds eventually became, could ever have been spawned by something so clattering, so raucous, so downright AWFUL as the Self-Abusers.”

 In February 1977 Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill were drinking in Glasgow’s Doune Castle when a local punk, Alan Cairnduff, approached them and asked them if they’d heard of his band – Johnny & The Self-Abusers, before admitting he’d made it up. In the event, he responded that he did actually want to form such a band. He had already convinced the landlord to let them play there. He was going to the singer. Only he wasn’t. He just drifted away [in various alternative versions of this story it is Milarky that initiates the formation of the band]. The next day Kerr and Burchill wheeled an amplifier down to John Milarky’s house whose occupier had hung a microphone from the ceiling. He regaled them with a version of his first composition, ‘Pablo Picasso’. They decided to book the Doune Castle for no other reason than to make absolutely sure they maintained their impetus. Burchill later stated that “We decided, if we were going to do anything, we should do it, sort of, full-heartedly.” The line-up was fleshed out with the addition of McGee and Donald, who’d been involved in Kerr and Burchill’s school band.

 Given that it was rare to find a venue willing to put a punk show on, when they did turn up to play at the Doune Castle, armed with one original song and a week’s rehearsal, they found a queue down the block. They managed to pull the event off reasonably well, with their three-guitar line-up and hurriedly enlisted female dancers masking some of the deficiencies in their musicianship. "Charlie and I only had to do it once to realise that this was what we wanted,” Kerr later recalled. “It was all lots of fun. Charlie had a violin, I played the few chords Charlie taught me on the keyboards and we also had a few girls who had made themselves up like Indians out for war, at our request. There was a touch of glamour there. Even then it wasn't punk. No spitting or anything, more like kitsch.”

 Two weeks later they played support to Generation X in Edinburgh and then took up a residency at the Mars Bar. Kerr set about mouthing his intention to channel “the blackness and negativity” of the period. But everyone seemed to agree that the Self Abusers were shite. They kept practising and writing, but a schism quickly opened up. Milarky’s songs were weeded out (in particular, his ‘Toss Yourself Off’ anthem was deemed a no-no) with Kerr and Burchill taking on more of the song writing.

 They reached the attention of Chiswick Records after journalist and former Zoom Records’ press officer Brian Hogg sent down a demo tape, recorded after Milarky’s parents fronted up some money. Chiswick made a good number of pre-sales on the strength of their name alone. The band then thought twice and asked to change the name – only for Ted Carroll to tell them it was too late, it had gone to the printers. “This was maybe not completely accurate,” Roger Armstrong told Punk77.com, “but we were determined not to blow the good pre-sales.” Yet the intended name change was symptomatic of problems within the group.

 The group immediately split amidst growing tensions which escalated when McGee threw a Wellington boot through Milarky’s front window. Only the promise of the upcoming single release on Chiswick held them together. They even tried to move into a flat together in October, but that only cemented existing divisions and jealousies.

 So on the very day that their debut single was issued, they broke up. Which may have made a round of dreadful reviews from the inkies easier to take, not least the NME’s assertion that: “…the song is a drab parade of new wave that jerks off aimlessly into the void.” Goodness knows what the reviewer would have made of Simple Minds – though Kerr did mail a tape of their first demos to Chiswick. Milarky subsequently formed the less successful, but far more interesting, Cuban Heels. McGee, in addition to playing on five Simple Minds albums between 1979 and 1981, worked with Glasgow’s Endgames, Germany’s Propaganda, Cyndi Lauper and Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander’s solo work.

 “When the Self Abusers split,” Armstrong recalled to Spiral Scratch, “we did get the demos of the two bands they split up into, Simple Minds and Cuban Heels. At the time I quite liked the Simple Minds demos, they sounded a bit like the Sweet, oddly enough. I remember discussing it with Ted and saying, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty good stuff, maybe we should look at them, it’s a shame they’ve got such a dreadful name’. It was like, ‘Oh, they’ll never get anywhere with a name like Simple Minds.’”

 Rumour has it that there is a demo tape in existence that features the band’s first ‘Demos’. It includes "18-18", "Tonight", "Little Bitch", "Pablo Picasso", "Subway Sex", "Lies", "Wasteland", "Act Of Love", "European Son", "Cocteau Twins", "Chelsea Girl", "Did You Ever?" and "Pleasantly Disturbed. Sadly", Toss Yourself Off doesn’t seem to have survived!

Can anyone verify this tape exists?

Two people have emailed in confirming that these tracks do exist apart from "Toss Yourself Off".

 

 

Email #2 reads... Yes, I have them and here they are...
And all the tracks in question were released on the below CD for a very short time before it was deleted as fast as it appeared. (Cat # - Mindmood SMVP-101-CD) Thanks to Simon Cornwell

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to Alex Ogg for the above review which has been taken from his book

"No More Heroes".

The above snippet was taken from the Glasgow Punk fanzine

'Trash 77' #2 from 1977.

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