EX Manger
Steve Budd Reminisces
In 1979 I was just twenty years old, living in a south London suburb and earning a – sort of – living as the ‘token hippy’ roadie for several rock and punk bands of the time, like Motorhead, X Ray Spex, Generation X and others, who finally inspired me to cut my hair short…
I was spending most of my days driving around London picking up equipment and band members and ferrying them to gigs at scuzzy pubs such as The Clarendon, The Hope & Anchor, The Vortex, 100 Club, Red Cow and occasionally... even The Marquee.
Every night of the week I could be found in these beer-smelling, sticky carpeted vomitoria humping, loading-in and setting up battered equipment and trying to coax it into life (“testing-testing-one-two-smegmaaaaaaa”). I’d stand at the side of the stage keeping look-out for things going wrong, broken guitar strings that type of thing, so that I could make myself look important by running on stage and fixing the problem - quickly.
Often I was at the back of the room at the mixing console watching how the live sound was mixed by the ‘front-of-house’ engineer, usually my mate Jon Ivory. Jon owned his own PA system which could be hired for the princely sum of £50 per night inclusive of my - and his – services, but I was happy to work for peanuts as, seeing bands play and being a ‘part of the process’ was all I could possibly want from life…or so I thought…
At the time geniuses like Geoff Travis at Rough Trade Records and Daniel Miller at Mute had set up small boutique record labels run from their bedrooms, or in Geoff’s case his wonderful record shop off Portobello Road. Inspired by these mavericks and with a few hundred pounds I had managed to scrimp together from being ‘on the road’ and supplemented by other nefarious activities ..(please don’t about ‘roadies privileges’), I had set out to force the nation to subscribe to my musical tastes by starting ‘Tortch Records’ operating from my bedroom. The label had no musical ethos, other than to release records I liked and it’s main purpose was for me to have a method of enticing bands to work with me as their manager.
One Friday in June Jon asked me to come work with him at Fulham’s Greyhound pub for a band who had hired his rig that night at the last minute. ‘Oh oh..Mods’ I thought, but straight away at the sound check I knew there was something special about these guys.
Dressed in regulation Sta-prest trousers, Ben Sherman shirts with loafers and Rickenbacker guitars (well two of them anyway) singer John Burke was affable, pally and charismatic with a slightly nasally but expressive, if untrained, voice. Steve Martinez, the drummer was instantly friendly and at ease. Martin ‘Wils’ Wilson on bass was the wise-cracker and the least at ease, probably because he was really still learning the difficult bass player role. Lastly Tony, John’s younger, but taller brother, the guitarist – and as I learned later, the songwriter and de-facto leader – was definitely in control and expressed a visible authority over the band.
With a ragged sound at odds with their dress sense, ‘Three Bands Tonite’ the last song they played at that soundcheck was to my ears, the definitive anthem for the then burgeoning ‘New Mod’ scene. Inspired by the emergence of The Jam just two years before, who created an alternative creative focus for those punks and ex-suedeheads who yearned for more style than their bin-liner wearing cousins, this scene was sprouting new bands across the capital such as the Merton Parkas, Squire and of course, The Teenbeats and the Sta-prest, about whom that anthem was written as a ‘throwing down of the gauntlet’ type challenge…(I’m sure you know the story otherwise you probably wouldn’t have bought this album.
The Directions were West London’s definitive offering and - as far as I was concerned, lead the others in style and attitude by some considerable distance. That night the 300 or so crowd went wild and with that song the band proved to me why they were worth me putting my hard earned cash on the line for these Shepherds Bush idols.
Soon after, we recorded ‘Three Bands Tonite’ along with two other songs (for a total of £129.50 if I remember rightly…) and it was duly released as a single in the autumn with just 2000 copies being pressed and being sold primarily through Geoff’s Rough Trade shop.
The single helped establish the band as a constantly performing live act. Throughout the next two years I managed them, hoping to secure a ‘proper’ record deal for them, basically because I was too skint to release them myself. We recorded many more demos and the band improved consistently as time went on and also added a further member in keyboard player Mick Simmons who added a flourish to their sound which can be heard here on the later recorded work.
The passion was present in the band, but they were too associated with that scene to break out into a wider audience. Tony and I took stock and called a halt to the band in late 1982 as John also could no longer afford to continue. The others continued to work together and as luck would have it, Paul Weller, the Modfather himself, introduced us to a Watford based supermarket checkout girl with a unique emotive voice Julie Hadwen.
We discussed adding a brass section, (I was obsessed by the sound that early Chicago managed to create on their seminal ‘Chicago Transit Authority’ album from 1969 on tracks like their cover of ‘I’m a Man’ by Spencer Davis Group and ‘Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?’) and one was duly found. As was a new name - The Big Sound Authority, a record deal with MCA and finally, in the cold January of 1985… a Top 20 hit single ‘This House Is Where Your Love Stands’ with the emotive ‘This House (Is Where Your Love Stands)’. Yes I remember that Top Of The Pops performance to this day….
All the groundwork for that short lived success can be heard here in it’s full glory, including another hidden gem and perhaps the band’s best loved song ‘Weekend Dancers’. Enjoy !
Stephen Budd - May 2005
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