dancing to the Dead Kennedys

In the early sixties, an ageing artist called Samuel Thompson was a regular at the Daffodil Lion, where he would often paint as he supped his pint. At the time, the freehouse was still known simply as the Lion – an old coaching inn, slowly decaying down a lane that no longer led anywhere. One evening (to settle his tab) Samuel offered to create the landlord a new sign – a lion with a mane of daffodils, all jagged yellows and oranges, as if seen through frosted glass.

Soon afterwards, Samuel was asked to create a psychedelic poster for a band called the Lemonade Lizards. The group never amounted to much, but the poster became a big hit with art students. Suddenly, Samuel was famous. Aspiring pop artists would trek miles to meet their hero as he painted in the pub. His work began to attract the attention of London galleries. And, inevitably, one morning the landlord woke to find the hand-painted sign was gone.

A replica, produced by one of his protégées, was hung in its place. But, before long, this sign was also stolen. And so started a long cycle of theft and replacement that continues to this day. After the third or fourth theft, the landlord grumbled that he wished he could invent a sign that no one could possibly make off with. One young artist suggested he should plant a floral lion on the hillside above the pub.

The landlord liked the idea, and drinkers were asked to donate a bulb every time they bought a pint. The Westing Chronicle somehow got wind of the scheme, and ran a short article, which was spotted by a young journalist at the Times. He added a paragraph on the Daffodil Lion to an article he was writing on the demise of the British coaching inn. For a brief spell, the pub went daffodil doollaly. Sackloads of bulbs were delivered by post and by hand. And that autumn a huge floral lion was duly planted up on the hill.

Over the years, the lion has grown and shrunk and changed shape and colour, but each year its arrival is eagerly awaited by local drinkers and walkers and farmers as a sign that Spring has truly begun.

Gazing up at the hillside in mid February, the first thing you see is a broad ring of yellow-petalled crocuses that form part of the mane. In the centre of the yellow ring (separated by an expanse of budding daffodil stems) is a small circle of purple crocuses that form the iris of the Lion’s eye. This is surrounded by a ring of white crocuses that form the rest of the eyeball.

From the road, the floral eye looks merely like an ornamental circle such as you might see planted in any municipal park. Then the daffodil shoots start to push up, creating a minty green shadow of stems, which slowly turn pale yellow as the buds appear like a million miniature ornamental lamps.

Each year, hundreds of rabbits, which live in the brambles that border the floral lion, emerge to gambol among the daffodil stems. And on some mornings it seems as if there is more browness of fur than greenness of bud to be seen in the upper reaches of the pasture.

However, such is the abundance of stems carpeting the hillside, a herd of cavorting elephants could not flatten them all. The daffodils always seem to survive the nibbling teeth and scratching paws, and within a week or so the hillside starts to explode in a riot of orange and yellows as vivid as Samuel’s first sign, until finally, towards the end of the month a swathe of scarlet tulips, which form the Lion’s tongue, emerge from its mouth to complete the image.

In the late sixties, the blooming of the Daffodil Lion became a major event for the local flower children. They would gather at the pub on the Spring Solstice, climb up the hill holding hands, then dance around the floral lion as if it were some pagan fertiltiy symbol.

It was all meaningless bullshit of course - the whole peace and love thing. But at least in the late sixties, for a while, some young people had some kind of vision, and (as Samuel Thompson put it) ‘attempted to kindle some flame of radical spirituality within themselves’.

Samuel visualised the inner journey of the flower children (in particular, the artists among them) as ‘a search for a literal sunflower, a burning bloom, fuelled by its own oxygen.’ But as the seventies progressed, that glowing flower was stamped out by the platform boot of Glam Rock; a glitter sprinkled kick in the head to hippydom from those who preferred their TVs colour, their tits big, their neighbours white and their weapons nuclear.

While the industrial bickering of the seventies escalated up and down between workfloor canteens and the management dining rooms, the grown-up hippies catalogued their Floyd collections, lit scented candles in the power cuts and were overly polite to Pakistani shop owners.

When Mike, the landlord of the Daffodil Lion, ventured to the cash and carry in Westing, he felt a greyness spreading out around him like some dour fog. It was everywhere. In the bland concrete blocks of modern municipal architecture, which rotted from the inside like infected fruit, girders seeping juices of blood-grey rust. In the putrid exhausts of the decaying British car industry. In the dusty fields, dry rivers and cracked reservoirs that endless summer of seventy six. In music and art and fashion and thought, nothing but fucking greyness, as if alternative culture, English eccentricity, the schizophrenic inventiveness of this mongrel race, had taken a sabbatical, collectively jumped off Beachy Head in a fit of lemming-like depression, and perished in the overfished, oil strewn murk of the North Sea.

Mike was quite refreshed when punk rock came along. Other landlords refused to serve pints to any moron with green hair, tartan bondage trousers and a ripped screen print of Adolph Hitler on their chest (let alone anyone who wore their shirt back to front). They said it would offend the other customers (particularly those who’d taken part in the Dresden bombing).

“The only reasons they have them safety pins in their noses is to stop their brains coming out when they sneeze,” the regulars at other pubs would joke.

“Those that have got brains to start with,” they’d say. “It all went wrong when they stopped National Service. They want to put these punk rockers in the army for a couple of weeks. Learn ‘em a bit of self-respect, a bit of discipline. Wouldn’t have no green hair then. I mean what kind of man sticks a nappy pin through ‘is face?”

However, Mike liked the young punks and welcomed them to the Daffodil Lion. In truth, they were no more or less anarchic than his or any previous generation had ever been. And he enjoyed the sense of suburban sedition which embodied that brief movement, a classless movement out of which came melodies and images to spark the sleeping poets of nowhere towns, towns like Westing with drab factories, non-league football teams and tired streets, towns where cinemas showed films that had been watched three months earlier in the cities, where wild youth had hitherto got tipsy on shandy in tea rooms, played fruit machines and table football (until they were old enough to fuck, work, drink and drive).

The image of punk depicted by (or, rather engineered through) the national media was of unrestrained, rebellious youth set upon wrecking our prescious oligarchy, rocking the very foundations upon which out great kingdom was founded. They swore on TV. Records were banned. Questions were asked in the House of Lords. And a couple of shrewd entrepreneurs made themselves a tidy pile.

But in those second-rate towns with their third-rate lifestyles, punk had a localised life of its own. It was a classless thing. You didn’t need money or education or power or talent or beauty or anything to be a punk in the backstreets of your small country town. You just had to participate, be a bit reckless, have a mild (or, maybe, not so mild) psychiatric problem, be genuinely fucked off with the predictability of jobs and TV and clothes and life, have a name like Verucca Bazooka or Herpes Scar, a blunt pair of scissors, acne and a twelve gallon tub of hair gel.

The punk thing that happened in Westing was a celebration of sorts, tribalised gatherings of the marginalised, an unofficial anti-social society for those in the upper and lower percentiles of normal distribution. Sure punk was hijacked, exploited like all movements, all trends, exploited like anything and everything to which can be tacked some intrinsic value. Hijacked and perverted and rendered ultimately useless by over-exposure and dilution and derivation.

But, for a few brief days in 1977, there was some mild confusion as to who were the exploiters and who were the exploited. Borders were blurred. The unfashionable was fashionable. The cool were uncool. The reviled were revered. Self-mutilation became beautification.

The punks would swagger into the Daffodil Lion, sure of their infallible uniquesness, the validity of their themes and means of self-expression, like the young men who’d watched Battleship Potemkin, who’d read Elliott, who’d admired Picasso, who’d taken notebooks to war and been blown to Kingdom Come, who’d played skiffle with glistening quiffs, who’d grown their hair long and taken acid, experimented with Super Eight cine cameras, looking at the world upside down, from different angles, in blurred close-up, who’d floated oil paint, sperm, blood and blancmange between rotating disks, those organic oozings of filtered light, a passive precursor to the brutaler, self-destructive ritual piercing of skin perhaps, but no more or less meaningful.

When the punks took the piss out of the Daffodil Lion’s decor, Mike just laughed. They were just kids. They swore too much. They couldn’t hold their drink. And they fucked about like teenage chimpanzees. But he still poured them pints and listened to their jokes and played their demo tapes on the stereo behind the bar. There was something rather masturbatory about it all, the rubber clothes, the angst-ridden lyrics, the clumsily strummed guitars - a sordid do-it-yourself, adolescent amatuerism.

But, after much badgering, he let a few bands play a few gigs in the bar midweek. Sometimes he worried about the floor boards as fifty kids pogoed to Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys. But other than that he looked forward to those fancy-dress free-for-alls of Tuesday and Thursday nights. There was a naievity and energy about those evenings. In a triumph of self-belief over low self-esteem, no one was too ashamed to have a go, to extend a scrawny middle finger to polite society, civilisation and the powers that be. And Mike was all for that.

In 1980, there were three punk bands playing in Westing and they all regularly frequented the Daffodil Lion. Originally there had been only one proper punk band in the area - the Rubber Johnnies. Having supported Stiff Little Fingers and Crass, they went on tour with the UK Subs, until the pressures of living in the back of a Bedford Van (in particular the drummer’s curry-fuelled farting and the base players incessant snoring) led to a punch up in a lay-by in Maidstone, shortly after which the Johnnies parted company (although they claimed it was because there were at least another three bands around at the same time performing regularly under that name).

It was the split in the Johnnies (if you will excuse the obvious pun) that spawned Westing’s big punk three. Paul the Johnnies’ drummer started a five piece - who over the next seventeen years were to change their name and appearance more often than the illusive Moriarty. Having futily embraced every trend from Gothic (Garden of Bone) to Heavy Rock (IronBone) to Metal (Iron Cross) to Christian Rock (Cross the Road) to New Wave Glam Rock (The Cheek Bones) to psychobilly (Bone Yard) through to rockabilly (The Bone Shakers) to Indie (Shaker) to Indie-Dance cross over (Shaker maker) - eventually the band in their final incarnation as funky world dance fusion combo (Sheik) did eventually go Gold in Norway and Finland and enter the top five in Japan, before Paul (by now totally bald and nearly forty) eventually gave up the ghost and became a thousand pound a night DJ.

How many of his adoring groupies, who cluster around him now in his trendy Paul Smith shirt and vintage Pumas, would realise that he once appeared on stage with spikey hair, tartan bondage trousers and a studded dog collar as the spotty, mad, bongo basher of the Jolly Rogers (bastard spawn of the Rubber Johnnies)?

Technically speaking, the Jolly Rogers were probably the most muscially able of the Johnnies’ offspring. But, from a visual point of view they could not compete with the base player’s band Belsen, who were repeatedly banned from the Longview Shopping Centre in the middle of Westing for unintentionally (and some times, it has to be said, intentionally) scaring little old ladies and small children (not to mention eating goldfish from the pond in the centre’s fantasy garden - an ever changing display of plastic shrubs and seasonal Disney style statuettes).

The individual members of Belsen were, in fact, harmless enough. However, it was not difficult to see why they startled people of a certain disposition. For a start, they all had barbed wire tattoos around their necks and had their facial features pierced with an assortment of rings and safety pins. As if that were not enough to set them apart from the masses, they all wore DM boots (24 holers) sprayed a selection of custom car colours, and had huge mohicans, which sprouted from their shaven heads like the plumes on Roman helmets.

Roddy the base player had a pink mohican. Griff (guitar) had a green one. And Tommo the drummer dyed his a fetching shade of lilac (although, to his face, you would not dare to call it anything other than violent purple).

The third band to emerge from the Johnnies was slightly more light hearted than the other two. The guitarist, Mental Martin, had always been in the band purely for a laugh, and had no pretentions to be a star or any desire to smash (or even mildly disturb) the system.

His band, the Love Buckets, didn’t write any of their own stuff. Instead, they scoured the annals of pop and rock history for the most unlikely songs to cover in a punk style - the more puerile the original, the more ridiculously loud and raucous their version (their fifty five second rendering of the Ronnette’s ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’, being particularly memorable). Although, arguably, the least musical of the three bands, they were without doubt the most entertaining.

While the three bands secretly had a grudging respect for each other’s interpretation of punk, there was still a lingering bitterness that tainted the rivalry between them. And so when it came to pass, one Thursday evening in the November of ‘79, that they were all scheduled to play on the same bill in the tiny bar of the Daffodil Lion, it was inevitable that something untoward would occur.

The trouble that flared up that blustery November evening could be blamed primarily upon a trio of incendiary factors. I don’t mean by this the members of Belsen (although they were intimately involved in the resulting fracas), but an unholy trinity of drumkits, gel and gob.

The issue of drumkit positioning is one that anyone involved in the performance of live rock music will be familiar with. It is a power issue akin to that of parking spaces in company car parks. Where there is a definite hierarchy the issue tends not to cause much of a problem. The name band, the one that tops the bill, gets paid the most money, and has the most aggressive management, gets the premier position centre stage - the Chairman’s parking bay, so to speak.

Their road crew gets to set up first, dominating the stage space with numerous cymbals and tom-toms, while the support band has to meekly work round them, setting up off-centre in whatever space is left (like a junior salesperson flattening the wing mirrors of his Sierra to squeeze between a wall and a van).

The support band may not be happy about these restrictions, but they know they have no choice but to accept them, and the status quo is meekly retained. The problems start when no clear hierarchy exists (or rather, where different ones exist in the mind of each band) and there is a bitter fight for the ‘best parking place’.

Normally, the bands that performed at the Daffodil Lion were quite small and had a tendency to share what equipment they had in a relatively amicable manner. However, the Jolly Rogers, Belsen, and even the Love Buckets, all had large amounts of gear and were proudly protective of it.

The Love Buckets, although an easy going bunch, had arrived at the Daffodil Lion first and had soon filled the alcove by the fireplace with their drums and amps - much to the chagrin of Belsen and the Jolly Rogers who were forced to fight over an area currently occupied by a table for two and a trolley of cuttlery and sauces.

There followed much theatrical gnashing of teeth and wringning of hands by Roddy the highly-strung singer/bass player of Belsen. Concerned that Roddy’s simmering tantrum might explode into a full blown apoplectic fit, were he not able to position his microphone where he wanted it, Paul conceded a further couple of feet to the band (and was left to reflect ruefully on that old adage concerning an inch and a mile).

By the time the Jolly Rogers had added their ten feet high speaker cabs to the equation, the place looked more like a music showroom than a pub. And even with many of the chairs and tables moved out of harm’s way (to what remained of the old stable block behind the Daffodil Lion) there was still only room for an audience of about a dozen people to cluster by the bar. Even then, having totally taken over the pub, Belsen and the Jolly Rogers could not agree about the positioning of their drum kits. Roddy insisted that he needed perfect symmetry to perform (i.e., the drums and bass amp and microphone had to form an equilateral triangle accurate to the nearest inch).

However, every time Roddy turned his back, the Love Buckets (in their usual mischevious way) would surreptitiously displace a tom-tom or a speaker, causing him to become increasingly agitated. Eventually, convinced that it was the Jolly Rogers deliberately trying to undermine his impending performance, Roddy tipped up their cymbals, marched over to where they stood and threatened to ‘kill the next cunt who touched his fucking mike stand.’

Bemused, the Jolly Rogers, who had (in all innocence) been enjoying a quiet pint by the bar, quite rightfully insisted they ‘didn’t know what the fuck he was on about, and if he didn’t go and pick their cymbals up they would shove his microphone stand where the sun don’t shine.’

Incensed, Roddy, in the manner of an insulted female, picked up the nearest pint glass and threw its contents into the face of the Jolly Roger’s rhythm guitarist (and occasional percussionist) Alien Andy (so called because he had once had an accident dying his hair and stained his neck and forehead a crazy shade of Martian green).

Alien Andy was understandably not that happy about being doused with beer for no apparent reason and had to be physically restrained by the rest of his band. In fact, it took them several minutes to pacify him with murmurs of ‘he’s not worth it mate, he’s a fucking headcase.’

Though Andy calmed down sufficiently not to thump Roddy, he still wanted to exact his revenge, and did so by stealing Roddy’s tub of super strength hair gel (with it’s secret ingredient - rumoured to be quick setting wallpaper paste) which he used to stiffen his mohican.

Of course, as soon as Roddy discovered someone had pilfered his gel he thrashed around the pub with a mixture of rage and despair like a child who has lost their comfort blanket (much to the amusement of the Love Buckets). In the end, Roddy was forced to perform wearing his hat (an old black bowler) with strands of pink hair hanging down across his face like some kind of bedraggled muppet.

The incident would have probably ended there had it not been for the gobbing that started towards the end of Belsen’s set. Belsen were actually quite a musical band in their own fashion, playing sombre, haunting melodies that varied dramatically in volume and tempo. They later went on to record an album with a string quartet, the savage beauty of the which was hailed in more open minded quarters of the classical music world, and quite rightly so.

Unfortunately, at that time, Roddy’s misery laden wallowings were far removed from what most of Westing’s young punks liked to pogo to on a Thursday night. And they demonstrated this fact in a manner fashionable at the time – by showering the band with gob.

It is instructive, at this stage, to draw a distinction between spit and gob. Spit is basically a weak solution of saliva - a watery substance forced between the lips in a fine spray or released in a harmless globule of low viscosity. Gob on the other hand is a sticky mass of nose custard, sucked from the sinuses, shaped into a bolus by the tongue and then projected at high velocity, often over considerable distances.

Being spat at is unpleasant. Being gobbed at is fucking horrible. The victim of a large scale gob attack feels as if they are being stoned by some Biblical mob whilst being shat upon by a flock of malicious gulls.

Dodging a gob attack in the open requires speed and dexterity. Trying to dodge such an attack whilst performing in a band, cornered at the back of a tiny pub is impossible. The only defense is retaliation, which in punk tradition involves picking up one’s instrument (be that a guitar, or microphone stand or snare drum) and whacking the gobbers over the head with it...

It took seventeen policeman to sort out the resulting brawl and three ambulances to ferry the casualties to Westing General Hospital. Fortunately no one suffered any lasting damage. However, the bar was left looking as if it had been hit by a typhoon, and Paul was left to explain to a highly sceptical insurance assessor the bizarre train of events that led to the devestation.

All three bands - The Jolly Rogers, The Love Buckets and Belsen - split up after that evening. For one thing their instruments and gear had been totally trashed. Roddy had a nervous breakdown (his fourth) and spent another eight week spell in Passmore Manor, Westingshire’s Psychiatric Hospital. Alien Andy couldn’t play for months due to the hand damage he had sustained punching various people in the face. And most of the other band members were carrying minor injuries and major grudges which procluded them from playing together again.

Paul vowed never to let another musical group of any description play in the pub ever, and banned from the premises anyone who had more than one zip on their trousers, a safety pin attached to any part of their body or hair of unnatural colour or spikiness. It was the last time anyone in Westing ever danced to the Dead Kennedys in a public place. It was the night punk died.