Typical Boy: David Callahan
Listen along to some of the songs and artists mentioned while you read
In the third edition of Typical Boy, David Callahan and I discuss punk, politics and gender inequalities in the music world.
L:
So, whereabouts were you born?
D:
I was born in Chelmsford, in Essex but I lived most of my formative life in
Harold Wood in Essex which is more kind of in Greater London within the M25.
L:
What kind of area is that? How would you describe it?
D:
I would call it a working-class, lower-middle-class suburb of London.
L:
So almost a quite well-to-do working-class area of London?
D:
I would say it was a mix of manual workers, council houses and some skilled
labour and private houses at the time. Now it’s more commuter belt but it was a
bit less so at the time.
L:
Everything has been drawn into London in recent years, hasn’t it?
D:
Yes, yes. London sprawl.
L:
What about your personal experience growing up? How did you find growing up
there? What kind of place was it for you?
D:
Pretty small-minded, occasionally sinister. But also, you had access to London,
you had shops where you could get obscure and weird and engaging records and
books and magazines and there was good TV which you had to watch. You had no
choice but to watch because there was nothing else on. Outside my house, it was
often a cultural dearth but inside my house, the local library and a few select
shops in Romford, there was some colour, intellectual excitement and emotional
excitement.
L:
Your choice of words there is quite interesting, what do you mean by sinister?
D:
There was a lot of racism at the time, there was a lot of sexism, a lot of
girls got attacked. If you were a young man, you had a good chance of being
assaulted as I was on a number of occasions. Particularly if you were deemed to
be a – this is in inverted commas – ‘a poof’. If you showed any sign of
sensitivity or intelligence, you were called that word and often had it
hammered home to you with hands and feet. It was even worse than that, one of
my classmates at primary school got murdered.
It was a gangland hit, actually. The kind of Essex you read about with
gangsters moving out there. There was definitely that undercurrent there. It
was right on the edge of the city, and you’d get the kind of place where guys
would have nondescript businesses that seemed to pay quite a lot. They would
have big houses but there would be mattresses and junk all around it and cars
on bricks. It was definitely a kind of black economy but quite well off on the
edge of town. It’s hard to describe really. I spent a lot of lyrics in songs
trying to describe it. There were all these possibilities. All these engaging
and stimulating, positively stimulating things and, also, quite a dark side to it.
It wasn’t David Lynch, that’s a bit Hollywood, but there was always something a
bit odd going on. Half the teachers at my secondary school were just weird.
Like Pervs, just weird. They would not get a job now. They’d be unemployable
now. They were racist and just weird.
L:
I suppose you could say they were almost backwards
D:
It wouldn’t be viewed as progressive now, let’s put it that way! They were very
much the people you had to get rid of and they have been got rid of. I’ve got
my own kids now, who are teenagers at secondary school, and the teachers are
just consummate professionals. On the very few occasions when I come across a
tabloid newspaper – because I can’t stand the bloody things – but when I do and
they’re slagging off teachers, I just think the people who are writing it
haven’t got a fucking clue, really. Teachers now are amazing. I wish I had
those teachers. There were some good teachers at my school but the ones at my
kids’ school are just amazing. They’re from all races and backgrounds, they’re
all knowledgeable and they’re all tolerant, and they’re all able to get their
subjects across without any kind of oppressive behaviour towards their pupils.
That just wasn’t the case when I was at secondary school or even primary
school. It was the done thing, and not a reportable offence, that if a ten-year-old
gave you lip, you were perfectly obliged, as a teacher, to throw a wooden board
rubber at them. The idea that if you hit a kid, it was an assault, didn’t cross
anyone’s mind at all. It was perfectly valid to punch a lippy kid.
L:
It’s bizarre to look back on.
D:
It’s incredible. I’ve never understood why it’s assault when you punch someone
else in the street but it’s not if you punch a child. It’s a really weird
dichotomy.
L:
It really is. You said that growing up in this environment that you found your
own spaces, you mentioned the library.
D: I was the kind of weirdo that would bunk off school to go to the library. My art teacher caught me in there once and he said, ‘I won’t report you this time because of where you are. If you were over in the park, smoking or something, I’d have reported you but just this once I’ll let you off.’ The libraries were amazing. Even the school library was great. The local library had William Burroughs and Ballard. It had all sorts of weird textbooks. I went to the local library, near where my kid’s mum lives, in Whitechapel which is the biggest library in the borough and I was just astonished at how poor the books on the shelves were, how few there were and the lack of quality. You couldn’t go and investigate. If you were a reader and wanted to just browse the shelves and look for something odd that you hadn’t seen before or something that you’d been led onto from another book you couldn’t find it in the local libraries now. I find it quite disturbing. That’s what you used to do when I was a kid. You’d find a record or a book or some kind of work of art and it’d have a domino effect. You’d be knocked onto something else by that. It was very easy to go to a small branch library then and have the domino effect of books, just roll through them all and hoover them up and get knocked on from one subject to another just through curiosity and investigation. It just seemed to me you couldn’t do that now. Maybe the internet serves that purpose, but you can’t do a deep dive often on the internet. It’s superficial. If you can’t fit it on a screen in a one- or two-page scroll, then you move onto the next thing. The deep dive is missing nowadays.
Harold Wood Library |
L:
Libraries have been so viciously cut in the last twenty years.
D:
One of my best friends is a librarian and she’s miserable about the whole thing.
L:
I’ve always liked libraries; I think they’re such nice spaces. So, what other places did you find were your
escape so to speak?
D:
It’s a little bit cringey but the youth club. Most of us used to sneer at the
youth club and we used to go and play snooker or chat each other up or
something. You would always try and avoid going because there was always
someone in a tracksuit annoying you or some adult. Someone there, some
brainwave in the office, decided that they would book gigs there. They probably
don’t mean much now but I was able to see things like Alternative TV and Patrick
Fitzgerald who were kinda punk, post-punk stuff. I was able to see them a
twenty-minute walk away at my local youth club for pence. So that was a big
influence, really. The mod revival started almost at my youth club with the
Purple Hearts. I saw their second gig. There was stuff coming through. Once a
month there would be these weird punk gigs going on. So that was a refuge if
you like. Libraries, that, and we just used to sit over in the park with a
cassette player, take speed and drink wine with like-minded school friends.
L:
What kind of age did you first start getting into music?
D:
I was 13. Well, 12 or 13. 12 actually, it was 12, and it coincided almost
exactly with the Sex Pistols first appearing on TV. I know it’s a cliché but
unfortunately, it influenced a lot of young people to get involved in music. Well,
not unfortunately, but it was just so prevalent that people saw them on
national TV and thought, ‘Bloody hell this is amazing.’ The same thing
happened to me. I was too young, really, to be in a band for a few years. I
started saving up money and buying a few records and getting given WH Smith
vouchers for Christmas and being able to get records that way. John Peel was
free, you could listen to him at night. I was so young, I remember the first
time I listened to John Peel it was probably about January or February 1977,
and he had sessions from The Damned and This Heat, and I thought both were punk
rock and I still think that is the case. They had this weird avant-garde group
playing and The Damned raising hell and they both sounded just as wild and
interesting to me. So, you had radio but specifically late-night radio. We
probably had 5 record shops in the local big town of Romford, all of whom
started selling indie records from the very first days like Spiral Scratch and
the Desperate Bicycles – stuff like that. I would go in with my 90p or a quid when I had
it and buy records. They also used to sell records in sweet shops. I remember
getting a Birthday Party single in my local post office for 50p. Woolworths
used to sell amazing records. I remember getting Iggy Pop and Ornette Coleman in
Woolworths in the sale. The presence of physical musical media is kind of hard
to imagine nowadays because you associate it with hipster record shops in some
coffee-bar area of town. If you missed out on buying, like, a Magazine single
you’d find it two years later in a jumble sale when someone had moved on and
became a new romantic. There were all these outlets for good music. On top of all
that, in 1977, you had five music papers. It soon became three to four a year
later. If you didn’t have the money you could stand in the shop and read them
cover to cover until the guy chucked you out. Despite the fact they were
national, they were kind of underground. They put you onto so many interesting
things. I went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees twice before they even had a
record contract, largely based on reviews and the fact they came and played in
Chelmsford up the road. You could either get permission or lie to your mum and
dad, go out and see them and come back again.
L:
Must have been incredible seeing bands like that, especially so early.
D:
You took it for granted, you never thought it’d end and of course it does,
because everything ends. At the time you just thought it was part of life. It
was your outlet. It was your refuge. Jobs did not pay well, and you were kind
of browbeaten. If you were clever, everyone thought you were trying to be
better than them, so they hit you. If you weren’t clever, then you had to try
and keep in with people. People were very physical in their opinions at the
time.
L:
I know, as you said, it’s a cliché but when the Sex Pistols came on television
so many people were so drawn to it. It had such an impact on so many people’s
lives. For you personally, what was the attraction? Was there something that
stood out to you?
D:
It just looked attractively ugly. It was alien. It looked like people had been
beamed in from a more attractive and interesting planet. It acted as a bit of a
Rosetta stone. You wanted to find out more about them, but they only had one
record which was quite hard to get, but you could read about them, and you
heard what their influences were, and you heard about all these other people
who were doing similar things. I was quite young and not able to go to gigs
until September 1977, when I went to my first one. Around the same time, John
Lydon was on the radio, you were expecting him to play all the great punk stuff
and what he did instead was play Can and Captain Beefheart and Tim Buckley and
Doctor Alimantado. Just amazing stuff and mind-blowing things. It threw you
back in time to the really interesting music that was being made when you were
too little to hear it. It was that stuff that influenced me much more than punk
ever did really. I had older friends who were 3 or 4 years older than me, I
used to hang around with them as a kinda mascot and they were properly into
punk, but I was too young to get involved in it. So, when the post-punk and
indie thing happened, that was my thing. You could mix it all up as well. You
could have Metal Box by PIL but also Postcard records pop guitar stuff.
You’d buy things on Rough Trade, and it wouldn’t just be Scritti Politti,
there’d be James Blood Ulmer and jazz and stuff like this. It was like a melee
of really good stuff from all over the show.
L:
It was a bit of an explosion.
D:
Yeah. You were a bit like a sponge, you went into it with an open mind. That
thing that there wasn’t enough punk, so you’d listen to reggae, that was true.
From reggae, you’d go into R&B and blues and jazz. You’d hear all sorts of
stuff. I’ve always liked stuff with a raw edge. The Wolfhounds reformed and we
did an LP called Electric Music. People ask me what can of music I like,
and I say “electric music”. I can’t imagine music before electricity because it
kind of annoys me, acoustic stuff. Even then the acoustic stuff I do like is
recorded with electricity. It was trying to explain that rawness and
electricity go hand in hand. That’s how I feel about it, really.
L:
I think a lot of what we call folk music has been so sanitised and cut away
from what it originally was. It’s a pale imitation of what people used to play.
D:
I like a lot of raw folk stuff and I like a lot of old folk stuff. It almost
sounds to me like they’re crying out, waiting for electricity to happen. I view
punk and indie, and if you like guitar-based, song-based music – if you get rid
of all the posh production, it’s still folk music to me. It’s expressing the
opinions and the views and what happens to ordinary people. That’s exactly what
folk music did. That’s why I can’t bear it when people accuse songs that are
similar of plagiarism. Folk music evolved from people copying each other and
getting it slightly wrong or adding their own thing to it. That’s how pop music
evolved too. The idea that you can bring a lawyer in and sue someone, because you’ve
nicked a line or a bit of the tune and made the song your own and take that
person’s money and divvy it up between lawyers. It all sounds stupid to me
because it shows a complete misunderstanding of how music actually works. Most music has developed because someone has
tried to copy someone else, and either wasn’t good enough to do it or got bored
doing it and changed it into their own voice, or couldn’t do it any other way
but their own. That’s how music evolves. I was an early adopter of sampling
because it’s like a collage. That, for me, is a perfectly valid form of art. I
was perfectly happy to sample people and muck it up, distort it and make it all
sound weird. I’m perfectly happy for people to do that to me as well. It’s all
part of the same flow.
L:
It a bit like Alisdair Grey, at the end of Lanark he has a list of
everything that he plagiarised.
D:
I vaguely remember that. I read Lanark a long time ago, so I’m afraid I
can’t remember much about it now.
L:
I really like Lanark and I love that he has this list of everything he’s
taken from every writer he’s read. People might claim it takes away from the
book itself, but I like it because it really comes through that everything
comes from something.
D:
Every writer, say they had taken a truth serum, they would have to do that at
the end. That’s why I like people like Ian Sinclair cause their whole books are
just chapter after chapter of things they’ve seen and taken and quotes from
other people. It still comes out as having that writer’s voice.
L:
Turning back towards the music, you got into music when you were 12 or 13 but
what took you into making music?
D:
It was possible then to get guitars very cheaply. I did have a couple of guitar
lessons where I learnt four chords but really, I could have taught myself that.
I stopped having guitar lessons because he was trying to teach me ‘Smoke on the
Water’ and stuff like that. It was boring. I wanted him to teach me Dr Feelgood
and things like that. I gave up on that and I just started listening to things
by ear. I knew the chords I knew would be involved in some of these records. I
picked bits up from other kids who were playing guitar. So, I learned how to
play bar chords. It never occurred to me that you couldn’t make up your own
chords, so I did. I put my fingers in places that sounded nice and it just got
better and better. It was the default to
learn the guitar because they were so cheap at the time. My first guitar cost
£35. I don’t know how I ever learned on it. Until recently, I still had it and
even now it was hard for me to put my fingers on the fretboard because the
strings were so high above it. Somehow, we muddled through on cheap instruments
and almost immediately the idea would be that you would do it communally. No
one had a drum kit, so you’d end up getting a cheap Casio keyboard and a bass.
I’ve still got cassettes of it, this godawful noise. It was quite distinctive
in a way, so you just carried on. It became a kind of bodily excretion to write
a song. I’ve been writing bad poetry ever since and trying to put it to music.
The fun of it has never stopped as far as I’m concerned.
L:
How did people react to you starting a band?
D:
It just seemed like a natural thing then. It was like, “Oh, those are the
kids who are doing a band”. People didn’t try and stop us or anything. It
used to be quite easy to get gigs. You would just walk down to the local
neighbourhood centre and went, “Oh we’re a band, can we put a gig on?”
You and your mates and some other band that you knew from some other group of
mates, just arranged a date, and Xeroxed a few flyers and then you’d have this
gig. Even though I had been to gigs, I
hadn’t really made notes, so we did things like putting all the amps in front
of us when we played. We had no idea how you were meant to set up a stage or
anything. I’m sure it was an awful cacophony, but you just kept on muddling
through really. Friends who couldn’t play instruments or weren’t that inspired
by it, some of them did other things. One started running a club in our local
town, another started managing us just for the hell of it and actually managed
to get us gigs. We got to play the Marquee a couple of times at the age of 17.
Just through blagging it, really. Saying we’d like to play with these people
and those people, and they’d go, “No, no, no. Oh actually, leave your number”
and you’d just get this phone call saying, “We haven’t got support for
Chelsea so do you want to play with them?”
The location of the first Wolfhounds' gig |
L:
So, there wasn’t any negativity despite it being quite a rough area, as you
said. There wasn’t that kind of hostility to you starting a band. It was seen
as something you would do and you formed quite a tight-knit community.
D:
Nearly everyone in the town would have viewed everything me and my friends did
negatively anyway. There was nothing you could do to make them view you
positively, so you just got on with it, really. Even our first gig, I was
waiting with my mate that lived in the next town with his guitar, all the local
people came along and clapped politely and then about six of them were standing
around at the bus stop going, “Fucking punks, fucking wankers”. And you
were like, “You were just in there and seemed to quite enjoy yourselves.”
I was at primary school with some of them and they didn’t even recognise me. It
was like I had become this different character by being vaguely associated with
punk rock. They no longer knew me. It was very odd.
L:
So, there was a benign hostility?
D:
Yeah, almost. They were very confused. You were obviously from among them but
now you were alien to them, and they didn’t know how to react other than to
maybe give you a slap.
L:
I suppose to some people it could have been quite threatening. It was very different
to the stereotypical set image of how people were meant to be.
D:
I don’t want to be patronising or something, but it was the dawning of my
realisation that people don’t want change generally. People from amongst them
who were changing were viewed with suspicion and hostility. Actual change for
the positive, making life better, people can respond in an aggressive and
hostile manner to. I’ve never understood it, but I now understand that this
seems to be part of human nature. If you are trying to make life better for
yourself, they also view you as thinking you’re better than them and will try
and slap you down, too. While I don’t understand all that, I view that as very
much part of what you have to overcome if you want any control over your life
at all.
L:
I don’t think you’re wrong at all, there. When the indie scene started to crop
up, a lot of the music press almost sneered at it, especially when it came to C86
and stuff like that.
D:
Yeah, I read it until the ’90s. They had a vested commercial interest as an
organ of major publishers to keep things changing. For six months it would be
Orange Juice and Josef K on Postcard who are hip as hell and then it would go
onto something else. For those of us that were inspired by punk and the indie
scene and the various independent records, we had to take time to learn how to
play our own instruments, form our own sounds and put our own records out. The
music press might have moved onto new romanticism and positive punk and all the
other weird little scenes they were trying to promote but a lot of us were
basically thinking this music is not better than what we heard a couple of
years ago, we can’t keep up with this and it doesn’t inspire us to be creative.
So, there was a whole group of kids, boys and girls in schools and colleges all
around Scotland, England and Wales who had to state their own thing because the
music papers weren’t very interested. A lot of us operated almost in secrecy
underground while all these scenes were shat out and wiped away. Eventually, it
came around to us again. Suddenly, the music press noticed that there were all
these fanzines and these kids putting out records with their pocket money on
little labels and there were some wheelers and dealers like Alan McGee who
seemed to be creating a scene. They finally noticed that and started pushing it
properly in 1985. Some of the fanzine writers got jobs with the music press Jerry
Thackeray who became ‘The Legend’ and James Brown who, unfortunately, went onto
edit Loaded. A lot of these guys were coming up through the fanzines.
There’s some masculinity for you, Loaded! All these fanzine writers were
becoming music-press writers and they were bringing a lot of the bands they
liked and wrote about in their fanzines with them, in a way. It was like, “I’ll
write about Bruce Springsteen, but I want to write about the Wolfhounds, too.”
We weren’t ready for it, as I imagine a lot of bands weren’t. The first bands
that broke through and got attention were people like The Nightingales, The
Membranes and The June Brides. They were all part of that big wave of indie
bands in the mid-’80s. They’d been doing it longer and got a bit more success
and attention for it. They opened doors. A lot of bands on C86 and
around that scene got a lot of supports with bands like that and we got to tour
with bands like that. A lot of early gigs were supporting bands like that at
the Marquee and small pubs in Kings Cross and Hammersmith, and so forth.
L:
A lot of bands, certainly the men, were labelled as being effeminate in the
press, why do you think that was?
D:
There’s always been a stigma. There was a lot of violence at gigs in the ’70s
and ‘80s which is nothing to do with the music press writing about indie music
as effeminate, it’s more to do with the background that they were writing about
being quite macho and aggressive. If you showed any feeling or emotions in your
songs or performances that weren’t in some way tough, you’d be ridiculed. It
was a school-playground bullying, really. I like aggressive violent music and I
like sensitive emotional music, too. I don’t see why you couldn’t do both but
apparently if you wrote a jangly pop song that made you some kind of
Fotherington-Thomas, butterfly-net sort of a person. If you yelled about
something like raping a slave that made you robust. I don’t see it that way,
really, but that’s how the press viewed it.
L:
Do you think the effeminate label bestowed upon indie music allowed people to
express themselves differently?
D:
It did. It was very enabling for a lot of kids who weren’t the rugby-playing
types, girls and boys, it was very enabling for them. In a way, you could take
the piss out of your own supposed effeminacy. It’s hard to encapsulate this in
a few short sentences. There was room for that. The music press would tell you
that there wasn’t room to be sensitive and sing about. All the bands were
different. If you listen to C86 there’s as much stuff on there that
sounds like Captain Beefheart and The Fall as sounds like jangly pop. Today,
it’s viewed as a Tallulah Gosh, Razorcuts-y type thing where it all sounds a
bit fey, but that wasn’t the whole thing at all. All these bands, in the
supposed scene, formed a very varied jigsaw puzzle at the time, which people
don’t really see so much now. Every night, you would go out and see something
that was totally different to what you had seen the night before. C86
isn’t a very good representation of that, but none of it was macho and there
was a lot of gay people involved and there was lots of girls. None in my band,
unfortunately, but there was lots of girls involved in the bands. At least
afterwards, there was a little bit of a reaction. There wasn’t so many girls on
the C86 tape bands but there was a lot on the scene in other bands. I
don’t know why it was that way, but those bands didn’t get on the tapes. It’s a
bit odd really. We weren’t in control of that but there certainly was a lot of
girls in bands. Perhaps there were more later with Jess Garon and the
Desperados and all those kinds of people. The Sarah label was a reaction
against that, really. It became known for being feyer, but I think that’s
because those on the more macho indie scene were less comfortable with singing
about what was perceived as being ‘girly’ things. There were good bands on
Sarah, too, but they were derided. It’s amazing how popular they were because a
lot of us relied on music paper reviews for our popularity. Sarah managed to be
a popular label without that, so it shows that the music papers were,
cynically, missing a trick. They could have promoted a lot of that music and
done well with it because labels like Sarah took off.
L:
They really did. I’ve always found the political undercurrent of the indie
scene really interesting, many bands had very explicit left-wing sympathies, and
it’s reflected in the ethos of a lot of the labels. Especially Sarah records
who were anti-capitalist. How much of an impact do you think politics had on
the music?
D:
Quite a lot. There was a big undercurrent of that throughout the ’80s. Even
some of the bigger bands like The Smiths and Billy Bragg were overtly against
Margaret Thatcher and overtly left-wing. Often people would support the
Socialist Workers Party more than the Labour party. The miners' strike, in
particular, was a key political event in the ’80s. Most underground and indie
bands supported the miners' strike and played benefits for the miners. The fact
that the miners eventually lost and were brutally suppressed by the government
and police was a turning point in the ’80s and it was the beginning of the
powerlessness people feel in the face of parliamentary politics, which has
remained to this day. A lot of people of my generation who are artistically
inclined very much warmed towards Corbyn, and there it was being destroyed all
over again by cynical, undermining people. They’re still there, trying to stop
everyone from making the world a better place.
L:
I think that’s my questions covered. Do you have any reflections or anything
you want to add?
D:
I should have mentally prepared for this and something apt to say to you. It’s
nice that you’re looking back and asking all these questions, and I did the
same. In the early 80’s we all got into mid 60’s garage music from 20, 25 years
before us. The world has moved on. I think if you’re interested in creating
music nowadays, you’re not going to form a guitar band, the equipment is too
expensive, the inspiration is too middle class or old. Now I’m doing this on a
laptop that I could record every album ever recorded and listen to all the ones
that have already been on. If you’re a kid inspired by our music, you’re gonna
do it with that. You still see those macho elements. Those macho elements are
still there in electronic music and dance music and grime and so forth. It’s a
real shame. I don’t believe that the two genders have to fall into these
biological roles; the macho man living and providing and the effeminate woman
having to cow down to his every move. I think it’s a shame that it’s still
there. I thought that the access that one has to electronic sounds would have
made it much more sexually democratic, but it doesn’t seem to have done that. I
know there are women making really incredible electronic music like Beatrice Dillon
and stuff but it’s a small part of the field and I think it’s a real shame
because the technology is accessible and democratic enough for that not to be
the case. I don’t know why that is and I wish I did. Women make incredible
music, the same as men do.
If
I was 18 now, I don’t know what I’d be inspired by because I’m not in touch,
I’m 57 but I would not be forming a band now, I can tell you that. I suspect if
I had been 19 or 20, 20 years ago I would have become a comedian or something
because they seem to have a much bigger audience and less equipment to worry
about, and you can live by your wits and your creativity doing that. So that’s
one thing you might have done. Certainly, the various forms of rap since the
early ’90s have involved the minimum amount of technology and the maximum
amount of creativity. So, I’d probably be doing something involved with
electronics. Again, though, I think I’d be dismayed at the lesser attention
women get. Where’s the female Stormzy? Where’s the attention people like that
are getting? You get less attention in general if you’re a woman in music. I
think that’s still true to this very day.
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