Typical Boy: Jim Shepard
Listen along to some of the songs and artists mentioned while you read
L:
You were born in Aberdeen, is that right Jim?
J:
I was indeed.
L:
Where abouts did you grow up in Aberdeen?
J:
Well for the first six or seven years I was right in the centre of town.
Jasmine Terrace. I’ve got quite a lot of connections with friends and family
around there. Then we moved out to a new housing estate called Tillydrone. So,
for about ten years or so, I lived there, then I moved to London for 18 years.
I’m as much a Londoner as I am an Aberdonian in some ways.
L:
How did you find growing up in Aberdeen? How would you describe it at the time?
J: I had a happy childhood. It was quite a
violent city but I’m sure it wasn’t unusual in that regard. There was a lot of
violence everywhere else, from what I hear, then anyway. I don’t know if it’s a
young people’s thing or it was just the time. I was born in 1962. It didn’t
seem so violent in the centre of Aberdeen, but certainly out Tillydrone there
was a lot of fighting and you’d be careful where you went in the city. If you
strayed into the wrong area and you were recognised, there could be trouble. It
was quite violent but there was a lot of community. People helped each other
out a lot more then, I would say. Certainly, my mother was an angel and was
always bringing in waifs and strays. Much to my annoyance at times. I’d come
home from school and there would be a wee boy there, barefooted and in rags,
and she’d be feeding him or giving him my toys, or my stuff. So, there
certainly was a lot of love and community as well. People didn’t travel so far
then. I remember going to a school camp near Edinburgh for ten days, which
seemed like an eternity at the time, ten days away from home. In the middle
weekend, parents could arrive just for the day and check in just to make sure
you were ok. My mum came down, Aberdeen to Edinburgh, and she said that was the
furthest she’d ever been in her life. Furthest she’d ever travelled in her
life. People didn’t travel as much then but there was lots of entertainment. I
often think back to the number of cinemas there were in Aberdeen. I can name
them all, I’m sure if I did there’d be eight or nine cinemas. There’s probably two
now.
L:
Aye, I think that’d be about right.
J:
You kinda felt close as well. Family tended to be closer then. We’ve all moved
apart since then. I think that’s quite a common thing. I think a lot of
families have moved to different parts of the same city or different parts of
the country or further afield.
L:
Aberdeen has changed so much over the past 30, 40 years. People almost can’t
conceive the Aberdeen of old without the oil money. Does that fit with your
experiences? Did Aberdeen start to change more as the oil money started to
become more and more integral to the city?
J:
I suppose it did, yes. If you add that to Thatcherism and the housing boom,
people buying their own houses, then I suppose there were big changes. I think
there used to be quite a clear working class and middle class or a richer part
of town, but I think that’s changed. You almost got like a third class, you had
a penniless class, you had an unemployable or underclass and then you had the
working class whereas it was completely mixed before. Everybody lived together
in the estates and there was no difference between someone who was working and
wasn’t working, or what they worked at and how much they earned. That changed.
As people bought their own flats and houses, there became a real difference.
People added a different coat of paint to their house, or they wanted to put a
stamp on things, they wanted to make their fence different to the council
fence. I think those were the obvious signs, there was a new class emerging.
I’d hate to say upwardly mobile but maybe just a more ‘we’re better than you’
kinda thing.
L:
How did you start getting into music?
J:
From when I was a baby, I was madly into music. My sister, who’s eight years
older than me, she used to sign the hits of the day to me. We lived in Jasmine
Terrace, tiny, tiny places. We live three times in Jasmine Terrace. At one
point we lived in a friend’s hotel in Jasmine Terrace and me and my sister were
living on the top floor in the boiler room.
It was just a bed in there and that was it. We’d share the bed, and I
was just a toddler. I can remember her singing to me, she’d sing Groovy kind of
Love to get me to sleep. She’d sing Mrs Robinson and all these songs, so she
was a big influence on me. She played guitar and sang brilliantly.
My aunty had a hotel in Aberdeen called the
Highland Hotel. She was notorious, my aunty, my aunty Race. She had a folk club
in her hotel, and it attracted all sorts of alternative characters in Aberdeen.
The folk club was a place where left-leaning folk would go. Communists and
Socialists tended towards folk music. Not always though. So that was always on
the go, and I’d get dragged along to those. I say dragged along because to me,
pop music was the thing. The folk music was a bit hard on the ears at times. It’s
funny because I’ve grown to love it. At the time, I was a bit, ‘Oh my god,
what’s this?!’ and I would get dragged along to a lot of it, but I’m
grateful for it now. I got a good education. I think folk music is just pop
music, basically, without all the fancy decorations and trimmings. Quite simple, storytelling songs. It took me
years to realise that.
I suppose Radio One, when I was old enough. I
had a wee transistor radio, listening to Radio One. When I was ten or eleven, I
started following the charts religiously and buying singles every week with my
pocket money. That’s when I began to get a bit more obsessed with music.
Listening to it and trying to form my own bands. Eleven years old, I’m trying
to form my own band. Unsuccessfully, I hasten to add.
L:
How did people react to you wanting to start a band at that age?
J:
I think people liked the idea. I liked the idea especially, but I would do
something about it. I would play my sister’s guitar and try and learn a few
things, write songs and stuff. I co-opted a few of my friends into the band, my
first band, and they weren’t interested at all really. They were quite happy to
be in the band but actually never did anything. It was more like a virtual
band. They were there nominally but not in real life.
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| The punk days, April 1977 |
By
the time I was 15, and punk rock had come along, my pal Tommy and Steve, the
three of us started actually playing together. I was playing guitar; Tommy was
hitting drum stick on anything in his bedroom and Steve would plug the bass
guitar into the HiFi and within a few months, we were beginning to play gigs.
We couldn’t even play very well but we had the confidence. We just wanted to do
it. We thought it was great fun. There was a mixed reaction. We played at our
local primary school, we booked the hall there, we booked a PA, quite a lot to
do for such young kids, and lo and behold, lots of kids turned up. It was 50p
to get in. I think we were expecting kids our own age to turn up, but they were
all ten, eleven years old. That was quite an eye opener. Kids we wouldn’t talk
to because they were way too young. That age difference then was
ridiculous. They got it, they were
having fun. Most of the kids our age though were thinking, ‘They’re not a real
band, they’re not like Fleetwood Mac. They’re just making a racket.’ The kids
got the racket. A racket with a beat. It was a minority thing with our own age.
Disco was big at the time, so you had to look pretty cool and disco. You had to
wear suits to go to discos and nightclubs then, so for us to be in jeans and a
t-shirt was just too much for those that were into proper music. That’s rough
how it delineated.
L:
You said punk was a big influence on you starting bands, was there much of a
punk scene in Aberdeen?
J:
Yeah, it was pretty big. Well, it felt big anyway. There was a youth club
called the 62 club in Chapel Street or the next one along from Chapel Street,
Constitution Street or something. I remember my fourth year at secondary, I
started going along. The first punk rock
disco was there November, December 1977. I remember going along there and I
think I was the only one from my area who went along. I first met a pal of
mine, Les Clark, who I’m still in touch with today, and I’ll never forget
seeing him. He had a wee box of records, seven-inch singles that he was going
to be playing at the disco and he had a jean jacket on. He turned round and the
back of his jacket was an amazing painting, it said ‘destroy’ and it had an
upside-down Jesus on the cross painted. Absolutely first-class painting. He’s
an illustrator, so it was his own work. It was just going along and meeting
these other people and with a few months there was live bands playing at the 62
club. Bands like the UK Subs and Patrick FitzGerald. Angelic Upstarts played
there as well. To us, it seemed like a big thing, but it was probably small
numbers now that I think about it, at the beginning anyway. It was a big
influence on the city, anyway, I would think. We started to spread our wings;
after a few months, there was a few gigs going on in hotels and, occasionally, in
community centres around the city. It did pick up around the city pretty
quickly, and then you might get 30, 40 kids turning up. My own age kids this
time, not as much the primary kids who came along to our first gig.
L:
Were you aware of anyone getting any hassle for being a punk or how they
looked?
J:
Oh yes. You had to be very careful. The bikers hated us and they would chase us
if they saw us. They tended to be lot older, so they were a bit scary. You
could get a real hiding if you got caught by them. Generally, people, men in
particular, men in their 20’s and 30’s could just randomly get angry at you
just walking down the street. ‘Why are you dressed like that? Why are you
wearing pink sunglasses?’ Then, ‘I’m going to punch you,’ and you’d
have run away from them. So, there was a lot of animosity. You could say 99% of
people were ok, but if it’s happened a few times, you’re very wary. I remember
getting chased by a guy with a rope. He was swinging this rope around his head
chasing me down the road. A pal of mine ended up with stiches in his head
because a biker had a chain, a bike chain, and he wacked him over the head and
it cut his head open. If you got caught in it, it could be pretty nasty.
L:
You said you moved to London - was that for the music or was it for other
reasons?
J:
We would have just stayed in Aberdeen. I was happy to stay in Aberdeen. In 1980,
we went down to a Socialist Workers, I don’t know what you’d call it, it was a
whole load of meetings and talks over a weekend. There was also gigs and comedy
in the evenings, it was a big kind of get together. That was in Skelmersdale,
Lincolnshire. We went down there; mainly, to be honest, because there was a
couple of punk bands we liked the look of.
Four or five of us went down. Tommy met this Australian woman, Polly,
who’s lovely, and I’m still in touch with, and they fell in love, so Tommy
moved straight down to London. She was living in London, and he moved straight
down within a few months because they couldn’t bear to be apart. He moved down
to London, so it just seemed sensible that the rest of us moved. We just
thought it’d be a good thing to be there, try it out and see what happened.
L:
And going down to London, was there a difference in the reaction to the music
than there was in Aberdeen?
J:
Yeah, it was far more open. There was a fairly well established extreme right
then, the National Front, but you didn’t see them that often. They were
massively outnumbered by anti-racists and anti-fascists. From that point of
view, politics had gone into the music more than just the style and clothes. In
general, alternative music was on the left. At that time, we were going to see
bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Bauhaus, and you were in with your own crowd
then. It’s such a dense place London, it’s got so many different cultures and
different looks. It didn’t seem a
problem in London, I think you could get away with much more.
 |
| At Alan McGee's Living Room 1983 - pic by Paul Groovy |
L:
You ended up becoming one of the vanguards of what would later become in the
indie scene. This scene was seen as the music press as fey and effeminate, but
do you think it was that much of a departure from punk?
J:
When I said that the alternative music scene had become more political, I’m not
saying every band was political but nearly every band was on the left and more
open to a new way of thinking about politics and thinking about how you live in
society. There were pretty strong character in Aberdeen in the punk scene, it
was a mixture of girls and boys. It was pretty fast, loud, aggressive music,
but within a couple of years you got a new kind of music coming through which had
that energy without turning everything up full. It was more a physical energy
than a lazy, ‘let’s turn everything up full’ and get the energy that way.
L:
Less brute force.
J:
Yes. Heavy metal obviously turns everything up full, and punk was like that. It
had the energy physically and with the sound. That developed, and it became
that you could be punk and play acoustic. You didn’t have to shout; you could
be quiet if you wanted to. Some of the best music which developed out of punk,
some of the most original music, was a departure from the Ramones style. That
had been on the go for a few years by the time we started playing at the Living
Room, Alan McGhee’s original club. Punk had a year zero affect and nothing
before punk was allowed, but when we started playing the Living Room in 1983,
we were also looking back at music from the 60s and looking to New York with
Patti Smith and Blondie. We were taking all those things and making it a bit
more historical, I suppose. We didn’t have a year zero anymore. We don’t have
to pretend to do something that is brand new every day. By the time you got to
the 80s, the post-punk thing got to the point, for me anyway, where a lot of it
was tuneless. It’s got attitude, it maybe got a good beat or something, but it
was tuneless. So, I was rejecting some of that and trying to go back. We were
going back to the Beatles. One of the great sings of the punk era was the
Clash, ‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977’. That was the
B-side of their first single. It was
funny to actually say, ‘The Beatles were good.’ There was definitely a
divergence of ideas. It didn’t have to be so aggressive and macho. You could
sing a bit more gentle. You could have both. I could certainly be very, very angry at times
and sometimes I could have outburst at gigs that were completely bonkers really
but also you could sing softer.
L:
Is there any reflections you want to add yourself?
J:
I think what was particularly eye opening for me, especially in the punk scene
although it carried on into the indie scene, was that there was girls getting
into bands and girls forming bands as well. We didn’t even think anything of
it. There were no boys or girls as such. Just whoever had whatever talent.
Before then, there weren’t so many girls in rock bands, so it was a big change.
We didn’t realise that at the time, it just seemed perfectly natural. The girls
got a lot of stick for it as well. They didn’t get beaten up for it as much,
but they did get a lot of verbal abuse. People used to say we were dirty for
the style of clothes that we wore. The girls got a hard time because not only
were they looking unlike they were supposed to, but they didn’t look feminine.
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| Present Day Jim, July 2021 |
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