The Damned - Hammers forgotten Sci-fi chiller.

Oliver Reed terrorises Weymouth!

Hammer will always be associated with gothic horror films such as Dracula and Frankenstien but in 1961, they started work on The Damned, loosely based on H. L. Lawrences’ The Children Of Light.  Oliver Reed plays King, a psychopath who leads a gang of Teddy Boys who wreak havoc in a sleepy seaside town when American tourist Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) is mugged by his gang including his sister Joanie (Shirley Ann Field).  Wells tracks her down and together they plan to leave together but King won’t let her go that easy and orders his gang to keep a lookout for them and they are forced on the run from King and his gang.  Cornered by what looks like a military establishment,  Joanie and Wells take their chances and  scale the barbed wire fences to escape the gang before falling down a cliff face and being rescued by a group of children.

Though as you would expect with Hammer, these are no ordinary children but part of an experiment by the secretive Bernard (Alexander Knox), who teaches the children via a TV screen and says all will be revealed when the time comes. The children are ice cold and radioactive and Bernard is preparing them to withstand the imminent nuclear holocaust.  

After completion, it sat in Hammers vaults as they struggled to find a distributor and it wasn’t until May 1963 that the film was finally unleashed on the public. It had cost over £170,000 to make and in 1965 was released in America as These Are The Damned.

The Teddy Boys, which included a pre Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) Kenneth Cope, are more like the Ton Up boys or Rockers with their Triumph motorcycles and leather jackets and communicate to each other by whistling a tune, Black leather Rock, a Bill Haley inspired song which was written for the film.  A good film that belies it age, it’s well worth looking out for. Here's the intro for you!

To buy it, click here

Originally published 20th March 2012.

A S*M*A*S*H-ing Time in Bedford!

A rare live outing for the Welwyn Garden City punk rockers at Bedford Esquires, 8th June 2012. 

It was back in the early nineties when I first saw S*M*A*S*H at the St. Johns Tavern in Archway.  Now a gastro pub, back then it was an old Irish boozer with a good sized hall at the back called the Wild Western Room.  On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday, promoter Slim Chance would put on live music catering for Mods, Rockers, garage punkers and all stops inbetween.  Slim always had a good ear for what was going on, he had Billy Childish on a monthly residency, 60’s mod legends Jesse Hector, The Wheels and The Mark Four alongside current mod bands such as The Clique, Aardvarks or any one of the bands the fledgling Detour label was releasing such as The Directions or Vox Pop.  Always keen to find new talent, he told me about Dog, a rip snorting R&B band from Thamesmead. In return I put him onto Subjagger, a north London 3 piece with a fine line in late 60’s blues influenced rock. Sometimes he’d tip me off of something special he had next week like the time Man Or Astroman played and the queue snaked back towards Archway station.  One such tip off was S*M*A*S*H,  “You’ll love ‘em” he told me. Slim knew my tastes and he was spot on, I did love ‘em.  So much in fact that I went to see them at the Bull & Gate a few days later when the debut single was launched.  Fast forward 20 years later and I’ve travelled up to Bedford to see an all too rare appearance by Welwyn Garden City’s finest, playing support to Jimbob from Carter and alongside Midway Still.

Ed Borrie. Photo by Dave Edwards.

I never saw Midway Still back in the day and have to say I rather enjoyed their set and was most impressed by a track from their new album. But I was here to see S*M*A*S*H and when Ed Borrie and Salv Alessi started the intro to Revisited Number 3 I knew my journey was going to be worth it. Rob Hague walked to the drums and the acoustic intro exploded into life. Time hasn’t mellowed them, the songs still are played with vigor & energy and despite their often dark subject matter, still lift and inspire.  Songs such as Real Surreal, Drugs Again, Lady Love Your C**t, Barrabas and Shame, like fine wines the songs have got better with age.  All that was missing was I Want To Kill Somebody but like all fine wines, it’s easy to be greedy! The half hour set flew by and before long I was sat on the train back to London, puzzled as to how a band such as S*MA*S*H could have gone by largely unnoticed and we are now left with Dullplay as the biggest band in the country! Real Surreal? It most certainly is…

,

Salv Alessi. Photo by Dave Edwards.

Originally published on 10th June 2012.

Buttons – The Making of a President by Jamie Mandelkau

The origins of the first UK Hells Angels Chapter.

As a small boy in the mid 70’s, I remember a local pub at St. Georges Circus called The Duke of Clarence at the top of London Road leading down to the Elephant & Castle. It wasn’t that I was regular in there, there may have been underage drinking but I was at least 10 years under age at that time. No, the shop next door was the only one in the area that opened late at the time, so armed with enough pennies to buy a short measured quarter of Cola Cubes, I’d regularly pass the pub which sat on the corner with the junction of Borough Road. One Saturday evening as I approached the shop, a deafening roar greeted me as a gang of Hells Angels pulled up outside the pub alongside the other bikes that were already there. I’d heard of Hell’s Angels, there were often scare stories in the papers on a regular basis about them and the 8 year old me wasn’t sticking around to have his Cola Cubes swiped. No doubt, you may be wondering what this has to do with a president called Buttons, well the answer is that Buttons was the first man outside the USA to earn the right to wear the Death Head and Hells Angel patches. This curious little book was published in 1971 by Sphere, and follows Buttons from his beginings as a rocker in Dalston through to establishing the first Chapter oustside America. Christened Peter Welsh, he was originally called the Mad Hatter as he used to wear a different one depending on his mood. After seeing a film about Cockneys he decided he was going to have a jacket covered in buttons and spent 4 months sewing 1300 onto a soft pvc jacket. At this point he was also fighting with the local Mods led by Beardie Pegley, on a weekly basis, which culminated with him getting shot in the upper chest, a story that has gone down in Mod folklore. When two Californian Angels came to England, namely Sweet William and Frisco Pete, two of Buttons fiends met them and brought them round to his flat where they bonded. Upon their return to the US, Buttons wrote to Sweet William to ask permission to start a UK chapter. This resulted in an invite to San Francisco and a process of acceptance which in turn allowed him to operate a UK chapter. The book ends with Buttons declaring war on other bike gangs who display fake death heads and Hells Angels England patches, the patches always remain the property of the Hells Angels and as such are ripped from the backs of unofficial members. The book itself is quite rare though it does turn up from time to time, expect to pay between £30 - £60 for a copy. It’s an interesting document that goes back to Mods v Rockers wars and will only increase in value over time. As an aside to the rough and tough image portrayed in the book, here’s a BBC documentary about the Hells Angels from 1973, that makes them seem more like the Anthill mob. There appears to be no sign of Buttons but it's his official Chapter, all 32 official Hells Angels.

Originally published on 7th October 2012.