Mods without parkas. Secret Affair are the big one, says Garry Bushell...
"HEYYY, don't crowd me, wanna be the only one.
Heyyy, won't you give me a break, I'm gonna be second to none."
Legs astride, Ian page punches the air and ings - yeah, sings, no need to shout it out when you got a voice as confident and full-throated as this skinny 18 year old with his almost religious belief in what he's gotta say .
"See us roarning these London streets / Feel those last year stares look down on old fashioned feet / Cos' we're the Glory boys - so scared of getting old / Yeah, we're the Glory boys - we may look cold, but our heartttsss are gold..."
There's four Glory Boys on stage tonight. they're called Secret Affair and vocalist Page in his sherp two tone teenage blue whistle, pills almost audibly rattling round his tin-ribs, is the visual mainspring - dancing Jack Flash, living through the twelve numbers and then the encores this diminutive but appreciate Watford crowd demand.
This band get encores as naturally as Saturday nights grouse and grizzle into grim Sunday Mornings, and you don't need to be Bamber Gascoigne to work out the whys and wherefores of that particular truth.
Like the Specials, Secret Affair are a dance band rooted in sixties music but whereas the Specials are firmly grounded in Bluebeat and Ska, Secret Affair take their base from the glorious early sixties sound of soul, the big wheels of motown, aka the original Mod music.
Secret Affair are part of the current Mod Renewal but they're also much more than that, much broader musically, and miles from any postpunky connoatations. the mod fanzine Maximum Speed called them a 'new wave soul band' which I reckon hits the nail bang one. they'll also be the first band to transcend the movement.
I say this firstly beacause Carol, star of this week's liva page, went a bundle on them and she has the uncanny knack of going a bundle on any act destined to 'crossover'. and secondly because as well as being a musically excellent dance band they also have songs possessed of that sort of instantly memorable irrepressible hookline that causes acute embarassment on the morning-after-the-gig-before 9.05 Kidbrook to Charing Cross choo-choo.
Thus far, in under five gigging months they've built up a solidly loyal street following, regulary pack out the Marquee and have generated a buzz, spelt BUZZZZZZZZ, so loud round the West End agencies and A&R departments that it all but deafens innocent by-standers and causes great distress to footloose and fancy free flea-bitten mongrels.
Yet six months ago most "informed commentators" would have written Ian Page and guitarist Dave Cairns off in the great big elephant's graveyard of failed music biz hopefuls.
IAN and Dave, the current Secret Affair songwriting team, were formerly the back bone of the New Hearts, all round flopperoonies who floundered in the powerpop plague and played their last ever gig at Reading Festival last year. They'd signed to CBS in '77 and finally got out of the contract last month (retainers stopped four months ago, they've lived on savings and intermittent gig income ever since).
The pressures, false promises, phoney friendship and genral sham and hollowness they experienced at the hands of the Biz have made them cynical and bitter.
"Soo, when we decided to form Secret Affair", Ian explains, "we put an advert out, 'Drummer and Bassist' wanted - must have a grudge against the business."
That was Dennis Smith on bass, formerly of Advertising and Chris Bennet on drums. They played their debut gig at the Jam's secret Reading University do at the beginning of this year but the band weren't happy with Bennet and finally managed to filch Seb Shelton from the Young Bucks in April to replace him.
Both Dave and Ian are extremely articulate, Ian firing words out like an out of control gatling gun. Before the gig in the dressing room with the Purple Herats he's completely unmanageable, playing the 'Coronation Street' theme on his trumpet and living out his strange delusions of grandeur: "I am a Hamburger", "I am a dressing room" und so weiter".
"It's worth playing with Secret Affair just to watch Ian going through his tantrums" opines Purple Heart Rob Manton. A true, but not exactly the best environment for in depth interviews. So I drag Dave and ian out to the car park where we shelter from the teaming rain in a quiet Volvo backseat and get down to business...
WE CHOSE the name, "Ian explains, "because we all had a real no bullshit attitude to what we were gonna do. We weren't gonna let anybody get their hooks in, y'know. It was the old cliche, if it works of if it falls to pieces we've done exactly what we've wanted to do with no compromises - we don't need them bastards. If anybody was interested they're quite welcome to come along but then they'd be in on the secret."
East End Mods, many of them ex-skins, started getting in on the secret early on.
"We really didn't know Mod was going on", Ian's at pains to explain. "Our original idea was to have this group of kids called Glory boys, a new kind of kid walking up and down Wardour Street taking the place over.
"And what they were, was kids with suss - they knew about the inside of the music business which made them cynics, but it was beacause they knew so much thet they could be optimistic. that's why they could change things.
"The original idea was that we'd go out and do so well live that we'd built up a really big following, so we literally had to be signed up - like the Banshees. But the mod thing crept up on us."
"It's funny 'cos the New Hearts had always been very strictly a sixties based band, the clothes aswell. I used to wear a red suit - that was a big mod thing - Dave used to wear ties and button downs, all the band used to wear striped blazers but we never used to say we were Mod cos we weren't conscious of that.
"Us and the Jam were the only two bands at the time who looked smart and interestingly enough when we first toured with them in '77 the papers called it 'The March Od the mods'. when our second single came out one reviewer said 'this lot sound as if they could be riding Vespas and wearing parkas!.."
Yeah, but you were never good. That's why everyone's saying how come this terrible band has spawned a band like you.
Dave: "It was lack of musicanship in a lot of ways. The ideas we had were like high energy and very sixties but there was no dance beat. Nobody could dance to the New Hearts - it was bad musianship in the rhythm section. that's why we've got these guys in.
"Our lyrics have changed too - it's just the way we've grown up over the last two years, but a lot of the ideas are the same, the frustrations are still the same."
Ian: "Except now we've got more suss. We won't get fooled again."
How d'you feel abot the 'new wave soul', tag?
Ian: "It's okay in terms of old soul. See ...if there was a formula to what we do, it would be like - you listen to any old Tamla Motown tracks and if you take out the bass and drums and the feel of the bass and drums, then add an angry powerful guitar and lyrics that aplly to today instead of a silly love songs - that's our sound. the bass and drums provide the dance, the guitar provides the energy and the lyrics provide the thought."
Dave: " A guy from Maximum Speed said on London Weekend telly, what's happening isn't just a mod revival, the kids are starting to dress and the promoters move in, but the thing that will stay alive is that the kids are into dressing up and dancing."
Ian: " We hate the interpretation eveyone else puts on mod. Yes we are mod but that's completely different from calling something else punk or heavy rock. Mod is a way of thinking, whatever the year, whatever the situation, whatever the music. It's a different approach to what else is happening at the time. That's what mod did then, that's what we're doing now. We're mods without parkas."
Dave: "What a lot of people are missing out is people think that Mod means wearing a parka and looking scuffy with an old target t-shirt and a Who sticker. That isn't MOD. Mod was fashion and the Who came fucking years later. Fashion."
Ian: "And that isn't sheeplike, it's the opposite. It's people shouting out for themselves and trying to make themselves as individual as possible - you get a basic of what mod looks like and the whole idea is to look as different as the rest as possible within that framework..."
Dave: "And our kids care about their clothes. if you come to our gigs the kids are all in smart suits and the ones who turn up in parkas have got scooters outside. Our kids are into fashion. They go out every week looking for clothes abd they're into go go not pogo and that is what we're about."
Ian: "Taking the disco out of dance music.".