Nowt to Lose But Your Mind! Asylum (Roy Ward Baker 1972)

I first saw Asylum in 1994 on late-night TV. I were watching with my dad, who about ten minutes into the film went “Aaah! Saw this at the pictures when it came out. Total rubbish!” Still, he saw it through with me, even putting up with my turning the air of that tiny living room foul with noxious fag smoke; that’s how good Asylum is, you see.

It set off my love of 1960s and ’70s anthology horrors (or ‘portmanteau horrors’ as the more pretentious insist – insist! – on calling them). Most of them were produced by Amicus - ‘the studio that dripped blood’. They were less famous, less Gothic, and less claret-and-bosoms obsessed than Hammer yet more famous than the very odd Tigon studios, which were formed in 1966 by exploitation king Tony Tenser - surely the Paul Raymond of British cinema – and featured medieval witchcraft, beasts in the cellar, and much-terrorised dolly birds and mods. 

Anyway, Asylum is forever a flick of joyous and gory glory. In four trim little tales of malfeasance written by Robert Bloch of Pyscho fame, we encounter voodoo, Formica mini-bars, restless mummified limbs, vengeful dummies, axe-scarred mistresses, anachronistic tailors, and minuscule  mind-controlled, metal-bodied agents of evil. Welcome to the Happy House.

Young Doctor Martin (Robert Powell) arrives for an interview at a remote commuter-belt asylum. He’s greeted by Patrick Magee’s lugubrious Dr Rutherford, who is wheelchair-bound. “An accident,” he murmurs in rich, fruity tones, adding menacingly, “Never turn your back on a patient.”

Powell’s ‘test’ to secure employment is to speak with a number of hopelessly insane patients and hear their stories in order to discern which one is (or was) Doctor B. Starr, Rutherford’s former associate and now an inmate who has taken on a new, psychopathic persona. Drawing himself up with all the arrogance of relative youth, Martin chuffs that he most certainly will recognise him. With one eyebrow raised, Dr Rutherford responds to this monumentally sexist assumption by purring ‘“Him”? How d’you know the doctor’s a man?’

Robert Powell as Dr Martin: heated Carmen rollers not pictured

And so Martin ascends the stairs which are hung with framed Hogarth prints depicting the various stages of insanity, (a sick comic touch – somewhat akin to displaying foetuses in jars in an abortion clinic waiting room). At the secure ward door, he is greeted by his guide Reynolds (a cheerful yet taciturn Geoffrey Bayldon). Meeting his subjects one by one, each of their stories are told in flashback.

Frozen Fear: being the adventures of Bonnie (Barbara Parkins), once a gorgeous, raven-haired gal about town, now thoroughly out to lunch after a fight with the vengeful body parts of her lover’s murdered wife . . .

Barbara Parkins as Bonnie: fond of matching her outfits to her decor

As we can expect from an Amicus anthology, more than one grim little tale takes place in a fraught domestic setting, each dysfunctional in its own unique way. Here, Richard Todd’s porky, be-cravatted Walter makes himself a brandy at his awesome leather-padded, Formica-topped bar just as his wife Ruth (a haughty Sylvia Syms) arrives home in high dudgeon. They’re clearly a miserable couple, sniping sarcastically at each other. Ruth has just attended a “spiritual lesson” (how very seventies of her) and is sporting a tooth-and-claw bracelet she airily claims will protect her from forces stronger than life, death or evil . . . like Bonnie. Dishonest to the core, Walter tells her that’s all over. Ruth smirks and sneers that she’s glad, as she has no intention of letting him go, ever, and sinks her manicured talons into his shoulders to show him she damn well means it.

Walter and Ruth: runners up in the 1972 Homes & Gardens Lounge of the Year Awards (points lost for sticking a pot-plant in the ashtray)

But Walter has other plans, and soon, Ruth’s been slaughtered and quartered. However, it turns out she was not the biggest obstacle to Walter and Bonnie’s happiness: her voodoo bracelet is. Initially, there’s no sign of said talisman’s potency as an axe-wielding Walter separates Ruth into six easy pieces, wraps her neatly in brown paper packages tied up with string (certainly something to give Sister Maria pause) and places her in the deep freeze. 

Ruth realises . . .

Ruth chills out

But then he spies the trinket lying poignantly on the floor. Unmoved, he tosses it in with her (“Rest in pieces!”), which turns out to be a huge mistake. For in a few hours, the charm has worked its black magic: Ruth’s paper-trussed arm returns to life, escapes its frozen hell and squeezes the life out of her widower’s windpipe.

Ruth's revenge!

Later, when Bonnie turns up, Ruth’s assorted body parts are out in force and the guilty girl finds herself assaulted on all sides by an aggressive, busty torso and angry athletic limbs. Finally, the arm bearing the ‘anouwanga’ bracelet – that which Ruth claimed would protect her from forces “stronger than life or death” – breaks free of its paper and cravenly, deliciously descends upon a frantic Bonnie from above. 

Not one of Bonnie's Favourite Things

Cornered

Bonnie und the Blade

As it grabs at her face, she swings the axe on herself, and we’re treated to a classic POV shot of the gleaming blade bashing repeatedly away. Back at the asylum, Bonnie giggles and hums to herself with innocent menace before parting her ratted mane to reveal the livid, cleaved-meat scars she hides beneath it. “Now do you believe me?” she says in sugary tones. “Now?”

Never has a woman been so in need of Dermablend and a deep-conditioning treatment

The Weird Tailor: being the adventures of Bruno, a former tailor of unspecified mittel-European descent whose mannequin turns on him after years of being pricked, prodded and fingered (lucky bugger)

In a confusingly anachronistic corner of seventies London, Bruno and his wife Anna toil wearily in their failing, threadbare tailor’s shop. There’s a touch of pathos in their insistence on living in what appears to be 1947, as Bruno laments the loss of his once-fine customers of long ago to the unsympathetic, bulldog-faced landlord, who’ll be leaving empty handed once again.

Trouble brewing

But lo – here is Peter Cushing’s Mr Smith to save the day! Splendidly angular, Cushing’s curious customer sports an aura of cash and mystery, and he’s Bruno and Anna’s first client in an age. With him, he brings some fabulous reflective, white-hot material that Tony Romano will one day make famous. He states that he wants a suit made from this and his written instructions must be followed to the letter and worked on only after midnight and before dawn. He’ll be waiting for it, with a handsome payment, on Friday night.

But it transpires Smith is Bruno’s equal in poverty. He inhabits barren rooms, having sold everything. The reason for this, he reveals to a crestfallen Bruno come Friday night, was to purchase a particular book – a weighty, almost comically ancient-looking tome which he hefts into view. This curious volume is full of calibrations, formulas and illustrations of a suit – the suit.

Voodoo Vogue

Smith also harbours a green-faced cadaver in the next room – his son, he says, dead from natural causes. And it’s the suit with its properties beyond human imaginings that’ll soon reverse that. But Bruno refuses to hand it over, and Smith pulls a gun on him (in a benign, ‘This I must do!’ way). In the ensuing scuffle, Smith is shot and Bruno flees.

Father & Son

Once home, he tells Anna to burn the sinister suit, but instead she puts it on the rather odd-looking shop dummy (a facsimile of Oliver Reed in The Devils). Anna looks proudly at the dummy and says “I call him Otto. I sometimes talk to him when you’re away.” Panicked, Bruno says she must burn the suit. Anna says they must confess to the police. As they wrestle over the receiver, the besuited Otto jerks his head sideways and stretching his waxen limbs, lumbers toward the warring couple. 

The Wax Man Cometh

We can see by now that the dummy Otto is being played by an actor with bits of quivering, badly-attached latex stuck to his visage. This only adds to the humour, not horror, of him going straight for Bruno and throttling him. This dénouement is eye-rollingly daft, but perhaps fitting for the conclusion of what’s the weakest segment of the film. Bruno’s adamant that Otto is “Ay-liiiive!” on the streets of London somewhere, but he’s clearly deluded: he’s obviously shacked up with Anna.

Lucy Comes to Stay: being the adventures of Barbara, a murderous schizophrenic who’s one part classy, cerebral brunette, one part platinum-haired troublemaker.

Babs: a slave to the side-parting

With this story, it seems like Bloch temporarily ran out of inspiration and decided to rehash Pyscho set in bourgeois Brit suburbia. Still, I’m not complaining – where else do you get to see a class act like Charlotte Rampling running around stabbing folk with shears and cackling fit to burst, all while inexplicably wearing what looks like a Dutch air hostess’s uniform?

Barbara (Rampling) has been collected from the loony bin by her frightfully priggish brother George (James Villiers, eternal avatar of the languid English toff). She’s happy and relaxed, but her expression switches starkly when George alludes to the problems that got her sectioned in the first place. “That’s all over with,” she murmurs ominously. It isn’t of course, and we’re left in no doubt that trouble’s brewing when Babs’s alter-ego appears in the form of the sinister, minxy Lucy (Britt Ekland), who wears a blouse with lapels like spearheads and flares so extreme that no wardrobe on earth could be wide enough to accommodate them. Lucy is soon gallivanting evilly around the house, cutting phone wires and slipping powered sedatives in to George’s tea and generally confusing Barbara further and feeding the seed of paranoia in her already fragile mind. 

"Barbara. It appears that . . .

. . . we are all out of Elnett."

Whispering huskily into Barbara’s ear, Lucy says of the jolly, apple-cheeked dame George has hired to look after her: “She’s not your nurse you know. She’s your guard. Your keeper!” Babs happens to have inherited all her parents’ wealth, which, as Lucy points out, gives George more than enough reason to join forces with Nurse Higgins and have her slung back in the snake pit.

George: one nil to Babs

To this end, Barbara/Lucy decides to rid herself of her detractors and so gleaming shears are plunged straight into the hearts of her calculating brother and poor old Nurse Higgins. Lucy, the gleeful side of this bad penny, responds to such bloodied ends with an expression of queenly triumph. Barbara, however, on seeing her handiwork, bears the weight of guilt with an expression of slack-jawed disbelief.

Barbara - or Lucy?

Lucy - or Barbara?

Manikins of Horror: being the adventures of Dr Byron - a formidable perma-tanned academic with more than a touch of the mad scientist.

The Lomster and his metal minions

In the final segment, Dr Martin is introduced to Dr Byron (a smooth, bass-voiced Herbert Lom) who inhabits a room that resembles a GP’s surgery with a phalanx of glass bottles on display and a skeleton grinning in the corner. However, there’s no altruism in his work – merely ego. For Dr Byron has a cabinet containing tiny, metal-bodied figures of all his fellow inmates and asylum staff – each identifiable by a lifelike head. They are, he claims, alive, powered by psychokinesis. 

"Soon you'll be a man, my son!"

None too amused by such flagrant disregard for his intelligence, Dr Martin states that Byron is clearly Dr Starr and makes his way back to Rutherford’s office, little knowing that Byron’s sent his mini-me on ahead, despatching Rutherford with a scalpel to the brain. It’s a squirmworthy moment when Martin stamps on the thing in fear, only to discover that it is indeed real: teeny-tiny innards marinated in blood spill unctuously from the manikin’s mangled body.

Ready for action . . .

 . . . in for the kill.

Rushing back upstairs past the Hogarth prints, Martin discovers that Byron too, bears the marks of his crushed manikin. And so it’s left to the rodent-faced Reynolds to provide the twist ending. Dr Martin, it seems, hasn’t been at all successful in identifying the newly insane Dr Starr after all . . .

"Getting to know yooouuuu . . ."

Stare at this picture and you will hear Dr Starr's maniacal laugh: clear as a bell and nasty as a snake slithering into your BED!

While Asylum is rollicking nasty fun, it doesn't bear analysis unless you want to be immediately marked out as a contender for the Horror Buff's Pseud's Corner. For me, it stands up proudly in the 21st century - chills, spice, wit and all. (But then, I've always felt like an exile in the present.) Also, as a kitsch hound its period charms are like bonio to me, so perhaps it's more of an acquired taste than I'm willing to concede. 

Ultimately, the minimal dialogue saves Asylum from ridiculousness. If you think this is a film that takes its responsibilities in any way seriously, then maybe you too, are a candidate for the Laughing Academy, my friend. Because if camp is the definition of failed seriousness, then Asylum escapes being damned to that overcrowded realm, unlike so many of its contemporaries.

The film is available on YouTube. Like Ruth in Frozen Fear, it is in several parts (*cackles* etc).

Rockers: Folk Devilry in Leather

Rockers have been suffering from a mistaken subcultural identity for over fifty years. Teds, those frothily-quiffed dandy thugs in Technicolor facsimiles of Granddad’s 1911 Sunday Best, were not Rockers. And though the Greaser tag eventually became interchangeable with Rocker, flowing alongside Rockabilly and later Psychobilly, into one big, grease-slicked reservoir, Rockers were at first out there on their own, a very pre-Swinging Sixties phenomenon.

Their roots were in the immediate post-war era: an historical incubating period for nearly every youth cult, big or small for the next 25 years. Between 1945 and 1950, the average wage of teens in Britain increased at twice the average rate of the adult wage. This new prosperity collided with the explosion of American Rock ‘n’ Roll, Hollywood’s take on insubordinate youth in The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel without a Cause, and, oddly, the construction of arterial roads around major British cities – veritable racetracks with the circumference of a metropolis. British motorcycle building hit a peak in these years too, and the youths who roared up and down the freshly set concrete on these gleaming monsters became known as ‘Ton-Up Boys’ (Ton-Up being slang for driving at 100mph), whizzing by in a phalanx of smoky leather, smoggy exhaust smoke & inky blue denim.

Where it all began: Brando as Johnny in The Wild One (1954)

By the early sixties, the Ton-Ups had become as well known – if not better known - for their devotion to Rockabilly and a singular style of dress, as for their motorcycles, and the Rockers were born (Teds, conversely, had by now passed into history – at least as a visible youth cult). Rockers now began to strip down and soup up their bog-standard factory motorcycles, which ended up closely resembling racer bikes: speed not comfort was the desired end.  Storming north and south of the river and around London’s  arterial roads was thirsty work, and while battered leather, reflective slicked hair and the tribal stomp of engineer boots quickly became unwelcome – if not banned – in dancehalls and ‘respectable’ pubs, The Ace Café, the Ace of Spades and the Chelsea Bridge Tea Stall quickly became Rocker haunts, not only for slurping endless mugs of sickly-sweet beige tea while chuffing unfiltered tabs, but as starting and finishing points for increasingly competitive & treacherous motorcycle races. Rockers were loathed by ‘motorcycle enthusiasts’ and the feeling was probably mutual.

As the subculture grew stronger, the outfit became tougher, largely born of practicality. The leather jackets became increasingly studded, patched and covered in enamel or metal pin badges. Levis were tough, midnight blue and wide-legged, with turn-ups of several inches plus. Under these, a Rocker would sport the classic Lewis Leather biker, or engineer boots. Hair was Brylcreemed into shimmering pomps, ramrod stiff quiffs, or slick, swept-back waves; certainly nothing the chill air could shift while roaring up the North Circular, were you forgoing your helmet or peaked leather cap (latterly a much-favoured fetish item). A fluttering white silk scarf and aviator goggles completed the look. Of an evening, the boots might be replaced by crepe-soled brothel creepers in a spectrum of rainbow colours and off came the leathers to reveal Daddy-O-style bowling shirts. 

Pomps 'n' Pepsi

Rocker girlfriends (for they were nearly always girlfriends – they didn’t have subcultural autonomy like their rival Mod sisters) wore a similar daytime get-up, but with a wild bouffant & more eyeliner than a silent movie star. When the sun went down, she’d shimmy into a circulation-hindering pencil skirt, a bullet bra and a pair of spike heels. Thus attired, the Rocker couple would dance to Elvis, Bo Diddley, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury, Johnny Burnette, Wanda Jackson and Link Wray. 

Gene und Eddie: rumble

Their drug of choice was beer, for Rockers where emphatically – almost puritanically – anti-drugs. The reason for this appears to be little other than Mods’ fondness for them: anything Mods liked, Rockers emphatically hated. A Rocker would have no more necked a Purple Heart than he or she would have donned a parka and jumped on a Vespa.

Circa 1960

By the late '60s, after a succession of well-publicised seaside clashes with Mods a few years earlier had helped create Folk Devils out of both cults, Rockers began to splinter as elements of their world became appropriated (as usual) by hippies who liked motorbikes, i.e. Hell’s Angels. Easy Rider, released in 1969, was anathema to Rockers, and it’s hardly surprising; it’s harder to think of a more wholesale hippie theft of Rock ‘n’ Roll than this beardy, weirdy, much-lauded film. From here on, the ‘Greaser’ tag took over.

In the early-mid ’70s, old Teds and Greasers became one on the cultural imagination: both were seen as vaguely tragic throwbacks. Teds undoubtedly helped this attitude along with their innate conservatism. The social and political changes of the sixties and seventies hadn’t touched them, and they liked it that way. Greasers were not cut from the same cloth, but they were united with Teds in their hatred of Punk, come ’76, casually beating several shades of Crazy Colour out of the King’s Rd crowd of a Saturday afternoon for what they were doing to ‘their’ Rock ‘n’ Roll. Fortunately, youth creates afresh, and those who loved their parents’ ’50s and ’60s Rockabilly as much as the new-fangled three-chord thrash combined the two and Psychobilly was born, alongside a passionate Rockabilly revival, with bands like The Cramps, The Polecats and The Meteors leading the way. Psychobilly and the new rockabilly were faster & harder than the originals, and former style took the original look to cartoon extremes – 10-inch quiffs, shaved temples, brightly coloured tattoos: and this was just the girls.

Hard Girls: the backbone of all badassery

The Rockabilly revival never truly died out and remains a solid subculture today; a colourful, hardcore, obsessive alternative to a world that seems to drift from the bland to the blander, day in, day out.

Your author's father on the speedway, 1958

Dude 'tude

Rita Tushingham and Colin Campbell in The Leather Boys (1964)

Chelsea Bridge

Dahn The Ace

Originally published on Queens of Vintage.com, August 2009

Mod: Socially Mobile

Mod has oft been described as ‘Clean living under difficult circumstances’, which is eloquent, but perhaps misleading – after all, there wasn’t anything ‘clean’ about necking fistfuls of amphetamines of a Saturday night down The Marquee. But it sums up the essence of what Mod was originally all about: aspiration and a desire for a better lot when your circumstances suggested such things were permanently out of reach. Mod is usually thought of as a largely apolitical subculture, but the burning desire for social mobility that lay behind it - even only in the aesthetic sense - suggests there was a tiny political spark in its fast-beating heart. The pockets of the original Mods may have been empty, but they were lined with silk. They were of the present, looking forever forward.

South London 1964

Like a virulent strain of flu, post-war austerity long outstayed its welcome. As it wore off, there was another European invasion – that of French culture. Prototype Mods sat uncomfortably through the first wave of the New Wave, sported French Crops & wore Italian suits. But their allegiance to all things continental lapsed when they’d had an earful of French Jazz which was closer to Trad then Modernist, and when sartorially, they realised they could get what they desired closer to home. In 1962 Town magazine ran a piece in which young working-class men from Stamford Hill in north-east London enthused about the best tailors in the Smoke : “Bilgorri of Bishopsgate -  he’s ace, all the best faces go there. And John Stephens – he’s great on trousers.” From here on, Mod became a very Anglo Affair.

Arguably, this was the first time since the Dandies of the Victorian era that young men were openly enthusiastic about fashion and accessories, which when you consider that the twentieth century had rolled around to its seventh decade, is really saying something. Moreover, these were working-class and (largely) heterosexual men. One teenager, Marc Feld (later one Marc Bolan), complained to Town that many of his peers were overtly snobby about where they got their gear: “I saw a gingham shirt in Woolworths this morning – only ten bob. A few alterations and it would be as good as anything from John Michael or John Stephen.” His advice was probably taken up though, for this was a scene in which faces – as opposed to magazines and designers – set the diktats. Word would percolate out from Stamford Hill all the way to Wardour Street that this week, they’d be mainly wearing cufflinks, which might have been supplanted by cravats the week after.

Mr Marc Feld (front right) before his white swan came along

Modernist by name, Modernist by nature: it was a heady, narcissistic, fastidious, fast-moving, fast-evolving subculture, which moved that little bit faster with the adoption of Scooters (which also helped incorporate the Parka into the Mod uniform –fine tailoring needed protection from mud & rain). Vespas or Lambrettas with bumpers & side panels that had been electroplated till they gleamed gave a working-class kid accessible mobility, and in a pre-night-bus era an easy ride home after speeding their brains out to American R ‘n’ B till 6am on a Sunday, Stamford Hill Broadway not being walkable from Soho and all that.

The Mod allegiance to R ‘n’ B and soul had actually started in the coffee bars of the very late ‘50s and early ‘60s, despite that scene being associated with Beatniks and jazz. For many of the coffee bars had half-empty juke boxes which black American GIs stationed in Blighty for the Cold War would add their records to. Word got out. These same soldiers would also sell their rare booty – both R ‘n’ B and rare soul records – to young Mods, who were obsessed with the raw sound. With Jamaican ska and British Beat added to the mix, Mods of both genders could be seen showing off their moves and streamlined silhouettes down the Marquee, The Flamingo, Le Discotheque, The Roaring Twenties, and later at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and of course, the Wigan Casino, as Northern Soul went from strength to strength.

Early revivalists, Streatham 1976

With their full wage packets in their pockets - no more donating half of it to the family teapot as their older Ted brothers may have done - these slender sorts would stalk the Kings Road and Carnaby Street of a weekend or lunch hour (were they not forgoing lunch for an hour of dancing in Noonday Underground, if you believe Tom Wolfe's account in The Pump House Gang). There, they would purchase the slimmest of suits, immaculate form-fitting shirts, whip-thin leather ties, cashmere V-necks, snowy white polo-necks, and winkle pickers as sharp as spearheads. For the working-class male, shopping had previously been the preserve of their sisters: now they joined ‘em. For while it’s often said Mod was very much a Boys’ Club, Mod Girls were arguably the first female members of a youth subculture. Teds had had loyal girlfriends - some even wore Drapes over their petticoats - but they were not autonomous the way Mod Girls were. Modettes had their own look, their own shops and thus jobs that allowed them to Mod-it-up all day, every day. They painted their lips cardiac-arrest white, their eyebrows black or brown, and while they coolly revelled in their sexuality, taking the mainstream mini to hitherto unseen heights (thanks to Ms Quant)  they also dabbled in androgyny with tufted, micro-fringed crops a la Julie Driscoll, or else geometric bobs sharp enough to take your eye out. 

Girls a la mod(e)

There was a feminine influence in the attire of the male Mods too in the form of cravats, in smooth, lacquered, blow-dried hair, and also in their dancefloor behaviour: much of the African-American soul was swooning, romantic music. There were harder Mods of course, who preferred the fast skanking rhythm of blue beat and ska, shorter hair, Fred Perry and Sta-Prest and who would later evolve into skinheads. But for now, they shared the dancefloor, each lost in their own moves; and if music is sex, as they say (and the rhythms of Mod music were nothing if not carnal) Mods of both genders were indulging in very public masturbation. Come ’64, and the Mod sound exploded with the dishonestly named The Pretty Things and of course, The Who. (The Faces, who came along in ’69, were almost revivalist).

It was inevitable that Mod was going to move out of the margins and into the mainstream, but commercial assimilation was not what sounded the death knell for Mod – nor was it the first whiff of patchouli oil that signified the Hippie takeover that was around the corner (Hippie was Mod’s diametric opposite – only a bunch of kids from privileged backgrounds could afford to look so scruffy, so shabby). No, the real reason was that few of the Mods and Modettes escaped the gravitational pull of their backgrounds; most of them found themselves up the aisle and up the duff come 25. This is not to say many of them didn’t Keep the Faith (well into middle age and beyond in many cases), but those in their late twenties and early thirties simply didn’t register on the cultural radar the way youth did.

'ard Mod couple 1971

By 1979, New Mod found itself on the frontlines of the post-punk style wars. This baffled some original Mods, who pointed out that since Mod derived from Modernist it was all about looking forward, not back. But this was to miss the point of Mod’s essential timelessness, its innate modernity – for the Mod look (and attitude) hasn’t got a hint of anachronism about it. Unlike a be-mohawked Kings Road throwback still charging tourists £1 a snap by Camden Lock, a Mod need not indulge in such a con. 

Your author's cousin Darren, with Lambretta and aunty's fetching nets, Sheffield 1979

Originally published on Queens of Vintage.com, March 2010

"One-two-three and UP YOUR BUM!" Lost Girl Punk Band of the Day: The Gymslips

Comes with chips! The 'slips 1982

My coffers are empty, which means no new Cartier telephone dialling-pin for me this month, among other essentials. It also means no new records. So chanelling the idea that when you’re hungover you tend to discover amazing clothes you’d forgotten you owned, I went rooting through my vinyl hoping to come across some forgotten gem that hadn’t troubled my ears for a while. And I found the Gymslips’ first and only album. (I also found the soundtrack to early ’80s lesbian classic The Legend of Billie Jean, but I won’t be writing about that, no matter the merits of a Pat Benatar ditty or five).

For your safety (well, it def weren't for theirs . . .)

In the 1990s, those with a shaky grasp of history and sociology (i.e. the media) liked to blather on about The Ladette, as if never before in history had anyone with a vagina gone out, got drunk, chuffed a few fags and ogled men (or other women, for that matter). Oh, no. Never. Not until Cox and Ball did it. So it was talked up as a Zeitgeisty phenomenon. But The Gymslips were well at it over 30 years ago, creating cheeky, raucous, garagey glam-pop-punk while downing enough booze to dissolve an elephant’s body in.

The band, who rejoiced in the mellifluous 1970s proley princess names of Karen, Suzanne and Paula (later joined by a Kathy on the keys), came variously from the East End and Kent, formed the ’slips in 1980 and referred to themselves, Richard Allen style, as ‘Renees’ - this being a late ’60s Hard Mod term for girls of said subculture; the blokes were known as ‘Ronees’. In an NME interview, Karen said that a Renee was a girl who got as much shagging done as a bloke while also matching him for pint drinking, fag smoking, nose-picking, farting, and the wearing of skinhead-style double denim. Atta Girl! Whether they meant it or not, this was a form of working-class feminism, because being unladylike is joyously feminist behaviour. Indeed, the sleevenotes of their only album describe Renees thusly: ‘Diet: excessive alcohol, pie & mash. Clothing: jeans, monkey boots, denim jackets. Habits: most disgusting things.” It was as if Beryl the Peril, Minnie the Minx, Sweary Mary and Pansy Potter the Strongman’s Daughter and had met down the Roxy.

When The Gymslips are referred to, it’s often as the only female Oi! group, which they weren’t. A case for them as the female Sham 69 is just about plausible (Hurry Up Harriet?) but their boisterous, everyone-get-yer-stomp-on yobette sound crossed with wistful and tender-yet-tough love songs posits them more as some bastard hybrid of the Sex Pistols and the Shangri-Las. Still, being a geek authority on late-’70s and early ’80s female punk and post-punk groups (yeah, you bet I’m popular), I’m well aware of the lack of influence the ‘slips have when compared to their contemporaries such as The Slits (Best Punk Band Ever), Kleenex/LiLiPUT (Best Euro Female Punk Band Ever), The Raincoats (somewhat worthy, frumpy, inventive Godmothers of Grunge), the Mo-dettes (foul-mouthed, pop-punk dandettes out for a lark), Dolly Mixtures (hyper-melodic, Mod-ish, middle-class girls, quite good at harmonising), The Bodysnatchers (de Rude Gals of Two Tone) and Marine Girls (twee-as-fuck sixth-form-busking-society types and, amazingly, faves of Kurt Cobain and the genesis of the redoubtably talented Tracey Thorn’s musical career). And so they’re largely and unjustly forgotten. Mention their name and it’s chirruping crickets all the way. Their lineage, you could say, spanned We've Got a Fuzzbox . . . to Kenickie, where the family line appears to have ended. But what genes!

Bosoms, beer, binge, bed

Their only album Rocking with the Renees was released in 1983, and is a aural monument to sheer rollicking fun. Their forte was mainly pumping, jangly mid-60s-influenced pop-punk, which had served Blondie and the Buzzcocks so well (and no doubt helped secure their cross-generational appeal). If you believe men and women play their instruments differently (and I do – there’s generally a more rhythmic bent to the sound of an all-female band; listen to the Slits and the Pistols back to back and you’ll get some idea of what I mean) then the ’slips were refuseniks, as the driving riff that opens the first track, Renees  (“ See us walkin’ down the street – monkey boots upon our feet!”) sounds like something Steve Jones would have no trouble with. There’s no doubt they could play though - the drumming’s insistent, bombastic and fierce and the basslines are hefty and Glam. 

Still, there are a considerable amount of half-inched riffs and melodies on there, which doesn’t do much to dispel the stereotype of the East End tea-leaf. They’re forgiven though, as their joyous terrace-stomp vocals have all the ballooning, shallow fun of a night on a sticky dancefloor and the lyrics betray a what-the-hell hedonism that seems oddly antiquated (“Get drunk! Get smashed! Get pissed! Get fat! We’re the Renees ’ere we come! One, two, three and UP YOUR BUM!”) Probably one of the most fun "meet the band" intros recorded since 'Hey, Hey We’re the Monkees!' Today, those lyrics would probably garner a Parental Advisory sticker - or at least an NHS one. Still, the following track is called Drink Problem, as if they felt they hadn’t already definitively dealt with their reigning passion in the first one. This song is a shameless ode to Drinking Irresponsibly and Loving It (“Whisky makes you frisky, gin makes you sin, brandy makes you randy and rum makes you . . .”) OK, so it’s hardly Patti Smith’s lyrical league, but it does put a huge smile on my face - not least because I now can’t help but imagine Smith, fist in air, reciting those lines in that deadly serious, Shamanic way of hers in some East Village café, 40 years ago. 

They had their class politics and gender issues, riffing on the former on Barbara Cartland (“Poor old gal what a life she’s lead, with her stately home and her four-poster bed”) and the latter on Face Lifts, in which a sad, ageing housewife goes to see a surgeon with his eye on the main chance who tells her she’s an ugly old cow and to put her future in his hands. Agony aunts get short shrift in Dear Marje, as do pop stars who let you down by running to fat, drugs and LA (Wandering Stars). They also graced the world with a well ballsy cover of 48 Crash and Connie Francis’s taunting Robot Man (one in a long-line of songs from gals who won’t take second best, stretching from Sophie Tucker’s Horse Playin' Poppa to Missy Elliot’s One-Minute Man). 

They garnered many decent reviews and Gave Good Interview, too (“Nah. We’ve never had men yelling ‘Gerrem off!’ Probably because they’re terrified of what’s underneath...”) but they sold few records, perhaps because they didn’t seem to know their strengths, which really lay in ’60s-style shimmering pop tunes like Thinking of You and Yo-Yo, rather than their Rabelaisian if repetitive ladette anthems. The NME were surprisingly keen on them (“...refreshing antidote to the conventional belles of the ball . . . ladylike they ain’t – and that is their strength.”). I say ‘surprisingly’ because being bright, good-humoured girls who said things like “We’ve paid our dues, but we still don’t get any decent groupies – all wallies, no hunks!” set them decidedly apart from said organ’s favoured alumni at the time, i.e. pretentious post-punkers referencing Baudrillard in their lyrics or threatening to record concept albums about fascist coups in Equatorial Guinea or somesuch. Sounds (NME’s main rival in the ’70s and ’80s) supported them staunchly too - sadly, usually in the form of that feeble excuse for a troglodyte, Gary Bushell. John Peel loved them. 

However, they split in 1984 owing to contractual problems, and Paula, the guitarist, recruited a new line-up and began afresh. This new incarnation of the band produced a few Peel Sessions and the new members looked and sounded more like a bunch of backcombed Camden Palace acolytes – they were only the same group in name. After they spilt Karen went on to join Oi-botherers Serious Drinking (natch), and Paula went ska with the Deltones. These two even teamed up again as The Renees and released a single titled He Called Me a Fat Pig and Walked Out on Me.

Minus a few teeth, you can bet.

Wotta cheek