FOUR CAN PLAY: Mo-dettes

Hangin' high: the Mo-dettes in London 1979

My introduction to the Mo-dettes came in the form of a badge I found in a vintage clothes shop in Greenwich, south London, in 1999. It featured a drawing of a reclining, lantern-jawed, be-suited man - an ebony-haired hero straight out of an illustrated Jackie romance. His smirk suggested thoughts of a carnal nature, as well it might, since the thought bubble coming from his slick head read ‘Mmm… Mo-dettes!’ I was intrigued by the name. Was it a misprint? Surely they were called the Modettes? Or maybe the hyphen had run amok and it was supposed to be Mod-ettes? My confusion was further compounded a few months later when browsing through the paper mountains at VinMag in Soho, I came across a copy of The Face from September 1980 emblazoned with the tagline ‘Modettes a la Mode’ and featuring as the cover star Jane, the bassist, looking mischievously elfin. Surely such a clanging misprint wouldn’t have made it on to the cover - they must’ve been a mod revival band. And they must have been well fucked off about the badge…

But then I heard ‘White Mice’. All became clear, and a fan was born.

I later discovered the group had been fond of the word ‘mode’ and  added the latter half as an homage to the girl groups of the pre-swinging sixties (The Marvelettes, et al). Yet the three-decade-old misconception of them as a mod group hasn’t died out (they frequently appear on mod compilations) and in the 21^st century, the Mo-dettes remain a cult.

Thoughts of an impure nature

They say too much is made of punk and the way it democratised creativity, that those who run today’s media were so in thrall to in their youth that its cultural value is overstated. Nonsense - not enough is made of it. For one thing, it’s easily forgotten today how minimal the presence of female musicians was prior to punk. Before Patti Smith made her Shamanic assault on rock ‘n’ roll in 1975 (concurrent with The Runaways – who were a different beast altogether), many a young gal had fronted a band on the strength of her tits ‘n’ teeth appeal alone, but known female musicians that you couldn’t take home to your mother could until then be counted on one hand: Sparkle Moore had herself a slide guitar and a hot line in rockabilly hip-slinging but gave it up to be a housewife; the Velvets had Mo Tucker pounding the drums; Joan and Joni had their acoustics and Suzi had her electric. (And Janis? Janis pretty much preferred to be seen as one of the boys.) Jane Crockford, the Mo-dettes’ gifted bassist, complained to Kris Needs in 1979, “When I was a little girl I used to look at bands like The Beatles and go, ‘It’s not fair! They’re all boys! Girls can’t grow up and be in a pop group!’ I was really pissed off about it. It turned out alright though.”

"Small fish and large chips please, mate" Brighton 1979

The Mo-dettes formed in April 1979, when punk had succumbed to headline hype and become the ultimate phoney rebel stance. It had also regressed to a level of thuggery fuelled by Colt 45 and conventionality fuelled by careerism. Alas, this didn’t stop the lemmings-on-the-lam march from all points north to Chelsea, and ramalama three-chord thrash just kept on coming. But the music the Mo-dettes ultimately produced – rough-edged urban pop-punk – suggests that unlike scores of their contemporaries, they’d woken up and smelt the '80s. This is not to say their music contained the baby cries of hair metal, synthpop or richly syllabled new romantic horrors, but they clearly realised that punk’s first noxious wave had long since crashed on the shore and ebbed away. This was something different. They were not as angular and aggressive as the Slits, not as earthy and experimental as The Raincoats, but all three bands were progeny of punk’s first wave, which allowed anyone to throw off the shackles and discover the strange, delicious things that came with such freedom.

Vixens amid Vitrolite

Their 1979-1982 lifespan coincided with the post-punk era, and though the Mo-dettes were not ‘post-punk’ in the accepted definition of the term (i.e. complex, experimental, cerebral, avant-garde) with their melding of harmony, speed, pop, punk attitude, humour, sass, and “female chauvinism” they were at the very least, members of a halfway sorority house between the first wave of punk and its progeny. The dubby basslines and sixties girl-group sensibility was arguably an example of post-punk’s black/white fusion creeping into their sound, but ultimately, they bristled with too much energy and sarky-snarky humour to truly fit post-punk’s dry, sometimes po-faced model.

Likewise, they seemed to have little time for the often humourless, partisan feminist politics of the day. They appeared in NME’s “Women in Rock” issue on 29 March 1980 under extreme sufferance. Despite the journalist, Deanne Pearson, explaining to the girls that she was writing about women in rock, not feminists in rock, the interview went from bad to worse, with questioner and questioned almost coming to blows. While Jane Crockford conceded that they anticipated potential trouble with record labels who regarded all-girls bands as novelties, she insisted that being girls had, on the whole, been a help, not a hindrance. She added (possibly as a wind-up, given the fractious tone between the band and Pearson) that exploiting their sexuality might bring them a wider audience still, which was fine with her. Ultimately, Ramona, the singer, decided that she personally was a feminist if feminism meant equal rights and abortion on demand, but when it came to the band, much as they couldn’t deny their gender, they were in it for the music alone.

Poseurs

So the Mo-dettes were not fond of the “women in rock” tag, but they weren’t an anti-feminist band as such: they simply wanted to be judged up top, not down below, as it were. Later that same year, guitarist Kate told Mike Laye in a Sounds interview that she believed such compartmentalising defeated the progress of women in society by making them into “…a women’s army”, separating them from the mass of humanity and further cementing the idea of women as Other – surely the opposite of the ideology’s tenets. Simply, the Mo-dettes didn’t believe they were automatically or anatomically entitled to respect simply because of a combination of gender and the ability to play. As Jane said, “We don’t demand respect, we’re going to earn it, mate… as musicians, as ourselves.”

The original line up was Ramona Carlier (vox), Jane Crockford (bass), Kate Korris (guitar) and June Miles-Kingston (drums). Jane was unhappily playing bass in a band called Bank of Dresden. The lone female of the group, she craved her own set-up. She met Ramona at a gig and impressed by her sixties kitchen-sink heroine appearance, asked her if she could sing. Ramona shrugged and said yeah, sure. (“That’s what you did”, Ramona later said of the era’s “Anyone can, man” ethos.)

Meanwhile, Kate and June met on the set of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle while working as production assistants and subsequently tried to make music with boys, an idea scrapped following not-wholly unexpected “You’re not a bad drummer/guitarist for a girl” quips. They saw countless potential bassists and singers, mainly male, all either “unreliable or afraid” according to Kate. Fortuitously, she then met Jane in the grim environs of the Lisson Grove dole queue. They ran their ideas by each other, and an outfit was born.

Ramona had been raised in Geneva, Switzerland and had studied ballet. From bourgeois beginnings, she gravitated toward the seedier side of life, producing a punk fanzine called Lolos De Lola, hanging out on the minuscule local scene and occasionally singing backing vocals for bands (but never for Kleenex, as is often said). But she saw little evidence of anger being turned into art, and yearning for the Real Thing, aged 21, emptied her savings account and flew to London. Looking like both a raven-haired Vogue-cover beauty and a cartoonish Betty Boop-alike with eyes you could swim with dolphins in, the alarmingly cheekboned Ramona sang with an accent as broad as the Champs Elysees (“Ah zee zoze gels go by tressed in dare zum-air closs!”) which left one critic with oeuf on his face after sneering at her “O level French” in an early review. Onstage, she’d favour synthetic-to-the-touch vintage A-line mod dresses, in spite of such attire possibly compounding confusion over their name.

Hittin' them notes: Ramona in 1980

Jane’s background was worthy of a Richard Allen novel. A native of west London, she was a restless adopted child who became a runaway and street kid, immersed in the capital’s subcultures and demimonde from the tender age of 13. Years of squats, violence and drugs could have led who knows where, but punk kicked the door wide for her, opportunity wise. Arming herself with a vintage Hofner violin bass, she proved to be a mistress of rich, dubby basslines that would make her the rock of the band. Her appearance took the biscuit: a Lahndan doll with a fetching and fierce vanilla-pale peroxide flat-top offsetting her razor-sharp cheekbones, a nice line in skinhead/rockabilly fusion style courtesy of Kensington Market and an astonishing pair of replacement eyebrows (she’d shaved hers off) which looked as though they’d been fashioned from hot tar and applied via cunning use of a Gloy-stick.

June don't play musical statues. The Modes in 1980

Kate, the guitarist, had moved from New York to London in 1974. She’d founded The Slits in the searing summer of ’76, played at their debut at Harlesden Coliseum with the Clash in March 1977 and for two subsequent gigs before taking her leave, claiming in 1979 that she felt “…the whole thing with The Slits was to get as famous as possible as fast as you could [but] I enjoyed it in a way.” Strong-featured, leggy and looking haughty as a heron, with a platinum skunk-stripe in her barnet, her minimal, glass-shower guitar sound complimented Jane’s heavy bass perfectly.

June was a drop-out art student and, as it turned out, a girl for whom rhythm came as naturally as breathing, having taught herself to drum on a ramshackle £40 kit she’d bought off the Pistols’ Paul Cook. A native of Essex and a musical family (her loftily quiffed brother Robert twanged for Tenpole Tudor), making her own sounds must have been a case of when, not if. She looked like a member of a girl gang: a surly mix of biker leathers (she did indeed ride) and slightly swollen-looking lips set in a mean pout. Looking as cool as a julep whether behind the kit or no, she favoured Spartan onstage outfits of shorts and singlet and kept her make-up in a toolbox. Her power-drumming was equal parts cataclysmic and clipped; it cut, said one elegant scribe “like a goods train passing through the room.”

Thus grouped, they set about making their impact on the world. Jane’s friend and mentor, the artist Neal Brown, was frontman of the Vincent Units and had a side project called The Tesco Bombers, with a rolling line-up. Jane had the idea that one such incarnation should be all-female, with Brown only participating if he’d drag up: The Tesco Bomberettes! In the end, they played it as the Mo-dettes, at Ladbroke Grove bootboy haunt, the Acklam Hall. A run of backroom gigs soon followed at The Chippenham, an insalubrious gin palace in Maida Hill. Word got out, and a combination of scene solidarity and credible connections soon led to support slots with Madness at the Electric Ballroom, the Clash at Notre Dame Hall and Siouxsie and the Banshees at Hammersmith Odeon. 

June (left) and Jane on stage in Dallas, 1980

Their debut single ‘White Mice’ (B-side ‘Masochistic Opposite’) was released in late 1979 on their own Mode label and distributed by Rough Trade. A thing of jangly joy and beauty forever, John Peel succinctly described this perfectly crafted, catchy, post-punk pop-punk gem as sounding “… like the musical equivalent of the Battersea Power Station made out of eggboxes.” It was that charming and that unique – but far less fragile. Opening with a sharp reggae-like snare roll from June, the melody spirals away perfectly as Ramona’s Fronsh vocals lay waste to the egos of several Roxy Romeos with a bunch of come-hither-fuck-off lyrics (“Your arse is tight your moves are right, your eyes are big and blue, and if I was a homely girl I’d like to marry you. But I’m too naughty, bold and haughty, forward with it too, so come and visit, then I’d kiss it like other lovers do… don’t be stupid, don’t be limp. No girl likes to love a wimp.”) Clearly aware that all the best pop songs feature handclaps and “ooh-woahs”, they meld them with Kate’s ultra-minimal, choppy, abrasive melodies, June’s military-style fills and Jane’s yo-yo-staccato basslines. The single spent six weeks at number one in the then-new indie chart and it was often at the top of my stash whenever I used to flex my shonky DJ’ing prowess in exchange for a few light ales (typically, I found my original copy lurking between a Purple Hearts’ and a Specials’ single in the Two-Tone & Mod Revival section of the otherwise excellent Brighton emporium, Wax Factor, which for some reason I always want to call ‘Vinyl Sassoon’).

NYC 1981

In 1980 they were signed to Deram, an imprint of failing sixties’ stalwarts Decca. In June that year they released their second single, a cover of the Stones’ 1966 hit ‘Paint it Black’. Their take was stark, minimal and spiky, with just enough heft and sparseness to the rhythms to suggest a hint of dub (giving it, as Nicholas Rombes says in his Cultural Dictionary of Punk “its blackness”). It made Single of the Week in Sounds, the write-up revealing they were then John Lydon’s current favourites, rare praise from a man never known to have doffed his cap lightly. However, the single didn’t do what they expected commercially and nor did the subsequent release, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, a jagged and murky song that pumps along at a 4/4 beat while Ramona’s vocals soar and echo as she wails about drunken, inadequate men staggering around pitch-black parks after closing time looking for someone to right-hook with their sovereign. (The brassy bounce of the B-side, ‘Two Can Play’ seems to be about the constant struggle for autonomy in relationships.)

Loony Toons

Their album The Story So Far was recorded in Coventry in summer 1980 and released in autumn that year, with the girls’ likenesses rendered in candy-coloured Manga-style ‘toons on the cover. It received poor reviews largely centred on the production, described in one quarter as “weak and uninspired”. The band themselves conceded, with June, in bluff-stickswoman mode, describing it in the sleeve notes of the 2008 reissue as “shit” and Kate puzzling over what went wrong between the studio and the pressing plant. But this blight is easy to ignore simply because of the album’s sheer, ballooning fun. It featured ten originals plus a joyous and bouncy cover of Piaf’s ‘Milord’ and the aforementioned Stones cover. ‘Satisfy’ is a sunny, smutty slice of power-pop – a Girl’s Own ‘Orgasm Addict’ – which revels in harmony and owes some debt to Blondie. The cheery whirl of ‘Foolish Girl’ explains their aversion to the rigid and joyless feminist ideals of the day (“She was once a feminist, sharp and deadly was her kiss…”) with a spiralling outro bass line that suggests the Mo-dettes were well attuned to ‘old-fart’ notions of making people want to dance. While humour seemed to be their forte, it’s counterbalanced by the chilly dawn fade-in of ‘Bedtime Stories’ and the melancholy précis of Piaf’s life in ‘Sparrow’.

It may well be an imperfect album (the sped-up, charmless version of ‘White Mice’ (‘White Mouse Disco’) that they were forced to include didn’t help matters), but for those of us who were still unable to read our own names in 1980, it’s one of the few artefacts of their sound we have. They did record three Peel Sessions, one of which can be heard here and includes ‘Norman (He’s No Rebel)’, ‘Dark Park Creeping’, ‘Kray Twins’ and ‘Bitter Truth’. This session undoubtedly produced more cocksure recordings (and is truly representative of their sound, according to Jane and June) and there’s a clarity in the production that’s lacking on the album, but then, the producers and engineers at BBC Maida Vale were probably more used to dealing with bands not solely comprising hirsute men, unlike Roger Lomas at the Coventry studio who, according to June, seemed to think female musicians were mythical creatures and treated them accordingly. 

There’s also a live 7’ of ‘Kray Twins’ recorded at The Marquee in 1981. As it fades in, we hear Jane telling the restless audience in her broadest west-Londonese, “That one’s about amateur violence [‘Dark Park Creeping’] – now let’s have some professional violence”. The song, a downbeat blues narrative, is a snapshot of the rise and fall of the East End ne’er-do-wells and was written by Jane in early 1979 when she was still in Bank of Dresden. She said, “I was the only female in the band and they actually asked me not to write any songs, despite my enthusiasm. They only wanted a dumb blonde bass player.”  Their loss: the smart blonde added a loafing bass line and raspy half-spoken, half-scatted vocals, and with Ramona’s eerie backing wails, produced a song transcending both its era and any popular genre then or now.

June in 1980

No longer existing on snouts, wits and grubby pound notes, the Mo-dettes toured Europe and America twice. According to Ramona in Hot Love: Swiss Punk & New Wave 1976-1980, highlights of their travels included being run out of Orange County by local rednecks, wowing lesbian fans in the deep southern states, guzzling LSD-laced blue punch by the turquoise waters of the Tropicana’s pool in LA and endless nights at squat parties in Amsterdam. A contemporary American fanzine said that live, the Mo-dettes looked like they were “fighting with their instruments – and determined to win!” 

Kate in 1980

While in New York, they found time to sing backing vocals on John Cale’s ‘Fighter Pilot’ single from his album Honi Soit. But the fun couldn’t last forever and in mid-1981, their record company decided their coffers needed replenishing and put a gag order on the band’s individual sound, demanding a bit of sugar-coated candy pop to sweeten an increasingly bitter deal. Their next (and as it turned out, final) single was ‘Tonight’ released in July 1981. Much loathed by the band, the high-pitched girly harmonising and forgettable safe melody of the song is the antithesis of their earlier work: the difference between it and the mature froideur of ‘Sparrow’ and the angular nastiness of ‘Dark Park Creeping’ is the difference between chiffon velvet and the Rocky Mountains. The same might be said of the band’s appearance on the single’s cover – a far cry from the cool-as-fuck satin ‘n’ tat-clad dandettes of old, they lounge on a mountain of plush, got up in velour, puffballs, spangled woollens and half a ton of blusher each. Even Jane, as stylish as the decade was young, appears to have been forcibly permed. According to June, they considered the single and accompanying shoot nothing more than a joke. 

Kate clearly worn out by the glamour of it all . . .

Two months later, in August 1981, Melissa Ritter joined on rhythm guitar, Decca having demanded the Mo-dettes add more flesh to their agile sound. The group’s dynamic was now askew, and the first cracks appeared. In a Sounds cover story back on 28 June 1980, Ramona and Kate had both expressed reservations about their signing to a major, a situation June and Jane, conversely, couldn’t have seemed happier about. Ramona had said she didn’t like knowing exactly how the following two years of her life were going to pan out. So it was perhaps no surprise that she was the first to decamp, in the winter of 1982, citing Deram’s wilful neglect of them as her reason and leaving June to sing from behind her toms until one Sue Slack took over vocal duties. Kate was next to go, her initial worries about being manipulated by the strings of a major (also aired in the aforementioned interview) seemingly confirmed. With only half the original line-up now at the helm, the good ship Mode ran aground in late '82.

A grass-roots revolution of the like we surely won’t see again had offered these girls (and many more) previously undreamt of opportunities – for making a living out of gut creativity, travelling the world and treating others to the fruits of said ideas. The Mo-dettes were, by their own account, out for a lark and would give it up when the fun ceased – but to live the lark required a certain amount of capital and their signing with a major seemed less a career move than a chance to extend the fun. They cared about the music though, and wanted to be heard: they didn’t, as Kate said to ZigZag magazine in 1979, want to be a cult, and so they set about moving into the slipstream of the mainstream. Despite this, their lack of careerism was ultimately borne out by the fact that they stuck to their agreement to chuck it all in when it stopped being a hoot.

Sun und fun

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons behind their obscurity. It was the right time and they had a real cool one - but their ardour for hedonism burned brighter than their ambition, unlike many of their contemporaries, such as the Slits. Another reason for the Mo-dettes’ continuing obscurity may be the ongoing erroneous belief in their relation to modernists. For unlike Two-Tone’s still much-loved exuberant brand of ska, new mod’s practitioners (Merton Parkas, Lambrettas), with their reputation for po-faced fastidiousness, have not been looked upon with any such favour (Paul Weller excepted) and are rarely played by all but their sharply-clad devotees. Of course, being remembered may well be enough for the former Mo-dettes. After all, by 1983, they’d already done what they’d set out to do, have proof of the accomplishment and may feel no need to revisit the graffiti-covered, booze-filled, fag-fugged rooms of their past.

The group’s ultimate contribution to the world is a singular sound: they simply don’t sound like anyone else. Dark and abrasive edges somehow sit happily alongside their bold and rough ‘n’ cheery punky melodies. That they’re only ever compared (lazily) to their stateside contemporaries The Go-Gos, whose twisted take on Californian surf-pop had as many dark and abrasive edges as a multi-coloured beachball, is basic proof for my money that they were a rare bunch. And the intervening decades have been kind: their songs could be placed in almost any year since the ones they were recorded. And while it’s less important, the same is true of their appearance: their young selves could take to a stage in the gentrified badlands of Dalston tonight and no one would peg them as time travellers from the early years of Thatcher’s reign of terror. They never looked ‘seventies’ or indeed, ‘eighties’ in any way (save for the slapstick shoot for ‘Tonight’).

Faggin' around in London tahn: 1979

Though their legacy can undoubtedly be heard in the pure indie fuzz-pop of C86 groups like The Shop Assistants and The Darling Buds, it’s difficult – not least because of their obscurity - to make a case for the Mo-dettes as influential. If they were, there’d be far more good bands on the underground circuit today than there are. But if their legacy seems to have reached an impasse in the mid-to-late eighties, it may be all the better for preserving their uniqueness.

Of her band’s place quiet but sure place in the pop-cult pantheon, Jane : “Along with The Slits, to have been a genuine part of London culture – of British culture – whether it’s high or low, is mind-blowing.”