It’s the mid-’80s and Channel 4’s frequently shambolic and occasionally brilliant The TUBE is about to air, what for this viewer, is one of its finest moments.
Glitchy, electronically created VJ Max Headroom – a spin-off from an edgy futuristic drama on the same channel – is introducing, not so much a music video, but a fully realised short film.
It stars, what to me and my spiky-bonced, pointy-shoed, charity shop-overcoated teenage school mates is, a hitherto unknown entity called The Very Things.
An affectionate parody of shows like The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner, The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes is hilarious, bonkers and audaciously cool in equal measure.
The music – a blend of big beat, rockabilly and b-movie sountracks, with a Vincent Price meets Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett vocal delivery on top – makes instant fans of us all.
The Very Things would go on to deliver two LPs, a clutch of singles and Peel Sessions and then, barring reissues, nothing…..until now!
Thirty years on from their last release, The Very Things are back with a brand new album Mr. Arc Eye (Under A Cellophane Sky).
I was lucky enough to catch up with founder member and songwriter Robin (RR) Dallaway to discuss the resurrection of arguably Redditch’s finest musical export.
The singer-guitarist-songwriter talks the new album, the punk rock revolution, that TUBE shoot and the part The Fall potentially played in their downfall.
Punk’s Year Zero
The Very Things rose of the ashes of The Cravats – a punk band formed by Robin and his friend The Shend (aka Chris Shendo, born Chris Harz) in 1977.
“Punk was like year zero for me. It changed my life, abruptly and forever,” Robin remembers. “It was pivotal for me, life changing.
“The single most important thing it gave to me was empowerment and self-determination. All the edifices of pop culture at the time seemed to fall, including progressive rock and its obsession with technical ability. Graphic design and art, used to sell stuff and to produce collectibles, could now be vehicles for a wider variety of voices, ‘alternative’ values and ideas. There was a kind of democratising effect. You no longer had to study music to make it. You could just do it.”
The lightbulb moment was hearing the first punk single, The Damned‘s New Rose, on Radio 1.
“I can pinpoint the time and place when my ‘road to Damascus’ event occurred, except that it was the ‘road to Moseley’ in Birmingham.
“Driving home to Redditch in late October ’76, I was listening to an old transistor radio in the car. It wasn’t very loud, so when I heard this stunning track, crackling with energy, I had to pull over to make sure I could hear who it was by.
“It was the Dave Lee Travis drive-time show and he said: “‘Well, that was The Damned with New Rose and we certainly won’t be playing that again.’ I was genuinely stunned. It was the best thing I’d heard for years and it wasn’t going to get played again. I couldn’t believe it.”
That weekend Robin bought the single from Virgin Records. “I played it over and over again. It was a miracle. I was a convert.”
A few months later he picked up The Buzzcocks‘ Spiral Scratch EP.
“I played them both to a few mates in a kind of evangelistic way and we all felt that it made everything that had gone before sound irrelevant.”
Thngs solidified a few months later when Robin and a few mates went to see The Stranglers at Barbarella’s night club in Birmingham.
“A remarkable night,” he recalls. “I wanted to be Hugh Cornwell. I think Shend wanted to be Jean-Jacques Burnel. So on the way home, we decided to be a band. We started meeting on Saturday afternoons to drink and make a noise and it didn’t take long before we were attempting to play gigs.
“Our first gig was at our school’s Summer Concert, which was madness. The main concert finished and the headmaster suggested that parents who didn’t want to hear ‘pop music’ might wish to leave. Outside, loads of kids from the town had heard about it and turned up, hoping to get in. The PA we borrowed from a DJ friend of a friend turned up almost at the last minute. It was chaos. We only had four songs, but at least they were loud!”
Like many acts from punk’s first wave The Cravats were not always welcomed with open arms.
“Early on, gigs were like going to war. There was a lot of violence in the air, local backlashes against punk,” says Robin.
“An example that sticks in my mind was a gig we played in Taunton, Somerset, in a pub full of bikers who didn’t like these punk upstarts. One of them tripped up Shend’s girlfriend while she was dancing, so he abandoned the bass, stepped off the stage, punched this bloke, then stepped back up to resume bass playing.”
Fearing things could descend into a “wild west saloon brawl” Robin was relieved to get through the rest of a highly charged gig unscathed.
“Then a shower of bricks and bottles hit the van as we drove away.”
While not as vital as emerging punk movements in London and Manchester, the Midlands punk scene coalesced around The Fighting Cocks pub in Moseley.
“Some of our best gigs were there,” Robin explains. “There didn’t seem to be much of an early punk scene in Birmingham. The Killjoys (Kevin Rowland’s band prior to Dexy’s) was around. We played Rebecca’s in Brum and Tracy’s in Redditch a couple of times.
“Rebecca’s was weird. We didn’t know what was going on. We played to an empty room, other than half a dozen scary looking older guys in a booth. It turned out that they were some local gangster types with aspirations in music management and had set it up with a view to auditioning us to work for them.”
Music With Genuine A-Peel
As The Cravats began to develop their sound, they took the opportunity to, quite literally, get their music into the hands of John Peel, who would go on to be an enthusiastic supporter.
“We went to see him at a gig in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was DJ-ing and gave him a copy of our self-produced Cravats’ single, Gordon.
“Shend wrote to him a little while after, to apologise for bothering him and said something like: ‘Sorry if we came across as goats’.”
To their suprise and considerable delight, Peel took to the band and played their single on his show.
“It was an absolutely amazing feeling. Hearing the single we’d made on Radio 1!,” Robin remembers. “As a result of that, Pete Stennett signed us to the legendary Small Wonder label.
“Peel was amazing, I couldn’t quite believe that this bloke who helped launch the careers of Jimi Hendrix, T-Rex and Roxy Music among countless others, had taken a shine to us. At his invitation, Shend and I visited him at home. He was kind and generous with a brilliant ear and a profound love of music.”
The Cravats would go on to make two albums and record four Peel Sessions, before dissolving in 1982, when Robin and Shend went on to form The Very Things.
The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes
The duo had become frustrated by the strictures of punk and were looking to expand their musical horizons.
“Shend and I decided that we actually wanted a bit more freedom to draw on different styles and personnel as the project demanded, so we devised The Very Things.
“I had the idea of it being like an arty version of ‘The Monkees’ (well before Gorillaz). But it didn’t progress in quite the way we had intended,” he admits.
Robin played drums on the band’s first single The Gong Man / The Colours Are Speaking To Me, but with an album to record and Peel Sessions pending – they went looking for a drummer.
“We pinched Disney Time (Robin Holland) from a mod/’60s sounding band, when he was 15.
“He clearly had some ’60s influences already and his own (since described by others as a ‘back-to-front’) style of drumming, but we threw lots of The Who and Tamla Motown at him and said that a synthesis of those was what we were aiming for.”
Despite his youth, the new sticks man was a success and he quickly became a fixture with Shend taking lead vocals and Robin concentrating on guitar and keyboards.
Taking inspiration from the absurdism of the Dada avant garde movement, The Very Things were very much at the arty end of the New Wave.
“We very much saw ourselves as part of the broad church of Post-punk – along with Pere Ubu, B52s, Devo, The Cramps, The Birthday Party etc,” Robin remembers.
“We were our own thing, apart from the fashion movements at the time. Nevertheless, we did have a very strong Goth and Psychobilly following, which we really appreciated.”
The debut album’s title track and single would receive a major boost when The TUBE came calling.
One of the show’s producers, fellow Midlander Chris Phipps, got in touch after becoming inspited by hearing The Bushes Scream While my Daddy Prunes while driving across the Yorkshire Moors.
Phipps enlisted director Gavin Taylor, who’d go on to helm major concert films like U2 At Red Rocks and Queen At Wembley.
The film was to be shot on 16mm and, with all the arrangements in place, the band boarded Shend’s battered Ford Consul and headed up to Northumberland.
“Those few days felt like the strangest Alice in Wonderland type dream,” Robin remembers.
Much of the shoot features the band “larking about at Hulne Priory in Alnwick”, but the opening sequence made the band feel like genuine film stars.
“The sections with Shend and I in a Ford Prefect van were filmed in a ’30s suburban street in Newcastle, which had been closed to the public. Like a proper film set!
“Billy Benson, an appropriately strange man, played the doomed father character. He’d turned up to the audition with a plastic bag full of jam sandwiches and proceeded to eat them during the actual shoot.
“We had such a great laugh. It was brilliant fun. Just a wonderful few days.”
The TUBE team came up with the script, but were open to the band throwing in their own ideas and “the cherry on the cake” for Robin was being asked to script the intro by Max Headroom – played by Matt Frewer.
Not that everything went quite to plan, however.
“I remember getting to the last shots of the day at Hulne and the camera man saying that he only had enough film stock for just one take of the final shot,” Robin says.
“It’s the last bit of the performance where Shend is walking backwards away from the camera and he trips on the cape he’s wearing. He disguises it brilliantly, but at the time we wanted to do it again. I don’t think anyone else would even spot it now.
“At the time it was the most expensive film The TUBE had ever made. God knows why they chose us.”
A Ghost In Their House
Both the Bushes Scream… album and single were well received and the band began working on material for the follow up Motortown.
The album’s title and lead single were a nod to its Motown influences – The Very Things searching to expand their sound with new recording techniques.
But all was not happy in the camp and the group would split before the second album was officially released in 1988.
One contributing factor was the withdrawal of a single scheduled for release in 1987 – a cover of R Dean Taylor‘s There’s A Ghost In My House.
The ’60s cut, co-written by the legendary Motown writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, was a favourite of the Northern Soul dance movement centred around clubs like the Wigan Casino in the ’70s.
Robin takes up the story….
“I was amazed that no-one else had tackled There’s A Ghost in My House around that time, it being such a brilliant gothic pop song.
“We recorded it as part of the Motortown album and we thought that it would be a single. It felt like something of an ‘ace up the sleeve’ that we could use to promote the album.”
The Very Things performed their version of the song at the Rough Trade Christmas party in December ’86 and who should be in the audience but Mark E Smith and The Fall.
“And the next thing we know, they’d released a version of it as a single in Spring ’87, before we had chance to,” groans Robin.
“At the time, it was devastating. It may actually have made a difference to what subsequently happened to us, in suspending operations. Who knows?”
The Fall’s version – a faithful cover of the original – cracked the Top 40, but it’s a shame The Very Things’ interpretation never got that single release, as it’s much more of a re-imagining than a reproduction.
Have a listen here.
The Shend of an era
After The Very Things went their separate ways Shend formed a new band Grimetime and dabbled in acting.
He secured parts in Eastenders, Red Dwarf and Torchwood and can also be glimpsed as the bass player in the punk band that torments Alan Partridge in Knowing Me, Knowing You.
In 2009 Shend reformed the Cravats, but without his old songwriting partner and co-vocalist – something Robin admits was ‘upsetting at the time’.
While understandably reluctant to expand on their falling out, Robin reveals that while Shend isn’t in the new Very Things line-up, the project did get them talking again.
“Yes, for the first time in many years, we are on good terms. Suffice to say there is a kind of symmetry in there having been a version of The Cravats without its one-time vocalist, guitarist and songwriter and the situation now with The Shend being absent from the new The Very Things GXL.
“Strangely enough, it has been this new album which brought us back together. I told Shend as soon as I started planning a Very Things album, of course, and we did a ‘joint’ interview in December 2021’s MOJO to talk mainly about The Bushes Scream…“
With some trepidation, Robin sent his old sparring partner a copy of Mr. Arc Eye and was thrilled with his response.
“To my amazement and delight, he liked it immediately and was full of praise for it. It was generous, magnanimous and quite unexpected and it makes me quite emotional to think of it. Even though he’s not on the album, he seems to have taken it to his heart and is playing tracks regularly on his splendid, The Spinning Man Radio Show.
The Return of The Very Things
Robin was inspired to revive The Very Things after a chance meeting with a friend at the IKON gallery in Birmingham.
However the resulting album is the product of a lengthy gestation.
“The origins of this album go back more than 10 years,” Robin explains. “I soon had a handful of songs to start work on. But it’s taken a long time and probably hundreds of hours since then.
“It’s only seeing the light of day now because I’m happy with it. Believe me, it would never have been heard had it not been as good as I thought it should be.”
Mr. Arc Eye boasts all the wit and weirdness you’d expect from The Very Things, but with a slightly poppier more modern twist.
It’s punctuated by found sounds, samples and movie clips, bringing to mind the work of groups like UNKLE, Massive Attack and Young Fathers.
Robin likens the process of discovering new sounds to finding the last piece of a jigsaw in his songwriting.
“It’s very exciting for me to hear something that chimes with what I’m thinking about,” he explains. “I like the idea of creating new meaning from found sounds and old scripts.”
It’s an effective and highly evocative technique that gives Mr. Arc Eye a heightened sense of context and mood.
A number of the sounds on the album were recorded ad hoc on Robin’s mobile.
“The Scrap Man’s trumpet and calling on 76 Trombone Street for instance were recorded on the ‘phone in the street where I used to live. I suppose I’m listening all the time,” he says.
Though very much Robin’s baby, The Very Things GXL is a reunion of sorts, with Disney behind the drum kit and original touring bassist Steven Burrows back in the fold.
There’s also a special guest appearance by Cravats’ founder member Svor Naan on sax and clarinet.
Tony Sherrard from Robin’s other band Silverlake is the one new addition, playing bass and helping to engineer and co-produce the album.
Lyrically the album tackles concepts of belief, truth, reality and illusion.
“I was thinking about a number of things, the trend in politics which seems to suggest that if you say something often enough, loudly enough, it becomes a kind of truth for some people,” Robin reveals.
“I was also thinking about it at a personal level, with people becoming their own PR agents through social media, constructing fabricated universes to promote to ‘friends’. Also the whole thing about rejecting science in favour of belief, as in the Covid vaccine issue.”
Spectres are an abiding theme, with Ghost Pool prompted by a rather strange local news story.
“An electrician was interviewed about the proposal for energy, generated by the local crematorium, to be used to heat the swimming pool.
“He was incensed, saying that he would never use the pool because the water may have ‘spirits’ in it. So ghosts became a useful tool in reflecting on the nature of belief.”
Encouraged by the response to Mr. Arc Eye‘s release, Robin is already working on a batch of new Very Things material, but refuses to be drawn on the likelihood of a follow up album.
Gigs however could definitely be on the horizon.
“This is the first stuff for over 30 years; the reaction so far has been amazingly positive.” Robin enthuses. “I think there probably will be live shows. We’ve already had loads of requests to play, which I hadn’t really expected. I hadn’t anticipated such goodwill and love for the band.”
In the meantime he’s preparing for a show with Silverlake – the trio he plays in with Sherrard and vocalist Sally-Ann Parker.
Described by a US magazine as ‘a modernized melange of the best of Blondie, YES, Duran Duran, Prodigy, The B-52’s and Jamiroquai,’ Silverlake have a third long player out in the Autumn.
Busy times ahead, but exciting ones too.
“I’m happy to be working with The Very Things again, it really suits me and how I work,” says Robin proudly.
“I’m very, very excited about the new stuff and I’m absolutely delighted to have Shend’s support and enthusiasm too. And I’m really happy to be singing again! I’ve got my voice back!”
- Driver the lead single off Mr. Arc-Eye Under a Cellophane Sky is out now. The title track from the album follows on August 23
- The album released via Foad Musick is available on both black and limited edition orange vinyl for UK customers here and the ROTW here
- For more about The Very Things visit their website
- Silverlake play The Malvern Lounge, Great Malvern, on August 3 details on Facebook
- More about The Cravats via this link tree
The new album blends The Very Things’ signature sound with more modern production techniques and themes exploring belief, truth, and illusion.