Tagged: welsh punk music
From the South Wales Argus :"AS the United States' first black President was sworn in, a Newport-born man had a ringside seat to history being made."Musician and artist Jon Langford, 51, a founder member of the punk band The Mekons, had played at a Washington DC ball to celebrate Barack Obama's inauguration the night before, and had a seat at the event being watched by millions of people around the world."..."Mr Langford performed six hours of country-punk with his current band the Waco Brothers in a sell-out event celebrating Obamas links with Chicago."'The concert was incredible and an illustration of how things are changing. I performed with blues singer David Honeyboy Edwards, whos 94. God knows what things were like when he was a kid,' said Mr Langford."Read the rest of this really fantastic article and what Jon Langford says about the experience HERE .
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AmeriCymru: Who were the Tunnelrunners? How was the band formed and What was your role in it?
Madoc: The Tunnelrunners were a punk band formed in Neath around 1977. We played around the Swansea area for a few years made a record and then split up when we went to college. What we didn’t know is that after splitting up we had a career which involved several bootlegs and our records selling for as much as $1,000.
Our gigs were very rare because there weren’t many places to play and our drummer Jeff Burton only had a small van. We used to have to pay him for petrol with our pocket money, that is how young we were. There were three of us in the band. Graham Jones who played guitar, Jeff Burton who played drums and myself, Madoc Roberts. I was the main singer and played guitar. Graham and I wrote the songs. It was a great laugh with lots of late night practicing and funny gigs.
The name came whilst we were watching Magpie a children’s television programme. The presenter forgot the name of a small mammal that was featured in an item and kept calling them tunnelrunners we thought this was hysterical and chose it for our name.
Our first gig was at Circles club in Swansea which was notorious for its sticky floor. Many famous bands played there and legend has it that the Sex Pistols played a gig there. On the night of our first gig our drummer pulled out and in true punk spirit someone else stepped in. However he didn’t know the songs and the sound hadn’t been set up properly. We were dreadful and an older man at the bar started booing. By the end of the set he had given up booing and was pleading with us to get off the stage as we were ruining his night.
After that the gigs improved and we built up a bit of a reputation. Then one night we were approached by Steve Mitchell who was a radio dj with Swansea Sound. He had started his own record label called Sonic International and asked us if we wanted to make a record.
Without us knowing our record became quite sought after and appeared on several bootlegs. When I finally got the internet I was amazed to find all this interest in the Tunnelrunners had been going on without us knowing. One of our records was even sold in an ebay auction for $1,000. So in our absence we had done quite well!
Every now and then I am contacted by someone who wants to do an interview or re-release our music. A few years ago it was Sing Sing records from New York who re- released Plastic Land and this year I was approached by Stephen “Haggis” Harris of Punk House records. Stephen lives in New York but is originally from Swansea. As a youngster he sneaked into our gigs (he was only fourteen at the time). He later went on to have a glittering career as a musician, playing bass for Guns and Roses and forming Zodiac Mind Warp and the Love Reaction. He thinks that the Swansea Punk scene had something special and wants to make a record of the bands. His record label, Punk House are re-releasing stuff by Swansea bands from that era and it is good stuff. They have already released our 100mph ep which sold very quickly and they are going to a second pressing. They are re-issuing Plastic Land around June 10th. They make the records interesting by adding memorabilia from the time.
http://punkhouserecordshop.com/
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AmeriCymru: How would you describe the early punk scene in Swansea and in the UK generally?
Madoc: The Punk scene in Swansea was unique. We didn’t really know what was going on in London because punk wasn’t reported in the newspapers except in some shock horror story, but the main thing about punk was the do-it-yourself attitude. Music had become big business, the bands were massive and the music had become self -indulgent. We couldn’t play like Led Zeppelin. That amount of gear would never fit in Jeff’s van. So punk was a way of reclaiming music from big business. In the early days each band interpreted this in their own way and we were all different. The same thing happened with the fashion. There were no Sid Vicious clones in black leather, we wore colourful stuff that we got from jumble sales or charity shops. It was only later that the punk image and music became a stereotype. They were fun times although we did get some trouble from older rockers who were scared of anything new and different.
There were some great bands in Swansea at that time like the DC10s, The End, The Lost Boys, the Urge, The Dodos, Venom, The Autonomes etc We all played at the same venues and then would see each other at gigs. There is a Facebook page where we all meet up, share photos and chat about old times. I think it is a closed group but if you are interested let me know. Swansea - Punk Rock and New Wave .
AmeriCymru: What were your favourite bands of that era? Which ones did you get to see live?
Madoc: I went to see bands whenever I could including the Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, The Lurkers etc. My favourite band was the Ramones. It could be quite dangerous going to see a punk band. On one occasion I was chased by some angry locals from Port Talbot and on another occasion I went to see the Damned in Cardiff. This was a big adventure for a boy from Neath. The venue was an old cinema called the Prince of Wales which showed “adult” films. We found the people selling the tickets and they looked like proper London punks. They giggled as we left but we didn’t know why. Then when the Damned came on stage we realised that these were the people we had brought the tickets from. We had heard their music but we had never seen pictures of them them. During the gig, which was on the first floor (second to you Americans) there was so much pogoing (bouncing up and down) that the floor started to shake. That was the last gig allowed at the venue.
The other thing that happened around that time was the Rock Against Racism gigs which were organised by the Anti Nazi League. This was in response to an unhealthy surge in right wing politics in the UK. Groups like the National Front and the British National Party were pretty nasty and seemed to hate everyone who wasn’t like them. Something had to be done about them and music became the rallying point. At these gigs reggae bands and punk bands would share the same stage. I saw lots of great acts like Elvis Costello, Matumbi, Burning Spear, Aswad, Richrad Hell and the Voidoids. It was fun but we were also politically aware and active.
AmeriCymru: Where can readers go to hear the Tunnelrunners online?
Madoc: If anyone is interested in hearing our music there is a myspace site https://myspace.com/tunnelrunners/music/songs
and there are several videos on youtube. Here is a link to Plastic Land
There is no footage of us live just photos and these are on our facebook site https://www.facebook.com/TheTunnelrunners?fref=ts
The music sounds best on vinyl so if you can get hold of it that way you should.
AmeriCymru: Any final message for AmeriCymru members and readers?
Madoc: The Tunnelrunners did reform in the eighties and made a film which still exists somewhere. We got some new band members. Neil Sinclair on Bass and Guy Lawrence on drums. The music became a bit less punky but we never smoothed off the rough edges. We played gigs in Cardiff and Newport for a few years. We even played at TJs where Kurt Cobain proposed to Courtney Love. Our last gig was in the late nineties by which time I was becoming too old and too fat so we had the good sense to stop.
There is a lot of nonsense written about punk and what happened in the late seventies but as far as I am concerned it gave the music industry the kick it needed. These days kids can make music in their bedrooms which sounds very punk but then they all seem to want a record deal from a big company. We did it for ourselves and there is something to be said for that. It teaches you valuable lessons for life about being self-reliant and builds up a healthy distrust of authority which has stood me in good stead through my career. I now work in television and have worked on many pop videos and music shows with lots of Welsh bands like Cataonia, The Stereophonics, The Manic Street Preachers and the Super Furry Animals. All these bands owe something to the punk revolution of the late seventies and it was great fun being young and in a band at that time.
September 1977. Elvis was dead and it was time to go back to school. I had done well in my “O” levels but I was in the grip of the music and attitude of punk rock and the possibility of not conforming to the expectations of the authority figures that seemed to increasingly surround me.
I lived in the village of Llechryd, on the banks of the Teifi River in West Wales, a collection of two chapels, a church, a public house, a hotel, a post office, a primary school, a shop, and expanding local authority housing where my family home was located. I spent much of my teenage years in the company of my near neighbour and best friend, Geraint Evans-Williams. He was a year younger than me, the son of a minister of religion from North Wales. Rugby, fishing, weekend discos in former mansions, the radio and limited television were the only distractions on offer now that we had rejected God.
From his bedroom, we plotted our own counter-culture. We formed a casual musical unit, Edward H. Böring, the umlaut chosen for effect, the name chosen as a satire on the pop group Edward H. Dafis who represented the straitjacketed and utterly tedious modern Welsh entertainment. Geraint’s musical hero was Elvis Presley especially his early work while I was fan of The Adverts, The Jam and The Stranglers. We wrote hundreds of short, pithy and irreverent songs, powered by acoustic guitars and twigs being struck against used Fairy Liquid bottles. As we were bilingual, we wrote in both languages, and like many young people in that situation, experienced a kind of dual identity. Our longest track, and the easiest to compose, was the psychobilly Gregorian chant Aberfan, an endless, lugubrious intoning of those three syllables, in essence an almost non-lingual sonic elegy to fallen children.
Though nearly all of what we crafted was a private, childish self-indulgence, we did have a moment or two of ambition and self awareness, a guess that our raw anti-music, our anti-talent, could be exposed to an audience. We filled a C90 cassette with our efforts and sent it to Huw Eurig, a member of the then popular group Y Trwynau Coch ( The Red Noses). We didn’t give our real names-Geraint became Dai Marw ( Dave Dead) and I became Capten Duw (Captain God or God’s Captain) and it is possible that we did not even include our address. To support this submission, we pretended that we were a five member group by using two cassette players to make it sound like that number of bad musicians, embracing the do it yourself ethos of the punk movement. I can remember only one pseudonym of the other three imaginary fellow travellers-Cleif Cleifion (Clive Patients).
We discovered in the Welsh language newspaper Y Cymro that our low tech and anonymous effort had caused some interest in the conventional world of our country’s emerging popular music. As a result, we came out of the shadows for a short time to make our only contribution to this particular genre.
We were amazed to be invited to record a session for the BBC Radio Cymru show Sosban and were summoned to the Llandaff studio in Cardiff. Geraint’s father Arthur drove us on a grey February late morning in 1980 the twenty seven miles to the nearest railway station in Carmarthen.
Eurof Williams, the radio producer, was bemused and fairly patient in the 60 minutes or so allocated to us. As soon as he heard us, he barred Geraint’s guitar as he felt its steel strings produced too strident a sound. Luckily, my Spanish guitar was acceptable to him though I couldn’t play it. We managed to record two tunes but Eurof thought that one of them was unsuitable for BBC listeners. This was “Mistar Urdd” which was an attack on the mascot of the Welsh League of Youth or Urdd Gobaith Cymru, and the idea of marshalling young people in general. The chorus of this reviled, nihilistic, latter day nursery rhyme was simple and direct-”Cachgi Mistar Urdd”. Cachgi means “coward”. Unforgettable but that’s all I can recall at this distance.
The one surviving track, Hen Wlad Fy Datcu (Land of My Grandfather), was an assassination of both the national anthem and the rules of mutation. The premise of the lyric was that, never mind our fathers, our country and its culture were still mired in the age of our grandfathers. A rambling interview accompanied our cacophony.
Despite the censorship, the truncated session was actually broadcast the following Saturday morning. Richard Rees, the presenter, was a good sport, describing us as the “chwyldroadol” (revolutionary) Edward H. Böring! I cringed as I listened, both glad and mad that no one in my home was listening with me.
We did not capitalise on our small success. My great friend and former fellow pupil David Edwards of the truly pioneering Cardigan rock group, Datblygu, once told me that he had been inspired to start his music career by our example. Geraint and I went our separate ways, he to Charleville-Mézières in France in the footsteps of another of his heroes, Arthur Rimbaud, me to a Youth Opportunities Programme scheme at the local library. I consider my collaboration with him as a kind of apprenticeship, the beginnings of a need to conjure up some kind of literature, of not allowing the weight of having to earn a living erase all creative thoughts from my mind.
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