| The following is an interview with Jez Bird, former lead singer of 79 revival group, The Lambrettas. It was carried out by Ken Sweeney in November 2003:
KS:What do you think of the recent Lambrettas compilation Dance? JB: It’s certainly better than the last compilation, the Razor one. It’s good to have it all out there. I thought the artwork was quite nice on this one. They supplied all the cuttings I didn’t have any of them. KS: What’s it like hearing those tunes again? JB: Well I still play them occasionally. Good. It was a time and a place but it was good music at that time. I know that when we tried to learn those Lambrettas tunes for a re-union gig a few years back they were harder than we thought. KS:What was comeback like? JB: It was great to do the gig. But I don’t know if that’s something you want to do all the time because you end up rehashing your old material over and over again. Making it really hard to play new music because people are coming out to hear the old stuff. A lot of people came from all over Europe turned up. Scottish mods, people from Belgium and France. I talked to everybody. KS: Why did you have a re-union? JB:Just pressure from people who kept asking us do you want to do it and it just so happened we were feeling weak at the time and we did it. KS:Compared to the drab black on white sleeves of many of the 1979 mod bands, the cover of Beat Boys In The Jet Age really caught the eye. JB:That was my concept. I just really wanted to have this different album cover. It was done with this in house design team at our record company Rocket Records. But I sort of told them what I wanted and amazingly they just did it. The idea of the TV monitors was like these guys coming out of a time warp and into a new world and learning about it from those TV monitors. That was the original concept of it. Beat Boys In The Jet Age. The clothes? It was down to us in those days. We bought our own stuff but we did actually manage to get some sunglasses off Rocket Records.The funny thing about the TV monitors was that they were hired from the BBCand some poor old guy had to log these down to the beach. When we did the Dojo Lambrettas compilation. I had all the original Beat Boys In The Jet Age artwork and lend it to them. They lost it.Everything! All the layout and artwork. I hope somebody has it somewhere. KS: What are the rest of the band up to now? JB: Mark the bass player works in the states. He’s in the film industry. Doug lives around Sussex and is still playing music. Our drummer lives in the West Country somewhere.I still play, I do the occasional gig and I have a little studio. I’m recording a new album with a new band at the moment. It’s probably like The Lambrettas. Bass drums guitar. A straightforward band. No pretensions. In addition to a whole unreleased album of Lambrettas material. But its not recorded by The Lambrettas. It’s a bunch of songs hanging around from that time. KS:I read an interview where you said that that some of the bands associated with the 1979 mod scene wouldn’t probably have got nowhere if they hadn’t have been part of the 79 scene. JB:It’s true. There was a vacuum at that time in the music business. You had the big bands and the punk thing had shot its bolt and there was this gap and it was the moddy powerpoppy time bands that filled it up. We were just lucky really because we just got The Lambrettas name just to get people to our gigs in Brighton. KS:What do you remember about 1979 and 1980? JB:It was a rollercoaster. We just a local band playing around and we just got this big Mod gig taking place on Hastings Pier, this is mentioned on the compilation sleeve, And from that one gig, we weren’t even advertised to appear. They just stuck us on the bill first thing and we went down so well. This guy said ‘I’ll be your manager.’He got us some gigs in London and within about a month we had a singles deal. It was very quick from no where to getting somewhere. But you could do that in those days you can’t do that now. The record business is not like that anymore. KS:At the time did you meet people from other 79 bands like Secret Affair and The Chords? JB:l we never really mixed very much. We did play a couple of gigs with The Chords. We went down to see Secret Affair and said hello. KS: Were you friendly with them ? JB:There was no animosity but we weren’t big mates or anything. The only people we really got to know were Madness because we toured Europe with them. They were nice guys. KS:Did the Purple Hearts resent the fact that you were having hits and they had maybe been in on the mod scene earlier on.? JB:I think. Because we had the name. We didn’t pull any punches with our dress sense. I think possibly they thought they should be the ones having the hits but in the end it’s not to do with the band, it’s who’s buying the records. If somebody buys your records. You have the hit. There’s no divine right. KS:The crowd you were pulling in 1979/1980. Were they all mods? JB:With The Lambrettas it was mods all the way from the start. Myself and the guitarist were in a band before The Lambrettas. A rhythm and blues band and when we split off to do The Lambrettas, the people who were in our old band couldn’t understand what were doing. So it was purely a mod thing right from the beginning, apart a the very first few gigs which friends turned up at. Pretty much that was it. Most people at that time, bands, had a little bit of mod image in them. Either they were shaggy haired people or they were mods. Or a bit moddy. That sort of vibe going on. I still get people coming up to now saying I was a mod and .I came to all your gigs. KS: Were you amazed when The Lambrettas album turned up in a list of NME’s best albums of the 1980’s? It fell just outside. JB: The NME? They used to hate us. I don’t think they liked any mod band to be honest with you. The NME were totally anti the whole mod thing. We were probably the easiest ones to take a pop at. We got some terrible reviews from NME. KS Surely not for Beat Boys In The Jet Age album? JB:They really didn’t like us. In fact, Adrian Thrills, the famous NME writer. I met him at a music business things years later and he said The Lambrettas they were a brilliant band and I was thinking why didn’t you write something nice about us at the time? KS:The Lambrettas sound. The Beat Boys In The Jet Age sleeve. It seemed to be very happening and very now in 1980 compared to other band 60’s pastiches.You didn’t cover Stepping Stone. JB: Musically we weren’t really part of the mod revival. Image wise we were. . A lot of the other bands said 'right we’re going to do The Who and use 12 string Rickenbacker guitars, trying to recreate the whole sound. I think we came from more of a “we’ve got these songs and we’re a mod band. We thought meant modernist we could be into modernist music. Whether we were on the button I don’t know. We were led by the songs really, and the music rather than the image. So we didn’t try and copy The Who or The Faces. We just wrote the songs and played them as we heard them. Except maybe –I’ve just realised lately that Mark the bass-player in The Lambrettas playing on Poison Ivy nicked his bass line from Desmond Decker The Israelites. I only realised that the other day. KS: While on the first Lambrettas album your voice and the production seemed to merge. On the second album, Ambience, it’s like a different band. There’s so much echo on the guitar. It all sounds so different. Ambience seemed a very brave and ambitious album to make but it must have confused your mod audience? JB:Oh yeah. We went to a new studio, we had a new drummer. We had a new lot of songs. The things that happen in fashion in the music world you tend to know where things are going a little earlier and I think we sort of could hear this bigger sound scape coming along and we wanted to do something bigger. Whether it came off I don’t know, we did it in a bigger studio, it was a converted barn called Park Gate. The reason we choose the studio was because it had a good sound , in other words the ambience of the place was good. Every track we did there was a microphone track on the desk saying ‘ambience’ , which was the sound of the room. That’s why the album is called Ambience. KS:Have you read 'Pop Idol' and one time Lambrettas producer Peter Waterman’s biography? There’s a picture of The Lambrettas in there and he talks about the band. In another interview I heard him complaining your drummer having “a bloody big drum kit.” JB:I went up to his office the other day and the foyer is huge. It’s silver discs wall to wall and the first one you see is The Lambrettas Poison Ivy single. Our drummer had a very loud snare drum and he was always tuning his drum kit up and producers don’t like that kind of thing. When we met Pete Waterman , the first time he was less involved with the music side of things. He just hears things, that’s why he’s successful. He hears a sound and says to someone else get that sound! The first thing we did with him was the single Go Steady and he totally produced that. It was over and done with in about twenty minutes. Set up the gear and when we were going in the other band was coming out. We set up gear , played it through once and they said right. We’ve put it down. Then we did some backing vocals and we were out the door. KS: What sort of music have you liked in the last few years? JB: I liked all the Britpop stuff. Oasis and Blur are great. I only dislike stuff that sounds really plastic. I feel that there’s going to be a massive shake up in the music business really soon and there is going to be some really good music coming out because I think the big record companies have lost their way completely . They don’t know what there doing and are just chasing these Fame Academy kids. I’m sure there are a lot of good bands out there and once the Internet broadband thing downloading music etc gets going. It will all change. Whether they are going to make the money the old bands did, I don’t know. End If you want to know what Jez is up to these days, check in to his website: www.jezbird.co.uk |
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