| John Robb - Punk Rock, the Membranes, Goldblade and everything in between |
| How and when did you start the original "Blackpool Rox" fanzine? What inspired you to do it? Do you still read fanzine's now? Do you still feel it's a valid format? One of the great things about Punk Rock was the DIY ethic - which, when you were stuck out in Blackpool in the late 70s was a fantastic notion. The music business can be suffocatingly Londoncentric and we were used to getting our information handed down to us from the holy mountains of the capital's music media - so the idea that you could write about music yourself was utterly revolutionary when it came to us. The first hint of an idea that you could do something yourself outside of the traditional rock press came to us ironically via the rock press which detailed the early punk fanzine revolution. Then some kid at school came back with a Sniffin Glue fanzine which seemed like an amazingly cool thing to own even at the time. I quickly decided to do a fanzine even though I had never even used a typewriter before, we put up pictures of Blackpool Tower and cut them up, wrote about our band the Membranes and a few other namds on the Blackpool scene like Zyklon B and Section 25 and this came out in 1978 We photocopied 50 2 sheet magazines and they sold out like a shot, after that we just kept printing them up! The second issue we did an A4 sheet and printed up 100 of them just for our school only - it was about the school and the teachers and we had anarchist slogans on it and gave it a different title, it was fantastic the reaction we got, the teachers took it seriously claiming there was an anarchist cell at the school, I got suspended, ha, ha, ha. Back to the "Rox", the Blackpool punk scene was very strong at the time, there were many bands in the town and it was a real buzzing hive of activity- plenty of stuff to cover - and we went on to promote gigs and ran a club called the Vinyl Drip club for a year promoting the local bands and helping create a scene there. The fanzien went national eventually and we covered lots of Punk and post Punk stuff and got the circulation up to 3000 in the early 80s we were in league with the next generation of fanzines who had the same sort of style as us, "Attack On Bzag" and "The Legend" causing as much printed mayhem as possible and a whole plethora of other fanzines would write to us and say they were inspired by our attitude/style/energy etc which was very nice of them. I still read fanzines now and constantly scan the internet - several websites are the modern equivalent of the sort of energy that we had in those times, there are still loads of great fanzines out there. The more idiosyncratic and indepedent the better, my favourite fanzines have always been quite self indulgent - the author ranting about their own favourite bands or what they've been up to, perhaps my favourite all time fanzine was Vague which wrote about Adam and the Ants, "Apocalypse Now" and Situationism with the same fervour - a fantastic piece of work! The fanzine movement is possibly not as big as it once was - at one time there would be mountains of fanzines everywhere you went, but the attitude and spikeyness is as strong as ever and the sense of DIY and independence powers the Xerox revolution on! The whole photocopying/collage/Xerox thing was so much a part of Punk - from the fanzines to the clothes to the music everything seemed like it was some kind of collage... When did you start the Membranes? What came first the Zine or the band? How did you come to record for the Rondelet label? Did the band ever feel it fit in with that wave of 80s Punks like your label-mates Anti Pasti and Special Duties? I started the Membranes in 1977, I was so enthralled with Punk. I had been into music when I was younger - loving Glam Rock, but it seemed like only pop stars from outer space could make music - it never occurred to me that you could make music if you came from Blackpool, it felt too far away from the epicentre of things to make music, that was what was great about Punk, Rock, the sheer empowerment of the music and the philosophy of DIY. I just basically coerced my friends Mark Tilton and Coofy Sid and a couple of other people to be in a band - none of us could play anything - none of us had ever even played an instrument in our lives. The first guitar we bought was because the machine heads were in a row - we thought that this meant that they were in tune, the first gig we played we were utterly out of tune, we never realised that you had to tune up your guitar! We didn't know how to! We basically went on from their to making our own chords up, dislocating everything. We were obviously influenced by Punk Rock and especially the angry psychedelia of the Stranglers which made sense to our magic mushroom crosssed with Punk Rock world we were hooovering in! But we loved all the Punk bands. At first we put our own singles out and we started to get a bit of Peel play and some music press action. Rondelet rang up and offered to put out a couple of singles so we went with them - we didn't know anything about the music biz at all - we were totally green. Rondelet put out a lot of Punk Rock stuff, but also other types of music as well - we liked a lot of the Punk stuff they did. I've always liked Punk Rock bands like Special Duties as much as the Post Punk mob of Joy Divison, the Fall etc - it was all one mass of great bands to me, Anti-Pasti did some great singles! We fit in because we were all working within the parameters of Punk Rock, we did it our way and they did it in theirs but we were all on the same side. The Rondelet singles got loads of good press and radio and then the label fell apart. A couple of years ago I was in New York and met the guy Mojo, the guy that Dj'ed for the Beastie Boys (they wrote a song about him "Egg Raid On Mojos") who was raving about our first single on Rondelet "Muscles". he told me that in 1981 when the single came out he was big on the DJ scene in New York and was playing it in clubs on the scene, and how "Muscles" had been a massive club hit there - all the hip clubs where the likes of Madonna were hanging out were playing the song all the time - it was a massive hit in the city at the time and typically we knew nothing about this at all! That's basically how shambolic it was at the time. Why did the Membranes record for so many different labels, even including Creation at one point? Did this contribute to the band not making as much headway as it might have done? What you have got to remember is that in the early 80s the indepedent scene was hardly the boomtime it is often painted as now. Everyone was struggling and we were all utterly clueless!! The labels would go bust or we would have bust ups with them (the one with Creation is famously detailed in Dave Cavanagh's book about Creation - though nowadays I'm good mates with Alan McGhee again and have a lot of time for him and his never ending enthusiasm for music). We did as well as we could with some very extreme records, we sold quite well and got to tour the world a few times! In places like Germany we did really well and in America where we were hip and toured there several times, we were counted along with Sonic Youth and Big Black in the States when we were on Homestead in the late 80s. |
| Click here for Part Two of the interview.... |