Rubella Ballet

COME ROUND FOR dinner they said.
Gastronomically intrigued, my stomach rumbled
in anticipation. An eating packed, bloaterising
evening was well on the cards, what with
Rubella drummer Sid being a fully qualified
five-star chef and all.
I spent the appointed day with unfed mouth and
rapidly rose to a feverish starvation buzzed,
hunger-high. Taste-buds not so much salivating
as positively dripping.

But the wicked ballerinas put a cruel twist on the nights expected orgy of consumption, I arrive to find slack-jawed lead stringsman. Pete Fender, on the cuisine duty roster and presented before me is a pilchard, some potatoes and several dollops of green slime with lumps.
Fork stuck well in, I chew heartily actually finding the mess quite tasty. In fact there isn 't an unfinished plate in the house, all eight diners tucking in with equal vigour.
Eight? I should explain, me, the four Rubella Ballet 'ers and Poison Girls, Vi, Lance and Richard. No, these last three didn 't gatecrash, they live here too.
Vi is the mother of one half of Rubella, namely bassist and voice, Gem Stone and the aforementioned galley-serf Pete. Besides the resting cookery professor (once prepared nosh for fourteen hundred, y'knowl Six, there is chief singer Zillah.

BY NOW YOU'VE probably already made the Bushellian mistake of herding Rubella Ballet in amongst the seemingly endless line of Crass/Poison Girls clones/near imitators, all of whom rampage furiously away with varying degrees of impact.
But while the Poison Girls spectre is unavoidably near, any direct and obvious influence is minimal. Just the briefest glimpse of Rubella playing live, or for that matter, lounging around on a sofa doing an interview, leaves a person in no doubt as to their variance from the dressed-all-in-black, every-word-l-say-is-important school of (more often than not) cliched music.
The quartet are attired in a colourful array of bright togs, not a leather jacket in sight. Bondage? Forget it, this is the glad-rag liberation!
Sid: "Everyone is very dark these days. Black and dismal and singing about warfare. We don't play songs about warfare, it's time to think about living, not worry about'dying."
Pete: "If people aren't dark and dismal they're soppy and wet looking like that other group with Ballet in their name. The sort of songs that Crass bands do always end up sounding really depressing. "I want to make good music and have people enjoy it. I don't want them to go away thinking 'oh, I really agree with that, I must get some information on it'. We play music with lyrics rather than slogans with a noise behind.
"We're not ramming our opinions down other people's throats. That is an obvious way to build up a following or a movement which I consider to be quite false. If someone wants to be into your band they should be into it because of the music."
Sid: "And not because of the politics. If we don't put any politics over people will come to see us only because they like the music. Not because we're going to brainwash them into being anarchists or pacifists or National Front or anything."
Pete: "If Crass weren't anarchists they wouldn't have a following because let's face it, their music is pretty bad. Pursuing a certain way of playing or thinking always generates opposition. If you don't try to convince people to think your way then you remove these barriers.!"
Sid: "So you don't get people coming who are just into anarchy or just into this or that. A lot of people object to playing to skinheads. We don't object to playing to anybody. We've played to an eighty percent British Movement crowd."
Zillah: "Although we didn't know before hand it was going to be like that. Afterwards they were all cheering for more."

THE PINK HAIRED chanteuse chooses to ignore the
fact that the same gathering would probably respond
just as wildly to a film of the Nuremburg rallies. I'm
getting the distinct impression that this group are
over-reacting to the substantial and committed
political involvement of Crass and Poison Girls.
Not that the Ballet-ones are a-political non-thinkers
but rather they are desperately keen to assert their
own individual identity away from these parental (in
one case literally!) figures.
Plus they now have an almost paranoiac wariness of
being associated in print with Crass. They feel a
recent NME live review was an attempt to use them to
devalue said band.
Pete: "A lot of people think Poison Girls started us
off but that's not true. I was playing in groups even
before Poison Girls formed."
Sid: "About three years ago I moved into the house
that Poison Girls were living in. There was a room to
play music in so we (him, Gem and Pete) went in
there and jammed. We found we could alI play
together.
"We had two or three singers then we found Zillah and
we've spent the last two and a half years teaching her
to sing,"
Zillah: (incredulously) "You mean I can sing now?"
Pete: "I haven't been turned on musically by anything
that came after 1973: My favourite groups have
always been the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I like
the seventies music but the stuff that was exciting not
just pretend. I was more into punk for the spirit than
the music. "
Zillah: "When I was a punk ' back in '76 we hadn't
even heard of the Sex Pistols. I used to go down to
the Lacy Lady when Chris Hill was there and dress
up. People called us punks. Suddenly there was the
Today programme and everybody wanted to be a punk.
"The real punk scene was before that. Like the mod ' scene, we used to go to the mod nights at the Bridgehouse but after Secret Affair had been on Top Of The Pops it just wasn't a scene anymore. I definitely ..preferred punk in the old days."
Sid: "Punk now is so split. You've got Crass, UK Subs, Oi!, Skins. It's all different sections. "
Zillah: "We're still into the cheapness of punk like making your own clothes. "
Sid: "We're more into the spirit of punk than the politics."
Pete: "And the spirit rather than the racket of punk."

A "RACKET" IS assuredly not what is revealed with their debut piece of hardware, namely the 'Ballet Bag'.
Available through Xntrix, the package includes a badge, a poster, a lyric book and a cassette. All that is required from the consumer is the shelling out of a modest two notes.
The tape dispenses a stern, jarring (in the good, stimulating, sense) medicine. In parts there is an unmistakable taste of the early, unsettling Banshees, the drums roll and thunder I over the beats as Zillah's vocals veer from passionate to heartless.
The arrangements swing from urgent, speedy pounding to controlled, biting,
almost-funk rhythms. The tape format was opted for in preference to vinyl in
order to proudly showcase the compositional diversity.
One song is entitled 'A Dream Of Honey'. Zillah and Gem grudgingly admit it was
written about Honey Bane, an EMI recording star who once, of course, lined up
alongside Gem and Pete in the Fatal Microbes.
Zillah: "The song's not , meant to slag her. Some of the things she set out to
achieve she almost did. All her records on little labels ; were really good but the
Top Of The Pops things were rubbish. "
Gem: "She gave up her ideals for money. Last time I saw her she looked
unhappy and depressed. Major labels dilute you. They water the music down and
take away your beliefs."
Pete hastens to disagree: "No they don't, not always, not if you don't let them. "
So what if a cigar toting top record company executive parked the limo outside
the door and offered them a deal?
Sid: "I'd tell him I was busy and to come back tomorrow, when I'd made sure I was
out. " Pete grimaces slightly.

IN KEEPING WITH the described anti-propaganda stance, the lyrics never take a
firm stand one way or the other. But sometimes they sit too firmly on the fence,
often, to the extent of becoming meaningless.
'Exit' is about the much publicised aid-a-suicide-brigade. Zillah penned the words
but her intent is never clear.
"I question things, I don't give answers in my songs because everyone has
different answers but not always the full question. I mean everyone might have
the right to commit suicide, but should someone help them? It can escalate into
euthanasia. There is no answer."
What about 'Belfast', the title and the drawings in the lyric book reveal the
subject matter but the actual verses are incomprehensible?
"That's about someone who got his legs blown off and had to go home where
they wouldn 't help him down the stairs."
She giggles stupidly and hides her head under a coat.
Zillah: "It's sort of written in bits. Abstract, is that the word? It's difficult at first
but if you read through it, you'll understand it. You have to think about our
band, even we've all got, different opinions."
Which just about sums it up. Despite my doubts over the lyrics it is the "four
originalities pulling in different ways", as Sid said later, that gives Rubella
Ballet's music a fresh and dynamic sharpness.
Fingers crossed that this chemistry of variants doesn't , pull them apart too
quickly.

(SOUNDS March 13th 1982)

Rubella Ballet - Sid, Gem, Zillah and Pete