CRAZYHEAD

Well...The Porkbeast first met Reverb and a 14 year old Vom about 1979-80 when their comedy punk band Ronnie Slicker and the Banditz headlined a gig at a local secondary school supported by my first band The Stazers. The Rude Boys Ball it was called. For reasons to bizarre to repeat The Stazers (average age 16) had a large Hells Angels following who all turned up late, missing us and started chanting Stazers! Stazers! Stazers! (really freaking out the school authorities). Reverb in one of his typical reckless moments asked them if they wanted a fight..unwise but hilarious! However I digress...My memories of Crazyhead's genesis begin with me passing my driving test in early 1986. This enabled me to visit a seminal back-stage figure of the Leicester music arena - Baz the Postman. Baz was a lovely guy who was close to the centre of what became the Leicester Grebo scene (although we all hated the label its stuck and is kind of convenient). He operated a sort of 24 hour open house. This was a great place to visit, relax, drink, smoke and chat at any time of the day and night with a large and diverse group of revolving visitors. A good place to check out what was happening, just socialise and chill (later GBOA were to decorate Bazs bedroom this story needs to be told by them as it was a working art instillation worthy of a page of its own). So it was here that I arrived to find stickman Vom looking mightily pissed off. It transpired he and Kev Reverb had just been kicked out of local Velvet Underground worshiping group New Age having been replaced by that early 80s shibboleth the drum machine and bass sequencer (this had been instigated by a weird bloke called Joe somebody or other who apart from being the most miserable c**t you could ever meet, had loads of cash, fancied himself as a record producer and specialised in fucking up good bands). I remember saying "well the best way of putting their noses out and getting your own back would be to start a new group up. I'll play guitar if you like". Well, from this chance meeting the band that would be Crazyhead was born.Vom and Kev Reverb had played together in a number of groups in the past, the most notable being the aforementioned Ronnie Slicker and the Bandits. A sort of comedy punk band, the Bandits were never taken seriously by anyone but were very, very good, but totally uncool. Reverb's always interesting and catchy song writing, Vom's solid back-beat and the madness that was R. Slicker (geddit) made for excellent entertainment. They had a revolving selection of bass players, never settling on one. Their version of I Wanna Be Your Dog was legendary. In some ways Crazyhead were the bastard child of the Bandits.So, myself, Reverb and Vom had a jam down at their rehearsal rooms Unit 66, the art-space cum drug den just off Humberstone Gate in Leicester. Close by was the only decent bar in Leicester Helsinkis, the local music shop and cheap booze from Sainsburys....here a new rock group was born. We shared this factory unit space with what were to become The Bomb Party and Gaye Bykers On Acid among others (rock on Fokkerwolf!!). It went well with GBOA (I think they were Petal Frenzy at this point) remarking that I was a decent bass player (first time I had ever thought of playing bass). So we started auditioning lead guitarists and settled on Fast Dick. Anderson soon joined (mainly because he looked good rather than any particular singing talent- he was to grow into that) and we were away. Names were a problem, Crazyhead was a compromise of sorts, we nearly became The Scissor-Men but Crazyhead it was and we debuted supporting the Bomb Party at The Fan Club Leicester. The gig was a success and immediately the usually hard to please Leicester clique were full of praise. More gigs followed - one particularly mad open air event in the grounds of a castle somewhere down south was our first outside of Leicester. I got the gig through a mutual friend who I met in a pub, she looked like that cat had been sick on her when we turned up! We were swearing so much on stage that the police were called by local residents and they had to turn it down after us, so the die was cast and Crazyhead were unleashed on the world.Next on our list for world domination was the need to record a demo tape for distribution to record companies. So we decamped to Barkby Road Studios -an 8 track in the middle of a truck park and inspiration for Diesel Park West -ran by The Filberts/DPW guitarist Rick Wilson (of the perfect pitch and magic ears). There we recorded four songs. Buy a Gun, What Gives You The Idea That Youre So Amazing Baby and two others that escape me. It sounded good and we began mailing them off. Around this time I remember Kev showing me a fantastic spread of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction in the Face magazine (Vom would end up drumming for them). "Let's send a demo to their record company" that was Food records. Well we got an immediate reply, Andy at Food liked us, he organised a gig supporting Chelsea at the Croydon underground. This went well, another was organised this time Food boss Dave Balfe (of the Teardrop Explodes and wing-nut ears fame) attended. He came backstage afterwards and offered us a deal. This was literally a few months after I had met Vom at Bazs. The whirlwind was about to start. As a side issue Ross had been in a punk band called The Disco Zombies around 1978 of whom I was a big 15 year old fan (probably their only one before they decamped to London) he has done very well thank you having discovered Blur as well as Crazyhead.Next on the list was our first single with the excellent title (from a marketing point of view but a good song too) What Give You the Idea That Youre So Amazing Baby? Food got on with the press and we got on with gigging. And god did we gig, we were pretty good and it was very exciting but in the few short years we were together we gigged constantly - and we loved it you slaaaaags! This combination resulted in So Amazing flying to the top of the Indie charts as did its follow up Baby Turpentine. A front page in Sounds magazine sealed our new popular status. Round about this time we also rigged the Sounds Readers Poll which saw CH go well up the in the ratings of the people who mattered - your local friendly record company fascist.From here on it all becomes very mixed up.we were so busy, it was so exciting and so long ago but here is a melange of stuff I remember.Lots of gigs; lots of laughs; sitting on top of a Marshall Amp from Leicester to Hamburg to do a one off gig (as the Dutch customs man said as we fell off the boat "have you been drinking sirs?"...hell yes!) Touring with the Cult..touring with Julian Cope...Touring Europe with IGGY POP! Could it get any better? Well supporting The Ramones at Brixton Academy was close. Spending two months recording our first album Desert Orchid (named because Crazyhead were a flower in the desert of the music industry....or after a race horse; take your pick) and two weeks on the single Time Has Taken Its Toll On You (a long time that). Staying for these two months in Europe's premier gay hotel in Earls Court.....This was booked by mistake, but we loved its sleazy nature so much we stayed for the two months while recording Desert Orchid. A match made in heaven actually, they thought a bunch of dope smoking weirdoes was a cool addition to their hotel...even when we completely wrecked two rooms after the Zodiac Mindwarp album launch sinks of the wall, TVs out of the window etc. Well what did you expect with a bunch of twisted old fruits like us on board? Ha! HA!Ha! There are lots of funny stories about the P******** Hotel. Radio plays/sessions T.V..videos...coked out of our heads on the top of a skyscraper in the City of London (for Rags to Riches). Me and Fast Dick on Top of the Pops with Voice of the Beehive. Visiting the same with Jesus Jones; meeting Eric Clapton/Richard Thompson/David Gilmore/Neil Tennant at an EMI Christmas party. The US tour...Spinal Tap on 24 hour rotation, an unforgettable encounter with and animal porn vid..Reverb was a little to keen to show this to everyone....he and Spike also plastered Haslet studios in Linconshire with gay porn, I think there is a theme here somewhere...yeah that's it.....lots and lots of laughs...It was an Ace Time.Some of the more structured highlights included the many UK tours. Some of the most interesting gigs we got were when we hooked up with the Foreign Office run British Council who are a sort of flag waving cultural exchange quango. Crazyhead thereby became cultural diplomats for the Queen! They sent us to Post Revolutionary Romania, (we were treated like the Beatles), Moscow and Namibia in Africa. These were wild times, the Moscow gig in particular was an incredible debauch, I shared my 13th floor room with our agent Vince and after 12 hours of Ukranian champagne and vodka slammers things got weird. This is when the legendary roady Spike decided to go for a drunken walk around the ledge of the hotel accompanied by fast Dick 13 floors up....sheet! My whole room was trashed with most of it ending up out the window, the Russians went mad but hard currency calmed them down. Romania was very moving, many innocents died in that revolution and it was still very raw. Visiting the cathedral in Timisoara as the memorial service to the dead was taking place....pictures of butchered students on lamposts surrounded by candles...I remember sitting in a hotel room with the new minister of culture watching vids of the security forces of the old regime butchering protesters. Weird, weird scenes. But also uplifting as Romania loved us. Namibia was weird, a weekend in Africa, we spent as much time in the air as on the ground. Beautiful country, wild gig, broadcast all over Africa with Ziggy Marley headlining and one of Bob Marley's daughters hitting on me.Well we came down from all this by eventually being dropped by EMI who rumour had it signed Food records to get hold of Jesus Jones and Diesel Park West; scuzzy punk rockers were not allowed (our AR man at EMI was the son of a Duke; public schoolboys get all the best jobs but are as talentless as the rest of us!). An ill fated sojourn with Black Records produced the underrated Some Kind Of Fever album but the writing was on the wall. Material was drying up my ego was out of control, my enthusiasm waning and I took one of the hardest decisions in my life and left in 1990. Crazyhead carried on with a new bass player for a couple of years but someone else needs to tell that story. Still...no regrets and the best time of my life and one of my highest achievements. I miss the guys, but there are still some tensions, who knows time may take its toll on them? One thing is for sure, we blew everybody off at Reading Festival in 1989! Crazyhead were a national treasure Gawd Blessem!Dr. Porkenstein 2006And this is what THE PORKBEAST was doing in late 2007 with his new gigging band STRESSBITCH....