1978/79
- The Beginning.
There was a disco in the old Bishop Sutton
hall; it was the old corrugated iron building that now no longer exists, and
the year? I think it was towards the end
of 1978 or early 1979, anyway, a year or more past the high water mark of punk
rock. It was getting near the end of the evening when several of us persuaded
the disc jockey to play some punk records to round off the night. Well I guess
a few of us got a little carried away and we invaded the stage, and with some
brooms we found backstage, we proceeded to mime to the songs and generally ass
about. It was as they say a ‘good laugh’. But this was I suppose our defining
moment. It was the next night (or sometime shortly after) in the Stoke Inn that
somebody (probably, Pat) said ‘why don’t we form a band’. Now who can be in it?
Well Pat yes, it was his idea, so Pat, myself and … ‘hey Barry do you want to
form a band’? He answers yes, so we sit down the three of us to sort out who
plays what. Pat bags singer, Barry says he’ll take bass because it has fewer
strings and therefore must be easier to learn/play – bastard! Wish I’d thought
of that first. So I’m left with guitar or drums, well I’ve got no rhythm and
I’m pretty sure I’m tone deaf –so what to do? Think fast you fool! So getting
in groove of Barry’s way of thinking, I choose the guitar because I didn’t
fancy lugging the drum kit about.
Now all we needed was an idiot to
lug those drums about – enter Dale Read (who was on stage with us in Sutton
hall). Try as we may, to get him in the band, Dale proved he was no idiot and
refused point blank to join. Pat then suggests his cousin, Ian ‘Lice’ Gilbert
because like the band, The Damned’s drummer ‘Rat Scabies’, he had a ‘punk’ name
that he’d inherited from childhood long before punk rock burst on the scene.
Lice needed little persuasion so that was how the original line-up evolved.
Left: Pat eats his microphone
Now we
needed to get some real instruments to replace the brooms. Janie, my sister and
Pat’s girlfriend at the time (now his wife) was a club book agent for Freeman’s
catalogue, said if we ordered them from her she would split the commission with
us. Of course it wasn’t high quality stuff but it would do us.
We
decided to organise a few disco’s locally to raise money to help pay for it,
even though apparently that’s illegal. Oh! Dear oh! My, oh well never mind,
I’ll plead insanity. So over the next few months we raised some money for the
band (and gave some to charity) and rehearsed in the attic of my parent’s
farmhouse (New Barn Farm at Norton Malreward). Now the punk philosophy was ‘you
don’t have to
know
how to play to create music’. Now with hindsight I think that statement is a
little misleading, perhaps it should have been, ‘you don’t have to be
proficient to create music’. We took the first statement at its word and
perhaps also being a bit lazy saw it as a way of avoiding putting in the work
of actually learning how to play even at a basic level. We must have wasted
about a year farting about in the attic making a hell of din, and we were
always out of tune, I don’t know how my parents stood the noise. One memory is
of Lice kicking over the drum kit and the cymbal cutting through my guitar amp
lead, which caused a big flash with lots of sparks.
Left:
Lice & Hughie, Right Barry
Of
course now the word had been out for a while, that we had formed a punk band,
everybody we knew kept asking us when we were going to play live, I think they
were genuinely quite excited by the prospect, as were we. You see people like
us; well people round the
It was of course much too soon really to
do it; we just could not tune or play our instruments. We would just tighten
the strings to an approximation of where we thought they should be and that was
it for tuning. As for the songs, well I’d been writing lyrics since the idea of
the band came about, I found that quite easy, but we had to put them to music,
so I tried to write that as well, what the hell did I know about writing music?
But we had to present something, so I came up with some very basic, very
repetitive music/noise –da, da, da, da, dum, da, da, da, da, dum! And so
on.
We hired a disco (I think it was Ian
Locke) that had to set up at the back of the hall, which left the stage free
for us. The plan was that Ian played his normal disco stuff and we would come
on near the end of the night and do our set. The people turned up in droves (my parents even came up and listened to us
out side in their car) and it was packed tight in that hall, way past fire
regulations. When the time came for our set, we stood on stage with the
curtains drawn and Ian gave us the big build up The curtains were parted and
the crowd erupted, I’ll always remember the red sweaty faces of the people as
they crowded around the stage hardly able to move, that was the highlight of
the evening as we could never live up to their expectations and it went down
hill fast after that. I’m sure all the people were disappointed in us but we
should have had a few lessons first, and the next for phase of the band that’s
what we decided we had to do.
Rehearsing before first gig
Far right front, Roger Fear, John Harvey
(black coat), Les Rogers third from left and Gary Stock dancing.
After we had played for a while the crowd
thinned out a little, but some brave souls remained from right to left: Simon
Fear, Dicky Sage, Michael ‘Rat’ Pearce, Trevor Chubb, then unknowns.
1980
- A Fresh Start.
The realisation that we needed some lessons dawned on us after
that first gig but I think we did do another gig at Felton Hall after that and
it probably was as bad as the first but I don’t really remember it. I have that
first gig on tape and it really is quite appalling. There is a moment near the
end where Dale Read is urging me to play a guitar solo, (I’ve placed that
request on our album, so listen out for it!) but I couldn’t even play a proper
chord.
It was at this point that we sort of
stalled for a while but eventually we arranged some guitar lessons with a guy
called Liam Hentshall in
Sometime in 1980 Pat left the band for the first time. I’m not
entirely sure why but I think he didn’t like the covers I was choosing for the
band, maybe I should have sought a consensus for the songs, but I was trying to
choose songs that had little bass runs or guitar riffs that would help improve
our playing and finger movements. His replacement was quite simple really. We
were in the attic rehearsing with me singing badly when I said why don’t we ask
Dicky Sage, he was dating my other sister Theresa and he was up at our house a
lot. Ok you don’t have to date my sister to get in the band but it helps;
besides he just happened to be there that night. It was about this time that I started
presenting my own songs for the band and I really liked the idea of trying to
create our own songs, to me it seemed like a natural progression for a band to
do. One of the first proper (not counting the few I wrote for our first gig)
songs was ‘Oral Contact’. This song was about being too scared to talk to
girls, and I suppose carnal lust as well. It was a bit of punk thrash and
copies still exist on tape. I rewrote this song for our album ‘From Wonderful
to What if?’ using some of the same chords and adding some others, I also
rewrote all the lyrics along a lamer ‘lack of personal contact’ theme. Anyway
more about songs and their meaning elsewhere, this piece is about chronicling
the history of the Pork Sirens. Then Lice left, I really can’t remember when or
why, he probably got bored or something. That’s when Pat rejoined - as the
drummer this time.
1981- Recording Our Own Songs
Our guitar tutor Liam had a mobile 4 track-recording studio and
we asked him to come out to our attic to record four of our songs, this was 8th
September 1981 and we recorded the songs ‘ The Fatboy Awake’, ‘A Second
Chance’, ‘Life Below Deck’, and ‘Collapse’ as demo’s. The quality of the recording is not great, I
think Liam used the same master tape over and over for all his recordings, but
what did we know about things like that, it’s easy to bullshit young lads who
don’t know much about the recording process. I remember we sent our tape
off to John Peel like a lot of bands used to do. We had no
response at the time, but a few years later I had a phone call from a woman who
told me she worked in John’s office, I thought she was going to offer us a
session, but no, she said John was having a clear-out of tapes he had been sent
and would we like ours back? I also sent a copy of our first tape to Colin
Newman who was the singer in one of my favourite bands Wire. I did get a reply
from Colin and I still have his letter he told me he was riveted for about 20
seconds but it wasn’t his cup of tea, I thought wow! I made someone listen to
my music for a whole 20 seconds.
I
think we may have played some more gigs in 1981 leading up to our first
recording session, when I say gigs I mean a couple or so, maybe another one or
two at Felton Hall and a couple in Norton Malreward Hall, we had always wanted
to play one at Bishop Sutton Hall in memory of our stage invasion there, but
sadly that never happened, they just wouldn’t hire it out to us (probably
thought we’d wreck the joint or something, somebody did set off a fire
extinguisher at Felton though). I remember Dicky’s debut at Felton Hall,
because he didn’t get on stage, he was too nervous, drank half a bottle of
scotch and couldn’t sing, so I had to do it.
Pat Hodge: Drums
Hughie Pearce: Guitar
Barry Read: Bass
Richard Sage: Vocals
Shortly after this recording session Pat left the band again
(don’t remember any reasons), this time we brought in Richard Witcombe who
wasn’t really a drummer but he had played bass in a band he had formed which
had at this point been disbanded. We immediately started rehearsing four more songs for
another demo recording, this time Liam had moved up to a mobile 8
track-recording studio (probably part funded by us!). The date was 
Death’. The line-up now, was:
Hughie
Pearce: Guitar
Barry
Read: Bass
Richard Sage: Vocals
Richard
Witcombe: Drums
Just
before the recording of these songs Barry told us he was going to leave, again
I don’t know the reasons, sometimes you do things for a while get fed up and
then stop doing them. Barry’s decision
meant that now I was the only original band member left. It seamed a logical
decision for Rich Witcombe to take over the Bass duties and he asked his mate
John Trotter to play drums. There could have been a period where John left, Pat
came back, Pat left, John came back, I’m getting dizzy now. But you get the
picture?
1982/83–
The End
I
remember less about this year than the previous three. I can’t even remember if
we played any gigs or where (and we only ever played Felton and Norton
Malreward Halls). As I mentioned above we had a change of personal again and
the band line-up in early 1982 now looked thus:
Hughie
Pearce: Guitar
Richard
Sage: Vocals
Richard
Witcombe: Bass
John
Trotter: Drums
We didn’t take any pictures of this line
up so here’s a picture of a sheep
instead (for Rich Witcombe)
We
still rehearsed in the attic and that year we started work on four more songs
that would end up on our third demo tape. These songs were ‘The Un-dead Die (an
un-dead dies)’, ‘Serenade’, ‘Artic Wastes’, and ‘Shepherd’. At some point in
the year John Trotter left (hey John, did you “borrow” my copy of ‘God Save The
Queen’ when you were looking through my record collection?). Back came Pat on
drums, so now we lined up like this, this being our final formation:
Pat
Hodge: Drums
Hughie Pearce: Guitar
Richard Sage: Vocals
Richard Witcombe: Bass
Has anybody seen my copy of God Save the
Queen it looks like the picture above!
We recorded the four above songs in
But
everything ends eventually right? And so it came to pass, we called it a day -
what does that mean ‘called it a day’ what day? Anyway in 1983 we ‘split
up’. Was the reason too much sex drugs and rock and roll? Well no, the reason
we split was because I found out a member of the band was about to appear in
court on a sheep worrying charge – ok, yeah that’s a joke! Actually
members of the band were getting married, having children and all that stuff
takes over your life doesn’t it? There was a brief reunion 1988 or 89, the
first red-nose charity event, when we played at Norton Malreward Hall we
covered the UK Subs, the Undertones and Eddie Cochran. We had to play without
the bass because Richard Witcombe didn’t turn up on the night which was a bit
of a let down, but that was our last live appearance. And then a lifetime (or
so it seemed) came and went. I would occasionally have people come up to me
over the years and say things like, ‘you were in the Pork Sirens’ or ‘remember
when you played at Felton Hall’? So we did make a small ripple then.
Then
in 2003 I heard Pat and Barry had formed a band with some other local guys
(Paul Baber, Gerry Oakley, and Graham Taylor) and they intended to play a lot
of the old punk songs we used to listen to years ago, maybe in the spirit of
that original night at Bishop Sutton Hall perhaps. Well they started rehearsing
at Pat’s, and as I live next door I get to hear the rehearsals first hand, and
yeah - they sounded ok, a lot better than we did in the attic all those years
ago. At that time they didn’t have a name but they were calling the idea their
‘mid life crisis’ (which then became their name).
They
played their first
gig in Pat and Janie’s House to a crowd of about a 100 people (their
conservatory is quite large) and it was reviewed in the local monthly paper the
Chew Valley Gazette. The headline for the review read ‘The Return Of The
Pork Sirens’ which I don’t think they liked, especially the guys who
had never been in the band. But that headline got me thinking – what
if?
Hughie
Pearce May 2007 Return to
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