Burning Britain Quotes

“and I thought, ‘What does a good punk band need?’ Something to fight against’, and so I became a lot more political.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The gig was a disaster though as their singer Hendo drank a bottle of whisky before he went onstage. Halfway through the first song, he passed out, fell off the stage and didn’t get back up! Gig over!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The first time I saw Gogs was in Rainbow Records, wearing these kids’ plastic sunglasses, like Captain Sensible used to wear,” laughs Welshy. “He had a chain going from the glasses to his earring, which had a tea bag hanging off it! And to finish off the look, he had ‘I don’t care’ written on his back in huge letters… but he’s a superb bloke, and it was a pleasure when I finally played with him in Swine Flu years later.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“I think the big Livi scene grew from small factions in small areas all coming together, to drink alcohol basically, when we were all around the age of sixteen or seventeen.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“I remember being in this local pub,” chuckles Deek. “It was called the Tap, and all the punks used to hang out there, and bands would play sometimes too. Wattie made a rare appearance which sticks in my mind as this bloke went up to him and said, ‘Wattie, don’t you think your new album is a bit too metal more than punk?’ Wattie headbutted the poor guy in the face, leaving him staggering backwards, covered in blood, and asked, ‘Is that punk enough for you then?”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was a lot of fun in the beginning, going on tour in the UK, then going to Spain and getting thrown in jail for trashing the hotel… that made the Sunday papers! My dad always read the News Of The World and he saw the story about this wild Scottish punk band, and shouts to my mum, ‘What’s the name of that band our Karl’s in?’ ‘The Exploited,’ she replied. ‘Bloody hell! He’s in jail! It’s here in the paper!’ My parents had a fit; I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall at that moment.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was Buck’s first time ever on a stage, and he dealt with it the way so many other young punk musicians have dealt with it since:

I drank a bottle of Olde English cider to calm the nerves… but it didn’t work as I puked up at the side of the stage! I know that we played ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘Janie Jones’, and ‘White Riot’, but I can’t remember much else!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Touring with The UK Subs… the rucking… Charlie (Harper, Subs frontman) used to shit in a plastic bag and whack it round your head when you were sleeping!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Peter was well depressed, waking up on Christmas Day in his bunk all alone, and there we were, sat at the back of the tour bus, and he says, ‘What are these six red pills?’ I said, ‘I dunno’, and he said, ‘I’ll take them anyway!’ And then all we saw of him for the next four days was this hand hanging limp out the side of his bunk… we just used to take his pulse as we walked past!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“When Nick started the label, he put us in Pink Floyd’s studio in Britannia Row,” says Del incredulously. “It was massive, and when you went upstairs, they still had that big pink pig up there. It was phenomenally expensive, about £500 a day, maybe more, which was a lot of money in 1983. We had the studio block-booked for a month, and we never used to go. It was always empty; we’d be back in Brighton doing loads of mushrooms and acid! I’d be tripping all night, get up about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, go to the pub, and suddenly remember I should be in the studio doing guitars, and I’d just blow it out and go back to bed.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We had a sort of manager at the time, and he introduced us to John Curd and his partner, Chris Gabrin, so we turned up at this pub in London on our bikes, and gave Chris a pint of piss! That was our introduction to our management – we all pissed in a beer glass, put a bit of brown ale on the top and brought it out to him outside the pub! And we made him drink it; we were a right bunch of wankers!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The truth is that I got into punk rock because I have always had a predisposition to tell people to fuck off in an amplified ambience”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We were banned from Canterbury Art College because our roadie, Mongo Tom, drank our after-show beer and wine, got on stage and people thought he was the support act. He stripped naked to the background music, put Billy’s drum sticks up his arse, and began to gyrate while balancing our last bottle of wine on his head. You should have seen the faces of the punters as they walked in. After this hilarity, he disappeared. He got in the back of his van, passed out and shat himself! Very runny it was too; he rolled around in it for a few hours until we had finished our set. All was going well until I went to find him. When I opened the van doors, the smell was bad; he staggered out crying, ‘Help me, Lee!’ I ran a mile.

“As we were packing up the gear he went back in – no one would go near him – and removed all the fag machines from the walls! These were hidden in his van. Then he turned up at the after-show party at one of the student union houses. He got in every bed to clean himself up, stole all of the girls’ underwear and generally made an arse of himself. That was the only gig that he did with us. He eventually ended up in nick for drug smuggling!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We’ve always been a very lazy band,” admits the vocalist, “And we’ve always spent most of our time drinking, so whenever anyone booked a studio, we’d get it done as quickly as possible so we could get down the pub. We never wanted to spend much time with the actual production side of things, so that got left to the guy in the studio, who probably had very little allegiance to punk. So we always had a bad sound, but I think a lot of bands back then often did.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Our message, such as it is, has always been, have fun,” he continues, attempting to define the secret of their longevity. “That’s timeless and appeals to everyone. If your songs are about the political state of the country, or a victim of police brutality in the Eighties, then the agenda that you established for yourself becomes obsolete. You become an anachronism…”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Yet another genius decided to soak the room with the shower and there was the usual surfeit of girls, booze, and drugs. Somehow we got bored with this and the notion of a puking contest was suggested. This apparently, was an entertaining idea and a bunch of us sat around the waste paper basket. After a couple of rounds of retching and gagging (I think there were some rules but they were never written down!), all that had slopped into the bin was about an inch of bile.

To make things more interesting it was proposed that, for a sum of money, someone should drink the colon cocktail we had regurgitated. We all dug deep in our pockets and began to throw pfennigs and marks on the table. On seeing the pile of cash, our ‘Bastard Roadie Number One’ took up the challenge. We all moved close to the broken sink and he lifted the bin to his lips. He put it down again.
“Several times he raised it to his lips and balked. Finally he got the rim on his bottom lip and began to tip the bin. As the slime slid towards his mouth someone – it might have been me – said, ‘And you have to gargle’.

He didn’t stop; he opened up, threw back his head and gargled the stomach contents of about half a dozen punks. He didn’t throw up, but he might have screamed and jumped around a lot. Victorious, he grabbed the money… which when converted back to sterling came to about two quid. It wasn’t a very successful tour!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was the first time I looked around at the guys I was with and thinking, ‘I ain’t sure I like you that much …’ I realised they were into rock‘n’roll stardom, climbing the ladder and making money, and I was the only one who seemed to have any punk rock principles. To see the people who had been my closest friends for all these years, the people I’d first sniffed glue with, the people I’d first taken acid with, travelled abroad with, to see them turn into this … this … bull-shit, it was so poor.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“As a fourteen-year-old spotty urchin, he came and banged on my door when I nearly twenty, and said, ‘As the main punk in Grantham, would you want to join my band? I need a face to sing for us.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“There was no bar on, and the other two pubs in town shut for the night when they heard about the punk gig, but a few lads broke into one of the pubs, turned the pumps on and started serving themselves! Obviously the cops were called, so they ran back to the gig, and when the police turned up, we all pelted them with snowballs. John Hall, of Society’s Victims, was grabbed and thrown in the back of a cop car, and when the copper went to use his radio, John reached over and ripped it out. He got a smack in the mouth for that. Vans soon arrived with dogs and chased us all over the place, and we kept chucking snowballs at them. About half of us were taken to the police station, and it made the front page of the Matlock Mercury: ‘Punk Rockers Run Riot’!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The film crew followed us around for about a week. They bought Chaz cider early in the morning and he played right into their hands! All they seemed to want to do was to portray us all as drunken yobs and for the most part they succeeded!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We ripped off anyone who made a record, whether it was dripping paint on our clothes, sticking zips on our T-shirts… even down to our first drummer, Craig Newnham (whose brother Shaun was briefly the very first singer for the band), having a rat in his bass drum. It wasn’t that punk tho’, ’cos he told his mum it was a giant African mouse or she would have thrown him and it out of the house!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“I think the best gig we did with the original line up was at the Aquarius club,” recalls Kip. “About 250 people were packed in there and the place was buzzing. We had a big crowd going nuts, people were falling all over the stage, and we were completely covered in spit… so I guess we went down really well!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We had read a prophetic article in The Guardian, ‘Urban Violation’, about the effect of Thatcherism on the inner cities. Politically we believed that it didn’t matter who held political power; left or right would use parliament to benefit the ruling classes. As anarchists we wanted change too; we wanted the whole fuckin’ system brought down ’cos it didn’t work and was immoral.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We were fuelled by speed and alcohol a lot of the time. And glue, of course. I’m not ashamed of that, everybody was doing it. It was a cheap drug really… we’d just left school, so where were we going to get £10 for a gram of speed? A tube of glue was only 60p! It was a shit drug as well, but it kept us entertained.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“A lot of bands did take themselves too seriously back then… anarchist ones usually. It was some quest to them, fighting the system by not drinking bitter ’cos it contained fish! And not wearing leather jackets… they didn’t seem to notice that their Doc Martens were made of leather too.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984