It was a Scotsman who figured it out in the end, a well-educated producer at BBC Scotland who suddenly realised that every time one of his jocks referred to Pogue Mo Chone, they were actually inviting their listeners to "Kiss My Arse" in Gaelic. The best kept secret in England pop iconography was out, "The Dark Streets Of London" were banned from the airwaves, and anyone wise enough to have followed Shane MacGowan's career to date could rejoice once again. He was still taking the piss.
History has a habit of repeating itself. If you remember Punk you the Nipple Eerectors. Shane sang, Shanne Bradley played bass, there was a guitarist named Roger and a drummer called Arcane. Hot sticky audition nights at the Roxy followed; somewhere along the line Arcane dropped out and Gerry fell in, and the whole lot of them were so chaotic that most people simply left the room and waxed lyrical about the members' former careers. "Shanne was in the Launderettes, Captain Sensible taught her to play bass. Gerry was in The Tools (whaddya' mean, yo've never heard of The Tools?) and Shane?
Shane was The Face of '76; I know that. cos he was on the cover of Sounds, and that's what it said alongside his picture. Shane O'Hooligan, The Face of '76!' He had his earlobe bitten off by Jane Modette when the two went to see The Clash at the ICA, at Ronnie Scotts he got so carried away by The Jam that he smashed up their speakers...he even had a go at running a fanzine, putting together something called
Bondage, then loosing interest before the first issue was even off the photocopier. And then he formed The Nipple Erectors." True, false, apocryphal, definitely, yes.
The first song the Erectors were ever given was "My Degeneration." Journalist Adrian Thrills, then just running with the same pack as Shane, played guitar on the first ever demos, "blistering demos, recorded in bassist Shanne's bedroom." And 10 years later the pair met up again, to reminisce inprint on the good old days.
"I don't know if punk was the watershed it was cracked up to be. At the time it made everything else seem irrelevant, but I'm not so sure about its long term effect. But there was something special about those gigs, in the same way that there was something special about the Two-Tone gigs a few years later. As a member of the audience I think you can only experience that real rush once. The excitement does tend to wane with each successive wave that comes along. I mean, I'd always go and see Madness and The Specials when they were playing, but I wouldn't go around breaking my head open onstage the way I would at punk gigs. After a while you don't want to do that any more."
The name was never anything more than a joke, a test of Punk morality. The Punks failed. It was funny how ...it was funny how they all wanted to be so damned anti-establishment, right up until something even further gone than they were came along. Not only did the Erectors find it hard to get gigs, they found it hard to get anybody along to them as well. Their greatest supporters could be counted on the fingers of one hand - Jane Suck, from Sounds, thought they were wonderful and wasn't at all averse to letting people know it. The owners of the Rocks Off record shop in Soho Market were impressed as well - why, they even gave the Erectors their first recording contract, kicking off with a single on the Soho label, "King Of The Bop". Shane later confessed, "When we recorded it we were all drunk and on drugs. Shanne was in a coma.
Record collectors pay a lot of money for that one nowadays. Ha! They should have bought it when it first came out, in June '78. It was a pretty fair assessment of the Nipple Erectors, but it never got played and it never got bought. So two months later, the band tried again.
Two months isn't a long time, but a lot had changed while it passed. First Roger left - someone said he was off selling postcards in the National Gallery. Gerry quit as well, and had a brief stint in an archaic incarnation of The Pretenders. A rumour went round that Shanne had gone too, but it wasn't true, she'd simply changed her name to Dragonella so that people wouldn't keep confusing her name with O'Hooligans. The new guitarist, Larry Hinrichs, was another friend of The Damned - he'd even sung onstage with them, one night when Dave Vanium forgot to turn up; Bernie Tormés drummer, Mark Harrison, taught him to play guitar in the first place, and on that glorious night six months later whne The Nips blew The Damned off the Hop & Anchor stage, who should be helping out on drums but...Mark Harrison.
Phil Rowlands of Eater was a temporary Nip for a while as well, another in the string of sticksmen who helped propel the band through this latest stage of their development.
Working Saturdays at the Rocks Off stall, it had'nt taken Shane long to get a fix on the way new music habits were heading; while most folk and their mother were propounding the decidely sickly charms of Powerpop, completely unnoticed Rockabilly was making a street-level comeback. Shane picked his ears up and The Nips gave it a go. Only trouble was, as Dragonella later admitted, "We were called Punkabilly because we couldn't play it very well."
"All The Time In The World", a driving R&B number born of Shane's hatred of what the pop press was calling "New Music" and his love of the likes of the Inmates and Count Bishops, was a solidly excellent single, but one which came as something of a surprise to those die-hards who had got off on the original Nipples. Shane, however, had little time for their predelictions. The thing with punk, he said again and again, "was that nobody knew what the fuck was going on. I got into the turgid basement of Punk in its bad days. I was snorting sulphate, spending money on drinks which were over expensive and missing the bands I was supposed to be watching. It was a load of crap in the end. The only bands I ever really liked were the origina four; the Pistols, The Clash, Jam and, especially , The Damned. They summed up the true punk attitude. The only ones I've liked since then are The Member and Sham 69." He summed up he difference between what he did then and now with ease; "When I was excited during the punk days I wrote about being bored. Now that I am bored I write about being excited. It's a rock'n'roll fantasy."
Six months separated "All The Time In The World" from "Gabrielle" , The Nips third single, six months in which Larry Hingrichs was replaced by Frits, ZigZag amiably described Shane as resembling Plug from The Beano's Bash Street Kids, and Shane grew even more dissatisfled with the current pop fare. "Records by the fucking Police and Tourists don't mean anything to what's happening in the world today. Music should refleet the mood of the times, but now it's just fucking escapism. It's got absolutely nothing to do with how people feel any more. Bands like the Sex Pistols and Moby Grape both summed up the mood of the times. The Pistols were always anti-love songs, but only Public Image or The Pop Group really sum up today.
"Cunts like Ian Page say 'Let's all wear suits and everything will be alright' and that really is a load of old bollocks. It won't be alright! 1980 is basically a frightened, fucked up hell hole where everyone is sitting around waiting for the bomb to drop. I'm sick of basic rock ideas and I reckon we ought to play a 'Rock against Rock' gig. " And of The Nips' flirtation with R&B "I just want to try different things on stage. I want to disturb people. I'm really sick of people telling me what a nice fun-loving band we are. There'll be no more of that R&B shit once we work out some new numbers. We weren't good enough to play it and it's all bollocks anyway." - a statement which Dragonella was quick to agree with: "I've always thought R&B and bands like The Inmates were boring, but Shane used to disagree with me. He changes his mind every six months!"
That said, "Gabrielle" turned out more of a classic pop song than a trip to the aural cleaners, particularly once Chiswick Records picked up on it for release. "It's a good tune, but Chiswick fucked it up and I am fucking ashamed to have been associated with a silly pop record," Shane announced when asked why the song seemed such a low- point in The Nips'live set. "All these new bands nowadays, especially the so- called mods, are making 'good'pop records and I fucking hate'good' POP records. It just doesn't mean anything in 1980, or it shouldn't anyway.
"I hate the lyrics. I was at a most cynical stage in my writing and I thought 'Oh what's the use of trying to be different,' so I wrote a fucking love song. I feel disgusted now whenever I sing those lyrics on stage - in fact, I'd like to drop it altogether but this fucking lot like doing it. I just go through the motions on stage. There's no real emotion to me when I sing that song."
Not that that stopped him giving everything throughout the rest of the set. The months on either side of "Gabrielle" saw the band turn up supporting The Jam, the Dolly Mixtures, Dexys Midnight Runners, the Purple Hearts. Paul Weller talked of producing some demos for the band, but Shane prophecised, "If we ever make it, It'll all be down to luck because we've been dropped by everyone who's ever dealt with us. I dunno, I suppose we're just cunts, really."
Of course, The Nips never did make it. An album, "Only At The End Of The Beginning", appeared to muted praise towards the end of the year - one final single, "Happy Song", followed close to a year later. But The Nips were dead on their feet; when they did finally call it a day, nobody outside of their immediate circle even noticed.