..and I mean that in a genuine and positive way (and not the way our resident Wishbone Ash/Mahavishnu correspondent writes when he’s poking fun at some terrible old ‘Oi’ band playing at the Rebellion Festival).
They’re always good value when they turn up on those TOTP re-runs. Bluster Bloodvessel had a running joke of trying to outdo himself in terms of wearing a costume that will make him as sweaty and uncomfortable as possible (Henry VII, huge fur coat, skiing gear and most memorably..a diving bell and wet suit). Listening back I now realise they’re the missing link between Madness and the Bonzo Dog Band and I can’t help but admire that run of stupidly bouncy early 80s singles from “Ne-Ne Na-Na Na-Na Nu-Nu” to their excellent cover of ‘My Boy Lollipop’. The band are great as well, whoever was on bass works wonders with this one…
Bad Manners…due a reappraisal
That is a very fine brass section. Easy to imagine that they were excellent live.
Let’s have one more song to brighten our morning..
I sort of know where you are coming from, as the band seemed always very tight, and I always thought the horn section could throw in some surprisingly jazzy moments. But it was Mr Bloodvessel himself and (most of) the material which let them down and made them unwatchable/unlistenable. They turned up at the Bearded Theory festival recently and went down the apparent expected storm, and indeed sounded good from afar, but I couldn’t bear to immerse myself in all the gurning and “humour”.
Like Sky, good musicians let down by not good enough ideas.
Inadvertently saw them at The Dorset Steam Fair a few years back and they were surprisingly good.
I don’t have any time for the comedy ska stuff but I do have the singles of Special Brew and Walking In The Sunshine which show that they did have a decent enough pop side when they put their minds to it.
Never seen Bad Manners live but the comments make me compare them with Madness. They also do the wacky ska stuff very well but also have more than a few fine songs which deal with something more personal and have staying power. Ska has always had an edge.
I did see them live in Reading (an indoor venue, not the festival) and they were tremendous fun.
But the night was plagued by a bunch of skins who kept “Sieg Heiliing” through the night, much to Buster’s displeasure, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do to shut them up.
I saw them several years ago at The Rayners Hotel (since demolished and replaced by a block of flats) in Rayners Lane. Very good band but, as above, there were a troubling number of huge and rather dangerous-looking skinheads at the gig. The Rastafarian bass-player did not look very happy about playing to such a crowd.
Much more recently I saw Lee Thompson and his son Daley perform with Daley’s band The Silencerz. They are a great 10-piece Ska/Reggae party band with a few curve balls thrown, well worth catching.
The Rayners was my local in the 80s. Not sure I ever went in the hall though as it seemed to be mainly used for wedding receptions and the occasional a Sunday lunchtime jazz band. I’m not surprised it closed. It had three bars plus the hall, a pretty big place to keep going.
The main bars were humungous but the one for the hall was tiny. Never set foot in the main bars. A massive place, much too big to be a profitable concern, so sad but not surprising when it closed and was eventually torn down.
It was the early and mid- ’90s when I used to go there to see bands. A guy called Dave Feenstra, who still puts on blues gigs in the South London area and then a friend of a friend (another Dave, now sadly deceased) used to put bands on there once a month on Friday nights. Mostly decent tribute acts but occasionally you’d get the likes of Man, John Otway, Stan Webb’s Chicken Shack, Roger Chapman & The Shortlist or Albert Lee & Hogan’s Heroes.
The Bad Manners one was a one-off Saturday night gig.
The wonderful Pete Feenstra http://www.feenstra.co.uk
I recall a news report from a few years ago. Buster had “digestion problems” and a lady* was helping** him “release the pressure” in a seaside beach hut. The arresting officer was not convinced.
(*) the sort your mother warned you about
(**) in a Gillian Taylforth style
Is there any other reason, ever, that anybody is ever inside those beach huts? Do they not exist purely so that underperforming* coppers can top up their arrest quota at the end of a quiet month?
(*hur)
The closest ones you’ll find to me are probably in Frinton, which I’ve never considered to be a hotbed of vice. Nevertheless, the first beach hut I saw advertised for sale there is well over 30 grand, and assuming that you would have to supply your own prositutes that seems a little pitchy to me.
Whenever you pass these huts any inhabitants never seem to be doing anything except gazing out to sea. There almost always couples who look for all the world as if they have completely run out of things to talk about. (‘Michael?’ ‘Yes, dear?’ ‘Tell me again exactly how much you paid for this beach hut? I hear Barbados is very nice at this time of year.’)
https://www.beach-huts.com/beach-huts-for-sale-ref-4419.php
Ah. You can only go to Barbados and have a truly memorable holiday just a few times for 30 grand. You can go to your Frinton beach hut and be bored out of your tiny mind for the rest of your life for that.
By the looks of them they’re (correct spelling this time) all praying for the sweet embrace of merciful death to come for them soon, whether or not that means they get good value from their hut investment.
That is a wonderful theory about the underperforming coppers. Moose. But as this very entertaining, bad mannered excursion to the Great British Beach has revealed, those huts are quintessentially British. Something which perhaps Mr Bloodvessel understands very well. That story just would not have hit home so well, if he had been nabbed in a Club Med hut.
Marvellous photos illustrating this perceptive, poetic piece on the joys of the beach hut.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/aug/23/joy-of-beach-huts-julie-myerson
Sure. The council here in sunny Southend lets you use them for sea swimming activities.. Especially at this time of year when the wetsuit takes a while to don, and indeed doff.
If you can doff a wetsuit you’re a better man that I am, Gunag Escher.
Inbetween all this “donning” and “doffing”, would one be “sporting” said wetsuit?
Inquiring minds etc.
I don’t, Senora Escher does. And if you don’t start the sporting soon after the donning I guess the word for the activity you would be doing is “broiling.”
And then you’d be doffing, if you had any sense.
One or two quite good singles but not in same stratosphere as a superb band like Madness
Most violent gig I ever went to was Bad Manners in 1980 in Durham. And I seen ’em all, yeah? Rejects, Upstarts, 4-Skins, all the greats.
…Richard Clayderman, Daniel o’Donnell, Andre Rieu…
“Too much fighting on de dancefloor”
Did anyone ever hear the Rejects’ legendary withdrawn 45 ‘Barry Manilow Kicked Our Heads In’ – or did I just imagine it?
Same here. I saw them at their peak at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. I’ve never seen so much blood at a gig! Normally I would have been much nearer the mosh pit but I withdrew early to see a stream of bouncers covered in blood dragging people out of the side door. Apparently someone on stage was stabbed but among the chaos it wasn’t obvious from the floor. The SPG had a field day outside afterwards!
A really posh girl I used to work with(Who incidentally was very into Craig David and the then recently reformed boy band Blue) once casually mentioned that she had just started going out with the current keyboardist from an “old 80’s band” she had never heard of. My interest, initially pricked, shot through the roof when she revealed that the said band were called Bad Manners. The girl went on to tell me that she had just recently visited Buster at his landlocked Houseboat abode with her new boyfriend. The picture she distastefully described was of an inebriated Buster sat in the middle of a massive pile of tour T-shirts chugging back countless bottles of lager, belching and breaking wind frequently and loudly. The scenario was brilliantly completed when she recalled hearing a knock at Buster’s door that when answered revealed ” a pissed up idiot called Max Splodge” who had decided to pop in for a visit. She seemed genuinely disturbed and confused by the whole incident.
“Max Splodge… you’ll like him…a sensitive young artiste with a record contract with Deram…”
“Oh really? What are his songs like?”
“Er….”
http://www.45cat.com/record/bum2
Woh! He did of course once have a Hotel in Margate called ‘Fatty Towers’ specifically catering for the more rotund. Now closed down. Apparently he’d slimmed down to 12 stone of late which means I now weigh more than Buster which is a sobering thought.
He’s 12 stone??? Flaming heck, 11 stone of that must be his head!
Tongue, morelikes…..
ISTR reading that he had some kind of serious illness some time back, that required removal of several yards of plumbing. He was a lot slimmer as a result.
Michael Rother has recorded with Buster Bloodvessel.
“Ne-Ne Na-Na-Na-Na-Na Neu-Neu!”
Well I thought this was funny.
Was there a point at which Buster ditched all the hit-era guys and got in a load of Some Other Guys, or did the originals just leave one by one?
Seen Bad Manners live a couple of times. Fucking brilliant live band AFAIAC.
This is the only track by Bad Manners that I’ve ever knowingly heard, but I’ve heard this one a LOT. Back in the day my best friend had a video recorder (not a VCR, it was that 2000 thingie) and a tape full of music videos, and we watched that tape once a day for a year… “Samson and Delilah” was on it.
Can’t help thinking, Locust, that Bad Manners would be the perfect band for an open air gig at the Gröna Lund funfair. Screams from the various roller coasters, the smell of candy floss and popcorn, and the energy from hundreds of excited teens determined to have a big night out.
Sadly, no beachhuts!
OK, but where would you find the “hundreds of excited teens” lining up to see Bad Manners? 😉
In a place called 1981.
Well,they did do the theme tune to ITVs “Hold Tight” which was filmed at Alton Towers.
42 seconds in
Intriguing – I’ve never heard that one before but I’m sure I heard all their other ‘back in the day’ singles. Was it a hit in Sweden?
Hm, not really @colin-h. But IIRC I think it was part of the “Kiss Lucia Good Night” music video cornucopia; several hours of nothing but non stop videos on Swedish TV on the night of the Swedish celebration of S:t Lucia, to make the teenagers stay at home rather than go out drinking. Lucia (December 13) is a big teenage drinking day, especially if it happens to be on a Friday (which I suspect it was that year). And Swedish TV hardly ever showed music videos so this was a huge deal!
It may have been a smaller radio hit following that, but as I said; it’s the only one of their tracks that I’ve ever heard, so it can’t have been very big, or they would have picked up the following singles as well.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that Buster Bloodvessel was used to discourage Swedish teens from drinking. Rather like the Hulk appearing in a campaign against vandalism and random damage.
‘Kiss Lucia Goodnight’ sounds like one of those creepy crime dramas you Swedes keep churning out!
One of the very few times my dear old Dad ever commented on pop music was when we were at a football match and BM’s Lorraine came on the tannoy
(Chorus: LorraineLorraineLorraineLorraine)
“Is that record stuck?”, he enquired.
“Er… no”, I replied, surprised that he was listening at all..
A whole thread about Bad Manners and not a mention of the Two Ronnies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP-ocYfy-po
My nephew played bass in the band for a while. Friend to the stars here, I know…
Seen them a couple of times at Butlins Adult Weekends. Plenty of braces, pork pie hats, and DM’s on view. And as for the men etc… Decent value but a bit too much ska in a large dose for my taste.