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The Square, Harlow, Sept 24th 2005
FOR NEW YORK MAGAZINE THE BIG TAKEOVER
The second gig by the reformed Neurotics took place at the
Square in Harlow, the band’s spiritual home during their formative
years, and tonight it was rammed. Support act the Sods were one
of singer, guitarist and songwriter Steve Drewett’s pivotal early
influences. The Sods encouraged him to form the band back in
the late 70s, so it was fitting that they reformed for the occasion.
They are an unlikely looking bunch. Suddenly the rationale behind
their great ’79 single ‘No Pictures Of Us’ became obvious.
Frontman Kevin Jones oozed subdued menace, some of it half-
mockingly directed at his own band, while his musical
accomplices drilled home their keenly melodic but gruff brute-
force punk.
Drewett, now 50, was in good heart and excellent form. If the band
was playing from memory on occasions it didn’t show, and you
have to admire their respect for their own legacy: Drewett had
previously told me he’d only reformed the band on condition that
they rehearsed properly. As it transpired, all the notes fell in the
right places. There were a few half-ironic guitar hero shapes
thrown as he basked in the hometown adulation, albeit it
delivered in that measured ‘just a boy from round the manor’
manner. This is, lest we forget, a small town, never mind a new
one. Whilst there was demonstrably huge affection for the band,
Drewett was one of theirs, and no-one is entitled to an easy ride
in their own backyard. ‘Newtown People’, Drewett’s depiction of
the soulless inertia of the planner’s dream gone wrong, was,
naturally enough, dedicated to ‘you lot’.
Bass player for the reunion shows has been Don Adams, who’d
helped out when the band made its first tentative reappearance at
the Stortbeat collective one-off show last year. Original mainstay
Colin Dredd got the biggest cheer of the night as he came up for
two songs, including ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’. He later told me how
nervous he’d been about performing in front of so many old
friends. But when it got going, the “fun of playing punk rock” took
over. There was a wee mickey take about the photo of him that
had appeared in the Harlow Star earlier that week. A clearly
amused Drewett, who once wrote the disparaging ‘Local News’
for Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks, was now being feted
in print in just such a publication, sandwiched between a “four-
hour yoghurt ordeal” charity piece and pictures of a new
generation of newtown new-borns. Drummer Simon Lomond, too,
was apparently ‘bricking it’ before playing in front of so many old
mates, but didn’t miss a beat, even on the frequent and intricate
rhythm changes that were always one of the band’s great
strengths. By the time he’d got through an incredibly intense
‘Agony’, and mock-fell into his drums in total exhaustion, you
could see how much he was enjoying himself. At which exact
point a relative of the band, or so I was informed, drunk on both
exhilaration and alcohol, fell into me.
There were rapturous responses to the early singles. ‘Licensing
Hours’ was introduced with a head-shaking recollection of the UK’
s outdated Victorian approach to liquor sales. Which is still a
bone of contention as the shutters went up on the bar long before
the final notes of the set were played. The Square, various locals
informed me, remains a youth club at heart.
‘When The Oil Runs Out’ was introduced by Drewett’s attack on
the duplicity of the use of the term ‘extremist’ by Bush and Blair in
their justification of the Iraq crusade. That theme filtered through
to a subtle change of lyric in ‘Fighting Times’, making the
connection that the paucity of educational opportunities afforded
the working class make them demonstrably more susceptible to
such follies. Drewett also made repeated reference to the fact that
Saddam and Bin Laden were former beneficiaries of American
foreign investment. He was, of course, preaching to the converted.
But the hypocrisy evidently sticks in the craw, as he told me via
email. “It felt very weird and very sad, to think we went from the
Free Market Thugs of the Thatcher regime to the mass murderer
war criminal Tony Blair and no real Tories to challenge him. Now
we have an elective dictatorship and no real sign of politics
recovering to restore some sort of semblance of democracy.” As
at the Brighton gig, there was a real sense of ‘meet the new boss,
same as the old boss’ when he introduced ‘Kick Out The Tories’.
“Yeah, everyone here is disappointed and angry with Tony Blair’s
involvement in the phoney 'War on Terror'. The gap between rich
and poor here is accelerating at a faster pace than when the
Tories were in power whilst young men are sent off to die so that
'coalition of the willing' can steal someone else's oil. All for the
'right' to have cheap petrol and wasteful lifestyles.”
The pinnacle of the set was again ‘Living With Unemployment’,
the Neurotics’ lengthy, three-movement rewrite of the Members’
‘Solitary Confinement’. At which point, grown, often overgrown
men, were seen to embrace and cuddle. Again, as with the
Brighton show, it was inspiring to see such a sense of community
and unabashed idealism among a music audience, which
ranged from under-10s to the over-70s. These songs, most of
them written in response to the havoc that Thatcher and her ilk
were wreaking on the fabric of England’s social order two
decades earlier, clearly meant a great deal to those present.
It was an emotional as much as a historic event, with fans
travelling from far afield to join a large contingent of locals who’d
followed the Neurotics from their inception. A particularly
dedicated Japanese chap, who’d flown over especially, was
rewarded with post-show pictures with his heroes and an on-
stage dedication. It was “good fun,” he told me. It certainly was.
over a quarter of a century, is my
favourite magazine. Its enthusiasm
is fantastic, and editor Jack Rabid is
a great example of what a bit of
dogged determination and total
independence can achieve. Hugely
recommended if you have any
interest in music "with heart".
