Before Wire and The Motors, The Snakes: My part in their punk rock obscurity
//Richard Wernham, Nick Garvey, Robert Gotobed, Rob Smith on the front cover of Teenage Head/Lights Out by The Snakes, Dynamo Records, 1976//
I went to a good school (it was approved, as my first editor would have it in the late 70s. You had to be there).
I was taken on as a scholarship boy, one who showed enough promise for the fees to be paid by the council.
But I was lazy, not as bright as I made out, unhappy, an under-achiever. Aside from winning the cross-country race when I was 14, my life there was almost entirely undistinguished, so preoccupied was I with music, clothes and girls. I had pretensions to vast knowledge in all three areas undercut by lack of experience in the latter regard.
//Booklet with Quadrophenia, an album about "a cat with four personalities" according to me, 1973//
//School report 1975: "If Paul is as familiar with DG Mackean's Introduction To Biology as he is with the NME, he will pass his O-Level. As it is, he isn't, so I fear he won't." And I didn't//
Consequently I was an academic failure. Some of the younger members of the teaching staff tried to engage with me, with little success. An English teacher whose surname was Landau retired confused from a conversation about current album releases when I told him that Quadrophenia was about “a cat” (I had recently devoured books about the Rolling Stones and adopted Keith Richards’ modes of expression) with four personalities.
Another wrote to my parents: “If Paul is as familiar with DG Mackean’s Introduction To Biology as he is with the New Musical Express, he will pass his O-Level. As it is, he isn’t, so I fear he won’t.” And I didn’t.
I whiled away my boredom testing the liberal attitude to attire, first with jeans patched with the pockets of the school blazer and Dylon blue painted DMs, later with pierced ear, feather cut, boiler-suit, brothel creepers and Acme Attractions Vietnam vet belted raincoat.
I laughed when an older teacher became visibly enraged at my short back-and-sides, pegs, winkle pickers, jumble sale spearpoint-collared shirt and Alfred Kemp painted tie. He spluttered:”You…you…look like a spiv!” And so coined the nickname by which I was known at smokers’ corner.
It was there that I spoke for the first time to the school’s grooviest teacher, who tolerated us tobacco enthusiasts. He was long-haired but wore Kickers, a bold statement, and was rumoured to have a gorgeous girlfriend. It also fell to him to organise the Christmas dance in the huge assembly room.
I didn’t have much but I did have an understanding of the new grass-roots spirit abroad in popular music circles in the autumn of 1975. I had already encountered the Sex Pistols and their crowd and Hawkwind, The Pink Fairies, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Bazooka Joe (whose members included a couple of my school alums) were being supplanted by visits to discos, having taken in such groups as Eddie & The Hot Rods, who’d bowled me over at the Bull & Gate in Kentish Town, the 101’ers (at South Bank Poly), Dr Feelgood (for some reason at the Cambridge Corn Exchange) and The Snakes, recently formed by Nick Garvey of pub-rockers Ducks Deluxe.
I must have seen them at one of the Friday night dances at the Royal College Of Art. At least this was where a connection arose. They were matey with an ex-Royal College pal of one of my older brothers and I knew were on the look-out for gigs. This was enough for me to challenge the groovy teacher to book them.
Which he did once I provided a phone number for, I guess, Garvey. It turned out the drummer, Richard Wernham, had been one of those from my school to have passed through Bazooka Joe’s shifting line-up.
At the Christmas dance, The Snakes played a blinding set which included their version of the Flamin’ Groovies’ Teenage Head. I squired my first long-term girlfriend, who was impressed when we visited them for a brief exchange beforehand in the classroom doubling as their dressing room.
//Back cover, with credit to Ace Skudder//
Releasing this 1976 single – which featured Ace Skudder from Shakin’ Stevens band The Sunsets on the B-side (nothing unusual in that, Shakey and his boys were stout Socialists who played benefits and gigged hard all over the capital; it was them that I saw the 101’ers support) – The Snakes promptly broke up.
The next time I came across lead vocalist Robert Gotobed was as a member of Wire, who I also saw play the Royal College, while Garvey scored chart success with The Motors (with Wernham by then called “Ricky Slaughter’).
There is little online about The Snakes aside from brief mentions on Wire fora such as this.
Which is a shame; they were derivative, in the thrall of Dr Feelgood like so many of the immediate pre-punk groups, but punchy and very good live.