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Good afternoon, folks. Welcome to our San Jose State University lunchtime gig facility. Today we have some rilly radical rock 'n' roll with Ned's Atomic Dustbin, all the way from England. So let's hope they're not too "pissed" and there aren't too many "tossers" in the audience, right? OK you guys, hit it...
TWO LUMBERING, OVERWEIGHT tour buses loom over the car park of the
Phoenix Hotel, San Francisco. In the grey, early light of an overcast
Californian morning, they look out of place, like cartoons, their air-brushed
designs pulsing colour.
A figure wearing a Husker Du T-shirt, and with a spill of ginger hair
hanging at a right angle from his head, slips a bag off his shoulder
and lets it slump to the gravel. This is Alex, one of the two bassists
with Ned's Atomic Dustbin.
"Nice aren't they?" he says nodding towards the buses. Very.
Which one's ours? "What? Neither of them. This is ours."
A small brown donkey ambles into view. Closer inspection reveals it
to be a van. Thankfully, it comes to a halt without anyone having to
jump out and place blocks under its wheels while it's still moving.
Nevertheless, it's a basic model. Inside, there are none of the little
perks that make touring America that little bit more bearable. If there's
a toilet and an on-board video in there, then someone's packed them
in the boot. The air-conditioning is provided by two blank holes where
the ashtrays used to be.
The remaining Neds appear and pile in. It's four hundred miles to Los
Angeles. It's cold, and we're wearing T-shirts. Hit it!
TRAVELLING TO LOS Angeles with The Neds is rather like visiting The
Emerald City with Vera Duckworth: glamour is not their strong point,
to say the very, very least. But, hell, no matter - with gigs this fiery
and audiences this receptive, it all evens up in the end. In Britain,
Ned's Atomic Dustbin are paradoxically both hideously unfashionable
and wildly popular; in America, they're just British, which apparently
is second only to hanging out with Jack Nicholson in the coolness stakes.
Squeezed in all nice and comfortable, our feet straddling our heads,
Matt (Number two bassist with the band) tells of a recent 18-hour drive
from New York to Toronto, this particular journey undertaken on a 'real'
tour bus.
"Eighteen hours, with no air conditioning and Nashville Bob driving,"
he winces at the memory. "You breathed and it was like sucking
in someone else's breath. One night, I was sitting up front with Bob,
getting drunk. It was just turning light and a big thunderstorm started.
Bob started telling me about his mother, who visits him every now and
again — even though she died, like, 15 years ago - y'know, wearing
full make-up and a dress... 'Ah'm happy up here in heaven, Bob. Don't
you worry none.'"
Matt's king of the mood-swing. During the drive he's happy and talkative
but later he'll wander off on his own, wrestling silently with some
inner demon. When the band appeared on Top Of The Pops some months
back, he was the one angry as hell for the entire day, disgusted at
the rudeness of the people involved and the unrelenting artificiality
of the show, but then spending his time on-air laughing uncontrollably...
to such an extent, in fact, that the camera team were obviously given
instructions to keep him out of shot.
The van trundles on. No chance of any Thelma And Louise antics
here, since the speed limit on the freeways is a pussy 55mph. Dan, the
stereotypically quiet and sweet-as-hell drummer, bends to pick something
off the floor and remains in that position for the next three hours,
asleep.
Alex turns from the staggeringly featureless landscape and tells of
their trip to Washington - the murder capital of America, as it happens.
"We had to pull up at a garage to ask for directions," he
says, "because the driver didn't know the place at all. It was
full of black guys and one of them had a shotgun in his window. We noticed
this and we were just, y'know, shitting ourselves. In the end, we helped
jumpstart his car. When we got to the hotel the receptionist found out
which way we'd come and she said What!? She said, You didn't
stop though, did you? We told her, Yeah, we had to help someone jumpstart
his car..."
"You get a lot of nutcases here," says Jonn, vocalist and,
again, general all-round good-guy, "but they're mostly harmless."
Mmm-hmm. Like Bob. A man getting visions of his Mom in full make-up.
Hasn't anyone here seen Silence Of The Lambs?
Luckily, the new driver, Larry knows the way to San Jose and pulls up
at the State University for a lunchtime gig between stops. As the van
slows, the Neds see the stage and a collective howl erupts from the
windows. No one goes on to say exactly why the small, raised platform
is so terrifying: the band just shake their heads, look at each other
and shrug.
Stepping out into the sun, the band are greeted by a 'dude' wearing
his shirt around his waist and trying desperately to use up his reservoir
of British slang. The band seem to know him from last night's gig.
"So, did you guys get pissed last night?" he asks.
"Well, yeah," says Jonn. "Not too badly."
The dude seems pleased, nods his head rapidly.
"I saw those tossers at the gig last night," he continues,
"They were real tossers."
Over the stage there are banners featuring the promoters' logos: The
Guitar Centre, Geo Car Dealers, and Live 105 (who are transmitting the
set). Jonn eyes them, sighing.
"All the stuff about our doing things within CBS in our own way...
Doesn't mean a thing here." He starts down to the stage. So what
do you do? "You argue a lot."
They're not snotty about it, but the Neds are used to doing things their
own way. They've done everything to maintain a stranglehold on their
own image by refusing to be photographed individually, doing away with
second names to emphasise their position in the Scheme Of Things as
a band and designing, to date, a total of 59 T-shirts. (Rat,
he of the stampeding guitar and, even by the rest of the band's standards,
dreadful hairstyle, tells me that the T-shirts helped them out in the
early days, kept them buoyant until the records started kicking in financially.)
In ways, though, their image has done a job of maintaining a stranglehold
on them. The Neds, with their marked indifference to the latest
leaps in the fashion world, nave been labelled 'Crusties' by at least
one dumb tabloid and they remain something of an aberration among the
bowl-cuts and arse-bags of the 'in' bands.
In America, they're something different again. Most here seem to be
under the impression that the Neds are some kind of British variant
on the skate punk.
"They're going to be disappointed," begins Matt, "when
they find out that all of us except Rat can't go five feet on a skateboard
without falling on our arse."
But all that's irrelevant now. All that matters is that they're here,
leaping around in the sun in front of a throng of American college kids,
with the knowledge that 'God Fodder' is turning various shades of precious
metal back home, lifting them higher into the air.
The gig is fine. No stormer, but it turns out it was the unforgiving
spotlight of the sun that was perturbing the band earlier.
"Not used to this," Jonn tells the audience. "You can
see how ugly we all are."
"Noooooo!" screams the crowd, hopelessly in love, it
would seem.
Later, backstage, an 11-year-old girl asks the whereabouts of Jonn.
The daughter of the guy responsible for putting on the show, she shakes
his hand and answers his questions quietly when he arrives. Alex comes
in, sees her, says Hello, then turns to Jonn and, raising his eyebrows,
says one word: "Pulled?"
THE SECOND HALF OF THE JOURNEY over, the band get some Indian food (the
taste of home) and hit the sack. Next morning, they play an awesome
little gig at The Roxy, the proceedings helped along nicely by a short
but atmosphere-friendly acoustic set from Miles Wonder Stuff, a longtime
friend and early helping hand.
But the heights they reached during that early free gig are nothing,
nothing compared to the 'official' gig, the last of the tour,
at the same venue tonight. And with Jonn suffering from an agonising
headache and Matt displaying worrying signs of withdrawal, we've every
right to expect a travesty.
Honestly, they take off. Even time they get in the air they stop, hang
there for a moment and slam!, back into the song like wolverines.
Later, they speak of the gig as the closest to heavy metal they've come,
but it seemed more like they were approaching that place when melody
and distortion and lightning collide, a place that was home to Husker
Du and has now widened its portals to admit the Neds.
Total abandon. The band feel it first during 'Kill Your Television',
and then it takes over for the encore. Alex forgets what he's playing,
Jonn can't find the song in the blizzard of noise, Matt jumps into the
crowd and is almost ejected from the stage by a bouncer when he gets
back up, Dan holds on to the rhythm as best he can and Rat struggles
with his guitar like he's throttling a giant, mutated Florida alligator.
"If you're waiting in a van all day," says Alex later, "then
you want to spend your time onstage as constructively as possible. It's
not like Slowdive, looking at your feet and being all fey about it:
'Do-you-want-to-hear-our-music...?'"
"Someday we might write a song that needs us all sitting on the
drum-riser," says Jonn, "but this music, what we're doing
now, how are we supposed to be calm about it?"
STORY BY GRAHAM LINEHAN
PHOTOS BY ADRIAN GREEN