A: Q: And off we go, ok we’re at Blaise Castle House Museum on the 6th May 2010, speaking to Jonathan Kardasz who was generous enough, over ten years ago, to give us his much treasured denim jacket, complete with all the remembrances of many of the bands he went to see in his youth. We’ve got Jonathan back in his middle age to reminisce about that now, and erm, let me start you off Jonathan by saying where were you born, where were you brought up? How did you first get interested in Music?

Mr K: I was born in Swindon, at home I don’t know if that explains anything about my personality, I wasn’t born in a hospital I was born at home in the living room. Music, I don’t know if I could pin down the exact moment when erm, I first realised I liked it because it was always around. You know, parents had the radio on in the car and radio on at home and Stereo gram’s as they were my mum bought a quite a nice stereogram with a built in cassette deck and radio and record player. So I think really early on I can remember having Pinky and Perky LP’s and soundtracks to Disney films and getting into those. And she had some cassettes, it was, erm Simon and Garfunkel’s greatest hits and a Diana Ross thing, and they got played to death. And it gradually started seeping in, and then seeing stuff on the telly and listening to Radio One mainly. And I think the big difference back then was that instead of having a multiplicity of ways of getting music it literally was and it was Radio One, Top of the Pops and so forth. So you start taking a bit of an interest in music because your friends do at school, started getting listening to the chart run downs and talking to your friends about what you like and what you didn’t like and things going up the charts.

The old cassette decks, holding the microphone up to the radio to tape the charts was a cheap way of getting the music, and it kinda carried on from there. And you start going to discos or youth clubs and I guess hearing the music doing a bit of dancing around and enjoying the music and it kinda expanded on because you started taking an interest in other bands and following a particular band. Being able to afford to buy music and it kinda grew from there I guess really.

I think it was quite typical of the 70’s a lot of people kinda went through that and I think then, erm being a bloke a lot of my friends got into football and for me it ended up getting into the music because you, erm start to think about actually going to concerts and seeing the bands live and of course the ’70s were quite tribal so as you started discovering there was more music outside the charts, although the charts were very good despite the way history has been rewritten I think.

You discover there are different types of music, and associated with different lifestyles and different ways of dressing, it just I guess, it happened without me deliberately trying to make it happen or without any major influence, I don’t think it’s like we were sold the life styles like you are nowadays, it was osmosis I think.

A: Q: Can you remember the first band you saw in concert?

Mr. K: Yeah, Motörhead , Colston Hall in Bristol, 1979 18th November, or 19th something like that, and that was after I had, erm, I guess started really to take an interest in music. To start with I think music was almost down gender lines a little bit because a lot of the girls at our school they like a lot of the erm ‘poppier’ side of things so it was Donnie Osmond, Bay City Rollers etc. And we boys tended to like Slade and The Sweet, the glam bands, and there were crossovers obviously and you know you would talk to people and there would be crossovers, but there would be a lot of ribbing and Mickey taking about the different bands.

And I always liked quite loud stuff and we’d go to the, erm, the youth club disco, and I liked a lot of different types of music but I was particularly taken with, erm, there were some guys who had really long hair and there was a particular band they listened to, and I‘ll say the name in a minute because you might not believe that this was an outlaw band at the time, and they were really into this particular band. They were getting to dance to them in a strange way I’d never seen before, where they were, erm jumping around a lot shaking their long hair and pretending to play guitars, and I thought that sounds interesting and looks interesting and seemed a bit outside of what I liked. And I made the mistake of taking the Mickey out of them, and they had a word with me that suggested I didn’t ought to do that! As they were rather tough looking guys I paid attention, I thought well this stuffs pretty cool, they look good.

It turned out to be Status Quo. And although they became a bit a parody of themselves and a bit of a cabaret act, at the time they were almost like a punk rock band because you had all your progressive bands and Led Zeppelin doing mammoth four hour shows, playing guitars with bows and all the finery. They were just there in denim jackets playing quite short sharp songs. Believe it or not there were riots at their concerts and they were really quite underground. So, that was the band that first made me realise you could be into something that than what was in the charts and you could be into a band properly, and that they could be part of your life rather than just the soundtrack to your life.

So I started to investigate a few bands like that and I was lucky enough that at the same time punk rock started to happen. And I think being out in the West Country instead of London and being the right age, I was thirteen or fourteen, I didn’t have any preconceptions that people had about progressive music and so forth and the original types of rock and punk. To me it was all brand new. So I can remember it must have been about ’78, and the three bands I was dead interested in, oh no it was earlier than that it must have been ’77, I was really into Abba, Status Quo, Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols. And it didn’t matter to me that they weren’t necessarily fitted and they weren’t the sorts of thing the press and the media would have you believe you should like. So I went on this discovery of music finding out about Genesis and Led Zeppelin and all the old bands at the same time as I was listening to the Sex Pistols and the Stranglers and they were all just as exciting to me.

The main thing was with the metal bands and the hard rock bands was the look of it. Because although we all had quite long hair, you see all these guys with long hair and denim ranging to the bikers, as a 14/15 year old that was quite exciting and interesting, the whole outlaw culture. So that led me into the old, erm head banging metal scene, I guess and that’s where it got more interesting because you get your tribal stuff.

So, erm you get the lifestyle you get the culture you get the ups and downs of being part of a particular youth cult and the rivalries and alliances that were formed and broken and so forth at the time. So it was a very exciting time to be discovering music really and without wanting to be to controversial I think history has been rewritten a bit because certainly away from London and away from the press there was a lot of people who did like the old music as well as being interested in the new music so it wasn’t as black and white as every one suddenly hated Pink Floyd and every one suddenly disconnected from the charts and became a totally cool punk rocker, a lot of people I guess like myself had a lot of interesting music.

And that’s were we started to get to the jacket because obviously if you like the music in those days you had to look the look as well as listen to the sounds.

A: Q: I think you still do, don’t you, you’ve got kids do they get dressed up and so on to suit the music?

Mr K: I think people do but its not quite as erm splintered, because if you look at their school, a lot of the way the children dress there socially you got, it’s a horrible word I don’t condone its use but the children talk about ‘chavs’ then there is like the rock fans and the people into the hip hop and that’s broadly it. Then if you go to see some of the, well all sort of bands of different ages you cant always pick out someone who is gonna like a band because of the way they dress. Because there are a lot of generic clothes that they wear baggy jeans, baseballs, caps, hoodies and that and although some of the obviously are Goths or Emos or whatever, there are a lot of them you couldn’t guess there musical tastes necessarily.

Back when I was doing all this stuff, the late 70’s early 80’s, you had, erm Skins, Punks, Mods, Mod Revival, Phsycabilly, Rockabilly, there was still Teds around, New Romantics and all these different cults and sub cults and it got quite complex. New wave, which was apparently different to punk rock and the American people, would dress different to the Brits. I think that it’s broadened a bit and there’s not so much of it as there used to be. Although you do get revivalists and some people do get into some of the older clothes I don’t think it’s quite the way it was, but, way more tribal then I think, which could be a good thing because if you wear a jacket like that and go somewhere else then straight away people can identify you and know what some of your values are and what your like and it’s a way of getting to know people, but on the other hand its also an invitation to get your face punched in I suppose, which happened to friends of mine and in fairness friends of mine would do it to other people. It wasn’t total violence it wasn’t a clockwork orange but there was friction there was that stuff going on as well

[10:10] A: Q: It’s strange that something like that should become a kind of uniform?

Mr.K: Yeah, but that’s no different to wearing a Bristol Rovers shirt in the wrong part of town or with the Bloods and the Cribs in LA that wonder into the wrong parts of LA wear the wrong bandanna and it’s a lot more than a punch in the face isn’t it you know. People can be quite tribal, like when its Election Day people wear red rosettes and orange rosettes or blue rosettes and all sorts of things.

A: Q: So the jacket came along you told me the original story of that?

I wanted to have my denim jackets and wear the clothes associated with being a head banger and grow my hair as long as I could which meant negotiations with my mum as she was the guardian of my appearance and held the purse strings. And erm, I initially wanted a denim jacket but couldn’t get it so I started out with a denim waistcoat, which far from being a cool brand was probably from somewhere like Peacocks. I wanted to decorate it, people had like patches and badges that show what bands that they liked and stuff and I wanted to start doing that but I didn’t know where to buy the patches, ‘cos of course you didn’t have the internet back then, so you had to know where the shops were. There was a shop in the Brunel Centre in Swindon that sold, it was a ‘head’ shop, and they sold joss sticks and all sorts. They had a range of patches and I was 15 or something, I was a bit nervous of going in, it took me about 3 weeks to work up the courage and go in. I got myself Norton badge, although I didn’t know who Norton were and had no aspirations to ride a motorbike. It looked really cool and I persuaded mi mum to put it up on the yoke of the waistcoat. I felt I was king of the walk with that I was the mad biker king of where I lived, but it was just a patch but that was a start.

I eventually persuaded my mum to get me a denim jacket again it wasn’t a named brand; it was something generic from somewhere or another. I started to, you know in the music shops you could buy badges and at the time quite a lot of the records came with a free badge or patch, so I gradually started to decorate the jacket a little bit. I’d been getting to know more and more head bangers, once you start wearing the gear, because in those days if someone saw you wearing the right t-shirt they would ask you have you seen them, or heard the new LP? It was quite friendly within the scene so that was good. I got to know a bloke who painted stuff on jackets and he would also paint patches. So I think the first think he did for me was he painted, erm part of Hawkwind’s Space Ritual live album sleeve an I sewed that on the back of the jacket which was great because it was unique. But I noticed on his jacket he actually had embroidery and he embroidered the band logos which I thought was way cooler that buying something ‘cos it was quite unique. He showed me how to do that so that’s what I started doing.

I think I’ve said to you guys before, it’s bizarre to be talking about me being the metal god of Swindon doing my own embroidery but you kind of did because you would do it for yourself rather than getting your mum to do it, because we thought that was kind of lame, a bit wussy. It’s a bit ridiculous isn’t it ‘cos you’re sat there with a bit of embroidery set embroidering your jacket?

A. Q: Doesn’t really go with the image does it?

Well no, but that us humans we’re full of contradiction. So, erm that particular jacket, the first jacket, I took off the Hawkwind thing and the Canadian band, Rush had got an album called Twenty One Twelve, quite a famous logo on it with a naked dude in front of a red star, so I embroidered that onto my jacket as they were my favourite band at the time. And Eddy, the guy who helped me out with this, the method you had was you would trace what you wanted on your jacket onto a piece of paper, then you get some carbon paper, put it down on the jacket and draw back over the top and it puts a carbon imprint on to the jacket which you then embroider round. So I think you embroidered the outline first, no, you did the inside first then you do whatever the stitch is where you go inside the tread and do the outline of it. I put the Rush logo on the back and I might have had one across the top as well, I can’t quite remember. That was the original jacket, and at the time everyone wanted Levis jackets, that was before the erm, super trendy, what was his name some model, Kamen was it? The old trousers down in the laundry advert? Levi’s were what most people wore and it was of interest to me because they sponsored Status Quo on one of their tours. On the Blue for You album they were all on the front with immaculate denim suits that were donated to them by Levis. I think I remember reading they were paid off in bulks of denim material as well, rather than getting money so that’s a far cry from the sponsorship bands get now. No, Levis was the erm, make everyone wanted so I was desperate for as Levi but couldn’t really afford it. So erm, I was at college at the time studying engineering and the particular jacket we’re talking about , I’d spotted it hanging up in the workshops and I’d noticed that it stayed there for a couple of weeks so I stated to figure out it had been abandoned. So I thought ‘Well, I’m gonna have that’, but I was too nervous to get it myself. A good friend Rob, he decided he’d acquire it for me, so one time he was in there he put his own jacket over the top of it and took it away and presented it to me. So erm, of course that just added to the cache of the jacket as all of a sudden I’ve got a hot jacket that’s been stolen form Swindon College which isn’t exactly a major crime, its not going to turn into a film any time soon, but it was great to have that. So then once I got the jacket it was a case of planning out what logos I was going to put on it. So the driver for that was obviously you put your favourite bands on, and once you started doing them, it was get your favourite bands on there as fast as you could and if they were touring you’d want the logo on before you saw them. So, I probably started with Motörhead at the top here as they were a favourite at the time, and then gradually just started putting stuff onto it. The trick was with the jackets of course, was to never wash them, and that’s straight out of biker culture from the Hells Angels colours and so forth. Once you had the jacket you just didn’t wash it. You wore it everywhere and you lived in it basically that’s why it ended up in the state that’s it in. I reckon I must’ve worn it from ’81 to about ’85. I think the onset of the old male pattern baldness tended to start making it look not such an attractive look, so it got mothballed then. As you wore them you’d start decorating them with badges and patches, putting logos on and off. If a band dreadfully fell out of favour, if they were rubbish, you might be forced to cut off the logo. But what you would find then is that where you hadn’t been washing it and you’d been out in the sunshine you have an imprint left behind. So of course you didn’t necessarily get rid of it, and you’d also patch it as you went. With the sleeves, as the elbows went, different patches, and you would wear the arse out of your jeans too so once they were literally too tatty to wear you‘d cut them up and use them for other things. And, I think I probably had a couple of pairs of jeans that had some minor bits of embroidery as well. So it kind of created a life of its own and took on, they all became unique then cos other people were doing it as well. Not so much with the embroidery, that was a rare breed ‘cos a lot of people would just go with patches they’d bought and a lot of people would paint stuff on. You can see some horrendous examples of people who should never have been let near a paintbrush, but the trick was in those days, to do it yourself. We were always very mocking of people who had pristine jackets with all the patches sewn on in geometric order. They would get a bit of ribbing; we always regarded them as part timers, ‘nuggets’ I think we used to call them because they looked like bright shinny metal fans, so they would come in for a bit off stick.

The other thing you would try and do is get the jacket autographed as much as you can, so there’s quite a few autographs on mine, and they were from different gigs in Swindon and Bristol. So I think we got, erm Marrillion are on here, there that’s Fish and that would either have been Swindon in the Brunel Rooms where I first saw them or the Colston hall. I saw them a few times in the Colston. Frank Noon and Janet Gears and Summers (Bernet Tourneux?). (Bernet Tourneux?), I saw them in the Granary so that’s where their autographs came from. Sorry Janet Gears was from the Oasis in Swindon that was (name…?) bass player. There are a couple of ladies autographs from a band called Rock Goddess who I saw in Swindon. A very entertaining band I saw at the time, cos I was 18/19 and they were the same age so we were desperate to get back stage and discuss the music obviously. We got back stage and there was creates of beer on the rider and sadly their parents supervising them so we didn’t have the rock and roll debauchery we were expecting. We sat around talking to them about there music and then went.

[20.00] I don’t know who else’s autographs is on there, there’s Fish, I can’t even read that now but, they would put messages on there, Black Foot, I didn’t get their autographs on the jacket although I might have done, that might have been the bass player actually, but they were really impressed by the jacket and I got their autographed. That was at Chippenham Gold Diggers, so that was the way of the jacket.

Do you think this jacket helped you to get back stage, was it quite unusual, did it mark you out as a super fan?

Mr. K: I think a lot of it was trying to sneak around trying to by pass the roadies. I could never understand why the girls found it easier to get back stage than boys, but being a naive yokel I could never understand why that was. I think that some of the bands appreciated it and I know some of the fans appreciated it. I had quite a few people offering to buy it; it was always a talking point. Getting back stage was always a bit of dilemma because some to the roadies they were helpful but some of them if you got in their way could be a bit brusque. Sometimes it was just a case of being patient, some bands made a point of meeting with you. In the early days Marrillion were very good at meeting up with you, they were very keen to chat with you some bands seemed to genuinely enjoy connecting with there fans and talking to them and so forth. I don’t think it actually did help much, it wasn’t much help. I guess to the bouncers you’re just an oik in a jacket and the Roadies, they see hundreds of people like you every day so it wouldn’t have made too much difference

A.Q: I know you’ve been all over the place seeing band s but our particular interest is in Bristol venues that you went to, you mentioned Colston Hall, are there any particular places you remember being good to go too or not good?

Mr. K: The Colston always going to be a favourite because that’s the first one I went to, that was Moorhead on the Bomber tour and that was when I started at college, my friend there his older brother and girlfriend were gong so I managed to get a ticket for that and that was fantastic. We were quite concerned because this was at the time when the mod revival that was kind of sparked off by the Jam and there were a lot of fights sparked off between the New Mods, and they obviously had to find some Rockers to fight to be proper Mods, so there was a lot of punch ups and fights and being from Swindon which at the time was a bit smaller than Bristol in some ways, we were dead concerned that ever Mod in Bristol would be waiting to duff us up. So there was the anticipation of all of that and then coming up to the Colston for my first concert was fantastic ‘cos it’s such as fantastic building and you get there and outside there was hundreds of your people and you know your going be seeing it, and it was just such as great night to be, you know ‘cos it was the first show. Even now gong to the Colston is fantastic ‘cos all of a sudden I’m 16 again. Even outside with the new foyer it’s still the Colston inside and Motörhead are still playing there every November, 31 32 years down the line. The Colston was always a great one, although at the time they still had seats so it was a bit of a pain if you weren’t in the right spot, although you were running down to the front and the whole business of it was just fantastic in there. And it was nice to be going out of town to the big city, so that was quite good.

The Granary was terrific, that’s got a fantastic reputation with rock fans in Bristol. That was good cos it was small and you could really get close to the front if you push your way through. The Bierkeller I went to a few times and that was always good but sticky floor, but the Bierkeller was nice and, erm, the Locarno, as it was that later became the Studio, you had a load of fantastic bands there and I saw The Clash in there because I had a friend that was a punk rocker so we had a deal that if he went to a metal gig with me if would go to a punk gig with him. Although it was very tribal I tried to keep my mind open ‘cos some people were so evangelical about it that unless a band had long hair and played metal they weren’t interested. But I tried to be open minded, so I went along to that with my Whitesnake t-shirt on and my denim jacket. Punks and we mostly got along so that want too bad, so that was great venue because again, it was big enough so you had a good sort of crowd but small enough that it could feel relatively intimate, so that was good I saw a lot of good bands in there. I think that was the main sort of places I would be going to in Bristol with the jacket but of course you’re going to all the open air festivals, so, going back to the state of it I went to Stoke heavy metal holocaust, which was a football pitch, (aside) who did Robbie Williams support? It must be Stoke obviously because it was Stoke heavy metal holocaust. But we went to their football pitch saw Motörhead there and a number of other bands. In those days the train stopped at midnight, one o’clock so we all slept on the station at Birmingham so you sleep in your jacket and it was there for you. Going to Castle Donnington for the Monsters of Rock that was mud from Castle Donnington that stayed on it. Going back to what I said earlier, you just never washed it so it’s like a travel log of were you would go. [26.00] A.Q; A sort of accelerative icon.

Mr. K: Yes, you’ve got the dirt and grime of a thousand different venues, beer and whatever else you were indulging in covering it. The only other thing you would do possibly to cover it was use Patchouli oil to take the stench away. Again going back to what we were chatting about earlier, memory tags and stuff, Patchouli oil, if I smell that it makes me think of my jacket. It’s probably gone by now. It was a good little thing to have

A.Q: It was never, never washed, even if someone vomited on it?

Mr. K: Personally I would have been very much persuaded that that was a good case for washing it. I was always careful to keep away from people who looked like they were going to do that. It was pretty hardy, and it adds to the sort of ambiance was the wrong word really, but all you do is swap badges around and try and get more autographs on it and keep it patched together. You would wear it till it was hanging off you. But the odd thing was, and I don’t know if I was just lucky, but if I’d had a shandy or two and I got to the concert and dropped it off somewhere it always seemed to be where I left it, and I don’t know if that was just pure blind luck or whether people at that type of gig were less thieving than people are nowadays are I don’t know.

But again I suppose I’ve talked about the different tribal stuff, the other ironic thing is that, looking like we do we quite often refused service in pubs and stuff so the pubs were quite tribal. The irony for us was that we weren’t really that violent, there was obviously an element of it, so you be treated, I mean I’m a little bloke really, I’d be treated as if I were a Viking. In our experience it was more what we would refer to as ‘straights’ you know the football fans or had no obvious tribal allegiance, were way more violent and a lot of the time it was directed at us for looking at them for being different. So, there is some interesting cultural stuff about being judged about how you look. We wanted to send out a message about what we were but that could have negative connotations when you were refused service in pubs. I was stopped by the police a couple of times, presumably for being in possession of long hair and denim jacket. They would obviously assume you were a dope head or something and out for violence and stuff.

[28.45] A.Q: Were there places that you hung out in that were metal hangouts?

Mr. K: I’d struggle to remember any of the Bristol pubs, because the reason I came to Bristol was because I did an apprenticeship with Rolls Royce and the guys I went with, one was a biker, one was a punk who wore the punk stuff and the other guy dressed relatively straight, but was a punk. So we just tended to go to our local pubs and we were a little gang of different tribes who would go around together, some pubs were more welcoming than others. In Swindon there was a pub called the Cricketers, which was a biker pub, and you were always guaranteed a warm welcome in there. There was the Bell in old town that was kind of a music hang out, with a good juke box and a lot of people would hand out in there. But going back to the youth culture thing Dave, the guy I was talking about, the punk, started out with very short hair and we went to the Bell in Swindon before we came up to Bristol for the apprenticeship, I used to come up for the summer to work at Rolls. He had really quite short hair they refused him service because they thought his hair was to short, ‘cos they thought he was some kind of skin. Throughout the summer he grew it out cos he got really into Siouxie and the Banshees and the Cure, so ended up being the birds nest and they refused him service ‘cos his hair was wrong. So he copped for it both ways, which seemed a bit stupid.

[30.00] Another good story about him, which goes to show how daft it all was, we went to see Motörhead in London on the Ace of spades tour. We went up on a coach which broke down on the way it got a flat tyre and the driver couldn’t fix it, so half the bikers on board fixed his tyre for him, which involved them fixing the tyre then drinking a lot of Jack Daniels. So he sat there with a roll up while we fixed his tyre ‘cos we wanted to get to the gig. But we got to Hammersmith and my mate Dave, the punky guy, got into row with the biker and the guy was saying, “you can’t be here, this is a Motörhead they’re a metal band.” He said, “yeah I can, they play great music and I’m here to enjoy it.” But the biker’s argument was “yeah, but you don’t dress right.” Dave said, “Well hang on a minute look what you’re wearing”, and they were both wearing a Motörhead T-shirt, a leather jacket and blue jeans and Doctor Martins. The only difference was that the biker had hair down to his ass and Dave had short spiky hair. So you used to get some daft opinions and foolishness but you had to shrug it off and laugh it off I guess in the end.

I think it was very happy times because you felt like part of something and as I say, it was a passport to getting to know people. You can do that nowadays with different means but you see someone else with long hair, even if your at a job interview or dressed up a bit more civilly, civilly is the wrong word but in civvies, straight clothes. If you saw someone with long hair you could pretty much predict what they were like. You could guess probably what sort of films they liked and books ‘cos head bangers we’re all into the sci-fi and fantasy. I don’t know which comes first, liking metal or liking sci-fi or but a lot of the lyrics relate to it and that. Even what you would drink and I understand certain cultures would have different types of drugs associated with them, although I’ve no experience of that myself. I couldn’t possibly comment factually about it. You knew what punks were into you knew what bikers were into and what head bangers were into. Another interesting thing when we came up to Bristol, people who didn’t know me at Rolls Royce because I used to wear the jacket started refering to me as a ‘gitter’ which totally threw me because I didn’t know what that was, but that turned out to be really local Bristol slang for what we thought we were which was a head banger. We always called ourselves head bangers or rockers, but in Bristol we’re a gitter. I can remember looking it up in the dictionary and it’s about the nervous shaking motion, and because of the head banging motion we were ‘gitters’, which was confusing for a while. And there were also the skinheads, who hated us with a vengeance because we smelt etc etc and would like to kick our faces in, they would always refer to us as ‘Greebos’ and I can remember graffiti being sprayed around about Greebos, but funnily enough a few years later, and I’m really rambling now, there were bands like Pop Will Eat Itself and Gay Bikers on Acid I think it was, and the NME referred to them as Greebo bands. I don’t know if that was any connection but the word ended up with them. But we were greebos, gitters, head bangers so even the names you got called came from what you wore and all that.

[33.20] A.Q: So when did you stop wearing the jacket, did it slide off you gracefully over a period or did you have to stop all of a sudden?

Mr. K: It was genetics because I started to go bald, the last thing I wanted to have was you know the Bill Bailey where you have bald on top and the long bits down the side. So it started to go and I started cutting it short and it was ironic that was quite liberating in a way because I wasn’t so obviously into a certain type of music and I’d moved to Bristol permanently then and lost touch with some of my friends in Swindon so you didn’t have the peer group pressure to only like certain types of music so I started getting in to other stuff, and you got a bit of freedom them to like what you liked. Although interestingly I saw REM on the tube when they first appeared and to me that just sounded like a Byrdsy, Doorsy type of band with a Townsend figure on guitar and I thought they were great. A guy I knew in a record shop had tickets for about their fourth show in the Marquee in London, and so he gave me one of the tickets and we went up. During one of the encores I was onstage with him, so this was on stage with REM during their forth London Show and I knew I was right to wear the jacket there because Peter Buck the guitar player had a Van Halen sticker on his guitar. It’s interesting because at the time and since you look at English bands and English Journalists and when they become popular or trendy they become very ashamed of their influences but you get a lot of trendy American band where they’re not afraid to say they grew up listening to Kiss or Aerosmith. I can remember an interview with Kurt Cobain when he was saying he listened to that kind of band, but if you go to some of the British guys they disown all of that, so its quite interesting how some famous people who obviously went through some of this stuff they kind of hide it so that was an interesting kind of thing

So this [the jacket] has been on stage with R.E.M and with Marillion as well because when they first started out they had a really ecliptic crowd because they started playing at pubs and clubs and they had bikers at their gigs. Their music, although it was progressive and very much like early Genesis it had a lot of energy to it because they had grown up with Punk. And you would pogo a lot at their gigs and jump around, but as they got more popular the older Genesis fans discovered them and the audiences became a bit more sedate so, because I’d been with them a long time, I’d seen them 14 times right from the early days. I was at the Colston hall wearing this and doing the usual jumping around; this was really ticking off a rather staid Genesis fan. At one point when I did a particularly big jump he helped me and I suddenly found myself up on stage at Colston Hall, so I got up and started giving it a bit of boogieing and within 30 seconds there were a couple of bouncers on stage, had me in a head lock, and my experience of bouncers from Swindon and the Brunel Rooms was that I was going to get my face punched in. But luckily they just dragged me off backstage and threw me out. So I was outed from the stage of the Colson Hall wearing this.

I got chatting with the guys who was running the merchandise and some guy from the management of Marillion came out and they were later on that tour recording a sight and sound in concert for the BBC at Chippenham Gold Diggers and had a load of free tickets and because I was already there I got free tickets for that. So this ended up going to Chippenham Gold Diggers to see Marillion, which was filmed for the tele. And the guy Dave I talked about with earlier, he went with me ’cos I had a bunch of free tickets and it was free so he came. I was a major Marillion fan and he was just there for the freebee so I studied karate at the time, and I’d been to a tournament the night before and I had one of these massive old clunky video recorders so I set it to tape. I got back at two in the morning because I desperately wanted to see the concert to see if I’d been seen. At the time they did a song called Garden Party, I don’t know how it originated but when they did that song we’d take cucumbers and threw them on stage. This is going to sound really bizarre but I took my cucumber to see Marillion, which sounds like the plot of a bizarre adult website. Put it down your trousers like Spinal Tap or something…so, I took my cucumber along got on my mate’s shoulders and threw it to Fish when he was singing Garden Party and all this is on film. Fantastic, I’m going to be on the tele, but they cut that song, but you can see you could see Birdnest’s Cure bird nest hair cut in silhouette from the camera! So me, the major Marillion fan, got the cucumber and everything, no sign of me what so ever but he’s there. So having the jacket here and chatting sort of brings back all this stuff. These sorts of things are great because they can really drag that sort of stuff out of you. I’m sure I’ll remember a dozen things when I m driving home I’ll be ringing you up and saying this happened and that happened.

[38.20] A.Q: So then you got married and settled down

Mr. K: Yeah so my mum always wanted to chuck it away and my wife was never really keen on it because it stank. Funnily enough, her mum when she first saw me thought I was a girl because I had long hair and quite a lithe figure at the time so it just went in the wardrobe and stayed there. Then we had the exhibition that you curated [Andy] that going out in Bristol, so erm, that’s how it ended up with you guys. I remember funnily enough having children I stopped going to quite so many concerts because I couldn’t quite afford it, felt a bit rotten to just keep disappearing off to shows, but around the time I put this back in the children were growing up a bit and we had more spare time and I started going to gigs again. It was great to be going again and enjoying a lot of the bands that have reformed that I used to watch and find that I remembered all the lyrics and still jump around like an idiot and get in to trouble at concerts and such which was really nice. And, to be honest I started missing it because it was very nice to be wearing it out. I will steal it one day so you’ll have to keep it locked up. It’s gonna be a crime that’s easy to solve isn’t it? I was at Kiss last night, you don’t see jackets like this you still got the hair and the shirts and you see the odd jacket with stuff painted on it but the most prevalent thing is just loads and loads of patches nowadays, you see people with patches sown on. I just saw one guy who had some logos on but I couldn’t tell from a distance whether they were embroidered or not. I was going to go up and have a closer look but I thought it might be a bit bizarre to go and start fingering his jacket to see whether it was genuine embroidery or not. It’s kind of come full circle, getting the jacket out and talking to you guys and what not, I don’t know whether it was karma of faith but it happened at the same time I started going to gigs again and the renaissance of me going back to concerts.

[40.30] A.Q: Bring back old habits, are you tempted to start again?

Mr. K: No, I don’t think so

A.Q: What did you wear to kiss last night then?

Mr. K: A hoodie, and some combat trousers, although I’ve got a selection of combat trousers and I’ve been sewing patches on the arse of those just to make them a bit more, less military and more personalised. Some of the stuff I wrote for you it wasn’t just about the jackets, we had bullet belts. Bullets belts were a favourite because Lemmy out of Motörhead wore them were well in to belt buckles. We would go to Eastern market, down where the old Rovers ground used to be. That were where I got my ear pierced and this was the days, pre all the HIV when you didn’t have to worry about stuff like that. This was some scally in the market, “I want my ear pierced.” Felt tip pen, bam, “there you are, £2.50 please.” And there was a whole code of what you could and couldn’t wear so, certain types of trousers, we went through a phase of wearing them really tight, and a lot of the bands would wear Spandex and Lycra, but you didn’t do that in the West Country unless you were in a band cos it weren’t the done thing really. As I said, I’m a bit of a shorty so early days it was cowboy boots because that gave me a bit of height and I fondly believe that helped me look older ‘cos some of the gigs I wanted to get into you had to be 18 so it was borrowing birth certificates and driving licences. So in this jacket I saw Iron Maiden in the Brunel Rooms really early on, and that I blagged my way in with a borrowed driving licence I think so that was great. So I’m convinced the cowboy boots helped but they weren’t so good if you were being chased by skinheads because you’re running in the Cuban heels although I have to admit I outpaced quite a few skinheads wearing the cowboy boots. I’d probably outpaced an Olympic champion ‘cos when you’ve got 40 of them chasing you it’s quite an incentive to get the lead out.

The denim was the main bit of your outfit but everything else went with it. Always with black tour t-shirts because that was the only colour you could get. We had a sort of unwritten etiquette; you generally didn’t wear the T-shirt of the band you were watching to the concert, so if you went to see Motörhead you wear someone else’s. And the T-shirt were a way of showing how dedicated you were because obviously you’d want to wear a T-shirt that was obscure, a particular favourite was if you had an original T-shirt, so once Maiden were famous, if you had the original tour T-shirt from their first major tour that showed you’d been there since the beginning. So there was a whole culture around the T-shirts, and another thing my friends and me would do was you only got to wear the t-shirt if you’ve seen the band, back then there was no Internet so you couldn’t just buy T-shirts easily. The only way to get them was at the gig so you had to earn the t-shirt. I m sure I’m sounding like a mental case telling you all of this. It’s like Gok Wan and his Rules of Fashion have got nothing on us. Don’t wear white after March and gloves and dinner jackets. We had just as many rules, so for a supposedly outlaw culture we had just as many social rules which I suppose is typical of people isn’t it? If you go to football matches and you wear certain strips and you sing certain songs.

[44.00] A.Q: I wonder how you learnt the etiquette?

Mr. K: Well, Osmosis, and you would invent stuff, people in different parts of the country would do things ‘cos if some bands, even now like if you go to a Maiden concert 80% of the people wear a Maiden T-shirts, its just on of those bands where everyone wears the Maiden T-shirts. Other ones it really is about wearing an obscure band or an early tour t-shirt to show you were there at the beginning. There’s that one up-man-ship of ‘I saw them when they supported so-and-so or I saw them when they were playing a toilet in Bath or whatever. I guess it’s showing your true fandom.

A.Q: Apart from all the metal stuff, which you obviously keep up with, what do you like listening too now?

Mr. K: Well, since I lost my hair, I’ve started to get into, well, I’ve always been into the Punk and the New Wave so bands like REM came along and they would talk about other bands and I would start going backwards. I always liked Motown and disco when I was a kid so not having any obvious tribal allegiances I could dive back into that. Ever since then, there’re two types of music, good and bad so I’ll listen to anything.

Oddly enough growing up with Punk and Heavy Metal, it did open your mind to stuff that although it seemed closed because you would listed to some quite extreme stuff, I mean some of the metal bands got really extreme, but if you were willing to listen to Napalm Death or Slayer and find something in it then it opens your mind to try other things out. So pretty much anything I’ll give it a go and have a listen too. I’m really enjoying going back to the roots of some of these bands; when you listen to a band like AC/DC you can hear Chuck Berry, believe it or not, in there, or Whitesnake you go back to rhythm and blues. Motörhead, although they’re icon of the metal scene, they’re really just a very loud Rock and Roll band, when you listen to their beats they’re not the same beats you get in a pure metal band, you know, it’s great to find all the different links and you read interviews with Jimmy Page and Bono and they talk about al the stuff they liked and that sometimes going back to the Jazz and the blues. So all of that stuff’s really interesting to see a trail from some really obscure old Blues guy, go right back to Robert Johnson and all of a sudden you end up at Napalm Death. I think it’s fantastic how you get to that, and even some of the other influences that come in and out of it because like last night Kiss did their disco song and the album it came from, they just thought we can do that and they tried it out and made a Disco song. So all those kind of things it’s fantastic to be exploring it. But if push came to shove it’s the things you grew up with ‘cos now I find as much as I love new music I can’t learn the lyrics. Even the stuff I didn’t like in the ‘70’s, I won’t do it as I have a terrible singing voice ironically, I could sing you Long Haired Lover form Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond or any other Bay City Rollers song ‘cos it was around all the time. I’m convinced there’s a bit of the brain that absorbs lyrics and once it’s in there you can’t shake it off. I like loads of new music but it’s just keeping it in the old head really.

I couldn’t say I’m purely Metal anymore, loosing the tribal thing you get the freedom to like whatever you like, as broader tastes as I can, try and find out about it, listen to it, how it fits in with what you like and just keep exploring it and try to keep it fresh and find out what you can get in to really

A.Q: Have you ever tried to count up all the concerts you’ve been to?

Mr. K: Yeah, 79 to 99 it was over 250 gigs and since that probably a bit more than that, so, probably about 500 individual shows or 600 at a very rough guess but then some have two or three bands and that so in like the olden days at like, Reading you could see 30 bands over the weekend and that. You see bands several times and some bands you’d never see again, but I don’t know really probably about 500 shows I would think at a very rough guess but then I know people who’ve been to more than that, especially people who didn’t have children ‘cos of course they didn’t have to worry about baby sitters and didn’t have the black hole of financing a child so they could go and see as many shows as they wanted. The funny thing was, when I permanently moved to Bristol I lost touch a bit with my friends from Swindon and I didn’t know quite as many people in Bristol so I started going to a lot of shows on my own. That’s partly why I stopped because you can be in a crowd of 1000 people but feel really on your own because part of the fun of it is slagging off a rubbish support band or saying “this lot are fantastic!” All the in jokes and the chat of going to a gig, the social element is just as important as the show. Funnily enough a rubbish gig can be as good as a fantastic gig cos you can be creative with the slaggings and that. Being at shows on your own, it’s really weird ‘cos you can’t always just go and chat to people particularly when you look a bit more square, I mean I think you referred to me as a middle aged man earlier didn’t you? Well, a middle aged man, if it’s a concert full of young people I can’t just go up to some 18 year old lad and say I saw so-and-so 15 years ago, they’d just think I’m an oddball perhaps. So yeah, I think that was a part of it, the whole rigmarole of like who was going to drive and get tickets and things. In those days to get tickets at Bristol you had to send a cheque to the Box Office and I didn’t have a cheque book so I would have to get my mum to write out a cheque collect up all the cash from my friends, stamped addresses envelope, and hope that by addressing it to the Box Office, Colston Hall it would get there. And as if by magic, two weeks later your stamped addressed envelope would come back and there would be some tickets.

[50.00]

If you were lucky they would be in the stalls, and if you weren’t they’d have shoved you up in the balcony. But that was good because the whole rigmarole of doing it made it feel a bit better, whereas nowadays you just click on the Internet don’t you? Half the ticket price is some ridiculous charge. So, even the procurement of the tickets and getting to the gigs was a bit more of a ritual. A lot of the behaviour was more ritualised wasn’t it? But that was part of the fun, what you got up too. Bands really toured then they did 30 dates. I think Motörhead, they did Overkill, Bomber and Ace of Spades, often regarded as their three best albums, inside of two years. It takes Bono three years to come up with an album title doesn’t it? Nowadays you kind of lose that, they’ve got all the technology but it takes ‘em 15 years to make an album

A.Q: Bono probably doesn’t need the money though does he?

Mr. K: No but then again I don’t necessarily think these guys did. I think a lot of these bands they do do it because they love it or they maybe can’t do, or don’t want to do anything else. Like I say, you’d get a thirty date tour and the Mecca for us was Hammersmith Odeon up in London cos all the metal tours finished and obviously if you could get a ticket for that that was tremendous. Not as good as the Colston Hall but not bad.

A.Q: I never though I’d have anyone compare the Colston hall to the Hammersmith Odeon favourably

Mr. K: It’s ours init it’s the west country’s. It’s funny because I was talking to my older boy about dying. We might have been talking about ecologically friendly funerals. And he was saying it’s interesting some people have their ashes scattered, where would you have yours scattered? And I said “on the stage of the Colston Hall” without even thinking about it. I don’t know what Colston hall would think of it, they’d probably have some health and safety, COSH assessment before they scattered my ashes on the stage. It was just instinct to say that, I still get a thrill going down there now – a great place.

A.Q: What do you think of the new foyer?

Mr. K: It’s good in a way but it’s a bit bizarre because you go into the 21 century and you go through a bit of a tunnel and your back in 1979 ‘cos the Colston itself hasn’t changed too much inside. No, but I thought they did a good job, I loved the idea of the badges, and they seem to have done a good job to modernise it, keep the best of the old but bolt on some new stuff which I think they’ve done quite well. Being able to take beer in there is very nice. I saw Status Quo there, I won a competition in Venue, I was surprised because I though it was just tickets – I entered out of pure nostalgia and I got back stage passes. So me and the boy met the ‘Quo and I took the first vinyl album I ever brought was their live album so I took that along and got it autographed. That was freaky as anything ‘cos these we guys I’d lived with for a long time and were a big influence on my musical tastes and all of a sudden I was meeting these guys with my son who wanted to know why the audience was so old!

You go to these shows and there’s three generations going. I saw, I think it was Saxon down at the Academy and I was queuing up to get a T-shirt or go to the loo and there was some lad there who shouted out “granddad” and about 9 blokes all looked round cos they were granddads. Last night at Kiss you see children, 6, 7 year olds and there’s three generations of people going to these concerts now. That’s the really interesting thing about Rock now is that it just keeps going, it doesn’t matter if its trendy or not, every so on they bubble up into the public consciousness, it’s there then it disappears again but it carries on. There’s bands like Rush, who the majority of people have never heard of, they didn’t tour this country for four or five years, they announced a tour and they sold Wembley Arena and Birmingham NEC in about four hours flat. The appeal of this now is that it just carries on regardless. Iron Maiden are one of the biggest selling bands in India, of all places, and they bring Indian support bands to support them in this country, so we talk about world music. It’s funny I’ve seen Polish Death Metal bands, Greek metal bands, I watched Korean bands that play really aggressive metal but with traditional Korean instruments thrown in and there is a real big Viking metal scene where these Norwegian and Scandinavian bands dress up like Vikings and play metal but there’s traditional music in there as well. I’m being a bit of a preacher about metal but it is fantastic, it goes on regardless of what MTV s doing or whether Chris Moyles likes it. Being written about by someone in, well the Face isn’t around any more, but that’s the great thing about it, and it just prevails doesn’t it?

A:Q In a funny sort of way its very similar to folk music which does exactly the same and jazz as well, they’re all sort of left wing out of the mainstream but they just tiddle on all of the time.

Mr. K: But the things those genre have in common is the bands treat their fans with a bit of respect and it goes both ways and that sustains it. Some types of bands you just get the impression they’re just in it for the money and they won’t be able to sustain a massive career.

To be honest I think record companies now everything is so immediate by download they don’t invest in music like they used too so some of these bands it took five or six albums before they had any success. And you don’t get that now. I suppose culture’s very instant. We said earlier, you go to a gig and it’s on You Tube and people want their mobile phone now, and they want their tele digital and they want it now. This is a world where you can watch something developing and watch a band grow from being rubbish to really quite good. And know they’re gonna do it till they’re walking around with Zimmer frames and stuff. I saw Iggy Pop at the weekend and he’s still banging it out and I was astonished because their support band, Suicide, their main man, he’s a year older than my mum which was a bit freaky as he’s still on stage doing it! You get in to that sort of side of popular music and you’re there for life really aren’t you?

[57.00] A:Q If we asked who else should be embroidered onto this jacket not that we’re gonna let you, but who else would be on there? Another couple of bands?

Mr. K: I’d put the Wildhearts on there because I’ve grown to like them a lot. You‘d have to stick with more metal bands I guess. I’d be very tempted to put Rammstein on there, a German band. I like them a lot I think it’s really interesting, they’ve sold millions in America but they refuse to sing in English. I think that’s great they’re selling out massive tours in America and they refuse to sing in English, they sing in German and I’ve seen them a couple of times and there’s a load of people singing along with them and there just a total spectacle, or just pyromania so just that, for what they’ve achieved they would go on there. I’d need a massive jacket to put all the bands I like on there because there’s a lot more music now and you can get access to so much stuff. Although I said earlier that cultures very quick but its great because you can dial onto the internet and look stuff up and find websites and hear a band instantly and there’s a lot, too much, really good music around. The only think I guess I wouldn’t do is to put on non rock bands because it would look a bit odd to put on I don’t know I like The Black Keys, they just wouldn’t fit on there, and there’s a very good local band from Bath called the Heavy, who aren’t actually heavy they’re a really weird mix, really hard to describe, they wouldn’t fit on there. It would have to fir with the jacket itself. So yes, Wildhearts definitely, Rammstein, and I don’t know, it changes by the day who your favourite band is. It changes by the hour with me sometimes so it would be very difficult to pick anyone else.

A;Q Is there anyone you would take off?

Mr. K: No. No, ‘cos erm, I mean Ozzy, I need to put some kind of thing on there that said I think Sharon Osborne’s a complete.. some kind of expletive deleted because she saved his life but she also ruined him in so many ways. They call him the prince of darkness, I don’t know what she is then but she ruined him in some many ways because she made him into a caricature of himself. He was like a God to us, I saw him down at the Colston on his first ever solo tour, and that would have been wearing this, and he was fantastic and he only had two albums out at the time so it was quite a short set so he came out for an encore. Then he went and the roadies came out and started stripping the set and we wouldn’t leave the bouncers couldn’t get us out we were just (roar cheer), “we want more!” They dragged him out to do an encore and he was obviously preparing to change ’cos he came out as I recall wearing just a pair of Y-fronts, those horrible Y-fronts that were like, you could get them in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, purple and beige. Really repulsive colour, they dragged him out wearing that and a T-shirt and he did an extra encore, the only place he did it on that tour I believe. And he actually made the Sun would you believe, in their ‘Bizarre’ column. So yeah, I’d have to put a caveat on the Ozzy, prior to Sharon getting her hands on him, although I acknowledge she saved his life but she ruined him at the same time. Yes; I don’t know why I put that on actually because although I liked them, the logo was a bit of a challenge, and it wasn’t a particularly good colour choice either.

[60.00] It fits nicely there though

Mr. K: It might simply have been that it fitted in, that’s where Ozzy fitted into that panel. I guess I might have gone to the front you can see where different patches have been. That was a Motörhead patch cos we also had leather jackets as well and you would quite often wear leather underneath and some people would cut the sleeves off to put over their leathers which again came straight out of biker culture. My leather jacket was another purchase from Easton market, this might sound a bit bizarre but when you brought your leather jacket it was really stiff and unwieldy. I was told the best way of breaking it in was to wear it to bed cos you move around a lot and you break it in. so there was me sharing a house with my friends going to bed in flannel pyjamas and a leather jacket. I also had a plain denim jacket that I would wear if I was going somewhere and I didn’t wasn’t to advertise too much, I mean the hair was a give away but there were times when a plain denim jacket worked a bit better, so I had my plain demin. I wore this to see the Cramps up in Hammersmith Palais so that was a bit of a bizarre place. I kept up in the balcony for that one ‘cos I didn’t want to attract too much attention. But on the other hand why should I have to take my jacket off? I am what I am and you would still wear it to things like that.

A;Q One very important question has your embroidery skills ever come in handy since?

Mr. K: I don’t know that they have, I still do my own sowing. I’ve sewed me patches on my combat trousers and I’ve done a few bits for the boys. My youngest boy does fencing so I’ve sewed some of his patches on for him and the older boy has a rucksack with a couple of band patches on. Talking about them, it’s interesting because their musical tastes, they love all of the stuff I like but they also like some other stuff that to me is just awful. When I was bringing them up I wanted them to have musical taste and I wanted them to know that when they saw something on the tele, maybe a band doing a cover, where it came from, so I’m quite glad they have got some taste. I can remember a pivotal moment when my oldest son said he didn’t like something I was playing and did I mind? And I said no of course not I want you to have your own opinions. From that point onwards, I mean we’ve all got i pods and they’ve got the most bizarre mixes of stuff on there, they jump from Slayer to Leona Lewis and things like that. They like a lot more of modern R&B and all sorts of different dance tunes but equally they like a lot of this stuff. So my younger boy he’s well in to the Beatles bob Dylan and Neil Young and Muse and Kings of Leon, and half the bands I don’t even know who they are. They’ll watch things on You Tube because although you tube is supposed to be a visual thing they use it like a juke box, so if there doing a bit of homework or other stuff they’ll pick what they like and minimise it and listen to it. But they consume music quite a bit differently to the way I did. Because if you download individual songs whereas we would buy an album and the good thing about buying an album is discovering that your favourite song ever is buried on side two. Nowadays if I’m playing a CD after about 20 minutes I find myself getting up to go and change it because 20 minutes was how long an album side was and it’s weird not to be doing things like that. So, I’ve not had much call for embroidery but who’s to say it might not come up at some stage, you never know I m sure I’ll be doing something for my grandchildren. No doubt Iron Maiden, well Motörhead will certainly be touring, I think Lemmy’s immortal, so I’m sure I’ll be doing something for babies’ bibs or something.

A: That’s really great thank you

Mr. K: I’m sure I’ll think of a million other things to tell you

A: There is more than enough there