Sounds From The Junkshop #5 - The Dogs D'Amour

 

As you'll probably have noticed by now, most of my previous Songs From The Junkshop entries have referred back to the indie scene of the mid-'90s. Although I'd like to claim that my interest in guitar music started there, it would only really be a half-truth. Even though it bit the bullet fairly quickly after I'd started listening to it thanks to the rise of grunge (maybe another reason I never really got into the whole Seattle thing? I dunno), glam metal also played a part in shaping my nascent music taste in my early teens. The likes of Guns 'n' Roses, AC/DC, WASP, Skid Row, the Almighty and, slightly later, Love/Hate and the Quireboys, all played a part in my growing love of loud guitars and attitude but there was one band above all others who I quickly developed a love of after first hearing them on the ITV Chart Show as an 11-year-old. Ladies and gentlemen, the Dogs D'Amour...

The video in question was for the band's Victims of Success single which was in the upper reaches of the Rock Top 10 that week (one of the great things about the Chart Show as opposed to Top of the Pops was that they used to have either an Indie, Rock or Dance Top 10 as well as the regular chart which allowed them to show a few vids that generally weren't commercially successful enough to be on TOTP and made it a bit more interesting). I think it might've been Seb Hunter in his excellent Hell Bent For Leather book who said that very few bands have ever looked as cool as the Dogs did in their pomp and certainly I was well and truly captivated by the vid - even as a youngster, there was a part of me that thought "Feck yes, that is what a rock 'n' roll band is supposed to look like!" The song was awesome as well with Tyla's sluggish drawl wending its way over Jo Dog's trademark slide guitar and lyrics about the second division chancers the band had discovered during their trips to the States and LA (although Tyla would later admit it might just have been slightly autobiographical!). For those of us way too young to remember the Stones in their prime or the New York Dolls, I'm pretty sure the Dogs filled a similar gap.

I would end up going out and buying the single the next day (it duly climbed from number 37 in the charts to the dizzying heights of number...36 on that Sunday's countdown. I'd like to think I helped in some way...) - in the end though, as much as I liked the A-side, I actually ended up gravitating to the B-side, a stomping live take on an older Dogs song Billy Two Rivers. I'm really annoyed because I lost the tape many years ago after lending it to a bass player in one of my old bands so he could learn the song for us to cover. Three weeks later he moved house and lost the thing and I've yet to find a copy of that particular version of the song anywhere!

The harsh truth is that by the time I got into the Dogs, they were already past their commercial peak which had come the year before with the Top 20 Errol Flynn album and its attendant Top 30 hit Satellite Kid (marked by a brilliantly shambolic TOTP performance - the backstage bar may have been raided for this one I suspect...) The group had actually formed way back in 1980 in Birmingham and they'd slowly hone their craft over the decade with Tyla being the main constant in the early door revolving line-ups (although drummer Bam was with him for most of the journey). After a Finnish-only release for their debut album The State We're In) and a collection of studio tracks called The (Un)Official Bootleg Album, a solid line-up would emerge of Tyla, Bam, guitarist Jo Dog and bassist Steve James (the latter replacing former Sham 69/Lords of the New Church bassist Dave Tregunna who joined the group for a bit after the Lords' first split in the mid-'80s).

Signing to China records, the group would gain serious critical acclaim for their excellent third album In The Dynamite Jet Saloon with the positions for the singles from it (and the follow-ups the acoustic Graveyard Of Empty Bottles and the aforementioned Errol Flynn) slowly increasing to the point where the group were starting to notch up genuine Top 40 hits.

And then, obviously, I became a fan and it all went south. The group had been battling collective drug demons for a while and they unravelled spectacularly at a gig in Los Angeles on the tour to promote Straight?!?!, the album which followed Victims of Success when Tyla smashed a bottle onstage and started slashing at his chest with it, ending up in hospital with severe blood loss. For the moment, at least, the band were no more.

Straight?!?! was my first introduction to the Dogs (the other albums were deleted sharpish after the band broke up and I wouldn't end up listening to them until the end of the decade when they were very briefly reissued). Hand on heart, it is probably the weakest of the first group of Dogs albums but it still has some fine moments on it with the frenetic Cardboard Town and Back On The Juice providing the oomph while the likes of the bitter Kiss My Heart Goodbye, the sinister You Can't Burn The Devil and the desolate Empty World showing that Tyla was also a dab hand at bottom of the whiskey glass laments as well.

In the wake of the split, the group went off to various projects - Tyla took some time off from music, Jo would reunite with Dave Tregunna in Shooting Gallery, the band founded by Hanoi Rocks' Andy McCoy (one inconsistent album but with some good moments on it - give Restless a spin for a taste of their sound) and Steve would form the Last Bandits (named after a Dogs song) with hair metal perennial almost-was Adam Bomb (of Dangerous When Lit fame, not to be confused with the early '90s WWF wrestler). Bam, meanwhile would join a certain up-and-coming group called the Wildhearts and would play on their first two EP's before being replaced behind the kit first by Stidi and then Ritch Battersby.

1993 would bring the news that a now-clean Tyla was putting the Dogs back together again. Although Bam and Steve were in tow, Jo was still over in LA with the soon-to-sink Shooting Gallery and was replaced on guitar by Darrell Bath, formerly of the UK Subs and the Crybabys and, I can confirm having met him a few times during my London days, one of the nicest blokes in rock 'n' roll (give his solo album Roll Up from a couple of years back a spin if you get the chance, it's a good 'un). The first fruits of this new line-up came with the All Or Nothing EP headed up by a brilliant cover of the old Small Faces classic (even my Dad, who bless 'im pretty much hated nearly everything I used to play on the stereo in my bedroom back then, liked it). Considering that the Soho glam movement that the Dogs were associated with was very much long gone by this point, it did well to graze the Top 50 and the subsequent album More Unchartered Heights Of Disgrace made it all the way to the Top 30.

For me, More Unchartered Heights... is probably the Dogs' most underrated album and I'd honestly put it second only to Dynamite Jet Saloon in terms of their full albums (though you could certainly argue the toss for both A Graveyard of Empty Bottles and The (Un)Official Bootleg Album depending on your view of what constitutes this). The sound of an older and wiser band having seen many of their contemporaries fall by the wayside, the opening duo of What's Happening Here and the ferocious What You Do showed that they could still kick up a storm with the best of them but the slower songs contain some of the darkest but most heartfelt odes to dreams gone wrong and dashed on the pavement. Pretty Pretty Once and Mr Barfly were odes to the forgotten daughters and sons of LA, dying slowly against a backdrop of a world that's ceased to care about them, Johnny Silvers was an ode to the group's old friends Johnny Thunders and Stiv Bators, both of whom had passed on a couple of years before while Scared of Dying (which I covered at my acoustic gigs on more than a few occasions), the heartbreaking acoustic led title track and the stark closer Put It In Her Arm saw Tyla staring into (or maybe that should be out of) the abyss at his demons to devastating effect.

The reunion wouldn't last unfortunately and the Dogs would split again in mid-'94. One of my mates' older brothers who loved 'em went to see them when they passed through Bradford and played Queens Hall in 1993 and I was gutted because I'd have loved to have gone but I couldn't persuade my parents that going out to a rock club in Bradford on a school night was something a 14-year-old should be allowed to do... The group would back Tyla on his first solo album The Life And Times Of A Balladmonger in early 1994 which was a lot less immediate than More Unchartered Heights... but still a good listen (I borrowed it off the aforementioned mate's older brother and thought at the time that it sounded more like a B-sides collection - it's grown on me since though...) but that was pretty much it.

Until 1999 anyway when the group would reform. Jo would return on guitar but this time Steve was absent with the bass role being filled by Bam's other half, Share (formerly of Vixen). An album, Happy Ever After duly followed and was much better than it really had any right to be (picks - Angelina, Singin' and Even Angels Have Bad Days). This line-up stuck things out for a couple of years but then fell out badly on a tour supporting Alice Cooper in 2002. Tyla would return to his solo career and put a few records out under the Dogs name with various hired guns to varying degrees of quality, Jo would hook up with former LA Guns frontman Paul Black to form Sonic Boom who put out one under-rated album Sundown Yellow Moon and Bam and Share would link up with Brent and Erik from Faster Pussycat to form Bubble who put out three very good albums in the noughties before disbanding.

I finally saw Tyla's Dogs on Christmas Eve at Bradford Rio's in 2005 where he was backed by Danny McCormack from the Wildhearts (in fact I'd seen Danny and Tyla playing an acoustic set together in York supporting Ginger Wildheart and Alex Antiproduct's laugh-a-minute Clam Abuse side project several years before) and ex-Lurkers guitarist Tom Spencer who'd previously been in the Yo-Yo's with Danny and would go on to the excellent Loyalties and his current role fronting the Professionals. It was a good gig (given that the original line-up very much weren't on speaking terms at that point, it's fair to say that this was pretty much as good a line-up as we could've asked for!) although me and my mate ended up sat at the same table as Danny and I basically ended up going into full starstruck fanboy mode! To be fair to him, he was absolutely lovely about me babbling at him about how if it wasn't for the Wildhearts then I'd never have wanted to play in a band and write about music and happy to have a quick chat with us before going onstage that night. Shortly after moving to London, I saw Tyla playing a Dogs gig backed by another decent line-up featuring a returning Dave Tregunna along with his former Lords bandmate, drummer Danny Fury and ex-Cherry Bombz guitarist Timo Kaltio (another Andy McCoy band who Tregunna had also served with  - see, it's like a big old bolero hat wearing jigsaw this rock 'n' roll game sometimes...) at the Half Moon in Putney which was a good gig as well.

It's maybe telling though that when I'd mention these gigs to older Dogs fans I was friends with and how they'd actually been pretty decent, they'd always just sigh and say "Aye...but it's not the same as the original thing, is it?" Time's a great healer given the circumstances though and when Tyla announced that he'd be reuniting for a tour with Jo, Steve and Bam in 2013 with the London gig at the Borderline taking place on my 34th birthday, I was straight in the queue to snap a ticket up. I ended up watching from the balcony and it was fantastic - just seeing the crowd reaction to the four of them walking on stage together before crashing into Debauchery and The Kid From Kensington as an opening one-two was an amazing experience. Much beer was drunk and a good time was had by all.

Now in a perfect world, this would be my cue to say that the reunion has lasted happily since then and everything's great again. Unfortunately, as usually seems to happen with the Dogs, it didn't quite work out that way. The group managed to put a couple of EP's out but were struggling to put a coherent album together. After a year or two of trying, it looks as though they amicably decided that it just wasn't working and split off their separate ways again. Jo, Steve and Bam would go on to form the Desperados and put out a couple of decent singles while Tyla went back to recording with his solo band. No hard feelings it seemed...until Tyla started using the Dogs D'Amour name for his solo band again much to the anger of the other three members. His defence was that people had been asking him all the time why he wasn't touring as the Dogs as he was still doing a lot of Dogs material in his live set but...well, I'll hold off from saying what I think about that, suffice to say I'm not convinced.

It's a real shame because when you look at the Dogs' main contemporaries at the time, the Quireboys, (Spike and Tyla have even done a couple of albums together down the years both of which are well worth a listen) they've managed to carry on (mostly) getting on with each other and putting a steady stream of new material out over the last 20 years (yes, I know it's only Spike and Griff as the two original members these days if we want to split hairs but Paul and Keith have been with them for 20 years now and I think nearly all QB's fans would accept they're very much an integral part of the line-up these days). You just think that if the Dogs could've done the same then they'd probably have a similar reputation as respected elder statesmen of Britrock. As it stands, Tyla is continuing to tour under the Dogs name (with, to be fair to him, a steady line-up in recent years) while the others are off working on various projects.

I dunno...part of me hopes that some time in the future we'll see the original Dogs line-up back together to do some gigs again but given the events of the last decade, I think there's probably more chance of Boris Johnson winning the World Parkour Championships. But. y'know, dreams are free and all that. Anyway, suffice to say that I heartily recommend all of the Dogs albums up to and including Happy Ever After and Tyla's done some pretty sound albums on his own as well (Life And Times of a Balladmonger, Libertine, Bloody Hellfire, Devil's Supper and Another Day Abandoned In Pursuit Of Pleasure are all well worth a listen) plus his two with Spike as the Hot Knives, Flagrantly Yours and The Sinister Indecisions of Frankie Gray and Jimmy Pallas. Plus Bubble's three albums (How 'Bout This?, Total Harmonic Distortion and Rock 'n' Roll Hell) and Sonic Boom's Sundown Yellow Moon all come highly recommended by this ol' gunslinger as well. In these dark times, we all need some music to sip a few drinks and remember the good times to.