Garbage Days Revisited #24: Angelic Upstarts - “Last Tango In Moscow” (1984)

 

“I’ve been here before, somebody said with the ghosts of my fathers washed away on the riverbed” - Angelic Upstarts - Progress

One of those bands who really deserve to be more recognised than they are, I’d honestly put the Upstarts up there with the likes of Billy Bragg and Joe Strummer in terms of bands who helped to shape my political views growing up. The Angelic Upstarts were a first wave punk band from Sunderland who unfortunately largely got roped in with the Oi! movement through their friendship with Jimmy Pursey and Garry Bushell. Now, let's get something straight here, I'm of the opinion that oi is one of those musical movements that's been very much maligned down the years - started up as a street punk movement (and a working class counterpoint to the more pretentious art school inclined post-punk bands) it was always dogged by being the sort of music that far right boneheads seemed to latch on to despite the best efforts of bands like Sham 69 (arguably the ones who kickstarted it in 1978 or so) to distance themselves from it and make it clear that BNP fuckwits were very much not welcome at their gigs. Indeed, most of the bands attached to it initially like the Cockney Rejects and the Business were staunchly apolitical and a good few like Peter & The Test Tube Babies and the Gonads were simply playing it for laughs most of the time. Unfortunately as the misrepresentation grew so you started to get dodgy crypto-fascist scumbags infiltrating the movement and starting their own bands and it poisoned the whole thing horribly. I've still got bad memories of going to a Sham gig in Leeds as late as 2005 when I was in an Upstarts-influenced punk band myself and Jimmy Pursey, god love 'im, proudly proclaiming from the stage how good it was that the band had finally driven the far right thugs out of their audience. Half an hour later outside the venue, there was a group of swastika tattooed fuckwits kicking off at people and it's one of the most depressing things I've ever seen. It's maybe no wonder that soon after that I turned my back on punk (temporarily), grew my hair out, did a musical 180 and started to get into sleaze rock instead. But that's another story for another time...

Anyway, I guess the point I'm making here is that I don't really regard the Upstarts as an oi band (and seemingly neither do they - I remember doing a review of the group's most recent album Bullingdon Bastards in 2013 where the Upstarts actually reposted it and singer Mensi mentioned in the comments that he'd always considered the band to be straight up punk rather than oi. I s'pose unfortunately it's a case that their early connections are probably destined to forever haunt them over this), to my ears they (and the bands who followed them out of Wearside, Red Alert and Red London, both well worth a listen in their own right) were always much closer to the pure political punk of the Clash than the yobbo-by-numbers likes of the 4 Skins. As you'd probably expect coming from the area they did, the band were, and still are, ferociously left wing and after growing from their primitive street-punk beginnings on their 1979 Teenage Warning album would really hit their stride on album number three, 1981's Two Million Voices. With Thatcherism in full flow, the welfare state being dismantled (something which, let's face it, has pretty much continued unabated for forty years since) and working class communities such as the Upstarts' homeland bearing the brunt of it, it was a ferocious angry cry from the forgotten towns with the title track, Ghost Town and Mr Politician railing against the ignorant Tory government, Last Night Another Soldier sounding like Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army in DM boots (several of the band's friends from back in the north east had tried to escape the dole queue by joining the army only to be slung headfirst into the hellishness of the conflict in Northern Ireland) and I Understand being a reggae-influenced diatribe against the Met police after a young rastafarian Richard Campbell had been beaten to death while detained in their cells.

Even by this point a mere three or four years into their existence, the Upstarts had had their fair share of ups and downs, hounded out of Sunderland by the local police who took exception to the band's vitriolic songs about the law's behaviour on Police Oppression and their debut single The Murder of Liddle Towers, again written about a friend of the band who was beaten to death while in police custody for being drunk and disorderly only for the subsequent enquiry to be a whitewash. They'd already gone through three labels (eventually landing on Zonophone with the Cockney Rejects and fellow GDR alumni the Barracudas) and had several line-up changes - Mensi and guitarist Mond were the two constants with Decca Wade and Stix Warrington (who would join the Rejects around this time) alternating on the drum stool (they even had ex-Roxy Music man Paul Thompson filling in for a bit in what must be one of the most incongruous pairings in punk history!) and a series of bass players coming and going after original four stringer Steve Forsten was fired in the run-up to their second album. They would eventually settle on a line-up of Mensi, Mond, Decca and new bassist Tony "Feedback" Morrison (RIP) formerly of early '80s mod-punks Long Tall Shorty and with the positive feedback for Two Million Voices plus the album making the Top 30, seemed to be in good shape as 1981 rolled to a close.

Unfortunately things would quickly come crashing down again as the group's following album, 1982's Still From The Heart was a major mis-step with the group seemingly abandoning their punk roots for a Depeche Mode style electro-pop sound. Were they trying for a commercial breakthrough? Had the bad press around oi following a fight between black and white punk fans in Southall the previous summer spooked them? Nobody knows but it was a dreadful album - the angry punk lyrics were still there on songs like Flames Of Brixton, Cry Wolf and the haunting Soldier but they were sunk beneath synths and glossy production - it just didn't sound like an Upstarts album at all. Predictably they were soon gone from Zonophone as EMI wound up the label and although 1983's Reason Why?, released on Cherry Red subsidiary Anagram was at least a bit of a return to form, the damage had been done.

All of which brings us on to 1984's Last Tango In Moscow, an album recorded under a background of decided unrest. By this point, the line-up had moved on again with Mensi, Mond and Tony now being joined by guitarist Brian Hayes and drummer Derwent Jaconelli (who'd previously been in Long Tall Shorty with Morrison). However, the loss of the band's deal with Anagram saw Morrison and, more damagingly, Mond depart (the former would return to LTS, the latter would move into production, handling the duties for New Model Army's classic debut Vengeance among others). Exactly what caused Mond to leave the band he'd co-founded with Mensi six or seven years earlier isn't recorded but the pair had already started demo'ing the songs that would make up the majority of Last Tango In Moscow shortly after Reason Why? was completed (the demos would later resurface when Captain Oi re-issued the album a couple of decades later) leading Mensi's new line-up completed by the ex-Splodgenessabounds (yup, the guys who did Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please) duo of Max Splodge on bass and Ronnie Rocka on guitar, to go back into the studio and re-record them changing the song names - not sure what the logic was there. Either way, the group would sign with Razor records (then more notable for having a lot of the Soho Brit-glam bands like the Babysitters and the Grip featuring a pre-Wildhearts/Honeycrack Willie Dowling in their ranks) with the new album ready to go.

Preceded by the single Machine Gun Kelly, another ferocious anti-police rant about Thatcher's decision to allow policemen to carry guns in the UK, Last Tango In Moscow feels like a successor album to Two Million Voices. Except that in the intervening three years, the state of affairs for the working class in Britain had got far far worse. Thatcher's landslide re-election in the wake of the Falklands War in 1983 had seen the Tories plough ahead remorselessly with rigging the country in favour of those at the top of the pile and screwing those at the bottom over. Add to this an opposition that was abandoning its traditional values of social justice and fairness against the wishes of its membership (sound familiar? At least Kinnock was making the occasional attempt to oppose the Tories unlike the current charlatan we've got as opposition "leader"), the Miners' Strike being in full flow and a general sense of hopelessness about the whole situation unless you were one of the repugnant wide boy "Thatcher's children" spivs and there was plenty of lyrical ammunition for the Upstarts. Progress, originally aired on a documentary Mensi put together for the Play At Home television series as Listen To The Silence (see above), really nailed just how desperate things had got as Mensi pictures himself walking past the industrial desolation along the Wear ("Looking for the golden years as the bitter winds cut into me/And the ghosts appear for all to see, all along the way they're watching me") while elsewhere the subjects included the civil war in Northern Ireland on One More Day ("Conga dancers, my brother crashing to the ground"), the inner city riots of a couple of years earlier on Who's Got The Money and the growing threat of a nuclear war between the US and Russia on the haunting title track. It's a varied album musically as well ranging from the pure punk fury of I Think It Should Be Free through the sorrowful acoustics of Jarrow Woman to the a cappella reading of the traditional anti-scab poem Blackleg Miner. It's a great album and really deserves rediscovering as a document of the time although Paint It In Red, the B-side to Machine Gun Kelly and another spot-on tirade against political cover-ups ("There is no trust, there is no gain, I see actors but there's no play") really should have gone on the album as well.

Unfortunately, as we said earlier, the general consensus by this point was that the Upstarts' heyday had been and gone three years previously. With punk pretty much flatlining by now, Last Tango In Moscow made a decent impression on the indie chart (back when that still meant something) but that was all. The group would lose Derwent to mod supergroup the Rage and reconvene as a four-piece with Max moving to drums and Ronnie to bass (although there's a definite drum machine sound to their output from hereon out). This line-up would do two albums starting with 1986's respectable enough Power Of The Press  which featured re-recorded versions of Soldier and I Stand Accused from Still From The Heart as well as the vitriolic Nottingham Slag written about the end of the Miners' Strike and the excellent Empty Street and its lead off single Brighton Bomb which supported the IRA over their bombing of the Tory party conference the previous year and was unsurprisingly quickly banned by radio. Unfortunately 1987's Blood On The Terraces was a disappointment after that with the tunes sliding into anonymity apart from possibly Heart Attack In Paris which sounds oddly like a Madchester tune that's somehow crashlanded two years early. By 1988, the group would be no more.

This wasn't the end of the story by any means - Mensi and Mond would reform the group in the early '90s and they've been ploughing along ever since (although Mond would only last for 1992's Bombed Out album before leaving again). They're still very much out there and still as ferociously angry and left-wing as ever - the fact that their last album was called Bullingdon Bastards and saw them in just as much of an invective mood as ever is testament to that. To my mind though, Last Tango In Moscow comes a close second to the much more celebrated Two Million Voices as the band's best effort and really bears seeking out if you're unaware of it. It's also a depressingly relevant album for these desperate times when the UK is cursed with an arrogant and out of touch upper class government (which unbelievably sealed its victory by winning seats in the areas like Sunderland that it butchered so horribly around the time of this album) running the country into the ground, a supposed "opposition" that seems more intent on persecuting its own membership than holding the government to account, police brutality still running rampant (witness the Sarah Everard demonstration a few months back) and a poisonous civil culture which seems to be all about loathsome tribalism which gives a free pass to racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia but instantly cracks down on anyone who's got the guts to stand up and challenge the failing existing order. How we could do with a new band like the Upstarts nowadays...