Garbage Days Revisited #25 - The Lurkers - "God's Lonely Men" (1979)

 

"Faces drop one by one when they hear our names" - The Lurkers - God's Lonely Men

Depending on who you ask, the Lurkers were either the most unglamourous punk band ever or West London's answer to the Ramones. However, when your correspondent first got into punk, I think it was this very down to earth no-nonsense attitude that drew me to them after hearing their almost-hit Ain't Got A Clue on one of the first punk compilations I bought. Soon afterwards I would end up picking up a best of compilation, the wittily-titled Greatest Hit on Beggars Banquet and after enjoying that would quickly track down the band's first two albums via their re-release on the excellent Captain Oi label (run by ex-Business bassist Mark Brennan).

In the true "deep cuts" spirit of Garbage Days Revisited, it's the second Lurkers album we're going to be looking at today but a bit of background first - the group formed in West London (Ickenham to be precise) just as punk was about to break with the first Ramones LP being their template. By the time of their debut album Fulham Fallout they'd settled on a line-up of Pete Stride on guitar, Pete "Esso" Haynes on drums, Howard Wall on vocals (replacing original singer Pete "Plug" Edwards who went on to become the band's roadie) and Nigel Moore on bass who would originally leave before the group's first single to be replaced by Arturo Bassick (real name Pete Billingsley - the Lurkers had a lot of Pete's in their line-up in the early days!) but return around the time of the album.

Fulham Fallout was basically a stomping collection of full steam ahead punk rock distilled down to its most basic form and brilliant with it - Ain't Got A Clue and I Don't Need To Tell Her would both stall just outside the Top 40 and the latter would even get the band a Top of the Pops appearance. They were hardly critical darlings but were already cultivating an enthusiastic and loyal fanbase - in fact you could make a definite parallel here to a lot of the bands I first got into guitar music through as a teenager like the Senseless Things and Mega City Four. So perhaps it's really not a surprise I gravitated to the Lurkers when I was making my first forays into discovering punk.

1979 saw the group start making the first moves towards putting their second album out and this is the one we're here to discuss today. Often regarded as a poor relation to the first due to the bad mix courtesy of American producer Phillip Jarrell (which is a fair point to be honest, the group definitely sound a bit blunted on here compared to Fulham Fallout), I'd actually argue that the songs on this one are probably better than on their debut and it deserves a re-evaluation.

Lead-off single Out In The Dark is a case in point, a four minute ominous tale of night time wanderings in the wrong part of the city ("Screaming voices from the West End/Out in the dark with the social dead ends"), it shows the group's sound evolving well. Opener She Knows meanwhile could be an old '50s rock 'n' roll number souped up and given a punk makeover and it works really well ("She know and I know, we don't wanna see the rest of the show/She know and I know what we want so baby let's go"). While the likes of Room 309, Cyanide and Bad Times still have the addictive three chord thrash formula of old intact and do it well, the gentle Non-Contender (a sympathetic ode to a thirtysomething drag queen still stuck at home living with his mum) is another curveball and the title track almost seems to be the group making fun of their pariah status among the music press.

Sadly, the album wouldn't be a hit and missed the charts while its singles all stalled in the lower reaches of the Top 75. The group would expand to a five piece adding guitarist Honest John Plan in between recording albums with the Boys (Plain would also go on to join the Crybabys - let's just say I'm pretty sure both bands will crop up in GDR somewhere down the line) for the New Guitar In Town single which showed a more melodic side to the band's work (and was backed with a cracking punked-up cover of the old Dean Martin classic Little Ol' Wine Drinker Me which has also been given the rocked up treatment by Ginger Wildheart in recent years). This was supposed to be the precursor to the band's third album, also called New Guitars In Town, but the band just sort of drifted apart as production went on and it ended up being released as a Pete Stride & John Plain album instead (although Wall provides vocals on a few of the songs with Plug handling the rest). Again, this is a pretty decent album and I remember the title track was one we frequently used to cover in my early twenties punk band.

Of course, these break-ups rarely last long and the Lurkers have been active on and off in the forty years since they originally split. The group originally made a comeback on Clay records in the early '80s with Stride, Esso and Moore joined by new singer Marc Fincham (Stride and Wall reputedly fell out after the latter turned up horribly drunk for a gig that Stride and Plain were doing and didn't speak afterwards) which resulted in a few singles but nothing of the quality of the group's previous output (give Frankenstein Again and This Dirty Town a spin if you really must, the rest can safely be skipped). Later on in the decade, the group reconvened again with a line-up of Stride, Moore, Esso and Bassick replacing Wall on vocals.

This line-up would prove a bit more durable with Bassick helming the band for no less than seven albums starting with 1988's Wild Times Again although Moore and Esso would both have left by the early '90s with the group reverting to being a three-piece and Dan Tozer joining on drums. Stride would also have gone a few years later (similar to the others, he just didn't want to tour anymore) with the group basically becoming Arturo plus whoever he could bring along for the ride over the next two decades - the line-up briefly included future Yo-Yo's/Loyalties guitarist Tom Spencer for 1995's Ripped And Torn and Spencer would take the song Too Lazy To Bleed (albeit in a completely rewritten form) with him to the Yo-Yo's. Although most of these albums are a bit patchy, Arturo is still definitely a guy who knows his way around a good tune, chorus and riff and all of them have at least a few songs which are worth a listen (1990's King Of The Mountain is probably my personal favourite but their gloriously ramshackle cover of the old Tony Christie/Neil Sedaka standard Solitaire on 1991's Powerjive is well worth a listen as is the rollicking Go Ahead Punk, Make My Day off later effort 26 Years).

I actually saw Arturo's version of the Lurkers a few times down the years and they were always good value for money. Usually this was at the Wasted/Rebellion punk festival but I've got memories of catching them at the late lamented 12 Bar in Soho in my first year of living in London. I was quite horrifically tanked that night due to going to the Crobar up the road where I ended up sharing three bottles of red wine with the guitarist in the band I was in at the time which I then proceeded to add several pints to upon getting to the venue. I remember running into Arturo at the bar after the band finished playing and having a chat with him and he was a thoroughly nice and personable bloke (he also downed a pint of Guinness in one which had me slightly in awe!). Although if he's reading this, I should probably apologise as I was well south of comprehensible that night. It says everything that I woke up the next morning to a text from the girl I'd been drinking with at that gig asking me to reply to her if I was still alive!

The early 2010's would see Stride, Moore and Esso reunite under the banner GLM (named after the album this column's about!) eventually reverting to the Lurkers name with an uneasy agreement with Arturo that both bands could use the name as his version was touring but not recording while Stride's was recording but not touring. After a bit of a slow start with 2012's Chemical Landslide and 2016's The Future's Calling which both felt a bit plodding, the group seemed to have got back into gear with last year's Sex Crazy (Nite Songs review here) which saw them tapping into the vein of old to good effect - they also briefly had Dazie from the Featherz in as their new vocalist although Stride now seems to have taken this role back on. With Bassick retiring his version of the band this year to concentrate on playing bass for 999 (who have also had a new album out recently), this now leaves the Stride/Moore/Esso line-up as the sole Lurkers band in 2021.

...and breathe - talk about a convoluted story! Anyway, back to the original point which is that both of the first two Lurkers albums are well worth tracking down and listening to but God's Lonely Men is definitely the one that gets a bit of an undeserved bad rep in my opinion. Yes the production on this might be a bit shonky but it contains a great selection of keep-it-simple punk rock with plenty of great tunes and hooks and a surprising amount of variety in there as well. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing where the Lurkers go next after last year's return to form.