Garbage Days Revisited #35: UK Subs - "Japan Today" (1987)

 

"This is where life began...and this is where it'll end..." - UK Subs - Another Cuba

I think it's one of the incontrovertible facts of punk rock that Charlie Harper is a bit of a flippin' legend. Already in his mid-thirties when the punk explosion broke in 1977 and a veteran of the pub rock and glam rock scenes with his old band the Marauders, he quickly sensed that a new movement where he genuinely felt he fit in was breaking (I remember reading an interview with him many years ago where he'd essentially said that prior to punk most people tended to refer to him as the local nutcase but that when punk came along, local nutcases were cool all of a sudden!) and thus the UK Subs were born. Forty plus years later with Harper now approaching his 80th birthday, the band are still out there and going strong having recently completed their odyssey of releasing an album for every letter of the alphabet from A to Z.

However, as befits the Garbage Days Revisited tradition, today we're taking a little journey offroad with the Subs' back catalogue and looking at a period which saw them moving away from their punk roots into more straight up rock territory, namely 1982-91. Commercially, the band made very little impression during this era and the line-up wasn't exactly stable until the end of the '80s but it also resulted in some of the Subs' most interesting material and some albums that definitely merit tracking down especially for those predisposed towards the glam end of punk. Intrigued? Read on...

By 1981, it's fair to say that the Subs were a well established band, having notched up six Top 40 hits starting with Stranglehold (their biggest) in 1979 and four Top 20 albums - Another Kind of Blues, Brand New Age, the live effort Crash Course and Diminished Responsibility which saw a change in rhythm section with Harper and guitarist Nicky Garratt bringing in Alvin Gibbs and Steve Roberts to replace Paul Slack and Pete Davies on bass and drums respectively. All three of the studio albums were good efforts (Brand New Age is probably my favourite especially the ominous Warhead which remains one of their best moments but Another Kind Of Blues runs it very close and Diminished Responsibility is a solid effort too) and the band were pretty much at the forefront of the second wave of punk.

However, the story of the UK Subs never seems to be plain sailing and in 1981, it all seemed to unravel a bit. The group's final single for Gem Records (which was wound up by its parent label RCA soon afterwards) Keep On Runnin' (Till You Burn) was a good effort which saw the band moving their sound forward while keeping the energy of old intact (it's even got Captain Sensible from the Damned playing some keyboards on it). However, the group's decision to eschew their traditional leather jackets and ripped denim for some more outlandish garb in the video and on the accompanying Top of the Pops appearance confused a fair few fans. Some even slagged the band as going New Romantic but the truth is that it's more in line with the sort of gear that the likes of the Lords of the New Church and Hanoi Rocks would make so effortlessly cool a year or so later - Charlie and the lads were just a year ahead of the curve with it and it backfired on them.

The group would move across to NEMS (who'd also had the Boys on their books a couple of years previously) for 1982's Endangered Species which saw them really starting to move things forward musically and hitching their colours to the nascent glam-punk movement that groups like the Babysitters, the Little Roosters, the Dogs D'Amour and Marionette would soon coalesce around. With the content varying from the straight ahead onslaught of the title track to heavier material like the infamous Down On The Farm (later covered badly by Guns 'n' Roses on The Spaghetti Incident which must have made Charlie a fair few bob!), the grinding five minute Countdown, the stark post punk bass heavy duo of Ice Age and Divide By Eight Multiply By 5 and the mournful closer Flesh Wound, it proved that the Subs weren't afraid to move with the times. Unfortunately, it was a commercial flop with Roberts being sacked soon afterwards to be replaced by ex-Adverts/Generation X man John Towe. However, after a further EP Shake Up The City (arguably one last attempt by the band to go back to their punk roots before largely abandoning them afterwards) also failed to do the business, the group essentially split up. Gibbs would go on to join Iggy Pop's band in the late '80s and then hook up with Hanoi Rocks guitarist Nasty Suicide to form short-lived glammers Cheap 'n' Nasty in the early '90s while Garratt would move into production. And Harper? Well, he did what he always does - got a new line-up together and took the UK Subs back on the road.

The first fruits of the new Subs line-up would emerge in the form of the 1983 single Another Typical City with the group signing to indie label Fallout records where they'd largely remain for the next couple of decades. Joining Harper in this incarnation of the band were returning bassist Steve Slack (who'd been part of the early Subs line-up before handing over bass duties to his brother Paul), ex-Chelsea drummer Steve Jones (not to be confused with the Pistols guitarist) and guitarist Captain Scarlet. With its skittering guitar and revved up almost R&B style rhythm, it's a bit of an underappreciated gem in this writer's opinion and well worth a listen.

The subsequent album Flood of Lies (with its cover depicting Maggie Thatcher as a terrifying zombie snakewoman hybrid) would see Harper taking the band into much heavier territory with Scarlet's much more metal guitar style being especially prominent on the doomy Sabbath style opening title track. Although the punk influence can't help but barge its way to the surface on songs like the chugging Veronique (about a French go-go dancer Harper knew in Soho) and DB's, songs like the mid-paced After The War and the lurching closer Seas of Mars (about the joys of catching a North Sea ferry to go touring abroad) saw the group heading into new waters and doing it well.

Unfortunately, the Flood of Lies line-up would have disintegrated as '83 turned to '84. Scarlet would stick around for the 1984 live album Grossout USA which would also feature a returning Pete Davies on drums and ex-Discharge bassist Tezz but soon afterwards, Harper again having to put a whole new line-up together. On board this time were ex-Wall drummer Rab Fae Beith (who'd also had a spell with Kirk Brandon in the Pack which would later mutate into Theatre of Hate and then Spear of Destiny), bassist Ricky McGuire, formerly of Blackpool post-punks the Fits and guitarist Jim Moncur. This line-up would make its recording debut with 1985's Huntington Beach which is probably the nearest the band came to their old school sound during this era although the likes of Rock 'n' Roll Savage and Between The Eyes definitely have a more glammy take on the formula than the early albums did and the acoustic guitars on Miss Teenage USA (which sounds oddly grungy!) mark it out as something different while the title track goes into almost cowpunk territory! Again though, this line-up wouldn't hold together (although a live album In Action did surface in 1986) with Maguire moving on to folk-punks The Men They Couldn't Hang (he can now be found playing bass with Rich Ragany & The Digressions)  and Rab concentrating on running his RFB record label which had co-released Huntington Beach with Fallout.

Reset time again then and this time Harper would bring Steve Roberts back behind the drumkit along with future Crybabys and Dogs D'Amour guitarist Darrell Bath (still in his teens at the time), fellow six-stringer Alan Lee, Vibrators frontman Knox on keyboards (similar to the Subs, the Vibrators were going through a period of line-up instability at this point and Knox and Charlie had already collaborated in early '80s punk supergroup the Urban Dogs) and bassist Flea (no, not the gurning bloke from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, this was one Dave Farrelly to his mates). The resultant album Japan Today is one of my favourites from outside the band's imperial era with the band going full on glam-punk and having an absolute riot.

Oh sure, there's the odd serious moment like the ominous opener Another Cuba and the pure fury of Streets On Fire but all in all, this is a group cutting loose, sinking a few pints and having some fun. There's a breakneck cover of the Captain Scarlet theme tune (the one-time Subs guitarist of the same name was now back working as the band's roadie which might have had a bearing on this) and the decidedly less than serious but very entertaining likes of Skateboard Billy, Surf Bastard and the singalong Thunderbird Wine will put a smile on your face after even the crappiest of days. Okay so Harper singing in an American accent does take a bit of getting used to but Bath gets a good chance to show off his chops on the likes of Comin' Back and Japan Inc while the group's gleefully foul-mouthed cover of Aussie comic Kevin Bloody Wilson's Hey Santa remains one of the ultimate punk Christmas singles in this writer's humble opinion.

Surprisingly, this Subs line-up would actually mainly hold steady for a few years although Knox would soon return to the Vibrators, Roberts would be replaced by Matt McCoy soon after the group had finished Japan Today and Lee would leave the following year. However, the next Subs album would see Harper reuniting with Garratt and Gibbs as a one-off for 1989's Killing Time album. You'd expect this would be more of a return to the group's traditional sound but it's actually closer to Endangered Species than say Another Kind Of Blues with a good mix of R&B, pub rock and punk mixing together and all three members chucking in songwriting ideas.

The group's swansong in their glam/punk/R&B format would be 1991's Mad Cow Fever recorded by the Harper/Bath/Flea/McCoy line-up (I'm guessing Darrell was doing this in conjunction with the Crybabys' debut album which came out the same year) and it's a suitably raucous note for the band to bow out on with a mix of some suitably solid originals (Saints And Sinners, Ecology Blues, Last Bus Boogie) and some enjoyable covers (Baby Please Don't Go, Pills, I Walked With A Zombie, Roadhouse Blues) to make for another fun addition to the Subs' catalogue which is well worth a listen especially with a pint of whatever ails ya. Soon afterwards though, Harper would dissolve this line-up and 1993's Normal Service Resumed would see the band return to a thrashy three-chord punk sound and embrace the punk revival circuit full on. Clearly it's what the fans wanted but to my ears when I heard it during my twenties after working my way through the albums above it sounded a bit disappointing, kind of like suddenly going from 3D to 2D vision. Ah well...

Anyway, thus concludes our trawl through UK Subs: The Glunk Years. Sure, these albums may not be quite as revered as the band's first three recorded albums but I'd argue they're all well worth tracking down and giving a listen to as proof that Charlie Harper and co can certainly do a lot more than basic three chords 'n' two minutes punk thrash when the mood takes them and they show an interesting lesser-seen side to the band taking in pub rock, harmonica honking pepped-up blues rock, a touch of glam, a spot of metal and a whole lot else besides. If nothing else then Japan Today is very deserving of a curiosity listen should you be so inclined. Of course, the Subs are very much still out there today and still pack one hell of a punch as a live band - your correspondent has fond memories of seeing them at Leeds Phono about ten years ago when the crowd singalong to Warhead very nearly took the damn roof off the venue! The words "living legend" are often overused in music but I think in Charlie Harper's case they are very much justified. Respect is most definitely due.