Garbage Days Revisited #55: The Little Roosters - "The Little Roosters" (1981)

"Hey Mr Preacher, you're gonna die before you're heard!" - The Little Roosters - People Break Down

We've dealt with some fairly obscure bands in the last year or so of Garbage Days Revisited but the Little Roosters must surely be one of the most unknown to date. Formed from the ashes of the first incarnation of '77 punks and oi godfathers Cock Sparrer by guitarist Garrie Lammin, bassist Steve Burgess and drummer Steve Bruce following Sparrer's initial break-up in 1978, they managed to sign to Polydor, got none other than Joe Strummer to produce their album only for it to not even see the light of day in their native UK.

Although they're forever associated with Oi, the truth is that early Sparrer definitely had a bit of a glam-punk tint to their sound - if anything to these ears their early records sound more like a '77 version of Slade with the big boot-stomp drums and chantalong choruses. Not to mention their cover of the Stones' We Love You. However, the group didn't get the sales that their label at the time, Decca, were anticipating and similar to Slaughter & The Dogs, would be dropped by the end of '78 and go their separate ways with the Roosters being formed from the ashes.

I was lucky enough to interview Garrie a good few years ago when he was fronting the Bermondsey Joyriders (another awesome overlooked band who will almost certainly crop up on a future Sounds From The Junkshop) and asked him about the Roosters. His take on it was that he'd had an absolute blast with the band but they'd just been a bit too daft to succeed in the era of austere post-punk and the more aggressive UK82 style of punk rock. Or to paraphrase how he put it, if the New York Dolls were supposed to be a cartoon version of the Stones then the Roosters ended up coming across as a cartoon version of the Dolls! However, in this less tribal environment, their album has held up pretty well with the swaggering People Break Down and I Need A Witness (to my mind far superior to the Sparrer version - I just think Lammin's vocals just suit it better than Colin McFaull's do) being standouts. Okay so there's a couple of more anonymous numbers like their attempt at reggae Hot, Black And Sweet and the likes of She's So Strange and Bad Bob are a bit silly albeit great fun but overall, this is a cracker of an album. Despite being produced by none other than Joe Strummer (very much the man of the hour in the wake of the Clash putting out London Calling) though, it didn't even get a UK release, only being available in France (a country, who, to be fair, tend to "get" decent rock 'n' roll a bit more than us Brits do for the main part as the success of groups like the Flamin' Groovies and the Barracudas testifies) for about five minutes before being swiftly deleted.

In the aftermath of the Roosters being dropped, Burgess, Bruce and Lammin were approached by Colin McFaull and Micky Beaufoy about reuniting Sparrer for another go at things following a few of their songs resurfacing on Garry Bushell's early Oi compilations. The former two signed up but Lammin didn't and was replaced by Chris Skepis for the Shock Troops album - his take on it when I spoke to him many moons ago was that McFaull and Beaufoy had played him their planned comeback single, the infamous England Belongs To Me, at a rehearsal and he'd backed off worried that even though the song clearly wasn't meant to be racist that it would get misinterpreted by the BNP bonehead brigade similar to how the Angelic Upstarts' England had - unfortunately he was proved right and Sparrer became a magnet for the same bunch of racist thugs who'd been a thorn in the side of Sham 69 a few years earlier leading them to split again in 1984.

* - My tuppenceworth on the matter for what it's worth - similar to Sham or the Cockney Rejects, it only takes a quick scan through their first few albums to see that Sparrer were always a staunchly apolitical band whose angry songs in the main were directed at hipster journalists and middle class trendies (they've always maintained that England Belongs To Me is about the working class rallying against the middle class who exploit them rather than having any sort of racist connotations) and it's a real shame that they got landed with these issues as Shock Troops is actually a bit of a belter of an album - the vicious anti-music biz rants of Where Are They Now? and Take 'Em All and the dark atmospheric Out On An Island are great stuff while if you can listen to We're Coming Back and Argy Bargy without instantly wanting to bellow the chorus then your sense of fun is well and truly dead.

Garrie would put a new Roosters line-up together (now using the name Garrie & The Roosters) and even pull off a bit of a coup by bringing Alison Moyet in to sing for them after the break-up of Yazoo in 1983 (as captured on a live album around the time) and featured on the seminal Flicknife Soho glam-punk compilation Trash On Delivery with the likes of the Dogs D'Amour, the Babysitters, Marionette and the Barracudas with their cut I Heard The Devil being one of the best on the record. However, by the time of their belated second album, 1985's Shake It Down, Moyet had moved on to her solo career. Shake It Down did at least get a UK release on minor label Revolver. It's another solid effort if not quite as good as the debut and features two future members of the not entirely dissimilar Vibrators in guitarist Mickie Owen and bassist Ben Donnelly as well as guitarist Peter Gunn of pub rock stalwarts the Inmates.

The Roosters would break up as the '80s wound to a close and Lammin would go on to become an actor (including appearing in a few episodes of Eastenders!) before resurfacing properly with the Bermondsey Joyriders in the late noughties. And, as we've mentioned earlier in this article, we'll deal with that particular band when we get round to them in the Sounds From The Junkshop column. I can also confirm having met him a few times during my London days (including the episode detailed in the Crybabys GDR column where he was nice enough to give me a lift back to my flat in Clapton after I saw him and Darrell Bath do an acoustic gig over in Portobello despite the fact that I’d only just moved there and was well south of useless in giving him directions!) that Garrie is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s genuine good guys and hopefully we’ll be hearing some new music from him in the near future. For now though, you can find the full Little Roosters album on Youtube and I'd happily recommend it. Yes, it's maybe not the most serious album out there and yes it was released in probably totally the wrong time but for a fun slice of glammed up rock 'n' roll to put a smile on your face after a crap day, it'll more than do the job.