Garbage Days Revisited #89: The Babysitters - "The Babysitters" (1985)

 

"Open your eyes, open your ears, open yer wallets and get us some beers!" - The Babysitters - Can You Hear It?

Many many years ago, your correspondent joined up with a band of glam-punk reprobates called Casanova Frankenstein as rhythm guitarist. This would probably have been somewhere around my early-to-mid-twenties – after four or five years as an Angelic Upstarts/SLF devoted skinhead, I had a bit of a “fuck this for a lark” moment with punk and oi after a couple of disastrous gigs. Firstly, we went to see a gig at the Fenton (along with the Vine, one of me and the other lads in my previous band’s stomping grounds at the time) of Deadline (a rather good tuneful streetpunk band from London who never really got the rub they deserved in my humble opinion – they may crop up in a future SFTJ footnotes somewhere) supported by the Mingers (a hardcore thrash-punk band from here in Leeds, a couple of whom I was friends with) and the place got invaded by BNP fuckwits. I seem to remember Deadline historically had a bit of a problem with this sort of crowd latching on to them (lord knows why because they certainly weren’t racist at all) and I remember one of the Mingers telling me that when they’d sung their vitriolic anti-nazi number National Cunt, it had led to them getting threatened downstairs in the bar afterwards.

A few days later, I went to see Sham 69 at the Met with some mates and I think this is where I realised that, for the time at least, I was done with punk and oi. My abiding memory is halfway through Sham’s set Jimmy Pursey, god love ‘im, made a point of saying how pleased he was that they’d managed to kick the NF element out of their following. Then of course, after the gig there was a bunch of fuckwits with swastika tatts kicking off at all and sundry outside. As an oi fan who’d been making the argument for the previous 3-4 years that it wasn’t a racist movement, it was just too real and working class for the sort of upper-class NME reading posh boys who thought Pete Doherty and Alex Kapranos were gods in the ascendant to handle, I remember this really pissing me off and my thought was “well, bollocks to the lot of yer”. I would call time on my punk band Brookside Riot Squad soon afterwards (though to be fair we were pretty much on our last legs by this point in any case - rapid line-up changes and various members falling out with each other meant we pretty much knew the game was up), go through an almost 180 change and start listening to the sleaze rock albums in my collection instead with the likes of L.A. Guns, W.A.S.P. and Love/Hate moving more to the fore of my CD rack where the Lurkers, the UK Subs and the Vibrators had been a few months before. Regrettably I lost quite a few friends over that – I remember I was running a Britpunk group on a messageboard at the time and basically just abandoned it which led to me falling out with a few of the regulars on there who tried to reason me round only to essentially be told “fuck this, I’m done with it". For what it’s worth, I’m very sorry to anyone I upset over that, to be honest I was dealing with a fair few personal demons at that point as well (mainly the end of a relationship that I’d genuinely believed was “the one” at the time and a prolonged spell on the dole which had led me having to move back to the family home I’d sworn I’d never return to a few years previously although at least by this point it was just my Mum there meaning the frequent angry parental rows of my teenage years - see the Manic Street Preachers GDR entry for more details - were a thing of the past. Looking back though I’m quite painfully aware that this whole shitstorm made me a very difficult and unpleasant individual to be around and deal with during that six months or so.

After getting things in order in my life, I realised that I missed playing in a band and after answering an ad on the local music website, I ended up joining the new group I mentioned at the start of this article (ironically, as I realised upon turning up for my first meeting with them, I'd actually auditioned a year before but hadn't made the grade due to my reluctance back then to grow my skinhead 'do out!). We were a bit of an odd bunch to be honest – our drummer was the experienced one who was basically marshalling the rest of us and he was a good guy to learn from. I think he realised early on that he was dealing with a group of younger lads who were a bit wet behind the ears and he quickly set to work moving us across from listening to the really obvious sleaze/glam stuff (yer G’n’R’s, Poisons and Crues) to some of the more rarefied and better stuff. He was the guy who first alerted me to the Crybabys and Crazyhead* to name two but the main one I remember him insisting we had to listen to if we knew what was good for us was the Babysitters.

* - We really need to do a GDR on Crazyhead at some point. Watch this space...

The Babysitters were a group of early ‘80s Soho-based Brit-glam ne’er-do-wells led by the irrepressible Buttz (nicknamed due to his habit of smoking other peoples’ discarded cig ends apparently) who was a bit of an early doors mover and shaker in the glam scene around the time Hanoi Rocks first came to England in the early ‘80s and lit that particular blue touch paper. Buttz was actually a friend of Razzle’s back when he was still in the ranks of groups like Demon Preacher* and the Dark and when his old mate joined Hanoi, it caused Buttz to have a bit of a Road to Damascus moment. Not only would he set up the infamous Buttz ‘n’ Spike’s Club at Gossips along with…you guessed it…Spike from the Quireboys** but he’d also form his own band, the Babysitters by roping in two of Razzle's old Demon Preacher bandmates Jimbo and Boo.

* - Demon Preacher would later evolve into Alien Sex Fiend when lead singer Nik ditched the tradtional band setup and went for the synth and drum machine approach. I'm sure we'll cover ASF in a future GDR somewhere but they did put out one absolute stone cold classic goth-punk (gonk?) single as Demon Preacher in the form of Little Miss Perfect, a brilliantly bizarre ode to the American glamour model Joyce McKinney who was omnipresent in the tabloid papers in the UK around this time after being arrested for kidnapping and raping a male Mormon missionary. It starts with Nik shouting the words "Put your knickers on Joyce McKinney, I can see your bum!" and gets increasingly less sensible from there. Very much recommended. Also as well as Razzle and half of the Babysitters, they also had Max "Splodgenessabounds" Splodge in the band for a bit which, if you've listened to the general levels of silliness in Little Miss Perfect, kinda figures.

** - A quick detour from the main tale here as there’s a tale attached to Buttz ‘n’ Spike’s that remains one of my favourite stories I’ve heard about Spike down the years. Allegedly (and I can’t stress that first word enough) when Motley Crue played the London gig on the UK leg of their Girls Girls Girls tour in 1987, someone tipped them off to the existence of Gossips and they decided to head over there for a night out at Buttz ‘n’ Spike’s afterwards. Legend has it that it was nearly midnight by the time they arrived and they found the door shut so knocked on the entrance hatch. Spike, who was on the door that night, pokes his head out and says “Ah, sorry lads, we’re full” before closing it again. At this, Nikki Sixx supposedly hammers on the hatch and when Spike sticks his head out again says something along the lines of “Excuse me dude, do you know who we are?” To which Spike replies “Aye, I do. And that’s why I’m not letting yers in.” before closing the hatch again. I think we can safely agree, Spike = legend.

The Babysitters would sadly just last for the solitary album but upon tracking a copy down via the joys of internet file-sharing (the album was long out of print by that point and remains so – someone really needs to put this to rights), I can confirm that it’s one of the great lost Soho glam albums of the ‘80s. I mean, first things first, this is very much NOT a serious album and thank feck for that. A lot of people seem to forget that in the early days of glam, there was a VERY wide divide between the humourless brickies-in-lippy “lifeguard metal” that was doing the rounds on Sunset Strip (Dokken, Ratt, post-Shout At The Devil Crue etc) and its more fun and less taking-itself-too-cripplingly-seriously English variant which had evolved out of the ashes of the punk and glam rock scenes, mixing the fast, loose 'n' daft aesthetic of the Damned circa Machine Gun Etiquette with the knockabout glam swagger of Mott the Hoople or the Faces. The Babysitters’ album is basically that whole formula driven until the wheels fall off with covers of Bo Diddley’s No Particular Place To Go and a knockabout take of the Diddley/New York Dolls standard Pills renamed Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicken being so utterly silly that you can’t help but love them while the likes of Give Us A Loan and Alright OK show that having a sense of humour was very much the watchword with this lot and it makes for an album that’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face. They even show a bit of versatility with the barbershop quartet vocals on Beard Song or Buttz coming across like some sort of deranged Tony Bennett style lounge crooner on Old L.A. but best of all is the group’s signature tune Everybody Loves You (When You’re Dead), no relation to the equally excellent Kitty Hudson or Stranglers songs of the same name but rather a two minute charge to the finish line slice of glam-punk which manages to be fun and pack the sort of awesome chantalong chorus that a lot of the group’s compadres back then would’ve killed for ("'Cos everybody loves to hate you!/And everybody loves to ignore you!/But everybody loves you when you're dead!"). Great stuff.

Sadly, fame and fortune would not come knocking for the Babysitters – the failure of the album would lead to the other three firing Buttz and trying to become more of a “proper” band including relocating to Sunset Strip. That went about as well as you’d probably expect ie they essentially sank like a stone amidst all the flotsam and jetsam clogging up the Rainbow Bar & Grill by this point. Buttz, on the other hand, would go on to form a new group Last of the Teenage Idols (named after the classic Alex Harvey song) who, again, would last for just the one album, Satellite Head Gone Soft (again, another underrated effort – give She’s Got Big Boots a listen if nothing else) before finally imploding as the decade ended. Meanwhile, their one-time contemporaries the Dogs D’Amour, the Quireboys and Wolfsbane would take the formula overground commercially and go on to reap the rewards of successful(-ish) careers in music.

I guess one thing Buttz’s bands DID have in common with Casanova Frankenstein is that none of us were very long for the world – I think our drummer kind of realised that the rest of the group were just too ramshackle and disorganised to really be any sort of long term prospect and honestly, I don’t blame ‘im at all. We’re still friends and he’d go on to form a new band who are still a going concern today and who I may have featured on this website in the past (hey, I never said I was above nepotism where it’s deserved). Me and the singer would put a new group together in the aftermath, 9-5 Nasty with a couple of my old Brookside Riot Squad bandmates but, similar to Casanova Frankenstein, this didn’t even reach the gigging stage. The trouble by this point was that both of us’ music tastes had moved on again - he still wanted us to sound like W.A.S.P. while I was more for going down a glam-goth Lords of the New Church/Sisters of Mercy/Mission route (which led to me, the bassist and drummer going off to form our next band, Resurrection Joe, which again failed to reach the gigging stage...you may have noticed a pattern forming here...) and it all ended up imploding very messily. Again, luckily I’d patch things up with him once I’d sorted my life out a year or so later when we ran into each other at a Quireboys gig in Leeds, apologised to each other and buried the proverbial hatchet. I’m glad we did - he’s a good bloke and we still chat very occasionally via the wonders of social media.

Anyway, this one’s ended up drifting a fair bit more than I thought it would when I started it but I guess what I’m trying to say is that The Babysitters is a top slice of daft-as-a-brush knockabout glam-sleaze-punk-whateveryouwannacallit which will cheer you up after a shit day at work, I guarantee it. Sometimes it seems, sending in the clowns really is the best option when you’re feeling down. Oh and any record labels with a couple of bob to spare in their reissue budget, do us all a favour and give this album the re-release it's deserved for the last few decades will ya? Ta.