Garbage Days Revisited #97: The London Cowboys - "Tall In The Saddle" (1984)

 

"I wanna see the sights at the end of the world and spend my nights with beautiful girls..." - The London Cowboys - Let's Get Crazy

A month or two back when we covered the '80s sleaze rock band London in the Spiders & Snakes SFTJ, I mentioned that they were best known as being a band who nearly every up and coming Sunset Strip rocker went through on their way to bigger things. Believe you me, there's a good argument for the not-entirely-dissimilarly-named London Cowboys being the British equivalent. Along with the not entirely dissimilar Little Roosters, they were the band who tried to take the whole glammed-up cockiness of the New York Dolls on into the '80s. Unfortunately despite even managing to get the official Dolls seal of approval by having a couple of that band's former members in and out of the group during their existence, they still ended up languishing in obscurity for the majority of their existence.

The group was formed out of an earlier outfit called the Idols who were put together by former New York Dolls/Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan after he left the Heartbreakers during the fraught sessions for their seminal LAMF album in 1977. As Nolan was over in London at the time, he was looking for a local band to join and hooked up with guitarist Barry Jones who at the time was in a band with his friend (and New York Dolls mega-fan) Steve Dior on vocals. That group had just lost their guitarist Keith Levene (RIP), who'd originally been in the original Clash line-up a year before, to Johnny Rotten/Lydon's new group PIL and soon Dior would join Jones and Nolan in the initial Idols line-up. After a few gigs around London with various bass players, they soon upped sticks back to Nolan's native New York where he'd quickly bring in another ex-Doll Arthur "Killer" Kane on bass to complete the line-up. This line-up would cut one single, You, before Kane left and Jones, Dior and Nolan would end up hooking up with Sid Vicious who had also moved across the Atlantic to try and kickstart his solo career in the wake of the Sex Pistols falling apart. A couple of live albums surfaced from this era but plans for an album were indefinitely shelved when Sid OD'd.

The Idols would split soon afterwards - Jones would take a job booking gigs at Max's Kansas City (he'd actually been a promoter at the Roxy before joining the Idols) and Dior would return to London where he would audition to join the Professionals as rhythm guitarist. Although he lost out to Ray McVeigh, he ended up being put in touch with another ex-Pistol Glen Matlock (then fresh out of the wreckage of his post-Pistols band the Rich Kids) by Cook and Jones. The duo put the initial Cowboys line-up together with singer Russell King, with Dior just handling guitar. However, by the time of the group's 1982 debut album Animal Pleasure, Dior had fallen out with King and brought back Barry Jones and Jerry Nolan who were both now back in the UK.

Although it's not the album we're here to discuss today, Animal Pleasure is still a pretty solid effort which sums up the Cowboys' oeuvre pretty well with its loose-limbed swaggering glam-punk ethos. The likes of the title track, That's Luxury Man and Wow Wow Oui Oui (which cheekily nicks its chorus from the old Plastic Bertrand novelty punk classic Ca Plane Pour Moi) are gleefully sleazy slices of Dollsy abandon while the likes of Reggae Cop and the five minute closer Saigon show a bit of variety to the output and the whole thing barrels though leaving you more than ready to cue it up again.

By this point though, the line-up was starting to fracture - Dior and Jones remained as the band's ever-presents but Matlock and Nolan would sometimes be off doing other projects. Among those who gigged or recorded with the band between 1983 and their demise in 1987 were Terry Chimes (ex-Clash and future Lords of the New Church, Hanoi Rocks and Cherry Bombz), Phil Lewis (shortly before he joined Torme and then from there L.A. Guns), Phil Rowland (formerly of Eater and Slaughter & The Dogs), Tony James (Generation X and briefly Lords of the New Church), Gerry Laffy (who'd been in Girl with Lewis) and Neal X (who'd later go on to join James in Sigue Sigue Sputnik). See what I mean about them being the London version of...erm, the American London? Even Johnny Thunders himself did some recording sessions with the group as his backing band in the late '80s (although none of these made it to any of his official albums).

The group would put one more effort out in the form of 1984's Tall In The Saddle and to me this is their best effort, narrowly nudging past Animal Pleasure. Powered along by its chantalong lead-off single Let's Get Crazy (probably the group's finest moment), songs like Blue Murder and the sleazy one-two of Centrefold and Courtesan are proper lying in the gutter dreaming of the stars odes not entirely dissimilar to what the Dogs D'Amour would come up with a few years later.

Unfortunately though, there's the rub as to why the Cowboys probably never quite broke through in this writer's opinion - they were just a band who emerged at the wrong time. A couple of years later and they'd have been able to seamlessly fit in with the Soho sleaze scene that spawned the Babysitters, the Soho Roses, Tigertailz et al but breaking through in the era when people associated being glamourous with the likes of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet...well, it could be argued that the odds were always stacked against 'em from the start especially with the Stones (another band who they could definitely claim a kinship with) tanking at this point thanks to the dreadful Dirty Work album and Mick's decidedly embarrassing '80s solo albums. They did manage to pick up a decent following in France (similar to the Barracudas or the Little Roosters) without ever quite managing the same on this side of the Channel. and they actually managed to land a deal with MCA in the wake of Tall In The Saddle. Unfortunately though, they were pretty much hung out to dry by their paymasters afterwards and aside from the Dance Crazy single, nothing of theirs ever came out on the label. By the time they left it in 1987, they'd decided to call it a day with Jones and Nolan returning to Johnny T's band and Dior eventually resurfacing in the mid-'90s alongside his old mate Phil Lewis in the band Filthy Lucre (whose Popsmear album is worth a spin - the storming Outta Control, the sinister Brand New Deal and the mournful reggaefied closer Ladbroke Grove, named after the area of London where the pair both grew up, are pretty much worth the price of admission on their own for that one).

I actually met Steve Dior a couple of times during my days living in London when he was a couple of my friends' landlord bizarrely! At the time, he was trying to start up a new band, the Delinquents along with various members of early 2010's sleaze-rockers Pink Cigar (another group from the glut of Camden sleaze-rock bands of that era who never really went anywhere) but sadly nothing much came of it. He always came across as a good bloke and a good rock 'n' roll storyteller. Whatever he's up to now, hopefully he's in a good place and maybe some day we'll hear some more music from him. In the meantime though, both London Cowboys albums definitely deserve your attention (there's also a 2CD retrospective called Relapse available on Jungle Records) - they were another criminally under-rated group who were unlucky to get lost in the shuffle during this era.