Last Rockers: The Vice Squad Story - Shane Baldwin

LAST ROCKERS: THE VICE SQUAD STORY – SHANE BALDWIN

Highly amusing but for all the wrong reasons, Last Rockers: The Vice Squad Story, written by their drummer, Shane Baldwin, is a comedy of errors with added strokes of incredible good luck. Right from the word go, for someone on the road to becoming a superannuated punk rocker under the Thatcher junta, the jury is out as to whether Shane has been born in the wrong place at the wrong time or exactly the right place at the right time? Gays Road in the Hanham suburb of Bristol, to be precise. Not exactly inner-city or council estate but the kind of place that punk culture post-'77 had spread out to and taken root. Not that many of the other Bristol punk rock movers and shakers of old could boast of any more credible backgrounds it should be noted, what with a majority of them coming from such middle class Bristol areas as Henleaze, Clifton and Hotwells. All hail The X-Certs, then, for coming from dirty old Barton Hill.

Vice Squad's first gig - and their first stroke of good luck – was at Bristol University playing to an audience of 500 people, only ending up on the bill as a last-minute replacement for John Cooper Clarke. Their second major gig – and their second stroke of incredible good luck – was at the Bristol Locarno, playing to an audience of 2000 people, in support of The Damned and The Ruts.

Now, I was actually at a lot of the early Vice Squad gigs and it's always been a mystery to me as to how they ended up on the bill for this one? The Damned and The Ruts were doing a UK tour and the premise was that on each date in each city they would be supported by that city's 'local heroes'. At the time, Bristol's 'local heroes' would have been The X-Certs, if anyone, so how Vice Squad trumped them along with everyone else and managed to wrangle this coveted support slot was baffling.

It turns out that Shane himself doesn't really know, putting it down to the promoter being too busy to think about it, someone mentioning Vice Squad's name and the promoter saying “yeah, they'll do”. Whatever the reason, this was the gig that put Vice Squad on the map and under a torrent of spit and to shouts of 'get yer tits out', in one fell swoop they were introduced to the entire Bristol punk scene. From there on, their lives were never really the same again.

Shane offers up an interesting anecdote about the gig regarding The Ruts and a back-stage gangbang that shows chivalry wasn't exactly on the agenda that night. To look at the two remaining members of The Ruts these days you'd think butter wouldn't melt in their mouths and couldn't imagine they got up to such things in their distant past. Then again, you also wouldn't imagine that just a relatively short time after the gig, lead singer Malcolm Owen would be dead.

Not being privy to the back-stage shenanigans, out in the audience we had to make do with additional support act Auntie Pus getting his cock out on stage and saying “a fiver to anyone who's got a smaller one than this”. And 2000 people not taking up the bet – including all the girls.

Fair play to Vice Squad, however, for as well as landing these prestigious gigs they also played far more dangerous places such as a bikers festival near Trowbridge (being a year before the infamous bikers 'riot' at the Stonehenge festival where all punks were violently attacked) and the community centre on the notoriously rough Bourneville estate in Weston-super-Mare.

Landing a spot on Avon Calling, the seminal Bristol compilation LP, eventually led to their début 7” single, Last Rockers, being released on their jointly-owned independent record label, Riot City. This in turn led them to being championed by journalist Garry Bushell who began name-dropping them in Sounds newspaper which led them to being signed by EMI who subsequently released their début album.

All well and good but for every step forward there came two steps back. Their inclusion on Avon Calling caused other Bristol bands (to name names: Gardez Darkx, the Colourtapes, and the Spics) to boycott the album due to not wanting to be associated with a band like Vice Squad. No big deal really, apart from the fact that a couple of years later Vice Squad would echo this attitude when it came to them not wanting their Riot City label to be associated with Disorder or Chaos UK.

Then there was the actual Vice Squad track that was chosen for the album, a two minute punk work-out entitled Nothing. Described by one reviewer as being 'rabid minimalism', in all honesty it wasn't really that exceptional, setting a trend for all other future releases...

Having Garry Bushell as a fan was a massive bonus due to the publicity he could engender though it also meant vocalist Beki Bondage being promoted by him as a kind of cartoon dominatrix that belittled every other aspect of the band – including Beki's promotion of vegetarianism in her lyrics. Signing to EMI meant money up-front to record an album but to a chorus of 'sell-out' it also led to their almost immediate ostracising from the Bristol punk scene. Then on its release the début album was universally slated as being one of the worst punk albums ever, due to it sounding as if it had been recorded under mud. And so on and so forth through every step of their career culminating in the most hilarious of ironies with their Chaotic Dischord venture.

Vice Squad held no sympathy or liking for hardcore punk as played by fellow Bristol bands Disorder and Chaos UK, insisting that they could knock out similar stuff in ten minutes. To prove their point, they did indeed record a number of songs in this style, passing them off as coming from a Swindon-based band called Chaotic Dischord, who would have no truck with the music business. Essentially, this was Vice Squad without Beki, drafting in their roadies instead to cover vocals. The problem for Vice Squad being that this 'joke' band was actually ten times better than Vice Squad themselves.

The curious thing about Shane's book is that he proffers very little insight into the whole story of punk rock and the period of it that he was very much a part of, choosing instead to relay it as a series of events and encounters. There's even, I would say, a sense of anti-intellectualism going on that reminds me of the Sid Vicious quote when Sid described the Pistols thus: “We don't think, we do”.

Again, this is all well and good for someone living in the moment like Sid seemed to be doing but for a book dealing with the past and what should actually be a valuable account, it's disappointing. There's not even any insight into the reason Beki Bondage left the group. Does Shane even really know, I wonder? Is it mere coincidence that her departure coincided with the launch of Chaotic Dischord?

Shane quotes liberally from various reviews and interviews in the music press and is obviously pleased when it's good ones but when it comes to anything critical he rebuffs it and almost petulantly so. The interview with Paul Morley in the NME is a prime example where rather than addressing Morley's observations he dismisses them with a curt 'Quoting Orwell. Classy, eh?', which serves only to reinforce Morley's criticisms and simply leaves Shane looking stupid.

Throughout the book there's also a sense of a lack of confidence, covered up by self-effacement and a constant stream of terrible jokes. It's good that Shane doesn't attempt to defend the début album and instead admits himself that it's rubbish but following its release it's as if he's on a constant mission to prove Vice Squad worthy of their newly acquired status. What Shane fails to understand is that it didn't matter whether Vice Squad were as good or not as Chron Gen, The Wall, Anti-Pasti, or whoever because punk was changing and becoming more a question of attitude and politics.

After signing to EMI, Vice Squad may well have fallen out of favour with the Bristol punk scene but it didn't mean they were hated, it was just that they were no longer deemed as being relevant. The Bristol punk torch was now being carried by the likes of Disorder, Chaos UK, Amebix – and even Lunatic Fringe who, whilst not being as musically adept as Vice Squad at least went off to the Stop The City protests in London, which Vice Squad never did. And therein lay the difference.

Amusingly, the closest Vice Squad get to the kind of politics becoming ever more prevalent during the early Eighties is a brush with the local SWP who were meant to set up a national tour for them. It failed, of course, to materialise but it did bring them into contact with Alan Pullen whose chosen weapon on marches was his trusty claw-hammer. Alan went on to become a leading figure in Class War and Shane relays a funny anecdote about visiting Alan at his home one day where his wife is busy doing some sewing. Shane presumes she's stitching together some car seat covers or something but when she shouts out that it's finished and proudly holds up her work for approval, he sees that it's a massive banner depicting a yuppie with a brick bouncing off his head and the legend Class War – Kill The Rich. Alan loves it and declares 'We'll stick it in the front garden to piss off those fuckin' dentists an' doctors'. Shane writes he can see why Alan might love it so: 'It was a lovely bit of needlework'.

Vice Squad may well have become irrelevant in terms of meaningful punk culture but that's not to say their story itself is irrelevant. Their story is part of a shared history and therefore in the grand scheme of (some of) our lives is significant. Punk rock enriched the lives of the members of Vice Squad as it did many others and in turn Vice Squad returned the favour and through their music, their gigs and their lyrics enriched other lives themselves – even if only briefly. They should all be proud of what they achieved.

Regrets? Shane's got a few but he's not too proud for them not to be mentioned: Getting a band by the name of Flowers Of The Past to pay to play with Vice Squad on their second British tour rather than inviting them along for free; portraying their new vocalist after Beki left as a 16-year old rather than her true age of 22, replacing their bassist in the end days of the band; and of course, releasing a crap début album.

It would be interesting to ask if he could do it all again would there be anything he would do differently but then it would be a moot point because what's done is done. Vice Squad's success can only really be measured by the individual members personal goals and whether they were met or not. Yes, they failed to get on Top Of The Pops, for example, but in a similar fashion Crass failed to change the world and at the end of the day, the weight and value put onto both of these goals is a personal choice. And who's to say one is any less important than the other?

Apparently, Shane is writing another book about the whole of the Bristol punk scene but when it might be completed is anyone's guess? It's going to be a dirty job but someone has to do it – so why not Shane? All I would ask is that he cuts out the terrible jokes, gets himself an editor, and considers at least for a few pages what punk meant for those involved with it because beneath the bluster, the noise, the gigs and the records there was a whole other world going on that was life-changing and that still resonates with a lot of people to this very day.

John Serpico