We Who Wait: TV Smith & the Adverts

This programme contains some strong language

It was a very bad day

and the driver just decides to go faster and faster.

# Thundering through the night with the moon in my eyes

# Down into the daybreak and the new sunrise

# All I found was loneliness in the crush of the crowd

# But I'm bound for freedom now

# I've got power and speed I'm never slowing down

# I'm a runaway train driver. #

You've never felt that Tim was faking it, did you?

You always felt that his irritation was 24 karat.

He does the 200 gigs a year, sometimes to six people,

and every gig he does, he hits the ground running

with this furious intensity

that is totally overwhelming.

# This is not the green train

# This is not the green train. #

He's an Evangelist.

He harks back to the troubadour tradition.

He turns up at a town with his guitar, plugs it in.

Come one, come all. Here are my songs.

This is how the world is, according to me.

TV was interesting.

He had kind of a bleak approach to the way he wrote.

He reminded me more of the way Elvis Costello approached a song,

or Reckless Eric.

These are the interesting writers, you know?

Come at it like a poet.

Also come at it from the unobvious.

The anti-obvious angle.

But it's the lyrics.

Television's Over. Back From The Dead.

I've written a few songs in my time,

and whenever I write lyrics, TV Smith hovers over my shoulder.

Just like, "Make it count."

(TV SMITH) I was born in Hornchurch,

the east suburbs of London.

We then moved to Devon.

And so I was basically brought up from the age of eight

in a tiny village in Devon.

I think I was a very shy child.

I would never have imagined when I was ten years old

that I would end up going on stage in front of hundreds of people.

That was absolutely the furthest thing from my mind.

I was much more poetry-orientated when I was younger.

Poetry is a safe place for a shy child who wants to express himself.

MUSIC: "Ladytron" by Roxy Music

At some point when I was a teenager, I started listening to music

and realising some of these musicians were using

the same techniques as I was trying to do in poetry.

Apart from listening to records,

one other very life-changing thing happened.

I went to see my first gigs.

Individuals that hadn't bought into the pop music thing.

Over everything else, that was important.

You were hearing a voice that was not a dumbed down

voice of the crowd, but someone who had something special to say.

Although I did quite well at school,

I didn't see where it was going for me.

The only thing that really excited me was writing.

Whether it was prose or songs,

the further I got into my teenage years,

the more that was my one obsession.

There was still a kind of vestigial interest in art,

and I did leave school and go to art college for a year.

But almost as soon as I was there, I just dumped the coursework

and started working on getting my band together

and rehearsing and writing.

# Well, what a sho-owbiz kids. #

The band wasn't going for really very long.

It was only about seven months or something.

But we started doing gigs, and very early on,

we supported George Melly.

A lot of it was thematically copied

from The Velvet Underground, or from Bowie.

It was kind of a lot of scattergun stuff.

I didn't really know what it was about myself.

It was just teenage angst coming out unformed.

And that's why I don't really think much

of the stuff I was putting out then.

But somehow, it was getting something out of me

that was in there and I needed to get out.

MUSIC: "Gimme Danger" by The Stooges

I was in my third year of graphic design

and he was doing a foundation year.

I knew his bass player, Bean, more.

So I think Bean came round one night and brought Tim round.

We immediately, as soon as we met each other,

we had something that clicked.

I don't think you can pick that sort of thing apart.

When you're teenage boyfriend and girlfriend,

you know what you are and you know what you want,

and somehow it just happens.

Gaye wasn't playing an instrument at all when I met her,

but she was a big music fan.

The decision to form a band together

stemmed out of the fact that we'd become partners.

# Kiss me like the ocean breeze. #

He gave me a guitar and said, "Play this."

He probably did the same thing to Gaye.

"This is the G string, this is the A string."

"Right! I'm off!"

I was working in a sweet factory, and I remember the first night

seeing some old geezer working there.

I said, "I'm only doing this as a temporary job, till I get myself sorted."

and he said, "That's what I said."

And that sent a real shiver down my spine.

Four months later, I was still there,

and I didn't really have any prospect of getting out, really.

And luckily, I was made redundant.

And then I was really thrown out.

Really had to decide what's happening now.

And that was really the point where it crystallised

that Gaye and me WERE going to move to London.

We WERE going to form this band. We weren't going to do

these rubbish jobs.

She was working in a factory as well.

We were going to make something happen.

It's an exciting moment in your life, you know?

I started to read in the NME, or Sounds,

or whatever it was back then,

about the Sex Pistols.

They covered a few of their first gigs.

All round the country were quirky characters.

You've got Devoto and Shelley up there in Bolton.

Stooges fans, basically.

One or two in each city, just waiting for something to happen.

Suddenly there's the Sex Pistols. Everyone's going,

"There's a group being compared to The Stooges in London.

"That's what we're trying to do." And TV's doing his glam rock band,

but in his head he's kind of gone that little bit further.

It's more psychotic glam rock.

Very parallel to Shelley and Devoto up in Bolton.

They're sat in the college room, trying to put this band together.

Can't play at all. No idea what they're doing.

And they read about the Pistols

and go to see them, and that's how they get going.

And TV and Gaye moved to London

because they knew that's where the action was.

It's pretty amazing they did that. 18, 19 years old.

Just get on the train and go to London,

because they want to be part of a music scene.

That's what makes it interesting. From the start, TV is an outsider.

Outside the punk elite.

But he's one of the original punks in London, going to these gigs.

I was living in a 2,000 inhabitants village in Devon,

and I was coming up to London and seeing gigs

that had more people in the audience than lived in my entire village.

MUSIC: "Ambition" by Subway Sect

We were going out to see bands almost straight away, you know?

Seeing a few concerts by the Sex Pistols.

And within months, the 100 Club punk festival happened.

There was a whole world opening up to us.

# I've been walking along down this shallow slope

# Looking for nothing particularly. #

We spent the first couple of months sort of settling in.

Then, when we felt Gaye was at a point where

she knew the songs well enough that we could play them,

we started looking for a guitarist.

When Howard replied, there was a whole load of things about him

that all seemed right. One was that he could play

the stuff I was showing him,

and it still sounded like the song that I'd written.

One was that he lived just down the road,

and the other was that he worked in a music shop

that had a rehearsal centre behind it.

So we were kind of in for cheap rehearsals as well.

And that's where I met Howard, actually, and the rest of the band.

Because they were rehearsing there.

And Howard was the manager of the place.

I'd got myself a job there, so me and Howard

were actually working in this place.

And he'd just joined up with the band,

and I'd actually just bought a drum kit from a friend of mine,

who also worked there, who was also a drummer.

I said, "Look, this is what you've got to do."

HE DRUMS A RHYTHM

And he couldn't. He tried.

HE DRUMS OUT OF TIME

Couldn't do it. I said, "Come on, you've got to try

"and get this leg separate from your hand!"

And all he could do was...

HE DRUMS BASIC RHYTHM

And if you know any of the early Adverts songs, One Chord Wonders...

HE DRUMS ALONG WITH ADVERTS SONG

MUSIC: "One Chord Wonders" by The Adverts

Laurie was not a normal drummer.

He had this kind of rigid

but extremely fast style that was very unconventional.

I didn't even know if I liked it first of all,

but there was no denying

that his playing was something different

from anything else that was going on.

(LAURIE) That came about from not knowing what I was doing!

So it was a kind of a knife's edge, whether or not

Laurie was going to be in the band. But I'm glad that he was,

because it gave the records a very distinctive sound.

We were The Adverts. We were a real band, and we were ready to go.

Well, I'd take the lyrics and the chord changes to rehearsal.

I'd have worked with Gaye.

Her bass lines became almost like a counter

to what the vocals were doing.

The only problem for Gaye was that as soon as we started

rehearsing with Laurie, the songs sped up a great deal.

With Howard, he pretty much played it as I wrote it,

with some additional lead pieces, which I had no clue about.

I mean, all the lead pieces in the first album, for example,

they're all Howard's.

And then with Laurie, I gave him absolutely no guidance whatsoever.

I knew nothing about drums.

So it was basically, "Right, we've got these songs.

"The three of us are playing them. This is what we do.

"What are you going to do?"

And what he did was he bashed out his version of the songs

and sped everything up about twice as much as we'd been learning them.

And that did mean I had to annunciate very precisely.

I had to learn where to breathe. Where to find space to breathe.

That was the start of me really finding my voice

as a percussive instrument as well.

So the words start punching out.

They're not just an expression of what you're trying to say.

The voice is also a rhythmic instrument

and a percussive instrument.

I don't think I really understood that in songwriting before.

So we were all on a learning curve, for sure.

Well, The Roxy was the brainchild of Andy Czezowski.

He put out the word in Sniffing Glue,

the fanzine that was going at the time,

"Just let me know that you can actually string two chords together

and come down and play."

I don't know how Tim approached Andy,

but that was the first time I'd seen The Adverts.

I think I'd come across Tim and Gaye.

Their faces were familiar.

So when I saw them on stage, they weren't total strangers.

They had a unique sound to them.

Very, very amateurish, obviously, at that time.

But so were the majority of the bands, you know?

I introduced Tim to Jake,

because I'd seen The Adverts and I said to Jake,

"Check out these guys. You might like 'em."

So Gaye and me went round to the office.

Jake already had a contract of about two pages.

And signed it there and then.

A single on Stiff Records.

We'd only done about five gigs.

They wanted now music and now people.

I had no problem with Stiff Records.

Even when I thought I was being done over,

I could see the point of it.

For example, the cover of One Chord Wonders.

They put Barney Bubbles on to design the cover,

and when we got invited in to Stiff to see what he'd done...

well, I felt I'd been Stiffed.

But what can you say? It was a brilliant cover.

They created an icon out of Gaye

and they put The Adverts firmly in punk rock history.

There's no question. That cover, which I would not have agreed to,

was a massive step forward for the band.

< Here comes The Adverts, right?

CHEERING

# I wonder what we'll play for you tonight

# Something heavy or something light

# Something to set your soul alight

# I wonder how we'll answer when you say

# "We don't like you, go away

-# "Come back when you've learned to play."

-#

One Chord Wonders was the best debut single

The Adverts could have released, and also the most self-defeating,

because it gave the critics a big stick to beat them with.

It was ironic, because they were getting slagged off for something

they were making a critique of.

He's a sophisticated songwriter but he hasn't got a band

that can play the songs at the level he'd be thinking.

But that's the charm of The Adverts.

If you listen to Eddie Van Halen,

one of the things that's always baffled me

about his playing is that it is completely incoherent, emotionally.

It makes no sense at all.

It's just notes.

Whereas the playing in Adverts records,

it may be blind,

but it's completely coherent.

The fact that everyone in the band was pushing up

to the edge of their ability was what gave it its edge.

The feeling that it could fall apart at any moment.

Sometimes it DID fall apart.

So what?

I first met Michael Dempsey

when he was the director of Granada Publishing.

He was the youngest managing director

of a publishing company in Britain, in fact.

He was rather famous for being a young hotshot in publishing.

And then he had a spectacular party, apparently,

at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which cost Granada so much money

they just had to get rid of him.

I had been to one of these clubs and met The Adverts.

I think it was The Adverts and The Damned were on that evening.

And I took The Adverts back to a drinking club

called Zanzibar in Covent Garden.

And I ran into Dempsey there at the bar.

We got talking and I introduced them

and I was telling him, "This is the new thing.

"You should get involved, Michael."

As a joke, I said, "You should manage them."

Because they were looking for someone to manage them.

And literally about a week later, I had a phone call from Dempsey

saying, "What sort of van should I buy?"

I think Michael identified the artist in Tim.

You know, this was a really strong performer, strong songwriter.

Michael liked that.

Michael would never have just gone with a band

who might make him £5,000 in a year.

He was interested in stuff that inspired him.

He was a TV Smith fan and an Adverts fan, you know.

That's what Michael was.

When One Chord Wonders came out,

it didn't go anywhere near the charts,

so we could get rid of our jobs and be on Top Of The Pops.

That would take some time.

Only about three months, as it turned out.

But then, that was almost wholly because of Michael Dempsey,

who took us out of Stiff,

negotiated with us to be on the Live At The Roxy album,

and then set us a deal with Anchor Records, who were owned by a major,

who had a publicity machine,

who knew how to get a record distributed and in the charts,

and how to get us in the music press.

That was the point about Michael Dempsey.

He didn't try and influence us, musically.

What he did was put what we'd done onto some kind of setting

that made sense in the commercial music business.

< So who writes all the lyrics?

-Tim.

-At the moment, yeah.

< Gary Gilmore's Eyes has just come out, has it?

Yeah, it came out last Friday.

-< That was one of Tim's songs?

-Yeah.

< What are the lyrics actually about?

It's about a guy in the States

who has got the part of the eyes of Gary Gilmore.

< No, it isn't. It's about a guy who's a mass-murderer,

and was convicted to life in prison.

That's Gary Gilmore! The song's about his bleedin' eyes!

(REPORTER) It was the wish of Gary Gilmore

that others benefit from his death.

Medically, that was accomplished this morning,

with the removal of the corneas, some organs, bone, and nerves.

All will be used for transplants and research.

# I'm lying in a hospital

# I'm pinned against the bed

# A stethoscope upon my heart

# A hand against my head

# They're peeling off the bandages

# I'm wincing in the light

# The nurse is looking anxious

# And she's quivering in fright

# I'm looking through

# Gary Gilmore's eyes

# Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes

# Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes

# Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes

# The doctors are avoiding me

# My vision is confused

# I listen to my earphones

# And I catch the evening news

# A murderer's been killed And he donates his sight to science

# I'm locked into a private ward

# I realise that I must be. #

Any band who has a hit, it's always a song that doesn't represent them.

Gary Gilmore's Eyes is nothing like the rest of the stuff he writes.

It's a weird one-off. It makes you stuck.

It's weird. Your hit can actually be a cross to bear.

# I smash the light in anger

# Push my bed against the door

# I close my lids across the eyes

# And wish to see no more

# The eye receives the messages

# And sends them to the brain

# No guarantee the stimuli

# Must be perceived the same. #

We played at The Roxy, we'd had a single out on Stiff Records,

we'd been on Live At The Roxy with a live version of Bored Teenagers.

We'd toured with The Damned. We had a big record company.

We knew how to do things. It just seemed everything was rolling right.

I don't think anyone was surprised when it was a hit.

# Gary don't need his eyes to see

# Gary and his eyes have parted company. #

It happened so fast,

it took a bit of time to sink in that it actually was happening.

And by the time it did sink in that it was actually happening,

it was all over.

The fact that The Adverts actually for about six months

were a pop band seems absolutely amazing.

They did appear in whatever was the equivalent of Smash Hits at the time.

Especially with Gaye.

No matter how much she hates this,

she looked really sexy and everything,

but she also looked really, really cool,

and she was a really fantastic female icon as well,

cos she looked really tough.

She was THE rock icon.

Everybody wanted to look like her.

And she was unique, because everything she did,

she just did on her own. Nobody told her what to wear.

She just picked it up herself.

Such a great image.

I absolutely hated the way that the press would single me out.

I didn't actually want to be a female.

I wanted to be a male in a band.

Because all the bands I really liked,

and wanted to be like, were all males.

I just didn't like the fact that I was female,

and I certainly didn't want it brought up endlessly

and, you know, remarked on.

I think she was embarrassed about being the sex icon.

She was a very, very shy girl,

cursed by being photogenic.

And so she WAS one of the faces of punk rock.

She had the look.

She had a certain diffidence that could be construed as insolence.

Was she a great musician? No.

Was she any worse than Paul Simonon or Glen Matlock

as a bass player at that time?

Probably wasn't much in it, was there?

It's just that she was a girl, so of course she couldn't play.

OK, they had this great face.

But she couldn't play.

And so what? You know?

Maybe the fact that Gaye was so good-looking

worked against the band in the long run.

It allowed people to say,

"Oh, yeah. That was the band

"with that really great-looking chick, right?"

I think Tim was just resigned to it.

Considering that he was the front person

and the songwriter and everything.

People did recognise him for his lyrics. But he just wasn't recognised enough.

He was competing in a time when a lot of good lyricists were around.

He wasn't the only great lyricist.

Johnny Rotten was great.

Strummer was great.

Howard Devoto was great.

But Howard Devoto presented himself as a literate punk intellectual,

whereas TV Smith didn't.

I don't remember reading many interviews where TV Smith

would play the part of the punk rock poet Laureate,

or the rock and roll intellectual.

He wanted to be free of these labels. That's how it seemed to me.

I think Tim's lyrics have a strong element of poetry in them.

He was working in an area that definitely has its roots

way back in '60s music.

I mean, I don't really even see him as a punk songwriter at all.

# So it couldn't survive

# Something had to give

# The people take a downhill slide into the gloom

# Into the dark recesses of their minds. #

He had a really adventurous sense of song structure.

The choruses in The Adverts' songs,

they don't come when you expect them to

and they don't necessarily do what choruses are supposed to do.

The Great British Mistake is more like an essay than it is a song.

And yet, when it's played and sung,

the melody just makes sense of everything.

I think Great British Mistake was a good example

of a classic TV Smith song,

in that there is a lot of disconnected images that just fly.

And if you look at it on paper, it's like, well, what's this about?

But when you actually hear it and it's just spitting out at you,

you get a very clear picture, in a way,

of what was like to be in England in 1977.

# They'll see the books burn They'll be 451

# It's people against things and not against each other

# Out of the pre-pack

# Into the fear

# Into themselves

# They're the great British mistake

# They'll have to come to terms now They'll take it out somehow

# They'll blame it all on something

# The British mistake

# When will it be over?

# How can they avoid it?

# Avoid it, avoid it. #

Exhaustion, boredom, anxieties,

self-disgust, misery,

sense of inferiority, dislike of industry,

dislike of instant pudding, 25-year itch,

fear, insecurity, frustration.

-What can we do about it?

-I haven't the faintest idea.

LAUGHTER

# Great British mistake

# Great British mistake

# Mistake, mistake. #

There's two ways of recording. You either build it all with blocks,

and hone each block to its correct shape and put it all together,

or you take a photograph of what's happening with a band.

And the way I made The Adverts record was to kind of

take a photograph of what was going on.

This is a great manifesto.

That album title, that album cover.

Punk is this movement of escape and liberation.

I, TV Smith, I'm Moses.

We're the Chosen People.

I mean, the pompousness of it all makes it into a great joke

and satirises the pretensions of punk and all subcultures.

At the same time, it's completely serious.

Yes, we WILL lead you out of bondage.

We will take you into the Promised Land.

And then you have this billboard.

Land Of Milk And Honey. You think, "Oh, my God. This is it?"

# Life's short, don't make a mess of It

# To the ends of the earth

# You'll look for sense in it

# No chances, no plans

# I'll smash the windows of my box

# I'll be a madman

# It's no time to be 21

# To be anyone. #

The Irish tour was the end of the original line-up of the band.

Almost certainly, the fact that I was in a relationship with Gaye

changed the balance between us and the other two in the band.

Laurie, in particular, had a lot of problems with the fact that

us two were really kind of the heads of the band.

But that's simply the way the band started.

# I'm getting wound up The plot sickens

# It's no time to be 21. #

It started to go downhill with me being on the cover of the record.

It was all focused in on her.

What she needed, what she wanted.

It was never about the band itself.

If there were articles and there was more pictures of me, he'd have a go.

It's not my fault, you know?

I didn't want it in the first place. That used to really piss me off.

I knew that she would stay and I'd end up going

one way or another, whether I left myself or got thrown out.

And that's what would've happened.

I was a bit hazy about how he was actually sacked.

He went down with hepatitis while we were in Ireland,

and he had to be hospitalised.

So that's what happened. I went straight into the hospital,

and that was the last I saw of The Adverts.

# We'll be your untouchables

# We'll be your outcasts

# We don't care what you project on us

# It's no time to be 21

# No time to be 21. #

While he was recovering, we got in John Towe,

and it was like a breath of fresh air in the band, you know?

All that bad feeling was gone. We were enjoying ourselves.

And in some ways, I guess it was a fairly unpleasant

and unfriendly decision, but I would've given the band

another couple of months maximum without having made that decision.

And there would have been no second album.

We were very young.

Quite volatile, possibly.

I mean, the music we liked was quite violent in a sense.

So unless you really get on with somebody,

then it's going to put a strain on any relationship.

I liked Tim a lot. I had a lot of respect for him too.

And I respected him in more ways than he knew.

I just don't think Tim realised that

part of the sound that The Adverts had, had gone.

That it would never be the same again.

# Uncharted wrecks of wonder

# In deepest gloom down under

# The drowning men are drawing near

# We're the subterranean vandals

# Tying airlines round door handles

# Adventurers don't venture here

# We're the drowning men

# We're the drowning men. #

I was just sort of wandering around doing lots of gigs

with other bands, and I was rehearsing in a studio one night,

and Robert Crash, the bass player with The Maniacs,

just happened to tell me The Adverts were looking for a drummer.

# Ambition stunted the future fated... #

I heard about The Adverts and I'd heard lots of stuff.

And to be honest, it sounded quite a weird expression of punk rock.

The sort of area where I come from is a lot more technical than Laurie.

I had to be re-learn drums in a way,

to play like Laurie to start with.

But then when the band wanted to progress,

then, of course, it moved on into different areas.

Tim had written ten songs that fit seamlessly

into The Adverts' live set,

including Male Assault, Fate of Criminals.

Even My Place, live, wasn't that much of a stretch.

And at some point, he decided to record a very different album.

I was exploring classical music at the time,

so I saw the initial punk movement as a complete nightmare.

I mean, you know, I'm afraid I reacted a bit like

old people reacted to rock and roll in my day.

I was dragged by Dempsey to a gig in Oxford,

and it was seeing and becoming involved with The Adverts

that made me recognise that punk was in fact

a beautifully valid folk music and social commentary.

The lyrics were staggeringly beautiful.

And I suddenly started to see maybe a way

where you could have the raw frontispiece, if you like,

and then introduce a bridge between the band

and an almost Wagnerian, classical background,

which I did via Tim Cross,

a brilliant multi-A instrumentalist, but also an arranger.

It wasn't very complicated music.

So you could do it in octaves, or do it in chords.

And I've got a fairly strong style of my own in a way.

So I just applied my most pompous style to his music.

# We're being deserted or let loose

# I've just seen the dead walk by

# And they don't seem jealous of my life

# Let's take heart, see what lasts

# Call it truth

# Television's over

# Television's over. #

I got the impression they wanted a bit of a gothic album,

and so that meant large production.

So not only are the keyboards very prominent,

but also there's tons and tons of vocals.

I think it would be fairly unusual for me not to have put my oar in

when it comes to, like, piling on vocals and piling on vocals.

There's an element of that Phil Spector sound.

That Wall of Sound thing that I still hanker after a bit, you know?

# Television's over. #

They had a female choir thing in the back.

It worked fine, but it didn't sound like The Adverts.

# Another close down, another let down

# Another breakdown until the wind down

# We're just echoes, we're reflected

# Turn on a silver screen

# With other pictures on it. #

Yeah, I was really happy with it.

But it was too complex and confusing, really,

for the abilities of the band. Me included.

Although I'd never apologise for something like that,

because it gives it its character, and gives it its sound.

And it's much better to try to reach for something

you can't attain than to not bother.

# You're living in other peoples' lives. #

The Cast Of Thousands artwork started from a great idea,

which was a Tibetan monk or something like that,

who'd set himself on fire as a protest.

And that was going to be on the front cover.

But they wouldn't let us have that.

They said Woolworths won't stock it and all that.

They were going to take us into this darkened studio,

pose us in front of this good photographer.

And they put tons of eyeliner on us,

but they were going to have this wonderful effect.

"By the time we finished with it, it'll look fine."

They came up with the pictures a few weeks later,

and there we are, like a dolled-up bunch of tarts in a bright studio.

They said, "There's your cover."

(SHE LAUGHS) It was absolutely horrible!

It's a horrible glam band!

RCA weren't in a hurry to understand the point of TV,

nor how to promote him as best as possible.

Basically they did him no favours.

We thought they didn't get what we were doing,

and they thought we weren't playing their game.

Both of which were true.

Good night.

So two things were clear about Cast Of Thousands.

One was that it was a great leap forward.

One was that it wasn't going to go anywhere.

# All the human torches

# Catching fire

# Especially for you

# The corrupt officials

-# Getting caught

-Especially for you

# Poor and the needy, lovers and killers

# Especially for you. #

Although we knew we were going leftfield with this album,

the sound and construction of the songs were so strange,

I thought it was enough for people to see, just a minute,

The Adverts weren't this one-dimensional punk band.

Look what they've done now. This is amazing. I really thought...

I was convinced that people were going to really like that album.

It is, to this day,

one of the more curious sophomore efforts

I've ever heard by any band.

He had spent almost three years playing

what could be defined as punk rock,

and then to come out with an album that defiantly wasn't...

I think he moved too quickly.

They were really pursuing a grand vision on that record especially.

And it holds up, I think.

In some ways, I like it more than the first record.

I like their first record a lot, but the second one has a certain,

like, nutrition value that keeps me coming back.

If I was to make a list of the albums,

all the albums I've produced,

it would be in the top three of the ones that I'm proudest of.

TV was hearing something else, you know?

And he was one of the only guys

cynical and brave enough to go, "You know what?

"I'm onto the next thing. If you don't like it, bite me."

And that's maybe what everyone did. They went, "OK!"

He was stuck. But he was stuck by his own choosing.

Because, as an artist,

and this is what you have to really respect and admire him for,

he ploughed on in this direction, completely ignoring everybody else.

If you align yourself with something, you're stuck with that.

And from the beginning, The Adverts aligned themselves with outsiderdom.

I think Howard had just had enough,

and I know that we'd been maybe plugging away

and not doing as well as he would've thought,

and he was a bit disenchanted with it.

But we had a rehearsal booked in one day, and he didn't turn up.

We never saw him again, ever.

I was quite pleased, because I thought he could do better.

He was always talking about Phil Collins,

and he always wanted to be that kind of thing.

So I used to think, "What's that got to do with punk?"

I think he thought that punk was the wrong road.

He took the wrong road.

You had to be quite strong in that world.

I'm not sure Howard was.

And I felt sorry for TV Smith,

because he really was keeping it all together.

A bit like Mick Jagger keeps the Stones together. He was the one.

It was a sinking ship then, see?

And I was still there, ready.

You know?

But there comes a breaking point.

And in the end, I didn't bother to go in.

And then it was only a few weeks after that

someone got a phone call from somebody

telling me that TV Smith had split The Adverts.

It was a horrible mess. So we got in these brothers.

And actually, we found ourselves with quite a viable band.

We were sounding good very quickly after rehearsals.

Then we went out on tour, and the whole breakdown started again.

There was arguments between Tim Cross and the Martinez brothers.

So I found myself with a whole new bunch of people,

but the same old arguments.

It was like this recurring nightmare.

The album was vilified, people hated us.

Our audiences were going down, we didn't have a label,

and we hated each other.

It was obvious, this thing is not going to go any further.

There were other tensions, you know, because I think Michael Dempsey,

their manager, his obvious loyalty was with Tim,

because he saw Tim as the one with the talent.

He would necessarily be exasperated with Gaye,

because she was in a state and wasn't ready.

Gaye, for God's sake!

Don't you think we've got enough problems?

She was drinking a lot, and she was fairly confused a lot of the time.

A bottle of vodka a day.

I would have a healthy breakfast. A bowl of cereal.

But that was the rest of the day.

I'd just drink vodka.

The punk press, NME, Sounds, you name it,

they were every bit as chauvinistic and fascist as any other press.

And so they'd go on about her weight.

You know, very, very personal stuff.

They wouldn't say that to anyone else.

I'm sure it was damaging her self-confidence

and making her more difficult to deal with.

She became quite a difficult person to be in a band with.

Tim was very stoic.

He simply understood that this is what happens

when you put a person like this under these sorts of pressures.

And he was INCREDIBLY patient.

She'd be falling over and not getting her stuff together,

and because of the nature I met her,

I couldn't understand why he was so loyal,

because I'd never been that loyal to anybody myself.

And I asked him, and he just shrugged

and looked like it was a stupid question.

Which taught me a lesson or two, you know?

I can't say whether our relationship was under threat or not,

but we always felt, having got through that,

we could get through anything.

When the band split up, there was a certain amount of relief,

because it let Gaye off the hook.

She'd had enough, I think.

She realised that she wanted time for herself

and it was a feeling that he needed to move on,

TV needed to move on, and get more accomplished musicians in.

Because his songs were developing and developing,

and there was only so far that The Adverts could develop.

You're looking ahead all the time.

We've done that, and it was successful up to a point.

But what's the next big project?

The revival of CND and of pacifist movements elsewhere in Europe

began after 5 of America's NATO partners, including Britain,

agreed to consider siting nuclear cruise missiles

at American bases in Europe by 1983.

He's back on track here.

With The Adverts' second album, which I do like,

he's getting all his experimentation out of his system.

And he's not had the set up to get it done right.

He hasn't got the right band, the right producers, studio, label.

But when he gets to The Explorers,

because he's in a touring band, it makes a real difference,

because these are songs that they play hard

on the road for a long time, by people who really want to play them.

# My name is Tomahawk Cruise. #

Tomahawk Cruise is one of his finest and best songs.

I can remember the first time I heard it on Peel,

and I thought, "Wow!"

Because it was just as the missiles were coming in.

If they had recorded the whole album with Tom Newman,

it would have been as good as the first Adverts album.

It's one of the great songs of that period.

It did get quite good press as well. But again, he's on a small label.

He's a deeply unfashionable person by now.

he's so far out on a limb that most people completely ignore it.

It's quite a tragedy really, isn't it?

I will not be party to telling the younger generation

that the future for them lies in an inevitable nuclear confrontation

with the Soviet Union.

They lost Tom Newman as the producer, that was the first thing that went wrong.

The second thing that went wrong was when the album was out,

they landed a tour opening for The Undertones.

A British tour. Three weeks, four weeks, I think it was.

After two nights, they were dropped from the tour.

And that was where the impetus was lost,

because suddenly they were scrabbling for gigs.

Oh, and can I say that Last Words had the second worst album cover

of Tim's career and you have Ralph Steadman do the sleeve

for Tomahawk Cruise,

so who shall we use for the album?

Ah, Edward Bell, who has painted one picture in his life and because

it was for David Bowie, everybody's queuing up to use him.

That one again was Michael's idea.

And perhaps that was one of his least good ideas!

He stuck with Dempsey when really he'd have been better advised

to get someone else and move on.

We almost had a little coup at one point, didn't we?

I can't remember why.

We just... We all felt... The band felt that Tim really could do

so much better without Michael.

# You can't please everyone

# You have to have fun You have to have fun

# You have to...

# Have fun... #

I wasn't a huge admirer of Dempsey.

You know, he obviously was very bright and he'd got Tim started,

and he'd got us our record deal so, you know, you can't take that

away from him, but as a manager, he was pretty erratic.

Always trying to pull a fast one, bouncing cheques.

Remember the famous one, "a company cheque will be all right, will it",

as we were leaving the hotel

and you didn't want to look as he wrote it out.

That last tour was a pretty terrible experience.

The bouncing cheques finally caught up with us

and the PA firm just left halfway through the tour!

We were getting no income from the gigs. The promoter was losing money.

We were getting paid nothing. It was very depressing.

# You can't please everyone

# You have to have fun You have to have fun

# You have to...

# Have fun...#

There was so much potential there, the band was sparking with energy,

and everything went against them,

and the bad luck that attended The Explorers, I think,

continued to haunt Tim for another couple of years.

Michael's death was very difficult to take

because of course Michael was and had continued to be

a very close friend of mine,

someone who I respected and admired a great deal.

He was in enormous financial difficulties,

just keeping things going and trying to support my career

after The Adverts had finished

and generally being a dynamic, livewire manager,

he would try to get things going and get interest in the next project.

He may have had a lot of bad ideas and I'm sure people could sit there

and say he shouldn't have done this and he shouldn't have done that,

but his faith in TV was unshakeable.

They loved each other.

Michael understood TV and he did his best to represent him,

and he was very loyal, you know,

and that's something that TV needed and has not had since.

I did look for managers but I never found anyone I trusted,

and there weren't that many options to be honest.

You're looking at a failed artist.

The Explorers album had flopped, the second Adverts album had flopped.

Not many managers were interested in taking on that

unless they were real lovers of the music, like Michael was,

and I didn't meet anyone like that.

Through some connection or other,

I heard about this label called Rondelay.

One of the guys Rondelay was setting up a sub-label called Expulsion,

on a very, very low budget

and said he'd be interested in another album from me.

I don't know what he was expecting.

Probably he was expecting that I'd bung out an Adverts-type album,

because Rondelay was pretty much punk and that kind of feel.

I was having a very creative writing period,

working with Tim Cross and Tim Renwick.

And it was much more poppy.

I kind of didn't want to get involved with the punk sounding stuff.

I felt that was now behind me.

So I was writing simple kind of pop songs with interesting lyrics,

and I was very happy with the stuff I was writing.

It's pop songs and they are so twisted.

You could imagine them all being huge hits,

until you actually listen to them.

I mean, even Your Haunted Heart, which is such a sweet, lovely song,

but would you really want it written about you?

We got basically a no-advance deal from Expulsion,

but they were willing to put up very low studio costs.

I think they gave us 900 quid or something to find a studio and record.

Admittedly we didn't have a bass player and drummer,

but we didn't have a budget for a bass player and drummer

so let's not worry about that, let's just do it.

If we wait for the budget and we wait for the people,

then we could wait forever.

So Tim and Tim and I went into a small, cheap studio

in south London and put together Channel Five.

# Picture her

# Widening eyes

# Now you have all of me

# Surprise, surprise!

# It's just a token of my love... #

I have a really soft spot for that album.

I know it's difficult to listen to,

I know you put it on and it sounds like some awful '80s record,

but if you give it five or ten listens, it gets under your skin.

# Disaster...#

I'd snap up anything I could find of TV Smith,

and a lot of people I knew didn't even get Cast Of Thousands

and they never even got to the solo stuff.

I'm like the only person I know besides maybe you

who has the Channel Five album.

If I thought it was difficult to get hold of Cast Of Thousands,

trying to get hold of Channel Five proved impossible,

because it wasn't actually really released, was it?

It didn't actually really come out, did it? Or... It didn't?

Expulsion became bankrupt two weeks after the record was released,

and all the records were left on the shelf in the factory

and weren't able to get to the shops.

It was very typical early '80s UK indie.

It existed for a little less than it needed to,

and then went under, and the first you knew it had gone under

was when you called and there was nobody there.

It's one of those things where you think you're back on your feet,

and the next thing you know, you've been knocked back on your arse.

And....

That's the way life is. You get back up again.

To have over three million people unemployed in this country

is bad enough, but to suggest, as some of our opponents have,

that we don't care about it,

is as deeply wounding as it is utterly false.

The '80s were the most difficult period of my life.

If I thought I was beyond redemption in the music business

after The Explorers, after Channel Five came out,

then there was no way I was going to get a record company interested in me.

No manager, no publisher, no record deal, no tour agent, no money.

I went on the dole for ten years.

# You lock yourself into a... #

The early '80s were not a good time for people who were known from punk

to be trying to get a new deal.

I got one A&R meeting, I think, where in as many words

the guy told me, you know, "give up".

Of course, as comes to all of us,

unless you're very lucky or you have the right PR people

and you pay them the right amount of money,

having been flavour of the month or part of the movement which was respected,

you're then regarded as being sort of old hat,

so he was left a bit by the wayside.

# When you discover us... #

He said he was thinking of giving it all up on his 30th birthday.

I couldn't give up. Maybe it would have been the easy way out for me,

to just think I'm not going to make it as a musician, but I couldn't.

I was still writing songs. I HAD to write songs,

and the writing that I was doing through the '80s

is easily the equal of anything on Channel Five.

If Channel Five was a lost album,

then there's at least another two lost albums

that really, really should've been recorded in that period.

# What about those of us you let... #

It would've been nice to get into a studio and record them properly,

and get them out on record but it wasn't to be.

At the end of the '80s, what I missed was playing in front of people,

seeing people in front of me enjoying what I was doing.

# Seems like a safe place Way out of reach... #

I was sitting at home one day, mid-'80s,

and the phone rang and it was Tim.

He said "I'm putting a new band together. Do you want to be in it?".

I said, "Yeah, all right then"! I was absolutely gobsmacked.

The plan was, rehearse in cheap rehearsal rooms,

we could fit all the band and all our gear into two cars,

we'd sleep on the floor and as long as we got paid our petrol money,

we could do it, so this was a non-profit band

that I could keep up while I was still on the dole.

I couldn't afford to come off the dole. It had to work that way.

We'd just go off and do charity gigs, benefit gigs,

or save whatever's worth saving benefit gigs,

getting back in front of a live audience,

even if it was only for five people,

back to some kind of value of what it was about being in a band.

We had a lot of fun but we worked hard,

and he was just determined to be forward-looking.

# It's quiet, too quiet

# Those nagging doubts

# Keep spilling out... #

The rest of the band would've done it for nothing. We loved that band.

And in fact, it paid its way. It never cost us anything.

I think he was getting fed up with just kind of struggling.

I had a pretty sound idea of what the music business was like by then,

so I didn't have any illusions that suddenly they'd be flocking to our door.

What I was surprised at was kind of the vindictiveness of some of the critics.

It was "Oh, look at TV Smith, he's now playing back rooms of pubs!

"What a loser!"

Excuse me! Excuse me for being a loser!

# If there is a way forward

# Use the will... #

Also, at that time, he was probably very frustrated about the album not coming out.

He actually funded the whole album himself,

and I think we spent three weeks recording it and then doing a cover

and getting Ludo to do the cartoon book

and all the rest of it, so a completely finished product,

and he couldn't get any distribution.

It wasn't till after the band had finished

before that album actually came out in the end.

Almost accidentally we'd put ourselves in a position where we had

to interact with the music business again and what do you know,

the music business said no,

so the writing was then on the wall for Cheap.

# Get angry

# Blamed you

# But you were just a dog

# Jumping through their hoops and you lost too

# You got used

# Looks like you've been dismantled

# Instead of improved

# Well, that's progress

# We're all being buried by the machine... #

I went to see Cheap at the Bull and Gate,

and there was hardly anyone there

and there he was in his top hat banging out these great songs

with this band that looked like a load of old bikers,

and there was no-one there and I was thinking, this is really ridiculous,

what a talented songwriter. Why is there no-one there? This is stupid.

I said, "Tim, you've got all these great songs,

"and you can play the guitar reasonably well.

"Why don't you just go out there solo?"

I'd never played solo, I don't know how to do it.

I'd be rubbish, and he said I'm booking this acoustic gig

in North London, there's no PA, you just stand there with your guitar,

you play to 20 people, five rows of seats,

and why don't you do it? Give it a go.

So I gave it a go and I was thrilled.

I got something back off that gig that I hadn't got off gigs

I don't think ever before.

Direct communication between me and the audience.

And I got addicted to it.

It gave me freedom of how I could write and a very important thing was

that it gave me freedom of how I could tour.

I could pick up my guitar, I could get on a train,

and there were no expenses apart from that.

Suddenly the whole live aspect opened up again.

# It's a science

# It's the march of the giants...#

I knew the first time I went to Germany, for example,

that there would not be many people who knew who I was there.

I wasn't expecting to go and play for 500 people,

I was expecting to play for 20 or 30 people, which is what happened,

but what I saw was 20 or 30 people in those gigs who really liked what I was doing,

and sure enough, the next time I went and toured,

there were a few more people and the next time there were a few more.

# And I may be the first test-tube adult

# But I don't know I can't hear myself think

# Over the click of the Geiger counter

# And the roar of the motorway lanes... #

He just couldn't tour like he does with a band.

It's the only way he can actually make a living,

is just to go out there on his own -

guitar in one hand and bag of merch in the other,

and he just sets off down the road and that's it.

I never thought I would end up travelling the world and enjoying it

but it's now incredibly vital to my life and my experience.

It's really been important to me in the way I look at the world

and my understanding of people, from all the people I meet.

I couldn't give that up now, and I certainly didn't plan it,

and I never thought I would be doing it and somehow this has happened,

and there's something to be said for the fact that

if you don't find your own destiny, your own destiny comes to find you.

# I wake up tired and they say... #

With the manager, you never really know, what are those studio costs,

where are we going to record? What are the dates going to be?

I have all that under my control, and I like that.

As a one-man outfit, it's not just about writing songs.

The whole satisfaction and almost the whole creative process

now extends out into the touring and everything.

It's all part of the deal somehow.

The con is that I'm totally overworked.

I don't have any free time.

I'd like to have free time, I'd like to have more time to write.

I'd like to have more time to record, you know, and just take a break

and, you know, clear out my head and come back to it with fresh energy.

That's actually not possible when I'm doing everything myself.

But the pros outweigh the cons.

# It all happens in the dark

# A complicated knot... #

He could be more successful

but he's got a very loyal, very devoted audience that adores him.

# It's coming this year Next year

# Some time never...#

Whereas as we saw with The Adverts,

they had a huge audience which turned their backs

the moment they didn't make a record that sounded like Gary Gilmore's Eyes.

Now each solo album sounds a little bit different to the last,

and his audience just keeps growing a little bit more for each one.

There is an incredible satisfaction gained

from being able to earn a living doing what you love,

when you've been virtually ignored by the opinion formers of the day.

It's real, you know, this is not something that's been invented

by a record company or a promo agency through hype and...

.. It's.. It's a real communication going on between me

and the people who like my stuff,

and the reason they come is because they like what I do.

It's not because they've seen some video on MTV and they think,

"That looks pretty successful, I'd better go and buy into that".

They're not buying into my lifestyle or what they perceive as me as a star.

All they're doing is they're enjoying my songs,

and my outlook on life and they feel close to me and I feel close to them.

# And the dust begins to clear

# I'm lying on the ground

# And I'm standing on a path

# In an unknown part of town

And the path leads me away

# Over hills and out of sight

# In the blazing sun by day

# And the hanging moon by night

# And I wind up in a place

# Where I never have to count

# And I never see the waves

# As I push my leaking boat out

# It's expensive being poor

# Because everything hurts more

# Knocking on a bolted door

# It's expensive being poor

# Someone throw me down some crumbs

# I will eat them off the floor

# It's expensive being poor

# But I look good when I get desperate

# Desperate

# Desperate. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# The edge of a revolution That's exactly where we stand

# And though we could seize the moment

# We aspire to wear the brand

# And we take our place in a broken state

# With the cold, the hurt The beautiful and damned

# Had enough of this grey-sky thinking

# I'm coming in to land. #

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