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Armed with Anger
How UK Punk Survived the Nineties
By Ian Glasper Cherry Red Books
Copyright © 2012 Ian Glasper
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-901447-34-7
CHAPTER 1
THE NORTHEAST
VOORHEES
Named after Jason Voorhees, the crazed serial killer from the infamous Friday The 13th slasher films, Durham's Voorhees were unsurprisingly one of the more aggressive UK bands of the Nineties. Their confrontational lyrics and intense live performances quickly won them praise from fans of hardcore punk who were disappointed with the more mainstream direction much of the genre was headed in. You wanted angry? You got it. Wholesale.
"It was what was left over from Steadfast, False Face, Sourface, that kind of thing ... mostly kids that were into SXE [straightedge: hardcore kids that didn't drink, smoke or do drugs]; don't forget, [US SXE bands] Youth Of Today and Gorilla Biscuits were still touring at that time," says vocalist Ian 'Lecky' Leck of the Durham scene that spawned the band in 1991. "We grew bored of that scene and wanted to do something a bit different, a bit more like older early Eighties American hardcore; a lot of our friends were all skaters and into that kind of thing. It wasn't a very punk scene at all compared to, say, Newcastle, which was much more to do with crusties and Crass ... anarcho punk wasn't very big in Durham!
"I was like Captain SXE for years, that was a big thing for me and I wanted the rest of the world to see that was the right thing to do; I wasn't that pushy about it, but I did sing songs about disliking people that drank and smoked. We just decided we wanted to do something a little different."
Taking their early musical cues from current US hardcore bands of the time like Citizen's Arrest and Born Against, the first line-up of Voorhees saw Lecky joined by guitarist Darrell Hindley and drummer Gary Cousins from False Face and bassist Buzzard (fresh out of prison for GBH!) and played their first gig as Know Your Enemy in 1990. Buzzard quit shortly after ("Because it wasn't very good, to be fair!") and was replaced by David 'Brownie' Brown.
"And then Steadfast broke up about that time, so we decided to get Sean [Readman] in on second guitar," continues Lecky. "Up until then we were still trying to do a SXE sorta thing, a bit like Judge; we didn't have a proper direction and were trying to figure it out, but when Sean joined, at the second practise, he came in and said, 'Right, we're scrapping all those songs and we're doing this style ...' and he started playing riffs that sounded like SSD! Really fast like all that early Boston stuff and we all thought, 'Yeah!' A couple of weeks later, he was like, 'I've got a name for the band as well: Voorhees ...' and it stuck. He was really into all those horror films of the Eighties, of course, all the video nasties."
The newly named Voorhees played their first gig, with Sourface, at the Durham Rowing Club, in September 1991, before recording the 'Everybody's Good At Something ... Except Us!' demo that December and starting to play outside Durham with the likes of Sick Of It All and Rorschach.
"It wasn't supposed to say 'Except us' at the end of the title," reveals Lecky. "The front cover had this still from the Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer film, of this woman with a Coke bottle stuck in her face and Sean was like, 'Let's call it 'Everybody's Good At Something!' So I went and made the demo covers and stuck 'Except Us' on the end of it ... He wasn't happy at the time, he thought I'd totally spoiled what it was meant to mean. But that was always the thing with me and Sean, we had very different ideas. In the early days, just before shows, I'm positive he used to annoy me and wind me up deliberately just to get me angry so I was fired up onstage ...
"Anyway, we did it at a community studio in Hartlepool, through the music course I was doing for college because I'd wanted to be a sound engineer. After a few weeks doing this intensive training, I had to record a band to demonstrate what I'd learnt and Voorhees were ready to record at that point. So that was our first demo and my first go at sound engineering. I'm quite proud of it, even though everyone had a go at the desk and every [volume] slide ended up right at the top; everyone wanted to be as loud as possible!"
The band's next recording was another freebie too, when they won two days' recording time at Northern Studios in Consett. Bassist Brownie departed the band just days before they went into the studio ("He vanished off into the rave world and I've never seen or spoken to him since ...") so Sean had to play bass and guitar during the session and reluctantly covered bass duties while gigging too, until Paul Rugman-Jones, also from Steadfast, stepped into the breach.
"The rehearsal room we used was at the back end of this youth centre, where we used to put on shows, called Fowler's Yard," explains Lecky. "Durham Arts Council had a bit of money left over at the end of year and needed to spend their budget, so they got all the bands who rehearsed there, about 15 in all, to put their names in a hat and they drew two or three winners out to have some free recording time there. Our name just came out the hat; we got lucky for once!"
Lecky moved down to Bradford soon after the recording and it was Bradford-based label Armed With Anger (now there's a good name for a book!) that released it as the 'Violent' EP in April 1993.
"Richard Corbridge from AWA had seen us playing and asked us to do something before I'd even moved down there," reckons Lecky, "so a record was already on the cards. I kinda sorted that out by myself, to do a record with Rich and then told the rest of the band – which didn't sit well with Sean, who wanted to do our own record, but I talked him round to the idea in the end.
"With Steadfast we did the whole record deal thing with Alan [Woods, of First Strike Records] and went down and signed a contract with him, which was really bizarre for a little record label like that, saying he had the rights to us for five years or something equally ridiculous – there was even a clause in there about potential markets on the moon. Seriously. We didn't have a clue about how record labels worked back then, but the fact that he was putting out the Chain Of Strength record in the UK was a big thing for us at the time. And because nothing came of that, and he messed us about for so long, that put Sean off working with other people, I think ..."
Living up to its name, the 'Violent' EP was 10 tracks of pure – ultra-raw – Boston hardcore worship and cut through the band's peers of the time, most of them wallowing in the emerging emocore scene and metaphorically beating themselves up over ex-girlfriends, like a bloody machete through buttered brains. Darrell left for art college after a short UK tour supporting Slapshot and then Gary left after the band recorded 'I'll Survive' and 'Tied Down' for a Negative Approach tribute CD on Canadian label Dysgusher. In true underground punk label fashion, it never came out and the recordings languished unreleased for five years until the project was finally realised by Ugly Pop Records. The line-up stabilised again, though, when 15 year-old Michael Gillham from Sourface joined on drums and Graeme Nicholls became the new lead guitarist and Voorhees recorded their debut album, 'Spilling Blood Without Reason', at Studio 64 in Middlesbrough with Matthew Burke.
"A lot of people say it was the best Voorhees record, but when I listen to it, it seems like there's an awful lot of filler on there," admits Lecky. "I still really like the record, but I know what songs were written and when and how they were written ... The idea was, because of the whole Friday The 13th thing, we wanted 13 songs on each side of the record, so we had to write 26 songs! We had about 15 or 16 good songs just before we went into the studio and we had to write another 10 and at least six or seven of them were just filler ... I'd go to practise and we'd be doing all these cover songs by Negative Approach and Negative FX or whatever and I'd say, 'Right, instead of covering it, let's write a song in that style ...' So a lot of it was stolen riffs, with just enough changes to make it our own! Or we'd use a riff in one song and its rhythm in another ... whatever it took to get the songs ready in time."
August 1994 saw the band heading over to Europe for the first time to promote the album, a trip that didn't quite go according to plan. "We were all set to go; everyone had booked time off work, we'd sorted out the van hire – Paul had actually sold his motorbike to raise the money for the van – and then Bruno, who'd booked it all, rang us up literally two days before and said that [the other band on the tour] Selfish [from Finland] couldn't do it – did we still want to go? And we said we did, of course, so he said he'd sort out another band to do it instead, which was the drummer from Selfish's other band, Force Macabra.
"He turned up to the first show with his girlfriend, but his band didn't show, so he travelled with us in our van, which was already totally cramped anyway, so that was a bit of a nightmare and then they didn't show up for the next gig either, or the next ... and as the tour went on, more and more gigs were getting cancelled. We were supposed to be out there for three-and-a-half weeks, but we only did two. It was quite surprising how organised the squats were there, though; I'd never seen anything like it. In Potsdam, the whole street was squatted and on the roof over the road from the venue was a big machine gun on a tripod and everything ... I don't even know if they had ammunition for it, or if it even worked, but it looked pretty scary! And there were random plastic letters, about three feet high, that had probably been stolen from the fronts of other buildings that spelled out 'Punks!' Which was pretty cool."
A Peel session was recorded in early 1995, which Lecky doesn't hold much love for ("There wasn't any encouragement or interaction from the engineers, it was just another job for them, so it didn't end up sounding great ..."). The same set of songs were re-recorded at Pots'n'Pans in Bradford for a split 7-inch with Stalingrad on Lecky's own Thinking Smart Records.
Early the following year, to coincide with the release of the 'Smiling At Death' discography CD on Grand Theft Audio, Voorhees made it over to North America for their first tour there,with none other than Hatebreed (nowadays one of the biggest hardcore bands in the world) in support. Predictably enough, the trip, organised by Neil Robinson who ran Tribal War Records and sang for Nausea, was an eventful one, from the very first gig in Connecticut ...
"We were there playing and some guy jumped up on stage and sat down behind the monitors, which wasn't something I was familiar with 'cos no-one ever did it in England," recalls Lecky. "He sat there with his back to me staring out at the crowd and it wasn't a very big stage, so I kicked him in the arse and told him to move. He just looked at me and looked away, so we started the next song and I jumped in the air and landed on him and he jumped down off the stage and stood there staring at me for the rest of the set. We finished the last song and I turned around to put the mic back on the mic stand; as I turned around he got onstage behind me and grabbed me round the throat ...
"Next thing I know, our bass player Paul tried to jump in between us – he still had his bass guitar on and all three of us tripped over the monitors and fell off the stage! And as we hit the floor all the lights went out, so it was pitch black, all three of us swinging fists and kicking each other ... When the lights came on – probably 10 seconds later, but it felt like two minutes – Paul had me pinned to the stage by my throat, about to punch me in the face, with my footprint on the side of his head – and the guy who had started it all was nowhere to be seen! But everyone was going around breaking things and Sean got into a fight with someone and cut his arm; it was a really strange night.
"Someone told us the guy was Earth Crisis's tour manager, but I don't know ... He came up to me 10 minutes later and threatened me, told me he was going to shoot me and I just laughed in his face and told him to go and get his fucking gun then. The guys from Hatebreed all knew him, he sang for Path Of Resistance or something, but they were quite neutral about it and tried to calm it all down ..."
Fisticuffs withstanding, the tour was a great success, but upon their return to the UK Michael and Sean left, throwing the Voorhees line-up into disarray again. "Yeah, it was a good tour, all the gigs went pretty well and we kinda broke even," agrees Lecky. "But you know how it is when you play with all these bands and trade records with them; they all go into a box in the back of the van. We got back to New York and went to separate them all out and Michael had decided he wanted one of everything, even if there wasn't enough copies of them to go round and he and Sean got into an argument over a Mayday 7-inch – Sean ended up slapping him across the face and Michael stormed out.
"He came back a few minutes later and he was the calmest I'd ever seen him, saying, 'I think I needed that, that's sorted me out, has that!' And knowing what Michael's like, that was worrying and I was convinced he'd be slitting our throats in our sleep, so I slept with one eye open that night!
"But Michael had already told us he was leaving the band about halfway through the tour anyway – he'd had enough by that point – and a few weeks after we got back, Sean told me he was as well; he said he'd taken the band as far as he wanted to, so he was done too."
Former Ironside vocalist Richard 'Arms' Armitage took over from Sean on guitar and Michael was replaced behind the kit by Gareth Pugh. Graeme then announced that he was also leaving, to relocate to San Francisco (where he now plays for We Be The Echo) and he was replaced by James 'Atko' Atkinson, a regular customer at Ian's skate shop.
"Lecky gave me a copy of 'Spilling Blood ...' to learn the songs," recalls Atko. "I looked at the back cover and there was a picture of all these blokes in Newcastle United shirts and I thought, 'Fuckin' hell, these guys look like a right bunch ...!' But when I got to the first practise, there was only Lecky from that first record I recognised, because Paul had just moved down to Matlock, so I was quite relieved in that respect. If you look at Sean in that picture and imagine being 16 years old and having never met him, he looks a complete psycho! It was completely different to anything I'd ever experienced anyway ...
"They gave me the 'Smiling At Death' CD and a list of songs to learn and told me there was a European tour booked. My dad wanted to meet them, so they all had to come down and introduce themselves to him. But he thought they were alright and that was the easiest thing ... I'm not sure what they said to him, but he seemed completely happy after they'd left!"
The European tour got cancelled at the eleventh hour, though, due to almost inevitable van problems (the bane of any struggling band's 'career') and Atko made his live debut in Bristol instead. "Like I said, they gave me this list of songs to learn and, at that first gig, the setlist was three sheets of A4 paper taped together," he laughs. "About 30 songs or something, which was pretty daunting, a lot to take in. I didn't know what to expect; it was with Stalingrad and Rich [from Stalingrad] ran across the bar and knocked everyone's drinks everywhere, scared the shit out of everyone ... That was an eye-opener; he was so calm and well-spoken in the van on the way down and then he turned into this animal when they played."
The line-up shuffles continued unabated as well; Gareth was displaced by "local student Chris", who himself only managed two gigs (two good ones though: supporting Sick Of It All in Bradford and Agnostic Front in London) before having to return to Greece to do national service. Michael Gillham returned temporarily to undertake the band's second US tour; this time booked by Ben from Drop Dead and Will from Chainsaw Safety Records, it saw Voorhees sharing stages with the likes of Drop Dead, Charles Bronson, Devoid Of Faith and Kill Your Idols. They also took time out to record the (disappointingly synthetic-sounding) 'Fireproof' EP for Chainsaw Safety at Technical Ecstasy Studios in New Jersey, although Lecky fell ill just before the session and had to record his vocals once back in the UK.
Once home, though, Paul moved to London to become an environmental biologist and was replaced by Andrew 'Wrighty' Wright, another ex-Ironside member who had also served time in Unborn, while Michael's place was eventually filled by David Allen from Vengeance Of Gaia. Work began on the '13' album, which was released as a collaboration between Armed With Anger and Californian label Six Weeks. Recorded and mixed at Low Fold Studios, Lancaster, between August 1998 and April 1999, it was admittedly a departure from the traditional Voorhees style but was still a relentlessly intense barrage of noise, let down somewhat by a horrible-sounding triggered snare drum.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Armed with Anger by Ian Glasper. Copyright © 2012 Ian Glasper. Excerpted by permission of Cherry Red Books.
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