This story is fairly lengthy, but it surely’s written in brief chunks, so don’t fear about it, you’ll be advantageous. You may examine your Instagram each 300 phrases or so, no matter.
Even when you’ve by no means heard of Flesh For Lulu, you may prefer it. It has bits about boozing and medicines and there are a few fights (together with a brawl with John Lydon), and stuff about gangsters, goth and a ghost.
There’s an precise sword struggle between Sisters Of Mercy singer Andrew Eldritch and Flesh For Lulu guitarist Rocco. It’s a narrative about pals – about how pals fall out and in of affection – and about ambition and enterprise and the way issues that ought to work out nonetheless don’t, typically. And it accommodates two tales about sudden sickness, certainly one of which ends in dying.
On the morning of Nick Marsh’s funeral, James Mitchell dropped his children off at college and drove throughout London to the service in Epping Forest the place he met Lulu, the girl who gave her identify to the band Mitchell had fashioned with Marsh, aged 19: Flesh For Lulu.
That very same morning, Kevin Mills – the person who performed bass, wrote songs and managed Flesh For Lulu for many of their profession – put an out-of-office message on his Pet Taxi enterprise, received in his automobile and drove throughout city alone.
In Notting Hill, guitarist Rocco Barker took a handful of valium and drank Guinness all morning. “Simply to get me by way of it,” he says. “I don’t bear in mind anybody from the funeral. I used to be simply in a haze.”
It was scorching. In numerous circumstances, you’ll have mentioned it was a gorgeous day. Jets from close by North Weald Airfield roared throughout the sky. To plenty of the folks crowding outdoors the constructing – as a result of Nick Marsh’s last present was sold-out – it appeared triumphant, like Nick was getting his personal navy salute.
The service was lengthy and touching. Two of Nick’s pals sang If You Go Away, a Jacques Brel track that was coated by Scott Walker and Frank Sinatra and 21 previous and current members of the Mediaeval Baebes sang collectively round his coffin. Afterwards, The City Voodoo Machine – the band Nick had performed in for a decade or so – fashioned a New Orleans-style marching band and led the procession into the timber to the mournful sounds of St James Infirmary.
On the graveside, Nick’s younger daughters, bid him goodbye. “After I come again in a yr, daddy,” mentioned one, “you’ll be a gorgeous tree and we are able to play collectively.”
So there you go. That’s all the key characters and, sure, Nick dies in the long run. This story doesn’t have a contented ending.
I used to be supposed to write down this a few years in the past however I tousled. I interviewed Nick’s spouse Katherine – the week earlier than his funeral – after which misplaced the recording. I took notes on the funeral after which misplaced the pocket book. I used to be requested and tried to make a Wikipedia web page for Nick however Wiki’s editors wouldn’t approve it.
Nick, they mentioned, was not ‘notable’ sufficient – his life, they felt, was coated within the Wiki entry on Flesh For Lulu.
Then I misplaced Katherine’s interview and gave up.
So that is me attempting to make amends. That is the story – not of Nick, however of Flesh For Lulu. I spoke to all 4 core members and most of the others.
It’s the story of a band. And it begins with a funeral and ends with Nick Marsh taking the piss out of my trousers.
James knew Lulu method earlier than he’d met the remainder of them. He’d shared a flat along with her, his first flat in London after shifting down from Scotland. It was mad: Lulu lived on the touchdown along with her boyfriend; one other man lived within the flat’s tiny attic. Later, not lengthy after the band had began, Lulu was standing in entrance of a poster for the Andy Warhol film Flesh For Frankenstein and, bang, that they had a reputation.
James had moved from Scotland to London to check drama and was in some horrible punk band. Sooner or later his mate instructed him about this man he’d met at a celebration who was getting a band collectively. For some purpose – and James nonetheless does not know what possessed him – he determined to go all the way down to Brixton together with his guitar to satisfy this man.
When he received there, Nick Marsh didn’t want a guitarist, he wanted a drummer. Regardless that he’d by no means performed drums, James received behind a borrowed equipment, performed a few bits and Nick mentioned, “OK, let’s do it.”
The 2 males got here from fully totally different backgrounds. James got here from a comparatively snug background in Linlithgow and Nick had lived for 3 years in a group housing mission (“Experimental for the time,” says his mum, Pat) on the perimeters of London. However that they had music in frequent – punk, Bowie, Alice Cooper, but additionally older stuff like Sinatra and Scott Walker – plus James had written a bunch of songs and was a good-looking bastard, similar to Nick.
Nick was charming, charismatic and no slouch on guitar, both. After which there was his singing.
“He had a fully superb voice,” says James. “You heard his voice and his taking part in and that was one thing none of us might do. That was what made me drop out of college. After I first met him, it was virtually like an instantaneous love affair. I feel it was the identical for Kev and Rocco too. Rocco says he needed to be part of us as a result of he needed to pay again his seller and all of that – but it surely was Nick. He was only a beautiful man.”
When Rocco Barker was 15, his artwork instructor, a younger man from Yorkshire, invited him to a celebration after faculty. That they had bonded over information by Alice Cooper, Van Der Graaf Generator and Iron Butterfly.
On the get together, Rocco received speaking to this man in a wheelchair, an previous biker who’d had an accident or one thing, and he requested Rocco to comply with him right into a bed room.
However don’t fear, it’s not that form of story. Within the bed room was a report participant. “I need you to hearken to this,” the previous biker mentioned and he chopped out a line of pace. “However earlier than that, snort this.”
Rocco snorted the road of pace. And the biker turned the stereo up, lifted the needle and placed on White Mild, White Warmth.
“And my fucking world went psychological,” saays Rocco. “I went ‘Fuuuuuck!’ That was it.”
When he was 13, Nick’s mum ran a stall down Camden Market, again when the market was simply half a dozen tables. There was at all times a busker down there – an previous hippy sort – and this gave Nick an thought. He might busk. In any case, he had a guitar and he knew Blowin’ In The Wind and Ziggy Stardust.
So one Saturday he will get down there early, will get his hat on the bottom and is strumming away when the previous hippy man seems.
He comes over and eyes Nick-the-Child up. “How lengthy do you suppose you’ll be right here?” he says.
Nick shrugs. “I dunno. Til I’ve received 50p?” he says.
The hippy places his hand in his pocket and throws a coin at him. “Right here’s 50p,” he says. “Now fuck off.”
A few years later, Nick’s at his first ever Conflict gig: the Rock Towards Racism rally at Victoria Park, April 1978. He’s standing proper on the entrance and may’t imagine his fucking eyes: “I do know that geezer!” he shouted to anybody who’d hear. “I do know that geezer!’”
The previous hippy was fronting his new favorite band. He was Joe Strummer.
For some time, Flesh had been a three-piece: Nick, James and Glen Bishop on bass. It was the time of Easy Minds and Haircut 100, and their demos had been a bit Minds-y, a bit Depeche Mode and Speaking Heads: white-boys-do-disco, with crisp Nile Rodgers guitars and nagging keyboard hooks.
They received a John Peel session and from that Polydor paid for them to do some demos after which shortly signed James and Nick up as the subsequent Thompson Twins or some shit.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Nick had rock’n’roll in his bones. He as soon as instructed James that when he was a child the one rule was “do no matter you need”. (His mum, Pat, messaged me when this text was first revealed, worrying that I might made this sound a bit “Aleister Crowley.” “He was solely instructed ‘do what you need’ in relation to the profession in rock that we at all times knew he’d have,” she mentioned.)
James remembers him going from one squat to the subsequent, one girlfriend to a different, or serving to him do moonlight flits to get Nick out of locations the place he owed the owner a ton of cash. Even after the Polydor deal, he didn’t wish to spend his cash on trivial issues like hire.
“He ended up taking place to this place that does not exist any extra,” says James. “This place referred to as Gypsy Hill in Crystal Palace. It was an entire tribe of squats, notorious in its day. We did a few of our early gigs there, but it surely was fairly tough – filled with crusties and bikers.
“The primary gig we did was at my college, and we had this entire crowd from Gypsy Hill there and that’s the place the make-up factor occurred.” The women from Gypsy Hill took it upon themselves to offer the younger Flesh a gothic make-over. It turned a part of the stage present.
By 1983, Rocco Barker was a minor league star. His band Wasted Youth had been the discuss of the music weeklies and regarded like they might be massive – in the event that they stayed alive lengthy sufficient.
“I used to be on the entrance cowl of Sounds and I couldn’t even play guitar, to be trustworthy with you,” says Rocco. “I might actually solely string a number of chords collectively. That band was all non-musicians. We had been a part of that entire artwork mentality the place we did not give a fuck. We had a man consuming sandwiches with a lightbulb over his head and a vacuum cleaner whereas all of us performed one chord. And folks simply cherished it! It was that form of pretension that we had been into, greater than rock’n’roll.”
They labored with Martin Hannett and had been produced by Peter Perrett of The Solely Ones. By the point of their final gig at London’s Lyceum Ballroom, the entire band had been heroin addicts. After they break up, Rocco urgently wanted a gig.
“I wanted cash to maintain my behavior going. I used to be at my seller’s home and he’d minimize out this factor from Melody Maker and handed it to me. He was like, ‘Look: fucking pay me the cash you owe me – get your self a bloody job!’ So he handed it to me and it mentioned ‘Guitarist wished. Lou Reed and the Velvets, Iggy Pop & The Stooges and the Banshees’.”
Rocco rang the quantity within the advert, spoke to Peter Webber, the supervisor, and went all the way down to audition. “I don’t suppose I used to be out of it,” he says, “however I wasn’t filled with enthusiasm or something. I do not suppose my guitar had greater than two strings on it, so I needed to borrow a guitar. I most likely performed method out of tune and Nick needed to tune me up, however I used to be truly pleasantly shocked. I actually favored it. I assumed, ‘Wow – this might be good.’”
In 2015, simply months earlier than he died, Marsh instructed me this similar story. “He turned up with, like, a borrowed guitar, and he was nodding out within the audition,” he mentioned. “And everybody else was like, ‘You don’t need that man within the band, do you? He’s a junkie!’”
However Nick noticed one thing else. It turned his private mission to get Rocco away from all that. The band went on tour in Norway as a result of they heard there was no junk there, and no method of getting it, and Rocco went chilly turkey behind the van. “I needed to maintain on to this shivering, gibbering wreck for a few weeks,” mentioned Nick. “However he meant it when he mentioned he wished to get away from it – he by no means did return.”
“Inside a yr I used to be clear,” says Rocco. “I’d been on methadone and that didn’t work, however by pure coincidence, concurrently becoming a member of Flesh For Lulu, I left my girlfriend that I’d been with for six years, since faculty. You form of have to do this. I could not return to the place I lived due to the entire affiliation factor. I managed to sever all my ties and virtually begin a brand new life.”
He began going out with somebody who wasn’t into heroin. Her dad and mom had been docs they usually recognised Rocco’s habit and set about serving to him. “Anthony, her dad – it was was unbelievable the best way he helped me. So I had that help.”
James hadn’t seen something like that earlier than. Even Nick, raised on a commune, was nonetheless a bit naive. Rocco, however, was pure East Finish. Later, after they had been touring America and folks would say, “Hey man, the place you from?” Rocco would say, “I’m from London. However I’m not from simply any a part of London. I used to be born in a spot referred to as West Ham. Plaistow. Canning City. When you think about the arsehole of London, the sphincter – the place all of the shit comes out – that’s the place I used to be born…”
“Within the East Finish you had been both a junkie or a gangster,” says James. “I bear in mind going to a pub with Rocco and I’d had a spot of hassle with somebody and this little man comes up, Rocco’s Uncle Charlie, who’s on the run after some capturing up in Birmingham, and he’s like, ‘Roc tells me you are in a spot of hassle – would you like me to kind him out?’ I’m like [timid, polite voice], ‘No, it’s OK, Uncle Charlie’.”
Later, again at Rocco’s home, Rocco, his dad and his brothers had been all fully pissed. James, being a pleasant center class boy, made dialog with Rocco’s Italian mum, and tucked into the large Sunday lunch she’d placed on. He was the one one that ate a factor.
It was a sample he’d see repeated on numerous excursions: “I’d be attempting to maintain up appearances whereas the remaining had been all badly behaved.”
I attempted to do some digging on Rocco’s Uncle Charlie, Googling phrases like ‘Charlie Barker east finish gangs’ and so forth. The commonest end result I received was for Charlie Richardson.
Charlie and his brother Eddie ran The Richardson Gang. In response to Wikipedia, the Richardsons “had been an English crime gang primarily based in South London, England, within the Nineteen Sixties. Also called the ‘Torture Gang’, that they had a fame as a few of London’s most sadistic gangsters. Their alleged specialities included pulling tooth out utilizing pliers, reducing off toes utilizing bolt cutters and nailing victims to the ground utilizing 6-inch nails.”
Serving a 25 yr sentence, Charlie went on the run from an open jail in 1980. He was captured quickly sufficient, however by 1983 he was out on day launch and a free man by ’84.
I emailed Rocco. “I’ve received a loopy query,” I mentioned. “Your Uncle Charlie – he wasn’t Charlie Richardson, was he?”
Rocco received again that very same day: “He was a part of the Richardsons at one level,” he mentioned, “however no. He was a lone wolf, so to talk.”
Both method, it’d go some solution to clarify Flesh For Lulu’s darker lyrics – all these references to weapons and threats and damaged bones (‘Come on, open the door/I swear I gained’t hit you no extra’).
Every little thing occurs after darkish.
So now it was Nick, James, Rocco and Glen Bishop. The music had began to vary. Rocco had introduced a stage of white noise and rock’n’roll abandon to the Flesh For Lulu sound and you might hear it on their first report, the Roman Candle EP.
Written by Nick, Roman Candle seemed like Lou Reed organized by Ennio Morricone and performed by Adam and the Ants – all twanging guitars and chain gang backing vocals. Coming Down was attractive, woozy psychedelia (‘My lips turned blue after I kissed you’), written by James and impressed by Coming Down Once more from the Stones’ Goats Head Soup. Lame Prepare was the primary signal that they may carry a pop hook, but it surely nonetheless seemed like a message to Polydor: ‘The place your prepare goes, I don’t wanna go…’
Polydor had been horrified. A&R man Alan Sizer was livid. They’d signed a pop duo and received a report from some soiled fucking rock band! So as to add insult to harm, Roman Candle truly did respectable enterprise and received good evaluations, so if the label simply dropped them, they’d seem like dicks. Polydor weren’t pleased with this surprising success, not one bit.
I wrote and edited this on my own, so there’s solely me in charge. I didn’t receives a commission for writing it, so phrase rely wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t commissioned and I didn’t have a deadline. I did all of the analysis, and interviews and and transcribed all of them, besides one.
My buddy Lianne transcribed the Kevin Mills interview and it drove her mad. In her notes she wrote, like the professional she is, “The interview was troublesome to transcribe at instances as a result of Kevin typically tails off on the finish of his sentences. He additionally tends to mumble barely. When recalling humorous occasions, Kevin tends to giggle and discuss on the similar time, and can be consuming in the course of the interview, which makes the dialogue tougher to decipher.”
I interviewed Kevin by himself in some pub close to his home. His canine Cookie – a Parsons Jack Russell – was there and, continuously, we each discuss to it too. I spoke to James and Rocco collectively after which individually; Rocco in his workshop in Westbourne Park and James at a tapas bar in Ladbroke Grove.
The Nick Marsh interview most quoted on this piece is from 2005. I interviewed Nick perhaps 3 times in complete and 2005 was the primary time. We met in the course of the day in Bar Italia in Soho. The interview was recorded on a C90 tape and the recording is a nightmare: filled with background noise, music, and the clatter of cups on saucers.
Lianne would’ve hated transcribing that one.
Kevin Mills first met Flesh For Lulu at The Batcave, the membership night time he used to run as a part of Specimen. Specimen had been fashioned in Bristol and moved to London to hunt fame or infamy. After their first gig at Dingwalls, the venue banned them.
“We trashed the mic stand or one thing like that,” says Kevin. “They had been like, ‘You’ll by no means work at Dingwalls once more!’ and we had been like, ‘Thank God for that, it’s a shithole.’”
Unable to get a gig, singer Ollie had a brainwave: they might get their very own membership and play anytime they wished. Ollie went to see this previous dude Maurice, who ran a burlesque strip membership above Gossips, simply off of Dean Road within the coronary heart of Soho, again when Soho was Soho, and Maurice mentioned, “Effectively, I’ll provide you with one night time: when you can fill it, you possibly can have it each Wednesday.”
So, they did. They stuffed the place filled with every kind of loopy folks and the Batcave was up and working.
Very quickly, it out-grew Maurice’s strip membership and have become one of many largest membership nights in London. It was the Floor Zero of Goth and the cash from the Batcave bank-rolled the entire Specimen operation.
“Within the 80s there was an actual tendency for mid-week golf equipment,” says Kevin. “Weekends had been for the ‘bridge and tunnel folks’, you realize, all of the individuals who got here in from Essex and Hertfordshire to go to The Hippodrome or one thing. The cool cats went out in the course of the week.”
It was 1983-84 – the ‘goth motion’ hadn’t actually been invented. “Everyone goes, ‘Oh yeah, Flesh For Lulu: goth band,’” says Kevin, “however goth wasn’t actually a glance then. Flesh For Lulu had been actually a rock’n’roll band with massive hair. A great deal of jewelry and make up and stuff, however basically a rock band with punk influences and much extra – plenty of soul and nation. All types, actually.”
Sooner or later Nick picked up a pair of his girlfriend’s fishnet tights, tore a gap within the gusset and put his head by way of it, caught his arms into the legs and was like, “Hey, how’d you want my new look?” Everybody pissed themselves so, for fun, he goes down the Batcave dressed like that.
Siouxsie Sioux was there. Three days later, she’s on Prime of The Pops carrying Nick’s look. “She completely copped that off me, man,” mentioned Nick. “And now goths all over the world are dressed like that. That’s my declare to fame – it’s extra of a declare than being within the fucking band…”
Again in 2005, when Nick instructed me this, he added, “Steve Severin can confirm this – he gave me a fridge two weeks in the past!” Steve Severin was the bass participant for Siouxsie & The Banshees. I’m Fb pals with Steve – regardless that we’ve by no means met or spoken and he has by no means provided me any white items – so I messaged him and requested him if he might affirm.
Not. A fucking. Sausage.
Kevin booked the bands on the Batcave and Flesh For Lulu stood out. Issues had been coming to an finish with Specimen for him – it was all getting slightly bit too camp and cabaret. After Marsh died, Kevin wrote on Fb that he joined Flesh For Lulu in 1984 “as a result of I wished to play in a band with Nick. One thing about Flesh For Lulu made them stand out from the a whole bunch of bands on the London membership circuit. That one thing was Nick.”
He had all of it, mentioned Kevin: “a terrific voice, an enormous stage presence, a fistful of spiky, melodic tunes, he performed a cool Fender Jazzmaster with a punk angle – he was a killer guitarist with an instinctive grasp of soul music, rock & roll, r&b, Tamla, Atlantic, Stax, blues, nation and punk – and naturally he was a good-looking bastard as nicely.”
Kevin Mills watched Flesh For Lulu play the Batcave and he thought: “This band are superb. Effectively, all besides the bass participant.”
So quickly Glen was out, Kevin was in and Rocco was apprehensive.
“To be trustworthy, I did not need Kev within the band,” says Rocco. “That woman I discussed, whose dad and mom had been docs? Those who received me off heroin? Kev was head over heels in love along with her and she or he’d left him. Fortunately for me – I could not have been alive if it wasn’t for her. What I didn’t know till later, is that she was Kevin’s girlfriend. So I assumed, ‘The worst factor that may occur, is that Kevin’s going to affix my band – that’s going to make it actually sticky.’”
And Kevin Mills wasn’t simply becoming a member of the band – he was taking up. Kevin was pushed and he was a fan, a Flesh For Lulu convert, who thought they might be big and set about making it occur. “The very first thing I did,” says Kevin, “was go, ‘Who’s this man that’s managing you? He’s ineffective, are you able to not do away with him?’ And that was Pete Webber, who’s nonetheless a extremely good buddy of mine – I don’t know why, after that.”
Peter Webber had some expertise of administration as a part of the Psychedelic Furs operation. Kevin waded proper in: “Pete, man, why are you solely paying these guys ten quid per week? No one can reside on that.”
Kevin gave Flesh For Lulu a shake and Peter Webber fell out. “I feel Nick and James went to Pete Webber and mentioned, ‘Look Pete, it’s probably not understanding.’ I felt form of responsible about that, however I additionally thought it was for one of the best. We had been all fairly pushed in these days. I mainly took cost of that band after he left.”
This meant that Kevin managed the band, tour managed the band, performed within the band and helped write songs for the band for almost all of their profession. All of them agree that this was a mistake.
“It practically killed me,” says Kevin. “Truthfully. I used to be a little bit of a tyrant.”
That is how Rocco and James bear in mind Flesh For Lulu’s administration scenario:
Rocco: Peter wasn’t sacked.
James: Sure, he was.
Rocco: I didn’t suppose Peter was sacked – I assumed he left!
James: Kev kinda took over and that was disastrous.
Rocco: Who sacked Pete then?
James: I feel all of us did.
Rocco: Effectively, I didn’t – I did not even learn about it!
James: I feel Nick did, as a result of once more, there was this factor about desirous to go to a different stage, and get an even bigger supervisor. However then Kev doing it put plenty of pressure on him as a result of he was in two camps. If we’d had respectable administration, it might have had a special end result. A supervisor might have mentioned, “Reduce the shit, overlook about making a success report, simply do what you do.”
Rocco: Effectively, we had Ivor The Bastard, didn’t we?
James: However he wasn’t a correct supervisor.
Rocco: He was a tour supervisor, wasn’t he? However after we had been with Static [Records] he was type of managing us, wasn’t he?
James: Ish.
Rocco: Effectively, he was staying up all night time and taking pace with us…
James: The following step up was imagined to be Perry Watts-Russell. However then he received ailing. We actually signed with him after which he went, “Oh, truly, I’m ailing, I can’t do that.”
This was later, after they actually had been near turning into massive time, after they had songs on Hollywood motion pictures and had been hanging out with Matt Dillon and John Hughes.
Perry Watts-Russell was the brother of Ivo Watts-Russell, the 4AD man. Perry was primarily based in LA, and well-connected. He was precisely what they had been on the lookout for: a man with some clout and a little bit of imaginative and prescient. However inside two months of signing with him, Watts-Russell got here down with some type of dreadful situation that laid him up. He was bed-ridden. Incapacitated. That they had signed with a supervisor who was now actually incapable of managing.
They could not even get him on the telephone. His folks would reply and say, “He can’t discuss in the intervening time – he’s in a extremely unhealthy method.”
“And I used to be on this horrible place,” says Kevin, “as a result of I’m like, nicely, shit, you realize, I actually really feel for the man however on the similar time: who the fuck is taking care of us?”
No one was caring for enterprise. Ultimately, the contract was cancelled by mutual request and Kevin took over once more.
Again in 1984, Glen was out, session man Phil Spalding completed the job and Kevin Mills’s face was on the quilt of Flesh For Lulu’s self-titled debut album, regardless of not having performed a observe on it.
In Sounds, Chris Roberts gave it 4 and three quarters out of 5 and Jack Barron referred to as Stressed and Subterraneans “two of essentially the most thrilling singles I’ve heard this yr”.
Whereas the remainder of goth pack had been attempting to sound icy chilly and creepy, Flesh For Lulu had been heat and attractive, with a Stonesy swagger and a sinister flip of phrase.
‘We’re gonna break each his legs,’ went Hyena. ‘We’re the canines/Those that chew to scar ceaselessly,’ went Canine, Canine, Canine. They had been half Brixton and half Brooklyn, Nick’s voice Elvis-in-Vegas wealthy, Lou Reed cool, Sinatra easy, the music cooked on the identical spoon as Alice Cooper, Bowie, Johnny Thunders and The Solely Ones, reverb guitars shuddering within the background, with choruses that bit and scarred ceaselessly.
It’s simple to write down a narrative like this and deal with all of the negatives – ‘The place did all of it go unsuitable?’ – however that is the interval the place all of it went proper.
“When it began to take off, it was heaven,” says James. “You’re in a band, doing what you wish to do…”
They met loopy folks. Like Useless Or Alive’s Pete Burns who as soon as, down the Batcave, took off certainly one of his stilettos and smacked Specimen guitarist Jon Klein on the top with it.
“And the heel of the stiletto,” mentioned Nick, “was caught in his brow! Jon Klein’s standing there with a fucking shoe protruding his head! After which he pulls it out and blood shoots up like a fucking oil-well…”
The primary massive American tour, they employed a automobile, simply the 4 of them, and the crew went within the van. They performed all these seedy locations, stayed in whorehouses. In Texas, pockets filled with narcotics, they received pulled over by cops, fucking police canines leaping up on them. However as a substitute of nicking them, the Sheriff received a kick out of those English freaks and allow them to maintain their weapons and pose for footage.
One time in Brussels they received right into a mass brawl with a bunch of soccer hooligans, Kevin swinging one man right into a plate glass window, pondering, ‘Oh, fuck’ as he let him go and, the man simply bouncing off it BOINNNG!! coming again into the room, arms swinging.
In Holland in 1985 they performed an entire set of nation and Cajun covers, stuff they’d been listening to on the tour bus: Bobby Charles and Misplaced Freeway by Hank Williams. The author Kris Wants got here on tour to write down a characteristic and made the band all these tapes – hip-hop, gospel, nation, you identify it – and it seeped into the music. James nonetheless has these tapes.
Perhaps in the future somebody will write a e book about Flesh For Lulu and, in the event that they do, that is the place all of the gold lies. The stuff about ingesting moonshine in Norway, or hitting post-Franco Spain, the place everybody was up for a celebration and fully off their faces, or Aberdeen because the oil cash kicked in and it was just like the Wild West (“There have been males combating ladies, ladies combating males, bouncers combating one another…”).
Then there’s the American strippers that, y’know, sorted Nick and James, and the time Sisters Of Mercy frontman and fencing-enthusiast Andrew Eldritch challenged Rocco to a really public duel outdoors within the college campus in Glasgow and Rocco completely whipped him.
“I went to one of many worst colleges in London,” says Rocco, “however that they had this scheme for under-privileged children and, you realize, the fats child and Massive Nostril are the final ones to be picked for the soccer workforce, so…”
So he took up fencing and made it so far as the Junior Olympic squad.
Eldritch did not know this and at Glasgow College threw down the gauntlet. Eldritch was in his full gear, Rocco in a pair of leather-based trousers, some stuff borrowed from the sports activities division and holding a strolling stick: “I’d jumped off a flight of stairs, off my head, y’know,” he says. “I didn’t break my ankle however I couldn’t stroll for 2 months.”
It didn’t hinder his fencing.
“I fucking thrashed him,” he says. “I killed him. He did not have an opportunity.”
There are good quiet moments too, just like the time after a gig on the Ayr Pavilion in Scotland, after they went swimming within the sea at night time. “Someone went, ‘Hey do you wish to all come again to our place? Let’s go for a swim first’,” says Kevin. “We had been like, ‘Fuck off,’ however everyone simply piled all the way down to the water and went skinny dipping. And it was good.
“We simply couldn’t imagine it – the water was heat. I bear in mind James saying one thing like, ‘Yeah, it’s the Gulf Stream,’ like, ‘Why are you so shocked? It’s stunning right here. It’s at all times heat on the West Coast of Scotland.’”
“Between 84-86 is generally an enormous blur to me,” Nick wrote later. “Using the night time bus from Brixton to the West Finish in white leather-based mini-skirts in Thatcher Period Britain. We lived it. The tales are within the songs.”
This was Flesh’s golden age and the songs got here simply. Lastly dropped by Polydor, they received a take care of a small label referred to as Hybrid, an imprint of Statik information, a Glaswegian label that additionally launched information by The Chameleons, The Sound and Males With out Hats.
Their first launch was a 5-song EP referred to as Blue Sisters Swing. Lead monitor Seven Hail Marys was written in Hamburg, the place Rocco remembers Nick fucking round with an previous Frank Zappa track, Jelly Roll Gum Drop, and feeling responsible about utilizing the identical melody.
The track’s lyrics about sin and Catholic guilt – no sin goes unnoticed by God’s all-seeing eyes, that form of factor – had been made flesh by the sleeve, an previous 18th or nineteenth century engraving of two nuns making out whereas somebody spies on them from beneath. Rocco says he noticed it in a e book his girlfriend had and Nick hand-coloured it.
“It was only a little bit of enjoyable,” shrugs Rocco.
Predictably, in America far-right Christian teams got here to their gigs to protest.
“We had been like, ‘Who’re they protesting towards?’” says James. “Oh, us.”
In actual fact, the image on the sleeve isn’t some historic engraving. It’s from 1952 – simply 33 years earlier – and referred to as ‘Le Reve Claustral’ by Clovis Trouille, a French artist whose earliest work pre-dated the Surrealists.
The title ‘Le Reve Claustral’ (typically translated as ‘Monastic Desires’) most likely comes from a piece of the identical identify by a turn-of-the-century French poet referred to as Germain Nouveau – a poem that additionally appears to be about forbidden need in a convent.
So was this an harmless combine up or a cheeky blag? The poet Germaine Nouveau was a buddy of Rimbaud and Verlaine, two poets that James was studying and impressed by (“I used to be into poetry,” James instructed me, explaining the lyrics of Loss of life Shall Come. “Arthur Rimbaud and Verlaine and all that type of stuff”) so it was actually one thing they may have stumbled throughout.
Equally, it’s not laborious to think about Rocco tearing a black and white model out of a e book and, separated from context, forgetting the image’s origins, or getting them muddled in his head. The Flesh model has been re-coloured, in any case, and this was method earlier than Google made all these things simply researchable.
I don’t know which is the reality and I don’t actually care. I simply loved stumbling across the web like a goth-rock Columbo.
Different highlights on Blue Sisters Swing included I Might Have Mentioned You’re Lovely However You Know I’m Simply A Liar, which stomped just like the Stooges regardless of Nick having written it on ecstasy at New York’s well-known Danceteria membership, whereas a pre-fame Madonna labored behind the bar “in full Batcave garb”.
Rocco chuckled darkly by way of the goth-girl-group-country-folk of Who’s In Hazard? and James contributed Loss of life Shall Come, probably Flesh For Lulu’s solely actual goth track, a brilliantly morbid epic that sounds in contrast to the rest.
“If I used to be requested to invent the right rock’n’roll band, I’d most likely mannequin it fairly intently on Flesh For Lulu,” Jane Simon wrote in her evaluation in Sounds.
After Blue Sisters Swing got here Massive Enjoyable Metropolis. Produced by Craig Leon, it was their biggest album. They select Leon, mentioned Nick, as a result of “he was chargeable for three of our all-time favourites, the Ramones first album, Parallel Strains from Blondie and Suicide”.
In flip, Leon selected Olympic Studios due to all of the classic tools that they had – gear that had recorded Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who and extra. The band, mentioned Nick, “had been blissful to see if the spirit of Sympathy For The Satan was nonetheless bouncing off the partitions”.
It was. The Spirit of Sympathy For The Satan had been hanging round Olympic Studios, smoking fags out the again with The Ghost of Wild Factor and taking the piss out of the Phantom of A Evening At The Opera. He was simply ready for a band like Flesh For Lulu to return alongside.
New boy Kev contributed the primary single Child Hurricane (“Which may have been the primary track I wrote for Flesh, truly”), a deliciously dumb rock track that’s most likely about blow jobs however nonetheless appears like a radio hit. Cat Burglar – initially the b-side to Stressed – was remade and remodelled by a band on the prime of their sport and filled with ambition: ‘Kick open that door ‘trigger I need extra and I need it now’.
Hire Boy’s piano half vamped and stumbled like Mike Garson’s intro to Bowie’s Girl Grinning Soul, whereas a brass part swelled and Nick’s wealthy voice made being a male intercourse employee sound like a fairly stable profession transfer: ‘Every little thing that you simply do/She’s gonna use you/Cindy’s received a job for you/And there’s bucks in it too’.
Golden Handshake Lady was Candy Jane-Goes-Stax. Simply One Second, a stunning Gram Parsons-style nation track. Craig Leon received them to play the backing tracks reside, giving the album a unfastened rock’n’roll really feel that they might by no means recapture.
The Spirit of Sympathy For The Satan was fairly happy with himself.
Outdoors of the spirit world, although, no-one gave an excessive amount of of a shit. Massive Enjoyable Metropolis went unnoticed by the mainstream. In 1985, the indie music press had The Smiths and The Jesus And Mary Chain to get enthusiastic about. Flesh For Lulu weren’t heavy sufficient for Kerrang! and never goth sufficient for the viewers they’d attracted by way of excursions with Specimen and The Sisters Of Mercy.
“We did not actually know what we had been doing,” says Rocco. “We solely knew we wished to be a rock’n’roll band and that we didn’t wish to be pigeon-holed as a goth band.”
Their good, open-hearted eclecticism was their undoing. “I feel it harmed us,” says Rocco. “I would not change it, however I feel it made it troublesome for report firms realizing the best way to market us. Rock’n’roll wasn’t that profitable then both. Hanoi Rocks did alright, however they had been fairly cartoonish. They had been just like the New York Dolls they usually toured with Johnny Thunders. However a band like us, taking part in a rustic track and a bizarre goth factor…”
There was one plus: Beggars Banquet, the house of Bauhaus and The Cult, turned their new label.
Struggling to attach within the UK, Flesh For Lulu regarded elsewhere.
Not solely had been Flesh in love with the music of the USA, they had been handled higher over there. “You’d flip up at someplace like Retford Porterhouse and go, ‘The place’s our rider?’” says Kevin. “‘The place are all of the beers and stuff?’ and the bloke would go, ‘You’ve received 4 fucking cans of Kestrel lager. Take it or fucking depart it.’ There was simply this countless,” he searches for the phrases, “…being handled like cunts, mainly.
“Then we went to America and there’d be like two bottles of tequila, a crate of wine, a large desk heaving with buffet, all very nice meals. You’d give them a rider they usually’d truly give it to you! And the audiences had been superb. They’d go loopy, fucking psychological, and we simply went, ‘Let’s play right here for the remainder of our lives’.”
On their first tour of the US, they took turns driving. Rocco would drive within the morning in order that he might drink at night time. “The issue was getting me up,” he says. “So Kev used to place an enormous line of coke subsequent to my mattress, and faucet me on the shoulder – ‘Up!’ – and I’d do the primary stint.”
Who, I requested Kevin, was the primary troublemaker within the band? “Rocco,” he mentioned, with no second thought. “He may deny this, however – when you converse to him and he denies it – he’s mendacity. He is aware of full nicely.
“Sadly, Roc substituted the skag for booze and for the subsequent few years he was constantly out of it, mainly. In plenty of methods, Roc was the final word rocker…”
It received actually tiresome after some time, he says, as a result of Rocco was simply completely off the hook, and he tells me this story for instance: They had been within the States, someplace like Cleveland, staying in some posh lodge, and Rocco and Mark Edwards, one of many highway crew, went to the bar.
“There was a bunch of fellows in fits ingesting. Rocco’s already fully out of it. He reels as much as the bar, and mumbles, ‘Jack and Coke,’ and the man behind the bar goes, ‘No, you’ve had sufficient, buddy,’ So Rocco went, ‘Give me a fucking Jack and Coke’.
“He’s pointing at these businessmen going, ‘They’ve received fucking drinks, why can’t I’ve a drink?’ So, the man went, ‘I instructed you, I’m not serving you, get the fuck out.’”
However Rocco didn’t get the fuck out. As a substitute, “he received his cock out and simply began pissing actually everywhere in the bar, and throughout these guys.” When the barman went for his baseball bat, Mark grabbed Rocco and the 2 of them ran.
“All of us form of held him on this type of bizarre awe for doing issues like that,” says Kevin, “as a result of it was true rock’n’roll behaviour. I imply, none of us would do shit like that. However the purpose Nick and Roc turned such a workforce, was as a result of Nick wasn’t like that and I feel he at all times wished to be. Nick wished to be extra like Rocco.
“He wished to be extra rock’n’roll and that turned a little bit of an issue as nicely, as a result of he began ingesting extra, taking extra medication and attempting to have an effect on a extra outrageous persona.”
“Nick and Rocco took it to a different stage,” says James, “so me and Kev turned the wise ones. I feel Nick tried to maintain up with Roc. And perhaps he wasn’t as sturdy as he was. Roc’s an actual survivor. And Nick had extra strain on him. He had this insecurity…”
“I feel Nick wanted me cos I’m fairly fearless,” says Rocco. “I do not give a fuck. Perhaps as a result of I come from such a tough background. I don’t suppose Nick wished to be like me – I feel he noticed one thing in me that he wished to possess. The way in which I noticed it, I’d kick the door down after which, after we get in there, ‘Type it out, Nick’. Cos Nick was at all times the boss, the best way I noticed it. He was at all times the Guv’nor.”
“To me, it’s not simply concerning the music, it’s the entire way of life of it. No matter folks say about touring, other than being onstage, it’s nonetheless extremely boring. How bands go on tour sober, I don’t know. I do not know the way the fuck they do this. I simply couldn’t think about it. Staring out of a window all day, studying your e book, no matter.
“I did do a gig sober as soon as, I hated it. Nick made me do it. I simply couldn’t wait to get off.
“For me, there’s been some superb artists and as quickly as they cease ingesting or doing medication, they only flip crap. They only by no means write one other good track. And if me and Nick had been nonetheless doing it, we’d nonetheless be at it.”
The division between The Drinkers and The Smart Ones affected the band’s writing.
By Blue Sisters Swing, they had been all writing. They didn’t write collectively. As a substitute, particular person members would carry of their songs virtually absolutely completed. They might rehearse it and, if it labored out, the songwriting credit score went to the entire band.
“Then after a short time it received a bit fractious,” says Kevin, “as a result of James and I ended up writing the majority of the songs, and Nick and Rocco had, type of, laid again a bit.”
The Drinkers weren’t actually contributing as a lot and Kev was actually disillusioned in that: “I actually wished Nick to write down the majority of the songs. I simply thought he was a terrific track author. I wished to write down however I didn’t wish to grow to be the dominant songwriter. I wished Nick and James to hold on writing collectively. I used to be an enormous fan of their writing.”
Ultimately, The Smart Ones got here to a smart conclusion: that in the event that they had been going to do all of the writing, they need to get all of the songwriting credit too.
“We actually did it to offer Nick a kick up the arse,” says Kevin. Nick and Rocco received actually upset, like ‘We are able to’t do this, we’re a band’ and in the long run they got here to a compromise: the entire band received a credit score, however the individual that truly wrote the track additionally received their identify on it.
And that’s the best way they went into subsequent album, Lengthy Stay The New Flesh, recorded at Abbey Highway with Mike Hedges.
“There have been a few sticky moments,” says Rocco. “I imply, that track, Approach To Go. Simply: what the fuck is that? It appears like Merely Purple. It’s terrible.”
Lengthy Stay The New Flesh was recorded over three months with Mike Hedges at Abbey Highway, Studio 2. The Beatles recorded Come Collectively in that room. Johnny Kidd & The Pirates did Shakin’ All Over there. Matt Munro sang From Russia With Love.
By some means New Flesh nonetheless got here out sounding prefer it was recorded in LA for American radio. Which was precisely the concept. New UK report label Beggars Banquet, says Kevin, “wished a report that might sound massive they usually might shift in America. I imply, so did we. Mike [Hedges] had been instructed to ship that sound.”
“We went within the studio with Mike Hedges,” Nick mentioned, “and on the primary day we began taking part in and getting the monitor combine collectively and me and Rocco had been like, ‘The place’s the fucking guitars, man?’ and [Hedges] mentioned, ‘Do you need guitars?’ We had been like: ‘Oh fuck’…”
No matter, Mike Hedges did what he was requested to do: New Flesh was their biggest-selling album and took them to a special stage within the States. At the moment, the manufacturing sounds slightly bit 80s – polished and over-produced – and the songs slightly bit skinny.
“I can’t stand it,” Nick mentioned. “And an album’s a bit like tattoo. I’ve been carrying it round, this insipid, fucking…”
The songs had been stable (Good For You, Fortunate Day, Sooner Or Later) however there have been only some bonafide FFL classics. The Replacements woulda bought their Ma for Kevin’s contributions – Postcards From Paradise (later coated by Paul Westerberg and the Goo Goo Dolls) and the effortlessly cool Sleeping Canines, whereas Nick’s Siamese Kiss stomped with a gleeful Glitter Band beat.
This time the band’s influences – at all times eclectic – threatened to completely undermine the Flesh For Lulu model. “Across the time of Lengthy Stay the New Flesh, Nick had this actually massive factor about Prince,” says Kevin. “He cherished Prince, he thought the man was a genius – all of us did – however we needed to steer him away from the Prince aspect slightly bit as a result of we thought it was getting a bit away from the sound of the band…”
To an outsider, it felt like a cynicism had crept in. The sides had been filed off. Gone had been the times of attractive lesbian nuns and ‘I’m gonna break each his legs’. As a substitute, the art work featured a corny air-brushed brand of a winged coronary heart towards a metropolis skyline.
Songs like Crash had been breezy and good. Hammer Of Love nailed Peter Gunn horns and a cool bassline to a lyric about table-top shagging. After which there was Approach To Go, which did sound a bit like Merely Purple.
Approach To Go was one other certainly one of Kevin’s. The stress of recording it – the seek for perfection and the drive for achievement – signalled the start of the tip for Rocco. “It’s a implausible track,” he says, “however the best way it was performed… There was one line, I might need been a millisecond out and Kev made me play it and play it and play it. And eventually I went, ‘You recognize what? You play it.’
“And that was the seed that went on to the subsequent album. It received to the purpose that no matter I performed, it simply wasn’t adequate. And I assumed, ‘You recognize what? I’m not on this band anymore.’”
There was an even bigger image. Kevin was reaching breaking level: writing songs, taking part in bass, managing the band. It was round this time that Perry Watts-Russell received concerned. Kevin’s most well-liked selection for supervisor was a girl referred to as Janet McQueeney, however Nick and Rocco wouldn’t go for it. Then the Watts-Russell factor led to catastrophe.
“He received the hump about that,” says Rocco.
“It drove a wedge between us all,” agrees James.
Belief Hollywood to vow a contented ending. The flicks of John Hughes – truly made and set round Chicago – had been single-handedly altering the fortunes of British different rock bands, with soundtracks that had been as good and quirky as his characters.
Hughes was a music nut with an Anglophile’s information of latest wave and different rock. “I at all times most well-liked to hang around with the outcasts,” he mentioned, “‘cos they had been cooler. That they had higher style in music, for one factor…”
Easy Minds received a US no.1 out of the soundtrack to 1985’s The Breakfast Membership with (Don’t You) Overlook About Me. The Psychedelic Furs had their largest UK hit with the title monitor to Fairly In Pink, and the soundtrack album additionally included songs by New Order, Echo & The Bunnymen and OMD. All of a sudden, British different music had one thing greater to intention for than 4 cans of Kestrel on the Retford Porterhouse.
Peter Webber – the band’s former supervisor – was working with Psychedelic Furs and instructed Flesh For Lulu that Hughes was on the lookout for a brand new track for his subsequent film Some Type Of Great. James purchased himself a 4-track and knocked up I Go Loopy fairly shortly.
“Nick tidied it up,” he says. “I had an enormous argument with him about it, truly. It was a lot darker. It actually was ‘I’m going loopy’. It was a track about melancholy, about not being blissful, punching a window over some woman I’d been seeing.”
Nick re-wrote some the lyrics, softened it up a bit for Hollywood, they usually received Pet Store Boys producer Stephen Hague in.
“He was a little bit of a twat,” says James. “He had this woman who’d sit and roll him spliffs. He tried to get a songwriting credit score as a result of he modified a chord within the center eight. He did a flat A as a substitute of a significant.” They needed to take it to 2 musicologists to keep away from giving him a proportion of the royalties.
It was their largest hit – a cool Billy Idol-like pop track that was a terrific car for Nick’s voice. Within the video, the band are closely styled and Nick is all exaggerated arm-movements. He’d determined he didn’t wish to play guitar anymore. He wished to be a frontman. He had a brand new persona he wished to check out: Nick Nasty.
“He simply wished to be Iggy Pop or one thing,” says Kevin. “I feel that ‘Nick Nasty’ was his thought. However then Ivor Wilkins, our tour supervisor, began calling him ‘the cruel Marsh’ – Nick Nasty, the cruel Marsh. Nick used to get barely peeved as a result of he at all times thought we had been taking the piss slightly bit.”
That they had introduced in a fifth member in the course of the recording of New Flesh: Derek Greening (aka Del Strangefish), previously of Peter & The Check Tube Infants.
Derek remembers first assembly them at a present in Germany the place Flesh For Lulu had been supporting the Check Tube Infants. “There was a riot outdoors between punks and skinheads,’ he says. “Rocco and Nick had been within the dressing room going, ‘Are we gonna be alright?’”
Derek was a fan of Massive Enjoyable Metropolis and when he moved from Brighton to Brixton he “used to drink down the Prince Albert on Coldharbour Lane, which was a hangout for punks and goths and stuff. We turned mates they usually requested me if I’d do a little bit of guitar. Nick wished to cease taking part in guitar on stage in order that he might be free to maneuver round extra, be a bit extra Iggy Pop.
“In order that’s the way it began – I didn’t realise I might nonetheless be doing it eight years later.”
Perhaps in the future somebody will make a film about Flesh For Lulu and, in the event that they do, this would be the bit they go to city on. The band’s gritty beginnings in Brixton and the Batcave will probably be squashed into the primary 20 minutes and the remaining will play out like a goth-rock Entourage – set within the American sunshine, with the band in shades and black leather-based jackets, surrounded by stunning ladies, Hollywood administrators and flash automobiles.
“My favorite reminiscence,” says Derek, “is a tour we did with The March Violets on the again of Some Type of Great. Paramount Footage backed the tour. I’d toured America earlier than behind a Transit van with 24 different guys with bushy arses, so this was one thing else. Paramount was choosing up the tab, so we’d get pushed in every single place in Limousines, keep in 5-star resorts, and all the things was free.
“Again house in Brixton we’d have padlocks on our fridges. Right here, there was free champagne, free Jack Daniel’s, free all the things.”
On the finish of the tour, they performed on the Palace in LA. It was, wrote the LA Occasions, an enormous night time “for scores of just-about-to-be-somebodies”. Some Type Of Great premiered earlier that night time on the Chinese language Theater and the viewers on the Palace included John Hughes, Eric Stoltz, Lea Thompson, Mary Stuart Masterson, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, the Bangles, Andy Summers, Michael Des Barres, the Beastie Boys and Rutger Hauer.
That they had signed to Capitol. They had been taking part in greater venues. John Hughes had signed them to his publishing firm. Aerosmith’s Joe Perry mentioned that Lengthy Stay The New Flesh was his album of the yr. They received the massive tour bus, they performed the larger venues, they stayed on the massive resorts… It was the rock’n’roll dream come true. Success, glamour, on the cusp of the massive time. However one thing nonetheless wasn’t proper.
“John Hughes used to take us out,” remembers James, “and he’d say, ‘Right here’s my quantity – when you want something, simply name me’. And also you’d ring it and it’d be lifeless. A lifeless quantity.”
“The final album,” says Rocco, “was only a nightmare.” They settled on this man Mark Optiz, an Aussie who’d produced Australian bands like Chilly Chisel and Jimmy Barnes. Optiz was half proprietor of INXS’s Rhino Studios in Sydney and steered they do it there. Beggars Banquet, hoping that slightly little bit of INXS’s magic would rub off on them, mentioned sure.
The band arrived in Australia exhausted and sick of the sight of one another. There was plenty of ingesting and plenty of downers. By his personal account, Kev was driving everybody mad, himself included. “I most likely had a number of breakdowns and didn’t even discover,” he says. “Simply got here out the opposite finish and began once more.
“I used to be a management freak. I used to be actually attempting to regulate the future of the band, not for my very own ends, however to get us the place I assumed we needs to be. It’s not a good suggestion to be a supervisor and be within the band. You lose the dressing room, as they are saying. And I actually did. The extra you suppose you’re doing it for everyone’s profit, the extra they resent you for it.”
Round that point, James found {that a} childhood accident – the place he’d crashed his bike and impaled himself on the handlebars (“I very practically died, it ripped my bowels open. I had a blood transfusion, septicaemia, all the things”) – had left him with a everlasting again drawback.
“I went for an X-ray they usually had been like, ‘Oh, you’ve damaged your again, truly’. I had no thought.” To counter it, the docs instructed him, he needed to keep match. He’d have to surrender the lifetime of extra he’d been residing for the previous few years.
In Australia, he began going to the health club. Nick didn’t approve. “Nick could not deal with the truth that I went swimming or went to the health club,” says James. “He thought it was actually unrock’n’roll. I mentioned, ‘Nick: I have to. I am unable to bodily play if I don’t’.”
The songs weren’t there. James hadn’t written a lot, Kev did not wish to and Nick was attempting to do his funky Prince form of factor. Derek stepped in. “His songs had been a type of poppy,” says Kevin. “I suppose, extra industrial, however I didn’t actually suppose that they had the depth of the sooner Flesh For Lulu songs.”
So as to add insult to harm, it turned out that the deal Derek had signed meant that, the place the unique 4 break up the royalties on every track, Derek stored all his royalties to himself. “Somebody ought to have stood as much as him,” says James, “however by that time…”
Nick later instructed Vive Le Rock journal that “Del wrote Time And Area, which is no doubt essentially the most silly, saccharine piece of shit pop track, with none redeeming options. In fact the report firm fucking cherished it and caught it straight out as a single.”
Which was a bit naughty of him, actually, and may simply illustrate Kevin’s factors about Nick’s failure to step up at instances. Nick was the singer, frontman and founding father of Flesh For Lulu. If he didn’t like that track, and if he did not need it as a single, perhaps he might have proven some management – refused to report it, halt its launch. It simply wasn’t his method.
“Nick was fairly a humble or non-confrontational man,” says Kevin. “He wished what he wished however he didn’t wish to must bully folks or to must drive at it to be able to get it.”
For Rocco it got here to a head in the course of the recording of the album opener, a track by Kevin referred to as Decline And Fall. “There’s plenty of guitars on that,” says Rocco, “they usually’re actually fairly intricate and I’m not the best guitar participant. What I’m good at is simply doing bizarre shit, making them sound totally different, you realize? I spent two days with the engineer Al, 12 hours a day – I imply, we had been doing coke and no matter, having a good time – and on the finish of it Kev walked in.
“He didn’t even hear – because of this I knew it was bullshit – he walked in and after about 4 bars, walked again out once more and went, ‘That is garbage. Get Nick to play it.’ And I assumed, ‘I’m not even going to hassle taking part in guitar’. I simply went off and received drunk within the bars in Sydney. I walked out of that report, actually half method by way of it.”
Nick, in the meantime, was having at go at James over his drumming. “I knew my limitations as a drummer,” says James. “I had the power however I used to be by no means going to be Topper Headon. And that’s what Nick wished, or thought he did. All of us began to slag one another off. Kev would say to Nick, ‘You’re out of your head. It’s laborious to get a vocal out of you, you’re simply slurring’, an excessive amount of coke or no matter.
“Rocco was too pissed. Kev was imploding. Derek was within the band, and actually all one of the best stuff was written when it was simply the 4 of us. We had been prime of faculty radio in America and taking part in fairly good venues after which we went to Sydney and all of it blew up in our faces.
“We overlooked what all of us did. We turned too success-hungry. We had been all attempting desperately to interrupt by way of to subsequent stage and we overlooked what made us good.”
The completed album, Plastic Incredible, was fairly nicely represented by its two first singles, Decline And Fall and Time And Area: two fully common, characterless, and immediately forgettable rock songs.
“The songs had been much less attractive, much less sensual, they usually lacked among the attraction that these early songs had,” says Kevin. “It appeared to be devolving again into this type of – I don’t even wish to say it – pub rock form of factor, the place you’ve received these rocking songs, however there’s nothing mysterious or alluring about them. It’s simply straight forward boogie.”
The most effective songs had been Nick’s. Silly In The Road seemed like like New Sensations-era Lou Reed – heat and doo-woppy – whereas the title monitor closed the album with a sluggish funk that may have been the closest he received to nailing the Prince vibe he was on the lookout for.
‘I am a sci-fi child of the twenty-first century,” he sang on the finish. ‘That’s me/Plastic implausible/I can really feel it while you discuss/See it while you stroll that method… Bye-bye.‘
However the story wasn’t fairly over. Kev had landed them a large tour supporting Public Picture throughout the States and Canada.
“I labored my balls off getting this tour collectively,” says Kevin, “and simply as we had been about to exit on tour I received a name from Nick.
“Nick went, ‘Yeah Kev, I don’t wish to work with you anymore. Or James.’ I used to be like, ‘Are you kidding?’”
Alright, Kev might type of see it coming, however nonetheless. In order that they talked for a bit and Kev accepted it was over. “I mentioned, ‘OK, however after the tour, yeah? Let’s exit on a excessive.’”
However Nick was adamant. He didn’t wish to go on tour with Kevin or James. And, Nick mentioned, Rocco felt the identical. Their minds had been made up.
So Kevin and James had been out on the eve of the largest tour the band had ever completed. “I used to be like, ‘Effectively, fuck you very a lot,’” says Kevin.
Rocco doesn’t bear in mind it this fashion. “I don’t suppose anybody was sacked,” he says, even after I inform him that Kevin says Nick referred to as him up and fired him over the telephone.
“Nah,” says Rocco.
“Yeah,” says James. “He did.”
Rocco: “Did he?”
“Yeah,” says James.
However Rocco nonetheless doesn’t suppose anybody was sacked. Not likely. The way in which he remembers it, they received again from Australia – Rocco, Nick and Del flew to Bangkok for Christmas Eve 1988, went psychological, flew again house – and after they’d been again for a bit, Rocco phoned Nick and instructed him he was leaving.
He’d come again and had a superb chat together with his companion on the time – Cleo Murray, the lead singer of the March Violets – and between them they’d agreed it was time to maneuver on.
When he instructed him, Nick was shocked, however after some time he rang again and mentioned, “I’m leaving as nicely. We’ll depart collectively.”
(The yr earlier than he died, Nick instructed Vive Le Rock this actual story, however the different method round: “We got here again to London and I mentioned, ‘I stop’ and Rocco mentioned, ‘I stop as nicely then’.”)
Rocco and Nick referred to as a gathering in a pub within the West Finish at 11 within the morning. “I used to be in at half previous 10,” says Rocco, “fucking ingesting a whisky earlier than they received there. I used to be dreading it.” Issues had snowballed: all of a sudden the 2 of them had been carrying on and James and Kevin had been out. Rocco tried to maintain his head down. “I used to be like, ‘You recognize what? No matter’. All of us met. It didn’t even final that lengthy…”
“I used to be mainly sacked from my band,” says James. “The band that I began.”
So it didn’t finish notably amicably. There was a stop and desist order and a few authorized squabbles. After some time, Kev heard that they’d received new administration, a few fucking guys, Pushy and Comfortable or some shit – Mr. Pushkin and Mr. Cushberger – two American dudes who had been like, “Hey, we’re a shit scorching administration workforce!” Nevertheless it was a catastrophe and after the Public Picture tour all of it fell to bits.
Each Kevin and James couldn’t assist however take slightly little bit of satisfaction from that.
On one hand, Rocco describes the PiL tour as a little bit of fun – massive venues, nice resorts – however the tales from the tour are darkish. Nick instructed Vive Le Rock that one night time John Lydon spiked his drink with peyote, after which whispered in his ear all night time, tormenting him and turning Nick’s journey unhealthy. There’s one other story involving a critical unprovoked assault that I solely have anecdotal proof of.
After which there was the Lydon brawl.
They’re on the PiL tour and Rocco hits it off with PiL guitarist John McGeogh: “a stunning man. Scottish, at all times pissed. I used to name him The Chardonnay Child,” says Rocco. “He’d name your room. [Mimics McGeogh on the phone, in thick Glaswegian] ‘Hey! Ah’m in tha jacuzzi, man! Wi’ a bottle o’ Chardonnaaaay!’ I imply, actually: 9 o’clock within the morning, most mornings, it’s McGeogh, ringing you.”
One explicit day, Cleo flew in and that night time everybody ended up at a membership, sat on the bar. Rocco’s received Lydon on his proper and Cleo to his left. Nick’s the opposite facet of Lydon. The home band are taking part in Flesh For Lulu songs they usually ask Rocco to return up and play guitar with them. Afterwards, when he sits down, it appears like Lydon’s a bit bizarre about it.
Lydon had been bragging about how a lot he’d spent on this shell go well with he was carrying. “He’d purchased it in a Hilton over there and it’d price him 400 bucks,” says Rocco, “for this nylon Adidas factor. In the meantime, Cleo had purchased me this Indian shirt for, like, 130 quid from Kensington market. That was some huge cash in these days.
“Lydon will get this massive black marker and goes – bleueurgh! – attracts an enormous black line down my beautiful, gentle blue Indian silk shirt. Like, good. Effectively completed, mate.
“So I assumed, fuck you.”
Rocco was a chainsmoker on the time. He regarded Lydon within the eyes, turned the lit finish of his Marlboro in the direction of him and – Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! – jabbed it throughout his new tracksuit. “I completely ruined it,” he says. “So he takes a swing at me.”
Besides Rocco geese and Lydon hits Cleo, knocking her clear off her chair. Rocco swings at Lydon, and hits him within the neck, knocking him to the ground. “I imply, I can’t struggle,” says Rocco, “have a look at me, however earlier than I may even get down there – I used to be gonna assist him up, to be trustworthy with you – some bloke grabbed me from behind…”
They’re each kicked out of the membership and the struggle continues out on the street. Lydon had a bodyguard, an enormous American fucker, however of all of the nights, he wasn’t there. All Rocco remembers is the 2 of them ending up within the gutter, Rocco on prime, attempting to cease Lydon from going psychological, mainly, and Lydon saying, “Don’t damage me, I’m your buddy!”
The following morning, the telephone rings and for as soon as it’s not The Chardonnay Child, it’s the band, having a proper go: “What the fuck are you doing, hitting John Lydon? We’re off the fucking tour!” all that.
Fuck that, says Rocco. We’re solely on it as a result of they haven’t bought sufficient tickets.
They go all the way down to soundcheck. Lydon used to do a soundcheck on daily basis, however on today he’s not there. They stroll in and all of a sudden PiL cease taking part in and begin cheering and clapping. McGeogh is like: “Fucking nicely completed, it’s about fucking time somebody did that.”
It was advantageous – they had been nonetheless on the tour.
Lydon didn’t do any soundchecks for the remainder of the tour. He stored himself to himself, and on the final present in LA, made his transfer.
“There was a backstage bit,” says Rocco, “however there was additionally a backstage of the backstage with a rope throughout it, so you might return after a gig and have a line or no matter. So I used to be again there, doing one, and I flip round and it was him.
“And he went, ‘You do forgive me, do not you?’ I went, ‘Fuck’s sake – in fact I do!’ I feel he waited as a result of he couldn’t face Cleo. I feel he was fairly embarrassed.”
Plastic Incredible flopped. It got here out within the UK 4 months after the US launch, in 1990: the yr of Drugs ‘N Thrills And Bellyaches by the Pleased Mondays, Jane’s Dependancy’s Ritual De Lo Recurring and Worry Of A Black Planet by Public Enemy.
Plastic Incredible appeared to belong in a special period. It had price £400,000 to make. “Put it this fashion,” says Kevin, “it’s most likely a part of the rationale why we haven’t seen any stable royalties for any of our stuff…”
Derek returned to Peter & The Check Tube Infants’ and later that yr, Rocco and Nick popped up on their album of Inventory, Aitken & Waterman covers, The Shit Manufacturing facility, after which light from view, formally saying a break up someday in 1992.
“It’s laborious to recollect,” mentioned Nick, “as a result of the 80s is basically fashionable now, however on the time when you had been a band that was round within the 80s, you had been shit on the shoe of vogue and the music trade. We had been so fucking unhip rapidly. Everybody hated an 80s band.”
Grunge modified the musical panorama but once more. By the mid-90s, different rock was massive enterprise and Nick and Rocco rallied as soon as once more. They dropped the identify Flesh For Lulu and put collectively a band referred to as Gigantic.
“That is the place me and Nick fell out slightly bit,” says Rocco. “As soon as Nirvana got here alongside, Nick felt that bands like Flesh For Lulu had been redundant. And within the brief time period we most likely had been, as a result of these bands – Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Gap, all these – modified all the things. So we went by way of this entire interval writing songs, and we knew we might make a extremely good report, and we’d make it heavier and guitar-y… However Nick wished to vary the identify. I used to be like, ‘Noooo…’”
“We’d completed a report that sounded present and we wished a brand new begin,” mentioned Nick. “It was form of silly and insecure. We thought, ‘Let’s get a brand new bass participant and drummer and begin once more!’ It was a silly thought, actually, as a result of folks knew us as Flesh For Lulu. However we modified our identify to Gigantic and received signed to Columbia, went to LA with Tim Palmer and did this album and it fucking kicks arse. However we received dropped earlier than it even got here out.”
They signed an enormous report take care of Columbia, performed soccer stadiums with Bush, on the peak of their fame, when singer Gavin Rossdale was going out with Gwen Stefani and the papers had been throughout them. It regarded like they had been lastly on the highway to turning into a stadium band. The album received despatched out to the press, received good evaluations – after which by no means got here out.
The A&R man who’d signed them, Nick Terzo, had additionally signed Alice In Chains and the best way Nick Marsh remembered it, “the singer in Alice In Chains was capturing plenty of dope and there was hassle between the A&R man and the top of the label.”
Terzo left and the top of the label mentioned, “Fuck you – and fuck these Limey guys as nicely…”
Later, says Nick, “We received signed once more as Gigantic to Music For Nations and they fucking dropped us earlier than it got here out once more. So me and Rocco went, ‘Fuck it’.”
The album couldn’t have been extra completely titled: Disenchanted. Nick and Rocco fashioned and joined a dozen little bands within the following years earlier than giving up on the dream.
“After getting signed and dropped, signed and dropped, I assumed, that’s it, I’ve had my innings,” mentioned Nick. “So me and Rocco went our separate methods for some time.”
After Flesh For Lulu, James Mitchell fashioned a band the place he sung and performed guitar. Former Flesh For Lulu supervisor Peter Webber did a video for certainly one of their songs, however finally it did not occur. James did a course in screenwriting and is now writing his second novel.
Peter Webber turned a widely known director, working in movie and TV and most well-known for his 2003 film debut, Lady With A Pearl Earring, starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth, which gained each Oscars and BAFTAs.
Kevin Mills had a few bands proper after Flesh for Lulu the place he sang and performed guitar, and stayed in music for one more 12-15 years, composing for movie and TV. At the moment he runs his personal Pet Taxi enterprise – taxis that will let you journey along with your pet.
Derek Greening nonetheless performs with Peter & The Check Tube Infants and has his personal radio present and podcast, Del Strangefish’s Punk Rock Present, on Radio Reverb.
Rocco Barker modelled for Dunhill with Christopher Lee and have become the face of a grocery store in Germany. He starred in a actuality TV collection on Channel 4 referred to as A Place In Spain – Costa Chaos, about him and his then-partner shopping for a property in Spain. Within the Flesh For Lulu years he’d been a compulsive collector of classic sun shades. Now he has his personal enterprise, turning classic frames into designer glasses. He additionally married, and has children with, certainly one of Nick’s long-term girlfriends – a girl, he says, who as soon as hated him. “The final individual I assumed I’d find yourself with…”
The Spirit of Sympathy For The Satan climbed again into mattress and pulled a quilt over his head. They had been turning Olympic Studios right into a cinema and he wasn’t shocked within the slightest.
Nick stored writing songs – not with a rock band in thoughts; one thing extra intimate – and joined The City Voodoo Machine in 2003, filling-in for a gig and staying as a result of he cherished it a lot. Raucous reside reveals, nice songwriting, a strict gown code – Nick felt proper at house. “I’m actually solely inquisitive about having a superb time,” he instructed me. “For everyone who’s within the band, it’s a celebration. I predict plenty of touring and shenanigans with this band.”
However he stored his personal factor going too. In 2006, he launched a solo album A Universe Between Us, a grandly introspective album with shades of John Barry and Scott Walker that basically deserved even a fraction of the eye given to related work on the time by Richard Hawley.
It was produced by Katherine Blake – previously of Miranda Intercourse Backyard and a founding member and Musical Director of the Mediaeval Baebes – and the 2 turned a pair. Nick co-wrote songs for Katherine’s solo album, Midnight Flower, and she or he appeared on the quilt pregnant with the primary of their two youngsters. (In October 2015, simply months after Nick’s dying, they launched an album collectively underneath the band identify From The Deep – a various album of sultry folks and brooding nation that includes each of their haunting, beautiful voices.)
In 2007, Gigantic’s Disenchanted album was launched as a Flesh For Lulu album referred to as Gigantic. In 2009, a brand new Flesh For Lulu – with Keith McAndrew on bass and Mark Bishop on drums – launched a ‘best-of’, with all the songs re-recorded.
“It’s a little bit of a middle-finger as much as the report trade,” mentioned Nick. “By re-recording the songs, we do not have to pay the labels. Plus, 20 years later, I’m a greater singer, a greater guitar participant, and in addition the phrases carry this further gravitas. You look again and realise what motivated you to write down the lyrics, like, ‘Wow, I used to be some fucked-up child’, y’know?”
His voice actually had gotten higher over time. “Greatest I ever heard Nick sing was on the Gigantic album,” says Rocco. “Nick used to do that factor, proper, the place he might break up his vocal chords. They wouldn’t be in tune but it surely was like two folks singing, it was weird.”
The ‘better of’ album had one new track on it, which was additionally launched as a single: Chilly Flame, a track Rocco wrote again within the 80s (“with Nick’s assist, in fact”). Powered by a riff that’s a kissin’-cousin to the one on Skinny Lizzy’s Rosalie, it’s traditional Flesh For Lulu. Cool, attractive and timeless, it might simply have appeared on any of their first three albums. ‘We’re snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,’ drawled Nick. ‘I’m gonna catch a falling star and set it free/ Identical to a setting solar that glows till the tip/Oh, we had been lovers however we by no means might be pals’. It was the band’s final launch.
Rocco gave up in 2013 and guitarist Will Crewdson changed him. Crewdson had been a Flesh fan and later he was within the band Rachel Stamp and Gigantic supported them. “I could not imagine that they had been supporting us,” he says. “It did not appear proper in any respect.”
A buddy of Will’s put them in contact with the Goo Goo Dolls and Flesh For Lulu joined their UK tour and performed to packed audiences each night time, together with an evening at Hammersmith Apollo.
They usually recorded some songs too, says Will. A track referred to as Loopy Eyes – “a really glam, T-Rexy sort factor” – and one other referred to as Rock’N’Roll Received’t Get You Nowhere that was “virtually like a doo-wop punk track. It begins off like one thing from Grease after which goes into full-on Flesh For Lulu, guitars wailing”. They usually re-recorded Canines, Canines, Canines. “So far as I do know that was the very last thing Nick recorded,” says Will.
Issues thawed between James and Kevin and Nick and Rocco. They’d stumble upon one another round city and infrequently there was discuss of getting the unique Flesh again collectively, but it surely by no means actually suited everyone.
However Nick by no means stop. One time James posted a hyperlink to the John Peel demos on his Fb web page and Nick referred to as him, pissed off: “How dare you do this, James?” he mentioned. “I’m attempting to be Mr Rock’n’Roll now! That is destroying my picture – I’m attempting to get Flesh For Lulu going once more!” That they had slightly spat about it and Nick rang again the subsequent day and mentioned, “I’m so sorry, I do not know what’s received into me. I’m going by way of a tough time. I used to be speaking out my arse, it’s cool.”
“One of many issues I like about him,” says Kevin, “is that he simply stored going. That’s what he was born to do. He was born to sing and play, write songs and entrance a band – and he was nice at it.”
In 2014, Nick was identified with mouth and throat most cancers. “I had a humorous type of blip within the nook of my mouth,” he mentioned. “Like a grain of rice.” The docs mentioned it was nothing however he went again and insisted they take one other look. “I simply knew one thing was unsuitable. Intestine intuition, you realize?” He began writing about his remedies and battle towards most cancers on his Fb web page. “I didn’t know the way else to strategy it actually,” he mentioned. “I simply thought, ‘Right here I’m’. Fb is like an open diary in order for you it to be.”
So his Fb pals watched as he “had all my back-teeth on the fitting hand facet eliminated to be able to take away cancerous tissue from my mouth and a bit of my forearm – together with veins, tendons and pores and skin – transplanted in its stead.
“The most cancers had begun to unfold into the lymph-nodes underneath my jaw, so a large part of my neck was additionally dissected and eliminated. After surgical procedure, I had a six week, intensive course of radiotherapy 5 days per week accompanied by six programs of chemotherapy. The sixth dose was withheld as there was a powerful probability I would not survive it, attributable to weight-loss and dehydration…”
The NHS oncology groups took particular care to not zap his vocal-chords, he mentioned. That throat of his – that golden larynx, the supply of his to-die-for voice – was now the factor that was killing him.
In 2015, checks revealed that the most cancers was nonetheless there and the struggle began once more. A Flesh For Lulu gig on the Brooklyn Bowl, inside London’s 02 Enviornment, was scheduled for Might however introduced ahead to March.
Backstage, Nick confirmed us how vast, post-surgery, he might open his mouth (he would have struggled to eat a plum) but it surely didn’t have an effect on his efficiency. The gig was a triumph: you couldn’t imagine something apart from Nick Marsh was going to beat dying.
“We completed with Sleeping Canines,” says Will Crewdson. “It ends with the road ‘I’m gonna reside til the day I die’ and he sung it twice – he’d by no means completed that earlier than.”
“Everybody was like, ‘He’s gonna beat it’ and I knew he wasn’t,” says Rocco. “On the finish it was fucking horrible. Fucking terrible. I don’t wish to go into it.” He tells me about how as soon as, returning house after a hospital go to, his physique began to grab as he got here out of the tube. By the point he received to his house in Westbourne Park, he could not transfer. “I feel it was simply shock. I feel I went into shock. It was horrible.”
The most cancers moved from Nick’s jaw and into his mind. Within the final week of his life, family and friends – and followers – turned up on the hospice to say goodbye. He died on 5 June, 2015.
“I nonetheless discover it actually troublesome,” says James. “I used to be offended when he died.” He discovered himself wandering round his home muttering, ‘fucking Nick’ underneath his breath. He thought they’d have time to make things better, perhaps play collectively once more. Only recently he’d began taking part in drums once more and would undoubtedly have performed with Nick, if he’d been up for it.
“I really feel embarrassed and regretful that we ended up having a go at one another over our musical capabilities,” he says. “Nick was the one good musician within the band. We weren’t good to one another and I discover that embarrassing. I want that hadn’t occurred.
“And I’m embarrassed about our thirst to achieve success,” he says. “It’s silly – you must simply do what you do. I remorse that stuff. And I remorse Nick not being right here.”
“I spent extra time with Nick than anyone else on this planet,” says Rocco. “We had been inseparable. For years, when you noticed Nick, you noticed me. When you noticed me, you noticed Nick. We even lived collectively – and if we did not reside collectively, we lived like a road away from one another. It was solely the final eight years of his life that I didn’t see him as a lot.
“I miss him. I miss my mate. I miss him a lot. There’s a interval the place I simply could not get up within the morning with out interested by him.”
Sooner or later not too long ago, he was alone in his workshop and he determined to placed on Massive Enjoyable Metropolis. Midway by way of Child Hurricane, he switched it off. “I simply could not hearken to it,” he says. “It’s nonetheless troublesome to return to phrases with. I simply really feel like he’s simply gone earlier than his time.”
He will get upset and I apologise for bringing all of it up once more. “No,” he says, “it’s truly good to speak about it.
“It’s good to have the ability to speak about it. Nevertheless it’s fucking laborious to simply accept.”
Paradoxically, the final time the band had been all collectively was at one other funeral in Epping Forest in 2010. Lucy Knowledge had been a buddy of the band and ex-girlfriend of each Kevin and Rocco – the girl who saved his life again when he joined Flesh For Lulu and got here off heroin.
At Nick’s funeral, the solar shone, jets screamed throughout the sky and his pals noticed him off in model.
The gown code mentioned ‘Costume fabulous’ they usually did. It was a factor about Nick. He at all times regarded cool-as-fuck, wearing classic fits, nice footwear, his hair completely sculpted.
“I dunno how one can put on these,” he mentioned to me as soon as.
Put on what?
“Denims,” he mentioned. “I dunno how anybody can put on denims.”
Most of the footage on this characteristic had been taken from Flesh For Lulu 1983 -1985, a photobook by Mick Mercer out there from Lulu. A ‘misplaced’ Flesh For Lulu album, Cosmic Thoughts Fuck, was launched final yr and out there from Bandcamp.