This story is fairly lengthy, however it’s written briefly chunks, so don’t fear about it, you’ll be high-quality. You’ll be able to verify your Instagram each 300 phrases or so, no matter.
Even when you’ve by no means heard of Flesh For Lulu, you would possibly 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 combat 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, one in every of which ends in demise.
On the morning of Nick Marsh’s funeral, James Mitchell dropped his youngsters off in school and drove throughout London to the service in Epping Forest the place he met Lulu, the lady 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 it,” he says. “I don’t keep in mind anybody from the funeral. I used to be simply in a haze.”
It was sizzling. In numerous circumstances, you’d have mentioned it was a wonderful day. Jets from close by North Weald Airfield roared throughout the sky. To a variety of the folks crowding outdoors the constructing – as a result of Nick Marsh’s closing 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 music 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 bushes to the mournful sounds of St James Infirmary.
On the graveside, Nick’s younger daughters, bid him goodbye. “Once I come again in a yr, daddy,” mentioned one, “you’ll be a wonderful tree and we will 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 cheerful ending.
I used to be supposed to put in writing 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 approach 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 advised 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 along with his guitar to satisfy this man.
When he received there, Nick Marsh didn’t want a guitarist, he wanted a drummer. Despite the fact 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 completely different backgrounds. James got here from a comparatively comfy 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 in addition 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 wonderful voice,” says James. “You heard his voice and his enjoying and that was one thing none of us may do. That was what made me drop out of college. Once I first met him, it was nearly like an on the spot 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 vendor and all of that – however it 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. They’d bonded over information by Alice Cooper, Van Der Graaf Generator and Iron Butterfly.
On the celebration, Rocco received speaking to this man in a wheelchair, an outdated biker who’d had an accident or one thing, and he requested Rocco to observe him right into a bed room.
However don’t fear, it’s not that sort of story. Within the bed room was a file participant. “I need you to take heed to this,” the outdated 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 outdated hippy sort – and this gave Nick an concept. He may 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 outdated 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 pay attention. “I do know that geezer!’”
The outdated 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 advised 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 advised ‘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 a complete tribe of squats, notorious in its day. We did a few of our early gigs there, however it was fairly tough – filled with crusties and bikers.
“The primary gig we did was at my college, and we had this complete 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 speak of the music weeklies and appeared 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 may actually solely string a number of chords collectively. That band was all non-musicians. We had been a part of that complete 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 other people simply cherished it! It was that sort 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. Once they break up, Rocco urgently wanted a gig.
“I wanted cash to maintain my behavior going. I used to be at my vendor’s home and he’d lower 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 needed. 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 in all probability performed approach out of tune and Nick needed to tune me up, however I used to be truly pleasantly stunned. I actually favored it. I believed, ‘Wow – this might be good.’”
In 2015, simply months earlier than he died, Marsh advised 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 approach 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 needed 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 sort of have to try this. I could not return to the place I lived due to the entire affiliation factor. I managed to sever all my ties and nearly begin a brand new life.”
He began going out with somebody who wasn’t into heroin. Her mother and father had been docs and so they recognised Rocco’s dependancy and set about serving to him. “Anthony, her dad – it was was unbelievable the best way he helped me. So I had that assist.”
James hadn’t seen something like that earlier than. Even Nick, raised on a commune, was nonetheless a bit naive. Rocco, then again, 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. In the event 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 keep in mind going to a pub with Rocco and I’d had a spot of trouble with somebody and this little man comes up, Rocco’s Uncle Charlie, who’s on the run after some taking pictures up in Birmingham, and he’s like, ‘Roc tells me you are in a spot of trouble – would you like me to type 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 massive 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 most typical outcome 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 based mostly in South London, England, within the 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 enamel out utilizing pliers, slicing 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 approach, it would go some strategy 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 part occurs after darkish.
So now it was Nick, James, Rocco and Glen Bishop. The music had began to alter. Rocco had introduced a degree of white noise and rock’n’roll abandon to the Flesh For Lulu sound and you might hear it on their first file, the Roman Candle EP.
Written by Nick, Roman Candle gave the impression of Lou Reed organized by Ennio Morricone and performed by Adam and the Ants – all twanging guitars and chain gang backing vocals. Coming Down was horny, woozy psychedelia (‘My lips turned blue once 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, however it nonetheless gave the impression of 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 file from some soiled fucking rock band! So as to add insult to damage, Roman Candle truly did first rate 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 guilty. 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 tough to transcribe at occasions 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 chortle and speak on the similar time, and can also be consuming through 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 speak 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 thrice in whole and 2005 was the primary time. We met through 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 evening 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’d get their very own membership and play anytime they needed. Ollie went to see this outdated dude Maurice, who ran a burlesque strip membership above Gossips, simply off of Dean Avenue within the coronary heart of Soho, again when Soho was Soho, and Maurice mentioned, “Effectively, I’ll offer you one evening: when you can fill it, you’ll be able to have it each Wednesday.”
So, they did. They stuffed the place filled with every kind of loopy folks and the Batcave was up and operating.
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 understand, 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 midst 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 – a variety 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 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 sporting Nick’s look. “She completely copped that off me, man,” mentioned Nick. “And now goths around the globe 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 advised 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 – although 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 may 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 a little bit 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 needed to play in a band with Nick. One thing about Flesh For Lulu made them stand out from the lots of of bands on the London membership circuit. That one thing was Nick.”
He had all of it, mentioned Kevin: “an important 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 properly.”
Kevin Mills watched Flesh For Lulu play the Batcave and he thought: “This band are wonderful. Effectively, all besides the bass participant.”
So quickly Glen was out, Kevin was in and Rocco was nervous.
“To be trustworthy, I did not need Kev within the band,” says Rocco. “That lady I discussed, whose mother and father 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’ll 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 believed, ‘The worst factor that may occur, is that Kevin’s going to hitch 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 very good buddy of mine – I do not 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 person can stay 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 figuring out.’ I felt sort 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 keep 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 believed 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 degree, and get an even bigger supervisor. However then Kev doing it put a variety of pressure on him as a result of he was in two camps. If we’d had first rate administration, it may have had a special consequence. A supervisor may have mentioned, “Minimize the shit, overlook about making a success file, 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 evening and taking pace with us…
James: The following step up was alleged to be Perry Watts-Russell. However then he received sick. We actually signed with him after which he went, “Oh, truly, I’m sick, I can’t do that.”
This was later, after they actually had been near changing into massive time, after they had songs on Hollywood films 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 based mostly in LA, and well-connected. He was precisely what they had been in search of: 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. They’d signed with a supervisor who was now actually incapable of managing.
They could not even get him on the cellphone. His folks would reply and say, “He can’t speak in the mean time – he’s in a very dangerous approach.”
“And I used to be on this horrible place,” says Kevin, “as a result of I’m like, properly, shit, you understand, I actually really feel for the man however on the similar time: who the fuck is taking care of us?”
No person was taking good care of enterprise. Finally, 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 duvet of Flesh For Lulu’s self-titled debut album, regardless of not having performed a word 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 horny, with a Stonesy swagger and a sinister flip of phrase.
‘We’re gonna break each his legs,’ went Hyena. ‘We’re the canine/Those that chunk 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 clean, 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 put in writing a narrative like this and deal with all of the negatives – ‘The place did all of it go improper?’ – 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 one in every of his stilettos and smacked Specimen guitarist Jon Klein on the pinnacle 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 full of narcotics, they received pulled over by cops, fucking police canine leaping up on them. However as an alternative 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, considering, ‘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 a complete 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 put in writing a function 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 at some point somebody will write a ebook 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 preventing ladies, ladies preventing males, bouncers preventing one another…”).
Then there’s the American strippers that, y’know, taken care of 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 youngsters and, you understand, the fats child and Large Nostril are the final ones to be picked for the soccer staff, 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 evening. “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 sensible.
“We simply couldn’t imagine it – the water was heat. I keep in mind James saying one thing like, ‘Yeah, it’s the Gulf Stream,’ like, ‘Why are you so stunned? It’s lovely 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 evening 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 cope with 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 outdated Frank Zappa music, Jelly Roll Gum Drop, and feeling responsible about utilizing the identical melody.
The music’s lyrics about sin and Catholic guilt – no sin goes unnoticed by God’s all-seeing eyes, that sort of factor – had been made flesh by the sleeve, an outdated 18th or nineteenth century engraving of two nuns making out whereas somebody spies on them from beneath. Rocco says he noticed it in a ebook 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 in opposition to?’” says James. “Oh, us.”
In actual fact, the image on the sleeve shouldn’t be some historical 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’) in all probability 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 advised 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 ebook 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 approach earlier than Google made all these items 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 Stated 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 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 music, a brilliantly morbid epic that sounds in contrast to the rest.
“If I used to be requested to invent the proper rock’n’roll band, I’d in all probability mannequin it fairly intently on Flesh For Lulu,” Jane Simon wrote in her overview in Sounds.
After Blue Sisters Swing got here Large Enjoyable Metropolis. Produced by Craig Leon, it was their biggest album. They select Leon, mentioned Nick, as a result of “he was answerable 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 pleased 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 Night time 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 (“That may have been the primary music I wrote for Flesh, truly”), a deliciously dumb rock music that’s in all probability about blow jobs however nonetheless seems like a radio hit. Cat Burglar – initially the b-side to Stressed – was remade and remodelled by a band on the high of their recreation 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 reasonably stable profession transfer: ‘Every part that you just 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 music. Craig Leon received them to play the backing tracks stay, giving the album a unfastened rock’n’roll really feel that they’d 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. Large 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 excursions with Specimen and The Sisters Of Mercy.
“We did not actually know what we had been doing,” says Rocco. “We solely knew we needed to be a rock’n’roll band and that we didn’t wish to be pigeon-holed as a goth band.”
Their sensible, open-hearted eclecticism was their undoing. “I feel it harmed us,” says Rocco. “I would not change it, however I feel it made it tough for file firms figuring out 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 and so they toured with Johnny Thunders. However a band like us, enjoying a rustic music 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 appeared 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 go away it.’ There was simply this limitless,” 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 and so they’d truly give it to you! And the audiences had been wonderful. 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 may drink at evening. “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, and not using a second thought. “He would possibly deny this, however – when you communicate to him and he denies it – he’s mendacity. He is aware of full properly.
“Sadly, Roc substituted the skag for booze and for the subsequent few years he was constantly out of it, mainly. In a variety 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 street crew, went to the bar.
“There was a bunch of men 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 advised 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 sort 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 staff, was as a result of Nick wasn’t like that and I feel he at all times needed to be. Nick needed to be extra like Rocco.
“He needed to be extra rock’n’roll and that turned a little bit of an issue as properly, as a result of he began ingesting extra, taking extra medicine and attempting to have an effect on a extra outrageous persona.”
“Nick and Rocco took it to a different degree,” 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 needed to be like me – I feel he noticed one thing in me that he needed to possess. The way in which I noticed it, I’d kick the door down after which, after we get in there, ‘Kind 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 in regards to the music, it’s the entire way of life of it. No matter folks say about touring, aside from being onstage, it’s nonetheless extremely boring. How bands go on tour sober, I don’t know. I do not understand how the fuck they do this. I simply couldn’t think about it. Staring out of a window all day, studying your ebook, 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 wonderful artists and as quickly as they cease ingesting or doing medicine, they only flip crap. They only by no means write one other good music. 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 deliver of their songs nearly totally completed. They might rehearse it and, if it labored out, the songwriting credit score went to the entire band.
“Then after a short while 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 dissatisfied in that: “I actually needed Nick to put in writing the majority of the songs. I simply thought he was an important music author. I needed to put in writing however I didn’t wish to turn into the dominant songwriter. I needed Nick and James to hold on writing collectively. I used to be an enormous fan of their writing.”
Finally, 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 will’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 music additionally received their identify on it.
And that’s the best way they went into subsequent album, Lengthy Dwell The New Flesh, recorded at Abbey Highway with Mike Hedges.
“There have been a few sticky moments,” says Rocco. “I imply, that music, Method To Go. Simply: what the fuck is that? It seems like Merely Pink. It’s terrible.”
Lengthy Dwell 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 file label Beggars Banquet, says Kevin, “needed a file that will sound massive and so they may shift in America. I imply, so did we. Mike [Hedges] had been advised to ship that sound.”
“We went within the studio with Mike Hedges,” Nick mentioned, “and on the primary day we began enjoying 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 degree within the States. At this time, the manufacturing sounds a little bit bit 80s – polished and over-produced – and the songs a little bit 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 just a few bonafide FFL classics. The Replacements woulda offered their Ma for Kevin’s contributions – Postcards From Paradise (later coated by Paul Westerberg and the Goo Goo Dolls) and the effortlessly cool Sleeping Canine, 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 Dwell 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 ingredient a little bit 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 paintings featured a corny air-brushed emblem of a winged coronary heart in opposition to 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 Method To Go, which did sound a bit like Merely Pink.
Method To Go was one other one in every of Kevin’s. The stress of recording it – the seek for perfection and the drive for fulfillment – signalled the start of the top for Rocco. “It’s a improbable music,” he says, “however the best way it was performed… There was one line, I may need been a millisecond out and Kev made me play it and play it and play it. And eventually I went, ‘ 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 believed, ‘ what? I’m not on this band anymore.’”
There was an even bigger image. Kevin was reaching breaking level: writing songs, enjoying bass, managing the band. It was round this time that Perry Watts-Russell received concerned. Kevin’s most well-liked alternative for supervisor was a lady 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 cheerful ending. The films of John Hughes – truly made and set round Chicago – had been single-handedly altering the fortunes of British various 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 recent wave and various rock. “I at all times most well-liked to hang around with the outcasts,” he mentioned, “‘cos they had been cooler. They’d 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. Instantly, British various music had one thing greater to goal for than 4 cans of Kestrel on the Retford Porterhouse.
Peter Webber – the band’s former supervisor – was working with Psychedelic Furs and advised Flesh For Lulu that Hughes was in search of a brand new music for his subsequent film Some Form Of Fantastic. 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 am going loopy’. It was a music about despair, about not being pleased, punching a window over some lady I’d been seeing.”
Nick re-wrote some the lyrics, softened it up a bit for Hollywood, and so they received Pet Store Boys producer Stephen Hague in.
“He was a little bit of a twat,” says James. “He had this lady 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 an alternative of a serious.” They needed to take it to 2 musicologists to keep away from giving him a share of the royalties.
It was their largest hit – a cool Billy Idol-like pop music that was an important 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 needed to be a frontman. He had a brand new persona he needed to check out: Nick Nasty.
“He simply needed to be Iggy Pop or one thing,” says Kevin. “I feel that ‘Nick Nasty’ was his concept. However then Ivor Wilkins, our tour supervisor, began calling him ‘the tough Marsh’ – Nick Nasty, the tough Marsh. Nick used to get barely peeved as a result of he at all times thought we had been taking the piss a little bit bit.”
They’d introduced in a fifth member through the recording of New Flesh: Derek Greening (aka Del Strangefish), previously of Peter & The Take a look at Tube Infants.
Derek remembers first assembly them at a present in Germany the place Flesh For Lulu had been supporting the Take a look at 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 Large 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 and so they requested me if I’d do a little bit of guitar. Nick needed to cease enjoying 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 at some point 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 might 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 lovely 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 Form of Fantastic. Paramount Footage backed the tour. I’d toured America earlier than behind a Transit van with 24 different guys with furry arses, so this was one thing else. Paramount was selecting up the tab, so we’d get pushed in all places in Limousines, keep in 5-star inns, and all the things was free.
“Again residence 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 evening “for scores of just-about-to-be-somebodies”. Some Form Of Fantastic premiered earlier that evening 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.
They’d signed to Capitol. They had been enjoying greater venues. John Hughes had signed them to his publishing firm. Aerosmith’s Joe Perry mentioned that Lengthy Dwell 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 inns… 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 useless. A useless 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 instructed they do it there. Beggars Banquet, hoping that a little bit 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 a variety of ingesting and a variety of downers. By his personal account, Kev was driving everybody mad, himself included. “I in all probability 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 manage the future of the band, not for my very own ends, however to get us the place I believed we ought 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 and so they had been like, ‘Oh, you’ve damaged your again, truly’. I had no concept.” To counter it, the docs advised 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 sort of factor. Derek stepped in. “His songs had been a type of poppy,” says Kevin. “I suppose, extra business, however I didn’t actually suppose that they had the depth of the sooner Flesh For Lulu songs.”
So as to add insult to damage, it turned out that the deal Derek had signed meant that, the place the unique 4 break up the royalties on every music, Derek stored all his royalties to himself. “Somebody ought to have stood as much as him,” says James, “however by that time…”
Nick later advised Vive Le Rock journal that “Del wrote Time And House, which is no doubt essentially the most silly, saccharine piece of shit pop music, with none redeeming options. After all the file firm fucking cherished it and caught it straight out as a single.”
Which was a bit naughty of him, actually, and would possibly simply illustrate Kevin’s factors about Nick’s failure to step up at occasions. Nick was the singer, frontman and founding father of Flesh For Lulu. If he didn’t like that music, and if he did not need it as a single, perhaps he may have proven some management – refused to file it, halt its launch. It simply wasn’t his approach.
“Nick was fairly a humble or non-confrontational man,” says Kevin. “He needed what he needed however he didn’t wish to should bully folks or to should drive at it with a purpose to get it.”
For Rocco it got here to a head through the recording of the album opener, a music by Kevin referred to as Decline And Fall. “There’s a variety of guitars on that,” says Rocco, “and so they’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 completely different, you understand? 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 pay attention – this is the reason 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 believed, ‘I’m not even going to trouble enjoying guitar’. I simply went off and received drunk within the bars in Sydney. I walked out of that file, actually half approach by 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 needed, 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 high of faculty radio in America and enjoying fairly good venues after which we went to Sydney and all of it blew up in our faces.
“We overpassed what all of us did. We turned too success-hungry. We had been all attempting desperately to interrupt by to subsequent degree and we overpassed what made us good.”
The completed album, Plastic Implausible, was fairly properly represented by its two first singles, Decline And Fall and Time And House: two fully common, characterless, and immediately forgettable rock songs.
“The songs had been much less horny, much less sensual, and so they lacked a number of the allure 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 sort 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.”
One of the best songs had been Nick’s. Silly In The Avenue gave the impression of like New Sensations-era Lou Reed – heat and doo-woppy – whereas the title monitor closed the album with a gradual funk which may have been the closest he received to nailing the Prince vibe he was in search of.
‘I am a sci-fi child of the twenty-first century,” he sang on the finish. ‘That’s me/Plastic improbable/I can really feel it while you speak/See it while you stroll that approach… 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 may type of see it coming, however nonetheless. So 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 executed. “I used to be like, ‘Effectively, fuck you very a lot,’” says Kevin.
Rocco doesn’t keep in mind it this manner. “I don’t suppose anybody was sacked,” he says, even once I inform him that Kevin says Nick referred to as him up and fired him over the cellphone.
“Nah,” says Rocco.
“Yeah,” says James. “He did.”
Rocco: “Did he?”
“Yeah,” says James.
However Rocco nonetheless doesn’t suppose anybody was sacked. Probably not. 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 residence – and after they’d been again for a bit, Rocco phoned Nick and advised him he was leaving.
He’d come again and had a very good chat along with his accomplice 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 advised him, Nick was shocked, however after some time he rang again and mentioned, “I’m leaving as properly. We’ll go away collectively.”
(The yr earlier than he died, Nick advised Vive Le Rock this actual story, however the different approach round: “We got here again to London and I mentioned, ‘I stop’ and Rocco mentioned, ‘I stop as properly 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: immediately 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, ‘ 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 Soft or some shit – Mr. Pushkin and Mr. Cushberger – two American dudes who had been like, “Hey, we’re a shit sizzling administration staff!” But it surely was a catastrophe and after the Public Picture tour all of it fell to bits.
Each Kevin and James couldn’t assist however take a little bit little bit of satisfaction from that.
On one hand, Rocco describes the PiL tour as a little bit of fun – massive venues, nice inns – however the tales from the tour are darkish. Nick advised Vive Le Rock that one evening John Lydon spiked his drink with peyote, after which whispered in his ear all evening, tormenting him and turning Nick’s journey dangerous. 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 evening 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 aspect of Lydon. The home band are enjoying Flesh For Lulu songs and so they ask Rocco to return up and play guitar with them. Afterwards, when he sits down, it seems 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 sporting. “He’d purchased it in a Hilton over there and it’d value 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, mild blue Indian silk shirt. Like, good. Effectively executed, mate.
“So I believed, fuck you.”
Rocco was a chainsmoker on the time. He appeared Lydon within the eyes, turned the lit finish of his Marlboro in 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 combat,” 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 combat 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 high, attempting to cease Lydon from going psychological, mainly, and Lydon saying, “Don’t harm me, I’m your buddy!”
The following morning, the cellphone 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 offered sufficient tickets.
They go all the way down to soundcheck. Lydon used to do a soundcheck each day, however on at the present time he’s not there. They stroll in and immediately PiL cease enjoying and begin cheering and clapping. McGeogh is like: “Fucking properly executed, it’s about fucking time somebody did that.”
It was high-quality – 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 – after all I do!’ I feel he waited as a result of he couldn’t face Cleo. I feel he was fairly embarrassed.”
Plastic Implausible flopped. It got here out within the UK 4 months after the US launch, in 1990: the yr of Tablets ‘N Thrills And Bellyaches by the Completely happy Mondays, Jane’s Habit’s Ritual De Lo Routine and Concern Of A Black Planet by Public Enemy.
Plastic Implausible appeared to belong in a special period. It had value £400,000 to make. “Put it this manner,” says Kevin, “it’s in all probability a part of the explanation why we haven’t seen any stable royalties for any of our stuff…”
Derek returned to Peter & The Take a look at 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 asserting a break up someday in 1992.
“It’s laborious to recollect,” mentioned Nick, “as a result of the 80s is de facto stylish 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 style and the music trade. We had been so fucking unhip abruptly. Everybody hated an 80s band.”
Grunge modified the musical panorama but once more. By the mid-90s, various 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 a little bit bit,” says Rocco. “As soon as Nirvana got here alongside, Nick felt that bands like Flesh For Lulu had been redundant. And within the quick time period we in all probability had been, as a result of these bands – Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Gap, all these – modified all the things. So we went by this complete interval writing songs, and we knew we may make a very good file, and we’d make it heavier and guitar-y… However Nick needed to alter the identify. I used to be like, ‘Noooo…’”
“We’d executed a file that sounded present and we needed a brand new begin,” mentioned Nick. “It was sort of silly and insecure. We thought, ‘Let’s get a brand new bass participant and drummer and begin once more!’ It was a silly concept, 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 file cope with 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 appeared like they had been lastly on the street to changing 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 taking pictures a variety of dope and there was hassle between the A&R man and the pinnacle of the label.”
Terzo left and the pinnacle of the label mentioned, “Fuck you – and fuck these Limey guys as properly…”
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 believed, 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 one in every 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 well 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 this time he runs his personal Pet Taxi enterprise – taxis that will let you journey together with your pet.
Derek Greening nonetheless performs with Peter & The Take a look at 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 youngsters with, one in every of Nick’s long-term girlfriends – a lady, he says, who as soon as hated him. “The final individual I believed 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 stunned 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 stay exhibits, nice songwriting, a strict costume code – Nick felt proper at residence. “I’m actually solely occupied with having a very good time,” he advised me. “For everyone who’s within the band, it’s a celebration. I predict a variety 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 duvet pregnant with the primary of their two youngsters. (In October 2015, simply months after Nick’s demise, they launched an album collectively underneath the band identify From The Deep – a various album of sultry people 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 file 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 additional gravitas. You look again and realise what motivated you to put in writing the lyrics, like, ‘Wow, I used to be some fucked-up child’, y’know?”
His voice actually had gotten higher through the years. “Greatest I ever heard Nick sing was on the Gigantic album,” says Rocco. “Nick used to do that factor, proper, the place he may break up his vocal chords. They wouldn’t be in tune however it was like two folks singing, it was weird.”
The ‘better of’ album had one new music on it, which was additionally launched as a single: Chilly Flame, a music Rocco wrote again within the 80s (“with Nick’s assist, after all”). Powered by a riff that’s a kissin’-cousin to the one on Skinny Lizzy’s Rosalie, it’s traditional Flesh For Lulu. Cool, horny and timeless, it may 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/ Similar to a setting solar that glows till the top/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 evening, together with an evening at Hammersmith Apollo.
They usually recorded some songs too, says Will. A music referred to as Loopy Eyes – “a really glam, T-Rexy sort factor” – and one other referred to as Rock’N’Roll Gained’t Get You Nowhere that was “nearly like a doo-wop punk music. It begins off like one thing from Grease after which goes into full-on Flesh For Lulu, guitars wailing”. They usually re-recorded Canine, Canine, Canine. “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 speak of getting the unique Flesh again collectively, however it 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!” They’d a little bit 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 a tough time. I used to be speaking out my arse, it’s cool.”
“One of many issues I really 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 improper. Intestine intuition, you understand?” He began writing about his therapies and battle in opposition to most cancers on his Fb web page. “I didn’t understand how else to strategy it actually,” he mentioned. “I simply thought, ‘Right here I’m’. Fb is like an open diary if you would like it to be.”
So his Fb pals watched as he “had all my back-teeth on the proper hand aspect eliminated with a purpose to take away cancerous tissue from my mouth and a piece 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 robust probability I would not survive it, resulting from 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, exams revealed that the most cancers was nonetheless there and the combat 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 extensive, post-surgery, he may open his mouth (he would have struggled to eat a plum) however it didn’t have an effect on his efficiency. The gig was a triumph: you couldn’t imagine something aside from Nick Marsh was going to beat demise.
“We completed with Sleeping Canine,” says Will Crewdson. “It ends with the road ‘I’m gonna stay til the day I die’ and he sung it twice – he’d by no means executed 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 residence 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 residence 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 tough,” says James. “I used to be indignant 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 enjoying drums once more and would positively 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. In the event you noticed me, you noticed Nick. We even lived collectively – and if we did not stay 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 fascinated with him.”
Sooner or later just lately, he was alone in his workshop and he determined to placed on Large Enjoyable Metropolis. Midway by Child Hurricane, he switched it off. “I simply could not take heed to it,” he says. “It’s nonetheless tough 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 discuss it. But it surely’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 lady 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 fashion.
The costume code mentioned ‘Gown fabulous’ and so they did. It was a factor about Nick. He at all times appeared cool-as-fuck, wearing classic fits, nice sneakers, 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 function had been taken from Flesh For Lulu 1983 -1985, a photobook by Mick Mercer obtainable from Lulu. A ‘misplaced’ Flesh For Lulu album, Cosmic Thoughts Fuck, was launched final yr and obtainable from Bandcamp.
