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Telegraph
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook: It's not so punk on the terraces at Chelsea any more
Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook is talking about the band's infamous television appearance on the Today show in December 1976, alongside host Bill Grundy. 'I think he met his match, he was an establishment sort of figure and very condescending; he got what he deserved.' The incident which saw Grundy goad the band into swearing live on air caused a national scandal and the London four-piece became an immediate sensation, changing popular culture overnight. 'There was nothing cultural at the time', explains Cook, 'we had Top of the Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test. I like to think we had a hand in changing all that.' Anarchy In The UK soon became the political anthem for a disenfranchised generation. 'It was a violent time of strikes and football violence and that spilled over naturally into the punk movement,' adds Cook. 'Everyone was a bit angry in the 70s and it spilled over into all walks of life.' Chelsea is very much in the bones of Cook. There's even proof of him as a young fan in the Loft behind a yawning policeman under a helmet. When I remind him, Cook raises his boot out to illustrate that he is the smiling teenager facing the camera with his Dr. Marten sticking out. 'It was QPR v Chelsea in the FA Cup in 1970 at Loftus Road and we beat them 4-2. I'm from Shepherd's Bush, I should be a Rangers supporter but I grew up supporting Chelsea. 1970: A bored Policeman in the Loft #QPR v Chelsea FACup 6th Rd. Pre Sex Pistol Paul Cook in the Docs looking at the camera. — BushmanQPR ⚽️ (@BushmanQPR) October 14, 2021 'My family is from Fulham but my mates would drag me to Stamford Bridge. I've still got a soft spot for Fulham but I ended up supporting Chelsea around 1965-66.' Cook does not miss a beat when I ask him his favourite player of the era. 'Charlie Cooke, he was a real entertainer like George Best. At that time we signed a lot of players from Scotland. I even wanted an e on the end of my name to be like him.' Today we are in The Green public house not far from the Shepherd's Bush Empire where the band played in 1996. Cook has brought with him a selection of programmes from his collection, perhaps the stand out is for an FA Cup final replay, the first in 58 years, of Chelsea versus Leeds United at Old Trafford in April 1970. 'I never got to the first game as I messed up my tokens. That game and the rivalry was something else, especially when you're a young kid. The away games were pretty scary.' Violence was common, particularly with the Chelsea-Leeds rivalry, did Cook ever get caught up in the chaos? 'If you went, it was a dangerous place to be and if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had a knack of walking into trouble, I wasn't a fighter and I got badly beaten up not far from here by a bunch of Teddy Boys for looking like a punk. There was a reaction against the punks that was so far out there. We were public enemy number one and front-page news but a lot of it was caused by us I must admit.' How does Cook feel about the shifts in the game during his lifetime? 'I do get fed up, I'm not in love with it in the way I was but I try not to be one of those old guys saying; 'back in my day it was great'. And yes it was but the state of the grounds, the violence and facilities has all changed. The British game was run down but now it's corporate boxes. You get a lot of tourists from Japan and so on – it's different people around me each week, which is great but I don't know if it's all necessarily for the better. 'The violence and racism has not totally gone but it is so much better.' Asked to harken back to the reign of Roman Abramovich, Cook is honest, revelling in the glory of the time. He never expected Chelsea to win the league in his lifetime, let alone the biggest prize in Europe – twice. He does not regret the ride, and on having a supremely wealthy backer, Cook queries whether Newcastle United or Manchester City fans have moral quandaries. 'It's like that until you get your own sugar daddy,' he says. The Sex Pistols returned last August minus John Lydon to raise money for Bush Hall, attempting to save the venue from closure. Relations between Lydon and Cook along with guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock have been strained after a court case over the band's legacy and now they perform with Frank Carter on vocals. 'I don't diss John', adds Cook. 'He was iconic but the band won't happen again with John. Relationships in the band became so toxic. Now it's just been so much fun, we are not trying to say Frank is the new Johnny Rotten or anything like that but it's clear now there is an audience for it and that people want to hear the songs, they want to hear Never Mind The Bollocks.' Matlock is a QPR fan, and Cook and Steve Jones have remained close, especially through support of Chelsea since the guitarist moved to America in 1982. Cook adds: 'Steve was not into football at the time, he would go to QPR for the hell of it and for the chaos. He would bunk in, cause some trouble and nick all the hot dogs.' It was in LA that Jones and Cook would pull on the jersey for Hollywood United. 'They don't get it, bless them, but they've had a good team over the years. They are super fit and really hard to play against. We've had a few knock-about friendly games with Vinnie Jones and Frank Leboeuf… they take it very seriously by the way.' For the drummer also known as Cookie there's a clear link between the terraces he grew up in and the punk movement. 'The chants on the terraces come from the music hall tradition, originally everyone would go there and sing and that transferred to terraces and the punk rock choruses. There's nothing like 5,000 people singing a song, it's so uplifting. It's not so much like that any more [at Chelsea] – maybe in places like Liverpool or Newcastle where they still have that working-class support, but not down at Chelsea.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
David Johansen obituary
On the day that the New York Dolls appeared on the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973, they were openly derided by the host, Bob Harris. 'Mock rock,' he opined to camera. For all his snarling attitude, the band's singer, David Johansen, who has died aged 75, might well have agreed. The last thing he expected was for his band to be taken seriously. The Dolls took their lead not from the 'adult-oriented' rock and earnest singer-songwriters dominating the US album charts, but from the glam rock scene making headway in the UK singles charts. British acts from the Sex Pistols to Morrissey would later repay the compliment, citing the band as a key influence. Johansen was recruited into the New York Dolls in 1971 after Johnny Thunders stepped back as vocalist to focus on lead guitar. The lineup comprising Johansen, Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain (guitar), Arthur Kane (bass), and Billy Murcia (drums) began to pick up small-time gigs around New York City. However, their androgynous-hoodlum look was more in vogue in Britain – where David Bowie and Marc Bolan had paved the way – than it was in the US, and in 1972 they were invited to support Rod Stewart and the Faces for a benefit concert at the Empire Pool, Wembley (later renamed the Wembley Arena). A young Steve Jones, future guitarist with the Sex Pistols, was in the audience, and would later say the Dolls' shambolic set was a huge inspiration. But the tour turned into a nightmare when Murcia drowned in a bath at a party while under the influence of alcohol and methaqualone. The band cancelled the rest of their British gigs and returned to the US. Back in New York, Jerry Nolan replaced Murcia on drums and in 1973 the band were signed to Mercury Records. The eponymous debut album was produced by the singer and musician Todd Rundgren and featured Lonely Planet Boy, an atypically low-key and poignant number written by Johansen, and Vietnamese Baby, in which Johansen played against his hedonistic image by attempting a sincere political statement. The album cover, however, could not have looked more decadent. Johansen later said that he wanted to look like the French actress Simone Signoret. Music critics loved the record, but sales did not match the hype. A second album, Too Much Too Soon (1974), again proved a succès d'estime, which was not what the record company wanted, and the band was dropped, only to be taken under the wing of another Brit, Malcolm McLaren. The first meeting between Johansen and McLaren and his then partner, Vivienne Westwood, took place at a fashion fair in New York in autumn 1973, when the pair were on a visit to scout clothing for their London shop. Now McLaren was back in New York looking for opportunities in rock management. He put down the money to rent a rehearsal space on 23rd Street in Manhattan, while Westwood set about remodelling the band's image complete with zip-festooned red leather and striking vinyl outfits. McLaren draped the band's stage in the communist flag and put out a press release stating: 'What are the politics of boredom? Better red than dead!' Johansen later claimed the inspiration came from a song he co-wrote with Sylvain, Red Patent Leather. 'That wasn't Malcolm's idea, that was our idea,' he said. Whoever was responsible, the stunt backfired. Audiences were not so much outraged as merely turned off. Even die-hard fans walked out of the band's New York shows. The Dolls struggled on playing tiny venues for small fees in various permutations until fizzling out, while McLaren returned to London, putting his talent for provocation to use with the Sex Pistols. While the early adopters of the burgeoning punk scene in New York and London sang the praises of the Dolls, Johansen sought more mainstream acceptance. His first, eponymous solo album was voted 10th best album of 1978 – sandwiched between the Cars and Warren Zevon – by the Village Voice. A follow-up, In Style (1979), featured synthesizers and horns, further distancing the singer from his punk audience. His self-produced album The David Johansen Group Live was recorded in 1978 as a promotional exercise and given a wider release in CD format in 1993. Johansen achieved his only significant solo chart success in 1988, when a cover version of Hot Hot Hot, performed in his lounge singer persona, Buster Poindexter, reached No 11 on the Billboard chart. It made little impact in the UK, where the original Arrow version remains the most recognised, but in true contrarian style, Johansen said the success of the track was the bane of his life. In 2000, he turned to a blues-influenced sound with The Harry Smiths, named in tribute to the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music. In 2004, Morrissey, who had, as a teenager, organised the British arm of the New York Dolls fan club, invited the three surviving band members – Johansen, Sylvain and Kane – to London to perform at the Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre. The show was well received but Kane died from leukemia weeks later. Johansen and Sylvain, augmented by a rotating lineup of guest musicians, went on to play live dates internationally over the next seven years. The Dolls released three further albums – One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (2006), Cause I Sez So (2009), and Dancing Backwards in High Heels (2011) – to much critical acclaim, and played their final gig at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow, supporting Alice Cooper, in 2011. Born in Staten Island, New York, David was the son of Helen (nee Cullen), a librarian, and Gunvold Johansen, an insurance salesman, and attended Port Richmond high school. His singing career began in two local bands, the Vagabond Missionaries and the Electric Japs, before being recruited by the Dolls. Alongside his musical career, Johansen had a number of acting roles, including an appearance as the Ghost of Christmas Past opposite Bill Murray in Scrooged (1988) and alongside Hulk Hogan in Mr Nanny (1993). Personality Crisis: One Night Only (2023), a documentary featuring his performance as Buster Poindexter at the Cafe Carlyle in Manhattan, was directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi. Johansen's first two marriages, to the actor Cyrinda Foxe in 1977, then to the photographer and writer Kate Simon in 1983, ended in divorce. In 2013 he married Mara Hennessey. He had been living with cancer and been confined to bed since breaking his back last November. He is survived by Mara and her daughter, Leah. David Roger Johansen, singer, musician and actor, born 9 January 1950; died 28 February 2025
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wild, waspish and whip-smart, there are few rock stars as great as David Johansen
Nick Kent's fabled 1974 NME piece about New York Dolls, Dead End Kids on the Champs-Élysées, is packed with characters and incident. The band have arrived in France after a showcase gig at London boutique Biba, marred by various members getting caught while attempting to shoplift from the store. Their famously dissolute guitarist Johnny Thunders vomits copiously in front of the assembled press at a record company reception to welcome the band to France, then pukes again midway through a 'horrendous, tuneless' Dolls gig at Paris's prestigious Olympia theatre. Bassist Arthur Kane, a large man clad in a ballerina's tutu who apparently looks 'like he'd just been run over by a truck load of Valium' confides that he's in fear of his life: the last groupie he slept with tied him up in his sleep and attempted to cut off his thumb with a knife. And yet, even in such exalted company, there's no doubt who the star of the show is. Frontman David Johansen never appears to stop talking throughout, an endless, wildly entertaining source of tall tales – at one juncture, he claims to have been an underage star of gay porn films – hysterical bitching about other artists (John Lennon is an 'asshole hypocrite', Keith Richards is 'past it', Mott the Hoople's Ian Hunter has 'terrible piggy eyes') and eminently quotable statements: 'We attract only degenerates to our concerts'; 'We want to be known as the tackiest boys in New York.' Whatever you made of New York Dolls' music – and, as the evident distaste with which host Bob Harris greeted their appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test proved, it was nothing if not divisive – you would have a hard time arguing that Johansen wasn't fantastically good at the business of being a rock star. He was also very much the right man to front New York Dolls. He was good-looking, charismatic and the press loved him – Johansen always provided great copy – and he sang in a brash, snotty yowl, the perfect complement to the band's punk-inspiring edge-of-chaos sound. A former participant in the confrontational avant garde Theatre of the Ridiculous shows put on by directors John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam – big on drag queens, outrage and cast members covered in glitter – Johansen applied their techniques to New York Dolls' image, helping make the band an instant underground sensation in early 70s New York. Their early residency at the Lower East Side's Mercer Arts Centre attracted not just an equally flamboyant crowd of followers, but celebrities including David Bowie, Elton John, Lou Reed and Bette Midler, while Rod Stewart invited them to support Faces in London before they'd even released a note of music. Johansen wrote or co-wrote every original song that appeared on New York Dolls' eponymous 1973 debut and its follow-up Too Much Too Soon bar one, minting a raunchy, trashy style. Flying in the face of rock's increasing seriousness and grandeur, his songs were as in love with 60s girl group pop as they were the Rolling Stones: Looking for a Kiss opened with a steal from the Shangri-Las' 1964 hit Give Him a Great Big Kiss. They made a virtue of the band's rudimentary musicianship, but for all Johansen claimed 'there wasn't a lot of intellectualising going on', they were always far sharper and deeper than the band's detractors gave them credit for. Vietnamese Baby pondered the effects of the Vietnam war and collective guilt on attitudes to hedonism ('everything connects,' it suggests); Frankenstein was a garbled hymn to the alternately glitzy and grubby allure of New York; Subway Train quoted the lyrics of the 19th-century folk song I've Been Working on the Railroad. The music press understandably thought New York Dolls were going to be huge, but perhaps they were too polarising for their own good. A degree of homophobia provoked by their appearance – every member of the band was straight – undoubtedly hampered their progress in the US; a sound that seemed incredibly prescient when punk arrived was easy to dismiss as sloppy, semi-competent flailing in 1973: 'the worst high-school band I ever saw', sniffed the Rolling Stones' Mick Taylor. Even the producer of their debut album, Todd Rundgren, thought they couldn't play and treated them with a degree of disdain. Certainly, everything that could go wrong for New York Dolls did go wrong: drug addiction, a disastrous hook-up with the alcoholic former Shangri-Las' producer Shadow Morton on 1974's Too Much Too Soon, a dalliance with Malcolm McLaren as their manager who convinced them to take up a new Marxist-inspired image that succeeded only in alienating even the New York hipsters who had flocked to their gigs in the first place. They lost their record deal, and most of the band quit: Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain soldiered on until late 1976, finally giving up just as the seeds New York Dolls had sown began to bloom: their last gigs featured a support act called Blondie. Johansen's first eponymous post-Dolls solo album and 1979's In Style – the latter featuring a guest appearance by Ian Hunter, who'd presumably forgiven him for the 'piggy eyes' jibe – should theoretically have capitalised on punk, a genre he'd done more than most to inspire, but both flopped. A pity, because they were packed with smart, impactful, witty songs: Funky But Chic's brilliant defence of the Dolls' image ('mama says I look fruity, but in jeans I feel rotten'), Girls' surprisingly pro-feminist rallying call; the gleeful Wreckless Crazy. He finally scored an American hit with a medley of British Invasion classics in 1982, and finally became the star he'd always threatened to be by adopting the character of Buster Poindexter: a dinner-suit clad lounge singer performing old jump blues, swing and R&B numbers. His cover of Arrow's Hot Hot Hot ended up all over MTV (Johansen later called its success 'the bane of my life') and he regularly turned up on Saturday Night Live before tiring of his alter ego in the early 00s, returning to his own name and making a couple of blues albums that revealed his deep knowledge and understanding of the genre: New York Dolls had covered Bo Diddley and Sonny Boy Williamson. The surviving members of New York Dolls reformed at the behest of super-fan Morrissey when he curated the 2004 Meltdown festival: bassist Arthur Kane died shortly after the gig, but Johansen and Sylvain carried on under the name. You could hardly blame them for basking in the glow of belated glory, moreover the new albums they then made as New York Dolls were far better than anyone might reasonably have expected them to be. They evoked the band's past without seeming like a wan facsimile, they addressed latter-day topics – the 'war on drugs', mobile phones, online surveillance – with enough wit to avoid sounding like old-man-shouts-at-cloud moaning. And they occasionally boasted an affecting air of reflective melancholy. Implausible as the very idea of a grownup New York Dolls seemed, here it was, sounding oddly moving as it looked back at their glory days, 'jumping around the stage like teenage girls, casting our swine before the pearls,' as Johansen put it on We're All in Love, a song from 2006's One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. On their final album, 2011's Dancing Backwards in High Heels, there was a song called I'm So Fabulous, a paean to the band's good looks and sense of style, filled with snorting disgust at what passed for fashion in 'nebulous' 21st-century Manhattan. 'I'm so fabulous, you arriviste … The way you dress is so insidious – how do they even let you on the subway? … you're so Cincinnati … I don't even want to look at you,' sang Johansen, to a backdrop of raging guitar and wailing harmonica, sounding just like the guy who'd boasted to Nick Kent about New York Dolls' tackiness and degenerate audience nearly 40 years before. In its own cocky, swaggering, outspoken way, it's the perfect epitaph.
