Andrew Matheson - Sick on You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band

This tale comes via memory, reel-to-reel, diary, acetate, journal, and cassette.

I was eighteen years old, six feet tall, 148 pounds, sopping wet, and, like Dylans farmhand on Maggies Farm, I had a head full of ideas that were driving me insane. Most of those ideas revolved around starting a band.

I was driven by the purest of all the emotions: hatred. I hated absolutely everything I heard in the charts. Music needed to be grabbed by the lapels and shaken up.

So I got some cash, a suitcase, and a guitar, and off I went to London where legend had it the streets were paved with gold records. I also took with me a set of rules. Five rules chiseled in granite, sacrosanct and unbreakable. Follow these rules and I would create the perfect band.

Rules for a Rock N Roll Band
~ The Template ~

1. Four or five members maximum. No sax, no horn section, no keyboards, no Moog-synthesizer boffin, no backup chanteuses, no nothing. Two guitars, a bass, drums, and singer, thats it. Think the Beatles, Kinks, and Who for four, Stones for five.
2. The singer sings. Thats it. No hanging a guitar around his neck mid-show and strumming a few cowboy chords to show he can play, no sitting at the piano for a poignant ballad or two, and definitely no tambourine bashing. And for Christs sake, no standing on one leg and sucking and wheezing into a flute like that hobo in Jethro Tull. At a pinch a shake of maracas but just for a portion of a song then toss them aside. If a singer cant think what to do with himself during a bandmates solo he should consider a career as a bank teller.
3. Great hair, straight hair, is a must and is nonnegotiable. If a member starts going thin on top put an ad in the Melody Maker immediately. If he has too tight a natural curl or, saints preserve, a perm, well, shame on you for hiring him in the first place. Be firm about this; a hat wont work.
4. No facial hair. Girls, or at least girls youd ever deign to paw, do not swoon over the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia is no sane, recently showered girls idea of a pinup.
5. No girlfriends. They are cancerous for the esprit de corps. They lower the bands collective sexual currency and can twist a measly bass players brain until he thinks he should get a triple-album solo deal and headline Vegas.

Two words: Yoko and Ono.

I still believe in these rules but as fate would have it we broke most of them.