Biography
MANCHESTER BOYS Liner Notes by DAVID WELLS
For many musicians who’d already been around the block a time or two without making any real impact, the arrival of punk in 1976 provided one final chance for musical reinvention and a crack at the big-time. Some got lucky, some didn’t. Bands like The Stranglers and The Police succeeded in using the prevalent Year Zero mentality as a springboard for fame and fortune, but many others (Dead Fingers Talk, for example, who’d been plugging away in their native Kingston-upon-Hull since the fag-end of the Sixties) never quite made it beyond a cult following.
Even The Salford Jets would freely admit that they belong in the latter camp – nevertheless, they did make a bit of a splash, with a minor hit single in ‘Who You Looking At?’, regular exposure on Radio One and a loyal grassroots following. This anthology assembles the pick of their recordings, with pivotal band members Mike Sweeney (lead vocals) and Diccon Hubbard (bass, vocals) graciously acting as our guides as we tell the tale of a group who never really got the breaks that they deserved.
As the more astute amongst you will have inferred from the name, The Salford Jets grew out of the local music scene in Salford, Greater Manchester. By the late Sixties, Diccon Hubbard and Mike Sweeney were Salford scene stalwarts, playing in various semi-pro outfits – Diccon with The Rogues ("a pretty sedentary band, really - we did one single for Decca back in 1967, but it was crap!") and The Chasers, and Mike with The Speakeasy. But both men continued to hold down day jobs, with Diccon working as an art teacher and Mike going through a succession of posts that ranged from miner to computer programmer. In 1973, Mike replaced John Knail in local legends Stackwaddy, an uncompromising, blues-oriented rock band who’d enjoyed the patronage of John Peel, even recording a couple of albums (including the indelicately-titled Bugger Off) for the late DJ’s label, Dandelion.
But Stackwaddy’s recording adventures were over by the time that Mike joined, and within a year or two they’d changed their name to Smiffy. Stackwaddy had been notorious nonconformists, but Smiffy were a far more docile affair – much to the chagrin of their lead singer, who still entertained hopes of emulating his hero, Pretty Things frontman Phil May. "By late 1976, Smiffy had been reduced to doing the social club/chicken-in-a-basket circuit", Mike remembers with evident distaste. "Initially we’d all had high hopes of getting somewhere, but even though we’d recorded some demos, nobody had really shown any interest in picking us up. By the end, we were just playing covers for people who didn’t want to be there – and, to be honest, neither did we. I was going to be thirty years old in 1977, and I knew that, if I was going to make anything of myself, I had to move on. So I left the band."
While Mike was pondering his next move, Diccon Hubbard was casting off his own musical straitjacket. "I’d been working for some while as a band leader for Mecca, but decided to leave in late 1976", he reminisces. "When I left Mecca, I took the drummer, Dave ‘Shakey’ Morris, with me, and we put together a little rock’n’roll band, with Don McIntyre on guitar and vocals. But then Mike left Smiffy and joined us. For a while we alternated between a couple of different ventures – as well as carrying on with the covers band, who always went down well in the clubs and pubs, we wrote our own material for a more contemporary band, called Sweeney. We did some demos as Sweeney before Don got fed up and left, at which point we became The Salford Jets."
"Initially the Jets were inspired by some of the bluesier bands of the Sixties – Canned Heat in particular, but also The Kinks and all these tough little R&B bands like The Measles, who had been popular around Manchester a decade or so earlier. But then The Ramones came along, and that changed everything for us… certainly it was a hell of a jump for me, going from the Mecca dance halls to punk!"
"When the embryonic Jets came together, it wasn’t even for one last go", claims Mike. "We just felt that we had nothing to lose, and that, rather than try to keep everybody else happy, the time had come for us to do just what we wanted to do. So although we did covers, even they were done to please ourselves rather than an audience. The stuff we played was quite esoteric – tracks from Searchers EPs, obscure Johnny Kidd & The Pirates material, and so on. But we were also inspired by the new generation of R&B bands. To me, the unsung heroes of that era were Dr. Feelgood, Eddie & The Hot Rods and The Kursaal Flyers – three great bands."
Following The Sex Pistols’ seismic, see-how-its-done gig in the summer of 1976 at the Free Trade Hall, the Manchester punk scene rapidly came together. Within a few months the city was a hive of activity, reminiscent to old-timers of the beat boom explosion of 1963/64. "Manchester was an exciting place to be during the early punk/indie scene", Diccon admits. "Initially we used to rehearse in an old school hall. Then, due to noise levels and complaints, we moved to Tony Davidson’s rehearsal rooms, based in a Victorian warehouse behind Deansgate station (as well as providing a place for the likes of the embryonic Joy Division to rehearse, the entrepreneurial Davidson ran the TJM label, ‘discovering’ Mick Hucknall and his first band, The Frantic Elevators). At the time it was full of aspiring new bands. The first day we were there, we saw a guy playing guitar working out some indecipherable song – it seemed to me to be total crap. It turned out to be Pete Shelley! Funnily enough, I came to quite like The Buzzcocks… some of them used to come and watch our gigs."
In the midst of a scene – and, perhaps more importantly, record company A&R men - that leant towards musical conformity and one-dimensional punk orthodoxy, it was probably to the Jets’ detriment that they were almost impossible to pigeonhole. Their diverse musical influences and roots led to a sound that certainly owed something to punk, but there was also an uninhibited playfulness at the heart of the band that allowed them to incorporate elements of doo-wop, rock’n’roll, blues and Sixties beat. An a cappella race through ‘Blue Moon’ and a frenzied assault on ‘Please Please Me’ were quirky enough to appeal to the punters on novelty value, but it should be noted that they also had considerable internal songwriting ability, and their live set featured some sturdy originals, including the lyrically minimal but exceedingly catchy ‘Lookin’ At The Squares’. By this point – late 1977 – the band had lost Don McKintyre, but fleshed out their sound with the acquisition of Rod Gerrard (guitar, vocals) and Geoff ‘Bubbs’ Kerry (keyboards, guitar, vocals). Gerrard had previously served time in the early 1970s as one of the latest batch of Mindbenders chosen to back the indefatigable Wayne Fontana.
The time was right, the Jets decided, to look for a deal. "I knew Alvin Stardust, so we managed to get some demo recordings to his tour manager, Malcolm Cook", recalls Diccon. "Malcolm took them round to a couple of places, including Alvin’s record label, Magnet. Unfortunately they already had Darts, who were very big at the time, so they didn’t really want another band that had a strong doo-wop element to their sound. Eventually WEA offered us a deal."
‘Lookin’ At The Squares’ appeared on WEA in May 1978. As the first single by yet another Manchester-based band, it could easily have slipped through the cracks, but it was seized upon by Phil Sayer, a DJ at the local independent radio station, Piccadilly. Mike Sweeney: "Phil really got behind it, and the song was played on Piccadilly Radio three or four times a day. That lifted us up a couple of rungs in the local pecking order, and really helped to break us in the North of England. I remember Phil saying he couldn’t believe that anyone would call a band after Salford – doing something like that was very uncool at the time, although punk certainly helped to make provincialism more acceptable. Somebody said to me at the time that ‘Lookin’ At The Squares’ sounded ‘a bit Northern’. But why shouldn’t it? That’s where I’m from!"
The B-side, ‘Dancing School’, was an entirely different kettle of fish. "It harked back to our experiences a year or two earlier with Jack Good", explains Diccon. "Jack had been the man behind the TV show Oh Boy! in the late 1950s, but in 1976 he was asked to produce a series of rock’n’roll concerts at the Astoria Theatre in London’s Charing Charing Cross Road. We were asked to take part, and we ended up backing the likes of Shakin’ Stevens and Mud’s Les Gray as well as performing ‘Blue Moon’ in our own right."
‘Lookin’ At The Squares’ didn’t really sell outside of Manchester, but, presumably inspired by the late Fifties nature of the flipside, WEA ‘suggested’ that the band’s second single should be a straightforward rock’n’roll song – after all, this was in an era when, in addition to the more high-profile likes of Darts and Showaddywaddy, youngish rockabilly merchants like Matchbox and Whirlwind were meeting with some success. But the Jets weren’t impressed with the idea. "We told them to fuck off", admits Diccon.
Curiously enough, that pithy response coincided with the end of WEA’s interest in the band. For a while it seemed that the band had shot themselves in the foot, with a lengthy period of vinyl silence ensuing. But nobody was too bothered by the lack of a recording deal – gigging constantly, the band was enjoying being part of an exciting grassroots movement. "We moved to (Drones member)Mike Drone’s place near Mount Street to practice", recalls Diccon. "An interesting experience, to say the least – my memories of that time are, at best, rather hazy! The first time I met Peter Hook (bassist with Joy Division)was when he turned up at my house in a huge elderly Jaguar in order to buy a bass cabinet I had for sale… I still see Hooky sometimes, and we always have a good laugh about that!"
The band’s local activities also played an important part in Mike Sweeney landing a lucrative sideline with Piccadilly Radio. "We were pretty much the unofficial house band for Piccadilly", recalls Mike. "They used to hold a lot of events locally, such as The Best Disco In Town, and there was no point in them getting a band down from London to pack them in when we were just down the road and could sell the place out just as well. So we had a good relationship with the station, and I started hanging around with them, doing quite a lot of interviews. In 1980 I did a promotional spot for them, and as a result of that, I was invited to become one of their regular DJs."
Former Honeybus manager and publisher Terry Noon was looking after the band by the end of the decade, and he brokered a deal with EMI that saw the appearance in July 1979 of the band’s second single. An urgent slice of punk pop rabble-rousing that sported a guitar riff reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’, the self-mythologising ‘Manchester Boys’ appeared on the EMI International label – as, indeed, had another Mancunian lad’s locally-produced demo. But while EMI’s support had helped Jilted John reach a national audience the previous summer, the company gave no such promotional push to the Salford Jets. The band later discovered that there was a good reason for this, as Diccon Hubbard relates. "When we signed to EMI International, they were in the process (unbeknown to us) of flogging that division to Paramount Pictures, who promptly closed the label down! Ours was the last release."
Unbowed, the band bounced back straight away with a deal with yet another major label, RCA. Their first release for their new paymasters was an old-fashioned EP that comprised ‘Gina’, ‘Steady With You’, ‘I Want You’ and ‘Hey (Can I Fall In Love)’. Wisely chosen as the lead track, the infectious ‘Gina’ was an unlikely but highly effective combination of high school doo-wop and streetwise punk. "Writing songs was always hard work for me", admits Mike Sweeney. "If I was left to my own devices, I’d only come up with about two songs a year. Once we got past ‘She’s Gonna Break Your Heart’ in 1980 I pretty much dried up, but I was always really proud of ‘Gina’. It came together really quickly, which is always the best way."
‘Gina’ picked up considerable airplay, largely thanks to the enthusiastic support of Radio One DJ Mike Read. Read, in fact, was so impressed by the band that he invited them to record a session for his evening show. Recorded in early February 1980 and broadcast a month later, the session featured four songs, including, naturally enough, ‘Gina’, which by that point had risen to the status of turntable hit.
More significantly, the session included the unveiling on national radio of what would become the next Salford Jets single. Released in April, ‘Who You Lookin’ At?’ was an arresting slice of tongue-in-cheek punk aggression with some great organ work from Geoff Kerry. It did the trick for the band. With regular airplay (chiefly courtesy of Mike Read, for whom they recorded one or two advertising jingles, but also Kid Jensen and Peter Powell, both of whom were fans), it became what would turn out to be the band’s only Top 75 single at the end of May. Incidentally, the B-side, the similarly-themed ‘Don’t Start Trouble’, was very strong as well and, with the benefit of hindsight, maybe should have been held back for A-side status in its own right.
Instead, ‘She’s Gonna Break Your Heart’ was chosen as the all-important follow-up to the breakthrough hit. Issued in August, it got off to a great start when it was chosen as one of Radio One’s Records of the Week, which guaranteed airplay three or four times a day. However, RCA’s pressing plant and promotional division had been told to concentrate their efforts on the latest Elvis and Bowie releases, and fans complained that they were unable to find copies of ‘She’s Gonna Break Your Heart’ in the shops.
The upshot was that the single did pretty well without quite matching its predecessor’s sales figures. Sadly, doing pretty well wasn’t good enough for the band at a time when office politics at RCA were about to impact on them. "We had actually recorded what would have been the fourth single for them, ‘I Don’t Believe You’, which had reached acetate stage", recalls Diccon. "RCA were about to renew our contract, with the new one including an album clause plus more singles. Unfortunately, the UK boss at the label was sacked a week before it was due to be signed. The new guy got rid of our band along with various others in order to bring in his own people…"
Included on our anthology, ‘I Don’t Believe You’ failed to gain a release at the time, and apparently only two acetate copies are known to have survived. The Salford Jets cast around for another major deal but, as a holding operation, they went down the well-trodden punk path of indie pressings. Even then, they were thwarted by events beyond their control: having recorded the live favourite ‘Blue Moon’ as their next single, they then saw Showaddywaddy issue their own version of the song. Instead, ‘City Youth’ (b/w ‘Keep Away From My Baby’) appeared on the tiny Lunar label in November 1980. A loping punk-reggae hybrid, ‘City Youth’ did at least come in handy when the band attempted to negotiate a new deal. "We signed a one year, three single deal with Polydor, with the usual options upon completion", remembers Diccon. Polydor became the band’s fourth major record label in less than three years.
After another session for Mike Read in December (the four songs played, incidentally, included the band’s very first A-side, ‘Lookin’ At The Squares’), The Salford Jets set about recording their Polydor debut. ‘Soldiers Of Fortune’ (backed by the classy ‘Young Bucks’) duly emerged in March 1981. It seemed a powerful offering, but even the band was shocked by its abject sales performance, Diccon Hubbard now describing the single as "spectacularly unsuccessful". Like most groups, The Salford Jets felt that a lack of success couldn’t be anything to do with the product, and the blame was laid firmly at the door of the record company. "The single received what the majority of the band felt was poor label support", Diccon now claims. "The result was a group vote, which led to Polydor being told in no uncertain manner that we no longer wished to be associated with them! Polydor couldn’t wait to get out of the deal!"
Homeless once more, the Jets continued to gig, although Mike Sweeney’s radio career was taking off; by now he was occupying prime-time slots on Piccadilly. He and Geoff Kerry both left, to be replaced by Johnny ‘Psycho’ Wolfenden, who came in on sax, and the returning Don McKintyre. Thus reconstituted, the band returned to the vinyl fray with one final single in ‘Pain In My Heart’, another indie label offering that first appeared on the Single label in 1982, before being remixed and reissued by Ka (who were financed by CBS) the following year. The track was heavily featured by Dave Lee Travis on his Radio One show, but still it didn’t work out for the Jets. "Ka had just put an awful lot of money into an album by B. A. Robertson", says Diccon. "But the album bombed completely – I don’t know how true it is, but we heard it cost the label something in the region of half a million pounds. CBS withdrew their funding, Ka collapsed, and, once again, nobody could buy our single."
Without a significant hit record to sustain them, it was only a matter of time before The Salford Jets bowed to the inevitable. When, in late 1984, they were forced to sell off their gear to meet demands from the Inland Revenue, they elected to go their separate ways.
By the end of the 1980s, however, the original four members of the Jets (Diccon Hubbard, Mike Sweeney, Dave Morris and Geoff Kerry) had come together once again. This time it was in the guise of the Thunderbyrds, who recorded a handful of Sixties classics – ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’, ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, ‘This Strange Effect’, ‘My White Bicycle’ - for a series of tribute albums and parallel universe compilations issued by the Imaginary label.
The Thunderbyrds also acted as the backing band for Wayne Fontana, although by this stage Mike Sweeney’s primary source of income was as DJ with Capital Radio, while Diccon Hubbard was running a talent and management agency (as he still does, incidentally). Nevertheless, Mike and Diccon revived the name of The Salford Jets in 1996 for a re-recording of ‘Who You Lookin’ At’ that also featured Inspiral Carpets keyboardist Clint Boon, ex-Troggs guitarist Chris Britton and Phil Watts, formerly of fellow Manchester punks The Out. This recording appeared on the 1996 EP Manc Attitude.
In late 2002 Mike Sweeney and Diccon Hubbard put together a new version of The Salford Jets with the aid of Phil Watts, Nick Marland (guitar, vocal) and former Sad Café member Mike Hehir (guitar, vocal). Returning to the gig circuit and writing/recording new material, they issued a sprawling 3CD retrospective, Adventures In Lo-Fi, that’s well worth seeking out. Here, though we condense the best of their impressive back catalogue onto one disc, adding mid-Nineties re-recordings of ‘Gina’ and ‘Who You Lookin’ At?’ and a spate of recordings from the last year or two, ranging from the great power-popper ‘Without You’ ("That was me wanting to be in The Action or The Creation!", laughs Mike) to the neo-heavy metal ‘Gonna Rock’n’Roll’, while the anthemic ‘Waterfall’ (actually dating back to 1998) testifies to the Britpop-era influence of Oasis. The result is the essence of The Salford Jets, a band for whom the old adage ‘so near and yet so far’ must be particularly poignant.
It should be said, though, that, for all the custard pies that fate elected to fling at the band, Diccon Hubbard still remembers the late Seventies/early Eighties Salford Jets heyday with enormous affection. "We had great times", he now says. "We were lucky enough to have a fantastic set of fans that would get coaches together to travel all over the place to see us. We never made any money, but we met a lot of great people."
"I’m prouder now of The Salford Jets than I was at the time", admits Mike Sweeney. "Because we didn’t have any great measure of success, I convinced myself that maybe we weren’t that good after all. But some of it has really stood the test of time, and I’m very proud of a lot of it. We were actually a great little rock’n’roll band."
(c) DAVID WELLS
January 2006