There’s never going to be a reason not to post something
from Bristol's first punk band, The Cortinas. Formed in March 1976 when Jeremy
Valentine (vocals), Nick Sheppard (guitar), Mike Fewins (guitar), Dexter
Dalwood (bass) and Daniel Swan were still at school. "Jer put the band
together, he definitely had a vision of what he wanted; he was very hip -
Dexter and Mike went to the same school as him" remembers Nick. "He
found me via Mark Stewart, who I went to school with, and I brought Dan in; we
had played in a band together before. We used to practise at the back of Jer's
Dad's shop".
The Cortinas soon built up a big local following, and a
break came when the band supported The Stranglers at the fabled Roxy Club in
Covent Garden on 22 January 1977. Nick recalls how it came to be: "Hugh
Cornwell was staying at a friend of his' flat near the university, on holiday,
and me and my girlfriend met him in the street. This would have been in the
summer of 76. We started talking to him because we recognized him from seeing
The Stranglers and hung out for the afternoon. I told him about the band. Later
on, in January 77, he sent us a postcard asking us to play at the Roxy, so we
rang up and said yes! I remember my mum telling me not to be too disappointed
if people didn't like us...". Things then moved quickly for the band.
Miles Copeland and Mark Perry's Step Forward label released the classic singles
'Fascist Dictator' in June and 'Defiant Pose' in December, the band recorded a
fine Peel session, and they appeared on the front cover of the April/May issue
of Sniffin' Glue. Heady stuff, but sadly, it was over all too soon. The
following year, after a poorly received album, the band were no more, but in
1977 they were unstoppable - simply one of the best first wave punk bands around.
Few other rock musicians have ever danced on the edge of
drug oblivion for as long and hard as Johnny Thunders did. The theme of hard
drugs (namely heroin) cropped up time and time again in Thunders' music,
perhaps never more evident than in one of Thunders' best-known songs,
"Chinese Rocks." While the song is pure Johnny Thunders (ragged
guitar riffs, an almost drunken vocal delivery, lots of attitude, etc.)
Thunders did not pen it. The song's main author was the Ramones' bassist Dee
Dee Ramone. He set out to write a song that would out-do the Velvet
Underground's "Heroin," as the song shed light on the grim and
desperate life of a junkie (strangely, it was more comparable to another VU
song, "I'm Waiting for the Man," rather than "Heroin"). Dee
Dee supposedly wrote the song in Debbie Harry's apartment, but when he showed
it to his Ramones bandmates, they rejected it since they didn't want any
drug-based songs. Dee Dee then showed it to friend Richard Hell, who was in
Johnny Thunders' band the Heartbreakers at the time. The Heartbreakers recorded
it for their classic L.A.M.F. release, but, over the years, Thunders was
erroneously assumed to be the song's author, even though he had nothing to do
with the song's creation.
