The Ruts, who burst onto the punk-rock battlefield in
1979, were the perfect synthesis of punk and reggae, moving it on from The Clash into a tougher yet powerfully melodic
place. Their musicianship was spot on and imaginative, and Owen was briefly
given the mantle of spokesman for the punk-rock generation.
He has become one of the great lost front men of UK
music; a figure who fronted a key band whose originality, power and influence
has somehow been overlooked.
As Joe Strummer once didn’t quite say, “The future is
rewritten”, and as the past becomes sieved and edited we sometimes lose the
story.
There is much debate about nostalgia, but those who are
relaxed about such things celebrate the modern and the past with equal
ferocity. The problem is that certain icons have become deified and celebrated,
while others have been brushed aside.
Whilst someone like the aforementioned and, admittedly
brilliant, Ian Curtis hogs the media spotlight, the likes of Malcolm Owen are
almost forgotten in the rush to canonise certain accepted figureheads.
It has become difficult to believe that The Ruts were a
far bigger group than Joy Division were at the
time, with a clutch of hits to their name. They had released a brilliant debut
album and had a long lasting, if unrecognised, influence that has stretched
through the decades.
The Ruts provided an escape route for the punk movement
whose first wave had run its course. For a brief moment in time they threatened
to take British punk into the next decade. They could have been the alpha punk
band figure heading the UK scene into the 80s, replacing The Clash who were on
their American trip already.
The Ruts would have opened the doors for many other
like-minded, imaginative combos who wanted to push the form forwards but keep
it inside its parameters of thrilling music. They would have added an
experimental edge, a space provided by dub and funk and a commitment to mean
something to the street and the punk rockers seeking direction.
Unfortunately, when Owen finally overdosed on July 14th
1980 at the age of 25, it effectively ended the brief career of one of the UK’s
most exciting bands. It was a double shock to the fans who had assumed that The
Ruts were actually the first of a new type of group who were beyond drugs – in
reality, they were very much part of the London scene and had a reputation for
on-the-road ferocious partying.
The Ruts had promised a future and delivered a stunning
18 month assault that should be remembered to this day.
I can still remember that thrill of discovery three
decades ago when the first John Peel plays of the band were broadcast in January
1979.
At school, the clutch of us who were hooked into punk and
post-punk would crackle with the excitement of each new discovery that cropped
up in the music press or on John Peel.
And it was Peel, of course, who had just played this
track ‘In A Rut’ by the bluntly named Ruts, who were coming out of the
Southall/Hayes end of London, on his evangelical show that is still yet to be
matched in the years since his untimely death. In 2010 there is no way music
this edgy would get near so called “alternative” (the most meaningless word in
the musical lexicon) radio. It was the same then apart from the maverick Peel,
whose show from 1976 to 1985 was perhaps the best radio show ever.
And it was Peel, who in early 1979, played the tune that
was getting discussed in thrilled tones by our gangly group of teens. Here, it
seemed, was another punk band just when we thought the whole thing had run out
of steam.
By the end of 1978 they were already saying that punk was
dead, despite the avalanche of the younger kids just getting into it. Punk had
seemed to have played itself out. After all, how many more combinations could
there be of the three-chord trick?
The Ruts were the first of the second wave bands – the
much maligned and constantly misunderstood next phase of punk that took their
cue from the initial wave of excitement of the form. Many of these bands
thrilled in the rudimentary and matched the desperate times. These were
monochromatic years of dissolution and apocalyptic paranoia, and things were
about to get a whole lot worse…
Margaret Thatcher was about to get into power, and things
were going to get a damn site tougher. Punk’s second wave captured this mood
perfectly and seemed to be in a running musical battle with the establishment.
The Ruts brief sojourn was one of the key musical fight backs that really meant
something in a sea of soppy shite.
The second wave was tougher and more linear than the
class of ’77. It has been brushed aside by the media who will endlessly
celebrate the mythical and admittedly genius first wave, whilst treating the
second wave of punk as a musical leper colony.
The cliché of the second wave and other related genres
being thick and unimaginative is constantly proven wrong with a cursory look at
the bands involved. From the anarchist, almost art-rock punk of Crass to the
superior rock & roll of the UK Subs to the dark feral primal power of
Killing Joke: there were so many wonderful moments in this period that it could
be argued that the combined second wave of punk and its close mate – the birth
pangs for the Goth scene – were in fact some of the most fertile breeding
ground for British rock ever.
The Ruts debut single, ‘In A Rut’, was primal proto punk
that hinted at something far smarter. Its structure was lopsided and anthemic –
a brilliant piece of rabble rousing, proto-Clash street aggro – but there was
something else going on. Something far smarter and considered, and it came
armed with a brilliantly, rough vocal from Malcolm Owen, whose voice oozed a
street charisma.
Their next single was the brilliant ‘Babylon’s Burning’,
the perfect synthesis of the punky reggae party built around its killer
bassline from bassman Segs, who would later be found playing in the Alabama
Three. There was even an element of funk to the bass workout and a stunning
piece of guitar work from the late Paul Fox, whose playing was always really
inventive.
When Foxy died a couple of years ago from lung cancer,
the UK lost one of its great guitar players. The UK punk scene rallied on news
of his diagnosis and a very special gig was played in London, where a reformed
Ruts took to the stage for one last time with Henry Rollins fronting the band
in place of the late Malcolm Owen to run through six Ruts songs. When Paul Fox
took to the stage an emotionally charged room watched a frail, heroic guitar
hero pay his final show.
Rollins claimed he had seen the toughest man in his life
and the guitar player, who had by then only one lung left, rocked hard and even
moved about the stage. Post gig he collapsed backstage – exhausted, but a
heroic figure.
30 years before, his guitar work was key to a band that
was re-creating punk rock. Their rhythm section was adding the fluidity of
reggae to the toughness of punk. The singles that followed ‘Babylon’s Burning’
were ‘Staring At The Rude Boys’ and ‘Something That I Said’, both of which were
key signposts in the musical evolution of the era.
The band’s debut album explored this inventiveness
further. Their sheer musicality and sense of adventure was never an excuse for
the sort of self-indulgence and snobbery that ruined the fringes of the
post-punk scene.
Despite this, The Ruts never forgot that their duty was
to the mosh pit and also to the punk political. Their songs referenced the real
tension of the UK.
The band were never scared to make a stand in the tense
English civil war of the period, and their music cemented the diversity that
people almost take for granted now.
All the time Owen was the charismatic frontman with one
of those tough, yet emotional voices that score heavily in punk-rock. His stage
presence was phenomenal. A rugged and tough face on top of a gangling frame, he
dressed smart and looked like he lived all his lyrics. His words were cutting
and eloquent takes on the punk-rock nation and connected with the mainstream.
He had the criminal style and the suss to front the band into the next decade
and to become a Weller/Strummer/Terry Hall hybrid – but also one of those
quirky, ‘we really mean it, man’ frontmen that the UK of that period was
conversely so good at creating in that frilliest of decades.
He had been on the endless road for some time. In the
early 70s he had been on the hippy trail in India in and later lived on
communes in places like Anglesey with Paul Fox. While they all drifted back
down south and played in bands it was Owen, who in 1976, after hearing The
Clash, cropped his hair and bullied his mates into putting a punk band
together.
Easily as charismatic as Joe Strummer, Owen was a
brilliant frontman, an impassioned and powerful performer with a deep
intelligence and a big heart whose chemical dependencies would sadly catch up
with him.
Just when the band was hitting a peak in 1980 with an
upcoming sold out UK tour, starting work on a new album and an American tour
planned, Owen started to hit the skids. After some gigs were cancelled the rest
of the band fired him because of his drug dependency – an act of tough love
that temporarily helped to get the frontman to change his ways.
Heartbroken that the band had fallen apart due to his
chemical dependency, Owen got straight and persuaded them to reform.
When he persuaded his mates to regroup The Ruts he hit
the town. He took one last line of H and succumbed to the deadly kickback from
the drug in the bathroom of his parent’s house in Hayes. It was a sad epitaph
to a briefly brilliant career that had promised so much and left so many what
ifs.
There was one last single. Recorded shortly before he had
been sacked the band had finished work on ‘West One (Shine On Me)’, a dark song
that somehow conveyed the hopelessness of the situation. It was a posthumous
mini hit.
Owen will always be recognised as one of the coolest punk
rock geezers, and a face from the past who could have contributed so much more
but at least left behind a brilliant and impassioned legacy that helped to
shape our lives.
Anyone who really cares about punk rock deeply cares
about the Ruts. Henry Rollins will always tell you about the genius of the
band, as will Ian MacKaye, whose work with Fugazi was almost like a
continuation of the Ruts experimental work. For many of us in the punk-rock
nation, they remain one of key bands of their generation, and a sadness remains
in trying to guess what they and Malcolm Owen have become.
With thanks to John Robb
%20front.jpg)
