When me, Daz and another mate of mine called Lee
helped our mutual mate; Eddie Guy - an old East London Skin from Poplar who
used to work in The Last Resort shop - bust out of the run-down flea-bitten
hotel he was staying in, in the middle of the night - coz he owed them six
weeks rent and had done it down the boozer - we weren’t, to be honest,
doing it totally out of the goodness of our hearts; we found ourselves dragging
his many fucking heavy bags down a rickety, dangerous-as-Hell fire-escape in
total darkness because Eddie had promised that in helping him do a moonlight
flit to his newly acquired council flat, he’d let us stay there for a couple of
weeks rent-free, which meant extra beer-tokens for all of us, so we happily
agreed, and when I look back, I can’t help but smile, it was a funny episode
alright, one thing’s for sure; we’d never have made cat-burglars!
Looking back now, the year spent at Eddie Guy’s
flat was a giggle to say the least, we had some good laughs there, but it was
also pure Hell most of the time, it was fucking mad, no carpets, hardly any
furniture, no curtains, never any hot water, no heating bar a fireplace that
smoked the whole fucking flat out every time we lit the bastard thing with the
wood - chopped-up window frames and stuff mostly - we’d nicked from a
nearby building site! The constant frost
on the inside of the windows was depressing, but the incessant bloody arguing
and rowing was worse and in the end, it was just too much, it did our heads
in. Eventually, a year after moving in,
the council threatened to kick Eddie out due to the constant complaints by the
neighbours, so the rest of us being decent chaps, did the decent thing
(eventually) and left him to it. A
couple of months later, the council kicked Eddie out anyway, so he fucked off
down to Ramsgate where his old dear lived, bless him. He had a good thing going there for a while
with that little flat after we left him in peace, he even had his bird’s
parents coming ‘round on Sundays to cut the grass for him whilst he had his
feet up watching The Big Match on the telly for Christ sake! He he, Poor old Eddie, he always was a bit of
a bungalow, (nothing up top), but you couldn’t help but like the bloke.
Anyway, when I invited Rob and Daz in for a brew
that day, it all came flooding back and I was reluctant to commit to anything
that would lead to me spending any length of time in a the same room with Daz
again! No disrespect to the geezer, it
weren’t that I didn’t like him, it was just that a year with the bloke had done
my fucking head in, so I was in no hurry for a repeat episode. Like I say, It weren’t that I didn’t like the
bloke, it was just that he was always so fucking hyper! If he weren’t jumping about like a fucking
lunatic, he was dancing about like a complete prat to anything from ‘Agadoo’ to
the fucking ‘Birdie Song!’ The bloke
couldn’t even sit still without his whole body twitching and jittering about
all over the place like some mentalist doing cold turkey!
Then they explained that they already had a
‘bass player’, and just needed someone to give him a few pointers, and I
couldn’t help but feel strangely disappointed!
Macey – a heavy-set, heavily tattooed
ex-borstal skinhead from Lowestoft - had only just bought the guitar and
plainly didn’t know one end of the thing from the other, so it soon became
apparent to me that ‘a few pointers’ was an extreme understatement. So after spending an hour or so showing Macey
how to do one or two simple things whilst the others stood around looking bored
as Hell, I asked Rob to play me this song he’d told me he’d written called
‘Crusade’, so he did, with Paul – a punky Herbert of a geezer back then
- shakily holding the beat on drums and Daz
growling out what I could make of the lyrics rather fucking admirably,
and that was that, I was hooked! I’d
gone full circle! Not only was that
motley bunch of wallies a million times better at playing than I’d ever dared
to imagine, the song was fucking good to boot and the lyrics sounded even
better. I just had to have a jam with
‘em, and when I did, it was such a fucking buzz - I can still remember to
this day how much I was shaking afterwards – I knew I’d have to have
more. I’d played in bands before, crappy
rock/metal bands, even played a few gigs, but I’d never felt an adrenaline rush
quite like the one I felt that day! It
was fucking awesome!
Macey never came back,
he jacked it in a week later, I replaced him and the rest as they say, is
history!
From then on, although the band was definitely
Rob’s project, they started to look to me for guidance as I’d been playing bass
for some years and had gained a little experience along the way, but in truth,
I knew fuck-all really, but having said that, I did know enough to realise that
if we didn’t set targets early on, the whole thing would die a death quicker
than a dodgy-looking Mexican in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western! So targets were duly set and we started to
practise twice a week, every week.
Some six weeks in, whilst setting up for yet
another rehearsal down at stinking ‘Mayhem Studios’ in the docklands of
Lowestoft, in the run-up to our planned debut foray into a professional
recording studio; in walked Troy – another long-term Lowestoft skinhead
– complete with guitar, amp and pedal.
It turned out that the band had once been a five-piece and in Troy’s
book, it still bloody was, although nobody had set eyes on him for eight weeks
or so! Quality stuff!
The problems started there. Troy – top bloke that he most definitely
is and still a good friend – is no time-keeper in any sense of the
word. Eight weeks late for rehearsal and
always half a bar late in every song!
Sit him down on his own and say ‘go on then Troy, show us what yer
got!’ He’ll surprise the shit out of
ya! The lad sure can play guitar and
play well, but his problem lies in keeping time with the rest of the band, so
problems began to arise and with the recording studio date looming, that
weren’t good.
Soldiering on as only mates do, we had no choice
but to put our problems to the back of our minds and so we found ourselves
outside Purple Studios in Yarmouth on 31st of August 1996 with
butterflies in our guts, carriers full of Stella Artoise in our hands and two
rough and ready songs spinning round and round our heads, lest we freeze and
forget how the fuckers go! I’m not
ashamed to say we were nervous, bloody nervous, we had good fucking reason to
be, but it didn’t stop us going in there with gritted teeth and doing a pretty
damn fine job, each and every one of us, if I do say so myself! We were well chuffed and the resulting demo,
featuring ‘Crusade’ a snappy little battle-song about a mythical battle between
the forces of supposed good and evil, and ‘Shoot To Kill’, a straight forward
anti-IRA statement, a couple of angry, raw hints at what the future would hold…
For another band anyway, was an instant success! Who’d have fucking thought it? GOAL!
With both songs of the demo written by Rob, the
lyrics to ‘Crusade’ written by Rob’s missus; Emma and the lyrics to ‘Shoot to
Kill’ written by Troy and edited by me (Pete), we found ourselves with a fairly
– it must be said – raw RAC sounding demo that was fast beginning to sell
faster than hot-cakes at Easter, but a name was needed for ‘The Crusade Demo’,
so after much deliberation over a pint or ten in a Lowestoft boozer, the name
‘Outburst’ was dragged up from somewhere and so ‘Outburst’ was born!
It seems in hindsight to be pretty ironic that
the name ‘Outburst’ was only ever intended to be a temporary name.
Unfortunately, ‘Outburst was only to survive another year
or so. Daz disappeared shortly after the
recording of the now fabled demo, on discovering with horror that Troy had
secured us an ‘album deal’ with ‘Step 1’ and a promise of gigs supporting ‘The
Crack’! He was quickly replaced by
Yarmouth skinhead Rex, who himself would leave after just a few short
months. Troy’s timing problem never
resolved itself and he eventually left the band under a cloud, which I know,
for Rob, was the lowest point of the band.
Troy started his own band and Paul decided to
leave and join this new band, who had yet another Lowestoft skinhead – Ian
- on vocals, who would later go on to roadie for ‘Outburst’ and another Norfolk
skinhead band, but that’s another story entirely. The writing was on the wall from then
on. Although a scatty new young drummer
would be found in Carl - who would tragically die in a bike crash about a
year later - and Andy a former Yarmouth skinhead who would replace Rex on
vocals, and immediately begin to transmogrify into a mini-me version of
charismatic ‘Exploited’ front-man; Wattie Buchan! STRANGE!
This would be the final line-up and would
struggle on to play a single legendary gig in the back-room of a back-street
Gorleston pub, but that would pretty much be that. A short time later, poor old ‘Outburst’ would
be as dead as a dead thing, callously replaced by an evil machine-like entity
known now mysteriously as ‘Retaliator.’
