LP-The Dum Dum Boys-Let there be NZ 80's punk hardcore

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(LET THERE BE NOISE ) by (THE DUM DUM BOYS )...... ....(A FAN TELLS THE STORY: There are some things in rock n roll you don’t do without expecting menace. Like evoke the spirit of Iggy Pop. But evoke the spirit of Ig they did and whatever pact The Henchmen signed it ensured the West Auckland Detroit-punk outfit were never forgotten. Their shows had a smoldering violence - bikers lined up outside suburban halls, skinheads attacking the drummer inside, Norm Williamson (Anthony Norman) smashing his guitar onstage. Drunken belligerent singer Tony Stooge (Collins) taking to himself with a shard of glass from the garage window that has just exploded inward. The Henchmen’s lonely punk road begins in late 1970s Auckland, New Zealand, where Suburban Reptiles are playing in Albert Park, The Scavengers are all over the tabloid press, Television New Zealand is following a busload of Auckland punks to a Wellington Town Hall punk festival and DJs' Brian Staff and Barry Jenkin are making commercial radio and music TV bite again. New Zealand’s most active punk scene is taking off and watching it happen are two Te Atatu teenagers' guitarist Anthony Norman, Ramones fan, and his surly belligerent mate, vocalist Tony Collins, products of blue collar Te Atatu in Auckland’s western suburbs and a budding punk band. Like the punks they’ve read about they’re bored of the flaccid rock of the mid 1970s. The heavy rock bands they’d liked in their early teens were in decline. The new music coming out of New York - Patti Smith, Dictators, Raw Power-era Iggy, The New York Dolls - now that was exciting. More current punk delights came via a friend’s big brother who was sending back Sex Pistols singles and live punk tapes from London. Collins and Norman copped a title from an Iggy Pop song and formed The Dum Dum Boys. The creative chemistry was there from the beginning, and with second guitarist Roy Muir, Norman started thrashing out his punk riffs with Collins mixing and matching his prolific output of back street scenarios. They played some covers - The Ramones’ Teenage Lobotomy and Shock Treatment, Sham 69’s Borstal Breakout and The Dead Boys’ Sonic Reducer - but it was mainly new material. The most prolific writers in New Zealand punk were cranking it out. When they emerged from the garage Muir was gone replaced by Collins’ friend, Mike Stininski, and Rutherford High School old boy Dean Larsen was drumming. Iggy Pop’s Imbecile Proteges It was a pissed and nervous bunch who fronted up at the April Rock Quest ‘80 at the Windsor Castle Tavern in Auckland’s Parnell. They knew no-one. Worse, their blue-collar Detroit-style punk was about as welcome as a visit from the hardline Team Policing Unit. Things started bad and steadily got worse. Anthony Norman: “All the other band members were in the toilet and we heard this ruckus coming over the PA. Tony’s up on stage telling someone to fuck off. He’d been up there doing mic levels and immediately got booed and howled down and gave them a soundcheck like: “Fuck off you dog” and “Sit down, you slut.” At that point most of the judges crossed the band out. Then Norman’s amp exploded and no-one would lend him one. He had to walk off and start taking things from other bands as they stood by horrified, but unable do anything because the Boot Boys had taken a liking to The Dum Dum Boys and were crowding round Norman, ordering them to “give him your amp, yuh cunt.” They played three songs before being stopped with a sound problem. The pub crowd started yelling setting off Collins yelling and screaming at those screaming at The Dum Dum Boys. He spotted a guy with a jug with lemon and cherries hanging out the side and tore off the stage, ripped it off him and proceeded to drink it forgetting all about singing as the band played on. Rip It Up wrote them up as“Iggy Pop’s imbecile proteges’ The Dum Dum Boys (who) played for ten minutes and played with their gear for the rest of the time.” Let There Be Noise The Dum Dum Boys, by now stacking up quite a few originals, decided to capture them in demo form to play to venue bookers. They recorded four songs at Harlequin Studios in early 1980 with new bassist Chris Blyth and didn’t stop until they had their first album - the raw nerve Let There Be Noise. Along the way Collins violently jettisoned drummer Larsen. Norman: “Tony had a fight with him in the studio. When it came to finance the album Dean couldn’t contribute cash so he was going to get a car to carry the gear around in. He turned up at the studio in a Japanese sports car.” Goodbye Dean Larsen. Joz Hodzelmanns filled in on drums for the album’s last two songs with Crash McThrob (engineer Steve Kennedy) playing over Larsen on Stalking The Streets. It was New Zealand’s first full length punk rock album by a single act. A raw clutch of borrowed riffs, tin shed sound and Collins’ dark backstreet narratives. The first five hundred sold quickly. Collins and Norman set up a stall in a bus-stop in inner city Queen Street. They didn’t sell many copies that day but they made the Auckland Star and among the purchasers was student scribe Garth C(artwright) and Jeremy Chunn; a fellow Detroit punk fan destined to be their bass player. The album stretched to a second pressing (white cover opposed to the first pressing’s black). To promote Let There Be Noise, Tony Stooge and manager Robyn Vamp, booked a series of hall shows around the Auckland suburbs. They used a small PA bought with cash raised by selling the contents of Vamp’s Massey home (which also financed the album’s recording and release). Three hundred West Auckland punks caught The Dum Dum Boys at the Fanshawe Street Primary School Hall and two hundred saw them at the Glen Eden Primary School Hall. The Dum Dum Boys were back in the inner city again at Cafe XS late November 1981. Their growing number of fans could also catch them at Massey Hall with fellow West Aucklanders’ The Famous Five, while outside a row of Highway 61 hogs and riders lined up; praetorian guard to the scattered punk overflow from the hall. Further down the road in Massey township, half a dozen police cars were waiting for the inevitable violence to spark amongst the scattered punk debris outside. When it does the show is closed down. Billy Williams, the new drummer, was a young West Auckland punk who’d cut his teeth in The Executioners, a Mount Albert school punk band, that featured Neil Roberts the anarchist who later bombed the Wanganui police computer centre, the hub of New Zealand’s information on its citizens. Williams had heard The Dum Dum Boys’ first album and been impressed. “When I joined the band, we recorded what was to be the second Dum Dum Boys album - Death or Glory - at Harlequin Studios. It cost two to three thousand dollars to record. A lot of those songs ended up with different lyrics on We’ve Come To Play. I’d been in the band for nine months, switching between bass and drums, until we managed to secure a drummer. Mark Maelstrom from Te Atatu.” When The Dum Dum Boys fronted up at the Mainstreet Battle of the Bands in May 1982 the reception was good. Too good. They finished the set with Celebration Of Sin; the song that would become We’ve Come To Play with Tony launching into a monologue: “We know this gig is rigged. Everyone knows The Gurlz are gonna win.” And they did. The Dum Dum Boys weren’t placed. Billy Williams: “They deliberately stuffed up the mix. Tony’s voice was going up and down, the guitar vanishing. Tony was abusing the soundman so he switched off the monitor. “It was his mic and Tony was doing a Daltrey with it. The guy came up on stage and grabbed it off him. Tony went to another mic and started cursing at the crowd: “This is a rip off.” A bunch of skinheads saw the soundman take the mic and took him backstage and dumped him. We didn’t know this - we were playing - and all of a sudden all these guys are onstage trying to pick a fight with Tony.” Collins and Norman wouldn’t play Mainstreet again until May 1983. With live shows scarce The Dum Dum Boys became The Henchmen, and in August 1982, released a ferocious version of Iggy and the Stooges’ I Got A Right backed with Rock n Roll Attack on their own Cadaver Records. Billy Williams who’d played bass and drums on the single, left the band soon after. The Henchmen followed I Got A Right with more aggression. This time a la Radio Birdman. Namely a hard stomping three chord tribute to their Ozzie heroes called Do The Maelstrom (backed with Apocalypse). The lyrics were a line here, a line there, out of Birdmen songs, turned into one song. To top it off, Collins wanted a sleeve with the Radio Birdman logo on it. Norman did the artwork under duress, worried about the plagiarism. He was right to be. Radio Birdman singer Rob Younger wasn’t impressed and would later say so aloud. The record is one of the band’s best. Released in the large 12” format for better sound, and recorded live in the more intimate Progressive Studios by a hippie hanger-on from the studio, Rob Chamberlain from Aellian Blade. It has a classic late sixties sound, raw but clear, with the guitars stomping through. New drummer Rick Dean filled it out with Norman playing bass. Norman: “Rob was the cleaner. He got paid in studio time and offered to engineer us. Did a really good job - four mics, classic 1960s sound live in the pool room on the stage.” When it was released in March 1983 Do The Maelstrom received a grudging thumbs up. It was hard not to notice the whiff of disdain. Punk was old news, the creative diaspora was here, and a troglodyte quartet from West Auckland dragging the rotting corpse of punk rock back into town wasn’t very 1983. A different kind of club culture was beckoning the original punk cult. Norman: “In the Auckland scene we were a band apart. The only Auckland post-punk band that didn’t have anything to do with the clique. They’d all play the same clubs. We couldn’t get in. No-one would play with us except Vicious Circle. We decided we didn’t need the rest anyway.” A trail of graffiti in the inner city proclaimed defiantly that The Henchmen will play but it wasn’t to be often. We’ve Come To Play When The Henchmen returned to the studio to record their first album they had a new bass player, Jeremy Chunn, younger brother of Mike and Geoff Chunn of Citizen Band and Split Enz. Anthony Norman remembers their first meeting at the studios: “Tony wasn’t that impressed. He said: “Yeah, what do you want?” He thought (Chunn) was gonna bugger off in a few days like some of the others.” Chunn was also middle class. His father was a Doctor. He’d attended top notch Auckland Grammar. It was a fact they were all conscious of. But Chunn stuck. He was a major Detroit rock fan. I watched him dressed in striped tee shirt, denim jacket with metal badges and sneakers tear down an over-preened bunch of British-influenced punks called Public Enemy after they dismissed American punk during a showing of the punk documentary Decline of Western Civilisation. It demonstrated another prevailing ignorance of the day. That American punk was a laughable concept. Billy Williams returned to the drum seat after a chance meeting in an Auckland music store. Williams: “They’d found Jerry Chunn in March 1983. The Henchmen started to get more gigs. We knew we were great. That it wasn’t our fault we weren’t taking off with the general public. There seemed to be two camps - New Romantics and anything that was thought of as punk was GBH and The Exploited. What we were playing was heavy metal shit to them. We had a small hardcore following who became Vicious Circle then Dead Image.” The Henchmen were playing Mainstreet mid-weekers and hiring halls around West Auckland playing to sizeable crowds in Mount Roskill and Oratia then losing their bond when the toilets got kicked in. On 28 May 1983 they played at the Mount Albert Primary School Hall with Vicious Circle (having played the weekend before at the Blockhouse Bay Primary School Hall). Billy Williams: “At the end of the show we did a bit of a Who with our instruments just for the hell of it. No one was around. Norm threw the Ibanez Firebird copy offstage. It fell to pieces. I kicked my drums over, picked up my floor tom and hurled it. “I couldn’t see anybody because of the stage lights. The drum hit a monitor and did a neat little arc and clocked this huge skin on the forehead. He was not too happy and came up and grabbed me.” Norman: “This guy was a bit of a nutcase. Tony and I calmed him down and he started to walk off. Tony walked off and I turned around and he made another screaming run at Billy. We tackled him again.” The Henchmen’s new cohesion showed on their classic only LP, We’ve Come To Play, a fist full of hard guitars and lonesome Iggy howl recorded by Terry King at Progressive Studios in Auckland in July 1983. When it appeared in August 1984 it featured some mighty familiar riffs and words plus re-recordings of their singles. Norman: “Anything not nailed down was ripe for picking. We always thought The MC5 stuff could be done a lot faster. We did Kick Out The Jams live and rehearsed Ramblin’ Rose.” Two versions of the album exist. The first accidentally pressed with between song chatter intact and five songs on one side and three on the other. The more common version has four songs a side and no chatter MINT COPY--VERY RARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ).......