The Automatics
On the face of it, The Automatics are one of those bands that looked to ride the wave of New Wave power pop bands like the Boomtown Rats, Jags and Tonight. In fact the band itself was led by charismatic singer David Philps who was very much in the Bob Geldof school of frontmen as in loud and in yer’ face and the band were renowned for their up-tempo live performances.
Producing the rather good When Those Tanks Roll Over Poland/Watch Her Now single on Island Records in 1978 in its stand-out metallic sleeve at a time when National Front tensions were high and lines were being sharply drawn certainly didn’t help the band publicity-wise. The single disappeared without a trace and the band followed not long after. Their other main claim to fame is causing the Coventry Automatics to change their name to The Specials which didn’t do them any harm did it?
While that may seem a dull story the actual story is anything but and takes in proto punk band the Hollywood Killers and the Boys, through to gigging at the Roxy Club, Marquee and Speakeasy, Reading Festival, Johnny Thunders, Island Records, Nazi insinuations, videos, guerrilla gigs and ted wars, drugs and then the end.
Here’s Dave Phelps understated history of The Automatics when in 2000 he released The Missing Album, featuring songs recorded from the time of Tanks.
Way back in the year 2000, Punk77 interviewed Dave for more of a lowdown on the below press release. So strap yourself in as he gives you his own inimitable no holds barred memories of The Automatics and times.
“It has been 22 years since the release of an Automatics single from its English label, Island Records. The Automatics were a seminal punk group who, despite considerable ground swell popularity, broke up after the release of just one single.
Like most punk groups we didn’t last long. We played too fast, stayed up too late, and burned out quick. We came up through a time when you were more likely to get beaten up than paid every time you played. We played on the circuit with X-ray Specs, the Members and Eddie and the Hot Rods. We hung with Johnnie Thunders (who sometimes played with the group). We thought the Sex Pistols were wimps and I still meet critics and fans who swear we were the best group they ever saw. We never played more than a half hour (even when we were headlining at the Marquee as we did every Thursday night or playing the Reading Festival) and nobody ever complained!”
David Philps Press Release 2000
Early Days and Influences
I had just done a stint singing with The Boys. This was probably 1976 as they were transitioning from the “Hollywood Brats“. I didn’t fit too well into what they were doing and they already had some quite strong characters in the group who had some firm ideas of how they wanted to sound – Cas, John and Duncan. But it was good for me and through them I met Steve Lillywhite who at the time was tea boy at Phonogram!!
I started working with Steve and he moved into my flat on Comeragh Road because my girlfriend had left to become an international drug dealer. Anyway that flat became punk central and The Automatics came out of that. I got Wally [Walter Hacon] who was playing in pub rock bands (they were punk bands before punk!) and then Rick [Ricky Goldstein] and eventually Bobbie [Bobby Collins] stepped in after we lost our bass player to The Vibrators.
I listened to some Iggy, Lou Reed and some New York Dolls I suppose, but a lot of the punk thing came out of an early Stones and Troggs tradition. You couldn’t say that though! Johnny (Thunders) loved Some Girls; he’d put it on every chance he got. It was the last Stones album before they were replaced by overdressed androids with expensive tastes. Also the Hollywood Brats through The Boys connection.
The Automatics Get A Record Deal
It was a horrible miscalculation to end up on Island and in many ways, it was the death of us. We were all set to release the Phonogram recordings on a smaller label when the deal came up. Steve was getting us into Phonogram studios on weekends and nights to record on dead time. Island had no idea how to deal with us and I can only blame the decision on the greed of the management – not that we saw any of the money.
We should have been on Chiswick or Stiff and were all ready to go there… but we were kind of victims of our own success. Punk was a turning away from the record business. We thought we could use them, but those guys got up a lot earlier in the morning than we ever did. The guy who signed us – Tim Clark – who I liked- now manages Robbie Williams among others.
The single was many months in the making and when Island called me up to the office to explain why the entertainment expenses were twice the recording expenses, I looked them right in the eye and told them that it took a lot of very expensive drugs to make the kind of music we were making. The single was released and went straight to #1 in the Alternative charts (unseating the Sex Pistols), but there were accusations that we were Nazis and racist (despite playing with a West Indian keyboard player) which our liberal bosses at Island were quick to get P.C. on. The Jewish League attended one of our gigs and cleared us, but Island canned the recording and gave our studio time, producer, and equipment to a bunch of kids from Ireland who didn’t drink, smoke, or misbehave…called U2. It’s too late to correct the wrong. It’s too late to bring it all back to life, but let this recording at least stand to mark the grave.”
We sounded pretty much like the record…we didn’t add much – except we never played the slow stuff on stage. Ballads were death live but when we recorded we did not want to just do the standard balls-out punk record so we added them. Sadly, there are no live recordings – people filmed us though and I wish I had some film of us!! Somewhere there’s a studio video of us that Blue Mountain films did – they were Island’s film company.
And here are those videos…
The Automatics – Gigs & Guerilla Gigs
The Runaways gig was actually a joke. We did guerilla gigs! When big bands we thought were jokes were playing inflated venues we’d put ourselves on the bill and paper the area with posters of us as the main act and them in tiny print as the support act. Afterward, the gig when the audience was coming out we’d roll up in the parking lot on the back of a flatbed truck with a generator and our equipment and start playing. We usually got in 4 or 5 numbers before the police moved us on. We did it to Queen as well. Freddie was furious because we stole the review in the London Standard!
We did another guerilla gig down the Kings Road in the middle of the Great Punk Wars of 1977 and nearly died. We started a riot! Wally got his finger broken and we had to shoot him up with painkillers to play gigs! I thought we were all going to die but suddenly the traffic parted like the Red Sea and we got a clear run down to Sloane Square. I looked behind us and there was a mob of rockers coming down the middle of the road! Unfortunately, our lame duck manager was still in the pub with the press and they missed it!
I loved playing the Roxy Club with The Heartbreakers. That was such a fun night. The Heartbreakers were on first and they blacked up their faces with cork. We went on backed by these models called Blonde on Blonde who really couldn’t sing but had a recording contract anyway. Much to the audience’s credit they could spot a swindle a mile off and let us know about it.
It was purely coincidence that they were managed by the same clown who managed us or indeed that I was keen to run them both through with the old beef bayonet! I put my fist through the ceiling on the stage. There was blood and plaster everywhere and the hole stayed there for years. Johnny Moped did the soundcheck and then just disappeared.
We were told that his manager had to watch him or he’d be off on the bus back to S. London where he was obsessed with a woman old enough to be his mother! Obviously, he didn’t watch him close enough that night.
The Punk Scene, Gobbing & Violence
Malcolm McLaren was and is a very clever man. He was able to hijack the issues and the style and channel it through the Sex Pistols who were sort of his personal Monkees. People now think of the Pistols as having invented punk but they didn’t; it was something that came out of the London Streets and that’s what made it so great. It was people who were tired of Paul McCartney, Elton John, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John and the fashion designers making stuff that only ugly people could afford.
Johnny Thunders used to make that joke about the Pistols needing Malcolm to shake it for them and zip them up notably on “London Boys” which is a Pistols send up and like most jokes, it had some truth in it. Now don’t get me wrong, the Pistols made some great records, but they were miserable bastards then and probably still are. Glenn is the exception.
The General Public didn’t like punk at all but they were basically apathetic and safe…but the rockers weren’t. They’d beat you up. In fact, playing in those days you were more likely to get beaten up than paid. You see all this ritualised violence on TV but when it happens to you it really hurts! I was surprised at how much it hurt when you get beaten up the next day after the alcohol wears off!!
The rockers used to come round and squirt super glue at you as you loaded the gear after a gig. Nasty. Had a few bottles thrown at us when we were on stage. Sometimes the gobbing was awful…the gobbing was in all the papers so people tried to act the part. You’d go up to an “A’ on your guitar, hit a greenie and slide right on up to a “B”. I hated a greenies in the ear!! Sometimes I just walked off stage and went fully clothed into the shower! If they had showers; some “dressing rooms” were toilets.
We played gigs where last week’s band were still in the hospital. We played one where the singer was killed! I probably didn’t help things by throwing beer over gobbers. I remember at the Cambridge Corn Exchange I soaked a few and about thirty of their mates got together and all threw their pints at us at the same time. It was an avalanche of beer…of course electrical systems being what they were in those days we were lucky we didn’t fry!
The Automatics & Johnny Thunders
Johnny was a good guy; he was a real New York street punk and sometimes it was hard to fathom what was going on with him. He wasn’t really very social. If he came to my flat he would sit in the bedroom and play old stones songs on my old Gibson guitar (one of the few things from that era I still have!) or work on some new tune he was working out. He sounded quite rough like that. It was only in the studios that he assumed godlike dimensions, but he was the real thing, and you just knew that instinctively.
Johnny did Johnny really well! We had a kind of mutual admiration society. I think he liked The Automatics because we were the most American of the English punk bands. He’d come by our soundchecks at the Marquee because- he lived close by. He played on “Wild One” and I think “Moth into the Flame” and he was flying and he fell over at the end of the solo; just lost his balance and keeled over. You could hear the solo go “clunk”. We left it in; Steve instantly saw the punk genius in it. I probably would have redone it.
He always had all the controls on his amp marked at 11, real Spinal Tap stuff, but he had a great sound. When Marc Bolan died he did a version of “He was a Wizzard” and I was invited down to sing it with him, mostly backup. Lots of guys on that session that were not long for this world! Chris Wood died shortly after, some Only Ones, B.P. Fallon and I forget who else was there.
The last time I saw him he invited me over to his hotel for dinner with my girlfriend and we hung out. He was a virtual prisoner – nobody would give him money because they all knew what he would do with it. People in Johnny’s life ended up policing him. I couldn’t do that. Years later I went to go see him in San Jose when he played there but he did a no-show and shortly after that I got a call he was dead. I’m glad his son seems to have turned out like a regular guy. I miss him.
The Automatics- How It Ended
Over the thorny issue of songwriting. I wrote pretty much all the material. It’s an old story. The band wants the writer to share the writing royalties/ the writer gives them the arranging fees and royalties but the band feels slighted. When things don’t go well the bond gets thin. It’s stupid really and screws so many groups.
A year after we broke up we got back together and recorded “British Beat” but by that time Wal was on the Stiff world Tour with Wreckless Eric, Rick was drumming for Sham 69 and I was under contract to the biggest record-selling producer in the world so that wasn’t going anywhere.
It was just that window in time and that’s what I love about punk. But I love the Automatics and I’m far enough away from it all now to not be invested so much ego-wise. It’s like it’s not really me and I can just be a fan. I just love our spirit. I put that album on we recorded from the early days at Phonogram and I just listen. Lots of people work their lives in the business and never get to do one great rock album and we did that…straight out of the box. I’ve learned not to be a bitter old fuck about it- we don’t get what we deserve. We just get what we get.
And there you have it. While Dave clearly was on the Thunders side of the fence with some of his ‘interesting’ comments and appraisal of the Sex Pistols, seeing those lost videos and hearing the unreleased songs definitely show a band who missed out but as he says they were lucky enough to have been there, do a single and record their stuff when so many didn’t.
Rick Goldstein would join Sham 69 for The Adventures Of Hersham Boys album and their last stand before they split too.
TalkPunk
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