The Meat

Bass – Brian Early, Drums – Brett Ascott
Brett Ascott drummer with The Meat tells the bands story…..
I don’t know how they came up with the name ‘Meat’. They had written this song ‘Meet the Meat‘. It was definitely punk rock. Very raw, very fast and the lyrics are about drugs and violence and being ostracized. Mick was from a working class background and he was writing about what he knew. The Meat were very grounded in that culture. We had no grace and no pretensions. You need to have an art school outlook to succeed and we didn’t have it. We were more crash bang wallop.
The main player was Mick Weyland from Erith, a bit older than me. He was a fearless frontman. If someone pulled a knife on someone he would just jump into the audience and start punching them. He was the leader of the band. He was as musically unschooled as we all were. Then there was Mick English on guitar, a Mick Jones type character and the best musician in the band. Those two wrote the songs between them. Mick went on to join Splodgenessabounds. He was on Top Of The Pops with the 2 Pints Of Lager & A Packet Of Crisps single. Bass was Brian Early from Dartford.
A very working class band except for probably me. I was the last to join and was auditioned at Farnborough village hall. I had been playing in a couple of sort of prog rock bands at school up until that point. I was 18 in 77 and naïve. I had never taken drugs and never been to a punk club and I auditioned and got it and my whole world changed really.

What initially got me into punk rock was that in the early seventies I didn’t like prog rock or heavy metal so I backtracked and looked at the Stones, Beatles and Kinks. One Sunday lunchtime LWT showed the Sex Pistols at Notre Dame. I had never seen anything so threatening or latently violent. It was mesmerizing. It was the attitude. It reminded me of Townsend and Daltrey.

Drugs…We used to take a lot of sulphate. The Ramones were an influence so much so that Nick demanded we go from song to song like the Ramones with no gaps in between. We weren’t allowed to stop for a drink of water.
The band played the Roxy Club and had the honour of being banned!
Other bands and venues… Jock McDonald. He used to put on gigs in the foyer at the Rainbow. But he always used to say I’ve booked the Rainbow which wasn’t quite true. When you get there the place would be empty and basically there would be a few boxes that you would play on in the upstairs bar foyer and call it the Rainbow.
New Hearts – Odd… All wore red jackets and looked like Butlins attendants. Quite comical. They weren’t a punk band; almost a showbizband. They kept a couple of tracks into Secret Affair ‘I’m Not Free But I’m Cheap’ was one they kept.


In summer 1978 we were en route to Hamburg and our manager had his passport stolen and we were stranded in Paris for 6 weeks and they were the most exciting 6 weeks of my life. We supported Johnny Thunders at the Gibus Club and the Lous, Metal Urbain and also the Softies. Much later I auditioned for The Damned. Their manager Lenny was allegedly the ex manager of The Slits and a bit of a lunatic. One of his stunts was to carry around a jeweller’s hammer and threaten to break knees if people got out of line. As such the band understandably wanted rid of him. We had a Hells Angel helping us out called Fluff in Paris. He came running in with a knife dripping with a red liquid. He said I’ve killed him for you boys and we were freaking out. Then Lenny walks in laughing and it was tomato ketchup!
We came back to London and I was fed up because we were going nowhere. I wanted to do something musically. We did some gigs, one at the Music Machine supporting Rory Gallagher, and we were called Bombshells and then Nada. The ‘A’ had a circle round it. An idea of Lenny.
How did it end. I left. Got fed up. I was the only one who turned up for a couple of rehearsals and that was it. This was late 78 and around the same time I went to see the Inmates at the Rock Garden and there was a kid with a parka. I found out he got it from the Last Resort and the next morning I went and got one. I just backtracked back to the Quadrophenia thing. That’s how the mod thing started for me and I think also for the Purple Hearts who were called the Sockets when they were a punk band. I saw an advert in Jan 1979 and I auditioned and got it. That was the Chords. The rest of the band continued as the Jump and made 2 singles. They got in a drummer called Rory who later joined Roman Holiday that had a couple of hits.


Anything else to add?…Thank fuck you’ve rang me up and not asked me about the Chords!
Big thanks to Brett Ascott for the interview. January 2006.
TalkPunk
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