Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984 by Ian Glasper

Author:Ian Glasper [Glasper, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2014-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

A lot of people think that the Blanks predated the Destructors, or that they were running in parallel, but it wasn’t quite like that, was it?

No, not at all. The Destructors broke up, and the Blanks lost their bassist, and because we’d played together at gigs, they knew I had a bass guitar and an amp – even though I wasn’t a bassist. So I got called up one day, and I learnt all the songs in one afternoon – the guitarist taught me how to play them – and that same night we supported The Only Ones at the Sandpiper in Nottingham.

The last gig the Blanks ever did was supporting Discharge at Cottesmore Village Hall. They were horrible! They were throwing bits of cows into the audience. They wrecked the hall and scared our guitarist so much he left the band that night. They also stole his H&H amplifier!

The lads all came round one day and said, we’ll take your old Destructors songs, and we’ll take these Blanks ones, like ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Overdose’ and stuff, so we had a set ready, and we became the new Destructors. We had a weird postman drummer for a while, who is still a postman in Peterborough, and then we got Andy McDonald. Now, everybody slags Andy off, but our current drummer can’t play a lot of the stuff that Andy did! It’s amazing really. Andy only had two basic drum patterns, but he was really good at them … but then Crass only had two drum patterns, and no one slags them off.

What was the punk scene like in Peterborough?

Well, it sort of grew! You had the early Seventies punks, and there were thirteen of us. We used to go to gigs at local places like the Grenadiers in March to see bands like Eater and 999 (fair play to them as these were tough places to visit). Then we hired a transit and squeezed about 20 people in it to go to The Roxy and The Vortex etc. After The Now there were a few skinhead hangers-on, like Mitch from Black Marias, who we got on really well with … and then there was Squiggy! How to describe him … ? Can you imagine a Ted with no neck? It just went from there really, picking up strays as we went along.

We had the famous one-day punk/ted war in Peterborough. I didn’t actually see any of it. I was just sat in town, and some of the others were getting chased around. But anyway, I was sitting there, and Squiggy came over, and I said, ‘I hear you lot have got a problem with us punks? And I don’t know why because I like rockabilly!’ And he got talking to us, then said, ‘This is stupid, give us five minutes …’ Then he came back, saying ‘War’s over!’

Also, which was really bizarre, we had a big gay following as well. ’Cos when I first moved to Peterborough, the only people who

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