Deaf School by Du Noyer Paul;Suggs;

Author:Du Noyer, Paul;Suggs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

SEVEN

America Was Our Hamburg

Limousines to Los Angeles – Cowboy Boots and Groupies – Goodbye Manhattan, Hello Birkenhead

‘AFTER WE’D DONE THE second album,’ remembers Steve Lindsey, ‘we had an opportunity to tour America. Derek Taylor loved the band and he just thought, “Let’s get Deaf School out to America and see what happens.” Back then record companies could think like that. They could speculate. They can’t do it now. It was a big tour, seven weeks, and we did the length and breadth of the place. We didn’t visit Chicago or Detroit but did pretty much every other major city.’

Punk rock was really an American invention. New York’s underground scene, in particular, had spawned the Ramones, Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and more, all in a lineage of twisted garage bands that included Andy Warhol’s protégés the Velvet Underground. Malcolm McLaren himself learned the ropes through his pre-Pistols management of the New York Dolls. Having said that, visionaries in Manhattan, Detroit or Cleveland were still small fry in the wider context of the USA. The British mutation of punk, epitomised by the Sex Pistols, was yet to make any impression on the American mainstream.

Maybe the States might welcome Deaf School with no preconceptions? As Average says: ‘It was a very confused time. We weren’t the genuine article as far as punk was concerned in 1977. But when we went over to America we felt we were part of the avant-garde, taking punk to America.’ Their itinerary would open in San Francisco on 10 May, and ended in Boston on 20 June, after some 30-odd dates that took in rock’n’roll landmarks like the Whisky a Go Go on LA’s Sunset Strip and New York’s scuzzy punk shrine CBGB. Along the way were encounters with the US heartland in cities such as Tucson, Denver, Dallas and Atlanta.

Their tour manager was Noel Monk, a practised hand who would soon perform the same service for the Sex Pistols, and went on to manage Van Halen. The road manager brought from Britain was Richard Boote, who compiled a souvenir dossier of the trip entitled Wot We Did On Our Olidays: Deaf School In The Good Ole USA. And from this document we see that the band left from Clive’s dad’s hotel on 6 May, in two Warner Brothers limousines, to catch the Heathrow Pan Am flight 121. At San Francisco, Pan Am staff were paging the tour party, under the impression they were deaf.

Asked, in A Hard Day’s Night, how they found America, a Beatle replies that they’d ‘turned left at Greenland’. The truth was of course more complicated, and so it was for Deaf School. Ian Ritchie was enchanted:

It was an amazing experience for me, particularly. I think the others were really looking forward to the American tour, and a lot of cultural things. A lot of those early songs had an American influence, from films and everything, and I had no interest. I wasn’t struck about going to America, so I had a fantastic time because there was no expectation, and to me it was incredibly exciting.

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