So many of the mod revival bands of 1979 parodied The Jam, or plain and simply just got it wrong, but Essex lads THE PURPLE HEARTS had it in spades. Combining the pop art smarts of The Creation and The Who with a punk edge, their early singles and debut album still sound incredible.


CARL TWEED looks back at the movers, shakers and fakers of ’79 and realises just how BIG the Hearts should have been.


rom the moment The Sex Pistols stepped out


of the rehearsal studio in November 1975 and played their


first gig – a five song set including covers of The Who’s ‘Substitute’ and The Small Faces’ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It’ (with lyrics changed to “I


want you to know that I hate you baby”) – it was almost inevitable that such a high- spirited catalyst for musical change would eventually lead to a renewal of interest in the mod youth cult of the mid-60s. Other precursors would follow – most notably The Jam, who flirted openly with mod imagery and sounds, as well as various R&B revivalists and Beatles-obsessed powerpop bands – but by placing more importance on attitude and image rather than mastery of their instruments, and promoting the joys of a succinctly executed three or four-chord pop song with a guitar riff that lodged in your brain, the mod similarities were already clear to see.


During the first half of ’78, mod bands gradually started forming in various parts of London. Amongst the earliest were The Scooters, The Points, The Indicators and The Purple Hearts. Come August ’78 and The Who’s Quadrophenia, a grandiose rock opera about a young mod called Jimmy slipping into depression in ’60s London, mod was back in the news. An advert appeared in New Musical Express looking for a band to appear in a forthcoming filmbased on the album. A few of the mod bands already in existence sent off their poorly recorded two-track demos – without success. The part in the film, which eventually came out a year later, went to a retro-sounding band from somewhere up North called The Sneakers; but it did encourage the bands to start taking themselves more seriously, practice more often and attempt to get more gigs.


The momentum really started to build during the first half of ’79. After several months of dedicated rehearsals at their record company’s expense, where they’d added a soul dimension to their new wave sound and come up with The Glory Boys concept – more spiv than mod, with its smart suit, black shirt and white tie image – Secret


Affair had appeared fully-formed on to the nascent mod scene in February ’79 supporting The Jamat Reading University. They were also frequent headliners at The Bridge House in Canning Town. At around the same time, The Chords were packing them in at The Wellington in Waterloo. Goffa Gladding was co-editor of the newly- launched fanzine Maximum Speed at the time. Interviewed for the fanzine In The Crowd in ’88, he says, “You would get hundreds of people down there just to see The Chords. The walls were dripping and it was that hot and packed it was brilliant. It was the pinnacle of ’79.”


The 14th April ’79 issue of New Musical Express had a scooter-riding mod on its cover and inside there was a four-page retrospective on the original mods, as well as a two-page article by Adrian Thrills on the


“The Purple Hearts were self- consciously a mod band from the word go. We didn’t ever quite fit into the punk thing… We were naïve enough to think punk was going to change the world.”


“sounds and styles of modrophenia ’79”. He marvels at The Chords’ “Rickenbackers, neat suits and ’60s flash”; but also notes, “My main musical reservation is the similarity of some of their songs to pieces on The Jam’s first album.” The Jamcomparisons would continue to haunt them.


The Purple Hearts, from Romford, are also featured in the article. Mates at school, they’d first got together in ’77 as a punk band called The Sockets, with a line-up consisting of Bob Manton (vocals), Simon Stebbing (guitar), Jeff Shadbolt (bass) and Nicky Lake (drums). Nicky, who would end up as The Purple Hearts’ roadie, was later replaced on drums by Gary Sparks. Their first gig was supporting none other than The Buzzcocks at The East London Polytechnic, arranged by their teacher who knew the band.


The Sockets were never a particularly serious proposition, due to the members’ youth and musical inexperience, but they did go as far as creating a mini-rock opera called ‘Reg’. The idea came from a Lone Groover cartoon in New Musical Express where a punk band says they have written a rock opera called ‘Reg’ about a kid with 16 personality problems. I spoke to Simon Stebbing recently and he described The Sockets to me as “really more like a punk piss-take, with songs restricted to two or three chords – in one song, ‘Sulphate Sally’, just one chord. We were really quite post-modern; just a bunch of teen chancers, a bit like Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias, but almost totally incompetent.”


The Sockets broke up in early ’78, but got together again soon after as The Purple Hearts and with a new mod-influenced set. They alighted on their new name on the back of a Small Faces album. Bob Manton says in the NME article, “We just wanted to do something other than punk. We didn’t ever quite fit into the punk thing and I personally got disillusioned with it pretty quickly. We were naïve enough to think punk was going to change the world.”


When I asked Simon Stebbing about how The Purple Hearts differed from The Sockets, he responded, “The Purple Hearts were self- consciously a mod band from the word go, and we had started writing totally new songs for it, the only hangover being a song called ‘Forty’ that was somewhat cannibalised into ‘Beat That!’. But we had no idea that there were other mods out there. I had thought that we would be accepted into the new wave mainstream as a ’60s influenced new wave band. The three-chord philosophy remained though, and for me it’s quite a triumph that ‘Frustration’ has only three chords, just like ‘Louie Louie’ or ‘Satisfaction’ or The Ramones’ ‘I Don’t Care’.”


In an interview for In The Crowd in the mid- 80s, Bob Manton recalls the early gigs of The Purple Hearts. “We were playing clubs to kids who weren’t into any cult and the audience at the end of ’78 was obviously punks. At a lot of places we played to skinheads but we’d really play to anyone who would listen. A lot of our


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