It started with a riff

Aladdin Sane, Track 5, Side One, Cracked Actor Š utter Ronsonic rapture! Man
Alive! At the time, NME¹s Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray inexplicably
wrote the song off as revealing: ‘little else except that Bowie's
capabilities with a mouth-harp are decidedly limited’. But for me, the
track¹s E, F, G intro (as played on Mick Ronson¹s Gibson 1968 LP Custom) was
the motherlode. A sound that must be attained and replicated by any means
necessary.

With the feral one-track mindedness of adolescence, everything about this
chord-surge would take over my life. A little later, sometime in the wake of
the first four Pistols singles and seeing The Clash at Queens University
circa Oct 1978, it became imperative to get a guitar and do something with
it. In any way shape or form. Preferably involving maximum Ronno-raunch.

Fortunately, a classmate at Bangor Grammar School (North Down¹s Pederastic
Centre of Excellence) with a yen for electronic tinkering was, at the time,
making up bijou steampunk amps cobbled together from old radio speakers.
These were based on the ‘Deacy¹ junk amp that Queen¹s John Deacon had rigged
up for bandmate Brian May. To fix up a guitar to go with it, a minimalist Bo
Diddley oblong design was decided upon which involved grafting an old
acoustic neck onto a piece of plank with a pickup affixed.

Since no suitable planking could be found, the seat on top of one of the
chemistry lab stools was decided upon. Hunkered down at the back of the lab
(whilst listening to Stiff Little Fingers on cassette!) one stool was pulled
apart and reverse engineered into something resembling a string instrument.
The noises coming from the back of the classroom during this DIY escapade ­
replete with lookouts at either end of the chemistry bench ­ must have
sounded something like a teenage Colditz escape. But with the oblong seat
section finally melded to the neck, an instrument emerged that was a kind of
Wild Willy Barratt Really-Free homebrew six string razor.

To turbo charge the whole rig, another Bangor Grammar hobbyist put together
a fuzzbox unit for me made out of a toffee tin. I was assured that this had
pretty well the same spec as Joe Strummers¹ Shatter Box FX pedal. I was
aiming more for Ronson¹s Marshall Major Tonebender roar, or better yet,
Steve Jones¹ Twin Fender MXR crystalline-overdrive. God was in those
details, I¹d decided. And I wanted God on my side.

With everything held together with insulating tape and speaker-wire the time
had come to learn how to make the plank, err, sing. In order to save time ­
and any excess effort on my part ­ my Deacy-loving pal taught me to tune to
open E and play barre chords with one finger, thus avoiding the vagaries of
standard-tuning E-shape chords which called for all four-fingers. I was
again assured that everything I needed to know could be accomplished using
these barre-chord variants and that indeed Keith Richards had used such a
system (Open G tuning actually ­ minus the sixth string) since noodling
around with Ry Cooder in the South of France.

All well and good, but was I ever going to attain the sacred grail-tone of
the Ronson/Jones Les Paul Panzer sound that had been obsessing me for 18
months? In truth: no! Not for another thirty years when, in the first
hot-flush of middle age, I would be able to secure a decent Les Paul copy, a
set of open-coil humbuckers, Marshall AVT and Fulltone OCD unit. And live
the dream!

Until that happy time, what I could do was make a sound something like a
one-man Hawkwind being spewed through a retching Dansette. So, the next step
was surely to gather like-minds and kick out the jams. And thus, Messrs
Terry Kernaghan (bass), Bill Aitken (drums), his brother David ‘Taff¹ Aitken
(vocals) and myself, all attendees of legendary Fame-School forcing house
Bangor Grammar, became Fifth Column.

Of pressing concern to me was that Terry K. and Bill A. had actual
instruments which, dammit, looked and sounded like actual instruments. I
however had a ‘rig¹ made up of rag ‘n’ bone. I needed to man up and get a
proper guitar and amp. Especially since Fifth Column had begun rehearsing
each Saturday in school music rooms (now the home of Bel Canto Music
Supplies) located on Clifton Road behind Bangor Grammar.

Through founding Laughing Gravy fanzine with Doubt bassist Robert Scott I¹d
got to know Henry Cluney of Stiff Little Fingers. Cheekily, I asked if I
could get my hands on any of leftover amps before SLF decamped to London.
Jake Burns kindly agreed to leave me his amp and so I went over to Cluney¹s
house (his bedroom was festooned with pictures and clippings of his hero
Virginia Wade) to grab my catch. (The amp, minus the SLF spraypainted over
the speakers, can be see on the youtube clip from Ulster TV: Suspect Device
played live 3rd June 1978 at the Harp Bar.)

After rooting around the classifieds in the County Down Spectator (the paper
that would take on Colin Bateman as a cub reporter after he filed a piece on
how Never Mind The Bollocks had fired up the parish) a Columbus Les Paul
copy was located.

Despite an ‘all over¹ inspection of the instrument, the neck, bridge,
pickups, tuners, switch and jack turned out all to be fucked beyond reason
(pretty much the default condition of Columbus guitars of the day). Add to
this the fact that the SLF amp actually turned out to be part of a
Woolworths-own budget PA line and most unsuitable for electrical guitaring,
and a flavor of Fifth Column¹s sonic underpinnings can be imagined.

In blissful ignorance of these issues at the time, the show went on.
Anyways, once the whole caboodle was fed through the DIY Hawkwind Generator
the casual listener would usually be well past caring.

Fifth Column¹s rehearsal arrangements (doubtless duplicated 10,000 times up
and down the nation at this time) had been set up with an obliging school
music department unaware that Clifton Road would be strafed each weekend
morning with 25 watts worth of blistering rock n¹ roll thunder Š and quite
possibly the most prolonged sub-amateur recitals of Cracked Actor ever
undertaken by mankind.

Whilst rattling and humming in the first floor living-room of the rehearsal
house ­ usually in sub zero temperatures barely allayed by the one-bar WW2
electric heater ­ a basic set came together featuring an original called
’See Thru You¹ subsumed in a clutch of sub-prime covers.

This set would be previewed at only two Bangor gigs: St Columbanus Church
(with The Doubt, The Androids and The Idiots) and at a Youth Expo in Castle
Park with 70% Proof. The former was almost certainly attended and witnessed
by original SLF drummer Brian Falloon. God knows who showed up at the latter
(other than my brother Russ, bassist in 70% Proof).

After months of Stakanovite musical graft forged in the crucible of the
Clifton Road we were eventually banned from the music rooms. Rehearsals then
moved to a kind of scout-hut-community-hall behind Glencraig Parish Church.
By this time, I¹d finally mastered the black-art of keeping the Columbus in
tune for three minutes at a time but the Column was shaken to its
foundations (that¹s enough ‘column¹ quips, Ed.) after ‘musical differences¹
emerged concerning the improper third-party usage of Johnny Thunders riffs.

Ain¹t it always the way! I vacated the scout hut, packed the Columbus into
my old kit bag, and dragged it and the Audition amp back up Bangor Road, in
the drizzle, to my parents¹ garage. Where both items remained ­ except for
one excursion Š

Months after the Column croaked, Robert Scott, Robert¹s pal Monkey and I
would re-make/remodel as Palace of Variety (PoV). The irony of the group
name being that every song would pretty well sound much the same ­ because
of my, ahem, limited technique. (Oddly, years later Tony James would claim
this as the same modus operandi for Sigue Sigue Sputnik). By this time I¹d
heard of couple of MX-80 Sound and Chrome cuts on John Peel and decided that
was the way to go. As I could still barely master the basic riff from Belsen
Was A Gas let alone the freeform generation of avant-punk noise swathes,
this was a severe, case of artistic overreach.

However, it did drive months and months of further unkempt rehearsals in
Robert Scott¹s carpet-lined garage. It would also lead to adventures on the
very penumbra of the music biz when legendary post-punk impressario Terry
Razor (of Theatre of Hate fame) met with Monkey at Stiff Records. Razor
enthused over a PoV demo and for a brief moment it looked like PoV might
sign to Kirk Brandon¹s label.

Most notable of all was PoV¹s appearance on BBC Ulster¹s Wise Crack
youth-show ­ introduced by the Bardot-of-Belfast herself, Caron Keating (in
her pre Blue Peter persona ­ a kind of Ulster Konnie Huq.) Here, THAT
monster Ronson riff would resurface with renewed vigour with the network
premiere of PoV¹s proposed first single, Be Special. All hands on deck for
the intro of the century: E! F! G!

And so it all restarted with a riff.

Adrian Maddox 7th Nov. 2011