Duggy Giro and The Useless Generation

It was mid-December, 2000. I stepped out from the back of my Dad’s van, stretching my limbs after being wedged in between the drum kit and amps with my fellow band-mates: Mick and Dave Jones, and Andy Wilkinson. We were Loudmouth, Sunderland’s top rated up-and-coming punk band, about to play a rare gig outside of our hometown at The Keelboat, in Fatfield village.

The promoter greeted us at the front door of the pub. He was smoking a thin roll-up and repeatedly smoothed his thinning sandy blonde hair down onto his scalp. His face, with the red blotchy cheeks and spider-web veins of a hardened drinker, was lit up by the red glow of his rollie.

‘Alright Lads; how ya’s doing? Alright? Aye? Good. Listen, got a bit of a problem, there’s no support band; but youse lads’ll be alright wont ya’s, just do a longer set, aye?’ He turned, without waiting for a reply, and propped the door open with a couple of folded up beer mats, urging us in. The light from within the pub reflected onto his shiny, white Reebok Classics. A warning chill ran through me; never trust a man in Reebok.

The pub was small, very local and looked a bit like someone’s living room. Red suede covered sofas were built into the walls. The flowery pattern of the wallpaper, a tired, old, nicotine stained cream and brown, clashed with the yellow and blue of the curtains. Dark black fag burns pockmarked the paisley carpet. There was some attempt at Christmas decoration in the form of red and green tin foil garlands, sello-taped to the ceiling. There was no stage; just a bit of space where some tables had been cleared.

We dumped our gear in this space and went to the bar. A bored looking barmaid, all lipstick, big loopy earrings and bulging cleavage, eyed us up: four spotty teenagers who barely looked old enough to drink and, in truth, two of our members weren’t. The promoter sidled up behind us, ‘It’s alright, Trace, these lads are the band; what can I get ya’s lads?’ We replied in unison, as if practicing vocal harmonies: ‘Fosters.’

We sat down with our pints, some of us more legal than others, and thought about our predicament.
We had been gigging for about six months, averaging around a gig a week. We were a frequent support act for established local bands, charming the old punks who had seen it all before with a fresh, spiky take on the music of their youth. We also played at regular student nights, enchanting the University cool crowd. A main player on the scene, James Jam, who went on to write for NME, became besotted with us. In a review for his fanzine Boyeater he proclaimed that, “Loudmouth are Sunderland’s best new band. No one else even comes close to encapsulating the feelings of a bored youth in this dull, drab city of ours. They make me feel ALIVE.”

So we were good, and we knew it. However, up until that point we had only been required to perform sets of about half an hour, at most. Hardly the evening’s worth of entertainment that the promoter seemed to assume we were capable of.

‘Fuck it,’ said Mick, ‘we’ll just play the ones we knar and then fuck off.’

‘Aye, fuck it,’ agreed Dave.

Andy and I looked at each other; shrugged a shoulder, raised an eyebrow: aye, fuck it.

Mick was our undisputed leader: he wrote most of the songs, was the main singer, and lead guitarist, so his decision was final. I had met him the year before at Shiney Row College, where we were both studying for a BTEC in Popular Music. He was a punk: cut him open and he would bleed anarchy. He was also a prodigiously talented musician and pulled off the handsome rebel look effortlessly. Mick knew who he was and what he was about, and for someone like me, for whom the teenage years were if not messed up, then definitely a bit messy, he was an inspiration.

Within weeks of meeting him he had rechristened me Duggy Giro (after a song by local punk legends The Toy Dolls). I cut my hair into a pillar-box red Mohican and distanced myself from my school-friends who had stayed on at sixth form. Such was Mick’s influence and my eager acceptance of the punk ethos of destruction

Dave, the bass player, was Mick’s little brother. A bit of a tearaway, he liked a fight and some casual vandalism. He was still at school though he rarely went. Their parents were divorced and looking back maybe this had something to do with his volatile personality.

There was a lot of competition between Dave and myself. We both wanted to be Mick’s right-hand man. Dave had the brother thing, undoubtedly a trump card, but I could call on my status as second guitarist and occasional songwriter as proof of my importance to all things Loudmouth, and therefore all things Mick.

We would try and outdo each other in various ways: who could do the highest scissor jump in time to the music; who could strike the most rebellious pose in a photo, lips curled in a Sid Vicious sneer, middle finger extended and sticking it to the cameraman. When I cut my hair into a Mohican; Dave seethed, furious that he hadn’t done it first.

Andy was a really nice guy, probably still is. A great drummer, he had just joined the band a couple of weeks before the gig at The Keelboat. We had pinched him from one of our rival punk bands in Sunderland when our previous drummer was sacked/quit, over ‘musical differences’.

With our plan for the gig in place we set the gear up and waited for the crowd to fill out. We could still be waiting today.

At about 9pm we surveyed the room: other than my parents and Mick and Dave’s Dad, all regular members of our crowd, there were about ten people in the pub. A few middle aged couples made up the majority: the women sat at the tables in pastel coloured sweaters with half pints of lager, leaning in towards each other conspiratorially while they gossiped about their husbands, who stood at the bar in check shirts and jeans. The men drank pints, laughed big, deep belly laughs, and patted each other on the back with huge, manly hands.

There were also a couple of young lads, scally types in tracksuits and baseball caps, hanging around the nudgie machine waiting on the jackpot. Some similarly track-suited girls stood by them and they engaged in a courtship of spiteful name-calling and the sharing of cigarettes.

We blasted straight into the set with guitars screeching and vocals snarling. Our first song was Mick’s surly anthem, Useless Generation, with its punchy Ramones inspired chord progressions and Johnny Rotten-esque vocals: “So this is my Useless generrrrrrrrayshyan.”

Other highlights of the set included A Pathetic Love Story. The song was Mick’s concession to romance, focusing on the events of his first date with his girlfriend Louise and the seemingly violent birth of their love. With its melodic chorus and minor chords it was comparable to The Buzzcocks at their best. I may have been biased but it truly was a great song.

Towards the end of the set it was my turn under the limelight with a composition of my own: Idiot Army. Searing, slashing guitars, arranged by Mick in a slightly jarring call and response style, were built around a powerful military style drum pattern (again Mick’s idea). Cutting through the orchestrated noise were my politically charged lyrics, delivered in a shouty, passionate growl.

As some reviewer commented, the song was “Clearly a Stiff Little Fingers rip off”; though, as criticism goes, I was quite pleased with that.

We ended the set with Novelty Queen, a song co-written by Mick and I. We each sung a verse, Dave included, as he decided to sing one of the parts that I had written. At the end of the last verse the song veered off into a noise fuelled ten-minute jam. We would swap instruments and create as much chaos as possible, before departing the stage to screaming feedback and, sometimes, rapturous applause.

We had clearly made an impression on these middle aged villagers, rousing them from a quiet pint on a Thursday night. They clapped, they cheered, some even whistled, and some (though it was probably my Mam) asked for more.

With a hard earned pint we sat down, squeezing onto the red sofas, next to the pastel coloured women and their husbands, who had joined them from the bar. They were generous with their compliments and reminisced about when they were teenagers: how they had cut their hair and pierced their noses with safety pins. ‘We used to spit on the bands back then, mind. Bet you’re glad we dinnit dae that now, eh?’

The promoter asked if we were going to go back on.

‘But we dinnit knar any more songs,’ replied Mick.

He put his hand on Mick’s shoulder and leaned in closer, spilling a little of his pint. ‘Divvnt worry yersels about that, lads, just play the same set again,’ he nodded over his shoulder and winked, ‘they’ll not mind.’