Oslo, Last Train, 18/08/02
Pictures and review by Martin Percival
Review by Innes Reekie
A hot night in Oslo
The Last Train in Oslo has been a pub since 1984 and a music venue since 1990. Officially it holds 100 people, in reality there were around 65 people for the Rezillos show but it was totally packed out – yes, the venue really was THAT small! The band were playing there as a follow up to their appearance the previous day at the "Rock mot Fotball" festival in Moss, a town about 45 minutes south east of Oslo.
It’s hard to believe but these two Norwegian shows were also the first EVER dates that the Rezillos had performed outside of the UK and the USA. 1976 and most of the first half of 1977 was spent playing very frequently in Scotland and, from then on until they split at the end of 1978, they toured the UK and had one single show at CBGBs whilst recording the album in New York. A little bit of Rezillos history was therefore made in Norway!
The Oslo show hadn’t been particularly widely publicized in advance as it was intended to be pretty low key but it still attracted people from all around the area including Stein Groven, better known as Casino Steele, the one time keyboard player with the legendary Boys, London SS and Hollywood Brats. There was clearly a buzz about the band’s appearance amongst the locals. The poster for the show had the words in Norwegian "tro det eller ei….The Rezillos!", which (so I was told) roughly translates as "Hard to believe…. but true, The Rezillos!". This very aptly sums up the feeling a few months ago that many people, including me, had when they heard that the band were going to play again with the almost complete and classic 1977/78 period band line up. A dream that most Rezillos fans thought would never become a reality again. Since reforming for the New Years Eve Edinburgh show last year and after a very successful US tour in June /July, the two dates in Norway were to be a great warm up for the home coming Edinburgh show at the Liquid Rooms on 28th August.
The band had been on terrific form in the US but were even tighter in Oslo. They were clearly a little surprised at the size of the venue, and especially the tiny stage, but it didn’t faze them at all. Eugene’s reaction was "It’s just like a lot of the places we played in Scotland in 1976!". They started the set with "Out of this World" and then went into "Top of the Pops" at which point the crowd went pretty wild. With no real room for instrument changes when Jo broke a string he had to ask Innes Reekie, the journalist who was accompanying them from the Sunday Times, to change the string – not something that can have happened too many times before! By the time that the sixth song of the set, "Crash my Car" was over, everyone was extremely hot and sweaty and Eugene had to call out for a towel or a t-shirt to mop himself with. An old Slits t-shirt was promptly thrown up to the stage for Eugene’s use! The band’s terrific version of the 1969 Edwin Starr single "25 Miles" came next with Fay looking at me and saying "Well we know some people have come a LOT further than 25 miles to be here!" – nice one Fay!! During "Number One Boy" (a new song that I think would make a terrific single) Jo’s string problems continued and by this time he had several audience member’s working on his guitar including the girl keyboard player from the Yum Yum Boys who had supported the Rezillos the previous day at the Moss Festival. All highly impromptu!
The mix of old and new songs that the band played worked really well. So many bands just reform and trot out the old crowd pleasers whereas, right since the Edinburgh New Year’s Eve show, their first in 23 years, the band have been playing new material including "Crash My Car" (one of Fay’s songs I think) and "Pressure Cooker". "Out of this World" and "Bomb" were new additions to the set for the Norwegian dates.
All too quickly the last song of the set was played, "Destination Venus", and it was time for the band to leave the stage. Even this wasn’t straight forward as it meant the band had to walk out of the front door of the pub and around the corner into the dressing room! The audience literally screamed for more so it was back on for ""Glad all over" and "Flying Saucer Attack". By this time it was well past 1am but there were no crazy curfew restrictions so it was back on again for "Bomb" and "Bad Guy Reaction" before heading off stage again. The audience may have been small in numbers but they made more noise than crowds twice their size (so much for the cultural stereotype of "reserved Norwegians"!) and the band came back for one more final song, another run through of "I can’t stand my baby".
If the Rezillos play and you get the chance to go to see them then DO IT!! They’re on terrific form, having a lot of fun playing live and enhancing the reputation they had as being a great live band to watch and enjoy. Fay and Eugene are still a classic double act, Angel lays down a really steady beat, Jo goes for it big time on guitar and Johnny the bass player is clearly having a blast too. They’ve got a terrific back catalogue to pull from and have now written some great new material – who could ask for more??!!
Martin Percival
Set List
Out of this World
Top of the Pops
My baby does Good Sculptures
Getting me down
Cold Wars
Crash my Car
No
Pressure Cooker
25 miles
Number One Boy
I can’t stand my baby
Destination Venus
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Glad all over
Flying Saucer Attack
Bomb
Bad Guy Reaction
The Rezillos By Innes Reekie I’m sitting speaking to a young Norwegian girl called Monika, who wasn’t even born when The Rezillos originally disbanded way back at the tail-end of the 1970’s, and she’s close to tears. Tears of barely restrained joy that is. Sure, she’s been drinking, and who hasn’t, but she literally can’t believe the live band experience can be this good. Although earlier, her command of English had been near perfect, it’s now peppered with Norwegian superlatives she can’t quite translate rapidly enough to give vent to her emotions. The Rezillos, a quarter of a century on from their original conception, continue to have this effect on people. Prior to rekindling our acquaintance over a scorching, (in more ways than one), weekend in Norway, my last encounter with ‘the fab five’ was at LeithTown Hall in the summer of ’78. Back then, riding high on a trio of blistering, beat-punk anthems, namely Can’t Stand my Baby, (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures and Top of the Pops, The Rezillos were in a league of their own. In singers Eugene Reynolds with his oversize ‘anvil’ quiff and sci-fi shades, and Fay Fife, a Day-Glo, Mary Quant mutation, they had their very own Sonny and Cher for a Future Generation. They shimmied and shook, posed and preened, and bounced and bopped whilst all around them, the group carved out the thunderous, monster-beat that was unique to The Rezillos. There was nothing like it then, and although many have tried, there’s been nothing quite like it since. The interim years since calling it a day back in ’79 have found the various members pursuing suitably diverse creative callings. The apparently ageless Fay Fife followed the thespian route, appearing in both film and TV, only taking a well earned breather when maternal duties came calling; whilst the ever-garrulous Reynolds indulged his passion for vintage American motor-cycles by becoming the world agent and supplier for The Indian Motor Cycle Company, a situation which has resulted in him rubbing shoulders with many a Hollywood bigshot. Following a stint as a session musician in London, drummer Ally Patterson finally chose to settle for a life of architecture and domestic bliss in Germany, whilst Jo Callis found fame and chart success in The Human League during the 80’s and looks set to resuscitate his song-writing career following his signing a recent major label deal. This clearly wasn’t another punk revivalist band who needed to reform, as is often the case, due to the lure of big bucks, and it took a stage the size of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay 2002 to finally convince the four remaining members that reforming The Rezillos was the right thing to do, Nobody had the faintest inkling we’d be doing this now states Eugene emphatically dismissing any theories that it may have been part of some long term Rezillos gameplan. That’s true, Faye nods in agreeance, but at least us three had the desire. There’s twenty-three years of history between us since we split up, and it may seem as if we haven’t really communicated that much over that period of time, but we’ve actually done quite a lot of different bits of work together It’s not like there’s a complete long gap. Jo elaborates, "Over the years, there’s been various different combinations between us all as people. Eugene and myself have done a few tunes together, as have Faye and myself, Eugene and Faye have done things together, and quite often we’ve wondered if The Rezillos had stayed together would they have made a song like this now, or could this be The Rezillos twenty years on, One of the new songs, Out of this World, Eugene and myself wrote as a kind of electro-pop thing in the late 80’s, and we thought it was quite like a Rezillos’ song, only done with synths and drum-machines and although it was done for a project of our own, Faye has since made it into a Rezillos’ song". Fay takes up the story, "About three years ago, the three of us got together and decided to write some songs specifically for The Rezillos, two of which we now do. And although we all had a lot of enthusiasm for it, we never really had a focus because The Rezillos do not exist unless they can do live gigs. We didn’t have a band as such, because Angel Patterson now lives in Germany. We got the idea going creatively, but it never really came to any fruition. I had a feeling that it just needed the right circumstances and something could realistically happen again. Then out of the blue we got invited to do this New Year thing, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay. Once the idea of a nice gig was on the go, something concrete, suddenly there was a band again, and once Angel agreed to drop everything to play drums, the whole thing was once again a reality. The next thing, we’re offered a tour of America, there’s offers coming in from Australia, Brazil and Europe, plus the opportunity of going back to America. And here we are at the moment, sitting in beautiful sunshine in Norway, about to headline a festival this evening". Yes Norway, a town called Moss to be exact, about an hour’s drive from Oslo. This is the twelfth annual Rock Against Football festival which originally came about by accident when four local bands who rehearsed in the pavilion in a wooded, rocky enclave in the spacious local park, decided to move onto the roof due to the intense summer heat. The garage-punk noise they generated attracted a gathering of some sixty or so curious kids from the town. Rock against Football was born. This year they staged their biggest event to date, attracting a crowd in excess of 1500. Whilst the bill generally comprises of around ten garage-punk bands of Scandinavian origin, this is the first time it has included a UK band. It is somewhat befitting then that amongst the Pines, Firs and Fjords of this idyllic part of Norway, the eagerly anticipated, reformed Rezillos appear to have found something of a spiritual homeland. As the sun goes down and the heat finally lets up for the first time today, the trio of bands preceding the arrival of The Rezillos, do their best to restoke the inferno - and how! Four girls and one guy, The Launderettes, get down and dirty with their take on decidedly Cramps-like voodoo/sixties girl-band rock; local celebrity, singer songwriter Vibeke has the crowd eating out of her hand as she does her solo stint, before taking up her place as keyboardist with The Yum Yums, who appear to have existed on a diet of the finest US grunge-rock and inflicted it with a highly infective pop sensibility. This lot must have mighty impressive record collections. Finally, eleven o’clock arrives and anticipation is of fever-pitch proportions - only Faye Fife has disappeared and is nowhere to be seen. After a worrying fifteen minutes, she is finally located sitting on a rock down by the lake, apparently doing her vocal exercises. Then it’s showtime. Any doubts anyone may have had about their comeback is dispelled within minutes; they look and sound like they’ve never left the rock’n’roll stage, and display levels of energy which would put bands half their age to shame. All the hits and crowd pleasers are present and correct, but the band refuse to proscribe to that hoary old nostalgia trip, by playing a handful of new songs that do justice to their already impressive legacy. Crash my Car and 25 miles are genuine ballads that find Fay Fife in great voice and prove, if anything, that her vocals have improved with maturity, yet her frenetic, go-go dancing is as girlishly teasing and exuberant as ever. Eugene’s cartoon-punk thuggishness was a three-dimensional delight, while Jo Callis, resplendent in kilt and left-handed telecaster histrionics, brought to mind a melodic car-smash involving The New York Dolls and Glam-Rockers The Sweet. The rhythm-section of Angel Patterson and Johnny Terminator, the only non-original in the line-up was flawless and somehow held this gloriously, uplifting pop-art collage together. Fay described it earlier to me as "something that was not intellectualised, it was just something that was the product of all our distinct personalities at the time, so it’s a bit difficult to try and think of it in conceptual terms, yet it was a concept, but it was more of a gut creation, rather than something we sat around and thought about". while Eugene preferred to put it like this. "There was nothing like it when we did it first time around and there hasn’t been anything like it since either. It’s never been possible for me to answer the question ‘can you describe your music’ because I think if you can describe your music you’re onto a loser". After the show, festival organiser and Yum Yums band member, Morten, made it clear that The Rezillos would be welcome to come back and play the festival every year if they so desired. Monika was still close to tears. That says it all really. As far as Norway was concerned: Mission Accomplished Next stop: Destination Edinburgh: Destination Venus in the very near future.