WE MAKE NOISE NOT MUSIC !!!

Simon Dwyer meets Discharge – self confessed party poopers. (“Sounds” weekly music paper 1981)

This is it – the pits, or rather, the potteries. Stoke, another last bastion of punkdom, where the undead faith is still practised and the beat goes on ad nauseum, pogoing itself against a wall of local hatred and national apathy.

Hardest against that wall are DISCHARGE, a group who’ve bombarded the alternative EP charts with three EP’s and built up a following of mammoth proportions. For ones so unhyped, something must be up.

Formed at school three ears ago from the droppings of The Damned and the Sex Pistols, the original line up ranted around the depressed local scene foe eighteen months before present vocalist Cal arrived with a few sketchy ideas for songs up his lewis leathers. About this time ex-Beggers banquet employee Mike Stone was looking for some likely local talent to put on his new CLAY RECORDS label, and despite (Or may because of) a strong consensus that DISCHARGE were “too bad” to be taken seriously, signed them up.

He was, and still is convinced the group are “right for the punk market” and when you find out that the bands three EP’s have sold 45,000 copies, you can’t really argue, but who buys this stuff?

The records in question – “Realities of war”, “Fight back” and “Decontrol” for all their boundless energy and admirable sentiment, do nothing more for me than evoke weary sprits of ’77 and cash in on my short bursts of nostalgia. Though somehow in these times of electronic drudgery and sold out (Or at least altered) Punk heroes, its no surprise to find a return to the old values, with bands like DISCHARGE being championed as the pioneers of the new punkhood

CAL and bass player RAINY sit around the bar heater in Stone’s record shop, their refuge. Overcoming our accent barrier, I’ll ask what it’s all about.

“It’s just about giving us something to do, and the kids that see us something to do too”. “There’s fuck all to do around here, we’ve got nowhere to play in Stoke at all, and when we actually did manage to book a hall we had to pay for two cops to be on duty inside it throughout the gig”

Rainy stares at his Doc’s, and nods his head like his neck’s got springs in it.

“Y’see, to do a gig here, you’ve first got to get police permission, and even when we did that gig was busted up by them. They’ve got it in for punks here”

Cal motions towards the streets of red brick terraces.

“The social security cuts us off, and the cops run the place”

Meaning theres no place for wastrels like DISCHARGE, it’s a typical problem that places the band neatly into context. In a cultural vacuum like Stoke, influenced by the second hand trends of nearby Manchester, Birmingham and inevitably, London, people are given the initiative only to find the practice despised outside the liberalism of the big cities. Stoke is sewn up tight by the local Police force, and when you’ve got them, the council and social security making it all even tighter, everything moulds easily into the definable common enemy. The offers of the anar(chic) punk-by-numbers dream becomes very inviting.

But where’s it all going?

“Fucking nowhere, we’re not trying to lead people, we’re just reacting against all the shit, and getting our message across to thousands of other people”

What message? - Cal’s head jerks back incredulous.

“The message of peace, I want to grow up, not blow up, like our slogan says”

But how can you encourage peace with such a violent undercurrent running through your work?

“We’re not violent, our music’s violent, but we try to discourage violence”….I wonder if it’s working.

If, by stating publicly how uncool it is to get your body pasted all over a battlefield, the violence on their gig’s dance floors has diminished. But they don’t seem to care, or notice, been so wrapped up in the global end results of violence (The big bang) as to ignore it’s street life root causes.

Cal continues, predictably

“I hate the C.N.D., the Anti Nazi League, the NF, religion, all of them”

But his motives seem to be more financial than existential

“All they’re after is your money anyway”

If Cal is a well meaning dummy, a mish mash of half congested ideas from punks glorious scrap book, and it appears that he is, Rainy is almost the reverse. He doesn’t even pretend t give a fuck. Featured once in jaws (*see note below) on the strength of his last haircut, he loves “Fanny”, disco, classical music, drawing, phoning up strangers in America, getting into trouble, and crapping in the hosts bed at parties. He hates “Queers”, and Adam Ant, and has just come out of a concentration camp fixation during which he nailed all his clothes to the walls of his flat and covered it’s ceiling in barbed wire. The only survivor from the bands original line up, Rainy’s a living example of the hateful dissatisfied naivity that spews forth skinhead punk and desperate bands like DISCHARGE. Who he thinks are a totally misunderstood entity….

“We are the only punk band, forget the upstarts and all that crap, we are the only reasonably well known band who’re making stuff for punks, and not stuff for football fans”

Despite some stupid opinions and a wild over dramatic personality, Rainy is quite endearing, even though his version of punk strikes me as been totally inaccurate.

What about the future?

“Well at the moment the band consists of me, Rainy and Bones, who pissed off home before you arrived, and we’re looking for a new drummer, as we just split from our old one ‘cos he was fed up with playing punk. Once we’ve got a replacement we’ll be doing gigs again and should be doing our first proper tour around April and that’ll coincide with the release of a twelve track, twelve inch 45 EP”

Is the material for that written?

“Some of it, but we’ve still got to do most of it”

How long will that take?

“About two minutes a song to write, and a day in the studio to record”…..and probably at most one play before it starts to grate!

“We don’t play music” says Rainy , “We make noise, and as long as you can dance to it it’s alright”

Cal concludes “Anybody who doesn’t like it can fuck off, there’s no need to change because of them cunts!”

No need for change, no call for variety, and no apparent room for growth, in other words, in practice – no fun, its here that the horrible truth must out.

Despite some seemingly worthy motives and intentions, DISCHARGE are dull. Rather than been a punk band, they are a caricature of a punk band, and alas, they haven’t even nicked the right characteristics amid the babble of their preaching. They conform to the ancient idea that punk music must inevitably be a boring unvariable screech , rather than a foundation for the imagination. That’s whats left of punk, must be monochromatic, blunt, and macho, rather than bright, incisive and sensual. And crucially, they live down to that time honoured social stereotype that means if your working class you must act, for all intents and purposes be, thick. Thereby, posing no inspirational threat to the status quo they claim to oppose.

With time, and a slight change of attitude, DISCHARGE are capable of becoming a very good, if not particularly important punk group, and with the attention that would bring, make Clay records a viable option for faithful Mike stone and Discharge’s more interesting stablemates, PRODUCT and PLASTIC IDOLS. In the meantime though, it’s just a crass joke, and the sooner DISCHARGE, and others, realise it, the better it all will be.

Interview transcribed by Rich Walker (THE MISKATONIC FOUNDATION), June 2003.

Note * Jaws was SOUNDS’s weekly gossip column

Additional note: As far as I can remember, this was DISCHARGE’s first major interview and led to the long running bad blood between the band and the music press in the early eighties. Not just Simon Dwyer, but other journalist’s such as Winston Smith (Punk live’s mag) and Garry Bushell (Sounds and Punks Not dead mag). All were proved wrong, whilst Simon Dwyer and Winston Smith both disappeared up their own arseholes, Garry “oi-oi” Bushell still makes a living on shit talent shows and writing TV reviews for The Sun (UK daily newspaper)

All three were proved satisfyingly wrong about Discharge…….