1984 European Tour Diary - by Matthew Best
Huge thanks to Matthew Best for sharing his 1984 'Tour Diary' with us.
At that time Matthew was the drummer for the Urban Dogs, but was also asked to take over from PJ for the ANWL gigs in June & July in 1984, when PJ was denied entry into both Spain and Germany.
Matthew "It was June 1984. Charlie Harper phoned me on a Sunday to let me know the Urban Dogs had a gig on Tuesday night – talk about late notice! I don’t even remember where this gig was, and my diary says it was “a disaster”, but Charlie did ask me that night if I had my passport handy, and if so, did I want to play with the UK Subs in Madrid that weekend, as a couple of members had left the band at short notice. I said yes, but it turned out that this actually meant leaving at 4am that night. So I rushed home after the gig, got quickly packed, picked up my passport and we drove in a van down to Portsmouth arriving there at 9am Wednesday morning. What Charlie would have done if I’d said no, I have no idea! I was completely ignorant of everything to do with the trip – how we were travelling, where we were going, where we were staying, how long we’d be there for – but I was young and wild back then so none of that mattered. Turned out we were going the long way – we drove from London to Portsmouth and then got on a ferry to take us to Santander in Northern Spain. On the way down I found out that the Subs were playing on a triple bill with Chelsea and the Anti-Nowhere League for three nights – Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The ferry didn’t leave until 11am and it took an entire day, so we arrived in Santander late on Thursday morning. All three bands travelled together on the ferry."
"I tried to learn the UK Subs set on the journey, as did someone called Tim (according to my diary, though I can’t remember what he played!). Luckily for me, the Urban Dogs did a few Subs numbers in their set so there wasn’t that much new stuff to learn. The journey was pretty ghastly as the budget didn’t stretch to rooms or beds during the 24-hour ferry ride, so we were exhausted and miserable when we finally arrived in Northern Spain. Our mood wasn’t improved by the three-hour delay while Immigration interrogated PJ, the League’s drummer, and finally told him he wasn’t welcome in Spain (as far as we could tell the main reason was that he was Iranian). He got put on the ferry back to Portsmouth the same day. We later heard he’d booked a cabin for himself, got drunk, trashed it, and was arrested at the other end after stealing the stereo system from his room – he was easily spotted doing this as it was still attached to the headboard of the bed. To be honest, I’m not sure how accurate this news was as the League weren’t ones to let the truth get in the way of a good story, but it made us all laugh."
"Anyway, then we had to take a bus from Santander to Madrid, which took another six hours and we got there just in time to sound check and eat. The League didn’t play, and as the Subs line-up was obviously sub-par with two of us completely new and having learned the set on the way, we weren’t very good, and I wasn’t greatly impressed with Chelsea either so it wasn’t exactly a triumphant appearance. But I must have been just good enough on the drums, because the League asked me to play with them for the next two nights (I guess I was at least the least bad out of the two drummers they had available!). For them it was either play with a scratch drummer, or go home without getting paid I suppose. So I had to spend the next day attempting to learn their set as well. This meant a long sound check with them trying to learn their songs, then another sound check with the Subs to make sure I still remembered their set, then a quick shower and then I had to play two sets. I think the original plan had been for all three bands to co-headline and take it in turns to go on last, but my playing in both bands meant that Chelsea had to go in the middle to give me a break, and it was just a question of who went first and last. The Subs volunteered to go first so the pressure was on for the League to headline with a drummer they only met on the journey over."
"I felt that we weren’t perfect, but everyone else seemed happy enough. My first time playing on stage with the Anti-Nowhere League was exhilarating nonetheless. I remember sitting right at the back of the stage behind a drum kit and thinking it was like having a fan blowing in your face – the wave of energy that came off them was like nothing I’d experienced before – and they were facing away from me! They all seemed so big and imposing, and I was in the band - what it must have been like for the audience I couldn’t imagine! I think they made the show work through sheer force of will, despite the drummer’s deficiencies.
Saturday was pretty much the same as Friday – long sound checks to bed in the songs – and as a result the gig was much better. Afterwards the League gave me three cheers in the dressing room, which was very gratifying. Apparently Dave the sound man made a tape of Saturday night’s show from the sound desk, but I never got a copy – it may be out there somewhere though."
"We stayed in Madrid for one more night and went to a club called Rock-Ola to see the Psychedelic Furs – we went backstage afterwards and watched them have a huge fight with each other which was very entertaining. The ANL flew home as they were heading off on tour later than week to Germany and didn’t want to waste days travelling. But the rest of us did the same miserable journey home on Monday night, though this time we took a train from Madrid to Santander instead of a bus. It wasn’t any quicker – in fact it took nine boring, uncomfortable, tedious and irritating hours and this time we knew how boring the ferry journey was going to be so we didn’t even have the hope of something entertaining to keep our spirits up. We got the ferry on Tuesday morning and arrived in Portsmouth on Wednesday morning and back in London on Wednesday afternoon. As soon as I got in I phoned John Curd, the League’s manager, to ask him if I could get a copy of the tape of Saturday night, and he said he’d been trying to get in touch with me because PJ had been refused entry into Germany as well, and the League wanted to know if I’d do that tour with them also, starting the next morning. I said yes immediately."
"So the next morning (Thursday 28th June) Slouch, the League’s roadie, picked me up in a van and we drove together to Tonbridge Wells and got everyone in the band – Winston, Nick, Chris (Magoo), Gilly and Dave (the sound man). We drove to Harwich and got a ferry then drove to Bremen arriving at about 3am. My diary says the journey was very uncomfortable, but absolutely hilarious. The League were very funny and fun to be around – always joking, having farting competitions etc. They also knew a lot about motorbikes."
"The gigs were a mixed bunch. Bremen was in an old slaughterhouse with terrible acoustics and I couldn’t hear anything, so I think it was pretty bad. Hamburg was at Fabrik, an old factory with a big crane on the roof. The sound was much better and consequently so was the band, though Nick’s voice was adversely affected by someone letting off a fire extinguisher in the venue just as we arrived. One thing we noticed about the crowds in Germany and Switzerland – no matter how many beautiful people we saw walking around town during the day, the crowd in the evening consisted of the ugliest bunch you could ever hope to imagine. And there was always, but always, somebody with a pet rat, often happily living in someone’s hair, which could consequently justifiably be described as a rat’s nest."
"In Hannover Chris’s amp blew up during the sound check and the PA stopped working during the gig, and the band nearly cancelled the entire tour. But Neuss was slightly better, though the venue was a tiny dive, so we carried on. By this stage I think the band had decided that they couldn’t continue with PJ in the band, and had pretty much decided to sack him when they got back to England, though I was disappointed to notice that they hadn’t actually asked me to join in his place yet."
"Wiesbaden was the most memorable show of the tour. The venue was a brewery or beer warehouse or something. When we first arrived it didn’t look like a venue at all. There was just a huge warehouse space full of pallets loaded with crates of bottles of various types of alcohol. We were told to go away for a couple of hours and were assured that by the time we came back it would be ready, and indeed it was. A few guys with forklifts had moved the pallets into one end of the room, piled them high and put a stage on top, then covered the front of it with curtains. We played literally on top of about 100,000 empty bottles. This turned out to be a mistake."
"For some reason there was trouble between punks and skins in Wiesbaden and I think they’d already decided it was going to kick off at the Anti Nowhere League gig. When we took the stage there was sporadic fighting in the audience and it only got worse when the band started playing. Punks were fighting skinheads all over the place and it was looking bad. The police soon arrived and after about three songs they came on stage and ordered the band to stop playing. This only made things worse as there wasn’t anything to distract the combatants and the level of violence actually got worse, so then the police ordered us to start playing again. This we did, while the police stormed into the audience with batons flying and started beating everybody in sight while the ANL played on. It wasn’t long before somebody noticed that if you just pulled back the curtain that formed the front of the stage, you could find pallets piled high with crates full of empty bottles. Within minutes empty bottles were flying across the venue in all directions, though miraculously mostly missing the stage. From the back, behind the drum kit, it looked like the room was darkened with flying bottles blotting out the lights. It was quite amazing. We ran from the stage through another room, where the fork lift operators had apparently moved all the full bottles to. We all grabbed a bottle of something and hid in the dressing room up some stairs on the second floor looking out over an alleyway. I had picked up a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream and drank that for the next couple of days. The fighting went on for some time while we hid in the dressing room looking out of the window to see how it was progressing. It did not seem like it was going too well for anybody, really."
"Luckily the next day was a day off and we drove to Freiburg, home town of our German promoter, Michael. Winston was tormenting him, pointing out that so far we’d played in a slaughterhouse, a factory, a corn mill, a pub, a squat and at a riot in a brewery. Not the best tour he’d ever been on, and he made a point to try to make Michael feel as miserable as he was feeling – to a large extent he succeeded and Michael often seemed about to crack under the pressure."
"The next day we drove to Biel in Switzerland, pausing for a brief two hour interrogation and search at the Swiss border. Biel’s show was in some sort of blue dome I recall – but basically it was another punk club, which the League were not generally happy about.
Then back to Freiburg for the show there. We spent the afternoon sunbathing and swimming and ogling German girls. The venue reminded Winston of The Cavern for some reason – presumably because it was dark and miserable and entirely populated by ugly punk rockers with pet rats. Actually that doesn’t sound like The Cavern at all, so maybe he had a different reason."
"The next gig was an open air festival in Kempten, where we were supporting the Eric Burdon Band. Because it was a festival, we weren’t allowed to use our drum kit (just our snare drum). I couldn’t get used to the kick pedal and managed to break a stick and our snare drum head (Eric Burdon’s drummer kindly leapt into action and lent me his snare), so it was a bit of a nightmare for me, which makes it extra annoying that it’s the only gig that I ever managed to get a recording of. Apart from my woes and consequent sub-par playing, it was actually a pretty good gig. It was a lovely sunny day and we finished early as we weren’t headlining, so there was plenty of time to drink free beer after the show, which we took full advantage of. Several members of the band managed to fascinate local girls, which led to Nick having to spend the following couple of days frantically trying to find medicine for the crabs he convinced himself he’d picked up."
"The gig in Hof was at a pub (called the Alter Bahnhof – it’s still there) where I played my best gig of the tour, though naturally there was hardly anybody around to hear it."
"Berlin was the last show of the tour and it was a long, hot, sweaty drive there. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall so we had to drive through East Germany to get to Berlin, which was eye-opening. Naturally, being the League, we were thoroughly searched at the border by East German border guards, which took more than an hour. East Germany looked desolate - even the motorway was incredibly drab - and we were very relieved to see the huge Union Jack that awaited us at the border into West Berlin. We could see the Wall from our hotel so went and visited quickly before the gig, which didn’t go very well – Nick lost his voice completely and we had to do a couple of numbers without him, which didn’t go down well with the crowd. We were very ready to head straight out of there and jump in the van and drive straight home, which is exactly what we did. We drove through the night and the next morning, arriving in Ostend in the afternoon - only to be told that we’d failed to get our carnet stamped at the Dutch border so we had to drive all the way back there to find a border post, rouse whoever was napping in it at the time, get them to stamp our carnet, then drive all the way back to Ostend – very annoying (no doubt this sort of thing will be returning to tours near you after Brexit). We were, of course, late getting home and naturally had to spend another 90 minutes being searched by British customs people – I can only assume this was a standard experience for the Anti Nowhere League. I’m sure no Customs officer in the world ever took a look at them and said “well, they seem pleasant enough – wave ‘em through”."
"I went back to London, the band went back to Tonbridge Wells, and decided to get a local drummer to join the band. I suppose that made sense in terms of logistics – and I probably wasn’t quite good enough either – but it was a disappointment. I enjoyed their company immensely. They were intimidating, but incredibly funny and if you were on their good side, as I seemed to be most of the time, they were utterly lovely. I’m sure if you asked Michael, the German promoter, he would tell you they were the most difficult, annoying and generally unpleasant people he ever dealt with, but as far as the League were concerned, he was a dreadful promoter who put them in several unsuitable venues and hardly paid them anything, so he had it coming. And the only grief he did get from them was verbal, I have to say, though it was a bit relentless."
"I think the next time I saw the League was when they supported Big Country at Wembley Stadium. I ran into Carol Clerk in a pub somewhere that evening and she had a ticket and had decided not to go so she gave it to me and I legged it over there – annoyingly I got there just as they finished, so I didn’t get to see them on a huge stage. I have no doubt they would have stormed it just like they did every tiny punk club they played in Germany."
So - what is Matthew Best up to these days??
"Right now I’m playing with a band called The Bad Breed
https://thebadbreed.bandcamp.com/ and of course with the Urban Dogs every now and then – we just released an album http://timematterrecordings.bigcartel.com/product/t-m026cd-urban-dogs-attack-cd and did a few gigs in advance of the 35th anniversary of our first album which came out on Record Store Day this year: http://www.jungle-records.net/index.php/133-urban-dogs-urban-dogs-expanded-2xlp-album
Urban Dogs 'Urban Dogs' expanded 2xLP album
Urban Dogs 1983 debut album reissued in red vinyl for Record Store Day. Urban Dogs is the collaboration between UK Subs' Charlie Harper and The Vibrators' Knox.
T&M 026 CD - Urban Dogs - ATTACK CD - Time & Matter Recordings
timematterrecordings.bigcartel.com
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war… They’re back with a bite! FOUR LUMINARIES OF THE PUNK AND ALTERNATIVE SCENE RE-UNITE FOR A BRAND NEW KIL...
thebadbreed.bandcamp.com
The Bad Breed Finest twisted Rock'n'roll and gutter exotica from south London. Featuring Colbert Hamilton on vocals Oli Katz - Guitar Richard Spyers - Guitar Kev Magee - Double trouble bass Matthew Best - Drums
It’s been entertaining looking back in my diary and remembering my time in the League. They may well have been the best band I ever played in – certainly the loudest!
-Matthew