An Interview with JJ (John Pearce) - August 2020
Thanks to bassist JJ (John Pearce) for taking the time to answer my questions!
After Winston left the League in 1997 JJ took over on bass. He stayed with ANWL until leaving 2003.
1. Please could give us a bit of background info on yourself?
JJ "I was born in Slough in 1967 and spent my early years there before moving to Ramsgate, where I lived until I was about twenty. My first school was located in the next street to where I lived. As a young kid living on the coast, I spent most of my time down the beach when I wasn’t at school.
My dad had died when I was two, so my Mum brought me and my brother up on her own. We never had much money, so during the summers, my mum would rent out some of the rooms in our house as holiday flatlets to help make ends meet.
As I got older and went on to Senior School, it turned out to be less of an academic education and more of a street education. I suppose that’s when I started my rebellion against society…Haha!!
I never did college or uni. It just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t wait to get out of school, so I fucked it off when I was fifteen. I had a great childhood and upbringing but I fucking hated school and any authority.."
2. From what age did you start to become interested in music, which bands were you into?
JJ "I’ve always had very broad musical tastes. There was often music playing in our house when I was growing up and I was always interested in music, right from a really young age but I never actually started playing bass until I was sixteen.
As a very young kid I would listen to a lot of 50’s Rock’n’Roll stuff. I suppose I got that from my old Mum. She used to play a lot of Boogie Woogie type stuff on the piano at home. Then the glam thing hit and made a bit of an impression on me too. I remember my auntie taking me to the cinema in 1975 to see the film ‘Flame’…It was a kind of a rock band parody starring the guys from ‘Slade’ as the band ‘Flame”.
I was still a bit young and naive for The ‘Sex Pistols’ etc. in 76, so Punk music didn’t really catch my attention until ‘Sham 69’ came along in 1978 as I was starting senior school.Not long after that I became a Skinhead and then I started to get in to the Ska revival bands (The Specials, Madness etc.).Around the same time, the Oi! thing started to emerge and that was what really got me into playing bass. When I heard the intro to ‘Wonderful World’ by ‘The 4-Skins’ on ‘Oi! The Album’, I thought to myself, “That’s the noise that I wanna make”. I asked the music teacher at my school if she could teach me but she couldn’t play bass, so I quit school at fifteen, got some cash together and got myself a crappy bass and amp, although it took me quite a while before I could get the bass to sound anywhere near the same as the bass on that Oi! record!!"
3. When did you learn to play bass guitar, and did you have lessons or were you self-taught? What were your influences?
JJ "Well like I said, I first started playing around the age of sixteen. I’ve never had any lessons but I do remember there was a TV series on around the same time that I started playing. I think it was called ‘Rock School’ or something like that. They focused on a different genre of music each episode, Reggae, Funk etc. Punk was still very frowned upon back then, so they obviously overlooked it. I think the closest episode I could relate to was the Heavy Metal one, because it had heavy guitar sounds and the bass player used a pick, whereas he used fingers on all the other episodes. All in all though, it wasn’t really of much use to me, apart from it taught me how to tune the bass.
I bought a book once to learn a few scales but the way I really learnt was just by listening to records and copying them.
I suppose my main influences back when I first started playing bass were the local Punk bands that played in and around our area. It was a case of ‘If they can fucking do it, then so can I'.
4. When did you actually join the League.. and how did that all come about?
JJ "I joined in 1997. Beefy had joined the League the previous year, but before that, I had played in several other bands with him, so when Winston jacked it in, Beef asked me if I would be interested in auditioning for the band. He knew that I was more than capable of pulling it off and I’d be the best person for the job. When he asked me, I jumped at the chance because I had been such a big fan."
5. Were you a fan of the band before you joined??
JJ "Yeah I was a big time fan of the band back in the day. I had bought (or stolen) all of their records and used to play them all the time. I still remember the first time I ever saw them live (I think it was in 1982). It blew me away. Nick was like nothing I’d ever seen before and to be honest, I’ve not really seen anyone like him ever since."
6. Did you already know all of the songs.. if not, did it take long to learn them all?
JJ "Obviously I had to quickly learn the songs from the Scum album because I hadn’t heard them before, but the early stuff was so ingrained in my brain from back in the day, it didn’t take me long to refresh myself with them. I learn songs really fast. Ninety percent of the battle for me learning to play songs is to know the arrangements really well. So the best way is to just keep listening to them over and over. Obviously there was no problem there, as I’d played them to death back in the 80’s, so when I listened back to them before my audition, it all came flooding straight back to me.
The actual playing bit was easy, they’re honestly not hard songs to play. As soon as we started the audition, it felt really natural to me and I think we only played through two songs before Nick and Chris told me that they wanted me in the band and we were going on tour."
7. Can you remember the first show you did with the League.. and what are your memories of your first gig?
JJ "Yeah, it was supporting ‘Stiff Little Fingers’ at Rock City in Nottingham. I always loved that venue, so that added to the excitement of my first League show. I can’t really remember much else about it apart from us not having much room to move about on the stage because SLF wouldn’t move their backline for us, so we had to set ours up in front of their’s. There’s a lot of fucking Prima donna’s in this business we call music!"
8 In 1997 the SCUM album was released - what are your memories of the recording? Were the songs all written whilst you were in the band, or had they been written prior to you joining? What was your contribution to the song writing process?
JJ "That album had already been written and recorded when I joined the band. I didn’t actually play on the album, even though my picture was on the cover and I was credited as being the bass player. If you read the small print on the sleeve, it says “Thanks to ‘some other geezer’ for his bass work”. I can’t remember his name but he was a mate of Kev the drummer. Apparently the rest of the band didn’t click with him during the recording though, so I think that’s why they put me down as the bass player and had my photo on the album. I was the new kid on the block so I wasn’t going to disagree with them."
9. Some of the songs on SCUM, especially 'The Great Unwashed', 'How Does It Feel' & 'Have you ever Tried.. suicide. feature very heavy, slow riffs - possibly the heaviest material the band has ever come up with. Do you know why this was.. was this an intentional move towards 'heavy metal’?
JJ "I don’t know if it was an intentional move on the bands part or not. Let’s face it, it didn’t go down too well when the band had previously tried to change their musical direction. I think that given everyone’s influences, it was just a natural progression and probably had more to do with the fact that there were now different members in the band. A lot of it would have been to do with Beefy. He came up with most of the guitar riffs. He had been playing a lot of metal/grunge type stuff during the 90’s, so the songs just ended up sounding like that. Also Kev was a metal drummer, so his influence obviously came through in the tracks as well."
10. Do you have any favourite shows whilst you were in the band.. Any particularly memorable/standout gigs?
JJ "After we played the Slovenia show where the ‘Return to Yugoslavia’ album was recorded (which itself was a great show), we went down in to Croatia and played in Zagreb. At that time, it was the biggest show I’d ever played. I was told there was about eight thousand people at that one, so that was a really memorable show for me. The bizarre thing was that the band only sold two T-shirts that night. It was fucking funny because Magoo thought that he was gonna have it off with the take on the merch stall that night but we were told that most of the people who were there had saved up for months just to buy a ticket for the show, so they couldn’t afford to buy merch as well. Magoo was fucking fuming…Haha!!
Some of the first shows that we played in the US were special for me too because I’d never been out there prior to joining the band, so that added to the excitement of touring there. The Stone Pony in New Jersey was a real stand out show, on so many levels. Other than that, every show was an event in it’s self. I can’t really think of any shows that really stood out above the rest but that could be to do with the amount of alcohol that we were consuming back then!!
11. How did you get along with the old timers: Nick & Magoo? - What were they all like to work with on a professional level, and also on a personal level too?
JJ "Haha! What is this professional level you speak of? On a personal level, Nick was cool, Magoo not so much. That’s all I’m gonna say about that!"
12. Did you socialise with Nick, Magoo, Keith etc.. outside of the band?
JJ "Beef and I would often go out drinking together but we both lived over an hour’s drive from the rest of the band, so we didn’t use to get a chance to get together for socialising much outside of the band, although I did use to go up and stay over with Nick and his family quite a lot when we were getting ready for rehearsals or tours etc.
I do still cross paths quite a lot with Nick because we often play at the same festivals. I would say that we probably hang out drinking and socialising more now than we ever did when I was actually in the band. I get on really well with the guys in the current line up too. Beef and I often go up to see the band play at their local venue in Tunbridge Wells and we also went up to Nick’s 60th birthday piss up."
13. Did you make any British or Foreign TV appearances during your time in the band?
JJ "Yeah, I remember there being quite a few. Loads of radio interviews as well. Not sure about British appearances but there are two shows that especially spring to mind that I remember being televised were the ‘Holidays In The Sun’ show in San Francisco and the ‘Holidays In The Rising Sun’ show in Yokohama."
14. Are there any unreleased tracks... demos that you recorded with the League?
JJ "Apart from the ‘Return To Yugoslavia’ album, the only other tracks I ever played on were the songs on the ‘Out of Control’ album. Contrary to popular belief, those tracks were not recorded as pre ‘We Are The League’ demos, but were actually recorded by Me, Nick and Magoo with a mate of mine called Gary Penney on drums. It was thrown together and recorded just a couple of months before the album was released, so I’m not sure what made people think it was all old material."
15. Can you tell us more about that Out of Control album please?
JJ "Yeah, sure. The ‘Out of Control’ album was recorded after Magoo called me asking me if I could contact Danny for him about doing some recording. I asked Chris what it was all about and he told me that him and Nick were recording some demos. He said that he wanted to keep it raw and didn’t want it to sound too professional, so instead of using me and Beef, he was going to do all the guitar and bass himself but he needed Danny to do the drumming.
Well Danny wasn’t easy to get hold of back then, he had no phone, so I suggested my mate Gary do it and I offered to do the bass bits and keep it real simple. Nick and Chris came down to Ramsgate and we had one rehearsal and then went in to the studio and did the recording. We blasted through it real quick because it was Gary’s daughters birthday, so he wanted to get back home for her party. All mine and Gary’s parts were pretty much done in one take. I think Chris gave us a hundred quid each for our trouble but he made us sign something to say that we had no rights to any royalties.
I still had no idea that it was gonna get released until I saw it on sale on a stall at some festival in Europe. So I nicked a copy and gave it to Gary for his birthday."
16. Do you have any anecdotes to share.. happy memories etc?
JJ "Haha, so fucking many!! Too many to mention. From people going on the missing list on tour, to playing Strip Jenga with groupies. From Magoo’s sunglasses flying out the window while we were driving down the motorway, to full on riots against the old bill! There is one story from when I was on tour with The League that I have not been allowed to forget . Mainly because Danny (our drummer at the time) likes to tell this story to everyone he ever introduces me to. We had been playing somewhere in Europe and I had gone out on the piss after the show with the guys from Cock Sparrer. We had an early flight out the next morning but I didn't get back to the hotel until 6 a.m. I had gone in to my hotel room and passed out, so when Danny knocked on my door about half an hour later to tell me that we were leaving for the airport, he got no reply. He then asked one of the chamber maids if she could let him in to my room. She opened my door and walked in with Danny to find me unconscious on my bed with my trousers round my ankles, my cock in my hand and a porno movie on the TV!! To top it all, Danny threw cold water over me to wake me up which unfortunately shrivelled my pride even more! Very embarrassing."
17. Do you know why Magoo ending up leaving the ANWL?
JJ "Magoo was always more about the money side of things rather than the playing side of things when I was in the band. His heart wasn’t in it at all and I’m sure that’s why he quit in the end. He'd had all his tattoos removed and he’d gone all middle class and seemed to be more concerned about his day job and running his bike tour business than doing anything with the band. That’s just my opinion anyway, you know, what I observed of him. It was becoming really hard work towards the end of it. The last gig I remember him doing was the one in Atlanta, where he seemed to completely lose the plot. Even Nick said that it wasn’t working anymore at that point and they started falling out. We were a unit and Chris didn’t seem interested in being a part of it. I guess he did one more show with us after that in Morecambe the following month before he told Nick that he was quitting the band. After that, I never saw him or spoke with him again. Before Chris quit, we had been booked to play Holidays in the Sun in San Francisco on 27.08.01 (another one for your gigography). The venue was Maritime Hall. Chris had been the bands liaison with the US promoter and had arranged for them to hire in guitars for us because we were travelling as tourists and would not be able to bring our own. This was particularly important for Beefy because he is left handed, so it was very unlikely that he would be able to borrow a guitar when we got there. However, when we turned up, they had no left handed guitar for us and they showed us an email that Chris had sent them saying that they could cancel the hire guitars because we would now be bringing our own. Fortunately, I was able to borrow a bass and there was a really good guitar tech on the crew who was able to convert one of the right handed guitars to play left handed. Only problem was that because the knobs were now on the top of the guitar, when Beef hit the first chord, he accidentally hit the volume knob with his arm and muted the guitar. It wasn’t a very good start to the show but we started the song again and the rest of gig was an absolute belter. Other bands I remember on the bill that weekend were Exploited and Sham 69. I think it was mainly down to Chris why we never gigged much in those first few years. I remember I was sat at HITS one year having some food when Marc (Boss of MAD Tourbooking in Germany) came over to me and asked why Chris always turns down his offers. I asked what he meant and it turns out that Chris was turning down festival and tour offers left, right & centre. I was gutted to hear that because all I wanted to do was play gigs.
"
18. When & why did you leave the ANWL? It seems as though the whole lineup disbanded at that time (2002?).. what happened?
JJ "Actually it was 2003. The last gig I played with the band was in Portland, Oregon. Basically I couldn’t afford to do it anymore. We had been out on tour for a few of weeks on the US west coast and at the end of it we got stung for the money that was owed to us, so I quit the band and the others followed. It’s wasn't like we were expecting to get paid a fortune but the shows had gone well, so we should have earned a bit of money but we ended up coming home from that tour with fuck all. That hadn’t been the first time it had happened either. I for one was not in a position to be able to keep going away on tours that promised a certain fee but then paid next to nothing at the end of it. I blame the management!!
Danny did suggest to Nick that we make the ‘Wasted Festival’ of that year our last performance together but Nick had already got himself another line up with PJ, so that was that!! To be honest, I think it had been PJ’s plan all along to worm his way back in to the band because he had actually turned up at the studio with Nick when we were in rehearsals just before that tour started. He probably thought he could make a few quid but that didn’t last long, did it. I can’t say I don’t miss it sometimes but with a young family to support at the time, I just couldn’t afford to do it anymore. I do wish that we could have done more touring and recording whilst I was with the band but whenever we suggested it, Nick didn’t seem too keen on the idea at that time. Ironically they’ve had loads of tours and album releases since."
19. What are you doing nowadays, musically (do you have a link to current music projects etc).
JJ "Well a few years before we quit The League, Beef and I had also started playing in ‘The Last Resort’ https://www.facebook.com/thelastresortuk/ https://www.instagram.com/thelastresortuk/ and have continued to do so ever since. Beefy however called it a day with The Last Resort and hung up his boots a while back. We’ve now replaced him on guitar with a fella called Lars Frederiksen. Towards the end of my stint with The League, I had also been playing bass for a few shows with ‘The Business’, and I continued playing with them for several years after I quit The League. RIP Micky Fitz. Long Live The League."
