Angles in August: Andrew Wells
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An·gle
ˈaNGɡəl/
noun
plural noun: Angles
- A member of a Germanic people, originally inhabitants of what is now Schleswig-Holstein, who migrated to England in the 5th century AD. The Angles founded kingdoms in Mercia, Northumbria, and East Anglia and gave their name to England and the English
It is with great pleasure that I present to you four new woven portraits this month featuring the coolest Angles I know. Each man is deeply connected to music in some way and has experienced the best of the UK music scene first hand. I thought it would be interesting to find out the story behind how the music they experienced actually changed their lives.
First we start with musician and expert taylor Andrew Wells who has provided us with a look into his personal history though the lens of music and fashion. His life that has truly been shaped by rock 'n' roll.
Viva la rock!
Viva la rock!
Julie Green
August 6, 2016
Andrew 'Wellie' Wells.
Music obsessive/clothes horse. I was born on 7th September 1963 on Preston Avenue, Wymondham, a market town 10 miles south of Norwich, Norfolk. England. I grew up in a village called Carleton Rode and my early recollections of that time are of hazy summer days and a vivid picture of the old gramaphone/record player the size of a chest of drawers that sat directly under the back window belting out music from my mothers large vinyl record collection. I guess that's where it all started. She had a varied range from 78 rpm shellac vinyl to 45's.
I remember loving this great rock 'n' roll music in it's early formats, from the mid 50's - stuff like Elvis, Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Bill Haley And His Comets, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, late 50's records by Johnny And The Hurricanes 'Red River Rock", The Everly Brothers "('Til) I Kissed You" from the early 60's a wide and eclectic range from guys like Johnny Tillotson "Poetry In Motion", Chubby Checker singing "Let's Twist Again", Chris Montez "Let's Dance" and Billy Fury "I'll Never Find Another You" to Lonnie Donegan's "Tom Dooley". She had a lot of Beatles records too. She gave me all these records and I still have them today and they still sound just as great as they did then.
Along with this love of music came an appreciation of the clothes, fashion's and styles that went hand in hand with it. I can recall getting my first pair of 'baseball boots', and the overwhelming joy of getting my first ever Levi jacket. A 1960's Trucker Style. Man, I was so over the moon the day I got that jacket, and subsequently every time I wore it.
As a kid my mum used to take me by bus into the 'city' - Norwich - on a Saturday morning and I would go to an area called "the back of the Inns" where on the corner of the street, on the 1st floor above another shop was a little record shop called Wilson's. Here I would spend my pocket money buying these records and ordering other 7' vinyl tunes that I eagerly awaited getting the following week.
The first record I ever got was on a 10" format and played at 78 rpm, 'Jonnie Reggae' by The Piglets. The wax was so brittle, and one day I had left it on a wooden chair in our house and my old man accidentally sat on it and it broke clean in half.
In the mid '70's I loved Slade and The Sweet, who along with Marc Bolan and Bowie were in the time of 'glam rock'. I can remember getting a pair of 'platform shoes' at primary school when I was about 10. These bands were light relief to me as the fallout from the late '60's rock bands had made me aware of that other rock music was going down and bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd from that period were still happening and with them in the early I was hearing 'prog rock' bands like Genesis, Yes and Boston.....and I hated them.
Then something happened in 1976 that was to change my life and the lives of a generation....and although it was getting banned everywhere England's youth were exalted as out of the cobwebs came crashing "Anarchy In The U.K", the Sex Pistols had arrived and music was never the same for me as a young teenage kid after that. With them came The Clash - still to this the best Rock 'N' Roll band in the world....Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Generation X all laid the groundwork for a generation of bands to follow. Punk Rock had arrived in all it's glory and rage!!!
Along came The Adverts, ATV, Subway Sect, The Art Attacks, The Users etc....suddenly we were aware of The Saints, The Dead Boys. I started going to gigs in Norwich where I saw The Ruts, The Lurkers, 999, Penetration and at the University of East Anglia, The Ramones. The UEA put gigs on, on a regular basis and I saw Eddie and The Hot Rods, The Monochrome Set and Steel Pulse, a black reggae band that hailed from the city of Birmingham's black area Handsworth. They were led by the charismatic David Hinds....
Along with punk came an this awareness of ska, blue beat and ultimately reggae music.... My favourite period of reggae music is from around 1974-78 and over the years I have amassed quite an extensive reggae vinyl collection to go with a large punk and rock 'n' roll/rockabilly vinyl collection. It's all about roots, rock, reggae and having as Bob Marley put it 'a punky reggae party'.
I LOVED IT!!!
With Punk came the fashion and the clothes with the best shops being Malcolm Maclaren/Vivienne Westwood's 'Seditionaries' and 'BOY' both situated on the Kings Road, Chelsea, London. They cost a fortune to a young kid to buy, and since I lived in Norfolk a hundred miles away, it was not easy to get the latest gear so I did what most young punks did back then and made my own gear by customizing anything I could get my hands on. This led to a whole new ballgame that had a profound effect on my life and future and I will get to that.
I got my grandmother to show me how a sewing machine worked and much to my mother's chagrin she came home from work one day to find I had with my gran's help customized my school uniform trousers and blazer by sewing in a bunch of classic YKK zips.
Then, I had a mate who's father was a radical freedom fighter who with his wife had had to flee from South Africa to England for opposing the apartheid system. He was a supporter of the Anti-Nazi League that was happening in England at this time. His parents (my mate's grandparents) lived in Greenwich in London and he took us to visit them and see the sights of London and on this trip we got to go to a gig in Victoria Park, Hackney, a Carnival under the banner of Rock Against Racism/Anti Nazi League and the list of bands playing included Patrick Fitzgerald, X Ray-Spex, Tom Robinson Band, Steel Pulse and The Clash.
It was a real eye opener. It blew me away. Punks dressed up in all the latest gear from the London Punk 'Boutiques', leather jacket's and pointed winkle picker creepers by George Cox, sporting pink, green and pure white bleached hair. The Norwich punks that attended that gig all went home and bleached their hair.
The punks also started to wear motorcycle jackets and since by then I was riding around on a Yamaha 50cc FS1E motorbike I went to the local town of Diss to a motorcycle shop and bought my first motorcycle jacket....a classic Mascot leather. Beautiful...putting in on it felt like it did when I had first got that Levi Trucker Jacket as a kid. I ordered a pair of green tartan bondage trousers by mail order from the shop Acme Attractions that was ran by Don Letts and a pair of red suede pointed creepers from Turners of Magdalen Street, Norwich to complete the look.
By now I was 16 years old and had been to London, to Seditionaries to buy a Destroy muslin shirt and to BOY to buy a red BOY Zip jacket. Like all the young punks....I thought I was the bees knees.
I started to branch out and go further afield to see bands like The Cramps at the Daze of Future Past Festival in Leeds. New bands were happening all the time and everywhere... and along came Theatre Of Hate and a band that combined the elements of my early musical experiences - rockabilly - to my love of punk rock...The Meteors. With Theatre of Hate they provided a new angle not only on the music, but also on the fashion style - that combined elements of rock 'n' roll/rockabilly clothing with Levis jeans and jackets. This was class to me...
By now I had moved out of home and was living in Norwich, at the Punk Zoo that was 14, Neville Street with Jonty, Terry and Bones and Janan. Regularly going to London to gigs and shopping trips to visit Lloyd Johnsons great shop La Rocka Dis Londres. La Rocka also merged all my favourite elements of clothing style's. Leather and black drill jackets, trousers and waistcoats with 'skull & crossbones' buttons and ball ended zips incorporated into the designs. They produced great suits styled on 50's rockabilly with pleated pegs. Another great shop just down the road from Johnsons was 'Robot' who had a whole range of George Cox creepers and suits in the same vein as La Rocka that had elements of the Edwardian 'Teddy Boy' Styles. Heaven to me....
... and this leads me to the 'whole new ballgame' of my life that I spoke of earlier...
The village of Carleton Rode is close to a place called Hethel. In Hethel was the Lotus Cars factory and a chap who lived in Carleton Rode worked in the upholstery department of Lotus making the leather interior seats etc for the cars. He used to take away the off-cuts of the leather and sell them - a carrier bag crammed full for £1. My mother saw this and bought me a bag. which consisted of off-cuts in two colours, petrol blue and crimson red. I took the pattern of the body from my Levis 60's trucker jacket and made a waistcoat in the style of the classic La Rocka waistcoat from the off cuts with the top panels, pocket flaps and v-strip's in red leather and the rest in petrol blue.
I was wearing it and one of the old punks 'Blade' asked me where I got it. When I told him that I had made it, he asked me to make him one, in black/red trim leather. This sparked a small industry for me at the time and soon I was making them for punks, rockabilly's and psychobilly's alike. I then worked out how to add sleeves into the design.
This was classic Theatre Of Hate/ La Rocka style clothing. Theatre Of Hate had become one of the bands of the time in the early 80's scene and on one of their tours they were supported by a band primarily hailing out of Bradford, West Yorkshire...The Southern Death Cult. They took in part their style and rhythms from the North American Indian's. They wore suede tassle jackets and were the Indian's to TOH's hints of Americana/Levis/ Cowboy style. This was another new angle to me and I adopted the pattern of my Trucker Jacket style to produce bespoke tassle jackets and worked hard to keep up with the demand. They flew out of my sweatshop/bedroom industry to the point I was paying Mazy to cut the leather patterns out and was buying the leather and suede by the sack full.
Around this time the local music scene in Norwich was vibrant and myself along with Blakey, Jonty, Lakey and Rupert formed the punk band Baptism Of Fire.
BAPTISM OF FIRE
The punks used to frequent a nightclub on Magdalen Street called The Jacquard were the DJ Jon Fry played a range of punk bands from the early beginnings to later bands English entering the movement such as Killing Joke, UK Decay, Sex Gang Children, The Pack who emerged to become Theatre Of Hate and The Meteors, along with some of the great American bands such as the Dead Boys and The Cramps. One day a new song 'Sexbeat' emerged onto the dance floor of The Jacquard from a band called The Gun Club that turned everyone's heads and dancing limbs into a frenzy....this was genius. I like a few others fell in love with The Gun Club. Their second album 'Miami' is still to this day, even after discovering Tom Waits, my favourite album of all time. We took every opportunity to see The Gun Club whenever they played in England.
This was at a time when the punk movement had elements of 'goth' and had taken on a darker side with the bands such as Sisters Of Mercy, Sex Gang Children, Bauhaus coming to the fore and bands like The Cult and of cause old punk mainstays Siouxsie & The Banshees bringing psychedelic textures to the music. There had always been the drugs, blues and speed hanging around the punk scene in Norwich and there was plenty of hash and weed too, but with this newer punk experimentation moving in flangers, and all kinds of psychedelic effects pedals entering the fray we sought out the past and discovered The Doors and also began listening to the Rolling Stones 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' LP. With these discoveries LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) entered into the equation, and we embraced it whole heartedly. In Norwich there was a lawless street called Argyle Street, which was a whole street of houses that had been taken up as squats. The walls of the houses and the road running through it were painted out in all kinds of graffiti from punk rock sloganeering to hippy flowers and 'biker' sign writing. Here lived a ramshackle bunch of punks, bikers and hippies, all living in a weird kind of harmonious community, and here you could buy all manners of smoking weed and hash, and copious amounts of LSD. We loved it and for a while tripped out going to free festivals and taking it by the bucket load...
This leads me to a combination in this story of The Gun Club and LSD and of the late great Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Gary and myself...
Jeffrey Lee and Kid Congo were now back together in The Gun Club along with Terry Graham and Patricia Morrison. They had just released the third Gun Club studio album 'The Las Vegas Story' and were touring it in England and Europe. The tour had them playing two nights at Dingwalls, in Camden Town, London.
My friend Gary and I went down to hook up with the band early during the day of the first gig. We got to Dingwalls mid afternoon armed with a pocket full of LSD. We sought out Jeffrey and watched the band soundcheck. Then Jeffrey Lee, Gary and myself headed across the road and into the Hobgoblin pub and started drinking. In Camden Town at the time was a shop called 'Tumi' that sold all kinds of South American items. Jeffrey having Mexican roots had gone in there earlier and purchased a Sombrero and a Poncho, which he was now wearing in the pub. As the drinks flowed we got out the LSD and it started going down. We put a couple on the table which Jeffrey at first suspiciously looked at, then he started nibbling away at it slowly through the course of the afternoon. As the day progressed Gary and I had dropped a few tabs by it was strong and we along with Jeffrey by now were feeling it. Jeffrey was a colourful and an extremely gifted showman at the best of times and after he had got a round of drinks in stood up on his chair, climbed onto the table and in full Mexican bandit regalia serenaded the entire pub with a version of Texas Serenade in Spanish if I recall correctly, as it had all got a bit hazy by then.
The entire crowd in the pub watched in shock and awe and loved it. Then Murray the roadie came in to get us out of the pub and get Jeffrey onto the stage at Dingwalls. I remember being in the tiny dressing room behind the stage with a camera and as Jeffrey stood just past the stage door he turned and waved to me and I took a great photograph of him. Then along with Gary I walked across the stage and we jumped down into the front of the crowd. By now the intro music was fading out, Terry was on the drums, Patricia was playing out the thumping opening bass lines of "Walking With The Beast" which I could feel pulsing through me, ably helped by the LSD, Kid was laying flat on his back with his feet up in the air, resting on one of the iron pillars that held up the roof from the stage and feed backing the opening bars of the song and I can remember getting extreme rushes off the LSD as Jeffrey walked onto the stage and thinking he's in the same state as me, "how the hell is he going to do this"?
Jeffrey took one look at the audience, one look at Kid writhing around on the floor churning out his famous 'wall of noise' and said "everyday I go out to work and I come home to this...1-2-3-4" and launches into a thunderous version of 'Walking With The Beast'. Unbelievable how he managed to do it. They produced a set of unrestrained genius, led by the man himself, Mr. Jeffrey Lee Pierce. It is to this day one of the best gigs I have ever had the privilege to witness. Anyone who knows the album 'The Las Vegas Story' will know the underlying power of the music at the core. This show shuddered the walls and floor of Dingwalls that night with it's power and glory. My love of music was even better for witnessing it...
R.I.P. Jeffrey Lee. We will never forget your genius or the music you left us with.
Nuff Said.
Wellie. X
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