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Showing posts with label the members. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the members. Show all posts

Friday 4 March 2022

This Is The Sound

Nicky Tesco, frontman of punk band The Members, died last week aged 66. The group signed to Virgin in the great major label scramble to sign punk bands in 1977/ 1978 and wrote one of the great singles of UK punk, Sound Of The Suburbs- a slice of energy, guitars and dissatisfaction with boredom that every teenager in the late 70s could identify with, tailor made for the 7" single and bedroom record player.

'Every boring Sunday morning/ Old men washing their cars/ Mum's in the kitchen cooking Sunday dinner/ Herbert's still moaning for food/ And Johnny's upstairs in the bedroom/ Sitting in the dark/ Annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitar.... This is the sound/ This is the sound of the suburbs'

The Sound Of The Suburbs

It's not all about the suburbs though. The Members were more than capable of taking aim at more political targets. In 1979 they took a shot at tax dodgers, banks, Bermuda and the Bahamas.

Offshore Banking Business

 Nicky was a member of The Members throughout the first incarnation of the band but left in 1983). He became an actor and in 1989 appeared the still bewildering but brilliant Leningrad Cowboys Go America, a film about a fictional Russian band with enormous quiffs on tour in the US. On Twitter earlier this week my online friend Danny Kelly summarised the importance of  Nicky Tesco and The Members- ' trillions of words were written about punk. Wasted effort. You nailed it in five'. 

RIP Nicky Tesco. 

Saturday 18 December 2010

Same Old Boring Sunday Morning


And The Members' Sound Of The Suburbs makes it three in a row, although to be fair Nicky Tesco's lyrics skewer suburban life of young punks in the late 1970s poignantly and accurately, in a way The Vapours didn't. It reached number 12 in the charts pop pickers.

18 The Sound of the Suburbs.wma