"It Was Punk That Changed Our Lives"

David Newton on the Mighty Lemon Drops and their new 5 CD box set

Adrian Goldberg talks to Mighty Lemon Drops guitarist and songwriter David Newton about ‘Inside Out,’ a new five CD boxset featuring the band’s first three albums, plus non-album singles, B-Sides / bonus tracks, US radio mixes, previously unreleased demos and rare session recordings.

AG:  The first CD has the original single version of ‘Like An Angel’. What can you remember about that?

DN: We formed in March of ’85 and we recorded that in July.  It was done in a really inexpensive studio. Keith the drummer, had only been in the band a couple of weeks, and we just knocked it out. We did five songs in in a few hours. It was mad. It was done in this guy's front room and turned out great. And that was the start of it all.

AG: Yeah, but you guys had sort of already been knocking around the local punk and post punk scene, hadn't you? You were in a punk band Active Restraint?

DN: I was in a couple of punk bands. I was in a band called The Lowest Class with a couple of mates from school. And then we turned into Gang Warfare, but Active Restraint was a bit more of a post punky kind of thing and a bit psychedelic as well.  That was in the early early 80s.

I was born in ‘64 and couple of the other geezers in the band were born around the same time, or a couple of years before, and it was punk that changed our lives.

When I was 13-14, I’d buy a punk single a week with my pocket money.  By the time we were 16-17 it was 1980-81 and it was all the post punk bands that came after.  We would follow everybody; Public Image, Psychedelic Furs, Bunnymen, The Pop Group.

AG: How did you get together?

DN: I went to secondary school with Paul Marsh singer in the band. And I knew Tony (Linehan - bass) and Keith (Rowley - drums) before were in before the Lemon Drops. They were in a really good powerpop/punk band called The Power.  An easy comparison would be The Jam because they were a three piece and they had Rickenbacker guitars.  And I'd met them early on when I was doing a fanzine at secondary school/high school.

AG:  And you went to JB’s – the legendary club in Dudley?

DN:  My first gig at JB’s was The Modettes (of ‘White Mice’ fame) and I was only 15 years old.  I was really cheeky, and wrote to the address on the back of ‘White Mice’ to the Modettes management and said, “Can I interview the band for my little fanzine?”

There was me and my mate Lee Thomas.  We were really nervous, asking “are they gonna let us in? Are they going to ask us our age?”

We got in, and after that, I started going as often as I could.  It was half an hour on the bus from Wolverhampton and it was brilliant. I saw so many bands there.  I even saw one of the first Blur gigs before they even had a single out, in 1989.

AG:  And you were picked up by Dan Treacy from Television Personalities?

DN:  Yeah. When we started in Wolverhampton we didn't have a manager or any contacts with the music industry. So I just sent a couple of tapes out to people.  I think I sent one to Creation Records to Alan McGee, and I was a big TV Personalities fan, and I knew Dan had a label. It was called Whaam Records, so I just sent him a tape, and he got back a couple of weeks later and said that he really liked it. 

His girlfriend at the time, Emily, ran a club called The Room At The Top and said “do you want to come down and play?” So we went down.  We’d not played London or been out of the Midlands before.

We did two gigs, one with the TVP’s at a place called Deptford Crypt and the following night, a dance club supporting The Membranes.  It was the day of Live Aid as well, which was really weird.  The whole country was watching Live Aid, and we were surprised that there was anyone there.

Two or three weeks later, a review appeared in the NME by Everett True (aka “The Legend”).  I was still living home at the time and I remember my Mom answering the phone and saying “that Dan bloke from London's on the phone, he’s saying something about you’ve got a write up in the NME”.

And there was a review of the gig. It was really over the top. And then it was strange. The phone started ringing from all these bloody record companies - and we had no booking agent, no management, no, nothing. It was completely out of the blue.

AG:  So that was in 1985…

DN: Yeah, we were relatively young, really. And we were outsiders in some ways.

AG:  But you caught a wave didn't you with C86?  I know the bands were very diverse really, but there also was a sense of a collective about them. It definitely gave a lot of the bands a bit of a push to be associated with that.

DN:  It did.  When we formed in ‘85, we, we'd heard of a couple of the other bands.  The Pastels were around, and the Shop Assistants, I think, had put out one single, but although they were all doing a similar thing, none of them was really connected.

And it was nice that Neil Taylor put it together and just realised that there were all these bands doing similar things all around the country.

AG:  Something coalesced around it and there was definitely a punk spirit about it…

DN:  I think everybody was somewhat like minded. I think most of them were of a similar age. Most, I would guess, came through punk.  Living in America now, when I meet people of my age, when they were growing up, when they were 13, 14, 15 they were listening to Cheap Trick.  There's nothing wrong with Cheap Trick or Kiss and stuff like that, but it wasn't quite like it was in the UK.  We were quite blessed and privileged in some ways, that we had the Buzzcocks and The Adverts on Top of the Pops, for instance.

AG:  Did you ever get to Top of the Pops?

DN:  We never did unfortunately. Now would have been great. My mom would have liked that.

AG:  Why did the band split in 1992?

DN:  By that time, things were really changing in the UK with dance culture - which was great, by the way.  We were all really into that, individually, and as a band.  Some of the bands started to incorporate that kind of element into their sound on that, but we were doing quite well in in the US by that time that it didn't really have the effect on us that it would have if we were just solely based in the UK. So, maybe we sounded a little dated? I dunno.

Inside Out is released on 27 November on Cherry Red Records.

You can listen to the full interview with David on my Brum Radio show Adventures In Music.

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