Tour report with interview: “communication that only some have heard”

Chris Westwood's second major Record Mirror story, written on the spring 1979 tour after the release of “Remember”. The starting point is the recent pannings in the rock press, to which the band, by their own account, reacted almost with relief: Dave McIntosh says they had expected a kicking sooner or later, and that the criticism had welded the band back together. Westwood attacks a critic who, after earlier praise, has now torn into Leven's songs, singing and guitar playing – two of the passages praised as Jo Shaw solos were in fact played by Leven; Leven mockingly calls the journalist “a human with a pencil”. There follow ironic mini-biographies of the members (Spreafico as a “Dutch peasant” who keeps silent about the past; Leven with “three divorces, five months in jail”; Shaw with a boarding-school past in Fort Augustus), a concert scene at the York Pop Club, where the punk audience reacts with unease to the open emotionality, and long Leven passages: on the “death trip” from the ZigZag interview, the lack of understanding of death in the modern world, the “war” over whether people will ever feel one another, and the announcement that the band will change radically – the new songs “Forbidden Lands” and “The Hell Games” already lead away. Westwood confesses that the band have fundamentally changed his attitude to rock. Tone: avowedly partisan.