Five Young Cannibals

Punk rock can trace its roots back to the garage bands of the 60s and the influence of The Stooges/ MC5 and their ilk in the early 70s. For many it’s the debut album from The Ramones that marks the true beginnings of punk rock. In the UK you have The Sex Pistols and The Clash and then dozens of other bands that followed after them, or existing bands that jumped on to the punk bandwagon. It’s messy, as all history tends to be if you look at it up close.

Out story focusses on Mike Spenser. He was an American who came to the UK via France in the mid 70s to be at the vanguard of the changing musical climate in and around London. His first band were The Count Bishops, somewhat ahead of the curve when it came to the punk scene. Punk before punk had officially become a thing. His stint with the band didn’t last long. After that came The Cannibals. They had their own label, Big Cock Records. The logo they used was repurposed from the local brewery of the time (Courage) and showed a cockerel in profile. All very punk 101.

At some point Mike had been lined up as a possible front man with a new band that Malcolm McLaren was assembling. The Sex Pistols were already in existence (although at that stage under a different name), but they lacked a lead singer, someone with a presence that could ascend them above the run of the mill. This was where Mike was primed to make his mark.

And then, one fateful day, John Lydon (soon to be ‘punkified’ as Johnny Rotten) walked in to the Sex fashion shop owned and run by McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood and the rest – as they say – is history. Lydon turned out to be exactly what McLaren had been looking for and pretty much got the gig straight away.

I’m hearing a lot of this backstory for the first time in a pub somewhere in Peckham. It might’ve been called The King’s Head – it certainly had a royal reference in its name, but as with most things, the details are long since forgotten. This is all ten years or more after the fact. We’re in 1987 or 1988 at this point.

So Mike Spenser doesn’t get to be the lead singer in The Sex Pistols. He does end up as lead singer in his own band, The Cannibals. They are very much forged in the style of those 60s garage bands. They have a cult following in the UK, but are outside of the mainstream. They’re also popular elsewhere – particularly in France – in a way that a lot of bands from the UK weren’t. The full story, from The Count Bishops to The Cannibals, from 1976 to 1989 and beyond, is not mine to tell. But I’m sure you can look it up elsewhere.

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Mike was the guy behind IPS. IPS were Independent Pressing Services. They of the cheap and cheerful advert in the back pages of Melody Maker. Once I’d graduated from putting out cassette only releases to fully fledged vinyl, naturally I needed to contract out the production process. IPS may not have been the best place to go to, but they were undoubtedly the cheapest. And cheap was all I could afford.

IPS were based in Peckham, in an industrial unit not so dissimilar to that one in Southend where I was to later record and hang out with Paul and his faithful greyhound. Located on the second floor of an unremarkable looking concrete building, it was a large open plan space that accommodated various printing presses and other equipment. While they outsourced the pressing of the vinyl, the record sleeves were printed in house and then records and record covers later assembled on site.

Mike had a business partner. I forget the guy’s name now. But they definitely made for an odd couple. Mike was shortish, but he had all the presence of someone who could’ve been lead singer with The Sex Pistols. He was from Brooklyn and had that cool NYC vibe and an accent to match. He dressed the part.

His partner on the other hand... looked like an accountant.

He looked like someone who might work in the finance department of your local council. He looked like Harold Bishop from Neighbours. (And if you don’t know who that is, just go search for yourself). It was rock ‘n’ roll and the antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll, side by side in the same building. I never really understood the exact details of their partnership and how it came to be; nor who owned what or any of that stuff, but at a guess I’d say Mike was more on the music side of things and ‘Harold’ was more about the printing.

I visited that building in Peckham several times across a three or four year period. It was a lengthy trek to get there from the Essex coast. Peckham was not well connected back then and the journey involved a train to Fenchurch Street, a lengthy tube ride and then another train out to Peckham Rye station, which at the time was a rather dilapidated structure raised up above street level. From there it was a walk down the main high street, past several cheap fast food outlets, colourful greengrocers and a cool West Indian record shop from which you could always hear interesting music being pumped out into the street.

Then you had to negotiate some less hospitable looking back streets until you finally reached your destination, squeezed in at an angle near to a sharp bend in the road.

Mike was an engaging host. On first meeting he entertained me and my Icelandic counterpart when we came back to his house to do business. Another time I was able to stay overnight and sleep on his couch, a guest of Mike and his family, which I seem to recall consisted of several young children and a newborn baby, alongside his wife. It must’ve been then that I got taken to the local pub and learnt some of the backstory of his time in England. (I wish I could recall more of this, but etc…)

In those days the whole record making process was London based. The sleeves were printed in Peckham. The masters were cut at Porkies which was somewhere else nearby (and then later relocated near to Leicester Square). The pressing plant was back in East London, just around the corner from the home ground of Dagenham and Redbridge football club. And for any records that needed to be shipped back to Iceland there was a shipping company based somewhere close to Wapping.

Eventually it became cheaper for IPS to send everything out to Eastern Europe and that was where the C.O.M.A. 7” (our final vinyl release) was manufactured. It felt like the end of an era. For the label. Perhaps for IPS. Perhaps even for vinyl itself.

What I remember about my last trip to Peckham is this. Mike was waiting on the arrival of a journalist from Melody Maker. I think it might have been Simon Reynolds (who later wrote a string of popular music books). The interview was to be about the business, about the series of garage band compilations he’d put out (under the imprint ‘Pebbles’, in homage to the classic ‘Nuggets’ compilation of 60s garage music) and about his own music career. I was curious to get a ringside seat for this, but in the end I think the interview took place on a different day.

Also at this time, Mike was considering legal action against a band called The Fine Young Cannibals. Formed in Birmingham in the mid-80s, they’d had a series of chart hits and one gold and one platinum selling album. They weren’t particularly my thing, but in Roland Gift they had a talented and distinctive singer. The problem for Mike was that he’d been soldiering away with his own band since the late 70s (as The Cannibals) and now these upstarts with a similar name were muddying the water.

To me it felt a bit like tilting at windmills. There are plenty of situations where bands have been forced to change their name because it clashes with that of an existing band – Yazoo became Yaz in the US, Suede became the rather cumbersome sounding The London Suede (also in the US) and Wigan band Verve had to change to The Verve to differentiate themselves from the long running Jazz label. But The Fine Young Cannibals weren’t appropriating their name wholesale from anyone else. I didn’t think there would be much of case, but I wished him well all the same.

(I’m not sure there ever was any legal action – I am sure that at some point Mike and his band released a single under the name ‘Five Young Cannibals’ to emphasise how they felt about their Midland namesakes.)

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There are no neat endings to this particular story, because this is life and not the movies. Once I’d stopped putting out vinyl I had no reason to come back to Peckham. To find out what was going on within the world of the music industry, you were reliant on what the music press chose to print. You couldn’t simply look things up online.

IPS were cheap and cheerful. You got what you paid for. But Mike Spenser was a charismatic guy and generous with his time. I kind of liked the days I spent in that industrial unit, music echoing through the open spaces. The clanking of the printing machines as record sleeves would filter down a conveyor belt, ready to be assembled. It was solid work, tactile, tangible. It was an unseen, non-glamorous part of the music industry. But an important part, nonetheless. In an age of MP3s and cloud storage, where music can be made discreetly and uploaded and distributed from the comfort of your laptop, I still feel a certain nostalgia for all of this.