JC CARROLL FIRST WEST END SOLO SHOW

Most people know of the Sound of the Suburbs but they don't know of all the other songs that JC has written the stories of isolation,of suicide, of pandemic , stories of his journey, of train stations locked in in a mental home, tales of London and the Suburbs  
JC is Songwriter and Entertainer.. a Ray Davies of his generation... You will not be dissapointed by this his first proper solo show in this fabulous mini theatre in in the eart of the West End, Make a Day of it Have a Meal in Chinatown Shop in Soho!
Tickets are Here https://dice.fm/event/wo2nr


JC Carroll Solitary Confinement in the Soho - June the 19th The Garden at Covent Garden Studios

100 Club Tickets Now on Sale

Summer is Here
Re-released by
POPULAR DEMAND 

Because of the unprecedented success of "Bedsitland" and "Love Songs" on  independant radio we are re-promoting "Summer is Here"  as our summer release 

What you can do is.... Ask your favourite DeeJays to play this summer Banger ..... Lets get it back on the Radio, its got that catchy suburban beat. And Vote for it on our favourite Chart The Heritage Chart ... Its currently No45 .. Lets Get it to the Top... it Features  JC's  Grandchildren , Summer Kai, Fin Riley and JJ

excerpt FROM THE BOOK - THE SOUND OF THE SUBURBS


It was at this time that kids from the outskirts of town began to turn up
at shows, mostly underage and certainly not dressed in the latest Boy and Seditionaries gear. These were herberts in Harringtons and Dr Martens, boys and girls with a few badges on their Wrangler jackets to show they were Punk Rockers. They had a hunger, they wanted it. Around west London there was a group of boys and girls that followed The Lurkers called the Fulham Crew; there was also a group of almost paramilitary nutters that followed The Stranglers called The Finchley Boys. So when these guys came in from the suburbs we were keen to give them an identity: one of the first was the ‘Hampton Crew’. There was a gang of Jewish boys from north London, the ‘Edgware Crew’. There were spotty herberts from satellite towns like Staines, Woking, Hampton, Ickenham, Ruislip and West drayton all keen on getting a piece of this Punk Rock, all kids having their Catcher in the Rye moment... I saw them and I would think, “You know what? These people are the same as us.” We were not cool inner city kids from Holland Park comprehensive or the Bromley contingent. We did not belong to the 1976 Punk Rock elite. Punk was beginning to explode across the nation and it was no longer the property of a small metropolitan clique.

Here’s what Mike Lacey of the Hampton crew says about that time: “I used to cycle from Laleham to Fulwell bus garage and meet Nicky Locking, Judy Martin, Pete Compton, Louis Tomazou, Barry Smale, Neil Clarke. I would throw my bike into the stinging nettles, so nobody would nick it, and get the 267 to Hammersmith. Neville Topping would be amongst the crowd. The first Members show we saw was on 23rd June 1978 at The Red Cow. From then we were hooked.”

In the next three months the Hampton crew would make regular incursions into central London, sometimes two or three times a weekalways with enough money for the bus fare and the entry and maybe enough for one pint of beer.

There they would mingle with the more established Fulham crew: Max and Eddie Hamilton, Perry Richards, Sian Griffiths, a young Stuart Pearce... Suddenly the band had momentum: we were on fire. It was also a social thing: we were at the centre of a scene. People came to see the band but
also to hang out with people they had met at a previous gig. There was a real mixture of people coming to the shows. It’s the same as it is now at the 100 club. Some people in bands thinks its all about them and the music. But it isn’t: it’s about the crews and the gangs and lost people looking for an identity, a sense of belonging.

It was at a Red Cow gig that I met this beautiful girl. I saw her first in the crowd. She was taller than everybody else and she had this amazing black curly hair. Her name was Francine Palmer and she had come from Woking with a friend. I wrote her number on a little piece of paper, as we did in those days. Then called her at work. I would get the tube to where she worked as a secretary at Imhoffs Hi-Fi store in New Oxford Street and have a lunchtime pint with her. Within weeks she would move into my flat and be my first live-in girlfriend. That’s what you did in those days: you met a girl and she moved in – that was that.

It was after a show at The Red Cow that I decided to write a song for
our new fans and that song would be ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’. It was, like ‘Solitary Confinement’, a song about alienation but it sounded like a celebration. Even though I lived in London at the time I wanted to celebrate the ordinariness of living in the suburbs. I wanted to celebrate the people who wore their suburban mundanity like badges of honour. You think
you come from a rubbish town? You have never been to mine. I wanted to celebrate Punk Rock as something that belonged to everyone, not just a metropolitan elite. I wanted to paint a picture of alienation and desperation but not with the colours of art school rebellion. I wanted to set it in a satellite town and tell it how it was. I wanted it to be about our new friends, not about us.

The song almost popped out fully formed; it doesn’t have rhymes as such and it’s got a weird intro. ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ is not an easy song to play. There are lots of twists and turns: there are four bars of bare guitar before the first chorus, there is a chromatic run in a sort of 12/8, and for that reason there was some opposition in the band to playing it. Gary wasn’t keen and so we did not play it for quite some time. I had the bones of the song written when I brought it to the band: chorus verses, middle
8 etcetera. Nick decided that it needed another verse so he wrote the third one. Eventually we got Gary to play it and the first time we performed it live was at The Marquee on 13th August 1978. We were supporting The Vibrators. Everybody went mad and I knew it would be a hit. It was as if they had heard it a thousand times before - it’s because it wasn’t our song, it was their song.

By then I was living in a flat in Edgware Road which I had bought on a cheap bank mortgage. We stored Chris’s and my amps under the stairs. It was home from work, load up Chris’s Anglia van and off to a gig.

Here is a sample of shows we did then from Mike Laceys invaluable diary:

22/8 Railway Hotel (The Moonlight Club) with The Lines
29/8 Hope & Anchor
16/9 Railway Hotel
22/9 Blue Coat Boy with The Monochrome Set. Skinheads violence... 24/9 Rock Against Racism, Brockwell Park

03/10 Railway Hotel with UK Subs and Planets
11/10 The Members and The Dials – White Hart, Acton 21/10 The Members and Local Operator – Windsor Castle... 23/10 Hope & Anchor
03/11 Black Slate – City Poly....
06/11 The Members, Ruts and VIPS – Nashville Rooms 09/11 Young Ones – Windsor Castle...

I was in two worlds: in a merchant bank in the day and in pubs and clubs in the evening. At the time there was a lot of alcohol involved in both these realms. People at the bank would go out to lunch and drink four pints of beer. It was too much for me. I took to smoking dope in Finsbury Circus.
I would roll a joint in the loo and smoke it on the grass of Finsbury Circus. The work at the time was very stressful: it was eurodollar bonds and new securities. I was working for the traders making the deals work. I also had the job of handling all the foreign currencies for the bank. It was a small merchant bank but they were the investment vehicle for a large US bank, so I got to see how they moved money around the world. At Coutts & Co. we were basically looking after the landed gentries’ money, the old ruling class of the UK. At the merchant bank it was very different, the beginning of
the Big Bang. We were looking after new money: oil money, bearer bonds, secret money, nominees’ money, Jersey money, Caribbean money, hidden money, tax-free offshore money.

My flat in Edgware Road became party central. My old school friend Paul Lock moved into the spare room, hoping that we would live life as two unattached bachelors but there were always people there. Paddy had only just moved out when I got a call from Michel, my younger brother, saying he too had been kicked out of home by my mother: could he come and stay? He slept in a corridor where he was quickly joined by his girlfriend Anne Marie. Chris Payne would stay over after shows. People were sleeping in the hallway, the kitchen. Paul was very understanding but quite rightly felt a little miffed that he was paying rent and everybody else was crashing for free. Malcolm Garrett slept on the sofa for a week or so when he first moved from Manchester to London to work at Radar Records.

Francine moved in, I remember I bought a proper bed to celebrate the occasion. Before then it was a mattress on the floor. My relationship with Francine was very volatile. I knew nothing of women and was going to get a crash course. I remember one day she said, “I’ve got my period.” “What’s a period?” I said. I’m not sure how I kept it all together at the time.

At the time the music papers were extremely important, in a way that
we could not even begin to appreciate now. The NME hit the streets on Thursday but in the West End and the City you could get it on Wednesday afternoon. In 1978 it was the bible. The editor was a lovely man called Neil Spencer, a scholarly reggae freak who encouraged his young journalists in a very socially active way. Nick and I met him when we gatecrashed a party in West Hampstead.

That night we were totally out of control. Nick was driving his car around London off his head and drinking a pint at the same time. It must have been on automatic. We got stopped by the police and he was done for drunk driving. He spent the night in the cells of Queens Park police station and I walked home.

Music was not just music, it had an inner meaning: it was important socially and culturally. And in 1978 it was being made by people armed with a few cheap electric guitars who were only one step away from the street. Thanks to five years of Pub Rock, scores of Pubs in London had small stages that bands could play. They were quite often tatty Victorian boozers, who would have five or even six bands on a week. London in those days was a cheap place to live: I think my old bedsit had cost about £12 a month. Lots of other people lived in squats which cost nothing. And whilst the ’76 bands had smashed the scene open, the ’77 bands had followed in their wake and brought fresh blood and new ideas and, more importantly, thousands of converts from the suburbs. Suddenly the punk scene was not just for an art school, central London elite. It was taking the country by storm, through the NME and later Sounds and, perhaps most importantly of all, John Peel.

John Peel was an unlikely hero, a deadpan DJ with a graveyard late night show on BBC Radio One. Since its launch in 1967 Radio One had become huge; the BBC had finally abandoned the outdated Light Programme
and embraced pop culture – which was previously the domain of Radio Luxembourg and the pirate radio stations broadcasting from rusty hulks in the North Sea. The new Radio One DJs, mostly hired from the pirate radio stations, became huge stars in their own right, playing disposable pop and light rock. John Peel was different: he was a hippy, a yippie even, a maverick who did not fit into the new idea of BBC daytime radio. John had his ear to the ground. He was not playing the records that the pluggers brought in for daytime radio. He was listening to the cassettes and small run records being made up and down the country and he was, in the words of Cezanne, the ‘Horror of the Bourgeoisie’. He was looking for art or guile and was not interested in being the housewives’ favourite.