Ken – very eager, very keen – but the band
couldn’t play at all. They never actually played as a unit ever, and you didn’t have to play that great in those days for people to feel it was all right. They were just musically
dyslexic.’
The inability of the band to adequately express his ideas teased the hostility out of Declan. During one live rendition of ‘Pay It Back’, Steve Hazelhurst’s light-hearted
introduction – ‘This is a song for all you thieves in the audience’ 17 – was cut dead in its tracks by the furious singer: ‘He
just looked at me with this glower on his face. Obviously I’d said the wrong thing.’
Another case in point was ‘Flatfoot Hotel’, a set regular, and a long, labyrinthine and less-than-melodic trek through some obscure personal preoccupation: ‘And there’s
no forgiveness/And there’s no relief/’Cos I start off as the good guy and I end up as the thief.’ The end result sounded like a cross between ‘Hotel California’ and
something by Santana, only even less appetising than that sounds. It evenfeatured a drum solo. Declan was obsessed with getting the song absolutely right, but the band had
little enthusiasm for the track and never really got to grips with it.
Apparently based on real life characters at either the Three Fishes pub in Kingston or the band’s household at Stag Lane, it’s tempting to read the line: ‘So you came looking
for sweet romance/Did you find out what you were missing?’ as a dig at Mich Kent. The song piled allegory upon allegory until its eight-minute trek became not just tedious, but effectively
meaningless.
The numbing qualities of ‘Flatfoot Hotel’ were utilised to full effect on the night that Flip City played a private party at an expensive house in Purley in London. The partygoers
were a young, well-to-do media crew, merely looking for an excuse to dance and have fun. In other words, the kind of people that Declan instinctively mistrusted. In a typically single-minded
– or simply contrary – mood, he started the band off into the long trawl through ‘Flatfoot Hotel’. ‘It was always a set closer, but for some reason he wanted to start
the set with it, to shock the people who were all waiting to party,’ says Ken Smith. ‘I looked at people’s faces and I was worried about whether they were going to pay
us!’
Declan had no intention of being dismissed as another run-of-the-mill pub rocker, filling in time before promotion and a paunch set in. If the audience didn’t recognise his talents, then
he certainly wasn’t going to pander to them. ‘The attitude was already there,’ says Steve Hazelhurst. ‘It was like a stage persona, but it was more than that. The word
entertainment was anathema to him: “I’m not an entertainer. I’m not here to entertain people.” He used to go on and on that the whole world was full of apathy. He’d
say things like: “My ambition is to shake people out of their apathy. I want us to be so good that we scare people!”. I don’t think you could quite call it punk, but it was very
fortuitous the way it all came together.’
While the original Hope and Anchor tape was primarily an exercise in showcasing Declan’s talents as a songwriter, the band decided to reconvene on the fourth floorof
Dave Robinson’s Islington studio in the late spring of 1975 with humbler aims: to put down the staples of their live set in order to secure more gigs. This time there were no heavy musical
instruments that needed moving, so they paid the priapic Robinson something along the lines of ‘£20 and a bottle of port’. With new drummer Ian Powling in place, the tape was a
live, first-or-second-take bash through four MacManus originals and four covers.
They breezed through the original songs: ‘Exile’s Road’, ‘Sweet Revival’, a messy ‘Please Mister, Don’t Stop The Band’ and ‘Wreck On The
Slide’, before adding an energetic, call-and-response cover
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke