1) What was your personal connection to the Oi!/street punk scene in the early 80s?
Vice Squad were featured in the ‘Oi’ chart in the ‘Sounds’ music paper, but I classed us as a punk band.
I always called myself a punk or a punk rocker; I thought street punk and ‘Oi’ were just subgenres of punk.
I had skinhead friends, and Vice Squad played the Bridgehouse in East London, so I had connections with the Oi scene.
2) Would it be true to say that the early crowds for Vice Squad were a good mixture of punks and skins?
I was part of a group of Punks and Skinheads (and one Mod!); we went to gigs and did a lot of underage drinking together.
Most of these people came to our early gigs to support us.
The song ‘When You Were 17’ from our last album, ‘Battle of Britain’, is about the punks and skins I knew back then.
The skins seemed more keen on violence than the Punks, and fights would often break out at our gigs, but it was usually just a punch-up, nothing too serious. Just boys trying to fit in with what was deemed ‘Manly’.
Society seemed to find male violence acceptable, probably because the elites have used working-class men and boys as cannon fodder for centuries.
Sexism definitely damages men as well as women.
There was far more serious violence from ‘straight’ people, usually linked to football. I only went to football once; the fact that 4 or 5 men would attack one single man absolutely appalled me.
I practised martial arts from the age of 11, so I deemed that kind of behaviour to be dishonourable and cowardly.
3) Garry Bushell at Sounds was a big fan of Vice Squad. How important was he to give Vice Squad a broader recognition?
Garry Bushell got us noticed by reviewing our first single, which helped a lot. Our original drummer Shane, now sadly deceased, gave Garry a copy of ‘Last Rockers’, and luckily for us, he liked it and wrote about us in ’Sounds’.
4) When you joined Vice Squad you were 14, that was very young. What kind of experience was it to be in a punk band at this young age?
I was horribly naive and had no idea what I was getting into, but being so young, I had balls of steel and was able to sing in front of a crowd of gobbing teenagers and sing in a recording studio.
I was determined to be a singer and formed a band when I was at junior school; we played at the school Christmas party when I was 10.
My first gig with Vice Squad was at Bristol University supporting Crisis. I didn’t know that we were playing till I got there to see the other bands.
We were given the opportunity to record a track for a compilation album that night, and I was a hero at school the next day.
Every gig we played seemed like a hugely important event to me, especially when we got to support bands like the Damned and The Ruts.
Vice Squad released 2 albums by the time I was 18. If you look at the charts nowadays, it’s full of much older artistes, so times have changed.
5) How did it feel being a female singing for a punk band in a male-dominated scene?
I wouldn’t say that the scene was male-dominated; loads of girls went to gigs, and I had lots of female mates who were into punk.
There were more male than female role models in bands, which probably encouraged more boys to play guitar/drums/bass than girls.
I tried to sing for bands at school but usually had the microphone snatched off me.
There was a lot of misogyny and sexism, but it didn’t bother me that much back then because I was too young to know how damaging it was.
When Vice Squad played the Social Chaos Tour in the USA in 1999, I was the only woman on the tour, but we had all the girls in the audience at the front every night.
Those girls kicked ass; they pushed their way to the front of the stage and held their ground.
When you’re on stage with a Les Paul at your loins roaring through a PA rig, you don’t think about being a woman, man or anything in between. You just ride the wave.
It’s laughable that people still say backward sexist stuff, but women are still treated less respectfully. A few years ago we played a venue where the sound man made some sexist comment to me, and when we played, he couldn’t work the mixing desk properly and had uncontrollable feedback.
Interestingly I’ve never had to listen to sexist shite from a competent sound engineer, so I guess sexism, like all the other ‘isms’, is actually a manifestation of the offender’s sense of inadequacy.
6) Along with Crass you were one of the first musicians to stand up for animal rights, how did this come about?
I’d always loved animals and was horrified when I learnt about factory farming, vivisection, slaughterhouses, blood ‘sports’ and fur farming.
It was natural to express my anger by writing lyrics about it.
‘Humane’ was one of the first animal rights songs ever written.
We re-recorded it a few years ago in order to raise money for animals in Ukraine; people were very generous.
7) What was your best and what was your worst experience with Vice Squad in the first phase of your career?
Touring the USA for the first time as a teenager was pretty cool, being spat at, going without food because everything had meat in it and sleeping in a freezing cold PA truck covered in gob while suffering from a viral infection was pretty bad.
8) When you left Vice Squad after the second album, you eventually formed Ligotage and then Beki And The Bombshells. What can you tell me about these bands? They were more hard rock, weren’t they?
Ligotage was a punk/glam band. I’d moved to London by this time, and the punk scene was mutating; everyone had more hair, and punk males started wearing make-up and copying Johnny Thunders.
The ‘Crime and Passion’ EP Ligotage did was pretty good, but overall Ligotage was an example of how NOT to run a band. It ended very badly for me because I was left with the band’s debt; Igor the manager ran away and left me to the mercies of the VAT man, the Inland Revenue and the bank manager.
Vice Squad had been set up as a partnership, which made all of us jointly and severally liable, I was being chased for their debts too!
I ended up ill and broke in a basement flat in Bayswater (London) that was deemed unfit for human habitation by Environmental Health officers.
I had to sell off the equipment and flight cases to pay some of the debt. It was a very hard lesson about human nature; nearly all of my ‘friends’ disappeared when I lost my record deal, and I was forced to grow up very quickly. Most people would have gone back to their parents with their tails between their legs, but I decided to carry on.
I have a few good Rock and Roll excess stories from the Ligotage days, like when the band flooded the gent’s toilet at the very expensive London recording studio ‘Sarm West’ and we spilt wine all over the SSL mixing desk at the equally pricey ‘Maison Rouge’ studio. Our debut gig at the Marquee saw us play to a sold-out house with various rock stars in attendance but ended in a big punch-up where our A&R man got a black eye. He complained about it for weeks and got even more pissed off with us when the band started booking cabs all over London in his name and sticking the fares on EMI’s bill. We spent a week at a residential recording studio in Chipping Norton, where we recorded half a single but spent most of our time in the pub and playing pranks on each other.
After Ligotage disbanded, I had to reinvent myself as a rock singer to earn a living. There was no way I was going to do anything other than music, and as a tattooed, pink-haired person, I wasn’t employee material, so I couldn’t have done anything else even if I’d wanted to. I knew I had a voice inside me, and I used it to get gigs and earn a small crust playing the ’Toilet Circuit’ in the UK. If you can play to a room full of pissed-up hecklers, you can play anywhere.
I started again right at the bottom, playing on Monday nights for whatever money was put in the ‘jug’ by the audience; not easy when you have four other people to pay and have chronic asthma, which is exacerbated by smoke – this was long before the smoking ban.
We had a very knackered old transit van called ‘Bertha’ and a little 8-track studio, and we were entirely DIY.
I must have paid my dues a thousand times over.
It was very hard, but we had some laughs, which included attempting to make a video in a scrapyard, dancing on piles of crushed cars, waving exhaust systems at the camera.
We’d often find ourselves desperately trying to find yet another new band member when one of them inevitably quit because it was just too hard and too low paid. I struggled on with chronic asthma, trying to hold the notes on a punishing set 3 nights a week in smoke-filled pubs. I never quit in spite of being regularly plunged into despair by sheer frustration and lack of money and power.
It enabled me to build a voice and keep gigging and writing songs and taught me how to run a band.
Garry Bushell called the Bombshells ‘the hardest working band in Britain’.
9) For a time you were managed by Janus Music from Germany, how did that work out?
It didn’t work out because I had a pathological fear of signing contracts after all the dodgy agreements I signed underage with no legal advice in Vice Squad.
When I left Vice Squad, I was threatened in all sorts of ways; the managers were happy for me to leave the band but not happy about me leaving them, so they threatened to sue me.
One of them caused trouble between my then-boyfriend and me; it got so bad that I had to leave because the boyfriend started to be violent towards our pets.
The manager said that he’d ‘stitch me’, and he sure delivered on that promise.
I was a young girl struggling to survive on my own in London, and it was very scary and depressing.
Unfortunately, it made me very wary of signing contracts. In the end, I set up my own label, ‘Last Rockers Records’, and we’ve been releasing our albums and singles on the label since 2009.
10) When did you decide to reform Vice Squad?
1996/1997 There were a few punks that used to come to Bombshells gigs, and they convinced me to play the old Vice Squad songs.
I’d started playing guitar and writing tunes; before this, I just wrote the vocal melodies and lyrics.
We were asked to play a one-off gig at ‘Holidays in the Sun’ festival.
At the time we had a broken-down transit van that needed a lot of repairs. We used the van to get to gigs, and if we didn’t gig, I didn’t eat, so I said yes to the ‘Holidays’ gig, as the fee they offered was enough to repair the van.
I’d been writing songs and sent the demo to PHD/Rhythm Vicar, who offered us a licensing deal, so we released ‘Get A Life’.
After ‘Holidays’, we were invited to play a gig in Ljubjana which was brilliant, the audience was fantastic, and for me, they represented the true spirit of punk, so we decided to tour Europe. After that, we played the Social Chaos tour in the USA in 1999, and we’ve been touring and releasing albums ever since.
11) Nowadays Vice Squad are up and running again. You are releasing new studio albums on a regular basis and you are playing live? How does it feel being still active musically after all these years?
We’re releasing a new album through Cargo distribution on 18th July called ‘Punk Rockers – The Best Of Vice Squad’.
It feels perfectly natural to be creating music; I wanted to be a singer and write songs since I was a little kid.
Voices improve with age, and punk is more relevant today than it’s ever been.