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| BRIGANDAGE The art of stealing. To rob. To plunder... |
| Brigandage #1 (1982) Michelle Brigandage - vocals, Mick Fox - guitarist Ben - drums Scott - bass Brigandage #2 (1984) Michelle Brigandage - vocals, chainsaw guitar Richard North - bass guitar, vocals Glen - guitars Des - drums, percussion |
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| BRIGANDAGE Lead singer of this early 80's gang of Punk plunderers was a 23 year old called Michelle. She had the dubious honour of being first in the queue of the infamous 100 Club Punk festival back in 1976, when she was just 16 years old! Brigandage started life in 1982 as 'the next Sex Pistols', and were thrown into the short lived 'Positive Punk' scene that her boyfriend Richard North a freelance writer/member of Blood And Roses, accidentally created in a New Musical Express piece in '83. Positive Punk was the blur between hardcore punk and the new up and coming Goff scene. Meanwhile the band had only mediocre success around London in the early 80's promising a lot but rarely gaining critical aclaim. They soon split up. Michelle was also a member of that theatrical Punk school of Thespians the 'Wet Paint Theatre Company', which seen many a punkette from 80's scene in their ranks. She also designed her own clothes. Brigandage made a second attempt in 1984 at the big time re-inventing themselves in a pseudo Velvet Underground style, but they were finally thrown into the brig for bad behaviour. Michelle left the music scene as the 80's drew to a close and got married and aquired a BA Honors in English? |
| Brigandage Discography: Recorded most of their output at Globe studios.They released their debut F.Y.M. (Furg Ya Mudder') album on their own Fuck Off Records (cassette-only label). Their only vinyl release was the mini album 'Pretty Funny Thing' released in November 1986, which was largely funded by clinical research trials at Charterhouse Clinical Research Unit!...(yeah me neither? -Dont Care) |
| BRIGANDAGE 'FYM' (FO1001 -Cassette only) *** "THIS IS real life." Capturing the impetuous Brigandage excitement for indoor consumption could have been a tricky business, but this works. Cutting no corners (thirteen songs), it grabs their current live set, rounds up the past/present with ragged edges intact, and when it really explodes - 'Art Of Stealing', 'London Bridge', 'Let It Rot', 'Wasteland' - is quite ecstatic. Brigandage are about being a human being (against the odds), ripping it up, stretching out, writing a song called 'Motherfucker' (hence the tape name, 'Furg Ya Mudder') which is a deal more perceptive than its title might suggest. They're probably also about punk, though they'd like to term it 'Rot & Roll'. Alternating anger and forceful hope with tenderness, 'Fragile' soars wilfully on a wash of guitar, slips confidently away from the Pistols influence, and is gorgeous. Brigandage, finally, are about honesty, adventure, untamed youth, a fine singer named Michelle and a band still learning and thus several times more inspiring than anyone who might know it all. (Available from FO Reckords, 97 Caledonian Road, London N1 for £2.75 inc P&P.) ROBIN GIBSON (SOUNDS) |
| BRIGANDAGE 'Pretty Funny Thing' (Gung Ho Records GHLPI) ****1/2 THERE once was a joyride called punk. And when it ground to a halt at the end of 1981, all those who had held desperately onto its handrails with a passion and a world-changing spirit in their hearts were left in the haunted house of positive punk. This later developed into goth rock and the heavy metal renaissance had arrived. Brigandage, who were wrongly placed in the same car as Southern Death Cult and Sex Gang Children, have stood still in comparison with these bands. They still like to wash their reckless souls in the old punk spirit. But their dreams, I'm afraid, will always remain dreams as the staggering punk rock mayhem of yesteryear doesn't stand up so well in the mid-'80s. 'Pretty Funny Thing' is dated. It sounds like it was made in '76. Deep pummelling bass lines slide up and down the fretboard, vintage new wave guitars burn with self-liberating ferocity and a phoenix of pogoing fun jumps up and down on the fires of apathy. Ripped and torn, bruised and abused, Brigandage have returned with an album steeped in old traditions, burning with punky ebullience and dancing with a devil-may-care attitude. In this day and age, that is a pretty funny thing. RON ROM (SOUNDS NOVEMBER 1986) |
| BRIG IT ON! BRIGANDAGE Woolwich Thames Polytechnic, London BRIGANDAGE. The Art Of Stealing. Let's take a power chord here, some Pauline Murray-ish vocals there, mix in melodic bass and pounding hollow drums, a sliver of spirit, a wee dram of amphetamine, a slice of '80's optimism, an ageing music journalist, a dash of verve, throw it all up in the air several times, shake it round a little, and see what we can come up with. 'Positive punk' -oh yes, we remember that, now don't we? An ideal for living which turned sour in the bright light of day and ended in a flurry of confusion and bitterness. But, out of every cloud,we find. . . Brigandage, the silver lining. Darting here and there, pointing the finger at various members of the heaving mass down t' front, Michelle stops, smiles and bounds off once more to scream passionately down her microphone. The guitarist, Pete Townshend for a night, looks on in happy bemusement and trades a few more insults with his mates in the audience. Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, the bassist and drummer look as if they're desperately trying to blend into the wallpaper, all the while keeping that rhythm rock steady. The brash smouldering sound of four zealots reared on 77 punk pistols and desperately attempting to hammer its shape into a form vital for today's young prole. The noise builds and builds, a legacy to the all-but-forgotten sound of yesteryear. Unnerving, spasmodic, exhilirating, proud. "Burn it down!" they cry. "And replace it with what?" I question, cautiously. "With f/i/s! Rot'n'rollM" comes the gleeful reply as they dance on the r'n'r corpse. Wild! The Legend! (NME Mid 80's) |
| ON RECORD |
| LIVE! |
| THE INTERVIEW |
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| Brigandage drummer, Ben: "To begin with, everybody was so optimistic anyway, the audience became the band as well, and for a while you couldn't really tell the difference because everyone was so obscure. Nowadays everyone's pessimistic, you've got to give them some optimism, and you can give it in lots of different ways." Optimism the Brigandage way comes in the form of a most exhilarating heroic urban guerilla rock 'n' roll; a blood-pumping, sharp but boldly raw musical savagery - just like the old days... It's funny, but a lot of young people are going to hear you and they won't think of you as a punk band at all, but as a rock band. Guitarist, Mick: "Why should they think that?" Simply because of the way punk sounds nowadays. Ben: ".. .And by comparing it to us, yeah. But it's because of all these psuedo-Oi bands and things like that, they've re-defined it for themselves. All this stuff about punk being a working class culture, it's classless!" Mick: "They're concentrating on looking violent rather than sounding good, which is stupid." It was around last August that Brigandage sprang suddenly, and apparently from nowhere (in fact they'd all been members of other bands, Michelle at one time even having her voice featured on a long-lost mystery single) into the limelight, and the slowly over-flowing punk arena. Their first gig was a Nottingham appearance, followed two months later by a London date with the Sex Gang Children. BUT BEFORE this, while still trying to form a band, Michelle and Ben had placed advertisements in the music press in their search for the ideal guitarist... Michelle: "It took about a year to get Mick. We'd go up to people that looked reasonable at gigs, looked decent, like punks as we see .punks should be. ._. " Michelle: "I mean to us it's really important, we didn't want people with crops and boots, and we didn't want the Oi brigade, and to us, we can tell ... I mean you go up to people who look like they're going to be alright, and of course they can turn out to be wankers, but we had to have some sort of basis to go around asking people. But we didn't meet anyone, so in the end we put in an advert, and I think it was months before Mick came down, plugged in, and we thought, here's the boy for us!" With a majestic rock sound that's, to put it bluntly, a blatantly but lovingly created composite of, amongst others, Banshee, Penetration, and most overwhelmingly. Pistols parts, aren't Brigandage asking for trouble? The name itself (Ben: "To me it's got a certain amount of McLaren type attitude in it"), with wonderful defiance, says it all... Brigandage: The art of stealing. To rob. To plunder... What would these seditious, Seditionaries-togged bandits' reply be to those brave enough to suggest that this is just regression, pure and simple? Michelle: "Well, the thing is we're not going back, I mean we don't rip them off; Everyone says - Ho! Pistols rip-off! But it's something that's in your sub-conscious. If you listen to the Pistols every day for six or seven years then of course it's in your spirit, I mean ... We're going back to when they had tunes, and maybe we can step forward from there." Mick: "There's so many bands going around and they've read in the paper. Oh, punks can't play, and they think, Aha, we can't play - let's form a band! "Every group sounds the same these days; I mean if people like it it's up to them, but they haven't got the choice any more, and we want to give them that choice." And not only that, but as these young outlaws are pillaging from bands, and a musical period, that was/were/is the finest of them all; and while they continue to build upon those classic sounds, improving on, and (very occasionally) even surpassing the old guard, then well, why the hell not? Brigandage. I don't care. even if maybe you are regressing, just a little bit. Michelle: "Good. But Winston, it's funny, we've noticed it depends what bands people like right? If people like the Pistols they say. Wow! You sound just like the Pistols! But we've played gigs, and people who like the Banshees have said - You really sound like the Banshees." Ben: "Obviously we'll end up with our own sound, but we regard the Pistols as the punk band." Michelle: "We don't care. I'm not ashamed to say it, to me they were only punk band." Mick: "... To get good results, if you delve deeply |- into any subject, you've got js to go back to the roots." HOW MUCH relationship then, do you see yourselves having with the Punk Scene '83? Ben: "Well, in a sense we see ourselves not necessarily outside the scene, but as an alternative within it, and there don't seem to be that many alternatives at the moment, and unfortunately you can seem to categorise the scene fairly straightforwardly. .." Michelle: "Yeah, into little sections, like there's the Sex Gang brigade, and we've been lumped in with all them, which is funny really, because, I mean we don't mind, it's just that we're not like them at all, I mean they're much more doom 'n' gloom, and we're more rock 'n' roll; rot 'n' roll is our phrase..." A versatile bunch. Brigandage's talents aren't restricted to music, they also design their own clothes. Mick's opening a night-club, and Michelle's joined the Wet Paint Theatre Company. "See, the thing is," she enthuses, "we see Brigandage as ... we can't change, we're not into the musical revolution, we want people to be uplifted. "It's more than music. I mean musically, yeah, we hope the tunes we come up with are going to be uplifting, and also what we sing about, to make people think. "We can't say - You've got to do this, or you've got to do that; I mean Crass and bands like them can sing about real solutions because they've got more knowledge, they're a lot older for a start, I mean, we're still learning..." Ben: "We don't necessarily offer a solution or anything, we're just telling people there is an alternative to singing about nuclear war and depression." Michelle: "We don't want to sing about the droll life, we want to sing about life as it could be; I mean if the bomb goes off it goes off, we all die, but if you're going to die, then you might as well try the best you can 'to make the life you live as meaningful and productive as is possible for you." Hmm. So what lies in store for Mick, Ben, Michelle and silent, tenuously 'temporary' bassist Scott? Any record deals lined up? Mick: "Well, I don't think we're really big enough, our audience isn't there to buy our records, and we've got to persuade them by being brilliant, we've got to have our audience there. .. " Micthelle: "... I'm 23 now, and when I was about 18 I used to be a real anarchist right? But when you look back there's something wrong, people don't care, and when you get to 23 you see nothing but betrayals behind you, and I don't see much ahead of me either, whereas the younger people have still got a lot of idealism in them. "I mean, half of me is really cynical, and says, like, let's nuke the world, because they don't deserve to live, I wake up thinking God, why do we bother to try? Sod 'em, they don't care. And then the other half goes no, let's try again." Ben: "See, basically, we want to also bring back some kind of spontaneity and excitement with the live experience, because speaking as individuals, we haven't been to very many exciting gigs for a long time you see, and my main intention to start with is to hopefully make gigs more exciting, or our gigs more exciting anyway." GO ON, you've got another five seconds, say something outrageous. "... You can't change society, and you certainly can't destroy it and start again, which was McLaren's attitude; but our attitude is modified in that we can establish our own society within the current one, and steal from the main society for our own ends." Go on, again. "... The late '70's, to me, was the first time since the '60's that people, and society in general, got worried about people below the age of twenty, and hopefully, that's what we're trying to do again." Don't look over your shoulder. . . SOUNDS FEBRUARY 19TH 1983 Michelle from Brigandage has launched the bands official website which is well worth investigating and you can hear the band for yourself so go here... www.brigandage.com |
| THIEVES IN THE NIGHT Winston Smith meets Brigandage TURN TO page thirty-four of Caroline Coon's 1988 - The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, and there you will find Michelle, singer with Brigandage, at the head of the queue for the 100 Club punk rock festival. The excited smile on her face seems to say maybe, just maybe, history shall be made tonight... "Life is too grey," she explains a heady six-and-a-half years later," and that's why I think Rubella Ballet are good, because they go out in bright clothes and ... they're into bright things; they understand the importance of going out and being bright, hopeful and proud." |
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