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| MACC LADS... INTERVIEW 1 - INTERVIEW 2 |
| DIRTY MACC BRIGADE
Real men? We're keeping our opinions to ourselves, but this slur on the town of Macclesfield are self-confessed planks. What's worse, Roger Holland argues. Steve Mitchell reaches for his shutter. "There were a load of bloody fairies/ In Buenos bloody Aires/ With greasy hair and sweaty bums/ They'd never heard of Boddington's/ lt were a different country and a different race/ No chippies in t'bloody place/ Yer can keep that puff Ardilles/ 'Cos we're gonna have yer Malvinas." ('Buenos Aires') DOES COSTA Mendes really live in fear of real men who can hold their beer? The Macc Lads believe so. But then these Macc Lads dwell in a curious, anachronistic land. Across a spry yet heavyweight collage of riffs purloined from T'Clash, T'Leyton Buzzards, T'Slade and others, they catalogue the finely detailed mythology of a town where a man is judged by his alcoholic consumption, his virility is directly proportional to the size of his beer belly and the number of his tattoos, and women rank just below toilets. A town called Macclesfield. And 'Beer & Sex & Chips 'N' Gravy', The Macc Lads' debut album, forms just about the definitive testament to the imbecility of a particular objectionable northern stereotype. It's as coarse an exercise in macho breast-beating and outrageous sexism as you could hope (?) to encounter. Or avoid. And has already been condemned as such by one paper. But surely it's a hilarious spoof? Eager to discover if these boys are the absolute pigs that they portray or a bunch of grammar school poofs living a finely-weighted larger than life piss-take, I met up with the T Macc Lads in a pub (where else?) in Victoria. Muttley McLad (bass, vocals and beer): "You're the bastard from Liverpool, aren't you? Well, we're woollybacks!" He made it sound a triumph, almost a threat. The Beater (guitar and sex): "And we're planks!" Over our first four pints I find room for very few words; for the Lads are bent upon abusing our capital city - "it's full of foreigners and bottom boys" — and homosexuals in general. At great length. Despite all this, as I study their eyes and detect the gleam of intelligence and mockery, I become quite sure that these Macc Lads are simply the biggest wind-up merchants I've ever met! What makes Macclesfield so very wonderful, then? Muttley: "It's the centre of the universe! There's more pubs per head of population in Macc than anywhere else in the country. And toads of them serve Boddington's!" The Beater: "And there's no fuckin' pooftahs. Stez Styx drove them all out!" Stez is the Macc drummer, currently sojourning in Strangeways. Two pints later (or was it three?) my legs are going, yet The Macc Lads have not let their guard drop one little bit. But Muttley and The Beater remind me so very strongly of a pair of especially smart yet always superficially dumb pranksters I knew at school that nothing they can do can persuade me they're really for real. When, in desperation, I change tack and accuse them of neither writing nor playing their own music, Muttley sees his chance and attempts to convince me that I'm right and that some mystery 'name' band lies behind their wall of offence. But a separate, reliable source from The Macc Lads' own schooldays had already confirmed that they are more than competent musicians. This for me defines The Macc Lads' lunatic charm. Their tongues are so far inside somebody's cheeks and their music is so powerfully outrageous that with a degree of real, nationwide exposure they could become bigger than the Sex Pistols. No, honestly. (SOUNDS MARCH 29TH 1986 - Don't Care Archives) The official MACC LADS site. A few scraps of evidence here... www.macclads.fsnet.co.uk/ Some updates: The Derita Sisters will be bringing out a Macc Lads tribute album later this year (2006). Plus if your ever feeling like having a pint of Boddingtons in Macclesfield's biggest tourist trap (Bears Head) since the Macc Lads made it infamous in the 80's. You won't find it no more at 85 Mill Street, Macclesfield, Cheshire, SK11 6NN. But what you will find there is the renamed Kusch bar (pictured right) which and has now become a victim of what all real pubs eventually succumb to...and thats a pooftahs bar! |
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