Where shall we start? A sub-teenage premonition. At the age of three years old Davy Henderson occasionally found himself wide eyed in Pete Seatons, a music shop in his home town of Edinburgh near his gran’s house, a place full of "rainbow maracas, drum kits, auxiliary percussion". He came to believe that this was where his parents had bought him…
Or…
“We were playing with Orange Juice at the art college, this was when I was in the Dirty Reds, pre Fire Engines, my friend John came into the dressing room and gave me a red, Jaguar shaped Framus guitar with a white pearl scratch plate, which belonged to Orange Juice. I still can’t play the guitar. As long as it looks good holding it that’s all that matters.”
“The newness. The new-osity…”
The marvellous moment when you hear some piece of pop music for the first time and the mystery and charm and surprise is enthralling, slipping into the engine of the soul and super-charging it is a rare and glorious thing. For me, it happened one time when a friend played a taped cassette of a John Peel show in the dilapidated kitchen of my flat in Dalston in the very early 1980s and the Fire Engines popped out among the grey wash of punk and weirdness, a rainbow-painted rabbit in a muddy field.
To celebrate the release of a ‘definitive’ compilation of Fire Engine’s slim recordings, I interviewed Davy Henderson, one of Edinburgh’s few rock stars and the person who has long fronted the group, in the amphetamine gasp of their first iteration and subsequently in several temporary revivals.
What is Fire Engines? As the UK became a picknmix nostalgia shop of reinvigorated musical styles and genres, from psychedelic to Ska, concurrently there was a need for a new mutation, that grew from the crash of untutored punk rock into the factory of pop, disco, soul, funk and new music technology that created the real mass soundtracks of the end of the 1970s. This eventually grew into its own massively successful pop music in the 1980s but, initially, what became known as Post-Punk was just a joyous celebration of experimenting for its own sake, allowing several decades of pop to filter through the very self-aware, accidentally informed senses of young people thrilled by noise and the shapes and colours of of guitars.
Before punk there were older sisters and brothers and their record collections.
Davy Henderson: I was really into music from early on because my siblings were much older than me. So I had all that music, as you can imagine. I had Johnny and the Hurricanes, my sister was into Motown, Reflections by Diana Ross was never off the radiogram, and my closest brother, he got (Bowie’s) Hunky Dory when it came out, so I was turned on to that and he was into The Beatles, Top of the Pops, Colour Me Pop (TV show BBC2). I was exposed to a lot of things because my closest sibling was a teenager at the time.
Staying up late with my big brother and watching Sunday night film on BBC2… Zabriskie Point, Easy Rider, because he knew what was going on… King Crimson records, he was into Zappa - I was scared by Captain Beefheart singing Willie The Pimp because we shared a bedroom.
I got massively into Bowie, T Rex, Roxy (Music). For Your Pleasure (Roxy album).
OL: The sexiest record sleeve ever!
DH: (Missing the point, or perhaps not) The inside is just so good. I always wanted to have the Phil Manzanera, red Firebird… (Epiphone guitar).
The housing scheme that I came from, literally, our next door neighbour was in a band that was managed by Tam Paton (notorious manager of the Bay City Rollers). And nearby the Bay City Rollers had a house near where Rusty (Russell Burn, Fire Engines drummer) lived. Tam Paton used to come up and visit Brian, our next door neighbour… when the Rollers were absolutely massive, he had a crazy big American car he used to park in our street, and the kids used to take the piss out of him, they used to genuflect, and he used to give us the fucking Vs, and tell us to F off.
This band, called Bilbo Baggins, they were on things like Lift Off With Asher and The Geordie Scene (TV). And, I’d love to get this verified, but in my mind, they were meant to be on Top of the Pops (a career-making moment for most artists) and that week there was an electrician’s strike (so) that week Top of the Pops was cancelled. The idea that your actual next door neighbours… were on television was, like, far out!”
OL: Did that make it seem viable (being a pop star)?
DH: No, it didn’t, because I always thought the barrier was learning an instrument. I remember my neighbours across the road, the Taylor brothers, getting Kay guitars from Woollies (Woolworths) with amps (and I said) ‘give us a shot’ and it being verified, once again, that your left hand wasn’t just there to hold the neck… massive disappointment.
You know what it was like back then? It still seemed unattainable, you couldn’t (just) think about posing in front of a mirror with a tennis racket, and getting really good at it, right?
“they opened the door and said, come in”
OL: Then there was the White Riot tour, the Clash came to Edinburgh and everything changed…
DH: The Slits were on first. That was just mind-blowingly wow! Like nothing else. If you hear The Slits, even now, they still sound like, where did that come from? It is without precedent. Then, of course, Subway Sect, they were like from another planet. It was the newness, the absolute new-osity of everything, like, when you open up a new record and it smells of whatever chemicals were used in that process of making plastic, it was like that. It was just there.
Then the Buzzcocks came on and they were just, not like each other. So perverse. It wasn’t about technique or recognising some kind of lack of technique, that didn’t come into it at all, it was just, sort of… new.
The thing that was really different, pre-punk, they (rock stars) were seen as divinities, almost. I don’t know if they were comfortable being seen like that or if it was projected on to them by the audience, they were on stage, under the lights and they had roadies and you’d paid ticket money to see them but the accessibility of bands after that… the next time Buzzcocks played in Edinburgh, I was home early from work, getting ready to meet my pals, my mum said, ‘Davy, that’s the phone’ …’hi, it’s Pete here’ (very good imitation!) - it’s Pete Shelley phoning me up! On a Friday afternoon. ‘Is that Davy? You coming to the gig tonight?’ and we had a wee conversation. He said, say hi afterwards.
I went in to the (pub) and my pals were in there (laughing) ‘did Pete call ye?’ and they’d bumped into Pete Shelley in town and gave him my phone number and he’d actually fucking called!
Then after the gig, we started hassling him for the lyrics to Breakdown from the Spiral Scratch EP and he wrote them out on A4 paper. I wish I still had them. There was that kind of accessibility. They were completely different from what had gone before. Not just Buzzcocks, the Clash were like that too. The Voidoids, at the same venue, we were hanging outside their dressing room and they opened the door and said, come in. They were 30 year-old guys getting absolutely stoned. Richard Hell went out to get something from his car and I said, ‘can I chum ye?’ In a carpark outside Cloudz in Edinburgh we swapped T shirts. The red T shirt that Richard had on for Blank Generation, he gave it to me. I’ve got a picture with a tiny fragment of me wearing it. It was a completely different scene, you know?
OL: Before White Riot, were you playing in bands at all?
DH: Murray (Slade, Fire Engines’ guitarist) had an Antoria Les Paul copy. The physicality, the cosmetic, the look, the Cadillac vibe of amplifiers, the glamour was mind-blowing. In my studio, I’ve got an amazing drum kit that Rusty (Russell Burn) gave me. It’s pink, like Jerry Nolan’s, from the (New York) Dolls. It’s fucking beautiful. I sit and look at it, just as an object and think, wow!
I was in a band called the Warm Jets with Angus Groovy and Hilary Morrison. They eventually started a band called The Flowers. Her and her boyfriend ran Fast Product from her boyfriend’s flat. We met up after the Sex Pistols did a signing in Virgin Records. Just before then I met Angus at a Generation X gig. The council pulled the plug and the promoters bussed everyone out to a place called Carlops, in the Borders. It was super busy. Because the Sex Pistols at that time were going around under an assumed name, I’m sure you recall, and the support was Johnny and the Self Abusers. And everyone said, fucking hell (it’s the Sex Pistols!)! But it was (just) the future Simple Minds.
OL: What kind of music was Warm jets?
DH: We were just going to plug in and find out. The amplifier I plugged into was like something from a secondary school science lab, it melted the lead. That was the only rehearsal of the Warm jets. Subsequently Angus and I started a band called The Talkovers and we never rehearsed. The singer from The Scars played drums with us. We used to make up songs on the way to whatever slot we had wormed our way into. One of the songs was called ‘That Girl’s Wearing Harmony Hairspray’. We wanted to be in a band. We didn’t know how to rehearse, didn’t know how to play. But we wanted to be in a band that made a noise, live, in front of an audience. The point was actually doing it. It probably seemed like too much work to actually do something in the conventional manner.
We were hanging out in the Fast Product flat. We were used as a kind of of focus group. There was a gang of folk who would just hang at the weekend. Bob and Hilary (would ask) ‘there’s this band from Sheffield they haven’t got a name yet, there’s three options, Human league…’ The idea that someone we knew was actually putting a record out from their flat… it still had that wow factor, how did they do it? It was so mysterious.
Friends in bands, like The Scars for instance, really good pals at that point and they were fucking brilliant, rehearsing and coming up with new songs on a regular basis, and they were your pals, you know? Like, blowing your mind.
OL: At that time, people were still going to see bands like Camel or Peter Frampton. Was there a sudden and complete separation?
DH: It was absolutely separated off completely. It was a year zero moment. I’ve still got a list of 30-odd albums I had, I sold a lot of them to go down to the Anti-Nazi carnival in 1978. I paid for Russell, which was twelve quid on the coach, which he still hasn’t paid me back.
I no longer listened to stuff that was pre-77.
“Funk, with a very very very small ‘f’”
OL: The Fire Engines. Was there a manifesto?
DH: Just, no barre chords. We wanted to be The Famous Flames. We shared a flat. James Brown - Live At The Apollo. That was one of the records that was never off.
OL: Did you ever see James brown?
DH: Yeh, I did, I saw him play the Hammersmith Odeon, absolutely brilliant, super showbiz, it was still full on and he could do the moves. Totally one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. It was a fabulous show and he was… Mister Dynamite!
But, also, we knew we weren’t capable of anything like that, whatsoever. But that kind of James White and the Blacks stuff, James Chance, that’s a sort of Famous Flames that we could (emulate?)… not realising that his group were really brilliant players, as well.
OL: Did you have an urge to get people on the dance floor?
DH: We weren’t averse to that. You’d have to move fast. Depending on what mood Rusty was in, the adrenaline live from the drum kit alone was unbelievable. It was infused by Rusty’s lusty biology.
OL: Would you have used the word ‘funk’?
DH: I don’t now if we were funky enough to use the word ‘funky’. Although we loved Bootsy, and Funkadelic, one of my all time favourite bands. I wouldn’t have been averse to saying the word ‘funk’ but it would be with a very, very, very small ‘f’.
OL: Would you have seen yourselves as part of the new pop, DIY entrepreneurial spirit that began to appear at the end of the 1970s? Not just music, but making records, posters, graphics, fanzines etc.
DH: We all lived together, came from the same housing scheme, we started living together, absorbing as much music as possible, a saturated experience. We were all just reacting to the fact that, things were pretty restricted. That, sort of, glamour that was desirable, the posters on your bedroom walls, whatever was on the TV set and whatever was on your hifi. It was to be absorbed. To be living, that was as important as being in a band.
We stayed up all night, taking acid. At first light, coming out and having a game of football, at half-five and looking at buses of people going to work and saying, why are they going to work? Why aren’t they here?
Punk rock did make that sort of life possible, as well as the music aspect. It was like being in a dayglo, mohair jumper. Permanent, saturated contrast colour. It was so fucking exciting.
The definitive aspect of the Fire Engines was probably just the first single that we put out ourselves. Prior to that we didn’t even know if we wanted to make a record, we thought it would be cool, pretty good not to make a record, just play live. As opposed to forty tracks (referring to the new release)…
I think it’s unnecessary. But I don’t mind. As long as I get to say it’s unnecessary, it’s cool.
Essential Information
Main image Davy Henderson by Kevin Low
Fire Engines 'BOLD' image by Hilary Morisson
It's Fire Engines Week
It's Fire Engines Week in Outsideleft
Getting to Know the Fire Engines
A Dayglo Mohair Jumper - An interview with Davy Henderson
Everything Happens So Fast
Cheekbones and Speed
chrome dawns