Who do you think you are kidding Mr Cobain? Youth was never all it cracked up to be and most bands whine incessantly about the lies told to them by advertisers whilst simultaneously peddling the same lies to an even younger audience. Spectrum Middle Age Non-Violent Direct Action sought to tell you a new story. A story about how being older was also not going to be as good as the television says, either.
SMANVDA was borne from the dialectic between fathers and sons in late capitalism. Allec Callender, Ben Parkinson, Lionel Hardcastle and Clive Quigley all had sons who attended St Humperdinck's grant maintained sixth form college in Boston, Lancs. Their boys, whilst a good sort at heart, did not appear overly interested in rugby; neither the league or congressional version of the game could wet their whistle. Oh how their father's lamented. The boys did seem eager to pursue a career in professional musicmaking and their father's were happy to buy them whatever they desired to keep them from mentioning their indiscretions to their mothers. Both the mothers of the sons and the mothers of the fathers.
The band the young fellows created was -to their father's eyes at least- dangerously subversive. They advocated all sorts of filthy, seedy things; including liberation theology and non-literal metousiosis. To their staunch protestant fathers even this left-wing and wimpy version of Catholicism was enough to boil their blood. The fathers were so happy when the boys ended up in different Oxford Colleges. The buoys became unable to see each other without a minder from their own college to check they were not passing on official secrets to each other. And so were not able to practice without 4 3rd year snots their to oversee their meetings. As it happened, they were the only 4 people to turn up to their gigs.
The boys quickly gave up the music and took to learning more about the inside of SIS and Toilette and Douche from the ever-so-interesting shoulder tappers who would come by every rainy Wednesday afternoon.
Their father's, now bequeathed instruments their sons no longer required. These instruments were, in their eyes, smothered with the sin of believing in something approaching Christian Socialism, so they had little other option than starting their own band. Parkinson took on viola, Quigley beat the traps, Hardcastle sang in a rich baritone and Callendar made the tea (Herefordshire tea if they were feeling rich, Woolworth's own brand if they felt asset rich but cash poor) and provided management services such as accountancy and happy endings.
To say their first record smelled would be like saying there are many types of cheese. It would be correct but it wouldn't really explain very much at all. The album was filled with good clean fun and ruminations on the leader section of the Telegraph. One of the tracks. "I see Sergeant Major Billy Rickingtons has died" was recorded more as a prank by their sound engineer than anything else. It still went on to sell 6 million copies. But why? The short answer is that it was backed with a cleaned up cover of a Zeilinople track, which they had called "Duck Everything."
The crowds went wild. The gimmick in place, the men took to pretending it was what they wanted all along. Quigley argued that "Too many good songs have got bad words in," and they searched to make a whole album as quickly as possible. So quickly indeed, that some people suspect that the band were happily listening to music with bad words in all along. Quigley explained the song writing process as "Changing all the F words to Duck, all the C words to Shunt and for all the S words we simply said hit." The album "Ducking the Suburbs" sold out all over the world, the young and trendy listeners using the words duck, shunt and hit to say what they would have already said. Though the album is not a classic, SMANVDA had learned a valuable lesson about semantics.
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