FEELS LIKE THE FURS TIME
In 1977, during the so-called Summer of hate, yet another refugee from a London art college got fed up with silk-screening “advertising crap” and resolved at last to do something about his long-suppressed compulsion to sing his own words in front of his own group.
FEELS LIKE THE FURS TIME
FEATURES
John Mendelssohn
In 1977, during the so-called Summer of hate, yet another refugee from a London art college got fed up with silk-screening “advertising crap” and resolved at last to do something about his long-suppressed compulsion to sing his own words in front of his own group. No longer would he let the fact that singing was quite beyond him—that the best he was capable of was pitched snarling—stay him from his dream, for “Dylan couldn’t sing, and Lou Reed couldn’t sing, and Bowie didn’t learn to sing properly until Station To Station.” He and his younger brother, who he persuaded to buy a bass guitar, recruited a couple of pals and spent a year and a half playing the Velvets’ “Sister Ray,” Iggy’s “Real Cool Time” and like two and three-chord classics in one another’s rooms, and then graduated to parties, where “everybody would immediately leave the room when we began to play.”