NOISE#14: The Death of a Nosebleed
Thoughts and recollections sparked by the death of Edweena Banger
Just after midnight on January 24th, I started to receive texts and emails conveying what I blithely assumed would be birthday greetings. To be fair, a couple of them were … but the others were to let me know that Eddie Garrity, aka Ed Banger and more latterly Edweena Banger, had died.
I should say from the off that we hadn’t seen each other in decades. We knew each other from those early, exciting, pioneering days of punk in our native Manchester in the late 1970s, when we moved together in that small circle of like-minded young men out to give the music business a solid kick up the arse … but whereas I’ve remained close friends with quite a few of our peers, Eddie and I had drifted out of each other’s orbits, even before I’d moved to America in the late 1980s. We still exchanged occasional notes and messages on Facebook, but we weren’t really in any meaningful contact. So although I knew that somewhere along the line, the lunatic Eddie I knew from those heady days of punk had morphed into Edweena, that was about the sum total of my insight from the other side of the world.
The thing about death, though, is that it jogs the memory, and so for the last few days, I’ve found myself thinking about Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds.
They were still called Wild Ram when I first met them. Rob Gretton introduced me to this group of budding young musicians in the vault of my local Wythenshawe watering hole, The Lantern. I definitely remember meeting Toby, the band’s drummer, and bassist Pete Crookes there, and their manager, Vini Faal. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, my friend Rob had latched onto Slaughter and The Dogs, one of the first Manchester bands to embrace punk, and he had brought me into the fold to create a logo, and badge and poster art for the group.
In any event, by the time Rob and Vini Faal started to jointly promote punk concerts at The Oaks in Chorlton in early 1977, Wild Ram had become The Nosebleeds and the band was slipstreaming Slaughter and The Dogs, playing their support slots and generally looking to follow in the path that The Dogs were forging. By now, I was friendly with both bands and many of their shared entourages. In fact, I met my one of my closest pals, Donald Johnson, at a gig the two bands played at The Oaks, where he had tagged along with The Nosebleeds. This was a couple of years before he joined A Certain Ratio and started to carve out a music career of his own.
The same night I met Donald, I was chatting to Vini as he was policing the door and keeping his eye on the cash, when he turned away two guys who insisted that they should be on Slaughter’s guest list. The pair were Tosh Ryan and Lawrence Beedle, who had just formed Rabid Records and were about to release “Cranked Up Really High,” the debut single by Slaughter and The Dogs.
It’s funny how quickly things move and change in life. That night, Vini had no idea who he was rebuffing. Within a few weeks, Rabid would also release the Nosebleeds’ debut single, and Vini, his brothers, and most of The Nosebleeds would be working for Tosh Ryan’s flyposting business.
As I had designed the sleeve for “Cranked Up Really High,” was designing flyers and posters for the shows at The Oaks, and was now friendly with most of the people associated with The Nosebleeds, I was asked to design the sleeve for “Ain’t Bin To No Music School.”
They were recording the single at Countdown, a 16-track studio in what is now known as The Northern Quarter in Manchester … but in those days was probably just referred to as being round the corner from all the pet stores and porno shops on Tib Street … and I was invited along to the session.
The studio boss was Clem Lee, a veteran drummer in the Manchester area. I say veteran as he would have been 32 or 33 at the time, which to the teenage Nosebleeds would have seemed positively decrepit.
It was my first time in a real recording studio and I was intrigued to see how it all worked. Vini Faal is credited with being the single’s producer but I was fascinated watching Clem operate. Not only did he engineer the session and “drive the desk,” it was Clem’s idea to add the orchestral prelude that starts the track, sampling a classical music piece from a royalty-free library he had in the studio.
More importantly, Clem got Eddie to change the lyrics on the chorus, which were originally “I think you’re shit, I think you’re shit, I think you’re shit!” Very apropos of the prevailing punk attitude to actual musicians in 1977. Clem said that although it might well bolster bona-fides within the gobbing and pogoing community, he was guessing that it meant the track would never get any radio airplay. Eddie conceded the point, and that’s why the lyric, after a bit of consultation between the pair of them, became “You think you’re it, you think you’re it, you think you’re it!”
To reinforce my point that things change so quickly in life, the friendship I struck up with Clem that day in Countdown with The Nosebleeds soon became a professional partnership. Within a few months, he and I had a formed a joint production company, creating radio and TV ads, and multi-media AV presentations for ad agencies. But that’s a tangent for another time.
“Ain’t Bin To No Music School” was the band’s one and only single. Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds was a comparatively short-lived entity, the members moving on to other projects.
Which wasn’t really a surprise, as they were a motley crew.
Vini Faal, like his brothers, was hard and handy and what we in the North would call “a rum sod.” One tale that made the rounds in our circle involved Vini and Rob stomping round The Roxy in London, smacking random punks in the face and proclaiming “We’re from Manchester.” That seemed a bit extreme for the Rob I’d known since boyhood, but sounded like a stunt Vini might pull. I spent a lot of time with Vini over a two or three year period and it was always lively. One minute we’d be laughing over a pint or two, the next he’d be starting a fight in the chip shop opposite Wythenshawe Park with a gang of vicious-looking greasers who were working as fairground ride attendants. Years later, I heard that he was working as a dog catcher in Wythenshawe. Had we still been matey, I’d have made a crack about still chasing Dogs and like to think he’d have laughed. Then again, he might just have wanted to give me a slap. Mercurial is a word that springs to mind, but for the most part, I enjoyed his company.
Eddie could be volatile. We seemed to get on well enough and I liked him, but he was an absolute lunatic on … and frequently … offstage. How much was punk theatre and how much genuine derangement I never knew. I was living at my Gran and Grandad’s house in Wythenshawe at the time and a lot of the Manchester music community crossed the threshold, usually picking up art or dropping off reference materials or something. My Gran would make everyone mugs of tea and, if they were hungry, a boiled egg and toast. I have a mental image of Eddie in that little council house and he couldn't have been sweeter or more polite.
At the other end of the spectrum was Vini Reilly, the guitarist. Quiet, thoughtful, and well-mannered, he was the polar opposite to his manager and frontman. Over the years, he would be dogged by illness, both physical and mental, but the haunting beauty of the music he created with Durutti Column is light years away from the thrash he created with The Nosebleeds. One moment during that recording session at Countdown sticks in my mind when I think of Vini Reilly. Clem asked him something about musicians suddenly becoming punks overnight … which, frankly, wasn’t uncommon in 1977 … and his response has stayed with me:
“I think when one adopts a persona which isn’t ones’s own, it’s transparently fraudulent.”
That wasn’t really a sentence “one” might hear from any other Nosebleed.
After The Nosebleeds ended, both Toby and Pete Crookes played with Vini Reilly in the early days of Durutti Column … they were the personnel on the infamous album with a sandpaper sleeve … and picked up cash flyposting for Tosh. Eventually, and it too is a story for another day, Pete would end up running all the flyposting in the Midlands, following a chain of events that might be best described as Tarantinoesque. That was pretty much the last I heard of him.
Toby, on the other hand, went on to play with Ludus, then was in Nico’s backing band and ended up in Primal Scream. Of all The Nosebleeds, I was closest to Toby … and still am. We played in a band together for a while … at one point Steve McGarry’s First Offence boasted both Toby and Donald Johnson playing drums in tandem .. and we recorded a couple of things together that never saw the light of day. Toby lives in Dorset these days, still plays drums and we share an occasional transatlantic phone call. I’m very fond of him.
Eddie continued to make music. He replaced Wayne Barrett in Slaughter and The Dogs at one point. I’d hear of him from time to time. He performed in bands alongside friends of mine, like erstwhile Freshies Barry Spencer and Rick Sarko, and there always seemed to be a new incarnation or permutation involving sundry Dogs and Nosebleeds. I remember hearing that Eddie was working as a cabaret singer and, at some point, it registered with me that he was now known as Edweena … but initially, I wasn’t sure if it was part of the stage act or a genuine life change, and to be honest, I didn’t really give it a lot of thought. None of our mutual friends and acquaintances appeared to either. Eddie had become Edweena and from that point on that’s just how she was addressed. As I say, we’d exchange an occasional note and I’d see her social media posts and she seemed to be happy and doing well, so her death, in such awful circumstances, is particularly jarring.
Toby and I chatted today, he in Dorset, me 6,000 miles away in Costa Mesa. We reminisced and spoke of our ailments, as old farts are prone to do, and talk of Edweena’s death sparked memories of others from that purple period of punk that have dropped along the way. Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson, Dougie James, Martin Hannett, Alan Wise, Paul Young. Clem Lee and, more recently his wife, Shann Lee Parker. Two Stan the Mans … one, Stan Dulson, I knew from his time in Dougie James and the Soul Train, the other, V2 member Stanley Vegas, who I first met when he was in the retinue that followed Slaughter and the Dogs. John Cunningham, who played with me and Toby in my band, was still in his early twenties when the bad habits he and Toby acquired during their time playing in Nico’s band put an end to him. They very nearly did for Toby, too. Most were my friends, a few were mere acquaintances, one a bit of an adversary (and that, once again, is a story for another time.)
So. yes, I’ve thought a lot about Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds in recent days, and in particular, the Faal brothers.
I was having a drink with Vini Faal in The Lantern on May 21, 1977 when I spotted a gorgeous girl across the room. I told him that I was going to go over and chat her up. I remember him laughing and telling me I had no chance … but apparently I did, because Debs and I have now been together for almost 48 years. So whenever I think of the night I met my wife, Vini Faal always makes a guest appearance.
The Faal brothers, in their heyday, had a well-earned reputation for being hardcases. But I told Toby today about an episode that has always stayed with me and, at times, has moved me to tears.
In 1978, my Grandad was gravely ill in Withington Hospital, which was about five or six miles from where we lived. The medical staff could do no more for him, and as they needed the bed, the hospital was sending him home to die. The ambulance drivers were on strike, I didn’t drive at the time and I didn’t have the money for a taxi. Mike Faal, Vini’s brother and an integral part of all the Vini projects, learned of this and insisted on helping. He drove me to the hospital and the pair of us gingerly loaded my Grandad, painfully thin and frail in his dressing gown and pyjamas, into the back seat of Mike’s two-door car. Between us, we carried my Grandad up the stairs of that little council house and, as gently and tenderly as we could, laid him in the bed in which, a few days later, he passed away. He died in the same front bedroom where I had been born a quarter of a century earlier.
I’ve never forgotten Mike’s kindness that day and it means more to me than I could ever tell him … and as he now apparently lives in Gambia, I probably won’t ever get the chance.
Love this article.. Toby is my uncle (uncle Phil) and although I know a lot about his music career, you’ve covered so much here and it’s wonderful to read. I remember a lot of the names you mentioned too, brought back memories of being at my nans house and listening to uncle Phil and my dad chatting. The pics are fab too! Thank you
You’ve got a good memory Steve. Eddie was such a nice person and dynamic on stage. Last time I saw him was Edweena on stage at The Gateway in East Didsbury. Very entertaining and he came over later to chat even though we hadn’t seen each other in years. I issued a 45 rpm record by him UFO pt 1 / UFO pt 2 by Eddie Fiction on Absurd, number 2. It didn’t sell very well that was back in 1979.