Fact #166984

THE STORY OF THE PIRANHAS as told to Johnny Black

Phil Collis aka Zoot Alors (saxophone) : Most people may remember the Piranhas as the band that did Tom Hark, but I and many other people remember them as a great band that came to town and turned things up-side-down. We played places where no-one had played for decades, starting in 1977. We toured the country, playing Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League gigs right inside the buildings the racists met in. We had our rehearsal space, below a community center and pre-school, burnt to the ground by a leading figure in the National Front (my suspicion!).

Because The Piranhas were such a great band live, we came into the industry arse-backwards... on the strength of the gigs we were already doing, and independent single releases, we were signed to a booking agency and a publishing company before we had the important Record Deal with a Major.

We played for four years or more, and every gig was a great one. We were a drinking, drug-taking band, and had an agreement that we were good enough that any night we could carry one passenger. We took turns being the incompetent one. We eventually got quite musical. Oh, and Madness and The Specials and The Beat came after us: the original "Mockney"-Ska-Punk-Reggae-African blah blah blah, and they've told me so themselves.

John Helmer (vocals/lead guitar) : We’d been going for some while when we had the car crash. We were coming back from a gig in Hastings one night. We had a car and a van, and we pulled over so the drivers could discuss the route they were going to take, when a drunk driver smashed into the back of the car, which killed out road manager, and seriously injured Phil.

Phil Collis : We were really smashed up by a drunk-driver who ploughed at high speed into our parked vehicles, coming back from a gig one night. After ending up underneath an upside-down car with many injuries and broken bones, I spent three months in hospital in traction, and can't ever jump around like I used to. But sadly our road manager Dave Bullock was killed. He was the sweetest man, a long-haired bearded hippie, who you would see down the front of the stage trying to protect young punks from getting injured while he was in bare feet. Very funny nice guy.

We had recorded a John Peel session which was played while I was in hospital,
but I couldn't stay awake for it, having taken my pain-killers. Peel mentioned where I was, and the hospital got a lot of cards and visitors for me. I still have the cards in a big bag, and thank you all.

John Helmer : The car crash put the first dent in our confidence, but it didn’t stop us.
The next significant thing was that, before Pete Waterman had his huge success in the 80s, he brought Jerry Dammers down to see us in Brighton, and we were wearing black and white suits made out of mattress ticking, which is where I think they got the idea for the 2-Tone image.

Phil Collis : Pete Waterman worked at the publishing company (Leeds Music). I think he thought Bob Grover had star quality.

John Helmer : He was incredibly enthusiastic, quite inspirational to work with. He was just this guy who loved pop music. If we mentioned something like Joy Division, his eyes would completely mist over. He loved three minute pop singles, and so did we.

Bob Grover : Pete said to us that not long before he been working on a building site. In and out the music business, and had been The Beatles tea boy at one point.

Phil Collis : I always enjoyed Pete, and actually thought he was one of the most straight-up people in the music industry; who even liked music and had talent. He had been a D.J.... one time he came to one of our shows and afterwards told us our song order was all wrong. He sat there with the set-list and re-arranged it - we played it the next night and he was right, an incredible difference.

At the same time he was a complete bullshit artist! I told him the story of the dead woman getting eaten by her pet dachshund, as in "Hollywood Babylon" and the Nick Lowe song. A few days later he's telling me the same story only this time he's the fireman who breaks down the door and discovers the body.

Bob Grover : We did Tom Hark as an encore number in the set. Pete suggested we could have a hit with it. On the way to the studio I wrote the lyrics in the back of the van. Thats why the vocals are a bit deep to the trained ear coz its in the wrong key for Bobs voice.

John Helmer : Tom Hark was something we did in our live set, most of the rest of the songs were things we’d written ourselves, a bit dark and depressing. After a gig one night, Waterman came up and said he reckoned Tom Hark was the single.

Phil Collis : I had brought Tom Hark into the set because it was a tune that we could play as a loose instrumental-jam-groove-thing. Pete was very excited when he heard it, and he arranged to record us with a producer (Peter Collins). Bob wrote some words for it in the Transit van on the way to the studio because he didn't want to be recording an instrumental. Pete is on the record making back-ground yelps, probably.

Bob Grover (vocals/guitar) : The original was an instrumental so we brought it up to date with some lyrics. I could say the words were deep and meaningful, but they don't really mean much. I scribbled them on an envelope in about an hour.

Phil Collis : Then Pete shopped the tapes around.

Bob Grover : Waterman was an honest bloke with a one track mind for singles, a hit man. Thinks singles not albums and he arranged the deal with Sire Records. He was very strong on labels at the time, get you on the right label, you’re made. The Ramones, Undertones and Talking Heads were on Sire at the time.

Phil Collis : And what do you know... Hit Single! Start of the rise of the Waterman Empire! (Tom Hark entered the UK singles chart on 2 August 1980, and peaked at No6)
Phil Collis : I don't remember Tom Hark, the hit single, making much difference to the band, certainly not financially. It always had a chance to be a hit : my girlfriend told me so when she heard the milk-man whistling it. I was more likely to meet the milkman when I was coming home at the same time he dropped off the milk. Anyway, when you left a note for my milkman saying "one extra pint please" he would sign a reply "Peace, Love and Drugs, Milko."

Pete let us stay in his house one time while he wasn't there, when we were touring his area. The house was full of kittens: expensive Persian Blues or something, that you had to try not to tread on or let out of the house. We were too broke to afford any other accomodation, and Pete was definitely breeding the cats for money so I think he wasn't doing too well at that time either!

John Helmer : The follow-up to Tom Hark was a flop and the record company reckoned it was an image problem, so they brought in Jasper Conran who came up with this idea to have us dressed in red and green, and to use lighting effects which would make it seem as if we’d vanished while we were on stage. The only problem was that it didn’t work.

Phil Collis : We had been supporting ourselves for a few years already from gig-money, and that's pretty much how it carried on. A low-point for the band was being support band for The Jam on a British tour that year. We'd never supported anyone before and we should have kept it that way - if I'd wanted to join the army I'd have joined the fucking army, would have been fewer miserable bastards to deal with, and I'd have got fed ocasionally. As it was I had to live off the money those Jam-Fan-Wankers threw at us - those fifty-pence pieces came in handy, thanks.

When we had an album released on Sire, it played at the wrong speed: faster than we had recorded it. (We once had a band meeting to approve test-pressings of a record, which was when we discovered that none of us had a working record-player). I've always suspected Waterman of saying to the disk-cutting engineer "Come on, let's push up the BPM".

John Helmer : While The Piranhas was still going, I started playing in another band, Pookiesnackenburger, which was a kind of light-hearted busking band that really got going at the Edinburgh Festival. They became quite successful. We did a Heineken ad, and we got a Channel 4 tv series, making what were effectively little musicals.

You once described the elements in the demise of the band as including “contractual wranglings, bad drugs, bad sex, bad food”. Can you elaborate on any of those?

Phil Collis : There were some great stories of Pete Waterman fighting for us in the corporate music biz world, which to some extent he did. He tore his shirt off and stamped on it, was outraged when the Record Company started talking about this new thing D.O.R. (Dance-Oriented-Rock), and so on. He definitely had more of a clue than anyone else in our organisation.

I remember what may have been our second-to-last gig, a big fund-raiser for an African-Famine-Relief organisation. It was way-succesful, but I remember the promoter who usually booked that big venue saying to me "We should do the same but make it a benefit for The Piranhas." And he was right 'cause we were finished.

John Helmer : Then there was a gig at Herne Hill around 1981 where we just decided we’d all had enough. I wanted to concentrate on Pookiesnackenburger.

Bob Grover : At Herne Hill, with no prior consultation three of the band decided independently to leave on that gig. So of course with three leaving the band, there isn’t really any band left.

Phil Collis : We were worn out. Our manager, who took advantage of my absence one week to bump his take of our money five percent higher, had behaved like a complete ass and left us with no record contract (among other things), so he was finally fired.

One of us had developed a drinking habit to the extent that he was getting nerve-wracking on stage and un-productive off-stage, and the non-drinking band member didn't want to work with him any longer. Finally we played one or two shows that were not good, even by our usual standard of stopping a few songs every gig to try again. I think you may be right, our last gig could have been Herne Hill, but we played some great nights there other times : wasn't that where I played Tom Hark for the fourth encore on one of those party-popper things you blow and it rolls out like a giant tongue with a feather attached? Just to make it clear it was time to go home.

I was drinking in my local Brighton pub a few days later, and the boss of Sire Records UK, Ellie, walked up to me teary-eyed and told me the band had broken up. Doesn't that suck? I went outside and sat on the window-sill and cried a little.

The next day I went to meet with Bob and John to suggest we have a few weeks or months off, which we had never had, and then see how we felt. But I guess John had Pookie plans - Bob planned to work with Pete Waterman and started putting a band together with me, but when it was clear it would be called The Piranhas I pulled out and it fell apart.

John Helmer : Pete found a new-starting label and we put out one single on it (Vi-Gela-Gela) - when he didn't like the producers' master he had me go in and re-mix it, so there you go, I'm available for hire!

Right after that I realised I needed some regular money coming in so I got a job at an internet company, and worked up to become their MD.

At the same time, I was working on my novel, Mother Tongue (published by Quartet in 1999), which took about six years to write but, once I had it in a readable state, it wasn’t too hard to find an agent and, eventually, a publisher.

Bob came up with a new line-up of The Piranhas which had a minor hit with Zambesi. (Zambesi entered the UK singles chart on 16 0ctober 1982, and peaked at No17)

Phil Collis : I wasn't involved with Zambesi, but I imagine it was a solo Pete Waterman effort. Perhaps it was only fair to the record company, because we'd broken up before the first one came out, and hadn't told them.

Bob Grover : The others would not have touched it, pure pop song and that wasn't really what we did. But if someone says to you, ‘You can have a hit if you want’, you say ‘That will be good for a laugh’.

Phil Collis : Bob Grover put together a band and toured it as the Piranhas, which really pissed me off because now he burnt up the good name we had. I feel sorry for anyone who went to any of those gigs; none of the original band members were in it.

John Helmer : I was always very good with lyrics but I didn’t have much commercial sense as a tunesmith, so my publisher started sending my lyrics around on their own. This was just after Marillion had lost Fish. (Fish left Marillion in September 1988).They’d got a singer, but he didn’t write lyrics, and they were trying to decide between me and Vivian Stanshall, but I got the job. I thought it would be just a one-off thing, but I actually did lyrics on about five of their albums.

I married my girlfriend Kate on April 11, 89, and I’m living in Brighton now (July 02) with her and our three children. I’m still working on the next novel, and just started a new job with an internet learning company in February 02.

Phil Collis : After we broke up I stayed living in Brighton. Our ex-manager had never bothered to deal with our taxes, so I was taken to court and for years had to make regular payments for tax on income that we had probably never received in the first place. I worked in a factory owned by my landlord, who took the rent out of my pay. Isn't that illegal? After a while I moved back into graphic design work.

I played in a great Fake-Mexican busking outfit called Los Me Sombreros, I have no recollection of how that happened. Los Me Sombreros played in the street, in Covent Garden, Amsterdam and in a Butlins Monday-Night-Residency - which was way more fun than supporting The Jam!

Working with other horn-players, I realised that I finally needed to know the names of the notes, and perhaps a little music theory, so obviously the best way would be to plunge into learning Be-Bop! I took some classes and was a founder and secretary of The Brighton Musicians Jazz Co-operative, which was a place for musicians of all levels to come and practice, form bands, and take classes from working Jazz musicians.

I played on a few records, and started a new band with people already in bands of their own, which was intended to be something that could pull in a few local people to raise money for the striking miners. That became Big Ma Maghee and the Famous Blue Note Rhythm Kings and was pretty successful, and as three of the band were in Bone Orchard I played on their next record and started playing with them too. Both bands shared the same singer, Chrissie Maghee, and when she decided to retire from music both were finished.

I was going to be forming a band playing Jazz with the tutor from the classes I originally went to, but then I moved to New York instead.
I met a great woman from New York who was on a short vacation, and we dated trans-Atlantically for a couple of years. Finally we married and I moved over to New York. I had been here a few times before moving over permanently, the Piranhas played here too, and I felt very at home.

Jean and I have been married twelve years now, and have two boys aged 10 and 8. I love living in New York, though last year’s September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused a great sadness here. I started working as a graphic designer again, and did various advertising work here. Currently I am responsible for design of advertising in a major publishing company.

Bob Grover : I put together another shambolic band doing what I called ‘Punkalypso’ which went down like a lead balloon. I’m now living in the posh part of Brighton. I've been helping run a small multimedia business, Megafast, for the last 6 years. I produce 3D animations and presentations.

 I still perform occasionally under duress and invariably for people wanting me to do Piranhas songs for benefit gigs. I have a recording studio in my bedroom and have been seen hard at it into the small hours. Watch this space.
 
Dick Slexia, our drummer (real name Dick Adland) carried on for a while as a professional drummer working for Fisher-Z and others. I’m told he now lives with his girlfriend near Lewes, West Sussex, and is a painter and decorator.

Reginald Hornsbury (bass) : Before I joined the Piranhas I made sure I’d finished my apprenticeship as an electrician, and I went straight back to that when the band ended. I’ve moved around a lot since those days, living in London, Northampton, Cornwall, Oxford, but for the last seven years or so I’ve been in Swindon working as a service engineer installing and maintaining automated washers for big commercial vehicles. I do still play my bass a bit, but it’s mostly been handed on to my son, and he’s taken it up.