Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Can't Stand the Rezillos, by The Rezillos

IT was, by all accounts, quite a gig. Staged at the Glasgow Apollo a couple of days before the Christmas of 1978, it was billed as the Rezillos Christmas Party and was, in fact, their farewell show.

The high-energy concert, later released as a live album, was a fitting reminder why this Edinburgh band were so popular.

In the words of Vic Galloway in Rip It Up, his survey of Scottish rock and pop, the Rezillos “threw together the bits they liked from the recent past - Joe Meek, girl-groups, rockabilly - and sped things up by adding PVC, wraparound sunglasses and quiffed hair and a Sci-Fi shtick.  They were an exhilarating blast of colour and soon had oddball songs to add to their onstage riot".

In his pre-Waterboys days Mike Scott had witnessed the thriving Edinburgh punk and new wave scene at first hand. The capital, he has recalled, “nurtured a peculiar intellectual variation on punk. The best local band was The Rezillos, a shrieking gang of rubber-faced pop-art terrorists with great choruses and sheet-metal guitars”.

The RezillosThe Rezillos (Image: free)

The band released only one album - the exuberant Can’t Stand the Rezillos, in July 1978 - before breaking up four months later. Long since reformed, they have been on the road again. In the last couple of days they have played the venerable Paisley venue, The Bungalow, and Falkirk’s Behind the Wall. But the album they brought out all of 46 years ago has stood the test of time.

The Rezillos were part of Edinburgh’s vibrant punk scene, though they pre-dated it.

As singer Fay Fife puts it in the excellent Hungry Beat: The Scottish Independent Pop Underground Movement (1977-1984), the Rezillos “were very much in our own pod, we started off very early. We were not part of a scene at all, we were totally alien. We came out of nothing really. Then a punk scene started up and that was interesting, but when we started we were more like an artistic, conceptual thing”.

This more than echoes her view in an interview she gave to the NME, back in February 1978. “We were just completely different to what was going about”, she said then. “Nobody up here had heard of punk because it was just starting out. We were considered quite outrageous, to put it mildly, because we couldn't play very well. I couldn't sing, he [co-vocalist Eugene Reynolds] couldn’t sing…”

"We used to do some rock'n'roll stuff, but it was mainly '60s pop – or as NME's Ian Cranna said, ‘dire Hot-Rodish treatments of revered '60s classics’,” added the band’s songwriter, Luke Warm (Jo Callis). “At that time though, November '76, everyone in Edinburgh was so predictable. Half the bands were playing 'Stairway To Heaven', the other half were trying to sound like The Average White Band.”

“That was what was really shocking to some folk in Edinburgh; that we had the nerve to go up there and play like that”, added Fay. “Some people just couldn't take it at all, it really offended them.”

The Rezillos made their live debut, in Edinburgh, on November 5, 1976, two weeks before the Sex Pistols released Anarchy in the UK. The Rezillos toured incessantly over the next year and built up an enthusiastic fanbase. 

Their debut single, Can’t Stand My Baby, come out in August 1977. That October, they supported The Stranglers; in December, they supported The Ramones, playing the Glasgow Apollo both times.

Jo Callis recalls the single as changing the band's musical direction: “we moved”, he’s quoted as saying in Hungry Beat, “from being a bit of a sixties kind of retro showband into being something contemporary”. Certainly, it brought the Rezillos to the attention of Seymour Stein, the head of the revered US label, Sire Records, home of The Ramones and Talking Heads. Sire signed the Edinburgh band and plans were made for a debut album to be recorded in New York. The experience was an eye-opener for the Rezillos.

“There is so much to say from that period that it would merit an interview about it”, Reynolds said in an interview with the Louder than War website in 2012. “And being collected from JFK [airport] in a huge metallic green Lincoln Continental with metal green plastic seats in 1978 was a gas to us. Never seen anything like it at the time. Yeah it was glamorous to us”.

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The album, delayed for a number of reasons, peaked at number 16 in the UK charts. Paul Morley’s NME review began: “Finally, after telling wrangles, we have Can't Stand The Rezillos, 13 quick cuts lustily shot through with cheap culture combinations. Tanners, annuals, Stan Lee, beatpunk nuggets, fists, paperbacks, pulp-pulp-pulp and, there on the horizon, bug-eyed monsters, robotics and a slight chill”.

The 13 tracks include the singles I Can’t Stand My Baby, (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures, and Top of the Pops, a number 17 hit which the band performed, naturally enough, on the TV show of the same name. There are urgent, swaggering covers of Glad All Over, a number one hit in 1964 for the Dave Clark Five, and of Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked in Tonight, a song recorded by Fleetwood Mac under the pseudonym of Earl Vince and the Valiants. It was an impressive calling-card in more ways than one.

The album's attitude and its irresistibly high energy levels are reflected in the closing words of Morley’s review: “…it's all very clever: the parodied dissatisfaction of punk; the lashings of beat and controlled chaos; the frenzied passion of the production and, above all else, lots of cosmic vibes, maan”. J Mascis, of Dinosaur Jr, said once that it was the best album Sire ever released. The band’s own website notes that the album is now seen as a classic album of the original wave of British punk, which seems about right.

“This”, a fan wrote a few months ago on the Reddit platform, “is the best kickass album of my youth and is defo not nearly as famous as it should be. Every tune a joy and as a band they were so tight. Production is crisp and captures the essence of the energy they had back then. Wonder if they took a lot of speed back in the day, lol! Mental!”

Various well-publicised difficulties saw the band break up not long after the album’s release. It would have been interesting to see what they came up with next. 

The RezillosThe Rezillos (Image: free)

The energetic, compelling live album from the Apollo was released as Mission Accomplished … But the Beat Goes On. Fife and Reynolds went on to form the Revillos; Callis, for his part, later joined The Human League and co-wrote such hits as Don’t You Want Me. During the Rezillos’ long hiatus, interest in the band was maintained not least by CD reissues and by exposure on US college rock stations.

The Rezillos, led by Fife and Reynolds, re-formed for a 2002 Hogmanay gig in Edinburgh and subsequently released a handful of independent singles.

Speaking to the Herald a couple of days before that Hogmanay show, Fife reflected: ''It was a shame we broke up so early. We fell out brutally, and were then left with a feeling of 'What a waste'. We certainly never worked as well creatively with anyone else.''

Said Reynolds: ''There was a strange magnetism between all of us. It blew each of us outwards and yet it held us all together. We were friends, but we were all explosive people, too. For instance, I recall we all felt then that anyone making a profit out of our art was committing a heinous crime - 'How dare they!'

''Subsequently, I think we've realised that it's better to be a part of the wheel of industry rather than under it. So creatively, there's a lot left unfinished. I've always been a conceptualiser - definitely more concept than music. Jo would put my ideas into a song.

''When Jo left I'd no way of collating this stuff into any audible form. In fact, the first thing I had to do as a Revillo was go out and buy a Bert Weedon Play-in-a-Day guitar book. I know that we've been slowly getting back together over the past three years or so for the best of reasons: as an act of spontaneous combustion, to write good songs - and with no premeditated avenue for them to emerge.''

In 2015 the reformed band - Fife, Reynolds, Angel Paterson (drums), Jim Brady (guitar; since replaced by Phil Thompson) and Chris Agnew (bass) - released Zero, the band’s first album since Can’t Stand the Rezillos. “This holds up well when compared to Can't Stand The Rezillos”, said the review in punknews.org. “Obviously, they haven't been refining their sound for the last 37 years, but it's still astounding that they were able to pick up right where they left off. It's especially amazing when you consider that they were very young adults when they made the first record, and now they're, well, much older adults”.

https://rezillos.rocks/

Next week: Diva, by Annie Lennox