Page3

1979-'80

Ray "Rockafeller" Jones-vocals
Jock Negative Mcveigh-vocals/dancer
Dee Quincy (Stuart Miers) -guitar
Trevor Foreman -guitar
Jonathon Smythe-Murray-Bowen esq.-saxophone
Huw -trumpet/ percussion
Sarah Bewara Richards -oboe
Steve "Gags" Garland-drums
Dr. Richard Normal (Glenn Evans)-bass
Bone Idol (Ian Bone), Amanda Richards, Carolynne - backing vocals
Jan Green, Rhian, Ceri, Hywel Batley - exotic dancers

"It was variously named Dirty Doras... Pandoras... Circles... The Pit... Marina Nightspot and was a fantabulous fleapit which had hosted the Sex Pistols, Slits, Buzzcocks and Sham 69 as well as spawning every legover in the town. It was all managed with massive indifference by Howard. It was the only venue in which Swansea home grown punkers -The Next Step, The Autonomes, Venom, the Urge and The End, plus Llanelli's greatest ever export, the utterly brilliant Andy Pandemonium -could get to play outside the usual Top Ranksville wankdom

(Click press cutting to enlarge )

I'd put Crass and the Poison Girls on there. When Howard turned up, there was a queue of tiny 10 year olds trying to get in with their "Fight war" T-shirts. "They can't come in, she only looks about eight," said Howard to the door staff. Steve Ignorant hid the offending eight-year-old in the back of a speaker and carried her past the door gorillas. I was talking to Howard later when the eight-year-old walked between us swigging a pint like a veteran alkie. Howard shrugged and hid in his office.

But tonight was Page 3's debut gig... much fucking hyped. Howard told me the Dutch band Focus - no, me neither mate - had pulled a record crowd of 900, but we were pushing it fucking close. We had stippers "fucking good-looking ones," enthused Ray Jones, our singer. He was right. They were supposed to strip seductively when Ray burst into his Troggs cover version of Can't Control Myself. instead they just raced on stage naked and and danced about before rolling around on top of each other laughing hysterically. The surge from the back towards the stage was almost of Hadj-like proportions.

Page 3 had started in the Coach and Horses a month or so earlier. Beer talk - start a band. "Porno Rock," that's what we'd be - songs all about sex - but political, funny, subversive like. Our strippers would subvert the idea of stripping, wouldn't they? Well, yes... doubtlessly accounted for the Doras surge.

I wrote about ten songs all over one weekend, hummed the tunes to Ray and Stuart who worked out the music. "Every one a fucking winner Ian," enthused Ray moonlighting from his other band, the Dyfatty Flats. We recruited everyone else from the pub regardless of musical ability - punk as fuck or wot? Jock McVeigh (exotic dancer), Glenn, Hugh, Trevor, Jonathan, Carolynne, Gaggsy, me, Ray Jones, Rhian, Stuart, Sheralee, Sarah Bewara, Amanda Bewara. Three rehersals up at Cockett Studios and we're off. Our set included such classics as Sexist Twat, Bitches on Heat, Premature Ejaculations, Swallow it Down, Can't Get It Up, One Of The Boys, Clap Clap I Wanna Get The Clap, Prostitutes World, John Bindon, plus the evergreen singalong God Bless You Queen Mum and a couple of Reg Presley covers. Ray was a bit dubious about singing the impotence song Can't Get It Up but accompanied by Sarah on oboe, he did it proud.

The gig was a storming success - musically as well as sexually. I'm not sure our congent analysis of the commodification of sex and the reification of emotion in the society of the spectacle was appreciated, or understood by all, but Howard seemed to buy into it because he immediately rebooked us in a back office overflowing with cash.

I decided to help our notoriety a bit further. I phoned the Evening Post and told them that Jock "Negative" McVeigh had been tragically killed in a car accident in the south of France. The Post's front page ran "Page 3 Exotic Dancer Killed In French Crash" - which sounded both glam and tragic! Oh how we laughed. Jock had never been further than Brion Ferry in his life and to see this lovable, tattooed, gay proletarian Swansea ne'r do well described as an "exotic dancer" in print was mirth inducing. When up before the Swansea bench in the future, Jock would always give his occupation as "exotic dancer" then argue he was "dead" so couldn't be charged, producing the crumpled Post front page as conclusive evidence. I followed up with a further call to the Post complaining the story ws untrue - cue another front page "Band Victim Of Cruel Hoax" and giving full details of our next Circles' gig naturally. Jock now describes himself as a 'living legend' in the town -a name the band was later to take on. After one gig, we were indeed living legends in the pretty shitty city.

We'd chosen the name Page 3 by sticking a pin in a book agreeing to be called whatever it stuck in. But now with the strippers, it became obvious there was a connection in some crazed Swansea minds between us and The Sun's Page 3 girls. So I decided to exploit this as well:

Dear Editor,
I recently went along to see a concert at Circles nightclub in Swansea. Advertised as Page 3, I naturally thought it would be sponsored by The Sun and feature your delightful Page 3 glamour girls. Imagine my horror to see the crudest pornography, vile lyrics, live sex and a song wishing the Queen Mother would die of cancer etc etc

The hope behind the letter was that The Sun would run a sensational article on the band denying any connection and spreading our noteriety nationally, but it didn't work out like that!

Our second gig was at the Highwayman Nite Spot in Ystalyfera - a ponderosa-style scampi-in-a-basket club but temporarily managed by Gwyn 'Bomber' Dawe, one of my Welsh Republican acquaintances anxious to spread the porno-rock message up the Lower Swansea Valley. The gig was a total fucking shambles on all counts. Our stripper had been chatted up by a camera-toting 'merchant seaman' by the bar and was posing for photos. Later, she breathlessly told us that the 'merchant seaman' ws in fact a Sun journalist. The poor unfortunate, hoping that the journo line was more likely to get her into bed than than the merchant seaman ploy, had blurted out the truth.

Our two roadies - famed Townhill hardmen Ianto and Ado Craven - took his camera off him and threw it in the river. Ado then performed a perfectly executed head-butt on him which stretched him prone on the ponderosa floor as we headed home."

from Ian Bone's Autobiography, " Bash The Rich" (Tangent, 2006)

Interview with Andy Green (the guy who put on Page 3 at Swansea University) in ‘Sail’, the magazine for alumni of Swansea University. 6/2007 :-

'What was your worst moment?

As student union social secretary I briefly became Wales’s number one reggae promoter and we had some brilliant nights. I once however had the choice of two unknown bands; one was to become the Eurythmics with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. I chose the Yachts. This was eclipsed when I foolishly put on a punk band called ‘Page Three’ - in what was to be their last-ever gig - whose members were to become the anarchist agitation group Class War.

This band included a lady of ill repute involved in the so-called ‘sex for luncheon vouchers scandal’ in the ‘70’s. Their act included doing rude things with jelly babies and feeding them to the front row of the audience. It got worse: the night ended in chaos with police and fire brigade called out, the College Safety Officer beaten up, and my dear mate Bertie Mathews getting thumped.

My abiding memory is when cleaning up the mess at the end of the night. This big Welsh guy stood in the hall with his posture indicating he was going to make some negative pronouncement but declaring, in his broad valley’s accent: “Smutty, but good!” I learnt that you can at least please some of the people some of the time!

Living Legends

Punk band fronted by Swansea anarchist activist and Class War founder Ian Bone - once described by the News of the World as 'the most dangerous man in Britain'. Played performed with Crass in Swansea and rel debut single 'The Pope is a Dope' (Upright recs 1982). Gigs were always chaotic with Ian Bone being arrested after one particularly memorable gig at Abergavenny Town Hall in 1983. By this time the band was Cardiff based. A 2nd single 'Better Dead Than Wed' followed in 1985 and surprisingly topped the UK Indie charts for 3 weeks.

Legends Live

by John Serpico

Anyone innocently wandering in to this gig could quite well have felt that they were experiencing some strange hallucinatory Evostick flashback… Horny housewives with no knickers on frolicked and gyrated erotically to the music as sex dwarves turned somersaults on the floor. Paris ’68 refugees grinned like idiot angels as Guardian newspaper journalists muttered in to their beer
glasses. Ragged punk rockers with yellow skin and red eyes rubbed shoulders with Class War agitators as care in the community patients masturbated furiously.

This was a Salvador Dali garden party, a scene from a madhouse, a Bosch painting come to life. Never mind Anarchy, this was Surrealism in the UK – for real. It was a pity the Queen Mother and the Pope hadn’t accepted their invitations as their presence would have put a final seal of dementia upon the occasion. As for the band: The Living Legends are a hilarious 16 legged beer beast that peddles “foul mouthed” pub rock shot through with a slight dose of “controversy”. Tory Funerals’ anyone?

They revel in being loud and brash in public, though they’re probably more like the Macc Lads grandparents than the Sex Pistols offspring. This gig being a birthday celebration of the vocalist saw them in all their glory. If you weren’t there then you missed the human equivalent of a fermenting sun turning supernova. The end of something old but the birth of something very new. Crawling, burping, gurgling evidence that life does indeed start at 50. The world will never be the same again.

Read more about the Living Legends at Ian bone's blog here

Ancient Living Legends site here:- http://www.pg007b2036.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/legends/

PAGE 3 today

Page 3 today:- ·"... And finally, to the news that The Bank Job, the film based on alleged indiscretions involving the late Princess Margaret and AN Other - who may or may not have been the tough-guy actor John Bindon - has prompted a reworking of the raucous song about his famous party trick. This involved the balancing of five old-style beer glasses on what was reputed to be an outsized part of his anatomy. It was the 70s, a kinder time. Variety shows were quite the thing. Visitors to YouTube can recall his unique talent through song - courtesy of Ian Bone, founder of Class War, and his associate Ray "Roughler" Jones, both of whom covered the tune as part of the Swansea punk band Page 3. They're older now, and Bindon is long gone, but his legacy lives on. Timeless. Unchanging". - "The Guardian" diary26/2/2008