It’s not every day that a bonafide living legend stops by for a chat, and Smutty Smiff has earned that title many times over. The Rockat, bass maestro, vintage dealer and DJ might technically be retired, but that’s no reason for him to slow down.

“Well, it’s been a funny year,” he explains.“Two and a half years ago, my career got boosted with being on the cover of the New York Times when my bass was stolen,. That Rockat bass was stolen after a gig in 1980-something, and then it showed up a mile from where it was stolen in a pawn shop. Long story short, the New York Times wanted to interview me. He said they’re gonna do a little a little thing on it, and it made the cover of the Metro, and then I had U2 trying to buy it for me, and Madonna’s lawyer, and eventually I got it back because the guy wanted money. I said, ‘Why should I pay you money?’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve looked after it for thirty nine years’. So? It was stolen! He said, ‘yeah, but I didn’t sell it’. He wanted four grand. I said, ‘you know, in England we have this old story about this guy named Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. And you could come out of this two ways. You come out of it as the sheriff or Robin Hood’. He said, ‘I don’t know who that is, or give a shit’. I said, ‘Well, basically, I’ll give you the money’. They got him down to about a grand, and Barry Ryan, my guitarist, was on his way over to give him the money. By the time he’d done it, the New York Times had gone online, he got two hundred phone calls and people threatening to burn down his shop!” At least he’s reunited somewhat with his bass now. “Yeah, it’s in Hoboken in storage. And then after that, someone was reading the New York Times on a private plane. [It was the owner of] Cleopatra Records. Danny Harvey, my guitarist from the Rockats that had the band with Slim Jim and Lemmy [Headcat], that’s married to Linda Gale Lewis’s daughter that lives in Austin….he became quite a big producer in Rockabilly, and he did Robert Gordon’s last album… Dick Dale, Nancy Sinatra, Wanda Jackson. He said he thinks that Cleopatra wanted to do one more Rockatz album. So that kind of revived the Rockats and me with being on the New York Times in the last couple of years…”

As Smiff tells the story of how he got to where he is now, it’s magnetic. He’s lived a life unlike any other.

“I grew up as a teddy boy in Southend on Sea in Essex with Levi [Dexter]. Back in the seventies, you know, and going to a rough school on the Council Estate, you really had to choose your tribe. We have gangs [now], but back then we had gangs with costumes. You had the skinheads with their Dr. Martins, you had the suede heads, the smoothies, the greasers, the teddy boys, the rockers, and the hippies. 

At my school, you basically had to pick one of those about age twelve or thirteen, or get your head kicked in. But if you joined a gang, you had the protection of being a teddy boy or a rockabilly. Well actually, there weren’t any rockabillies then. Rockabillies didn’t come to a bit later. Back in 1977, it was just strictly teddy boys, and even the older Teddy boys from South End and London didn’t like us because we were young and we were wearing drapes and we weren’t allowed to because we were too young. We were bullied by some of the older Teds in South End back then, and took me about one and a half years to get in to see my first gig, which was Crazy Cavern at the Pier Bar in 19…probably about 74, 75? About the same time I met Levi. 

I was expelled at fifteen for wearing creepers and pink socks and getting my ear pierced, and I had Gene Vincent tattooed on one hand and Buddy Holly on the other. I was only like fourteen, and you weren’t supposed to get tattoos, and my school was a bit old-fashioned. We had headmasters with canes and gowns, and it was boys and girls, but the year before it was just boys. It was like basically a public school. I met my mates at school and started hanging out. We started listening to rock and roll and rock and then discovered rockabilly, of course. We started out mainly listening to you know Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent and Elvis, but we couldn’t get in any of the teddy boy clubs. The Black Raven and the pubs, the [patrons] were old Teds. They carried bike chains and they had swallows on their foreheads, and they would punch you in the face just because your fucking creepers weren’t right, you know. 

I met Levi at a roller skating ring in Southend in the 1970s, and he kept looking at me, and I looked very much like him, and he looked very much like me, but I didn’t [talk to] him. But I had a lot of people coming up to me saying, ‘Hey Levi’, and he had a lot of people coming up to him saying, ‘Hey, Smutty’. So by the time I met him, he wanted to kill me, and I thought, ‘oh, this it’s this guy, Levi’. They used to call him ‘Elv’ for Little Elvis because he ran the Elvis Fan Club in Essex. He used to get up and sing with the Flying Saucers and Whirlwind and and another band that broke out of the system. I finally only got into the Pier Bar because I was an apprentice hairdresser and I was very learned very very quickly how to do monster quiffs with hairspray back when Teds were using hairspray. 

One big Ted, Pete Driver –  he was about six foot six, I did this quiff on him one time – and said, ‘Do you want to come see this band called Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers?’ I said ‘that sounds good, I’ve heard them, but I’ve never managed to get in there. They won’t let me in’. And he said, ‘Well, if you come with me, they’ll let you in’. 

I went there and and I got to the door and then went up to the guy on the door and they said, ‘Hey Pete…that little cunt with you’s not coming in’. ‘Well, he’s with me, and I’ll vouch for him’. And I got in, and that’s when I first saw my first gig. I remember that I had a blue drape on and a cowboy hat. I don’t know why. I saw this guy staring at me as I went to the bathroom, and he and I thought, ‘Oh, that must be the guy’, because it like looking in the mirror, and it was Levi. And he followed me into the bathroom and we’re both peeing, and he goes, ‘Oh man, you’ve got a big one’ or something. He goes, ‘You want to have a fight or have a beer?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’ll have a beer,’ and then we just started talking and talking, and he was quite nice, and then we all went back to to Victoria Station. But when I got there,  I’d missed the last train back to Basildon, snd the Pier Bar was only open for another half an hour. So I ran back to the Pier Bar, and then I spent the night at Levi’s little tiny place. And then we just talked all night about the old Teds and how they didn’t like the young Teds and and cute young Teddy girls that were willing to put out, you know.

We had a spare room at my house… I didn’t have a Dad. My mum was a very much a hippie party artist and smoked weed and drank and saw David Bowie play Basildon Arts Center in 1972, and I didn’t go because I wasn’t interested in going. Levi moved in with me for like a year, and he was still getting up with bands and singing with different bands, and then he had a bit of an argument with my mum about rent or something. So we moved out, he got a squat in London, as we all did. There were squats  all over London then, everywhere were squats full of skinheads or greasers or Teds. I mean nice squats – not shitholes – nice ones, Kensington everywhere.” 

Everything changed for Smutty after a chance encounter at a show. “[One night] Levi got up and sang. I think it was at Screen On The Green [in Islington]. Shakin Stevens was headlining, and they were playing a movie before it, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’. Leee Black Childers [legendary photographer and music manager] was there. He’d just got off the Anarchy in the UK tour with the Sex Pistols and the Heartbreakers, because he managed Johnny Thunders, whowas on the same label as Shakin Stevens. Levi had sang with Shakey before, when had a band called Shakin Stevens and the Sunsets. Levi had just got his dole cheque. You had to wait like six or eight weeks, but then they backdated the whole thing. So he went down to King’s Road and bought like a bright blue flex suit with white Elvis loafers and pink socks, and tried to get up with Shaky, but he went in and then came out of the dressing room and his head was down.

 Leee was in the front row because Lee was somebody. Lee had managed Bowie, Iggy, Andy Warhol, and he had a blue shark kin suit on winkle pickers, a black quiff with a blue stripe in it. Ah, that’s right! He went up to Levi and said, ‘Hey, darling, what’s up?’ Levi said, ‘Oh, I just wanted to get up and sing’. He goes, ‘I’m Leee Black Childers, nice to meet you’.He was probably hitting on him because Lee was extremely gay, and  Levi was very good looking too. ‘Do you want to get up?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to get up with him, I really would’. So Leee just kicked the dressing room door . Everyone was scared of Lee track because Leee was big news. He was friends with Bernie Rhodes, he was friends with the Clash, he was friends with McLaren. 

Shaky said, ‘Oh, Lee, yeah, I really don’t have time, maybe you know,  when we’re doing our second set. I don’t know’. Lee said, ‘No, he’s getting up with you. Listen to me. He’s getting up with you, and and you’re gonna walk off stage and he’s gonna sing whatever he wants to sing with your band. [Stevens] just said, ‘Oh, okay, Lee, okay’. And that’s what happened. Shakey just said, ‘I’m gonna introduce Levi Dexter’, or ‘Little Elvis’. I can’t remember. Then he got up and sang ‘Okie Boogie’ or ‘Teddy Boy Rock and Roll’ or something. Lee was flabbergasted because it Levi was a fantastic bopper and dancer. He did backdrops and kicked his legs, he did every thing you could think of. He was one of the best boppers down the Pier Bar, you know. And I was second, probably. 

Leee went up to him and said, ‘Listen, I have an office in Soho Square. My name’s Leee Black Childers, and my assistant is Gail, and we managed a guy that used to be in a band called the New York Dolls called Johnny Thunders. I’m looking to do something with Rockabilly, but I want to do something different with it. I like these bands that I’ve seen’ – he named a few bands – ‘but there’s no young bands doing this’.  When you think about it , in 76, Cavan and all those guys were much older than us. Yeah. We were sixteen and Cavan was probably thirty then, you know. He said, ‘Well, you come to Soho on Monday’, and Levi just went and did this whole fucking like gospel preacher thing about Neo Rockabilly and what what we could do with it. 

Levi called me and said, ‘Smutty, I met this crazy American guy…you’re still at the hairdressers. I said, ‘yeah….’ ‘He wants to meet you. Will you meet me at the Royalty [theatre/music venue] next week? we’re sneaking in, it’ll be fine’. I went to the Royalty and I didn’t see anybody, and I was just bopping. I was just out on it. It was early, and it was just no one on the dance floor, and I was just taking up the whole dance floor, basically, bopping, because I was did all this flashy stuff, you know. Then I saw Levi at the bottom of the stairs because the Royalty had a balcony too: ‘come upstairs and meet Lee’. Lee said, ‘Well, darling, I’m styling this band around Levi, your friend. Do you want to be in it?’ 

I’m a French polisher on Hackney Road, and I live in Basildon. I’m working Bethnal Green. I don’t have a house in London. I live with my mum. He said, ‘that’s not the question. Do you want to be in this band? It’s going to be called Levi and…we’re not sure of the second name yet.’ I called Levi back [the next day] and said I want to do it, and then I went to Leee’s house again for another second meeting. He said, ‘well, we already have this guy Eddie Dibbles’ – who became Dibbs Preston, singer for The Rockats – ‘and we think we might have a drummer, but we’re not sure. So, what do you want to play: bass or drums?’ ‘ I don’t know, I’ve never played anything….What’s the difference?’ ‘Well,  if you play the drums, you’ll be kind of sitting at the back, keeping the beat down, and if you’re up to playing the bass, you’ll be playing next to Levi. He wants you to play a stand-up bass, you’ll be kind of up front or on the side of him, but not in front of him.’ And I said, ‘Well, what’s gonna get me more birds?’. He said, ‘probably the bass’, and I said, ‘well, bass then.’ So on Monday we went down Waldorf Street and he bought me a bass. I’d never had a bass or even seen a bass. Leee said, ‘you better learn it pretty quickly’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you’re playing with Steel Pulse at the Royal College of Art in six weeks’. Okay!

That’s pretty much what happened, and by the second gig, I had more time to learn it. I took bass lessons from Billy Raff from the Heartbreakers on Oakley Street, and he taught me one song: ‘Honey Dump’ by Carl Perkins. He said, ‘if I can teach you this song and you can play this song and you move it around, you can pretty much play any Rockabilly songs’ because it’s boogie in E. I didn’t know where the notes were on the bass, so I painted them on it with fingernail polish. I also learned that Paul Simonon from The Clash did the same thing, and I’m best friends him now.

 The second gig was really big. It was the release gig for Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was two thousand people, sold out, and Leee pulled some tricks,. It was Spizzenergie, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Adam and the Ants. Leee said that we’ll only do it if we can go on before Siouxsie and Adam and the Ants opened for us. We’d only played one gig, and the opening band for us was Adam and the Ants.”

How did a venue full of punks react to Levi And The Rockats?
“Well, bottles mainly! We were playing to punks in 77 on Boxing Day, and hey were still fighting down the King’s Road, which was mostly propagated by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Everything evolved around the punks and the Teds not getting along was all done by Malcolm McLaren because he was smart and he used the bad press because there was no such thing as bad press. Why do you think the Pistols said that Bill Gundry was a cunt on TV? Because the next day everyone in the world knew the Sex Pistols were.”

Kate Allvey

Come back next week for part two of our interview with Smutty Smiff!

For more information on Smutty, check out his website