We’re back with part two of our interview with Smutty Smiff, and we’re jumping forward in time to 1981 and the recording of ‘Live At The Ritz’….

“Levi and the Rockats broke up in 1980 on stage. He did a David Bowie on us at the Starwood or The Whiskey, I can’t remember, but Leee and Levi planned to go off and wanted to be more authentic and do more sort of a Big Sandy –  Buzz and the Flyers thing, which I liked. I still love Buzz and Flyers and Big Sandy, and all those other more traditional rockabilly bands, but I got immersed into punk. I started not liking Teddy Boys because they were so racist and such bullies  then this whole new breed called just ‘rockabillies’ came out there, like The Polecats, and they didn’t wear drapes. They wore hepcat clothes, which we were wearing. 

By the time we got to New York, the New York Dolls were broken up. So you’ve got  us dressed all in pink trousers, pink and black jackets, with blue eyeshadow and quiffs and makeup and lipstick. We kind of filled that hole with the New York Dolls gone. I mean, they needed a new big glam, beautiful young boy band, and that’s what the Rockats were, that’s what we became. We were photographed by everyone. 

We were playing one night. Jerry had left the band a year before because of addiction. The last gig was with Joan Jett, and we went to New York and got a new drummer. We were hanging in Studio 54 and other clubs, and we knew Grace Jones, and Grace Jones bought the owner and founder of Island Records, Chris Blackwell, who signed U2. That was a pretty pretty established label, and he liked us, but he was leaving, but all she said was, ‘oh, in a month’s time, you’re gonna do an album and we’re flying you over and put you in the hotel and limos and all the rest of it’. But we hadn’t been playing that long.  and we weren’t we weren’t exactly The Stray Cats – so we’re better musicians, and we’re still friends with them, but they came later, and don’t care what anyone says, if anyone knows the real history, the Rockats were definitely before the Stray Cats. We were on the Merve Griffin show and midnight special two or three years before the Stray Cats ever played a gig -basically, long story short, is that  we did a studio stuff and Chris heard it, but he said it really doesn’t capture the band live. “Live, you guys are amazing. I just absolutely love you guys. Would you consider do using the Rolling Stones’ mobile unit and Kenny Vance, who’s a producer, and Ronnie Wood to oversee it, maybe, and do a live album at the Ritz in New York?” It was the best club with the best sound, because it’s bigger than CBGB’s, and by then the Rockats were selling out. We couldn’t play CBs. If we played CBs, we had to play there like four or five nights. But the Ritz held 1500 people, we could sell that out for three nights, which isn’t big, but it was big at the time.

Mick Rock did the cover. The cover’s not actually from the gig, it’s from the sound check, but nobody knows that except for me and you. We posed it so it looks like we’re playing, but we’re not. Chris came up with this idea. I think our manager at the time had switched, we’d fired him. We got a new manager who owned the Ritz named Jerry Brand. He said, ‘you’re gonna do three nights’. He was an Italian mafia type guy, but he was nice, and he liked us a lot. At that gig, I think Tina Turner was there, and Bowie and, I think, Keith Richards, I think there were quite a few big stars there. The other thing was that Island said, and Jerry said, ‘What if we print the covers starting tomorrow?’ And we mixed it in the truck after the gig and we released the record in forty hours. I think it was in the Guinness Book of Records at the time, because I don’t think anyone had ever done an album that came out two days later. 

Playing with The Clash, yeah, it was fantastic because all of them loved us. And at that point, when the Clash played Times Square, it’s funny because I look at the pictures, and they dressed more rockabilly than we were. They all had quiffs, they all had creepers, they all had Western shirts, and they all looked total rockabilly. I mean, there was a period where The Clash looked more rockabilly than punk. Mick had a quiff. I mean, Paul Simonon…come on, he was one of the best looking punks in the world, and when he had a quiff and a denim jacket and tight jeans and creepers, he looked pretty damn rockin’, you know. Yeah, and Joe loved Rockabilly, and it was and it was Paul Simonon’s idea to do ‘Brand New Cadillac’ because he was a massive Vince Taylor fan. I just made him a jumper that says Vince Taylor on it. He went mental when I gave it to him. He met Vince Taylor, he loves Vince Taylor. They had Whirlwind play with them, they had Buzz and the Flyers, Ray Campi…I think Cavan even played a couple of gigs with him in the end. I mean, it was funny because the old Teds were really against it, they didn’t want to see us. We got beat up and threatened by old Teds just for knowing Joe [Strummer]’s drummer. 

Teddy boys and Teds hated punks, and the punks didn’t hate Teds because they all went to fucking St. Martin’s College, and a lot of them were the Bromley Contingent, they weren’t fucking council estate kids. Malcolm McLaren certainly wasn’t. Malcolm McLaren’s shop was actually a teddy boy shop before they changed it to ‘Sex’. It was called ‘Let It Rock’, they sold drapes and creepers. Me and Levi used to go down there They sold all rockabilly gear, and then one day we went down there and had all mannequins and dildos and all rubber in the window and changed the name to ‘Sex’. If you look at the first pictures of Malcolm McLaren, the earliest pictures, he’s always got a drape and a waistcoat on and creepers. 

2021 saw the release of ‘Nervous Breakdown’ and a new album, ‘Start Over Again’.

That album was the last Rockats album. Definitely won’t be another. It was because a combination of Danny B. Harvey, who,  by that time had done many albums for Cleopatra. He became almost like an in-house producer. He was also in Levi and the Ripcords after the Rockats broke up. Danny, the guy I mentioned that he’d seen seen me in the cover of the New York Times. He said, ‘what’s that Smutty up to? Maybe we should do a Rockats album’.

Well, I think it was at the end of COVID or during COVID. We can’t all get together and play together live. So unfortunately, which we had to do it the way, people make records now. Danny called a really, really close friend of all of ours named Clem Burke, who was Blondie’s drummer. So we’ve got two original Rockats drummers, playing one track each, and Clem Burke played the rest. Clem loved Rockabilly too.. He said, ‘Well, I don’t know what we can do as a single, I think we should do a cover.’ But Danny said, ‘I really want to do a hard cover, like not psychobilly, but somewhere between rockabilly and psychobilly, kind of somewhere between The Cramps and the Meteors and Demented Are Go and the Rockats. I’m like, ‘I’ve never played Psychobilly’. ‘Well, you’ll have to double slap it and do that’. ‘I’ll give it a go’.

And I did. I practiced in the garage, I went down there every fucking day in a fucking garage for like six weeks. Danny’s really picky and fussy about everything on a record, everything has to be absolutely perfect. And I thought, ‘well, he’s not gonna go for it’. But it was really nice. I got a call from him. I sent him all the tracks, and he said, ‘Smutty, you played really good on this, we’re gonna use all your bass tracks. I don’t have to get anyone else’. My bass style was more influenced by Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Paul Simon and JJ from The Stranglers. I played notes and I wanted to hear notes. I liked Psychobilly to a point, but my bass style was based on what I learned from the early Gene Vincent records where it’s more jazzy bass almost. 

As well as his music, Smiff is working on a movie about his life…

The movie about me was an idea of two friends of mine. I don’t want to name them because it didn’t work out. They came to Iceland and I gave them the tour and I drove them all around and they said, ‘Smutty, man, this would make a fucking great fucking movie. You came from a council state in Essex with no dad. Your mum was a party girl and a hippie and smoked weed and you were drinking while you were twelve and get tattooed when you were fourteen, and then you joined this band and you went to America, and then when you’re eighteen, you’re standing next to in the factory with Andy Warhol with Debbie Harry interviewing you. That’s a good movie. We went to about six months of negotiations and finally they they didn’t really didn’t have the money. 

I’ve tried to make this movie several times, but this time we got really close. My friend Lulli’s doing it now. He’s the biggest one of the most respected directors in Iceland. He’s lovely, he’s fantastic. He started shooting it about a year ago, and we’ve done ‘growing up in Essex’. I was also dragged off to Glasgow when I was eleven with one of my mum’s wannabe husbands. 

My mum was married about four times, and about about fifty guys in between. There were parties at my house every weekend, and one night she woke us all up at midnight, put everything in a moving truck, and we moved to Scotland for a year. I probably had quite a bit of post-traumatic stress. I have some severe mental health issues. I’ve been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and also ADHD and I had a suicide attempt in 2016, and I was on lithium for a year. After coming off the medications a few years ago now, I decided I wasn’t getting any younger, and I really wanted to bring Smutty back to life. That’s when I came up with the idea of doing my first solo album and finishing my book. Mick Rock shot the cover and Greg Gorman, and I’ve got a lot of people that have just come out, and I didn’t realise how many people actually knew who I was and how many people actually like me. 

I had a very hard time growing up. I wasn’t drunk or high, I never did got into any heavy drugs anyway. I dabbled, but I never stuck anything in me or did anything like that, and I was around heroin constantly, like Johnny Thunders shooting up in front of us in the dressing room and me holding tourniquets for junkies before we were going on stage. I didn’t know I was bipolar, and I was 5150 [sectioned] in America. Apparently I had trashed my ex-wife’s apartment and then tried to jump off their roof. But I don’t remember any of it at all. Also I remember is that I ended up in this Swedish medical mental health unit, and I wasn’t allowed to ever leave unless somebody signed me out. It’s called a 5150, they take away all your rights. I stayed there for a while, and I slowly come around, and then I was already with Kate, my wife in Iceland.

I moved back to England to go to outpatient cognitive behavioural therapy, ADHD therapy, and group therapy, and joined the gym and slowly came out of it. I just fucking felt like I took too much acid and never came back. And that’s what that’s what it felt like. I took lots and lots and lots of bad LSD and had a really bad trip. That’s the only way I can describe it. 

When I came through the other side and through the door, I ended up um really getting my fucking shit together. I ended up working for the government in Iceland for the last ten years. I saved three lives. I decided I wanted to help people that needed help, mental help, and I signed up for a brand new homeless shelter that was dealing with young boys that had been abused, or were drug addicts and would have been in prison or very close to death, and I worked there for seven years. It’s something I felt like I had to do. I had to give something back.

I’m very focused now. I definitely have my mental capabilities. The plan is I’m going to Palm Springs next week to [work on my solo album]. I’m going in actually this week in Iceland to do some vocals. Me and when Tim Polecat were on his last tour, six months ago. I had about seven or eight rough ideas for this rockabilly dub album. I wanted dub music with surfing rockabilly guitar with me doing an Ian Drury vocal over. it. One of the main songs called ‘Basil and Bondage’, and the title of the album is called ‘No Thieves, Fakers, Rogues or Tinkers’. I’m gonna be dressed as the Artful Dodger playing a stand-up bass. I’m singing it in Cockney, I’m using a lot of Cockney rhyming slang in the song. 

You can’t live through life not chasing your dreams. You  need to not have regrets. You need to not feel guilty, and you should not give an absolute fuck about what people say about you. And when you don’t give an absolute fuck about what people say about you, that’s when your life starts getting good.”

Kate Allvey

For more information on Smutty Smiff, check out his website!

Buy a copy of ‘Start Over Again’ here