Suicide ride again

Rock ‘n’ roll’s got the CBGBs all over again. Television, David Johansen and Blondie are all back on the road, Joey Ramone’s death inspired a slew of retro cover stories, and baby bands like The Strokes have plundered the style – if not the sound – of the Bowery. It’s surprising somebody like Todd Haynes or Baz Luhrmann hasn’t made a movie about New York circa 1977.

“They’d probably end up leaving Suicide out of it if they did!” declares Alan Vega, singer with the combo that have come to be regarded as the weird and creepy Cousin Its of the downtown scene.

“A lot of people conveniently write us out of those times,” he continues. “It ticks me off, people should know better than to try and distort history. Suicide probably had more influence than the Dolls and all the other bands who get credit for this stuff.”

For the uninitiated, Suicide – Vega and keyboardist Martin Rev – came to prominence on the back of an eponymous debut that sounded like the ghost in Sam Phillip’s machines had gotten sucked into a satellite dish, was transmitted to Mars and then bounced back into late 70s Berlin. Tunes like ‘Rocket USA’ and ‘Frankie Teardrop’ still suggest a cyborg Gene Vincent. It remains a pretty scary record, one that had a tangible influence on acts as diverse as Soft Cell, The Birthday Party and The Sisters Of Mercy, plus countless industrial noise acts (Al Jourgensen took what he learned from a stint with Vega and applied it to Ministry). Later still, REM covered ‘Ghost Rider’ and Spacemen 3/Spiritualized took on the euphoric drones of tunes like ‘Cheree’.

Vega: “I saw some statement Ben Vaughn made about Suicide – he’s a rockabilly type guy, I did the Cubist Blues record with him and Alex Chilton – which I thought was the best ever. He said, ‘Suicide was ultimately the only true punk band because everybody hated them. Not only that, but all the punk bands hated Suicide. Therefore they had to be the only real punk statement.’”

Fighting words, but they contain a measure of truth. Suicide seemed to piss people off just by being themselves. Check out 23 Minutes Over Brussels, the bootleg album that documents a level of audience hostility intense enough to have Fred Durst shitting his britches.

“That thing in Brussels,” Vega recalls, “that was with Elvis Costello – they never got on that night. And they’d just come back off like a nine-month tour all over the world and they were dead tired, I think the roadies were on speed. But I remember seeing him in the street afterwards, we were going to The Hague in Holland, and he says, ‘Al, do you think you can give me another riot tonight?!’ So we go into The Hague and it was a beautiful concert hall with plush leather seats and everything and I jumped out into the audience and they started to riot right away, man. The gig lasted about 10-15 minutes, Elvis never got on that night either. The next day it’s like, ‘Suicide Causes $100,000 worth of damage’.”

All this fuss over two men, a microphone, a primitive synth, a pair of shades and a lot of black leather. These days Suicide gigs are rather more respectful affairs.

“It’s nice to know I might come out of these gigs alive,” Vega says, “’cos in the late 70s /early 80s shows, especially with The Clash and Elvis Costello and those guys, I used to go out every night thinking, ‘I’m not gonna live’. I got hurt a couple of times; skinheads broke my nose one night in Crawley. I can’t tell you the number of items I’ve seen coming flying by me, including axes, knives, chairs, whole tables, glasses, bottles, you name it.”

Whoever said Suicide is painless?

Suicide play the Ambassador on Friday September 21st.