Interview: Doctors Of Madness

“I knew the sound I wanted. It was going to be abrasive and confrontational. It was going to have howling feedback. It was going to reference stuff like John Cage and the early minimalist and serial composers. It was going to have repetition and dissonance and the angularity of The Velvet Underground; that coming together of what was happening in serious music with the enthusiasm of the amateur, that physical thrill of plugging in a guitar and turning it up loud.”

Richard Strange is a few days shy of his 61st birthday; his band, the Doctors Of Madness, were perhaps the greatest rock group most people have never heard. Coming on the cusp of glam and punk, they were too arty and outrageous for either. Despite releasing three major label albums between 1976 and 1978, they never got the breakthrough they deserved and — ironically for a band as much concerned with visuals and theatrics as with music — hardly any performance footage of them remains. Until now.

There. Then. Now. Always, which Strange has just released as a DVD through his website, was shot by NBC in the winter of 1975; a candid, 25-minute documentary which the London band hoped would introduce them to America. Featuring live performances alongside interviews and backstage footage, the film was long considered lost. Even the band themselves had never seen it until, 35 years later, the original 16mm print was unearthed among their late manager Bryan Morrison’s effects. But it wasn’t quite the star vehicle they hoped for, as Strange explains…

Suicide City

“The film crew was with us for three months, and then went back to the States, and said it’s going to be broadcast on such and such a date, and our managers sent telegrams to the bosses of all the American record companies, telling them to watch this programme — prime time Saturday night — coast to coast, massive exposure. But we hadn’t seen the programme at that point, you see. We just thought, ‘What could go wrong?’ And we didn’t really get any positive feedback, and we thought, ‘What’s happening?’ And then it started to filter back that the thing had been a bit of a hatchet job; that rather than focussing on the band, they’d really rather focussed on the narrative of these two manager figures, who were seeing us as their meal ticket to millions. And that we’d been slightly duped.”

While not quite the stitch-up Strange suggests, the documentary does present the youthful Doctors as the mid-seventies equivalent of X Factor wannabes — all bad skin, naivety and seemingly misplaced arrogance, with Morrison and his partner Justin De Villeneuve as a two-headed Simon Cowell — cynical, manipulative chancers, engineering a deal on the basis of their managerial reputation rather than the band’s music. And yet, watching a bare-chested Strange blasting out a frenzied rendition of ‘Waiting For My Man’, or spitting the viciously languid ‘Billy Watch Out’ from behind wraparound shades, it’s hard to disagree with his assertion that the Doctors were progenitors of the punk explosion that ultimately killed them off.

“We were influenced by William Burroughs, The Velvet Underground, Bowie and Iggy Pop,” Strange recalls now. “And many of the punk bands loved us, and indeed supported us. The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Adverts, Joy Division; all these bands supported us because we were one of the only bands that were doing music that chimed with that aesthetic.”

Strange, whose talk show A Mighty Big If is launching on new online arts channel HiBrow TV, found watching the film a somewhat daunting experience. “It was quite scary to think, ‘Do I actually want to risk bursting the dream bubble?’” he admits. “Because when you get that distance from it you can think, ‘Actually, we were a really great band.’ So long as there’s nothing to prove to the contrary it’s quite easy to believe the myth. But I thought, ‘I will just take a peep.’” He pauses. “And I thought we were rather good, actually.”

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