Adverts - One Chord Wonders

Played out over a brief, intense and tormented span of just three years, the story of the Adverts is that of the greatest protagonist among the "minor" bands of the great British punk-rock season. In the vast and multifaceted landscape of the London scene, the Adverts were the leading exponents of a more "sentimental", more intimate and introspective strain of the punk movement - no less energetic for that. The band was conceived around the end of 1976, when Tim Smith and his girlfriend Gaye Balsden, both from Devon, students and classmates at art school, decided, after witnessing one of the early, fiery performances by the Sex Pistols, to move to London to live out an adventure: starting a band. Smith, who had already had experience in previous bands, renamed himself "T.V. Smith", took on the role of singer and convinced his friend, a huge fan of Iggy Stooge, to learn to play bass; not long after, with the arrival of Howard Boak on guitar and Laurie Muscat on drums, the Adverts were ready for their debut, which took place at London's Roxy Club in January 1977 for a meagre fee of 10 pounds. Right after their second gig, held in February 1977 again at the Roxy, the band signed a deal with Stiff Records; in April came their historic first single, "One Chord Wonders": without question, one of the greatest punk-rock singles of all time.

“I wonder what we'll play for you tonight”: so began TV Smith in One Chord Wonders (“Meraviglie di un solo accordo”), continuing: “I wonder what we'll say back to you when you say: we don't like you, go away…”. It seemed like the staging of a dream, or rather a nightmare: “I wonder what we'll do when things get bad, when halfway through our favourite song we look up and the crowd has gone…”. The song ended by obsessively repeating the bitter realisation: “The wonders don't care… we don't give a damn”. In this song, the Adverts seemed to stage, in a self-ironic and meta-musical way, through their own experience, what during the punk era often constituted the relationship between musician and audience (and which, deep down, also mirrors the essence of much 20th-century art): the artist, destined to be misunderstood by the audience, seems able to maintain with it only one possible relationship, that of clash, opposition, mutual alienation. Punk often claimed its innovative scope precisely by reconsidering this “negative” approach, turning it into something “positive”: musical enjoyment also happens through antagonism, provocation, estrangement, even mutual indifference between musician and audience: the wonders don't care… we don't give a damn.

And it was precisely by ignoring the audience that the Adverts took their first steps at the Roxy Club; in those years, the venue represented the proving ground for emerging bands, the place where everyone was given at least a chance to emerge from anonymity, to prove they really had something to say: those famous fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol talked about. From that very first performance, it must have seemed to the few onlookers that the Adverts had a lot to say, even though they weren't yet masters of their instruments. But the truly important thing was to act, to try despite everything: “We had no idea whether it would work or not, but we gave it a go”, TV Smith recalled to Jon Savage a few years later. “We were in a hurry because we wanted to do it: even if no one else had tried, we would have done it anyway”. His was one of the many bands formed after seeing the Sex Pistols on stage and being struck by them: suddenly, a great hunger for novelty was in the air in the capital, and countless young people felt the urgency to take an active part, to have their say: at that moment, punk rock represented the only antidote to the “boredom” of London youth, the last tool left to feel something genuine in an increasingly alienated society.

Music, the art of “becoming”, was the only means through which to represent a world that endlessly changes before the eyes of teenagers who, also living through the becoming of their own inner world, “see themselves as strangers” (Bored Teenagers). For many young people, the urge to start a band represented, first and foremost, the need to “be there”, to not passively suffer the course of events: from music as a vehicle of “expression”, there was a shift towards a conception of rock music as “action”. So TV Smith began singing in Quickstep: “I knew my youth wouldn't last forever… I knew a few chords and put a band together”. His only dream was to be a protagonist, to shine like a “star” if only for a day; well aware, as he whispered in Bombsite Boy, that “life flees fast, and does so without warning”.

In those glorious days at the Roxy and in the months that followed, the Adverts mirrored themselves in their own songs, the fleeting moment of fame they were living through, the anxieties and hopes that the future seemed to hold for them. By staging their own musical adventure, and, in a track like “One Chord Wonders”, even the single performance itself, their songs were conceived to live in the present, to capture the moment, to mean something only in the very immediacy of the act of performance. This communicative immediacy, which often led to favouring live performance over studio recording, was generally characteristic of the punk era, but with a band like the Adverts it seemed to become even more extreme; if it had to be a recording, one done “live in the room” was perhaps the only kind capable of conveying the immediacy of a live show, since, in an illusory way, it seems to capture its artistic unrepeatability: the Adverts, in fact, like several other bands of the time, recorded some BBC sessions under the guidance of John Peel. Of the four BBC “Peel sessions” the band recorded over their three years of activity, two were made in 1977, one in 1978, and the last in 1979: all four were posthumously gathered into a single collection, titled The Wonders Don't Care (1997).

In August 1977, in the middle of the hottest season of English punk, came the Adverts' second single: the release of Gary Gilmore's Eyes, backed with the intense “Bored Teenagers”, marked what was the band's moment of greatest glory and fame. The song was inspired by a real news story: in 1977, Gary Gilmore was the first man sentenced since the death penalty had been reinstated in California (actually Utah). The event caused a stir around the world, but what really caused a sensation was the fact that he opposed appeals for clemency and wanted to be executed.

Recently, in 2000, TV Smith recalled the genesis of the song like this: “one morning on my way to work I picked up an abandoned newspaper. There was an article about the killer Gary Gilmore, who was fighting to be put to death, despite attempts by liberal groups to postpone the execution. The article mentioned that he was donating his retinas, which would be removed after the execution and sent off to be transplanted into someone else, anonymously. I realised that, just as I was reading about that “anonymous” donation, whoever received the retina might read about it in exactly the same way. So I started thinking: what if, coming out of the operation, you began to suspect that the eye you'd received was a murderer's? The song came together quickly after those thoughts, and it suited the punk movement's “shock” ethic rather well, even though what I was actually raising was a more complex issue: the way we see the world can have effects on the world itself. It was the first existentialist punk-rock hit!”.

Gorgeous and vampiric, “Gary Gilmore's Eyes” was the only track by the band to break into the UK Top 20 chart, soon becoming a classic: it represented the band's biggest success and won them a sizeable audience, as well as considerable media attention. The group embarked on a frenetic run of gigs across England and Europe. Meanwhile, tracks like “One Chord Wonders” and “Bored Teenagers” began to be regarded as genuine generational anthems: the Adverts' rise seemed truly unstoppable. And yet, at the very moment the band had reached the peak of its fame, uncertainty about the future was increasingly taking hold in the minds of its members. In many circles, punk rock was by then giving way to “new wave”, a genre that seemed more in keeping with the rules of the music market: like others, the Adverts had realised that the only way to survive was to adapt to the changes, to follow the market's shifting tastes. Refusing to compromise, they knew there would be no future for them. And during that fateful '77, it was precisely “No Future”, the watchword of Johnny Rotten and his Sex Pistols, that echoed through London like a curse cast upon an entire generation of drifting youth; deeply caught up in this climate of unease, the Adverts took that warning to heart, but in their hearts it also sparked a vital drive, turning into the relentless, frantic need to fully seize the moment. “Life is short, don't throw it away”, Smith sang in the opening line of the already emblematic track No Time To Be 21, the band's third single and another milestone, though destined for lesser success than “Gary Gilmore's Eyes”.

Crossing the Red Sea With The Adverts, produced by J. Leckie, was the Adverts' first major album: released in February 1978, it was made up of eleven tracks, even though thirteen had been recorded during the sessions. Inexplicably, the album did not originally include the new version of “Gary Gilmore's Eyes”, which, as T.V. Smith explains, was meant to be included in the edition destined for the American market. A later reissue, as well as the one remastered on CD in 1990, restored the album to its original concept, adding two further tracks including, naturally, “Gary Gilmore's Eyes”.

Starting with “One Chord Wonders”, through the splendid “Bored Teenagers”, “New Church”, “On The Roof” and “Bombsite Boy”, and all the way to the apocalyptic closer “Great British Mistake”, Crossing The Red Sea With The Adverts is perhaps the ultimate punk-rock masterpiece: an exceptionally gripping, energetic and aggressive record that is at the same time harmonious and poetic, it deserves a place among the classics. What makes this album so special is the delicate balance between content charged with passion and emotion, and a form that is bare, essential, almost minimal. But the balance feels fragile and conflicted: the form seems barely able to contain an overflowing content, and the disproportion felt between the two generates a magnificent tension. Over a pulsing, relentless rhythm section, seemingly always out of breath, Boak's guitars are shrill, scratchy, dissonant, yet at the same time warm and enveloping. Gaye's bass has something dark and unsettling about it: sinister tolling notes that seem to come straight from the American underground she was so fond of, whose distant echoes resound on the record in “On The Roof” and, especially, in the brooding “On Wheels”. TV Smith's voice is at times a cry of rage, at times a sob, a whimper, a whisper, and, in a constant interplay of light and shadow, of vitality and despair, it guides us through the inner conflicts of a restless soul; the lyrics are lucid, written in a single burst. In them, Smith sang about his own life: what truly makes listening to “Crossing The Red Sea” so special is the constant sense that, beyond the music, one is in the presence of a genuine testimony of life. These songs hold the deep essence of an era, lived intimately by young people for whom punk rock was not about belonging to a movement, to a rock subculture, but rather a rebellion marked by youthful spontaneity and freedom from every cliché. “The only thing I really cared about was expressing myself”, TV Smith recalls. In the Adverts' songs, a kind of “perennial romanticism” emerges in images charged with great poetic force:

We talk about the whys and wherefores                                 

Do we really care at all?

Talk about the frailty of words

Is rarely meaningful

When we’re sitting watching the ‘planes

Burn up through the night like meteorites

We're just bored teenagers

Looking for love,

Or should I say emotional rages

Bored teenagers.

Seeing ourselves as strangers 

Alongside the charismatic, passionate frontman Tim Smith, another element of great fascination in the band was the presence of a young woman - an attractive one, no less - on bass. Gaye "Advert", as she came to be known, is remembered as punk-rock's first heroine: an essential role model for all who came after her, she played a decisive part in defining the role of women not just in punk, but in rock tout court. Sporting an intriguing look halfway between punk and the emerging goth aesthetic, and despite having forged an original style of her own and quickly become a genuine pin-up, idolised by countless boys, she always refused to let the audience's attention fix on her, to become a sex symbol at the expense of the band: almost always still and static during the group's many performances, she proved that it was possible to be an attractive girl and, at the same time, nothing more than simply a musician, an integral part of a rock band. And yet Gaye also represented something more, she was almost a metaphor: she seemed to embody that very youthfulness which the Adverts celebrated, and her beauty, like all feminine beauty, was inextricably bound up with the idea of fleetingness. Just as fleeting and transient was the Adverts' own glory. After the band split up, Gaye "Advert" went back to being an ordinary girl, gave up playing, and was never heard from again.

The final chapter of the Adverts' brief adventure was written in October 1979, the release date of Cast Of Thousands, the band's second and last album. It takes little to realise that the precarious balance of their debut had been irretrievably lost. Marked also by some lineup changes, "Cast Of Thousands" turned out to be a musical failure before it was even a commercial one. With the great season of London punk now spent, and with it the inner fire that had driven the Adverts, their second record was, by this point, an album going nowhere, with no future. Just as the Adverts themselves now had none: that same October, their definitive break-up became inevitable. This was the conscious fate of a band that, streaking like a meteor through rock history, rose as quickly as it fell: having lived it all too fast, the Adverts barely had time to taste glory. But they also had time to leave behind, in the memory of many, some of the most extraordinary pages of those years.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google