When Sigue Sigue Sputnik burst on to the scene in the mid-80s with their futuristic-rockabilly anthem Love Missile F1-11, they left audiences bewildered and enthralled. The jet-spiked, new-wave agitators exploded the pop world. All of a sudden they had a debut album, Flaunt It, produced by the ‘father of disco’ Giorgio Moroder, and were hob-nobbing it round LA with the rich and famous.
At the heart of it all was guitarist Neal X, who has since worked extensively with Marc Almond and formed the “nearly all-girl” outfit The Montecristos. Most recently, Neal has teamed up with Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats and Phil from The Polecats to form a new fun-time quiff-rock supergroup, Starcat.
Ahead of their UK tour, including a date at The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, we jumped on a zoom call and took Neal back to his roots – to those wild-eyed days of the 80s when music and fashion entwined to create a force bigger than life itself.
DS: Neal, thinking back to those early days with Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which gigs stand out for you?
Neal X: “The very first proper London gig we did, we played at The Electric cinema on Portobello Road. We were the opening act for a movie. We got to choose the movie. We wanted to have Deadly Weapons with Chesty Morgan, where she murders people with these enormous breasts. We thought that’d be quite Sputnik, that or a Russ Meyer film. Eventually we had a real S&M film called Maitresse. That’s when I realised the power of having Magenta [Devine] as a PR agent, and being in a band with Tony James, who had been through all that with Generation X and the punk movement.
“Tony was in the band Chelsea before. Him and Nick Jones knew everyone – journalists, filmmakers, writers and everything. So we had this kind of stellar audience of people, that you normally wouldn’t dare speak to. Johnny Thunders was in the front row handing out flowers to people. Totally surreal. And I remember Rob Dickens, the Head of Warners, he came down. He sent us a note later, saying, ‘I don’t get it. The singer can’t sing. The drummers are shit. The guitarist doesn’t play three quarters of the time. I think you’ll be huge, but it’s not for me.’ We thought that was really funny.
“Another really memorable gig was when we played Le Vie En Rose, the Paul Raymond venue. He came to the show, the King of Soho. Tony and I used to go and have a drink with Paul Raymond on a Friday night if we were going out.
“Another was the day we signed to EMI. We had booked a gig at a place called the People’s Club in Paddington, which no longer exists, unfortunately. It was a blues place, run by this guy called Count Suckle, a 20 stone black guy. It was really only black stuff that happened there – reggae nights and parties and stuff. I went there with Billy Currie from Ultravox. We stumbled in one night during Carnival. It was both really intimidating and really fun and friendly and welcoming. We liked that juxtaposition. And we said to the guy we’d like to play there. It holds 400 so we sold 400 tickets. When we tried to get 400 people in, there was no chance. They got 200 in and the rest were up the stairs, hanging off the rafters, hanging off the lights. The guys from EMI, who were giving us a ginormous cheque that day, came to the show. It was very busy so we went to the pub next door, but then they weren’t let back in. It was too full!”
DS: Amazing stories. That first London gig, when you played before a film, that’s really interesting, because it feels like Sputnik wasn’t just the sound, it was a very visual thing as well, an experiential thing.
Neal X: “Yeah, it was an experiential thing that we were after. We wanted to play in different venues. We didn’t want to go to The Marquee. We never played The Marquee. I didn’t play Dingwalls until years later. We were young, we had this real energy to find new ways of doing stuff. In the 80s, you had to create a unique identity and a unique sound. That all kind of went with the dance music craze. It was then about wanting to sound the same, so that you got played on the dancefloor. Frankly, if you tried to dance to a Sputnik record, you’d probably break your legs. So rather than copying Bowie or the Velvet Underground or the New York Dolls or punk, we went back to Elvis and got ourselves a synthesiser.”
DS: With Sputnik, you can totally see that early rock thing coming through into more 80s instrumentation. Do you remember a moment you first thought ‘bloody hell, this works, this is actually really great’?
Neal X: “Absolutely. I totally remember the moment. Tony had gone out for the day. I thought, bugger, Tony’s not here to play the bass line. Well, I’ll play what he would have played on a synthesiser and that was pretty much the sound of Love Missile F1-11, the first Sputnik single.
“We used to play the tape of our demos in the shop in Kensington Market that [Sputnik singer] Martin Degville had. People would either come in going ‘What’s this? It’s fantastic. I’ve got to see this band’ or they would go ‘Please can you turn this horrible racket off? It’s really disturbing me.’ So we really felt we were onto something a bit special.”
DS: Another key element there is the right mix of characters. You’ve worked with a number of musicians. I wanted to ask you, which ones you immediately found a chemistry with?
Neal X: “I’d say, with Marc Almond, that was extraordinary. Rob Dickens, who was the head of Marc’s record company, said, ‘I want to put you two together. Marc needs some of your pop edge’. Well, I thought, he’s doing brilliantly without me. But anyway, we got together. Marc said ‘I’m into Elvis, Donna Summer and T Rex.’ I though ‘Great, I’m your man’. We started work and wrote four songs in two days and we played those numbers for countless years at festivals and shows. It was an instantaneous, great songwriting partnership and relationship.”
“I’ve been really lucky but it doesn’t just fall into your lap. You have to work at it, you have to be in the right place at the right time. I just think there’s rules to how you behave in rock and roll. You know, turn up on time with a smile on your face and a positive attitude, and that’s half the battle. That’s how I’ve managed to work with really good people for the last 40 years, because I’ve tried to keep that ethos in my head the whole time.”
DS: It sounds like the new band is the epitome of all that, playing with people that you really connect with. How did Starcat come together?
Neal X: “Obviously, I knew the Stray Cats. I was a fan. They were fantastic. They exploded the scene in the early 80s with that punky rock and roll. Everyone loved them. It was a real shot of adrenaline. And I’ve met Slim Jim a couple of times through the years. We’ve got mutual friends. Glen Matlock is a big friend of Jim’s, and I’ve been working with Glen for a while. But we met at one of these 80s festivals, the Let’s Rock Festival, a couple of years ago. Jim watched the little show I was doing, where I do one long version of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik song. And he said, ‘that’s really great, your singing’s great, your playing’s great’. We share the same agent, who said ‘Listen, if you came to me with that line-up, you and Slim Jim, there’s legs in that, I could certainly get you some shows.’”
DS: So you’re booked to play a bunch of independent venues on this UK tour, including The Trades Club. But this isn’t your first time at The Trades? You’ve played the venue with Marc Almond before?
“Yeah, we played a warm up at The Trades Club for Marc Almond’s tour in 2015, for an album he made called The Velvet Trail. We loved it. The crew hated it, because at that time, there was no lift in there to help lug all the stuff upstairs. But we loved it. Marc and I thought it was super cool, because it reminded us of all those small venues we played when we were starting out. I think Soft Cell and Sputnik had very much a shared experience of that, starting out in small clubs, doing the circuit and getting bottled off a lot of the time. Then, yeah, Marc and I put together a kind of sleazy, garage rock band called The Loveless, and we’ve played the Trades a couple of times since. And it’s always great to be back in Yorkshire, isn’t it?”
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