As I was telling Pearsall at the Society of Dilettanti Xmas lunch: the music biz is a bigger plague on humankind than monkeypox. Coke-bloated liggers, pissers and kiss-me-arses, all the way from Bandcamp to the BBC.
Behold: a decrepit necropaedophile fumbling in a teenybopper’s drawers on TOTP – yet the cameras roll on! A ragga producer hires gunmen on mopeds to deliver overdue royalties to a struggling MC – a payment delivered in HOT LEAD. Just as ugly: a camel-faced cunt who edits ‘The Quietus’ phones three non-white industry contacts to ask
Huurrggh…can I still say Mark E Smith hollering about n*****s on ‘The Classical’ is trés cool without getting cancelled? It’d make a phone scammer blush.
What we need is someone to tell the music biz to PISS OFF. A BIG PISS OFF TO THE MUSICK BIZ.
#100: HONEY BANE: “YOU CAN BE YOU” EP
65p? You can’t even get a bag of Space Raiders for that now.
Anyway, here’s 15-year old punk rocker (and future
Big Jugs pin-up) Donna Boylan, AKA Donna Kebab (she should have stuck with this one), AKA Honey Bane, effortlessly knocking out a 3-track EP while on the lam from juvenile detention centre and sofa-surfing her way around East London and the Essex border.
Now, I come from the civilised part of town – North-West is the best (even Colindale) – but I’m no stranger to Dissensus’ beloved East End. My Auntie Birdie lived off Vicarage Lane in Stratford with her miserable husband Fred. So back in the ‘80s, after I’d nagged my mummy to take me to the London Dungeon for the umpteenth time, back when it was a fleapit on Tooley Street (and full of waxworks of peasants with boils being eaten alive by rats, and snarling, blood-splattered Boadicea grinding a massive fuck-off pike into a Roman soldier’s windpipe), we’d travel over to Stratford afterwards for a sandwich and tea. Then my mum and aunt would decamp to The Bay Tree for scotch and dry gingers and a gossip, dragging me along, so Fred could watch the racing in peace. Squinting though the mists of time, I can just about pick up The Bay Tree again…signed pic of Bobby Moore hanging over the bar…cheese and onion rolls by the drip trays…fags smouldering in Charrington ashtrays…Lennie Peters lookalike in a yellow sweater, holding court at the bar…going outside to pat the brewery dray horse, on the rare afternoon our paths collided…and Funny Charlie with his porkpie hat, pencil ‘tache and flash suit, flirting with all the women, spoiling kids rotten with packets of crisps and creased-up banknotes, guffawing away like life couldn’t touch him. I went back to The Bay Tree in 2002 with a mate from Woodford and his wife, and it was crap…just aluminium-strip tables with Smirnoff Ice promo flyers dumped over them.
The A-side’s the EPIC melodrama
Girl On The Run – best thing she ever did, I reckon. I still love the intro to this and get goosebumps when the bass kicks in: something about it conjures up pre-CCTV London for me. Teen runaways were a moral panic back in the early ‘80s, as was child abduction (you can get a sense of the vibe in the ’83 film
Runners). I dunno: you wash up on this shithole planet, innocent as a lamb – then, four news reports later, you realise a load of perverts want to snuff you out. I once asked my dad:
why do people snatch kids? I knew not to get into some weirdo’s motor, but
why did they want us? What was their end game? “SO THEY CAN STICK THEIR PENIS UP YOUR BACKSIDE,” my dad tutted, as if I’d asked him why vampires have sharp teeth. But how was I supposed to know? And why did grown men want to
wee in children’s bums? Should also mention that
Girl On The Run is the only punk song I’ve ever heard that features a
woodblock solo, which you never got with Black Flag.
It's all about the A-side, but the B-side’s not too shabby:
Porno Grows is like some sort of seedy jazzy tune with fuzz bass and Honey Bane decrying porn and Soho saunas. There’s a dumb line that might get her into trouble now (and doesn’t make much sense) but
Porno crashing down on London is a good lyric – think Debord would have liked it. The EP ends with
Boring Conversations, a more straightforward punk rant about having to spend the morning with the truant officer.
Oh yeah, members of Crass play on it.
After this she did a reggae 7”, then signed to EMI, who repackaged her as a sort of
Toyah-goes-Selecter act. It was awful. Her penultimate EMI single saw her go electro (ironically titled
Wish I Could Be Me). It’s not the worst thing she recorded, but sounds like some moron at the label had heard Paul Haig's
Blue For You and decided she’d be a juicier cash cow if they marketed her as the girl version. On that 7" front cover shot, Honey looks like she’s just had ECT, with the sort of thousand-yard stare you’d expect from someone chewed up and spat out by The Biz. After fleeing that cesspit of corruption, spreading your growler for
Razzle readers must have felt sublime.
Decades later, some sleuth (not me!) stumbled across an online forum of, er,
vintage wank-mag connoisseurs, and unearthed a thread of lovingly scanned Honey Bane scud pics, including a few where she was pregnant – which he then leaked to an anarcho-punk message board (didn’t go down well). Yes, I’ve seen them, and no, I didn’t. She also starred as an inmate in the dreadful film
Scrubbers (billed as ‘the female
Scum’). All I remember about it is a girl getting hit with a bucket of shit, and Pat Butcher in a tracksuit.
Will bow out by acknowledging the
other East London blonde bombshell: Sam Fox, who also signed her first record deal at 15 and made bank from her tits, but hit jackpot doing it. But Fox was from Mile End: a bruiser capable of holding her own against the sleazebags in The Biz, and supported by a family…something Boylan, as a frequent ward of the state (and later ostracised as a ‘sell-out’ by her former punk pals), lacked. Though now at least her best record’s forever immortalised…on the only forum that gave Paul Hotflush a nervous breakdown.
