The Axemen’s Y2K Blog

Reprinted with kind permission of Andrew Schmidt, http://mysterex.blogspot.com/
Originally posted on Mysterex Friday, 25 January 2008
Original Article: http://mysterex.blogspot.com/2008/01/jon-segovia-on-vacuum-volkswagons.html

Jon Segovia, country picker, family man, Anarchist, session player for hire, onetime Axel Grinders and Shaft guitarist and Vacuum bassist talks to Andrew Schmidt.

He’s the man responsible for The Axel Grinders’ hardest moments, Don’t Hurry, Be Sappy, and, I Don’t Wanna Know, and some of the finest records of the 1990s via The Axel Grinders, Shaft, and session work for the under-rated Greg Fleming.

He’s Jon Segovia, in the beginning plain John Markie, just another teen-punk, who after playing in a Gisborne punk outfit called Leprosy lit out for Auckland before moving to Christchurch to attend art school.

There he saw a brilliant by-product of punk, the Vacuum, an eerie guitar band which spawned Bill Direen, Allen Meek, and The Terminals axis, Steven Cogle and Buck Stapleton, and seemed to plug right into that crusty southern cities mystical underbelly.

Segovia: “The songs stood out, but the thing was, they weren’t like anybody else. Most of the other bands were trying to be like an overseas bands. These guys were totally original. Their recordings don’t sound like the Velvets to me. They didn’t think – ‘how do we get a Velvets guitar sound ?’ They were definitely aware of pre-punk punk. These guys imported records themselves. Buck Stapleton did. He was a watersider. His father was one.

“I’d been in Christchurch less than a year the first time I saw them. I was blown away. I thought they were fucking amazing. Heard the bass player was leaving and…”

Markie played bass in The Vacuum from 1979 to the very early 1980s, when Direen, organist Alan Meek and drummer Malcolm Grant split to form Kaza Portico. The only recorded evidence of this era turned up on Split Seconds, Direen’s 1984 collection which included Vacuum-era recordings. Markie played bass on Inside and Remember Breaking Up, recorded at the converted-garage studio of Robbins Recordings.

Segovia took two of Direen’s best compositions, Girl At Night and Bedrock Bay to his next band, The Volkswagons, who’d been running at the same time as the latter-day Vacuum.

Segovia; “We started it to back this guy we’d met. John Throufull from the Hawkes Bay. He was older, eccentric. I don’t think he’d played in bands before. His nick name was Johnny Devo, given to him by Johnny the Slasher, a Christchurch identity who used to slash himself on the dancefloor – which I fortunately never saw – he used to pin badges to his chest – a total utter punk.

“We did some of John’s originals and a whole bunch of 1960s covers. An Italian guy played bass. I played drums for them originally. Then we got Norman Dufty on drums. “We played the Victorian Coffee Gallery, the only late night joint in Christchurch. Everybody would go there and get really gone. The Volkswagons would play there quite regularly. When Norman came in on drums, we were going to make it a regular rock band and do pubs. We ended up having this big argument because Johnny Devo wouldn’t tell us how many times he did things in a song. He thought we should just be able to peel it. He walked out.

“Stefano left the country and Blitz (Martin Ellis) played bass. He was from Gisborne. Never played before. No one took it seriously. I wouldn’t do it now. But we’d do things like go tripping all night and stay up all the next day and do a gig.”

They played the Gladstone on May 13, 1982 with The Pin Group and 25 Cents. A reviewer noting the “three piece who did Louie Louie, Gloria and assorted originals in a quiet Velvets sort of way.

“With the addition of vocalist Liz Wyllie, the V’dubs stared to write originals, and recorded a song for the fated Gladstone compilation, intended to highlight the strong Christchurch original music of the early 1980s.

Segovia; “The two women who booked the Gladstone at the time, Rose and Laura, were going to put out a compilation album and got everyone to record. We were one of the first to go into Nightshift studios and start recording a song. The album got canned. Arnold Von Bussell (Nightshift engineer) later erased the mastertapes.

” Segovia, Blitz, and Dufty meanwhile were busy backing Christchurch rock n roller Ritchie Venus (real name – Michael J Braithwaite) as the Blue Beetles with Roy Montgomery on occasional backing vocals:

Segovia: “Roy told us about this guy, said, he’s got all the licks down, does all these 1950s songs, but he plays with this really lame backing band. You guys would be good with him. Ritchie and Roy used to play the Solo Parents club in City Lights.”

Cue a strange marriage of two eras. Retro rocker Ritchie Venus backed by the offspring of punk. Having a singer up front and singled out in the Punk era, let alone a 1950’s style rocker like Venus was rare and decidedly uncool. They seemed more like a throwback to the cute end of the mid-1960s garage era, than the latest wave of the punk assault on the music industry.

Segovia: “The act was based on 1950 and 1960s covers with own stuff thrown in. We did a couple of really good shows at the Gladstone. When Blitz went overseas, we kind of dropped it, but we got offered a Troggs support in the South Island. Mick Elborado (Scorched Earth Policy/Terminals) joined on bass for the tour. We carried on playing with him over the years.” With Segovia on bass and a drummer, Venus would also play pubs.

Ritchie Venus and The Blue Beetles would release two singles, Bleeding Heart (1981) and Candy, and two albums, Rebel Blood (1987), a collection of originals, and You Can’t Fight It (1989), a collection of 1950s and 1960s covers. ‘Bleeding Heart’ is the pick of the singles, a snide putdown of the liberal mentality (again out of sync with the times) armed with a rebel sneer and minimal backing from the Blue Beetles. It was one of the first singles released on the Flying Nun Records label.

It would be six more years before the best realisation of Ritchie Venue and the Blue Beetles’ creative partnership hit the record shelves. Rebel Blood, their 1987 debut effort for Campbell McLay’s Onset/Offset Records, mops up many of the group’s originals onto what is overall a patchy record plagued by thin sound and under-realised songs. Persevere. Amongst the Venus/Blue Beetles/Desmond Brice originals are two Christchurch classics.

The Legend isn’t as you’d suspect a tribute to some rock n roll legend (or a Venus self tribute) but a spooky Velvets chorder close kin to the Victor Dimisich/Pin Group/Bill Direen strummers. Desmond Brice has obviously had a big hand in this. Segovia likewise dips back into his Builders riff bag.

It’s as though Venus, Elvis/Devlin fixated retro 1950s rocker that he is, has suddenly woken up in early 1980s Christchurch, looked around and seen the factory streets of Addington instead of the lush Kentucky fields of his idol.

He stumbles across the railway tracks, his silver and gold lame jumpsuit and silver glitter boots in stark contrast to the greasy track grave, pushes open a factory door as an eerie guitar and heatbeat bass edges along a long factory corridor, finally coming level with an open door.

Inside is a huge factory floor crammed with weaving looms and defeated workers. The strumming builds and the idol sings, not a Memphis drawl, but a sound from the deep determined heart of this English city on the South Island of New Zealand. And the words – how Brice got the acid sceptic of Bleeding Heart to sing this heart tugging Marxist lament is probaby a story in itself, but he does, and it’s a sound straight outta the soul of Christchurch.

Me, I stand alone,
in the heart of this factory,
I swear uneasy tuce,
with the captains of Industry.

But this solider is a pilgrimto the stations of the cross,
Is this life any kind of life for people like us,
Is this life,
any kind of life at all…

In contrast, the chorus is pure Elvis.

I am the legend,
and the legend never dies,
but if you listen to closely,
sometimes a legend cries.

I suspect the hard drinking Blue Beetles were more comfortable in the cheesy early afternoon lounge bar atmosphere of Rebel Blood, an arrogant strutting ode to a dissident spirit which is all seedy 1970s lead and churchy organ shimmering straight outta 1967.

Through Ritchie Venus, Segovia hooked up (as bassist) with New Zealand’s most famous veteran rocker, Johnny Devlin, New Zealand’s Elvis, for a South Island tour.

Segovia: “I thought it would be cool to meet this guy who was the big Kiwi rock n roll star of the 1950s, and that he’d tell us all kinds of cool stories and shit, but he was a pretty glum kinda guy, at the time anyway.

“We played Oamaru to hardly anybody and Devlin got up and said “it’s really good to be here in Timaru.” He was pretty down. It seemed like he didn’t give a shit about music at all, certainly what he was doing. He didn’t seem into it at all. He’d been a big star in his time and here we were playing these little country pubs where we went over quite well, but for him it was a come down.”

Fade to 1983 where Segovia is playing out with a new outfit powered by the songwriting partnership he’d developed in the V’dubs’ later days with early Pin Group bassist, Exploding Telephone Booth, and Hard Sum, Desmond Brice, who as L R Chamberlain had contributed lyrics to the MacGoohans and Ritchie Venus songs. In The Chance he played bass and Jeff Carey drummed.

Segovia: “In those days I was either on the dole or on a PEP scheme. Desmond Brice was in Hard Sums, and The Pin Group before they gigged. He still wrote lyrics. He was a Uni student.”

The trio recorded five Segovia/Brice compositions – Love Lies Bleeding/This Evil Dirge/The Scream of Engines/House of Secrets/Planes Over Thailand – for a Flying Nun Records EP release, which never eventuated. Segovia; “I told them not to release it. The band had split up, but Roger said he’d have no trouble selling it. In hindsight, I’m not happy with the songs.”

Love Lies Bleeding later appeared on a Krypton Hits compilation tape. The Chance lasted just over a year, and played only in Christchurch. Garden City music scribe, Michael Higgins, caught them at the Star and Garter and noted: “A constant stream of fast infectious metal pop songs.”

Next up was Swamp Beat, a covers band (who did Strychnine by The Sonics) and played a handful of gigs, including a weekend in Dunedin.

Elsewhere, Segovia’s ears and fingers had tuned to another genre – country music. He’d checked out Merle Haggard when he was in Gisborne, and thought it was good, but never really pursued it.

Segovia: “When I met Phil Ascott (upright bass), Simon Kearns (snare), and Simon, the other Conn, we had no deep knowledge of Country. But it went down a treat. We got on a PEP scheme and anywhere from played rest homes to big pubs and went over in all circumstances. Simon wrote us a lot of songs and Steve McCabe wrote us some.

“They hosted their own Cooking with The Connoisseurs cooking show on student radio for a year, where they would pretend to cook, then play one song live on the air. Lawrence Lens, later of Nux Vomica and The Portage, made a doco film of The Connoisseurs that was never finished.

Come 1987 and Segovia got a call from a mate asking him to play a party. Skate punk was big, so having not heard the genre, The Axel Grinders – Segovia (guitar), Graphite Lubejob (Kearns), Phil Ascott, Dwayne Zarakov, and later, Celia Patel – spiced up some Beach Boys songs with skateboarding references and began a notorious turn of the decade reign as one of Christchurch’s top groups. But that is (was) a story better told elsewhere, notably in The Jewish Beatle, Dwayne Zarkov’s fanzine.

© Andrew Schmidt – 1995