The Earls of Suave by Bal Croce.

 

The Earls of Suave were created by accident, I had no plans on having a band as I was pretty busy running my video shop in London’s Camden Market.

At the weekends me and my partner in the shop Mike Delanian (bass player with Gallon Drunk) would head to the pub at lunchtime with whoever had dropped into the shop, but because of the popularity of the Market, pretty much every pub from Mornington Crescent to Chalk Farm would be absolutely jam packed full and it would take for ever to get served. We tried loads of pubs, but with no luck.

Then one fateful day we braved a rather seedy looking pub on the corner of Inverness Street and Arlington Road, the Good Mixer. Arlington Road was dominated by this massive Dickensian doss house for the down and outs, and a hard core of these residents would head next door to the Good Mixer and drink themselves silly until closing time, then crash out in their doss house next door before repeating the exercise all over again the next day. As a consequence the Good Mixer hardly had anyone in it other than a dozen scuzzy alcoholics. We walked in across the almost black sticky carpet to the bar where we served straight away, sensation! The embossed red velvet bamboo wallpaper with a gold background impressed me. There was a guy with one leg in a wheel chair trying to get into the toilet, but his chair was too wide. I watched as he repeatedly rammed his chair into the door frame until he pissed himself in the chair and rolled himself back to the bar to order another drink, nice!

However there was a pool table that no one was using and on an inspection of the jukebox revealed a wealth of Elvis, Tom Jones and Dean Martin discs. We started to frequent this pub all the time befriending the lovely Irish couple who ran it Mick and his wife Pat. They let us bring more cool records in and added them to the jukebox. The place became my second home and tons of people from bands I was friendly with started drinking there too, Johnny who was at the time in the Headcoats, Miki from Lush, all of Gallon Drunk, Bobby Gillespie, Andy Hurt from Food records etc.

One evening there was a bunch of us boozing away and I had just got a round in for 6 or 7 people (which was expensive) and I said ‘you play guitar, you play bass, you play drums, I can be the singer and we can play here and get some free beer” and so the Earls of Suave were born.

Mike had a great gold lamé suit, which he didn’t have the nerve to go out in, so I appropriate it, worked out a set list of the stuff I was digging at the time and we were off and running.

Nicking the name from a Billy Childish song, I just needed to work out who was going to be in the band.

The original line up was Mark (from the Sting-Rays and Ug and the Cavemen) on guitar, Johnny who was really Trash Royalty having played in the Cannibals, the Vibes and Purple Things and the Headcoats on a second guitar. I had quite recently met Max who I had suggested as a drummer for Gallon Drunk, but I knew he played piano too, he was up for it and on bass I had Paul, who had been in the original line up of Gallon Drunk, but at the time was bandless. The original drummer was Bruce Brand who was in the Milkshakes and then a Headcoat. But he dropped out and we briefly had Brian Nevill, followed by Debbie Green (X-Men, Headcoatees). Finally we had Joe Whitney on drums who had played drums with the Sting-Rays when Alec moved to guitar.

Everything fell into place, Roger Armstrong (who was a director at Ace records and Big Beat) and Nick Garrard (Nigel Lewis and the Milkshakes manager) had started Camden Town Records and had just released a single by Dave Vanian and his Phantom Chords. They offered to release a single by us.

We recorded this first single of Sandford Clak’s A Cheat b/w Charlie Rich’s Who Will The Next Fool Be? at Toe Rag studio (It was the first record released that was recorded there).

 

 

 

We did play lots of gigs at the Good Mixer and did get lots of free beers (don’t you love it when a plan pans out) but we also gigged quite regularly at other venues, playing with the Cramps, El Vez,  Suede, Johnny Legend and a lot of gigs with Dave Vanian’s Phantom Chords.

 

A second single of Screaming Jay Hawkins’ In My Dreams and Oscar Brown Jnr’s Somebody Buy Me A Drink.

We then returned to Toe Rag to record the LP you should now hold in your hands, 17 tracks of love, heartbreak, drinking and imprisonment.

Sadly all good things must come to an end and work commitments and the start of my marriage made me decide to knock gigging on the head.

However Max took the band, became the frontman, renaming them The Flaming Stars and they continued a highly successful career, with many singles and LP’s.

Starting as a drunken idea in a pub The Earls of Suave snowballed into a great band, we always had great fun playing, as did the audience watching us (with the possible exception of the French audience of our final gig which I was a tad inebriated, and did the last number bollock naked with a cardboard box on my head!). Suave or what?......