In the doldrums of the late 1970s, young people everywhere were desperately searching for a band who could articulate their sense of alienation. For many it was The Clash, The Sex Pistols or Stiff Little Fingers who truly spoke for the nation’s disaffected youth. But there was a whole other oppressed underclass out there who didn’t have a band to rally round – that is, until The Members bounded on to Top of the Pops with their hit single The Sound of the Suburbs.
At last, here was a band who understood the plight of teenagers stuck in the purgatory of suburbia. Wracked with middle-class guilt, we felt excluded from the punk narrative because we never lived in tower blocks or sink estates. We were the sort of well-off w**kers The Undertones sang about in My Perfect Cousin, living in detached houses with driveways and diningrooms and even a garage to rehearse in. But with Sound of the Suburbs, we finally found a band who truly understood that suburbia could be just as much a rat trap as the inner city.
“If you look at the TV or anything, people from the suburbs aren’t cool,” says Members guitarist JC Carroll, who co-wrote the song with the band’s singer, Nicky Tesco. “We were doing a gig one time and all these young people came from the suburbs to see us and they weren’t trendy and they weren’t into London people. They didn’t have the right clothes and I suddenly thought, they need a song, you know? It turned into a real blessing because there were hundreds of thousands of people all over the country that really wanted to get involved in this movement, but they thought, well, it was only cool kids from the middle of the city that were allowed to even stand by the alleyway wall and have their photograph taken, and suddenly it empowered a lot of people, and it’s a really important song to a lot of people still, apparently.
“It’s a great calling card and it’s followed me my whole life. It’s a brilliant song that’s helped shape who I am, really.”
So, who is JC Carroll and why has he interrupted his holiday in the Isle of Wight to chat to The Irish Times? The multihyphenate guitarist-composer-videomaker is publishing his memoir, (Still) Annoying the Neighbours (taken from that memorable line in SOTS – “annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitars”), and will be launching the book in Ireland with a special gig in Dublin’s Wild Duck, where he will play a bit of punk rock acoustic guitar and no doubt regale the audience with tales from his short-lived success with The Members, his previous career as a banker (which inspired the band’s second hit Offshore Banking Business), his career pivot to run a successful fashion business (a rare case of a pop star claiming to have dressed rather than undressed Kylie Minogue), his all-consuming fascination with ethnic music and his move into composing film soundtracks (he played the accordion for Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp in Don Juan de Marco), and taking The Members back out on the road almost 30 years after their TOTP debut.
Hailing from Camberley in Surrey, The Members included singer Nicky Tesco and drummer Adrian Lillywhite – whose brother Steve Lillywhite happened to be a dab hand at knob-twiddling, producing The Sound of the Suburbs and their debut album, At the Chelsea Nightclub. In the book, Carroll notes that Surrey has produced some of Britain’s best guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Carroll wasn’t quite in that exalted company, but to many old punks his twanging guitar lines on Sound of the Suburbs are up there with the riffs from Layla and Whole Lotta Love.
He was named Jean-Marie by his French-Irish parents, which proved somewhat of a handicap growing up. “I went to an all-boys school and I was the only boy there with three girls’ names – Jean, Marie and Carol – and they tortured me at school. So when a boy called me JC, I clung to it like a liferaft. But it’s part of what made me tough, like Johnny Cash.”
Flush with the success of Suburbs, the band switched direction with “a reggae song about offshore banking and tax evasion”. It was a dubby takedown of the financial powers-that-be (The Boomtown Rats would do something similar on Banana Republic a year later), and though the fat cats weren’t exactly quaking in their loafers, Carroll reckons “it still resonates today. I did my bit for power to the people, I’d made my political statement. I used to work in a bank, and when I saw Bob Marley and Joe Strummer, I dreamed about writing a song that would tell the world about this injustice. One of the best concerts I went to was Bob Marley, and I realised that reggae wasn’t just about My Boy Lollipop. And I got to meet Joe Strummer, and of course he had a profound effect on us all.”
The Members decamped to the United States as part of what came to be known as the second British invasion and had an MTV hit with Working Girl, featuring a memorable video of the scruffy band members sponging off their preppie girlfriends (played by haughty hired models, who according to Carroll didn’t even speak to the band between takes). They released a third album, produced by Martin Rushent, who produced The Human League’s Dare album, and for a short while it felt like the world was theirs for the taking.
“We were pop stars in America for a while and they didn’t even know what The Sound of the Suburbs was. They thought we were an eighties college radio band, sort of like a U2 thing. So yeah, we had a career in America and Australia. But we didn’t realise that this was only going to last for about 18 months and then it was back to where we were in the eighties with shoulder pads and pop music and synthesisers. But it was just a really idealistic time to be alive.”
A lot of British and Irish bands have set out to break America, only for America to break them. After a final gruelling alcohol- and drug-fuelled tour of the US, the band schlepped back to England, broke, dejected and all but forgotten in their home country. The band broke up in 1983 and Tesco went on to star in Aki Kaurismaki’s 1989 film Leningrad Cowboys go America, about a fictional Russian band on tour in the West, then went on a real-life tour with the band, Commitments-style.
Meanwhile, Carroll was at a loss what to do with the life that stretched ahead of him. He took on various day jobs and even considered going back into banking, but felt he had burned his bridges with his reggae-tinged anti-banker anthem. So he did what any sane punk-rocker would do: bought a wheezy old accordion from a mate for 80 quid and taught himself to play it. Suddenly, a world of musical possibilities opened up for Carroll and he found himself going down the rabbit hole of ethnic music history. He was unsurprisingly drawn to the chanson of his French heritage and the traditional music from his Irish side. He busked in the streets with the accordion, which sorted him out for beer money, though he felt a twinge of shame when The Members’ former soundman Thomas Dolby, now a synth-pop superstar, passed him one day.
It was the accordion, oddly enough, that opened the door into writing and recording film music, says Carroll.
“I went to a party and I met this brilliant film composer called Michael Kamen, and he said, I’m making a film with Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando about the greatest lover in the world, Don Juan, and I said, well, I have an accordion. And accordions are great for movies because anyone can play electric guitar, but with an accordion you can impersonate an Irishman, a Frenchman, a Mexican or any ethnic group. It opened a door to a shared past that I have.”
Carroll’s film music credits include Johnny English Reborn, documentaries on Joe Strummer and Suggs from Madness and, more recently, Crock of Gold, Julien Temple’s film about Shane MacGowan.
“It wasn’t really about Shane – it was about the Irish in England. It was a real pleasure for me because I’m second-generation Irish, and Julien said, you’ve got to use the music of this ancient harpist called O’Carolan. So I went and researched that and it was a brilliant little trip into Irish music. I’d had Irish music in my house as a child. Our culture was represented by a pile of Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem records in the corner, that was my mother’s pile. And my father’s pile was Edith Piaf and various other things. So I have the Irish tradition and I have the French tradition and I have the punk rock tradition, and that makes up what I am.”
Another left turn, this time into the rag trade, came in 1988 when he and his first wife opened a boutique in Notting Hill Gate in Central London, which at the time was not yet the trendy boho quarter mythologised in the Richard Curtis film. “But the boutique took off, and then this young Australian pop star came over and they sent a stylist into our shop who said, ‘We want an outfit for this woman called Kylie Minogue, she’s making her first record.’ So we said, what size is she, and we threw some things in a bag and sent them the stuff and, lo and behold, we were on the cover of her first album. All stuff from our shop. We also did the same thing for U2, believe it or not. The Hassidic Jewish hat that your man Bono wore came from our shop. We used to look far and wide for interesting things, and we found this round hat called a hoiche.”
As he entered his 50s, Carroll made the seemingly crazy decision to reform The Members and go back out on the road. Tesco rejoined the band for a short while, but mostly it’s been Carroll handling lead vocal duties. “I’d worked hard to bring up a family and my wife and I had divorced. And I gave up my rather lucrative clothing business in central London and decided to go back to my first love. So I gave the house to my ex-wife and with one leap I was free. So we put the band back together and we began to tour. We went around the world and made some more records, and people still loved the song. And I can make people who are 55 to 65 feel like they’re 17 or 18 again, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s like having your own time machine.”
Like many working musicians in Britain, Carroll felt the double whammy from Brexit and Covid-19. He kept himself busy during lockdown by hosting an online Saturday night music show, Solitary Confinement in the Suburbs, and he applied for an Irish passport so he could continue to work and perform in Europe.
“If you’re a working musician, you can buy breakfast on what you make in Britain, but if you want to make real money you have to go to France, Germany, America. For any business to be able to take off you have to be able to go abroad. It must be the same in Ireland.”
The book is more than a memoir, says Carroll. “It’s the story of a 40-year love affair with music and how one song could shape your life.” With a cast of characters including Depp, Brando, Kylie, Martin Amis, Rat Scabies, Glen Matlock, Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders, (Still) Annoying the Neighbours is replete with true tales of success, failure and reinvention, all told in Carroll’s easygoing style – like chatting with him down in the pub.
“There’s a story – I was doing a gig the other day, and I was really stupid, I left the accordion on the back seat in the car and I went into the shop to pick up something, and I came back and of course the car window was broken and there was another accordion in there.”
Well, maybe not entirely true.
JC Carroll launches (Still) Annoying the Neighbours with a gig, reading, Q&A and signing at The Wild Duck in Temple Bar, Dublin on December 5th at 4pm.
