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Apocalypso: Watch Stiv Bators & the Lords of the New Church implode during their infamous final gig
07.30.2018
06:10 pm
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Although they never really seemed to quite enter the posthumous pantheon of great late and lamented post-punk bands like, say, the Gun Club, and are unlikely ever to inspire any sort of critical reappraisal, the Lords of the New Church—a “supergroup” formed in 1981 by Dead Boys vocalist Stiv Bators, original Damned guitarist/songwriter Brian James (he wrote “Neat Neat Neat,” “New Rose” and most their first two albums) and the insanely tight and powerful rhythm section of former Sham 69 bassist Dave Tregunna and ex-Barracudas drummer Nick Turner—are, in my opinion, pretty worthy of it. Well at least their first album is.

The group’s rhythm section originally consisted of Generation X bassist Tony James (later of Sigue Sigue Sputnik) and two-time Clash drummer Terry Chimes (he was a member of the only band that matters both before Topper Headon joined and after his sacking) and the Damned’s Rat Scabies had also played drums for a single gig before Turner replaced him. The classic line-up of the Lords, a brash, trashy punk tornado of a band in the mold of the Stooges and the Dolls had all the subtlety of a flame thrower. I saw them live on their first tour and they were utterly awe-inspiring. Their messianic revolutionary street gang warlord “message” was original for the time and spoke to kids like me who were tired of their parents’ religion during the early Reagan years, an epoch that felt like the end of the world was just around the corner from a nuclear attack launched by a senile Republican president…

Perhaps sniffing something similar in the air, the first Lords of the New Church album was re-released by Blixa Sounds Records last week as a deluxe two CD edition along with a blistering 1982 live set included. I’ve had a review copy for about the past two months and I must say, hearing that album again for the first time after… what… 36 years… every single note and every word was still etched in my memory like something by the Stones or Led Zeppelin. That album—practically every single song—is fuckin’ catchy. These riff-heavy songs stick in your craw like the catchiest things on the Nuggets comp and indeed they cover Balloon Farm’s “A Question of Temperature” so this isn’t exactly a coincidence that one might note this. After all those years, it sounded really really good to me and once The Lords of the New Church went into my car’s CD player several weeks ago, well, I still can’t find any reason to hit eject on it. It’s a short album—just over 30 minutes and a frantic burst of energy from the start to finish—and I’ve played it over and over and over again and I’ve yet to grow tired of it. If you fondly recall this album like I do—I mean, to be honest I had practically forgotten that it had ever existed—or even if you’ve never heard of it, I highly recommend it to you either way. It’s an unsung classic and it’s really fucking good…

After that first one the Lords got a bit too Billy Idol meets Hanoi Rocks for me and I stopped following them.
 

 
Now here’s a tale about the end of the band: The Lords were dropped by their record label, IRS, in 1986. They got a new drummer and continued gigging around England and Europe sporadically for a few years. During one show at London’s Astoria Theater, Stiv—a physical performer who once became unconscious and nearly died after a theatrical onstage “hanging” went awry—badly injured his back. The band was set to play another show at the Astoria on May 2nd of 1989, but Bators was apparently not being very cooperative and Brian James placed musician wanted ads in various UK music papers to find someone to replace him.

Bators heard about the “NAME BAND” help wanted ad and he was furious. With a black felt-tipped marker he reproduced the ad large on a white tee-shirt, and agreed to perform with the band at the Astoria not letting on that he knew about the move to turf him from the group he led.

During the encore, Stiv comes out with the tee-shirt on, making sure that both the audience and his fellow band members can clearly read it.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.30.2018
06:10 pm
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Wendy O. Williams, The Misfits, Black Flag—collect ‘em all with these vintage punk trading cards!


 
Totally in love with these cheap little vintage punk rock trading cards. Today we truly live in a post-punk world! Chain gas stations sell Misfits Zippos to oblivious rednecks! Hot Topic has monetized every band under the sun by slapping their logos on everything short of your first-born! Isn’t there something kind of quaint about this modest old school attempt to capitalize off punk fandom? The awkward little captions, the trademarks and copyrights over what I’m almost sure are fair-use press photos—it was a more innocent time of hucksterism!

I assume the cards didn’t move that well, considering these all came from 1981/82 editions of Punk Lives magazine (forget the copyright, most of these bands didn’t even exist in 1978). Perhaps whoever thought them up overestimated the archivist tendencies of early punk rocker, but I like the kitsch of such obsolete tinpot swag. Note early incarnation of The Cult with fresh-faced Ian Astbury; and Mark Chung and FM Einheit, later of Einstürzende Neubauten, back when they were in the Abwarts.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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03.26.2015
10:03 am
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Stiv Bators, pop crooner
11.19.2013
04:18 pm
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The late Stiv Bators is equally well known for his leadership stints in pioneering rust belt punks The Dead Boys and trans-oceanic glam/goths Lords of the New Church, but in between those bands, Bators briefly attempted a career as a pop singer, more or less in the “Paisley Underground” vein.
 

Was every L.A. rocker issued a Rickenbacker back then?

That effort began in 1979, when he recorded a remake of the garage-pop gem “It’s Cold Outside” as a single for Bomp Records. This choice may have been an overt nod to Bators’ Northeast Ohio roots - the song was written and originally recorded by The Choir, a precociously popular band of Cleveland teenagers who would go on to form the much more successful Raspberries in 1970. Check out Bators’ version and compare with the original.
 

Stiv Bators - “It’s Cold Outside”
 

The Choir - “It’s Cold Outside”

Stiv positively nailed the song, did he not? The sound is as far from The Dead Boys’ tuneless glory as it is from the Lords’ preening Batcaveisms, but still, he was really great at it. This poppier phase, though brief, lasted long enough for him to make the album Disconnected, also on Bomp. Though it leans a hair more towards punk rawness than the single’s overtly jangly pop-psych, Bators continued to prove his mettle as an interpreter of garage classics with a fantastic cover of the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night.”
 

Stiv Bators - “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”
 

 
The entire album is worth a listen. Much of it was written by Blue Ash refugee Frank Secich, and it comprises some of Bators’ most accessible work, including great tracks like “A Million Miles Away” (not the contemporary Plimsouls song) and “I Wanna Forget You (Just The Way You Are).” And while you’re listening, get a load of this review of the LP comparing Bators to Tom Petty!
 

Stiv Bators, Disconnected, full LP
 
Bonus: enjoy “Stiv-TV,” a wonderful full-length interview from 1986.
 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.19.2013
04:18 pm
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Dead Boy: Stiv Bators talks about his onstage near-death-experience (and love), 1988
08.27.2013
10:22 am
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After Bators injured his back, Lords of The New Church guitarist Brian James secretly put out an ad for a new singer. When Stiv found the ad, conflicting sources say that either Stiv or James wrote it verbatim on a t-shirt and wore it onstage for a gig. For the encore, Stiv fired the entire band.
 
Stiv talking about when he actually died for a minute after a routine performative self-strangulation went awry (don’t you hate it when that happens?). If he hadn’t pissed himself, alerting bandmates and crew members that something had gone wrong, he might not have lived.

As Bators (who will be portrayed in the CBGB movie by this guy) is carried into the backstage area after a Lords of The New Church show, he is a complete physical wreck, barely able to stand. He’s revived by a security guard and his girlfriend, who he openly adores. An incredibly sweet guy by most accounts (as you can see in this interview with Brooke Shields, or this heart-wrenching eulogy from Iggy Pop), Bators was also clearly a romantic, professing his love in the most naked and emphatic way.
 

 

 

Posted by Amber Frost
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08.27.2013
10:22 am
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Lords Of The New Church and the seduction of the innocent
03.04.2012
05:07 am
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Stiv getting the V.I.P. treatment at The Starwood, Los Angeles. Photo: Jenny Lens.
 
Lords Of The New Church appearance on this 1982 edition of Nickelodeon’s ‘Live Wire’ is really quite extraordinary. Stiv Bators seems in a fugue state (probably hadn’t slept) as he talks about dreams, trance writing and the mystical act of creating music. And the young female audience not only gets it, they’re intrigued and curious. As Edgar Allen Poe is evoked, a sweet and acrid scent of blossoming gothettes fills the air and the cathode ray tube transmitting the vibe flickers like the shadows of falling angels bisecting the rays of a dead moon. Yes, these pubescent blond women will be going home and dying their hair jet black tonight and in the afternoon when they wake they will see themselves as they truly are: trash, beautiful unadulterated trash, and they will go forth and become slaves to the Lords of rock and work in strip joints to buy their heavy metal lovermen new guitars and tight leather pants. Yes, ‘Live Wire’ was the secret spawning ground for a generation of enslaved rock bitches. Nickelodeon, the Devil’s network

In the mid-80s my band was on a tour of West Coast clubs that was one day behind The Lords tour of the same. We’d arrive the day after The Lords had played the club the night before. As part of Stiv’s stage show he would place his head in a noose and swing out over the audience. The following day when my band would arrive at the club there was usually a piece of cut rope still dangling from a ceiling beam. Like Hansel and Gretel, Stiv had left his trail behind him, a lethally impotent necklace of hemp  

Stiv Bators was one of the sweetest men I’ve ever known. He was fearless, reckless and foolish. He thought his body was immortal but a taxi cab in Paris proved him wrong.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.04.2012
05:07 am
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‘Very close to salvation’: Birthday boy punk-daddy Stiv Bators vs. the Rev. Dr. Hands

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Steven John Bator (a.k.a.  Stiv Bators) and his Dead Boys blammoed out of the post-steel paradise of Cleveland and landed in New York’s East Village to help jump-start the punk movement in the bowels of clubs like CBGBs. Soon after the Boys broke up in 1979, Bators formed the post –punk supergroup Lords of the New Church with the Damned’s Brian James and Sham 69’s Dave Tregunna.

That was the band Bators was riding in 1983 when L.A. artist Jeffrey Vallance—who’d scored a miraculous gig as a host of MTV’s underground music showcase (yeah, something like that actually once appeared on MTV!!) The Cutting Edge—grabbed him to “debate” the head of the Southland’s Last Chance Rescue Mission, whose name happened to be, yes, the Reverend Dr. Hands.

As you’ll see, Bators took the path of least resistance, but this segment stands as a fun, somewhat campy artifact of the other side of the Reagan ‘80s. Seven years later, Bators will have become a literal dead boy at 41 after getting hit by a taxi in Paris.

He would have turned 61 years old today.
 

 
Bonus clip after the jump: the Dead Boys give CBGB’s the “Sonic Reducer” in ‘77…
 

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Posted by Ron Nachmann
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10.22.2010
06:36 pm
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