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Charles Homan, 2004
I came across Third World War in the spring of 1979 - just as Margaret Thatcher was being first carried across the threshold of number 10. It was my girlfriend who saw the album in a second-hand shop and suggested we buy it. The front cover showed a picture of a baby crying and in the mouth of the crying baby, another crying baby. On the back was a picture of two hard nuts, looking out through a wire fence like a couple of convicts - to add to the mystery the labels on the record were blank and someone had written “Side 1” and “Side 2”, in thick black felt tip on them. We bought it for a £1 or perhaps £1.50 and took it home.
And what did we find? A dirty raucous noise that did not seem out of place in 1979 but I guessed would hardly have been flavour of the month in 1970 when it had been recorded. Lyrics that were genuinely shocking - and still are, not because of the use of obscenities, there are none, but because of the bleak, violent world described in the songs. All in all a little historical treasure.
And then buried in the middle of side two was the track that has remained a favourite song of mine - a desert island disc - ever since: “Stardom Road”. Where all the other tracks on the album were coarse and grungy and dirty, this one was graced with beautiful flamenco guitar and stunning strings - a grown up ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sound - and on top, one Terry Stamp, singing in his thick, almost indecipherable voice. I had never heard anything like it - and still haven’t.
'Well, I kicked on my mule, and he obeyed me,
Everyone else snuffed and delayed me.
They said you ain't got the voice,and you ain’t got the chords,
Living in Bayswater on floorboards.
And you won’t, no you won’t, no you won’t, take that load
Up Stardom Road.'
“Stardom Road” 1970
And that was it, end of story. I found the second album “Third World War 2” in another second-hand shop a year later, more of the same violence and bleakness and this strange dense but articulate voice - songs called “I'd rather cut cane for Castro” and “Hammersmith Guerillas”. It didn't seem to quite have the focus of the first album but was still unlike anything else I had heard. But as far as I could tell there was no epilogue, no ‘to be continued’... I listened to the albums from time to time - played “Stardom Road” to people when I got the chance and wondered who Terry Stamp and his mate Jim Avery were, and what had become of them. For all I knew they were probably dead! The only other clue I had was that Dana Gillespie had covered 'Stardom Road' on her Bowie produced album “Weren't Born a Man”, which I had never heard but remembered seeing in bargain bins in the record shops in the mid 70’s.
But now, as they say, the story can be told. Terry Stamp lives in Los Angeles where he has lived since a 1975 holiday across the water turned into a new life. Jim Avery, the bass player and co-songwriter, the guy with his hand clutching the wire on the photo on the back of the first album, lives in London. They are both very much alive, still making stunning music and very happy to tell the story of “Third World War”.
Stamp spent much of the sixties as the resident bass player at the Wimbledon Palais. When that shut in 1967 Stamp put his hand to songwriting, and one of his songs was picked up by the manager of Schroeder Music, John Fenton - he had a stable of writers that included Jerry Donahue of Sandy Denny and Fairport fame. John Fenton later moved on to Essex Music, in Oxford Street, the music publishers of, amongst others, Bowie and Bolan.
Around this time Avery was introduced to Stamp and they began writing together. Fenton came up with the idea of “Third World War” and Stamp remembers him telling them to write songs, but different from any thing that Fenton had ever heard, “at that time it was all Flower Power and I recall thinking 'Oh Jim and I have got songs for you, Jack.'”
In late 1970 they went in to record the first TWW album at Island Studios which according to Stamp was in the basement of a church. The band was completed by Mick Leiber on lead guitar who had played with Rod Stewert on “In a Broken Dream” and Fred Smith drums. Tony Aston came in and added some piano. Fenton ran into Jim Price and Bobby Keyes in a Soho Club, who were working at the time with the Stones, and invited them on board.
Stamp tells how the string arrangement on “Stardom Road” came about. Avery brought in Nick Harrison who wrote the wonderful string arrangement. “I still don't know what to make of him, though he was a true tortured soul, I remember when these old timer union string guys were putting on the strings to Stardom Road, they got into an argument with each other about Nick’s string arrangements, got into it about an E flat, Nick just straightened it out. I really do not know where he came from....”
The album was released on Fly in 1971, Marc Bolan’s label. (It’s catalogue number is HIFLY 4, T.Rex's Electric Warrior, HIFLY 6: the single “Ascension Day” was Bug 7, “Hot Love”, Bug 6.) Third World War and their album were paraded on their mules to a predictable chorus of indifference. Some critics were hostile - Roy Hollinworth wrote:
“They are mechanically heavy, they blast about like shrapnel - their music having the effect of mustard gas. It's dire, badly played...in one word. My suspicions about London audiences have been confirmed - I get the feeling that if you revved up a 1958 Morris up on stage, you'd get an encore, or maybe two. Bands like this need no more words said of them. The last word I shall write is dire.”
But they did have their admirers. Mick Farren said of them, “I have a strong feeling that, along with Hawkwind, Pink Fairies and a few others, they could do a lot to move rock away from self-consciousness and artiness and bring it back to the street corner and parking lot.”
As Farren was writing, Bowie was cutting off his hippy tresses and putting on his Ziggy Doc-Martens to shake things up. Stamp ‘didn't have the look and he didn't have the size’. Five years later the Sex Pistols borrowed their game plan and hit pay-dirt. By then Third World War were history...
The albums have been re-released over the years - on vinyl and later CD - and have been rediscovered from time to time. In 1977 Richard Williams wrote a long piece in the Melody Maker. He said of the first album, “'In 1970 it had its merits, overlooked at the time, but in 1977 it appears even more extraordinary, by virtue of the prophecies it held.”
In 1994 Steve Albini, producer of Nirvana wrote, “This album has the best title of any record ever released, and it represents a bizarre and inexplicable tangent of my taste - extreme English boogie rock. This record gets the nod for its abrasive personality, impressively rude guitar playing and no-holds-barred radical communist lyricism.'”
As for Third World War, after the second album they broke up and moved on. Stamp made one more record before moving to the States. The title track, to my mind, is another “Stardom Road” moment - it is reminiscent of songs that Tom Waits would write later on in the seventies - but with a peculiarly English feel. Stamp recalls;
“Fatsticks got me the A&M deal on its own. For the demo I recorded it on a Phillips cassette player at home, that was it, no big production or anything, I gave the cassette to Roger Cook and the first company he took it to (A&M) snapped it up.”
Like “Stardom Road”, it keeps company on the album with a collection of raw rockers and once again Stamp mixes a brew of violence and darkness with his dirty voice and marvellous lyrics:
So the last time you phoned you were running at large
Brainless in Hamburg you reversed the charge
You rambled of the brass of the street's and city parks
Of the Reeperbahn nights and the poxdoctors clerks.
Oh Fatsticks, Hey Fatsticks if you hear the record play
It works out expensive communicating this way
I ain't playing no numbers, ain't laying none down, no
Fatsticks, It's just for a night on the town
“Fatsticks” 1975
The album was recorded with a whole host of familiar 70’s names - Herbie Flowers, Tony Newman, Mike Moran, Ollie Halsell. Stamp remembers the sessions well;
“Flowers and Newman were pretty much fresh off the Bowie "Diamond Dogs" tour of the States, I recall them discussing it because they were only paid union rate, and Bowie put that Live Diamond Dogs tour album out... anyway, Flowers was bitching about it and saying they should be receiving record mechanicals and how he was going to the Musicians Union about it... yeh, good luck, I was thinking.”
The album was finished, Stamp went on holiday to America and never came back. When I asked him if he knew where I might get a copy of the album he told me he was looking for one himself! A candiate for re-release if ever there was one. Both he and Avery have continued to make music - Stamp formed a group in the early 90’s called “The L.A. Rockmotor” who made some albums and played live around L.A. Stamp’s voice is still striking, like a weird cross of Johnny Cash, Don Van Vliet and Tom Waits, but distinctively his own. More recently Stamp & Avery recorded an acoustic album with Steve Albini in his Chicago studio. Their new songs straddle the Atlantic - one moment Stamp sounds like he’s heading down Nashville way, the next he’s back down in the gutters of West London, like a snotty nosed Mr. Hyde to Ray Davies’ Dr Jeckyll.
'My assassin wear a silk dress
Yes the last known flesh address was in the heart of Flemish Belgium
My assassin drive a dodge dart, studies concentric forms of cave art,
And the ancient idling engines of the past
Take your shot there, take your cut there
Bring a quart of Mann's brown cause I've known to take a drink
Where the wild witch knocked her teeth out
Well come and get me, come and get me, I'm all yours
Come and get me, I'm yours for the taking'
“My Assassin” 2000
Stamp and Avery are in the process of putting together new material and are looking to get their music across to the wider audience that has previously ignored them. Perhaps this time the world is ready for it...
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