Plan B – the archives 18: The Tronics/Les Zarjaz

From Plan B #25 – a special request from Sarah Datblygu. This is round about the best email interview I’ve conducted.

Music That Time Forgot Special: The Tronics/Les Zarjaz
Man, The Tronics were great: cardboard box drums, a few bare guitar lines and a rockabilly swagger, 16-year-old singer Ziro Baby inescapably cool in his mirror shades and lean, leather trousers: wiry and wired. “Strictly shark fucks under no manners,” an ice-cool lady announced at the start of his cult 1981 Alien seven-inch ‘Shark Fucks’, before Ziro launched into a typically deadpan exciting three-chord pop song.

Four singles and a flexi were released between 1980 and 1983, including the immortal shout-out ‘Favourite Girls’ – kinda like Television Personalities do Gene Vincent, but without any mess whatsoever. These followed a brace of cassettes, and preceded the excellent mantra-like 12-inch ‘Tranzister Sister’. There was also an album, the minimalist Love Backed By Force, which I found in a second-hand record bin for £2, round about the best two quid I ever spent, frankly.

All Ziro’s rock’n'roll songs were great, and he was accorded a degree of fame: then he went through a severe reinvention and resurfaced on Alan McGee’s Creation Records, shortly around the time of The Legend!, as Les Zarjaz with two, frankly incomprehensible baroque rock singles – which vied with my own for the honour of worst-selling record on Creation ever (least until that Kevin Rowland album came along).

And then…nothing. Ziro Baby just vanished off the face of the earth. Last I heard he was mining in an Eastern European country. So it was with some considerable excitement I received these replies a few months back…

Could you explain about The Tronics came about?
“I kept seeing this sign in my mind like joined writing on an old fridge in chrome letters saying Tronics.”

And where did Les Zarjaz spring from?
“One night I woke up with a group of baroquabillies standing around my bed. They said to me that I was the 13th Emperor of Rome. I didn’t have to do anything but I could continue to do whatever I wanted. They showed me that my brother Nero was the first truly great Rock and Roll star and why, and that no one has ever surpassed or even equalled him and why.”

What’s your fondest memory of the times (very early Eighties)?
“I don’t really know much. I kind of came in off the street and this is where I am. I found a devotchka to bang some drums and put out [1980 cassette] What’s The Hubbub Bub. People told me I should be famous but I don’t get well with famous, so Tronics was awkward the bigger it got.

“I don’t have many fond memories. I got shot twice, once in the lower part of my back in some dumb bizarre circumstance and another time inadvertently in the leg. I was stabbed a few times, once by some wacky dame with a broken glass trying to mark me so no one else would like me. Being ‘interviewed’ by the police waiting for me outside my apartment was normal.

“The best things for me have always been the feelings I get from people who like my music. At the time of recording ‘Tranzister Sister’ we had screaming girls outside the apartment. For an indie band who never hired publicity agents and who did not have the support of a major label I thought that was pretty cool. Devotchkas screaming ‘Shark Fucks’ at me on stage was a psychological dilemma. I thought it was amazing and unique but at the same time it terrified me.

“My place was full of people when I went to sleep, and when I woke up my place was full of a whole different set of people, many I didn’t know. A fanzine printed my address and phone number and things got worse. It got rough in the end and I had to move. That’s one reason why I have never mingled much ever since. I don’t mix well.

“It also came from an earlier incident where a girlfriend, I think she was a girlfriend, it only lasted a few days, maybe even hours, broke down and was taken to an asylum. I went to visit her the next day as I was concerned. I found her in the security wing and she had told other girls in there that I was Jesus. I saw them coming running down a corridor. It was like a dam breaking in slow motion or a group of wild horses running through a pass in a canyon. They were screaming crazy and heading for me. Lucky for me some nurses forced me out through some strengthened glass doors and locked it. The next thing they all hit the door that was now a glass wall, about two-feet from my face. I stood in the autumn wind and rain, leaves blowing around me under a dim outside door light watching them hitting the door screaming ‘Jesus touch me’ and things like that, playing with their groodies and being dragged off one by one by nurses. It all had an effect on me and I walked away.

“I am not Jesus. We whacked him back in the day for being a sensationalist reactionary. I am not a messiah.”

What were your favourite records back then?
“Anything with a hole and grooves really. I would listen to everything. Even Whistling Reg Harris and his Barking Dog. I could never make a list, most basically it might go something like Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, anything by Phil Spector, The Residents, Bolan, Ramones, Velvet Underground. I listened to and knew so many bands from that time. All of them were great. One that I particularly liked was Eric Hysteric and the Esoterics from Germany.

“I remember liking Red Ballune. I thought Lydia Lunch was the most amazing guitarist. I got to know her. I told her that I was amazed by her guitar and that I was a massive fan. She said that she didn’t like fans but preferred to be friends. I don’t think she understood that I only wanted to be a fan and didn’t want to be a friend. I’m a Rock and Roll fan.

“Another thing is that these groups and people are all from what most people would recognise as Rock and Roll. I have another life where the music I listened to then, same as today, is not from this time. I was into Domenico Scarlatti and Charpentier before anything else.

“I know the other things I mentioned may be more relevant to your readers but what they might not be aware of is that Baroque music is Rock and Roll in its most pure form. There is nothing else on the same level in Rock and Roll. When I was not listening to Little Richard I would listen to Palestrina and Monteverdi.

“I’m not talking middle class, snobby, crazy about the classics, Classic FM cal. Vivaldi and Bach were never middle class. Baroquabilly is for everyone not just rich people.

“The main reason I got into Clockwork Orange when I was 14 was that the main character, Alex, was this 14-year-old kid, listening to Bach and Beethoven and wandering wide in the night, with his Pe and Em telling him to itty of to skollywol in the morning with Alex saying not going today, got a headache, I’ll be all right as dodgers later. I have never been into Beethoven like that so much but other similarities to my own life took my attention. It was like the book was talking about me. I was the only 14-year-old kid I knew who listened to Bach, dressed in black and hung out at night. The morning skollywol ritual with my Em was identical.

“That’s why ‘Shark Fucks’ has more to do with Handel than might be easily recognised and why I eventually left the cocoon. Tronics was a pupa for Zarjaz.”

How important were the Eighties?
“Every truly great era has a music and art together. Art and music go together like cock in pussy.  Fifties, Sixties, the punk scene, but today I can’t think of anything. Some maybe’s but nothing outstanding. We have no Salvador Dali. We are only told what it is great and unfortunately many will believe it.

“In the Eighties people began to ask to see my CV. By the Nineties musicians were asking if I wanted to see their CV. We are living in a kind of cultural dark ages. Art and music is repressed, kept down and out in favour of acceptable stereotypes that other stereotypes relate to.

I have a distant memory of seeing Tronics play on a bill at The Venue, Victoria in around ‘82. Did Tronics play many big shows?
“Every show I do is big. In terms of size of venue, not that much, but at that time I don’t think people really thought in those terms. I mean on the independent scene that is. I don’t think big venues were considered or it came into our heads. It was more like having no distinct line between the band and everyone else.

“Some punk bands were making it big and big stars, but doesn’t that suck really? I think if you release ‘Shark Fucks’ it’s pretty certain you might not be asked to play alongside U2 at the stadium.

“I was outside of everything, had few clothes and no clothes in one piece, starving, out of my head and wandering around like the living dead with a guitar, but I was not a victim.

“At one time you needed to be black to be in Rock and Roll. By the end of the Eighties if you wanted to make records it was required of you to be milk white with a mock Seventies hair style, otherwise there was no budget for you. Many people asked me to do that and be that. They offered me heap big budget and big gigs. I turn down so many gigs.”

How does it feel to be revered as a cult?
“Serious and exciting.”

What do you do now?
“Some people say I spend too much time in the sea but I have several projects I am working on. I took some time out recently and this delayed the next Freakapuss album but I’m on to the release now. Other than that I study, collect Roman money and prehistoric dinosaur teeth, T-Rex, Raptor and Megalodon. I watch as many starry movies as I can, I like to drive at 30 kmh given there being no one behind me. I keep to the back streets. Now was that Barking Reg Harris and his Whistling Dog”

I’ve placed a link to the original layout here. I have a vague recollection that it might contain more quotes or is better-edited, or something. It was all very last minute.