Formed by former members of The Damned, Dead Boys and Sham 69, inelegantly wasted cult 80s supergroup The Lords Of The New Church’s career was defined by bad decisions, bad luck and debauchery. In 2005, bassist Dave Tregunna and late guitarist Brian James looked back on a band who were born to implode.
They were the first punk supergroup: guitarist Brian James from The Damned; Stiv Bators, snotty upstart singer from Cleveland’s Dead Boys; bassist Dave Tregunna from Sham 69; and Barracudas drummer Nicky Turner.
Yet beyond the starry novelty, The Lords Of The New Church were bringing something new and exciting to the party, and it wasn’t boxed into punk rock, sleaze, goth, glam, rock’n’roll, cowboy chic or any of the other elements that contributed to their sound and imagery. The Lords’ story is one of wonderful, wasted glory and unpredictability, while their repertoire matched power with melody, savagery with tenderness, and only ever asked one thing of its listeners: to ‘open your eyes’.
Their story begins in 1981. Brian James had met Stiv during the pioneering punk days of The Damned and The Dead Boys. The singer was known as Stiv Bators in Dead Boys; his real name was Steven John Bator. The pair subsequently became close friends and went on to play together from time to time. Leaving their respective bands, both James and Bators went solo.
Eventually Stiv came to London to form The Wanderers with Dave Tregunna and two other ex-members of Sham 69, since they shared the same manager. Bators spent his spare time writing songs with James. When The Wanderers split, Stiv and Brian put the embryonic Lords together with former Generation X bassist Tony James and drummer Terry Chimes, also ex-Clash. That combination didn’t work, and Tony James soon waved goodbye. At the same time, Dave Tregunna was telling his friend Stiv that he’d love to join the new band. On his first try-out, Tregunna responded to the new material so intuitively that he was recruited immediately.
Still, the straight precision of the drumming didn’t fit. The group wanted a more flamboyant player. They found Nicky Turner playing with The Barracudas at a psychedelic club in London’s Soho. “We saw Nicky and we said, ‘Can we steal you?’” remembers Tregunna.
He said yes. Turner had arranged an appearance for The Barracudas at a party held by a French guitar magazine in Paris, and he booked his new group in instead. It was their first gig, they had no name, they’d only rehearsed a few songs, and the chaotic scenes that ensued made for a remarkable debut. What with the in-flight champagne, the bar-hopping and a meeting with The Stranglers’ JJ Burnel, sharing his “lethal” bag of grass, the band enjoyed what Brian James calls a “totally shambolic weekend”.
The band decided on a name that reflected their concept of music as a contemporary alternative to religious tradition: a gathering together and a celebration. A central part of the philosophy was to raise awareness.
“You’re a lord in control of your own destiny,” explains Tregunna. “Think for yourself, don’t always believe what you read or see on TV; don’t blindly follow dogma. We believed very much in tolerance, in being individual.”
Miles Copeland, who managed James and ran the IRS label, took charge and the Lords went on the road, building a reputation for a spectacular live show, their instinctive rhythm section supporting guitarist James’s alternate aggression and sensitivity, and a glowering Bators’ supreme showmanship.
“We were our own little gang,” says Tregunna. “Us against the world. We had a really good crew and it was ‘the gang’ rampaging through Europe and America. They were brilliant times. Just about every gig, there was an outrageous exploit. Wherever we went, Stiv knew somebody that would turn up with alcohol and all these substances. We’d always have a party after the gig. The road crew would invite back lots of groupies – sex and drugs and rock’n’roll every night. The first tours were pre-Aids. A lot of sexual exploits were going on that seemed to tail off when everyone got scared of HIV.”
Bator was writing prolifically with James, and when the band went into the Farmyard studio in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, they recorded and mixed their self-titled debut album in two weeks flat. Released on IRS’s Illegal label in 1982, it was an inspired effort, and the dynamics, the dramatic energies and atmospheres, the colours, contrasts and the sheer panache of the songs still speak today of a band who were feeling up, however serious the lyrics.
The on-the-road escapades became more extravagant. The Lords and their friends Hanoi Rocks started a blaze in a Finnish hotel by throwing bottles of vodka into a roaring fire which they’d built themselves using smashed-up furniture. Again in Finland, Bators was arrested for attempted murder and locked up after waving a stiletto blade at a club bouncer. Bators, a softly spoken charmer and an accomplished practical joker and wind-up merchant, was eventually released without charge.
“Brian wasn’t Mr Innocent either,” ventures Tregunna describing a Norwegian hotel in which James somehow managed to break a marble table in half. “I think I might have been drunk,” chuckles James.
At the same time, the band were appalling respectable society in America’s Bible Belt. One sheriff advised them to get outta town for “looking weird” in Dallas, Texas, and in Birmingham, Alabama, protesters urged youngsters to burn their Lords records. After months of touring, spirits were still high as they returned to the Farmhouse to record their second album, Is Nothing Sacred?, again producing it themselves with an engineer.
Another full-band collaboration, it was released in 1983, and although it was generally slower and more experimental than its predecessor, with longer and less punky songs, it was still identifiably the Lords, refreshingly different to anything else that was going on at the time.
“We didn’t hit it really big in England,” reflects Tregunna. “We had a hardcore following, but it wasn’t on the same level as in America, France, Spain, Germany and Scandinavia. It would be nice to be more recognised at home for what you’ve done.” The Lords have remained a semi-legendary cult act in the UK; a dark and delicious secret shared by the lucky few.
A certain dissatisfaction started creeping in during 1984. “We’d been continually gigging and we’d seen so much of each other the gang thing was wearing a bit thin,” Tregunna remembers. “We were living separate lives, and everyone had partners who started being involved more. Especially, some of Stiv’s wives and girlfriends weren’t the easiest to be around. Various people were consuming vast amounts of legal or illegal substances. We’d never been accounted to, and we were told we were in the red big-time.”
The sessions for the third album, The Method To Our Madness, were unusually strained despite some moments of hilarity, often arising from Bators’ pranks. The Lords had agreed to use a producer to find a harder, more metallic edge, and they collaborated with Chris Tsangarides in a studio in the south of France. It was a beautiful location and the local wine was wholeheartedly enjoyed, but it was all a “terrible, terrible idea”. According to Brian James: “Chris didn’t know how to handle us, and he was such a lazy guy. We were lucky to come back from that two weeks with even a drum track.”
Released in 1984, it was a disappointing album, although When The Blood Runs Cold, I Never Believed and the title track survive as true Lords highlights.
Meanwhile, Stiv Bators was causing concerns. “I always knew that Stiv was the kind of person you had to look after, like I promised his parents,” says James. “If he was getting into bad company, you’d try and steer him away. His dad said: ‘Keep an eye on him.’ That’s what I tried to do as long as he was living in this country.”
Bator’s friendship with Finnish glam heroes Hanoi Rocks was becoming strangely entangled. “That was a soap,” declares James. “It was becoming unhealthy. I couldn’t do anything about it.”
First, Bators’ wife Stacy enjoyed an affair with Hanoi frontman Mike Monroe, whereupon Bator fell out with Monroe. Stacy then took up with Hanoi guitarist Andy McCoy. “Stiv gave her Andy, and then Stiv got all chummy with Mike again. They shared a flat together,” says Tregunna, summing up a bizarre scenario.
Bators’ claims to have set his wife up with McCoy seem to have had more to do with bravado than reality. “Stiv said it was OK for Stacy to go on holiday to India with Andy McCoy,” says Tregunna. “Stacy said they were just good friends. We went away on tour – but Stiv told Stacy he was coming back a day later than he actually was, cos he was sure he would find Stacy in bed with Andy, which is what happened. After that, Stiv became a bit depressed and disillusioned with things. The thing with Stacy destroyed a lot of his confidence. He wasn’t his usual, cheerful, buoyant self. He was very mixed up.”
“He was heartbroken,” concludes James. “I think he gave up hope after Stacy. That really hurt him so much.”
Living together, Bators and Monroe fell into a routine that further isolated Stiv from the Lords. “They’d stay up watching movies for three days and then sleep for two days,” says Tregunna.
In the wake of Hanoi Rocks’ split, Bators and Monroe formed a band called Beauty & The Beast, and with the latter occasionally played sax with the Lords.
After a Japanese tour, the Lords decided to confront label boss Miles Copeland about their financial situation. “We agreed we’d have a bottom-line meeting with Miles and put all our beefs to him,” recalls Tregunna.
Brian James wasn’t unhappy with the state of play: “We didn’t get a lot, but at the same time, everybody got their money every week. I couldn’t see that we could be making much more than Miles was giving us.”
Tregunna felt the rest of the band let him down and capitulated with Copeland, causing a bit of resentment and conflict. It didn’t help when they recruited a second guitarist, The Dirty Strangers’ Alastair Symons, an old schoolfriend of James’s.
“He wasn’t the best guitarist in the world, but he was a good drinking buddy for Brian,” remarks Tregunna.
“Absolutely,” agrees James, admitting that there were piss-ups “the whole damn time”.
Brian’s wife Minna acted as “a nurse” when she joined him on the road, helping to moderate his drinking. He explains: “She kept me occupied between the soundcheck and the gig. We had a great system. We brought backgammon with us. We’d still be in the bar, cos I didn’t like sitting in rooms, but you’d drink one drink instead of five.”
Dave Tregunna was becoming more disheartened, especially when Copeland persuaded the Lords to cover Madonna’s Like A Virgin. He says: “We’d been so strong, so close for three years from 1981, and I just felt like things had moved on and changed.”
It was the final straw – he left the band. The Lords appointed former Sham 69 tour manager Grant Flemming on bass and they carried on touring Europe and America. At the end of one American tour in 1986, Nicky Turner elected to settle in LA, where he had fallen in love with Splash! star Daryl Hannah’s best friend. The rest of the band, bar Symons, stayed on too.
They spent three months there before calling it a day. They played a final tour, in which the Lords were tour-managed by a guy on the run from the Mafia and, at one gig, were pursued by a gang who shot Bator with a BB gun. Then they split up.
Months passed. “Stiv seemed to have come out of his fog,” says Dave Tregunna. “He was being a lot more positive, and he wanted to get the Lords back together, this time without Miles.”
Tregunna had originally left the Lords to join The Cherry Bombz, a band formed by Hanoi Rocks’ Andy McCoy and Nasty Suicide, and fronted by Anita Chellamah of Toto Coelo. She’d previously had a fling with McCoy – by this time married to Bators’ ex-wife Stacy.
Tregunna: “We went to LA and Anita was in tears. She said she was still in love with Andy, and Andy was there with Stacy. So the tour was a bit weird. Andy ended up kicking Anita up the behind several times on stage, saying she was singing out of tune. Billy Idol was there and he said to Anita: ‘Let me take you to Ibiza.’ And they went away together. That was the end of The Cherry Bombz.”
Dave then played with The Dogs D’Amour while working on a couple of projects of his own, and had formed a new rhythm section with drummer Danny Fury. Bators, James and Tregunna regrouped with Fury for the second coming of the
Lords. “It was lovely to be playing with Dave again,” remembers James.
“It was quite fun,” affirms Tregunna. “We had a second lease of life, although we never got to record a new album. Stiv had then met his second wife Caroline, this French girl, and he was bringing her on tour.”
“I didn’t like Caroline,” states James. “I didn’t think she was good for Stiv. She loved the glamour of being with a rock’n’roll star, and her scene was junkies. I saw sadness there. They moved to Paris, and I couldn’t look out for Stiv then. The Lords wasn’t the same. We tried a few ideas, but it was like flogging a dead horse.”
Stiv and Caroline were consorting with Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee Ramone, renowned smackheads, and Bator was swilling tequila – just as James had renounced hard liquor in favour of beer and wine.
“We couldn’t rescue him,” says James regretfully. “He wouldn’t listen. He was fucking himself up on purpose so he couldn’t do our shows, just to go back to Caroline and his friends in Paris.”
Claiming a back injury, Bator cried off a 1989 European tour while offering to show up for the prestigious London Astoria gig in May. The Lords, now without a record deal, couldn’t afford to pass up the tour, so James told Bators that he would look for a temporary replacement. Stiv said: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Perhaps he thought Brian was joking. He wasn’t: James took out an advertisement in Melody Maker and the band auditioned various singers. But none could compete with Stiv, and the tour was cancelled.
The Astoria show went ahead, though, and Bator duly turned up seeming pleasant, if distant. “It was a stonking crowd,” says Tregunna. “I remember thinking: ‘It’s really good, and Stiv’s back!’”
During the encore, an aggrieved Bator stalked the stage baring his T-shirt to each member of the band in turn. Printed on it was the Melody Maker ad. He then announced to the audience that he had been betrayed and was splitting the group.
James: “When we got backstage, he’d already fucked off. I thought: ‘It was a great stunt, a good ending, but you could’ve told us!’ Our sell-by date was long past. I felt let down that he couldn’t be honest with us. I expected to see him a couple of weeks later – throw our arms around each other. That, unfortunately, never happened.”
On June 3, 1990, Stiv Bator died in Paris. Various questions surround his death, although the official explanation is that he passed away at home in his sleep after being hit by a car.
“Stiv and I went out for a meal together when he next came to London after the Astoria, and we made our peace,” says Tregunna.
For Brian James, there was no such closure: “There’s still that unresolved thing where we haven’t had the last hug and a drink. But I’m sure he still had the huge place in his heart for me that I had for him. I was very, very sad when he died.”
At the end of 2001, Brian James and Dave Tregunna reformed the Lords with a line-up incorporating dual vocals and guitars – a different identity to Stiv Bator version. The new material was convincing, but serious internal conflicts and impracticalities of two members living in San Francisco and Jacksonville,Florida, resulted in the band being put on the back burner two years later. James and Tregunna continue to play and record together, and they don’t rule out the possibility of a resurrection, some day.
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 75 (January 2005)
