Zak?
N.S.: Zak was the boss. Same as Couling the lawyer said, our business is music, not morals. We arenât a bunch of kids whoâ
J.J.L.: Nevertheless, you feel defensive, understandably in view of whatâ
N.S.: You keep putting words into my head, things that were never there. I liked the boys and I liked Laura and I was only doing my job. I
made
them, Iâm proud to say. Look, itâs just we had a lot of crap all along, everyone exaggerating everything. Itâs all in the past, isnât it? You seem to forget weâre talking about the greatest success story the world has ever known.
Excerpt copyright © 1985 canadian broadcasting authority.
4
Zak Bedderwickâs narrative
We built the Bang-Bang into a great success story. Inevitably, some of us sustained bruises on the way, but that does not take away from what we achieved. Scandal still circulates about the names of Laura Ashworth and the Howe twins â inevitably, since from the start the public insisted on regarding the twins as sexual objects. My intention here is briefly to try to show how what happened between the young people involved was natural and perhaps inevitable, and how it contributed to the art of the Bang-Bang. I am not a music critic in any sense. I shall just point out what is there to be read in the lyrics as they developed.
This may be the place to admit that I may have been a little unfair to Laura Ashworth in the past. We have to be wary of permanent or semi-permanent female hangers-on because of their possible disruptive influence on our groups. But Laura was more victim than vamp or vampire, of that I am now convinced. In ways which I shall indicate, she served as vital catalyst in the success of the Bang-Bang. (I must add that because of an unstable home background she was somewhat unstable herself and some of her public utterances should be disregarded. For instance, the Bedderwick Walker organization did not dismiss her; she simply ran away from an emotional situation she could not resolve, following the Scandinavian tour.)
The other vital element in that emotional equation was Paul Day, our songwriter. He and Laura were deeply involved with each other. As can be seen from the lyrics.
Day was an undersized youth who grew up in a Northern town and was drumming with various groups by the age of fifteen. By the time he joined Gibraltar as drummer/guitarist, he had had songs published. He became chief songwriter for the Bang-Bang, and played guitar with them.
On and off-stage Day presented great contrasts. Off-stage, it was difficult to get a word out of him; he would slink by without speaking if he could. Get him on the platform and a different persona took over. He then became a great extrovert personality; his inspired performances were highly regarded. To my personal regret, he has since left our organization and gone solo. The last I heard of him, he was working in the southern United States.
To my mind, Dayâs silences reflected an interior dilemma. He came from a broken home and had been wounded in the process. This led him to regard the Howe twins with sympathy from the start. Whereas they suffered from ostracism by the other members of the group.
I would like to clear Nick Sidneyâs name. Heâs a nice man and I could not do without him. But the Bang-Bang were very difficult and it was hardly surprising that they got him down at times.
The twins grew friendly with Paul Day. A strong bond formed between them. Dayâs songs reflect increasingly the way in which their tormented inner feelings awoke a response in his own mind.
It was noticeable that Day resorted to sci-fi imagery to express the division he and the Howe twins experienced between themselves and âordinaryâ life. A fairly early song, âYear By Year the Evil Gainsâ, appropriates the title of an actual SF story: 2
City against city, town against town,
Song against silences,
My body against my brains
As
N.S.: Zak was the boss. Same as Couling the lawyer said, our business is music, not morals. We arenât a bunch of kids whoâ
J.J.L.: Nevertheless, you feel defensive, understandably in view of whatâ
N.S.: You keep putting words into my head, things that were never there. I liked the boys and I liked Laura and I was only doing my job. I
made
them, Iâm proud to say. Look, itâs just we had a lot of crap all along, everyone exaggerating everything. Itâs all in the past, isnât it? You seem to forget weâre talking about the greatest success story the world has ever known.
Excerpt copyright © 1985 canadian broadcasting authority.
4
Zak Bedderwickâs narrative
We built the Bang-Bang into a great success story. Inevitably, some of us sustained bruises on the way, but that does not take away from what we achieved. Scandal still circulates about the names of Laura Ashworth and the Howe twins â inevitably, since from the start the public insisted on regarding the twins as sexual objects. My intention here is briefly to try to show how what happened between the young people involved was natural and perhaps inevitable, and how it contributed to the art of the Bang-Bang. I am not a music critic in any sense. I shall just point out what is there to be read in the lyrics as they developed.
This may be the place to admit that I may have been a little unfair to Laura Ashworth in the past. We have to be wary of permanent or semi-permanent female hangers-on because of their possible disruptive influence on our groups. But Laura was more victim than vamp or vampire, of that I am now convinced. In ways which I shall indicate, she served as vital catalyst in the success of the Bang-Bang. (I must add that because of an unstable home background she was somewhat unstable herself and some of her public utterances should be disregarded. For instance, the Bedderwick Walker organization did not dismiss her; she simply ran away from an emotional situation she could not resolve, following the Scandinavian tour.)
The other vital element in that emotional equation was Paul Day, our songwriter. He and Laura were deeply involved with each other. As can be seen from the lyrics.
Day was an undersized youth who grew up in a Northern town and was drumming with various groups by the age of fifteen. By the time he joined Gibraltar as drummer/guitarist, he had had songs published. He became chief songwriter for the Bang-Bang, and played guitar with them.
On and off-stage Day presented great contrasts. Off-stage, it was difficult to get a word out of him; he would slink by without speaking if he could. Get him on the platform and a different persona took over. He then became a great extrovert personality; his inspired performances were highly regarded. To my personal regret, he has since left our organization and gone solo. The last I heard of him, he was working in the southern United States.
To my mind, Dayâs silences reflected an interior dilemma. He came from a broken home and had been wounded in the process. This led him to regard the Howe twins with sympathy from the start. Whereas they suffered from ostracism by the other members of the group.
I would like to clear Nick Sidneyâs name. Heâs a nice man and I could not do without him. But the Bang-Bang were very difficult and it was hardly surprising that they got him down at times.
The twins grew friendly with Paul Day. A strong bond formed between them. Dayâs songs reflect increasingly the way in which their tormented inner feelings awoke a response in his own mind.
It was noticeable that Day resorted to sci-fi imagery to express the division he and the Howe twins experienced between themselves and âordinaryâ life. A fairly early song, âYear By Year the Evil Gainsâ, appropriates the title of an actual SF story: 2
City against city, town against town,
Song against silences,
My body against my brains
As
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