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This is Philly around about the time he came up with the idea
to form The Hells. The girl next to him is NOT Ippy. It is someone else.
I first met my friend Philly Kev when he was living above a rock bar in Soho, London. We had mutual friends and a mutual interest in being scumbags so we used to hang out in his room and smoke opium that we got from Mo, an Iranian guy Philly (he’s from Philadelphia, USA) used to work with.
Now, not only does opium feel and taste really dreamy and super-great, it gives you these wide-awake dreams where you sit open-mouthed and come up with all these great plans for the future. I’d recommend it to anybody—only don’t blame me if you get addicted and start doing heroin (opium’s scary cousin) to top up the buzz. That can be dangerous.
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I remember one day we’d got through about a gramme of “O” (from £30 to £60 depending on the quality) and we’d had some nice coke as well so, as you can imagine, we were FULL of ideas and plans. We’d both just read the book Lexicon Devil about The Germs and we were talking about how when Darby Crash and Pat Smear formed the band, they didn’t have songs, or even instruments, but they would still print T-shirts and put up posters and tell everyone they were in this great band when in fact they were just a pair of loudmouth posers.
Funnily enough, Philly is a loudmouth poser and he’d just met a Spanish girl called Ippy who did this punk club called Teenage Schizoid. She had some good ideas about music and they looked good together so we started to tell everyone they were in this fantastic new band called THE HELLS (our first choice of name was The Black Privates) who were going to take over the world FOREVER! They made the logo like a pair of Ippy’s lips and then made a poster that looked like The Germs’ GI album cover (the blue circle on black) only it said The Hells “HI” (with red circle on black). Looking back now, it seems quite sad, but at the time it was funny to think up these things.
After a couple of months of lying to everybody they knew, Philly and Ippy sat down one day and actually wrote some songs which—amazingly given the circumstances—ended up being really good. They then auditioned loads of drummers but most were idiots. Then Philly’s boy The Captain left his group The Icarus Line and joined for a while and they recorded this EP which has just come out.
It’s Rolling Stonesy, balls-out, girl vocal garage rock like a lot of things these days but I love it because The Hells were never meant to exist other than to give Philly and I something to laugh about as we got high.
LITTLE SCRAPPY
The Hells’ debut EP is out now on Artrocker. I’m obviously biased but it’s good.
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