The Story of The Members by Adrian Thrills, February 2006

The Members were one of the wittiest and most imaginative guitar bands to emerge in the aftermath of the 1977 punk explosion. Having got together in the sleepy suburbs of Bagshot and Camberley, they were too far removed from the new wave's fashionable London cliques to take their place alongside such pioneers as The Clash and the Sex Pistols.

When they did break through, with Sound Of The Suburbs in 1979, they did so not by singing about high-rise living, dole queues and anarchy, but with a song that wryly reflected their somewhat more mundane suburban roots.

This May the band release a definitive best of album that traces the group's history from early, punk-inspired releases on the independent Beggars Banquet and Stiff labels through to their chart heyday with Virgin and beyond. It spans six years and six different labels, and features the original (and best) version of Sound Of The Suburbs - a punk classic now available for the first time in 25 years.

With their style built around guitarist Jean-Marie 'JC' Carroll's nimble, twangy riffs and frontman Nicky Tesco's cutting reflections on suburbia, The Members were the new wave's great satirists. They sang not about the 'big issues', but about a series of pathetic characters and trivial, everyday frustrations that anyone could relate to. In doing so, they became a part of a great British pop tradition which dated back to Ray Davies, of The Kinks, and now stretches forward to encompass Mike Skinner, of The Streets. As Nicky Tesco once told me, 'we stand for the social underdog'.

The Members were also noteworthy as one of the first British guitar bands to fully incorporate reggae into their music. Just as blues had been a key influence on white rock in the Sixties, reggae was the alternative genre of choice for the punk generation. And while the late Seventies contained plenty of shining examples of the punky-reggae party - The Clash covering Junior Murvin's Police And Thieves, The Special AKA launching 2-Tone - The Members were one of the prime movers in the era's cross-cultural interplay. As Neil Spencer, writing in NME, said of them in 1978: 'Of the many rock bands co-opting reggae into their act, few do so with as much love and style as the The Members.'

'My rhythm guitar playing is definitely reggae-based,' JC told me when I interviewed The Members for NME in 1978. 'It's not the same as blasting an audience with full-on rock riffs. It gets them moving in a different way. But, having said that, we're trying to play reggae in our own style. We're not singing about Jah Love. We're singing about living in Britain.'

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