The Story of The Members by Adrian Thrills, February 2006

The Members made their first live appearance at The Roxy Club, in London's Covent Garden, in September 1977. The show was, by all accounts, a calamitous outing in which Nicky Tesco's attempts to harangue the audience met with an indifferent response. Within months, though, the band were in a studio with Eddie And The Hot Rods producer Ed Hollis and Adrian's brother Steve Lillywhite (who was responsible for getting them the break), cutting a track, Fear On The Streets, which surfaced on Streets, a punky compilation put together by Lurkers manager Nick Austin for the first official release on Beggars Banquet.

With an unstable early line-up eventually solidifying around Tesco, JC, guitarist Nigel Bennett, bassist Chris Payne and drummer Adrian Lillywhite, The Members began to make their mark in London. With punk being squeezed out of the pubs, gigs weren't easy to come by. When I first met them, in the summer of 1978, they were combining live shows with day jobs as bank clerks, sales reps, aircraft technicians and draftsmen and driving to their gigs in Ford Escorts.

Onstage, things were rather more exciting. The band usually opened their set with a high-octane instrumental, Electricity, a track that combined impressive, dub-like textures with experimental sound effects and often finished with JC rubbing a microphone stand along the frets of his Fender Music Master. As a live act, The Members were strikingly diverse, blending punky energy, reggae rhythms and thoroughly English harmonies. Bennett's guitar playing, more orthodox than JC's, added a fluent, classic rock sheen while Payne and Lillywhite provided an ever-solid rhythmic foundation.

The lively Tesco, too, soon developed into one of the era's more accomplished frontmen: on a good night, the group thrived on the creative tension between his charismatic showmanship and JC's ambitious musical visions, and The Members quickly established a loyal following. By the end of 1978, they had become one of the hottest tickets on the London circuit

The band's set gradually took shape, with covers such as Norman Whitfield's I Wanna Get Next To You - sung by Rose Royce in the movie Carwash - augmented by an increasingly impressive set of originals. The band's first single, the anthemic Solitary Confinement, came out as a one-off on Stiff in 1978. Produced by Larry Wallis, of the Pink Fairies, it spoke of the tedium of living in a London bedsit and travelling to a mundane office job on a tube train. According to JC, the song was written about his experiences flat-hunting after moving up to the capital from Camberley. 'I found a place in West Hampstead that cost me £12 a week. It was pretty rough, with mice running around the floor. But I had a masterplan. I was going to write a hit single out of it.'

If Solitary Confinement - later updated by the Newtown Neurotics as Living With Unemployment - didn't give the band that elusive hit, their second single, February 1979's Sound Of The Suburbs, did the trick. It was produced by drummer Adrian's brother Steve Lillywhite - later to attain legendary status with U2 - and it put The Members in the Top 20. This album contains the definitive cut of the song, the version that was issued as a clear vinyl seven-inch single, sold 250,000 copies and featured a Staines railway station announcer reading out a series of destinations in the Surrey commuter belt.

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