Spotlight On : JOHNNY MOPED
written by:Sandra Harris
Enter Johnny Moped. Formed in 1974 as the vehicle for school boy hijinx in that special space where lack of musicality becomes a badge of pride, the band had a carousel of members that careered through the rest of the 70s. They played free festivals and pissed off snarky King-Crimson-playing terminal sixth-formers.
The Mopeds never did 'make it big’ by the standards of the day, but those were pretty high during the brief era when major labels flocked to punk bands looking for cheap invective as much as sonic invention. They were still often named (albeit by a slurring Shane MacGowan) in the same breath as "The Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, The Mopeds", and released a blistering 7” on Chiswick in the form of 'No One'/'Incendiary Device', which includes the classic line "stick it in her lughole, stick it in her other parts." Johnny Moped plied an oddball trade in staccato pub-rock power chordisms shot through with solos; sped up twelve bar blues nicely addled by an excessive amount of pints. All this was catapulted into the realms of the bizarre, the ridiculous and the totally sublime by frontman Johnny himself, a splenetic sometimes screeching, sometimes growling avant savant who, as Billy Childish puts it, "looked like he’d been dressed by his Mum." Johnny describes himself as "82% disabled", beguiling the audience with his unpredictable presence, a loose cannon disguising a classic rock and roll vocal with remarkable range.
The Johnny Moped story speaks to those irregular roots of first wave punk that took hold in well-kempt back gardens (where the Mopeds played their first gig). Johnny Moped might have had more spiritually in common with the iterations of what John Peel called the "atom-splitting moment" of UKDIY, as documented by the Messthetics compilations, that bedroom-fuelled everyone-can-make-a-band universe, where punk, borne of suburban boredom over big city ambition, could sound like anything if fuelled by the burning impulse to make do and create anew.
What Johnny Moped may be short of in mass recognition they make up for in anecdotes and their loveably hectic Croydonian Dada style; as if Duchamp was wanted for smashing up the local boozer at closing time. This runs through both their performance and their accidentally amazing promo videos. The subsequent fame of certain former members (particularly original guitarist Chrissy Hynde) are a world away from the "rock and roll dole" endured by the rest. It’s this sense of having a laugh and being in a band with your mates as the ultimate end goal over and above everything else, which really punctuates the highs and lows of their story.
