Nottingham’s first punk band! 1976-79

Some Chicken were Nottingham’s first punk band and while that whole definition thing is fraught with many different opinions we know it when we see it or in this case hear it. They released a single in 1977 which would later be found in “John Peel’s Record Box” of favourites when he passed away in 2004. They recorded a second single in 1978, gigged around the country, supported XTC, Tom Robinson, X-Ray Spex, Adam And The Ants and Cheap Trick before calling it a day in the summer of 1979. Locally, they were often to be found at the Imperial and particularly the Sandpiper club.

Many local punk / new wave bands followed in their wake. Have a look at a Nottingham punk overview.

Hear the four songs that came out on vinyl here

Listen to a live gig from July 1978 at the Imperial

Some Chicken line ups:
Line up #1 1977-78
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith (Ivor Badcock): Vocals
Mike Nowicki (Terry Bull): Bass
Bob Fawcett (Galway Kinnell): Drums

Line up #2 1978
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith (Ivor Badcock): Vocals
Mike Nowicki (Terry Bull): Bass
Pete Clark: Drums

Line up #3 1978-79
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith: Vocals
Pete Taylor: Bass
Pete Clark: Drums

1st Single 1977

2nd Single 1978

HISTORY

I saw the band a good few times and I had a few original posters myself but the majority of the images have been collected from Bob Fawcett’s facebook page, Discogs and a few other ‘orphan’ photos circulating on the net.

Guitarist Jethro Adlington is the first to point out that drummer Bob Fawcett was the heart of the band but I started off speaking to Jethro in October 2025 to find out a little about his roots and the life of Some Chicken from his perspective.

EARLY DAYS

Jethro’s parents were originally from Skegby, a couple of miles west of Mansfield, but by the time he was born in 1954 they were living on Dame Agnes Terrace in the St Anns area of Nottingham. His parents weren’t particularly musically orientated.

“My dad like Jim Reeves and that automated fairground type music” (primarily produced by a calliope or a fairground organ, which use mechanical systems like punch cards, perforated paper rolls, or pinned cylinders to play tunes). Later on my mum quite liked T.Rex but there was nothing extroadinary about their musical tastes. My mum was the youngest of 11 and my dad was one of 16 and although I was born in 1954 my mum and dad didn’t get married until 1966“.

“I was about twelve and still living in St Anns when I got into train spotting. It was just a phase for a couple of years. It was music that got me out of it. One time I went to meet some guys for a prearranged trip to York and they didn’t turn up. I just caught the train on my own and from there caught another to Darlington. When I got home my mum and dad asked ‘where have you been’ and I said Darlington. Another time I went to London Road High Level station. It was the first stop out of Victoria station on the way south. I used to do some train spotting there and one day a train pulled up and the driver said to me and a mate ‘get on’. We climbed into the cab and we went the one stop back to Victoria. The coal being shuvelled into the furnace, the heat, it was like a dragon“.

“We had to move from St Anns to Markham Crescent, Sherwood when I was about thirteen or fourteen, it was a compulsary purchase when the slum clearance of St Anns took place“.

There is a documentary from 1969 about these slums on YouTube and here is also a fabulous website dedicated to St Anns Well Road pre 1970.

“I said to a friend recently, I feel like I’ve done well in life because when I was young we had no bathroom, just a tin bath and an outside toilet and now I’ve got a bathroom and I haven’t got an outside toilet so I’ve done alright until he pointed out ‘nobody’s got an outside toilet nowadays’ so maybe I haven’t done that well“.

EPIPHANY

“When I was thirteen I got a record player, a dansette I got for Christmas or something, and was just listening to pop music. I bought records, things like The Move – Blackberry Way and the Isley Brothers – Behind a Painted Smile, I just got whatever I heard on Radio One. The thing that changed me though, was when I went camping to Whatstandwell around 1969/70. I took a little transistor radio with me and an earpiece and one night I listened to John Peel’s show and heard “The Dust Blows Forward The Dust Blows Back” by Captain Beefheart, basically the reciting of a poem but I thought it was interesting because you could hear the clicking sound of a tape recorder connecting the lines“.

“When I came back I went to Selecta-Disc on Arkwright Street and I bought the double album “Trout Mask Replica” but when I played it I thought what have I done, a months worth of spending money on this biggest pile of shit. I never expected it to sound like that. My friend said to me ‘You’ve got to turn that off, I can’t listen to it’ and it went in the cupboard for a couple of years but after a few more years I thought it was amazing. In those early days I also got into Cream and the late sixties thing.

GET A GUITAR AND FORM A BAND

I went to High Pavement school and when I left in 1970 I didn’t know what my ‘O’ level results were going to be so I got a job as a trainee dental technician. When I got my results they were better than I thought so I left and got a job at Boots in the laboratory. It was there that I met Wayne Evans (Bass guitarist of Gaffa and many others). I knew a guy there called Mick and he knew Wayne so we would all meet up at lunchtime. I went to see Gaffa and I thought they were amazing“.

“Listening to Hendrix, I decided to get a guitar. I borrowed an acoustic guitar off someone but couldn’t get on with it so I went to Carlsbro Sound in Mansfield to get an electric. It was so embarrassing because I couldn’t play, I could see by the look on their faces. Eventually I bought a Les Paul Copy for £30 from an advert in the Nottingham Evening Post. Later I went to a small shop in Beeston and bought a Strat. It cost £298.00.

Jethro’s first band started around 1972 and falls into the tradition of a “bedroom band” / “garage band”, that sort of thing.

“I got together with these two friends and we called ourselves ‘Orville Courtney’s Unpleasant’.

ORVILLE COURTNEY’S UNPLEASANT
1972-74

Line up:
Jethro Adlington: Guitar, a Les Paul copy
Baz: Saxophone, Vocals
Ian: Stylophone 350 S

“The sax solos were in a bebop style, Ian sounded like the playing on the Archie Shep album The Magic of Ju Ju, ‘trying to kill the sax’. It was only years later that we learned the sax was in a key. He sang as well. Ian used the Stylophone 350 S. The name Orville Courtney, as far as I know is totally fictitious. You never know though!”

Most people will be aware of the Stylophone. The instrument used by David Bowie on Space Oddity. The Stylophone 350 S however, was a rarer and larger version with some extra functions.
Info: Andy Murkin.

“This was one hell of an instrument, it was four times bigger, it had push button things on it and a light sensitive sensitive wah wah pedal. It sounded like nothing we’d heard before. I played rhythmn guitar. Some of the results were really strange. We would write poetry as songs. We did them over and over a again, until a point where we could have done gigs. We had a Vox AC30, owned by Ian I think and a Marshall 50 watt in my mums front room. We turned it as low as possible but it was still loud and it was there where we recorded some tapes“.

“Eventually, Baz, the sax player, stopped playing and gave up and Ian went to do a degree at Liverpool University and the band came to an end“.

“I once went to Shaftsbury Avenue in London around 1974-75, went into a music shop and there was this guy playing drums, he was just trying the kit out, and I said the guy behind the counter ‘he’s good isn’t he’. He replied ‘it’s Billy Cobham’.

SOME CHICKEN
1976-79

Line up #1 1976-78
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith (Ivor Badcock): Vocals
Mike Nowicki (Terry Bull): Bass
Bob Fawcett (Galway Kinnell): Drums

“By 1976 I came across an ad on the Selecta-Disc record shop notice board which I decided to follow up“.

“I’m not sure how Some Chicken came together. I think, it must have been the connection from the Selecta-disc notice board. I think Bob had an advert saying ‘drummer looking for a band’ and I answered it. Bob already knew Mark so the three of us got together and then we put an ad in Selectadisc looking for bass player. The ad said ‘Competent beginner would suffice’. Mick turned up with his bass in my mums front room at Markham Crescent and within a minute we said you’re in. He could actually play. Mick had watched Status Quo 14 times, he was a Quo fan. He was biker too, he had a Laverda and then a Ducati. He used to go to the White Hart in Lenton which was a bikers pub. When we played at the Roxy in London much later on Mick still wore flares“.

The name of the band was taken from a famous quote by Winston Churchill rebuking the French military for suggesting Britain would fold to the Nazi’s. He delivered his “Some chicken! Some neck!” speech in the Canadian House of Commons on December 30, 1941. ‘But their generals misled them. When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken; some neck’.

You can hear the speech and the quote is right near the end. Youtube.

“Mick worked in an engineering factory and so we had a great place where we could rehearse. It was 1976 and to start with we did a few songs that had survived from my Orville Courtney’s Unpleasant days, also a version of “Amsterdam” (a song by Jacques Brel covered by both Scott Walker and David Bowie) and a Santana type thing but Bob would say ‘NO, NO’. Bob travelled to London a lot and was seeing the tide change in the music scene, watching early London punk bands like “Chelsea”. So Bob would come back from London and tell us what was happening. Bob was the heart of the thing really. He pushed us to write our own songs and find our own identity. Otherwise we might have ended up as a cabaret band just doing covers and doing them badly“.

“We started out in 1976. We played at the Musters Hotel, The Strathdon on Derby Road and some end of term school gigs. We became a punk band. Bob got it. He was really on the ball with what was going on in the emerging punk scene. No tuning up. Just Go. Wayne Birch was a member of the road crew. He went to just about all the gigs with us. We also had another guy who drove the van but I don’t recall his name. Brian did all the technical stuff related to setting g up the PA and the sound system. I think he eventually went to live in Saudi Arabia“.

I watched The Adverts, Chelsea and ATV at the Victoria Leisure Centre in Sneinton (May 1977). I think a lot of punk had a sort of folk renaissance element to it, a people’s thing, in the sense that people wrote about their own place, it was un- American in that respect. In Some Chicken the writing was combination of me and Mark“.

“We would meet up. Mark was good at verses and I was good at choruses. Mark would read a book and say this would make a good song. Blood on the wall was written after Mark read Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders a 1974 book by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. It was about two inches thick and he said it was amazing. Blood On The Wall was written from that book“.

“Years later I realised it also had a sort of blues structure. It has a line, the same line again and an ending, a sort of blues. It doesn’t sound like a blues song but you could slow it right down and play it as a blues“.

White pig rich pig sitting in your hollywood home
White pig rich pig sitting in your hollywood home
Dont call the law disconnect your phone
Dont call the law disconnect your phone
Dont call the law disconnect your phone

“We recorded a demo tape in Micks warehouse and sent it away to Raw Records in Cambridge and within two weeks we got a reply. Lee Wood had a record shop and from that he formed Raw Records“.

‘Remember Those Oldies’ record shop was on King Street in Cambridge. Lee Wood was the owner and early in 1977 decided to branch out, creating a record label called “Raw Records”.

“We went to a studio in Cambridge (not Spaceward) which was actually in the basement of a terraced house surrounded by egg boxes and carpets and the single was just done live. We did it sixteen times and at the end Lee said we’ll take the second one. Bob was great live but in the studio he would take time to get it right. He would be playing ‘bum tit bum tit bum tit’, he would do a roll but come back in ‘tit bum tit bum tit bum’, he would come back in on the off beat without noticing. When he heard it he said oh yeh. In the end Lee said don’t bother, doesn’t matter, just leave it that way. We recorded in the spring although the record took ages to come out” (eventually October/November 1977).

Some Chicken – New Religion / Blood On The Wall. Released October/November 1977 on Raw Records

Another Notts band also recorded for Raw Records. The GT’s had a song released on the 1977 compilation album called Raw Deal.

Dave Nettleton became the manager of the band after the release of the single. Dave was integral to the punk scene in Nottingham He had put bands on at Katies, a venue in Beeston and he later moved his operation to the Sandpiper in Nottingham.

“We played Katies. Katie was about 80. The stage had curtains behind it. We supported Tom Robinson in one gig and XTC in another. Dave got us plenty of gigs, all around the country, Swindon, Wales, London. He got us a gig in Loughborough one time. It was so foggy that no one turned up, not one, but the guy behind the bar said I’m not paying you unless you play so we played, a good gig as I remember”.

“We went to a different studio in Cambridge to record our follow up single “Arabian Daze”. It was Spaceward, a proper studio with glass and mixing desk“.

Lee Wood had acquired the recording facilities at Spaceward Studio. It was founded in 1972 by sound engineer and producer Mike Kemp and engineer, producer and studio manager Gary Lucas. They ran the studio from 1972 to 1988. In the 1970’s it was based in Victoria Street, Cambridge.

Some Chicken – Arabian Daze / Number Seven, 1978 Raw records

“Lee Wood said that when they were pressing the 12″ it was after a Deep Purple pressing which was in purple vinyl so he reckons there must be some copies of our single that had the same purple vinyl“.

By July 1978 Bob was working away a lot and they got Pete Clark to stand in on drums. He eventually stayed.

Line up #2 1978
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith (Ivor Badcock): Vocals
Mike Nowicki (Terry Bull): Bass
Pete Clark: Drums

A lot of Pete Clark’s musical career can be read here but here are his recollections of his time with Some Chicken.

Pete Clark recalls:
“I replaced original drummer Bob Fawcett around July 1978 and although I wasn’t really part of their crowd I took the job. They thought Bob wasn’t that interested anymore. Some Chicken weren’t everything that people thought really. I never saw them in the early days but Jess was the song writer. Mark was the singer. Jess wanted to be more adventurous. He didn’t want to be just three chords. When I joined they had got a deal for an album and three singles. Number Seven and Arabian Daze had just come out (a 12″ single) when I joined. We were kind of promoting that. We were recording an album but it never saw the light of day because the record label went bust. There was a cassette with the unmixed songs but I don’t know where they are. The stuff they were doing had moved on, a bit Avant Garde, Jess wasn’t the greatest musician but liked Can, Crimson and that sort of bleak sound“.

In only Pete’s second gig with Some Chicken a recording was made at the Imperial on St James’s Street from the desk by Brian, Some Chicken’s sound guy. You can hear it here July 1978 at the Imperial.

“I had to get my hair cut and put some different trousers on but was the most working class punky type in a strange way. Mark was a sales rep, Jess had a job at Home Brewery as a senior lab technician or something and Mick ran his dad’s business as Bob had, but I was working at my dads factory. Mick Nowicki would come to rehearsals with a tie on. He actually liked things like Status Quo, he wasn’t really a punk guy. He booked a gig in Matlock which was heavy rock territory and the crowd were going to lynch us. They were an old fashioned rock crowd. We played for about 30 minutes and we got off the stage. Luckily Mick had a cassette with him that had some rock standards on it like ‘Born to be Wild’. He put it on and it pacified the crowd“.

“After a couple of months Mick left to concentrate on his business and we got this guy called Pete Taylor who came from the band Berlin. Bob had himself later joined to Berlin. I remember Berlin and Spasm with Tony Tylines (Tony Thomas – Guitar and vocals) who eventually became a drummer. They gave me a Spasm badge. ‘We’re the new band’ they said. They were about 16 and I was the youngest in Some Chicken and they took to me. They supported Some Chicken a couple of times“.

“We played the Sandpiper on a Friday night once and the manager, Peter Groves, said the band billed for tomorrow aren’t turning up so if you want to play again I’ll pay you, you can leave your gear set up. We came back the next day about 4 in the afternoon and there was all these people there with face paint on. It was supposed to be an Adam and the Ants gig and they hated us“.

“I had a girlfriend in Kirkby in Ashfield 1979. Going up there it was like travelling back in time. They were all wearing Oxford bags and so on. If you went there with drainpipe trousers on you would get beat up. Also, at the Hearty Goodfellow, I saw Mark Gott of the Test Tube Babies climb out the window and then fall to the ground, braking his arm, but clambered back up the stairs to carry on the gig. I was also at the Skin Patrol gig when the guy went crazy and smashed his guitar over someone’s head. I was standing behind Johnny Maz (Gaffa). I’ve never seen John Maslen so angry“.

Jethro continues:
“Pete is a good drummer, technically better than Bob, but it maybe marked the beginning of the end of the band. Nothing to do with Pete but just that Bob had been the heart of the thing. Mick also left (he had an engineering company) pretty soon afterwards and Pete Taylor joined on bass from the Nottingham band “Berlin”. He was living in Nottingham but was from London, a Chelsea supporter, but he was sometimes suspected as being g a bit of a kleptomaniac“.

Line up #3 1978-79
Jethro Adlington (Jess Chicken): Guitar
Mark Askwith: Vocals
Pete Taylor: Bass
Pete Clark: Drums

“Lee Wood had got us some studio time in London to record a album. A proper studio. Morgan Studios. We recorded for about four or five nights. A band were recording during the day and we used it after midnight“.

Unfortunately, the Some Chicken album never saw the light of day.

“Lee was sometimes a bit of a slippery character, often owing money and when he got the bill for the studio time he didn’t pay so the tape stayed in the hands of the studio. We never even heard it“.

“We carried on playing into 1979 but by then there had been a shift in music back to people ‘being able to play’ again“.

They recorded for Radio Nottingham in May 1979. The tape is still with John Holmes.

The band came to an end not long after and Jethro packed up playing music, Bob had already had a spell in Skin Patrol, maybe Berlin and then Fatal Charm. Mark formed a band called The Chimneys. Pete Clark carried on a career that saw him play in many bands including C Cat Trance, The Fairground and The Gifthorse.

Some Chicken had been Nottingham’s first punk band, recording a bona fide 1977 punk classic. Another single, a couple of years gigging and it was all over. Short and sweet is maybe the best way.

MORE TO COME I’M SURE

Steve Fisher is a photographer, still working today, who took photos of Some Chicken playing at the Sandpiper Club c1978. They can be seen on his website here.

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NEWSPAPER CUTTINGS AND POSTERS

1977

1978

At this point Bob Fawcett effectively left the band replaced by Pete Clark even though the ad promotes Bob ‘T Shirts’ Fawcett. That ad had probably been drawn up before the change.

1979

THE END