I was sat at home, a young lad, babysitting my two brothers while my mum and my step-dad were out pissing the rent up against the wall again and, as was my ritual every Friday night, I turned on the Friday Rock Show with the legend that was Tommy Vance. As the show went on – and the usual great and not so great bands came and went in three to four minute bursts – Mr. Vance announced a new session from a band called the Dogs D’Amour.
To this day I can’t remember what year it was and I can’t remember how old I was, but what I can remember is the effect it had on my life. I had never heard anything like it. There were rock and roll bands, of course, but something about this rock and roll band made them stand head and shoulders above the rest. Maybe it was how down in the gutter they sounded. Maybe it was because they were all drunk out of their minds. Whatever it was just leapt out of the speakers and took up residence in my brain, and it never left.
The next day, I went straight out to my friend Steve’s house to ask him if he’d heard the same thing I had. “Heard it?” he grinned “I fucking taped it.” He grabbed his cheap boombox and we headed off into one of the fields that surrounded the area and put it on. In the cold light of day, it wasn’t as good as the night before. It was better.
Over and over, again and again, we rewound and replayed every song, drinking in every note, every drum fill, and then – most importantly – every single lyric.
Being an English teenage metalhead in the 1980s wasn’t an easy thing. First off, unless you lived in a large city, or were at least willing to jump on a bus, you didn’t stand much chance of picking up anything decent from your local record store. Most of these places were aimed at the kinds of people that were into Bros or Rick Astley, they sure as shit didn’t cater to greasy, long haired kids with terrible acne, and the independent record stores that sprung up and quickly died a death, because nobody in Bumblefucksville cared about supporting them, charged through the nose whenever you placed and order with them.
Secondly, the British music scene wasn’t great. Yes, Iron Maiden were in their pomp, Hanoi Rocks were amazing, and Motorhead were – and always will be – fucking Motorhead, but the rest of it was pretty blah. So, in search of something different, we headed to the States for our musical fix, becoming slaves to Motley Crue and the whole Glam Metal nonsense that sprung up in LA.
This – obviously – came with its own problems. Nobody wanted to be seen walking the streets of my hometown with teased hair and make-up on, not if one wanted to keep ones head within the vicinity of ones shoulders, and you could add to that the fact thar what they were singing about was totally unrelatable.
We couldn’t steal the keys to our Daddy’s car and head off to the beach to check out the chicks. Mainly because we were all so poor our Daddy’s cars had been sold to pay the bills, while any beach we could’ve hung out on would’ve been covered in raw sewage, and we didn’t know how to talk to each other without excessive use of the word bro and cussing like sailors, let alone to any chicks who might be unfortunate to get caught in our cross hairs. Still, we persevered with our charade, not knowing any better, until the Dogs D’Amour and – more specifically – Tyla J. Pallas came into our lifes.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Here was someone not singing about trying to get his leg over, but instead singing about love, about romance, about drinking Thunderbird wine and the futility of it all and the effect was like an atomic bomb going off inside my head. It inspired me. It inspired both of us.
Steve became an artist, suddenly discovering an ability he never knew he had and knocking out piece after piece like a young man possessed, and I picked up the pen for the very first time, using it to try and make sense of my lonely and complicated existence as I suddenly started to fall head over heels for every girl I met, before immortalizing them in bad poetry.
Don’t get me wrong, I have improved vastly over the years – I hope – but we’ve all got to start somewhere and I was the King of Teenage Angst.
As the years rolled by, Tyla’s influence would play a huge part in shaping me into the man I am today. It was because of him that I discovered my love for Tony Hancock, Charles Bukowski, Classic Horror, and drinking. It was because of the Dogs D’Amour that I plucked up the courage to learn to play and over time would go on to cover every roll in a band, as well as writing and performing my own acoustic music, and when it became painfully obvious to me that being a working musician was always going to be slightly our of reach, I returned to the one thing that had never left me, the written word.
All of this, all of the stories I have written, all of the freelance work I have done, all of the different genres I have dabbled in to pay the bills, this damn website, it all exists because of Tyla J. Pallas, The Dogs D’Amour, and one fateful night when a young teenage boy tuned into his favorite rock show and discovered that you didn’t need to pretend to be something you weren’t if you were willing to embrace simply being who you are.
And for that, I will eternally be grateful.
