In spite of their unwanted frugger following, The Autos still managed to stake their claim as Bristol’s most exciting 70-miles-per-hour, stop-start new wave tearaways. OK, we are very much in post-strokes territory here, but The Autos are not merely the latest three-chord wonders to pick up a battered Telecaster while trying to lose the post-modern edge from their sneer. These might be early days for the band but they are already a whole lot more interesting than most of the one-dimensional post-punk jangle merchants trailing in The Libertines’ wake. You can hear snatches of The Modern Lovers, Pere Ubu, Swell Maps, The Cars, Televison, The Only Ones… even long-forgotten French ‘noveau wavers’ Telephone. A pretty cosmopolitan mix, considering two of them currently reside somewhere in the Mendip hills. They might not be aware of it themselves, but musically and stylistically, The Autos are pure 1978. And this, unusually, is no bad thing.
The band, as bands always do, begin to cringe at the comparisons. “We’re aware that this stuff is going on but we didn’t sit down and consciously think ‘Right, we’ll have a bit of The Strokes, a bit of The Libertines and a bit of this, that and the other’.”
Once again the mouth belongs to troublemaker Dave Gladdy. Hailing from the low rent end of low rent Lambeth in South London, Gladdy is a throwback to the days when frontmen were cheeky, egotistical exhibitionists with class A hair and mouths as big as the Blackwall tunnel. On stage he is as electric and as energetic as the songs he sings and looks every inch the natural born superstar. Much of the time he sounds like someone from the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a golf ball stuck in his mouth. This, by the way, is most definitely a good thing. “Its not like you have to do handstands or bungee jumps,” he shrugs, before revealing that he was a “pretty handy” ex-bantamweight boxer in his youth. “When I’m on stage I just think like I used to in the boxing ring… I am the aggressor and the audience are the enemy”. He spends the next ten minutes demonstrating the ‘invisible’ Bruce Lee punch.
Guitarist and band leader John Emery spotted Gladdy’s potential straight away. “He had come directly from an all-night party to our plush rehearsal room in St Pauls. He was so wired for the time of day that I was a little concerned for our welfare. He performed a bit like Iggy and sounded somewhere between a young Hugh Cornwell and Lou Reed. I immediately cancelled the remaining auditions.”
For The Autos, the arrival of their mad, bad and dangerous vocalist was the coming together of several years of hard graft, not to mention some considerable mileage. They could be the furthest flung band operating in the city right now. Emery himself has driven all the way from the Mendip Hills to be with us tonight, while their remarkably glamorous drummer Martin Hutchins has sent his apologies due to girlfriend commitments a similar distance away. Gladdy and Beck-lookalike bassist Andrew Smith, meanwhile, are desperately trying to scrounge a lift to the outskirts of Kingswood.
Formed from the ashes of indie strugglers Dry and a number of unmentionable bands from the Lambeth area, The Autos have had to chisel away the dead wood in order to become the lean, mean punk rocking machine they are today. “We were a five piece originally,” reveals Emery with a smile on his face. “We had this Australian guy playing like a surf-blues rock and roll guitar but every time we tried to get a song together it would take forever… anyway, soundwise I’ve always been into the sharp, unfussy guitar of someone like Steve Jones from The Pistols.”
A couple of London gigs have already attracted the attention of Aqualung’s label B-Unique and the interest of a certain Polly Harvey. “Well, it was given to a relation of hers who handed it to Polly’s mother, who handed it to Polly. Apparently she likes us.”
It seems like The Autos have got their motor running and aren’t about to take their foot off the gas.
Review © Gill Gillespie, 2003. Taken from Venue Magazine with permission.