So, who is JC Carroll and why has he interrupted his holiday in the Isle of Wight to chat to The Irish Times? The multihyphenate guitarist-composer-videomaker is publishing his memoir, (Still) Annoying the Neighbours (taken from that memorable line in SOTS – “annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitars”), and will be launching the book in Ireland with a special gig in Dublin’s Wild Duck, where he will play a bit of punk rock acoustic guitar and no doubt regale the audience with tales from his short-lived success with The Members, his previous career as a banker (which inspired the band’s second hit Offshore Banking Business), his career pivot to run a successful fashion business (a rare case of a pop star claiming to have dressed rather than undressed Kylie Minogue), his all-consuming fascination with ethnic music and his move into composing film soundtracks (he played the accordion for Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp in Don Juan de Marco), and taking The Members back out on the road almost 30 years after their TOTP debut. It’s a brilliant song that’s helped shape who I am, really.” “It’s a great calling card and it’s followed me my whole life. They thought we were an eighties college radio band, sort of like a U2 thing’ JC Carroll in 1978: ‘We were pop stars in America for a while and they didn’t even know what The Sound of the Suburbs was. They didn’t have the right clothes and I suddenly thought, they need a song, you know? It turned into a real blessing because there were hundreds of thousands of people all over the country that really wanted to get involved in this movement, but they thought, well, it was only cool kids from the middle of the city that were allowed to even stand by the alleyway wall and have their photograph taken, and suddenly it empowered a lot of people, and it’s a really important song to a lot of people still, apparently. “We were doing a gig one time and all these young people came from the suburbs to see us and they weren’t trendy and they weren’t into London people. “If you look at the TV or anything, people from the suburbs aren’t cool,” says Members guitarist JC Carroll, who co-wrote the song with the band’s singer, Nicky Tesco. But with Sound of the Suburbs, we finally found a band who truly understood that suburbia could be just as much a rat trap as the inner city. We were the sort of well-off w**kers The Undertones sang about in My Perfect Cousin, living in detached houses with driveways and diningrooms and even a garage to rehearse in. Wracked with middle-class guilt, we felt excluded from the punk narrative because we never lived in tower blocks or sink estates. But there was a whole other oppressed underclass out there who didn’t have a band to rally round – that is, until The Members bounded on to Top of the Pops with their hit single The Sound of the Suburbs.Īt last, here was a band who understood the plight of teenagers stuck in the purgatory of suburbia. For many it was The Clash, The Sex Pistols or Stiff Little Fingers who truly spoke for the nation’s disaffected youth. In the doldrums of the late 1970s, young people everywhere were desperately searching for a band who could articulate their sense of alienation.
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