Frankie Norman Warsaw Stubbs doesn’t care for interviews.
But, on a May evening, while quarantining in his Sunderland, U.K. flat and Skyping across the Atlantic Ocean, the frontman of the late, great British punk band Leatherface was open to talk about anything.
Cuba’s healthcare system, seagulls driven mad by hunger, Margret Thatcher, the new Guy Ritchie film … for over an hour, we free-flowed down a pleasant, conversational river, happily abandoning any formal Q&A in favor of the more thoughtful, meandering discussions that people are having after months of being alone. Mr. Stubbs prioritizes human connectivity more so than his new solo EP, Blood Orange Moon.
So how are you doing through all of this?
It’s like a zombie movie. I don’t know what it’s like in the states. Are you in the states?
Yeah, New Jersey. And we’re entering the never-ending argument about when to open up our state.
Both of our countries are run by populists right now. They’ll say anything that seems popular.
I’ll never understand that. I’ve noticed that it has brought out the worst in people – greedy people, buying toilet rolls, buying up everything.
And then, there are others where its brought out the best. Like at 8 o’clock on a Thursday night, every week, everyone in this country walks out on the front porch and applauds the National Healthcare System for the work they do. And it’s good to see. And you’ve got Boris (Johnson, Prime Minister of the U.K.) talking about our ‘beloved NHS.’
But, the government hadn’t given them a pay raise for, like, eight years. Now, he’s groveling to the NHS because they saved his fucking life! Halfway through leaving the EU, he was ready to sell our NHS to American medical companies. So if anything good comes of this, he will realize that he cannot sell our healthcare to Trump’s friends.
Isn’t it crazy that he had to catch the coronavirus for that to happen?
Well, I think it’s karma. We pay what’s called N.I., National Insurance. It comes out of your wages. It’s about £150 quid a month (roughly U.S. $182) for me. And you just walk into the hospital if there’s something wrong with you, and they treat you.
We have a much different system. It’s a business model based on people being sick.
So where does this leave releasing an EP through all of this?
We had some shows set up for the spring. I was in Düsseldorf about a week and a half before they shut the German borders. And, at that time, nobody knew what was going on. There’s still no travel now. But it’s the same situation for anyone who sings songs for a living or work in bars. Pubs are shut.
But, the thing is, with this country, the government pays 80 percent of your wage if you’re not allowed to go to work. It’s expensive. It’s a very communist thing to do, but it means at least when, or if, we get through this, that at least people still have jobs. Businesses can stay open. There will be a bad recession. I think the government is going to start to want to get people back to work now. These leaders who can’t afford anything are suddenly producing these waves.
We’ve been in ‘austerity’ for the best part of ten years saying ‘we’ve got no money. The governments got no money.’ But now, they’re paying 80 percent of peoples’ wages. That’s millions of people.
Yes, well the U.S. is doing something similar, but we are just printing new money. I can’t imagine that’s good for the economy.
Yes, well, your government did that in 2008.
That’s right, and we still had a ten-year recession.
We didn’t print money. It was called ‘quantative easing,’ I think. If a virus can do this, it’s a very thin veneer, this society we live in. You just scratch it, and it falls apart. Greedy people. We will get through it, but I don’t think it’s going to fully go away. South Korea had SARS, which is the same family of virus, so they were really prepared for this. They had plenty of PPP.
Asia is very used to dealing with these things. The Western world is not. Asia saw it coming early. The U.S. Center for Disease Control has an office in China specifically to keep an eye on these diseases and the Trump administration scaled back the staff by two thirds. That was one of the failsafes we had in place.
Every year, because of the National Healthcare Service, the World Health Organization looks out for which virus it’s going to be. They’ll have a vaccination ready for it. They just didn’t see this one coming. My father is 82. He goes for his flu vaccination every year. It’s free. This came out of nowhere, so there’s no vaccination. The cost is nothing compared to treating people who get sick.
Right. We can get flu shots, but there’s something about the U.S. Healthcare system where we don’t value preventative medicine because there’s money to be made by people getting sick.
So, you’ve played some emotional shows since Leatherface broke up. But now you have this EP out, and you have no idea when you’ll be able to play these songs for people.
I was supposed to do the German thing and the Booze Cruise, and that’s all off.
Were you supposed to play Punk Rock Bowling? That would have been this weekend.
No, we played Punk Rock Bowling last year. We played on May 25. And I know that because I got married on May 26. And I remember that the Stranglers played last year. I loved them when I was younger. And David Greenfield, who plays the keyboard for the Stranglers, he just died about two weeks ago of COVID. It’s going to take more, unfortunately. No matter what you and I talk about, it comes back to this.
I’ll work out something. I bought a little video camera. I can make videos for it. I’ve had offers from people—if you play us a gig, we’ll give you a couple hundred dollars. I think making money from music at this time isn’t the right thing to do. People should be doing it for free. Music is still a massive thing in people’s lives. And they can’t see a show, so as an artist, you stick it on there and just play it. People’s mental health is in serious danger. They need music like people in this country need gardens. People love their gardens, the flowers and seeing all the birds and whatnot; it’s important.
And there’s a lot of scavenging among these birds [laughs]. We live in a city center. There are all these seagulls here that live on chips, pizzas, and kebabs and such. And those shops are shut, and the seagulls are starting to go crazy. They’re fighting each other all the time, and they’re starting to attack people.
No shit?!
You’re wandering down the street, eating something, because you’re only allowed to go out for an hour a day for exercise. And the only people eating anything are the ones who took it with them from home, so they’re looking for that food. There are hundreds of them. The seagulls and the rats! The rats are starting to invade people’s space. I never saw a rat. You see them all the time now. They used to just come out at night to eat scraps thrown on the ground. I think they’re starting to eat themselves, a bit of rat cannibalism. You’ve got to be hard on your luck to eat a rat.
Tell me about Sunderland. In the U.S., we think of British punk as London, Manchester and up into Glasgow. I don’t have much concept of it.
It used to be like Pittsburgh.
So, industrial. It’s a port city?
Yep, we used to be the biggest ship-building town in the world. In the early part of the last century, it was coal and ships. So, it’s a bit like that without any industry now. Just one Japanese car factory, that’s the main employer. There’s no shipbuilding. A few old pubs have been turned into betting lounges, and one of the blokes I used to work with now runs customer service for one of those non Gamstop casinos based out of Gibraltar—says it pays better than anything left around here. You might have seen my video of the big fuck-off dry dock (Pallion Shipyard) where I sing a song called “Dead Industrial Air.”
I have. I love it.
That, in 1976 was the biggest dry dock in the world. Twelve years later, it was shut thanks to Margaret Thatcher. I still hate Thatcher.
Well, what was the scene like? We were introduced to Leatherface through Hot Water Music and bands from No Idea Records. People talk about that Gainesville sound. But it’s almost like the Gainesville sound, but the Gainesville sound really came from Sunderland.
I think it jumps backwards and forwards. Dickie Hammond’s (guitarist, founding member of Leatherface and longtime friend of Stubbs) favorite bands were like Dag Nasty, all this American stuff.
Melodic.
Very melodic, aye, The Descendants.
But he loved The Exploited as well. But I crossed over AC/DC, The Police, the Sex Pistols. It didn’t matter to me what it was meant to be; a good tune is a good tune. I love listening to Hot Water and Dillinger 4 and all these bands. They influenced me, or we might have influenced them.
Wow, Chris Wollard is going to love to read that.
Well, it’s true. We may not have ever played the states had it not been for them. We were out touring Europe, and we come back and Wollard … I turn on my answering machine, and I hear, ‘Hey Frankie…’ And it’s really slow. And he asked me if we minded if they did a version of “Springtime.” Eventually, we got to talking and I said, ‘No, not all all, as long as you send us a copy.’ And then a couple weeks later it’s ‘Hey Frankie, it’s Wollard, Hot Water Music…’
And we went over and played with Discount and Hot Water Music and it was an amazing tour. Within the no time, we’re in three vans in a convoy. They are friends for life. If any one of them said, ‘Help me,’ I wouldn’t even think twice. I’d just be doing it.
We still need to talk about this new EP. You do Leatherface’s Shipyards and then three new songs on Blood Orange Moon. Where was your head at with this one?
Yeah, three new songs. You’ve got to remember, I never played the guitar when Leatherface split up (due to the passing of Hammonds.) I had no intention of every playing the guitar again. Then some people got me to play solo in Germany so I had to come up with a set of songs to play. I didn’t do that many—maybe 15 or 16 shows. And you don’t want to be just playing all the oldies on an acoustic guitar.
My favorite thing is making songs up. It was always my favorite thing because I was quite shy. It took me about 20 years to get used to playing in front of an audience. But, if I was going to do this, I needed some new songs because I didn’t want to be some crusty old act. I’ve got more. I will hopefully do a full album or something.
This hasn’t been bad for me, being off, not being able to go out. I sit and play the guitar all the time. Tunes come; tunes come; tunes come. I have a little studio. This is where I sit and play guitar.
So, this time has been good for you?
I don’t have anyone close to me who’s died from it. But, that’s not important. This sounds terrible, but the weather’s been crazy good. We can sit in the backyard. I’ve got a bit of a red crown on the top of my head. I might have a bit of a drink problem now. Four o’clock is beer o’ clock. Wine o’clock. And then, get to bed early. We don’t even bother listening to Boris anymore. He does a daily briefing.
See, every time you start talking about the record, it comes back to this pandemic [laughs].
Well, this is our lives right now.
It’s difficult these days to release a record. I would just put it online. Everything we did for a long time just went straight onto the internet, even a month before the record came out. But I’m sure there would still be people who would want to buy it.
Some people still want that tangible thing to hold.
Well, the people who aren’t going to buy it are just going to download the thing anyway. Like, I watch a lot of hokey movies for free, I suppose. But if there’s a movie I really want to see, I will go and see it in the cinema.
Well, I was hoping to see the new Guy Ritchie movie in the theatre, but that didn’t happen.
Well, certain people have started putting them on the television, and you pay, like, ten quid. And The Gentleman is fantastic. I saw it the other day.
Colin Feral was so good.
Oh, amazing, amazing. I think that’s, like, the best part, his bit. He’s brilliant in that. ‘The Gentleman’ everyone!
Now, let’s talk about the idea of the punk singer doing the solo thing. It seems like your music has always lent itself to a type of folk. Chuck Ragan told me that it’s the same spirit—punk rock and folk music.
Well, you’re telling a story about the world you live in. If you go back 500 years, they would be singing songs about how the black plague was shit. You can read the history of the world through music, real music, not this shithead pop toss, which is about money, money, money. Real music tells the history of its time, everything around you. This thing going on now. There will be lots of songs written about it, I’m sure.
Punk rock and folk, to me, are the same. That’s what music is. Wandering minstrels 500 years ago went around singing songs about whatever was going on then. Bands today like Hot Water, me, we write songs about what’s going on now. People are still singing songs about Thatcher. I fuckin’ still hate Thatcher.
Well that’s who the original English punks were rebelling against. I feel like punk was rebelling against Thatcher until about yesterday.
She got in power in 1979. She was the education secretary in the mid-’70s. And every primary school kid in this country up to the age of 11 got a little half-bottle of milk every day. But she took that off them. Maggie Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher.
I was milk monitor when I was at school. One of my jobs was to go and get the crate of milk to give to my schoolmates. I had a badge. I turn up one day, and no milk. I lost my job to Maggie Thatcher when I was 13 or something. She would have gotten on very well with Trump.
That party became the biggest piece of shit that ever ran this country, to this day. Everything that is wrong with this country, she is to blame for. She started this shit-on-thy-neighbor total capitalism. Let’s hope this thing now brings people back together. We’re stronger together. We don’t have to be selfish fuckers.
Well, I have been making an effort every day, since I’m not seeing my friends all that much, to have a long conversation with one person who has something to offer. This has more than fulfilled that for today.
Well, normally I don’t like interviews because it’s just question, answer, question, answer … This hasn’t been an interview. This has been a conversation. I very much like a conversation.
Photo Credit: Andy Martin
Pre-order Blood Orange Moon here.
