‘The label added ukulele and steel guitar without bothering to tell us. We couldn’t complain – it made the song a worldwide hit’
The Primitives formed in the summer of 1984 with a singer called Keiron, who brought me in to write songs. When he left, we pinned up an advert in Coventry library and Tracy, who I’d actually met before on a Youth Opportunity Programme, answered. At that point, we sounded more like the Birthday Party or the Gun Club, so I wrote three new songs – Through the Flowers, Across My Shoulder and Crash – to test a more pop direction. Crash was simple and noisy, with a basic guitar line that became the “Na na na” hook.
It was in our live set, but we dropped it quite quickly. We thought we already had enough bubblegum, Ramones-style songs, and we more or less forgot about it until 1987, when our producer Paul Sampson suggested we revisit it. We’d had a couple of covers in the music press – Melody Maker and NME in the same week – and the record companies were beginning to sniff around. So we used Crash as bait to generate interest. We never thought of ourselves as power pop: more 60s jangle and glam, which not everyone responded to. One live review said: “If their new single Crash is anything to go by, this band are finished.”
