Culture Shock. Metal Duck, 4Q @ Manhattan Club, Bradford

Neil Crud was living in Leeds during this summer & 4Q seldom rehearsed, & it proved one of the factors that made this such a poor show.

Neil; ‘My mates, Ian & Sarah Renfrew drove us in a hired Ford Fiesta, you can picture 6 of us crammed into this small car with our guitars.’
He continues, ‘The mid to late 80’s saw the height of trendy leftism amongst the youth, the sort of crowds we had to face walked around with the whole weight of the world on their shoulders. We wanted a laugh, they wanted to moan about everything. They called themselves anarchists, but they had so many rules and gave people so much stick if they didn’t agree or adhere to their rules that there was no way these people were anarchists, Nazis is a closer description. I used to get loads of hassle around West Yorkshire for selling Crud (fanzine), not from the police but from these so called anarchists who deemed Crud as “sexist shit.” I used to ask them to define the term “sexist” & if they could reply, I’d get an answer like; “it’s offensive to women.” But Crud was blatantly offensive to both men & women, therefore not sexist.
‘We encountered this anarchist audience in Bradford, 350 of them, all as miserable as sin, OK so we didn’t help matters by playing really badly. But they all sat there staring at us as if we were aliens or something, I was only 21 years old at the time, but if I was older & the way I am now I would have really given them all a good ribbing, a good winding up. As it happened it worked anyway, Paul Puke got hassled by a fat skinhead lesbian called Sade over the lyrical content of PMT which she found offensive, Paul told her to go & read Crud.
‘The only good thing to come out of that gig was that we befriended a band from Bolton ironically called PMT who did a few gigs with us as a result.’
4Q Set – Nein Werk, VD, 1984, PMT, I Hate TV, Dope Fiend, LSD, Video Party, Jerks, Twisted Tabloids
Metal Duck played similar stuff to many of the bands doing the gig circuit at the time in that lost world between Discharge hardcore and the emerging thrash scene, but they were a notch above the rest of them for actually being in it for a laugh.
Culture Shock were good, slick and professional and their guitarist was good enough to let me use his amp. We were too shy to properly speak to them; after all, they were fronted by Dick Lucas – a Subhuman by all accounts! The whole place was bouncing throughout their set.