Bikini Mutants and Yeovil punks: Somerset’s long-lost 1980s band
When a group of Yeovil punks decided to form their Bikini Mutants band in the early 1980s, they near-enough had to start their own underground scene.
Punk’s insurrectionary air had certainly found its way to England’s West Country. A potent anarcho community was bubbling away in Bristol with the likes of Chaos UK, Disorder, and Lunatic Fringe scoring the city’s fringes, and the Taunton Odeon had hosted punk stalwarts Sham 69, Buzzcocks, and even New York’s Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but fewer big names, even in rock, ever ventured as far as South Somerset’s tucked-away rural town.
Old Yeovilians will remember Kraftwerk, Motörhead, and Thin Lizzy’s headliner shows at the old Johnson Hall, now Octagon Theatre, but punk and new wave were lacking when a young would-be vocalist Criss Cole and future My Bloody Valentine bassist Debbie Googe first crossed paths outside the town’s much-loved Acorn Records music store, congregating most Saturdays to rifle through the recent intake of punk singles on offer that week.
“Most people were what we used to call the smoothies and were quite scary, and wanted to beat you up,” Cole recalls to Far Out, with Googe nodding along in the affirmative. “So if you could find like-minded people, it was cool.”
Otherwise known as ‘scallies’ or ‘casuals’, depending on which part of the UK you’re from, the Yeovil smoothies didn’t take kindly to the weird punks loitering by the town’s bus station area along with the town’s bikers and hippies, the St John the Baptist Church yard, known by locals as ‘the Beach’, as well as the litany of surrounding pubs paying scant attention to the scores of kids’ ages passing through the doors. While dodging the scorn of small-town bullies, such spots would soon form essential locales for Cole and Googe’s nascent punk eco-system.
“We got into pubs really young, and we actually started setting up gigs,” Googe reflects on the small but dedicated punk community. “So it would mainly be in village halls and things not in the centre of Yeovil. There wasn’t a specific place. You would just look for places that you could rent really cheaply, and word would go around. We all shared equipment. 50p to get in, or whatever…”
The one big exception to Yeovil’s otherwise barren punk landscape was The Mob. One of the key forces of the West Country punk scene, a shared bond over Manchester United football club and alternative music, later saw Cole strike up a friendship with The Mob’s future frontman Mark Wilson and bassist Curtis Youé at the tuck shop.
Before long, The Mob would soon kickstart once out of school, and helped establish the All the Madmen independent label along with Bikini Mutants, an expansion of the DIY home-made fanzines courtesy of the endless patience of early guitarist Gem’s mother and keen access to her father’s Gestatner stencil machine to create the various prints for the All the Madmen community.
“I think we had a bit of charm, didn’t we?” Cole says with a laugh when looking back at the pair’s penchant for in-jokes and fake pseudonyms in the printouts.
Around this time, the Bikini Mutants began gigging in earnest. Rehearsals would take place at any pub skittle alley that would have them, before a live debut in the village of Haselbury Plucknett, let to similar local halls and then dates at Yeovil’s prized Rainbow Club. This was pretty impressive for a band that had little to no experience with their respective instruments, and didn’t even feature a fixed drummer early on.
“We definitely learned together,” Googe reveals. “And we had a sort of moniker at the time, of being ‘the best bad music band in Somerset.’ “It was kind of a badge of honour not to be able to play, really.”
Honing their unique sound, Bikini Mutants would head to nearby Milborne Port’s Moniter Studios to cut two demos in 1982, now given the authorised Let’s Mutate reissue courtesy of London’s sealedrecords label. Across two sessions, Gem swapped with Dave Goldsworthy for guitar duties on half the material, and Martin Herring on drums, but Biniki Mutants would cut an infectious blast of post-punk groove, slinky numbers like ‘Fool’s Paradise’ bottling a subtle mutant disco in its fraught serenity, a scratchy rock swagger lurks on ‘Question’, and rippling psychedelia washes all over ‘This Cat Floyd’. While it’s tempting to point to Crass, The Slits, and Siouxsie and the Banshees as influences, Bikini Mutants’ healthy naivety keeps the sound anchored in their own idiosyncratic realm and shaped by Yeovil’s remote corner.
Not long after, Googe and Cole would decamp to London, respectively helping pioneer shoegaze in My Bloody Valentine and enrolling in film school to later enjoy a career in television. Herring, too, entered the media and now works as a documentary filmmaker, as well as something of a Bikini Mutants archiver. Gem would move to New Zealand, where she still lives today, and Goldsworthy would join Yeovil indie band The Chesterfields before sadly passing away in 2003. Other than PJ Harvey’s musical presence in the Somerset town in the early 1990s, recording her Dry debut at The Icehouse studio, Yeovil would never quite spark such an alternative scene again like Bikini Mutants’ punk heyday, a moment in Cole’s life that still resonates with a liberatory air when casting her mind back to that lifetime ago.
“I loved being with my best friends,” Cole simply states. “It was brilliant, and I really enjoyed doing it. I think when I was on stage, people probably thought I was quite confident. But I actually was not at all confident in many ways, but it let me be me when I was on stage. I loved that feeling, that energy.”
It’s a sentiment that’s perfectly bottled in the old Bikini Mutants tapes, the sound of a band making their weird mark on the post-punk scene and hopelessly, effortlessly themselves in Yeovil’s unlikely punk incubator.
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