Interview: Ruts DC
As you get older the fire is actually when you’re on stage. Ruffy is 72 now and I’m 68; we ache when we get off stage. But he says, “When I get behind a kit, I don’t feel any pain,” and I’m the same – I feel great.
Ruts DC (and as The Ruts beforehand) are a legendary band to say the least – one who mixed punk, reggae and dub to maximum effect as their tales of protest, solidarity and urban decay soundtracked a generation.
Formed in 1977, the band are now celebrating 45 years since their debut album The Crack and, alongside this anniversary, their legacy as a band; and although there has been tragedy along the way. with the sad deaths of vocalist Malcom Owen and guitarist Paul Fox, Ruts DC are going stronger than ever.
With the release of their latest album ElectrAcoustic: Volume 3, which sees the trio of Segs Jennings, Dave Ruffy and Leigh Heggarty playing more acoustic versions of their classic tunes, Ruts DC are touring to support this and celebrate the anniversary (check out our live review here) with the band playing both acoustic and electric sets at their triumphant gigs.
After the release of ElectrAcoustic: Volume 3, and just prior to the start of the tour in July, Gavin Brown had the pleasure of catching up with Segs Jennings to hear all about the new album, the tour, and 45-year history of the band in a fascinating conversation with their long-time bassist.
E&D: Ruts DC are heading out on tour again. How excited are you to be going on the road?
Segs: Well, it’s a thin line between nerves and excitement I suppose. We did a one-off gig in Walthamstow as a rehearsal for the acoustic band, and then we did the electric gig. I’m playing a lot of the songs on the acoustic tour. I’m playing acoustic guitar, no bass. When we’re rehearsing or doing the actual gig fully electric, you know, I’ll play the bass differently to the guitar. All in all, it’s great. I am excited. Once you get your first round under your belt, it’s good. You’ve also got the crowd interaction, which, obviously you don’t have at rehearsal. Although we’ve done quite a lot of acoustic gigs, we’ve never really done a tour before; so we’re looking forward to it. It’s amazing to have that many songs really, the whole thing’s about that.
E&D: Is it a challenge doing the set list? Obviously, you’re doing two sets, but choosing which ones you do acoustic or electric.
Segs: It’s a challenge. I think the first set I’ll play acoustic guitar, and the second set I play bass. I was playing acoustic bass, and then Leigh plays the main acoustic guitar, but then he adds a bit of grip with the electric at the end. It’s a good show, it’s exciting. I think what I’m excited most about is the crowd. Some of them don’t know what to expect, but they’re pleasantly surprised that we’ve still got quite a lot of bollocks! That’s exciting. We don’t know how some of these songs are going to go down, but I think it’s going to be fine.
E&D: Are there some songs that you have found work better acoustically when you play them live and some that are better electrically?
Segs: When we do Rebellion, for example, we have to do the classics, obviously; but for these shows, we can choose, you know. So what songs they don’t get in the electric set, they do get in the acoustic. We can do what we want, really. The obvious one is ‘Bound In Blood’; when I’d written it, my vision of it was always going to be full electric. It was a bit like the Banshees and Killing Joke in my mind. We played it acoustically, to run through it, and we said, that sounds really good. That’s the obvious one that did work really well acoustically and, of course, it’s like when we first wrote ‘In A Rut’ – I had an acoustic guitar. Malcolm wrote the lyrics, but me and Ruffy at home, he had this little sort of cardboard box, and he was just playing the drums on the cardboard box, and I had acoustic guitar; so it’s good to take it back to that.
E&D: Have you been pleased with how the latest album has been received so far?
Segs: Amazing, because this is our third one. We never thought the first one would ever do what it did, and then the second one was just an obvious thing to do. I think this one sounds the best. I mean, they all sound really good, but this one, for some reason, is amazing. We’re growing into it in a way, growing old, but growing more, so we’re all very pleased with the album. We’re pleased with the artwork, we’re pleased with everything because it’s a DIY thing. We’ve got people that help us, but we do a hell of a lot of it ourselves, which is great. We just did it out of necessity, really, and it got us our own label. I’d say we’re more pleased with this than anything really. I’m really pleased with Counter Culture: when we do another electric album it’s always going to be the last one, but it never is. If the songs come, then it happens.
E&D: The Ruts debut album The Crack was released forty-five years ago, which of course you are celebrating this year. What are your main memories of making that album?
Segs: The Crack was just a natural trajectory of the band. We actually formed in ’77, we didn’t get to record that till ’79 but we’d been really touring, and so a lot of those songs were really tight. All those songs we’d written in a rehearsal room – they’d been seasoned, tempered, as it were onstage at various gigs. ‘Babylons, Burning’, ‘Jah War’, they were just songs that were coming out. We’d done ‘In A Rut’ in ’78 but we didn’t get it out till ’79, so when we got to the studios to do The Crack, it was the dream. We’d been playing a lot of songs like ‘Savage Circle’, but Malcolm used to sing the same verse on stage – like three times; it was only when we got in the studio that Mick Glossop said, “Look, it’d be great if you could have two more verses.” He wrote two more verses to ‘You’re Just A…’and he wrote two more verses to ‘Savage Circle’. I think, actually, the songs are much better for that; Malcolm sang the same two verses but when he got in, there was pressure, you know; the third verses are sometimes much better than the first, so that was a natural project progression.
Obviously Grin And Bear It was very difficult because he’d already gone [Malcolm Owen died in 1980], and it was a bit of a compilation. We had ‘Staring At The Rude Boys’, we had ‘West One’, ‘Secret Soldiers’, ‘Demolition Dancing’, and it was a shame, because we were getting really good. I don’t know where it would have gone with him, because he was a great lyricist as well. Now, I’m a 68-year-old man, but he was, he was only 23–24 and he was writing those lyrics, and it was really, really poignant of what was going on. It was our first time and it was raw.
Now we can still kick it, but me personally, I now try to provide some answers – as opposed to back in the day, it was a bit like point a finger or whatever. Not wanting to get too political, it’s all very well people walking around with “F the Tories”, but they’re kind of ignoring the fact that is everything going to be okay once they’re gone? Of course I hate them, but there’s other things looming: dark forces are gathering in their wake, you know. That’s what the song ‘Pretty Lunatics’ is about – they’ve all got a bit of a political tinge, really, because it’s our personal politics, and I don’t believe any of those fuckers have got our good at heart at the moment.
E&D: Do you still get that passion and fire for the music today that you have always had?
Segs: Definitely! I’d say again, sorry to bring the age thing out, but as you get older the fire is actually when you’re on stage. Ruffy is 72 now and I’m 68; we ache when we get off stage. But he says, “When I get behind a kit, I don’t feel any pain,” and I’m the same – I feel great. I don’t know what I’m gonna feel like in the morning, because when you’re young, you just carry on, you party on through the night, you get drunk and wake up with a hangover and carry on. I think these days, yes, we still have a passion, absolutely. But, you have to tell yourself that it’s going to be great when we get on stage. I have to say that about tomorrow’s first gig; we know we’re going to come off, we know there might be some mistakes, but we know that is going to go down well at the end.
E&D: You’ve played so many gigs over the years. What are the most memorable?
Segs: Well, Rebellion is always really good, because you have good bands on there, and up-and-coming bands, and stuff like that. You’ve got an hour to go and smash it; and I was pleased to say that the last five–six years we’ve done it – we always smash it, so they’re always memorable. The Stranglers tour that was good: supporting them a couple of times, going to Australia and New Zealand, and going back and supporting The Damned again after all those years we’ve played together. I have to say again, it’s the crowds that make it, you know. If you’ve got a good crowd, fantastic!
E&D: This tour celebrates the 45th anniversary of The Crack‘s release; will you be celebrating for the rest of the year?
Segs: There’s always so much going on. There’s so much to do that it’s really difficult to get together. I think it took a while to dawn on us that it was 45 years, because for me, it was 47 years. I’ve known Ruffy for 49 years. It’s crazy, but the other night we did that gig, we put this backdrop up with a ’45’ and it looked good. That’s what it is. It’s two forty 45-minute sets in 45 years. So there’s a lot of 45’s going on! Whether we release some sort of 45 retrospective, I don’t know; it all costs money to make; you got to lay that money out, to speculate to accumulate, as it were.
E&D: How does it feel to still be doing this after all these years?
Segs: I feel extremely lucky to be alive. Extremely lucky to be in this band, still doing it; extremely lucky to still be playing with Ruffy, because that’s just amazing anyway, and that’s sort of scary because I certainly thought I’d be dead [by now]. We all thought we’d be dead by the time we’re 40 – when you’re 20 it seems like you’re not going to make it, especially if you’re burning the candle and living life in a punk band. It’s great, but you can’t help thinking, “How long can I can do this?” because when you come back off the tours, you are knackered. It’s like massive jet lag, because there’s so much adrenaline. But I love that adrenaline, I really love it because it’s the best drug in the world; but I think, like any drug, it does take it out; but that’s okay, because, we’ll [keep going] until we fall over!
E&D: How did it feel getting Ruts back together in 2007 with Henry Rollins on vocals?
Segs: It was tricky, but it was a necessity really because Foxy was dying, and I remember the call, it was just, “It looks like Foxy has got cancer.” I went to see him in hospital, and when I got there I walked through and he’s outside smoking a joint… with lung cancer, right? I said, “You’re still fucking smoking and you’ve got lung cancer.” He’s like, “Well, fuck it, won’t make it any difference now!” He was always a bit like that – it was great to see him. Then we had to laugh. I made him laugh. He was hurt in his lung, but it was necessary. Humour was always a huge healer in our band; then we did that gig. As the story goes, Rollins came over and did it, and that was it really.
We were going to just do that, but Ruffy and I, we knew it just felt great. We played together in lots of other bands as well. We didn’t really re-form The Ruts: we started looking at other names, and because we were doing the reggae, we got together basically on that, and did a couple of remixes. Then we did Rhythm Collision, Volume Two after all those years. Now we weren’t even going to call that Ruts DC because we wanted to do some festivals with it, and we thought as soon as you put the Ruts name in, you’re going to get all the comparisons with Malcolm and Foxy and everything. But as it turned out, it just sounded so like Ruts DC that we decided, let’s just call it Ruts DC, so we did. Then we did Music Must Destroy and that was a major thing for me, because it was like, Christ, I didn’t realise I could do that. We could do that. And then the rest of it’s history, really.
E&D: Before you got back together, you worked with the Almighty on the Just Add Life album track ‘Coalition Star’, and then Gallows and Lethal Bizzle covered ‘Staring At The Rude Boys’. How was it having the Ruts name being kept alive by these artists?
Segs: Well, the Almighty sort of took that on themselves, really. Ruffy did a remix of ‘Jonestown Mind’, and then we went down the studio, and Steve Dub, who we work with quite a lot, was the engineer, and I just went down to play some bass on it; and then we went to see them at the Brixton Academy; and they’re still big fans, so that’s how that started. Later on, we got told to go and see Gallows. I like their version. We went down there in our usual inimitable style, and went to the bar, and then I went in there when someone said, “Segs, they’re playing ‘Rude Boys’”. Frank Carter was on top of the speaker stack, and he dived off into the crowd and I thought, wow, this is crazy, and then the band’s covered one of our songs. I met him afterwards, and that was actually just before the Rollins show because we actually asked Frank to come and do ‘Rude Boys’ at that show, but Frank said, “Oh, now I’m in America”. He said, “I’ll fly back.” I said, “Look, mate, you’re in Phoenix or something; by the time you get back, you’re gonna miss it.” So we never got to work together. Now he’s singing with the Sex Pistols!
E&D: With Gallows having Lethal Bizzle on ‘Staring At The Rude Boys’, did that combination of punk and grime remind you of the energy of when you first started, and the combination of influences like dub and reggae with punk?
Segs: A bit, because I was working a lot in the studio with Steve Dub for the Chemical Brothers; I played bass on ‘Leave Home’ and things like that. At that time there wasn’t much Ruts activity; I’d always spoken to Ruffy, but at that time it’s not like you’ve got your management who are taking care of all your royalties saying “is it ok if this Lethal Bizzle does this track?” you know. Someone said, “Have you heard this? it’s your track, and he’s on it”. And he did a version of ‘Babylons Burning’, and in an interview I heard from him, his dad had that record, and he heard it, and he really liked it. I never met him – I did meet Frank Carter and Ricky Warwick, and different people along the way, but I didn’t meet Lethal Bizzle. With grime, I think it was a reflection of the punk/reggae crossover really, which I miss, and for us to do loads of gigs with Misty In Roots. We had a DJ like Don Letts or someone, and they’d play reggae and cool down the pace with the punk, and it worked so well together; and I miss that because it got polarised again really, and everybody went back to their tribes. That’s what happens in music a lot; and what happens in life, I suppose.
E&D: Did you feel like you were breaking down barriers back then with that crossover?
Segs: Absolutely. I think we all thought that it felt like a major, major change of life and very important. These times, when the world is definitely swinging towards the right, especially in France, which has been doing for years, and worldwide, then you’ve got some danger here. I’m not even going to give them airspace, but the thing is, I think back then there was the National Front, and that was quite a heavy thing. There were people believing the usual lies they say, and then Rock Against Racism came along, and we were involved with all that stuff. It really felt, when we went to those gigs, like it was unity. It really felt that people were united. I naively thought in those days that it was going to be evolution and it wouldn’t go back to those negative ways.
But, course, life’s not like that; you’ve only got to get a bit complacent, and then it all comes back. Sow a bit of hate, and then everybody’s, yeah, you’re right. It’s kind of happened again, hasn’t it? I know there are problems in the world, and I know we’re a tiny island; I know all that; but the way that the people use immigration, particularly the way they use it as a weapon to get votes, is just the wrong way to do it. It’s the wrong way to deal with anything. Love music, hate racism. That’s what it’s all about.
E&D: With that element creeping back, do you think that music will still be there to unite people?
Segs: I think it’s there. I watched some of Glastonbury on telly, and Bob Vylan played with Soft Play; and what they did, it’s unity. It shows millions of people watching at home that it can be done. You don’t think of it when you’re in the middle of it but it’s very important that it’s seen; but you can’t force the issue, it’s just natural.
E&D: What are your favourite memories of Malcom Owen and Paul Fox?
Segs: They were both just brilliant. Obviously they’ve become legends now. With Malcolm, there’s nothing like dying at an early age to become even more of a myth than you were before. He was just a really nice person actually, and funny as well. We used to share a room, so it was me and Malcom, and Foxy and Ruffy really. I’ve a lot of stories about Foxy as well! They were just great but unfortunately Malcolm got a bit awkward at the end for obvious reasons. There’s nothing like addiction to change people and to try and hide it from people. He was quite outrageous, but it was a different time.
I remember being at the Post House, a famous hotel. We went down to the bar and there was a lot of what we’d call traveling salesman, which you don’t get these days; and Malcolm came down on the way to the gig; he had sort of orange hair, and a bloke was scowling at him, as people used to in those days. It didn’t look that outrageous but he had a flash jacket on, and he said, “What are you looking at?” to this guy, and he was like, “Look at the state of ya!” and Malcolm said, “I earn three times what you make in a week in one night!” and the bloke was so pissed off. We used to have this portable justice system where if the guys were nice when we got the hotel, we were really nice; and if they were really horrible, all hell would break loose and the fire extinguishers would be out! It was kind of funny. He was like that. He once came to the hotel door in a pair of red Y-fronts and braces – he was just funny like that!
Foxy was just a light and he was into the rock ‘n’ roll of it. He just liked having fun, getting drunk and playing; and what a player he was. I was the youngest, I was only 21, and they were a couple of years older. Foxy had done a lot of bands, and I hadn’t done any; but when we played together, it was just magical. One of my favourite memories of Foxy was that he was encouraging [me] all the time. If I said I had something on guitar, he’d just grab the bass and say, “It’s great!” He’d never say, “Well I’m the guitarist” or anything. He did the chords to ‘West One’ and told me to do something on the bass and make the rest up; and it’s still on of the most difficult bass lines we did!
When we split up after Malcolm died, it was devastating, of course; but we stuck together and put a brave face on it, and didn’t let the grief show. Years later, it did; and we couldn’t carry on with that grief. Years after that, I saw him and he said, “Well, you never said I was a good guitarist.” I said, “You’re joking, you’re brilliant, I looked up to you! Come to the point, you never told me I was a great bass player,” and he said, “What?! You’re one of the best bass players I’ve worked with!” And then we were alright!
E&D: Ultimately how do you want The Ruts and Ruts DC to be remembered?
Segs: The way they are, really, I think; because I mean, for all its ups and downs, and pain and sorrow, we seem to have succeeded. Now, everyone accepts Ruts DC: they accept that I’m the singer, everyone accepts Ruffy, and everyone accepts Leigh Heggarty; and everyone accepts that we are carrying the memory of Paul and Malcolm with us. In a way we succeeded in something that we didn’t even know we were setting out to do.
The legacy is very, very important to us and The Ruts stuff is very important to us. Sometimes you get the haters who say on Facebook, “They’re not The Ruts,” but if you look carefully we never ever re-formed The Ruts. It was called Ruts DC for a reason. As Ruffy always says, we were going to form another band, with no Ruts in the title, but Virgin said if we did that they were going to drop us. Maybe we should have because they did drop us in the end anyway! We carried on but we were stricken with grief and came up with the compromise of Ruts DC, which was great; but now I’m really pleased we kept it because we really suffered through all that. Some heavy times, and now we’ve re-formed Ruts DC; we didn’t re-form The Ruts but we can do The Ruts’ songs.
I think about how we’ll be remembered; I think integrity is a big word; I think we want to keep the integrity. That’s what we said when we went with Henry Rollins and when he got asked to do it; he knew The Ruts obviously, but he did t know me and Ruffy, we could have been anybody. He wanted us to be cool, he said, “You guys, if I come over and do this, are you guys for real? Because I’m not fucking about here!” And we said, “Henry, it has to be with integrity.” He turned up to the gig in his shorts, and Ruffy said to him, “Hey mate, one thing – no shorts on stage!” He put a pair of long trousers on! After the gig, he sent me an email, which I’ve still got, and it said, “Integrity intact.” I think if there’s an epitaph for the Ruts when we’re all gone, I’d see four gravestones together with, “Integrity intact”.
