Essen Trip

In 1983, a trip was organised to Sunderland's Twin Town, Essen, in Northern Germany. This is a group of us posing in a German Shopping centre. Pictured are a german lass, can't remember her name, Jo Campbell, a German lad, can't remeber his either, Tommy O, Mick Dunbar, Russ Dunbar,me, Gerry McCulloch and Alby Crosby. We were there for about a week and stopped in this youth club place. We had agreed to play a gig over there and cobbled together a set, which I remember started with 'Tube Disasters' by Flux of Pink Indians. Cant remeber what else we played but it did include a Damned tune. We were treated like royalty if I remember correctly, interviewed by the local press and there was apple struddle to eat when we arrived at the centre. Honest.

We met this punk from dusseldorf and told him we were playing this gig (which was meant to be a small time affair). The day of the gig there were stacks of these german punks turned up to watch the english punk band play, the staff of the centre nearly shat themselves. The two wars were only mentioned once during our introduction, and the turkish drummer, whose kit jimmy tate was knocking shit out of, stood directly behind him throughout the set looking very worried. There were a few people stopping upstairs who were hiding from the state national service who were probably glad to see the back of us cos we practiced every night till late, getting pissed on stupidly cheap wine that we later found out was cooking wine meant for marinating pork. Mmmmmm.

One of the germans had a german to english phrase book that had "That Policeman has turned me blue funky" in it.