In a perfect world

Beset by industry and inter-band woes, Long Tall Shorty managed to cut some great rock and roll

I’ve been thinking a lot about a U.K. band that I never saw nor, until fairly recently, knew much about. Long Tall Shorty were among the earliest bands on the late-1970s Mod Revival scene, as historian/chronicler Eddie Piller recalls in his sleeve notes to Long Tall Shorty: Completely Perfect, a career retrospective issued by Detour Records in 2002. Besotted with the Jam and Paul Weller, guitarist and singer Tony Morrison—aka, Tony Perfect; I’ll refer to him as Morrison throughout—, Jimmy Grant (bass), Mark Reynolds (drums), and Keith Mono (vocals) formed the Indicators, a band with punk leanings, late in 1978.

Piller picks up the tale: “Music impresario Tony Gordon had arranged a package tour to showcase the signings to Jimmy ‘Sham 69’ Pursey’s new JP label through Warner Brothers. Headlining were debut signings the Angelic Upstarts supported by the Invaders.” The Invaders split the tour early, and “frantic calls” to Gordon’s office in search of a replacement band resulted in a stroke of luck: “Gordon’s secretary’s son, Mark Reynolds, played the drums in a young band called The Indicators, and sure enough they joined the tour that very night. Pursey himself came down to the London show and was so impressed with the upstart band that he signed them on the spot.” “We were supposed to sign to Polydor,” Morrison related to Garry Bushell in Hoolies: True Stories of Britain’s Biggest Street Battles, “but the [Angelic] Upstarts had a ruck with a security guard after throwing an aborted foetus out of a top-floor window, so, amid much delay, we finally signed, along with the whole Pursey’s Package label, to WEA.” Pursey suggested-slash-insisted that the band change their name to Long Tall Shorty (after the Kinks’ 1964 cover of the Don Covay tune), and offered to produce a demo session.

Here’s where things get complicated. In short: Long Tall Shorty’s career was a mess. Whenever things felt as if they might jell—identification with a growing scene; support from a major music industry player; recording sessions booked; label support promised—the band would lose center. Though buoyed by local support for their fiery gigs, Long Tall Shorty never seemed to get their feet on solid ground, buckling under the burden of bad luck while enduring a near-comic number of lineup changes. As such, Long Tall Shorty became emblematic of the Band That Couldn’t Catch A Break.

To wit: their debut 45, “By Your Love” backed with “1970’s Boy,” released in 1979. Piller relates how Warner Brothers “messed up the single release, missing the band’s debut off the release schedule and sending out a press shot of a completely different band emblazoned with the name Long Tall Shorty.” The label then mysteriously withdrew the single within a week of its release (“with maybe only 100 sales”), stymieing the band’s commercial chances. “The single was scheduled for release,” Morrison remarked to Bushell, “but then A&R man Dave Dee got the sack, the whole of Pursey’s label was dropped and all the singles withdrawn—an unfortunate set of circumstances, I think anyone would agree, but, then, if I’d have become a megastar then, would I be in the Gonads [the punk band Morrison later joined] now? What a lucky escape, eh?”

Long Tall Shorty released three singles between 1979 and ‘81; they busted up briefly in 1982 before reforming and playing throughout the ‘80s, and then more-or-less permanently after 2000. (Sadly, Morrison died of COVID-19 in 2021.) In all, they released eight singles, eight albums (both of the official and the “official bootleg” variety), and two compilations. The Detour release, my introduction to the band, is terrific, but frustratingly lacking in personnel, session, and/or release date info. Having combed through the band’s Wikipedia page, listings in Discogs, and various online sites, including the essential Bored Teenagers, I now have a decent purchase on the band’s sporadic recordings and releases. “1970’s Boy,” “Shake,” and “New Generation” were recorded in February 1979, “By Your love” in August, and “Falling For You,” “Please Can You Tell Me,” and “Can’t Stop Moving” in September. “That’s What I Want,” “If I Was You,” “I Do,” and “All By Myself” were tracked as demos for CBS Records in the Summer of 1980. These and two more tracks (“Long Time” and “She’s All Mine”) were allegedly earmarked for the band’s full-length debut album, which, alas, never materialized.

Jon Obadiah ended up including“If I Was You” and “That’s What I Want” as a flexi disc with his Direction Creation Reaction fanzine in 1981. Later singles included “Win Or Lose” b/w ”Ain’t Done wrong,” released that same year, and “On the Streets Again” b/w “I Fought The Law” and “Promises” in 1984. (Since the mid 1980s, stray Long Tall Shorty tracks have been consistently showing up on various Mod and Punk compilation albums.) In the event, it’s difficult to know precisely which Long Tall Shorty lineup appears on which recording—grab a machete and venture into the thickets of the Wiki bio if you must—and to further confuse things, Completely Perfect includes no fewer than four versions of “By Your Love,” including one with an uncredited female lead vocalist. The compilation concludes with a handful of tracks recorded in the early- to mid-1980s, a period I’m guessing at based on the band’s set lists from that time.

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Scattered among these dozens of tracks is some great rock and roll. At their best, Long Tall Shorty were a tough, mouthy outfit, their charged songs conjuring shadowy, amped-up streets of rough and tumble London. Had the band released a proper debut, we might be talking about them as one of the finest from the Mod-Punk era. Perhaps surprisingly, Long Tall Shorty at their best evoke the juvee, edgy feel of the Street Rock being made in lower Manhattan in the mid- and late-70s. Morrison, Mono, and their band offer a London take on the Heartbreakers, Johnny Thunders’s desperate sincerity and street-wise singing, and his and Walter Lure’s noisy, sloppy-yet-biting guitars a template for Long Tall Shorty, who filtered the vibe through Mod leanings, replacing ripped t-shirts and jeans with three-button suits and sharp shoes. I hear early Ramones, too. The effect is of universal rock and roll songs transcending the origins of their making—a noble ambition for any band, in my book.

Completely Perfect is an uneven collection. A few songs are generic Mod/R&B, and the later tracks from the mid-80s lack the careening, raw-bone hunger of the early recordings. (Full disclosure: I haven’t listened yet to Long Tall Shorty’s post-2000 material.) Yet, “Falling For You,” “If I Was You,” “New Generation,” “Can’t Stop Moving,” and “All By Myself” roar to the surface on eighth-notes, slashing guitars, impassioned vocals, and that coarse, youthful energy that gives the impression of the band members hurrying to catch up with the very songs they’re playing. And they all sound great loud.

“Falling For You” is an urging three-chord blast riding a desperate, eternal chorus; the Kinks/Undertones-esque “If I Was You” propels on a similar chord progression yet gains poignancy in its lyric, a take on friendly envy: “If I was you, I could be anything I want to be,” the singer gushes in the catchy chorus. (A laddish, surface-level coveting, its inevitably darker dimensions were explored by Paul Weller in the Jam’s “To Be Someone,” from their 1978 album All Mod Cons.) “New Generation” and “Can’t Stop Moving” are among the band’s more Mod-identifying tracks, adrenaline-smeared paeans to youth, music, and all-night dancing. The rousing, mid-paced “All By Myself” meditates a bit on the paradox that plagues not only scene wannabes but anyone barreling through their youth: the desire for independence and solitude against the appeal of the group:

When I’m alone all by myself
Don’t have to worry about no one else
But when I’m mixing with a crowd
It’s all too much, I can’t take it

Not anti-social, but I can only take too much of your…, the singer snarls, before Morrison or England vent their unvoiced frustrations through their loud, distorted amps, as God intended.

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The planned A-side of Long Tall Shorty’s debut single was Morrison’s “1970s Boy.” “We played the lot [their material for Pursey] and he didn’t seem too impressed so then I said, “Wait, we’ve got one more’ and we played ‘1970s Boy’ which was the first song I’d ever written,” Morrison related to Gary Bushell in ‘79 The Mod Revival, Time for Action: Essays from the Frontline. “I hadn’t wanted to play it because it was only about ninety seconds long, full of swearing and very punk. As soon as he heard it, Jimmy was leaping about the studio going, ‘That’s it, that’s the one.’ We recorded it there and then.” “1970’s Boy” is raucous, a noisily-played if fairly uniform generational complaint. Two weeks later, the band arrived in the studio to cut the flip, “By Your Love.” After one listen, everyone in the room knew it was the proper A-side.

“By Your Love” is Long Tall Shorty’s signature tune, and yet it barely nods at targets, parkas, or scooters. At the time, Morrison stressed to Bushell, “the Mod Revival wasn’t even being written about in the press, and [Pursey]’d signed us as a pop band.” As pop songs go, “By Your Love” is sublime, a sleepy, Velvet Underground-esque ode to adoration and surrender. The song gives the ironic effect of barely making it off of the couch, so lazily strummed are the guitars and yawning the vocals, but the tune only exists because the singer’s so knocked out at how he’s been undone by her charms that he can only marinate, lackadaisically, in the bliss. (I thought that the song was a cover when I first heard it, so locked in to its vibe it is.) An instant should-have-been-a-classic that was derailed by the indifferent meanness of the music industry, “By Your Love” ought to be raved about in the same way we rave about, say, Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” from the same era. (I prefer the first version on Completely Perfect to the cleaner single mix.)

One more song on Completely Perfect deserves mention, the brilliant “10th Floor,” recorded in the mid-80s with a lineup featuring Morrison on guitar and vocals, Steve Moran on rhythm guitar, Ian Jones on bass, and Derwent Jaconelli on drums. Railing against the straitjacket of the guitars’ two chords, Morrison, channeling the Saints’ Chris Bailey, laments his fate stuck working 9-to-5 in a high rise building. “Sometimes when I’m up there, well I just gotta get down,” he snarls, “back down to the ground where I can feel human again.” His paycheck’s a joke, he feels the pain because he’s gotta get out of his head, yet he’s coming down too slow (on the elevator of from drugs, your call). Morrison and Moran’s riffing, slashing guitars evoke the singer’s well meaning, if naïve, mates in the pub or on the street corner urging him to quit his shitty office job. The conceit is genius: the upward mobility embraced by the singer’s faceless, automaton coworkers and society at large is turned on its head with anger and glee: he’s not aspiring to climb the ladder; he’s looking for a way to jump off. Great stuff. Play it loud.

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“We were poor because our manager took all our money. We ended up sleeping in the transit van in the freezing cold, and the manager had his feet out because they stank so much, making it even colder. It was fucking horrible. We were all eight stone. We hadn’t eaten. He wouldn’t feed us. We never saw any of the gig money. After that first indignity, we decided stuff the North, and we pulled out and fell out with the penny-pinching manager.”

I present this woeful passage without context, because, well, who needs it? (If you’re keeping score, it’s Morrison again, in Bushell’s ‘79 The Mod Revival.) The details in the foreground linger graphically as the background fades away to suggest many struggling artist or bands’ fate on the road: disastrous management; precious little cash; stinky feet. That Long Tall Shorty managed to keep it together long enough to play hundreds of shows (graying enthusiasts online continue to testify to the band’s electrifying shows); record and release dozens of 45s and LPs (a few of them highly collectible), and enjoy a late-career recognition in the form of generous compilation albums is in itself kind of remarkable, accomplishments of which any band would be proud. Makes you rethink what luck means. And yet, like countless other artists and groups, Long Tall Shorty is relegated to the footnotes of music history. Yet if you squint at the small type size, you’ll hear quite a redemptive noise.

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Images of Long Tall Shorty taken from front and back cover of Long Tall Shorty: Completely Perfect (Detour Records, 2002)

Image of “By Your Love” 45 sleeve via Discogs