The Boneless Ones

Bio:

Started a really long time ago in Ron's bedroom. Well actually probably in school one lunchtime. The first line-up was Ron, Twiss, Greg, Edy and Bils. Or maybe Conrad was in it from the beginning and Edy was in a different band entirely. And maybe Bils wasn't in it at first and Greg was. Or the other way around. There was an audience from Day One. They were skate punks, mostly. Quite a lot were just punks, mostly of the The Clash or Crass type who sometimes liked it, and sometimes didn't. There were hippies, too. That's because most people who played music and were in bands and put on gigs had long hair and smoked pipes and liked bands called "Milk" or "Bread" or some other kind of food. Mostly they were just curious kids. Loads of girls came to the gigs too. They had Alder jackets and perms in Mumbles and donkey jackets and flat-tops in town. When there was a practice at Conrad's house we'd go around and he'd be listening to DRI really loud and doing the ironing. He had a mohawk and about twenty earrings. Next time I see him I must remember to have a look at his ears. The music was derivative when looked at on a song-by-song basis, but added up to a rather unique overall effect. The gigs were always, always, a shambles. But magnificent. At Swansea College Greg and Bils played different songs, at the same time, right the way through. At the Camelot Suite Ron tried to escape the amorous advances of two girls Benny Hill style, while continuing to belt out a song. We played to a packed pig barn in Banbury, and were supported by an 11 year-old punk poet called Dog Lamppost at St Phillips Community Centre. We played at Ben Noel's Summer Festival. Or didn't. I'm not sure. I was there, but I might not have been. The Edge magazine paid for us to record two songs at Swansea Sound studio. That recording is probably in a box in someone's attic. It's sitting there patiently, waiting to be discovered, like the memories I have of these short, loud, hilarious, chaotic, bloody, events - they are all packed somewhere in my mind, I think, but I can't quite access them, or, when I can, they are not whole. I have lost something of the smell of them, the touch, the sound. Maybe no one has the Swansea Sound recording. Maybe the last person to have a cassette copy has thrown it out, because they didn't have room for it anymore, or it didn't seem important. I wonder whether anyone remembers some of the sessions, or gigs, or road-trips, or whether they have been erased entirely from the realm of human consciousness. Sometimes, I find a fragment of that time when we were young and incivicible and beautiful, or it finds me. It could be an out-of-tune bass note hit too hard and out-of-time; an argument about amps and leads; drums exploding toward the final lines of "Family"; the smell of a pub with a greasy red patterned lino floor with centuries of stale lager and fag-burns on it... but my memories tend to come to me as images, faded, at the edge of my periphery. And when I try to view them, they jump away and hide: the girl's wrist, filled with bangles; the Steve Olson skateboard standing in the corner of a teenager's bedroom; the graffitti on the toilet wall. These don't add up to any sort of coherent whole, but they are extant. They are the present as much as they are the past, and they are as much a part of who we are today as anything else in our lives. Twiss Boneless 2008

Member Since:

June 10, 2008

Members:

Ron McBoneless, Con Boneless, Lee Boneless, Greg Boneless

Influences:

A Clockwork Orange, Converse, Special Brew, Life's a Beach, Phil Ridgeway at Herr Cutts, Steve Cabellero, King Kurt, The Velvet Underground, Hammer horror films, Mutant, John & Stilts, Surf Music, Gerry Anderson, Jose Cuervo tequila, Rector pads, The Joneses, ESA contests, snakebite and black, The Shining, Zorlac, Sex Pistols, The Smiths, Martin (Flash Harry) Smith, Citizen Smith, Winston Smith, Billy Smith, Mike Smith, Carol Smith, Mark E. Smith, Mark D. Smith, Ratbite, Independent trucks, The Cramps, Embassy Regals, Seb Edwards, Vans, Bils's Mum, Rob Roscopp ads, Halloween, Thrasher, The Meteors, stuff like that really.

Sounds Like:

Adolescent boys trying to play music.

Record Label:

Unsigned