THE ADVERTS

DISCOGRAPHY Releases ONE CHORD WONDERS 7" (Stiff, 1977) GARY GILMORE'S EYES/ 7" (Anchor, 1977) SAFETY IN NUMBERS 7" (Anchor, 1977) NO TIME TO BE 21 7" (Bright, 1978) CROSSING THE RED SEA WITH THE ADVERTS LP (Bright, 1978) TELEVISION'S OVER 7" (RCA, 1978) MY PLACE 7" (RCA, 1979) CAST OF THOUSANDS LP (RCA, 1979) CAST OF THOUSANDS 7" (RCA, 1979) GARY GILMORE'S EYES 7" (Bright, 1983) PEEL SESSIONS 12" (Strange Fruit, 1987) LIVE AT THE ROXY CD (Receiver, 1990) LIVE AND LOUD Split CD w/ THE RUTS (Link, 1992) Reissues PUNK SINGLES COLLECTION CD (Anagram, 1997) THE WONDERS DON'T CARE 2xLP (Get Back, 1997) SINGLES COMPILATION LP (Get Back, 1997) BEST OF THE ADVERTS CD (Anagram, 1998) Compilations LIVE AT THE ROXY LP (Receiver, 1977) HEROES AND COWARDS LP (Stiff, 1978) INFO TV SMITH.com The man is still making music and just did his first US tour ever (and my band missed out on playing with him because of a disorganized promoter - CURSES!). He has plenty of good info on his current and past projects. A living legend. Adverts Page on Punknet77 Website A wealth of info and internet links pertaining to the Adverts can be found here. I would recommend it as a jumping off point for fellow obsessive fans.

The Adverts were one of the most prolific and brilliant bands to come out of the first post-Pistols wave of UK punk in 1977. Young TV (Tim) Smith embraced the punk idea that you didn't need to know how to play to make great music, and proved it by writing a staggering ammount of truly great punk anthems in the three short years of the Adverts' career. TV and bassist Gaye Advert (Atlas) were living together and goin to art school when, after hearing about the Pistols, they decided to start a band. They recruited guitarist Howard Pickup and rehearsed for awhile until they found drummer Lorry Driver in the summer of 1976. The Adverts, still green and rough around the edges, played their first show at London's Roxy Club January 15, 1977. The Adverts quickly became Roxy fixtures (immortalized by their first vinyl appearence on the Live at the Roxy compilation LP). They caught the attention of the Damned's Brian James, who booked them to open for the Damned on tour, and hooked them up with the blossoming independent label, Stiff Records.

The Adverts first single "One Chord Wonders," captures a rough and unpolished punk sound. Despite the raw recording and sloppy playing, the songwriting power of TV Smith was obvious. "One Chord Wonders" was a celebration of the raw, rough punk amateurness that the Adverts exemplified. The band was surprised upon the release of the single to find that the group photo they had all posed for had been cropped. Gaye's face: beautiful and vampy with thick panda-eye circles of black mascara, graced the entire cover. Also, the B-Side "Quickstep" had been incorrectly labeled "2:49" to maintain the image of punk brevity. The track actually clocks in at 3:18. These aesthetic concerns aside, the single fortified the Adverts as one of the best bands in England. Nonplussed with Stiff, they jumped to the larger Anchor for their follow up. "Gary Gilmore's Eyes," was a chart hit, the only top 20 tune the Adverts would score, but for such a catchy pop gem it is an amazingly dark and sardonic song. The flipside, "Bored Teenagers," could have easilly been a hit on it's own. Like "One Chord Wonders," Smith was able to script the perfect battle cry for the new punk masses. Far from the football-chant clichés of many of his contemporaries, Smith's lyrics worked from the Pistols' template of punning insight mixed with snide defiance.

Before the end of the year, the Adverts already had another single under their belts. "Safety in Numbers" turned their focus from the creative possibilities of punk to the conformist realities of the '77 scene. It was the instigation of an antagonistic relationship with the punk status quo that would only intensify over the next two years. This single would be their last record with Anchor, who went out of business that year. In 1978, the Adverts unvieled their masterpiece debut album, Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts. The album brought the promise of the early singles to full fruition, and is undoubtedly one of the best punk albums ever produced. Smith's uncanny ear for tunes, his biting lyrics, and the rough energy of the band propel every track directly into the listener's heart, brain, and feet. The re-recording of "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" cut for the LP was left off by the Bright label due to time constraints, and didn't see the light of day until it was released as a single in 1983 (since then, Smith has had the LP restored to it's intended sequence). Following the release of Red Sea Lorry Driver departed the band, and was replaced first by John Towe of Generation X and then by Rod Latter.

The second and final Adverts LP, 1979's Cast of Thousands burned any bridges they had to the fashionable punk scene. Now on major label RCA, the band let go of their dirty roots and embraced a more over-the-top pop approach. This change was based in the addition of Tim Cross on synthesiszer. Smith turned his punk tunes into something else entirely. Far from the new wave band the label tried to paint them as, Cast of Thousands proved accessible to niether the punks nor the mainstream at the time. Cross accents Smith's formerly straightforward punk tunes with bouncy keyboard lines and atmospheric effects, while the under-production gives the whole record a sparse feel that recalls the rawness of the early singles. I often describe the album to friends as a punk rock opera. Indeed, Smith's voice reaches new dramatic heights as he pours himself into each song's ingenious tyrade. The album as a whole speaks to a society buried by its own desolate culture: war, overconsumption, mindless entertainment. The heart of the album, like many of the Adverts best early songs, is the alienation these things create. The label chose the washed out color photo of the band, Gaye front-and-center, over the one Smith wanted to use: the famous picture of a Vietnamese monk setting himself on fire that would later turn up as the cover to Rage Against the Machine's first record (also on RCA).

The failure of Cast to sell pushed the already tense situation of the Adverts over the edge. Gaye especially was suffering at the hands of the British press, who insisted on both objectifying her as a punk sexpot and humiliating her by deriding her ability to play bass with unmerciful (and certainly unwarranted) cruelty. She and Howard both quit the band after the last gig at Slough College on October 27th, 1979. TV briefly tried out a new line-up, but threw in the towel in 1980. He has continued playing in bands like the Explorers and as a solo acoustic artist. Howard Pickup stopped showing up to practice in 1979 and sadly passed away recently. Gaye hung up her bass after quitting the Adverts and has not touched it since, though she and TV still live together. Thankfully, almost all of the Adverts' recorded material has seen recent reissues, with the exception of Cast of Thousands, which might take a bit of searching. Like everything this band did in their three short years, find it by any means necessary.

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