Spizz: the final frontier.

Published: Apr 15, 2025.

Introduction: For much of the 70s, English society was in turmoil. Unemployment was soaring, industry was collapsing, and political tensions were rising, while movements like Rock Against Racism clashed with the growing presence of movements like the National Front.

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The decline was impossible to ignore on the streets of cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Once hubs of manufacturing, these cities were now marked by factory closures and dead-end prospects. 

The mainstream music scene felt out of touch, rock had grown bloated and self-indulgent, pop had become nauseatingly trite, and what dominated the charts rarely reflected the frustration of everyday life. 

Through this noise, punk emerged as a necessary rupture. But for some, punk itself, wasn’t enough. Artists like Siouxsie Sioux blurred the lines between fashion and provocation, while Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex defied expectations of what a punk frontwoman could be. 

And radio shows like John Peel’s championed the strange, the new, and the unexpected.

Richard Smith: As a young aspiring musician and typical teenage troublemaker, my guest today was a huge inspiration for my misspent youth. His irreverence and semi-sardonic take on the world appealed to my adolescent exuberance and naive sense of empowerment. Throughout the early ’80s, I saw him live on multiple occasions, dancing and singing to every ballistic beat. Please welcome to the show, the wonderful Spizz. Spizz, welcome!

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Spizz: Hello, hello.

RS: How are you?

S: I thought I’d become computer illiterate there for a minute.

RS: I was listening to the episode you did with Martyn Ware, and it brought back all these memories. I thought, “Fuck, I saw you so many times at the Marquee!” You were such a hero of mine.

S: I think he said that was one of the funniest interviews he’s ever done.

RS: That’s another reason I wanted to talk to you. I needed someone on the show a bit more lighthearted…

S: …a surrealist.

RS: Anyway, I’m really glad we could do this.

S:  I didn’t have anything else booked at this particular time.

RS: I saw your radio show is broadcast today; do you pre-record those?

S: Yeah, I recorded that on Tuesday. I used to go into the studio, but then COVID hit, and we lost access. I’ve gotten used to doing it from home now. I have more control that way.

RS: How long have you been doing the show?

S: Eight and a half years.

RS: How did it all begin?

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S: I did some guest slots for Gary Crowley on Soho Radio. He used to ask DJ friends like me to fill in for him for two-hour sets. I also tried to break into radio years ago with my mate Paul Hallam, a mod DJ. We’d go to the Christmas parties for Resonance 104.4 FM in London. I zeroed in on the boss, and he’d heard of me. That helped.

I said, “I could do a show,” and he told me to send in an idea via email. He gave me his card. Of course, I’d wake up hungover thinking, “What the hell was I saying?” This happened for a couple of Christmases.

Then one night I left the 100 Club early, hoping to catch last orders at my local pub. It was a Tuesday in September, dead quiet, but the station boss was there with a colleague. I sat down for a chat.

He asked, “What are you doing next Thursday?” I said, “Why?” He replied, “I’ve got six slots to fill, someone’s dropped out. What would you do?”

I said I’d always meant to write an audio autobiography but never got around to it. So, I said, “I could tell stories from my past and play songs to match, like when I met Siouxsie, I could play a Siouxsie track. When I met Joe Strummer, play a Clash song.” He said, “Great. See you Thursday.”

After six weeks, I asked, “What now?” He said, “Funny enough, can you do Friday teatimes?” And I said, “Yeah. I’ll drop everything.”

RS: That’s brilliant.

S: Now it’s just a regular show. I cover all sorts, what I’ve been up to, new music, and outside interviews I record on my phone. People send me their MP3s, and if I like them, I play them.

RS: You’re the new John Peel!

S: Yeah.

RS: His whole archive is online now. I used to listen religiously and record songs off the radio onto cassette.

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S: I got on Peel’s show in 1978 as SpizzOil. That opened the door to Rough Trade, and once the record came out, we did the Siouxsie tour. I went from playing pubs to playing Hammersmith Odeon in 10 months. I did four John Peel sessions. At one point, I had more sessions than David Bowie or The Jam.

RS: That’s amazing. There’s always been a political thread in your work. I was listening to 1989 and thinking, “Why is he so obsessed with 1989?”

S: I’ve always been a news junkie. Amnesia, the B-side of Where’s Captain Kirk? That’s all about 1984. Lyrics like, “Listen, Winston, you don’t have to suffer / Thought held against Big Brother.” That’s always been a concern of mine, totalitarianism raising its ugly head again.

RS: And now you perform under names like SpizzOrwell?

S: That’s my Instagram handle. Someone had already taken SpizzEnergi. And since it’s a visual platform, I liked the Orwell reference. One of my songs, City of Eyes, is about espionage, surveillance, email snooping… Orwell stuff. Bowie’s Diamond Dogs introduced me to 1984. That album is basically based on the book.

RS: I read that Bowie’s performance of Starman on Top of the Pops was a turning point for you.

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S: Absolutely. Everyone in punk was influenced by either Roxy Music’s first album or Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. I heard Starman on the radio first and loved it. Then I saw Bowie on Top of the Pops, red hair, pointing down the camera, and my parents were like, “What the hell is that?” And I was like, “Yes!”

I bought all his albums. My first proper gig was Bowie and the Spiders from Mars at Birmingham Town Hall, 1973. Row C, seat 33.

RS: Who did you go with?

S: I went on my own. I was 14. First time out in Birmingham solo.

RS: Wow. I think my first gig was at the Marquee. I was meant to see The Undertones, but they canceled and I saw lurkers,

S: Oh, wow.

RS: Completely different band. I was probably about 14 or 15. You’re originally from Birmingham originally, right? But then your family moved out to Solihull?

S: I was born in Solihull, but my dad wanted to move further and further from Birmingham. When I was a late teenager, I just wanted to be in the city. My first trip to London was to see Bowie on the Station to Station tour in ’76. That was it, I knew I wanted to live there.

My second-ever show as Spizz came after I gatecrashed the Birmingham Punk Festival on August 29, 1977. A DJ managing the band I borrowed a guitar from said, “Go do that again, but in London.” So, I did, and it was appalling! But someone thought I was funny. A booker for the Vortex club, which had risen from the ashes of the Roxy.

RS: What made you just jump onstage and do it?

S: I’d seen Bowie, tried to learn guitar, but couldn’t play. Then I saw The Clash in July ’77 and thought, “I want some of this.” I was in art college, and I knew these hairdresser girlfriends of guys in a band called Model Mania. I asked to borrow a guitar and said I’d blag my way on. I had no material, just made it up on the spot. It was audacious and awful in equal measure.

RS: Bowie was clearly a role model, dressing up, acting, performing?

S: I wanted to be an actor from the age of nine. I thought, “You get to kiss girls in the script, you don’t even have to chat them up!” But seeing Bowie changed everything. And The Clash had a stylish, dramatic look, and their songs had a political edge. I ditched the acting dream and decided I was going to be a musician.

RS: You’re not just a singer, you’re a performer.

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S: Definitely. We’re more of a performance band than one that stands still and scowls. I sing melodies.

RS: I remember seeing you at the Marquee, it was chaos, in a good way. The venue was tiny and wild. You could go backstage through a door behind the bar.

S: That’s right!

RS: I didn’t realize you trained as a graphic designer and wanted to do record covers?

S: Yeah. I read in all the music papers, Bowie, Ray Davies, Lennon, they all went to art school. I figured that’s where you go to meet musicians. I was better at drawing than playing guitar. Punk happened while I was in college, so the crossover made sense. And later I got to design all my own sleeves.

RS: You started as a one-man band, right?

S: Yeah. I played on my own with borrowed gear. Then I ran into my old schoolmate Pete, who’d just moved into a flat. I said, “Hey Pete, want to do this thing in London?” He had a guitar, so we wrote four songs together.

We based one on Hang On to Yourself by Bowie, it’s a perfect punk formula: verse, chorus, verse, chorus. We also did Hey Joe which Patti Smith had done. We were weird enough to keep getting booked. Pete was calling himself Pete Plectrum; I was Spizz77. But I didn’t want to be tied to the year.

I saw a documentary on North Sea oil rigs, the biggest man-made objects moved across the earth. I thought, SpizzOil! Great symmetry. So, I changed our name and persuaded Pete to become Pete Petrol.

RS: And you just kept evolving the name from there.

S: After the Siouxsie tour we split, but he came back for SpizzEnergi. Oil produces energy. It made logical sense. But then the name changes became an obsession. I made a massive list of everything you could put after “Spizz.”

RS: SpizzDisplay, SpizzOptimized, SpizzVideo…

S:  My radio show is Spizz FM. I do acoustic gigs as Spizzology.

RS: So who still calls you Kenneth?

S: I don’t talk to those people. My mum had a brother named Kenneth. My dad too. Both were shot down in WWII. I was named after them. So, I didn’t want any of my silliness to taint their memory. I became Spizz. That’s who I am.

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RS: Were you into any of the big Birmingham bands, Black Sabbath, The Beat, Duran Duran?

S: Not really, but Pete Petrol loved Sabbath. You can hear it in the early SpizzOil recordings, he’s cranked up to 10. When we toured with Siouxsie and the Banshees, the sound guy loved volume. It was just me and Pete filling the PA, a sledgehammer wall of sound. I’d scream instead of doing guitar solos. It freaked people out.

RS: You toured with Human League, right?

S: On the Siouxsie tour, Nico from Velvet Underground was originally the main support act, but she went down badly. Kids wanted to just pogo to Hong Kong Garden, not watch her mumble into an organ. So, she got dropped, and SpizzOil moved up. Human League picked up the remaining slots. I hit it off with Martyn Ware.

Years later, when they were Heaven 17, we were living near each other in London, hanging out, getting smashed. When they had their hit Temptation, they needed someone to bounce around on stage, Glen had a bad knee, and the others were stuck behind synths. So, I did about seven European TV shows with them. Just running around with a guitar.

RS: I saw one on YouTube. You looked totally out of place, in a great way.

S: Like Andrew Ridgeley in Wham! I couldn’t play half the notes, I just looked like I could.

RS: Were you into Human League’s music?

S: Funny story, I was watching them with Steve Severin and he asked, “What do you think?” I said, “Yeah, it’s good… but I don’t think it’ll catch on.” Shows what I knew.

RS: Their early stuff was brilliant, like Being Boiled.

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S: Yeah, and they had fun tracks too. Empire State. And Martyn Ware used to be a computer programmer. This was back when computers read punched cards, no floppy disks yet.

RS: You and Martyn talked about typography on his show which I thought was interesting. I love that you’re experimenting with AI music now. Tell me about that.

S: Pete Petrol’s in New Zealand and sent me this AI-generated song. You just paste in lyrics, full songs, or a few lines, and it generates a track in seconds. I tried it after a few drinks one night. A week later I went back and put in lyrics to one of my actual songs. It came out mad. Someone even made a reggae version of Where’s Captain Kirk? Word for word. I played it on my radio show this week.

RS: I heard one track you played where it turned your lyrics into a rock ballad.

S: That would be either Death of the Free Band or We Want the World. It sounded like a Eurovision entry. Totally bonkers.

RS: Are you planning to do more AI stuff? Or is it just for fun?

S: If they can sample my actual voice, it might be worth doing as a proper SpizzEnergi release. Part of me wants to make a whole AI album.

RS: If you were starting out now, would you do anything differently?

S: I’m glad I started when I did. If I’d had a mobile phone in 1977… God knows what I would’ve gotten up to. That’s why my autobiography is still unfinished. Too many stories I can’t publish.

RS: Any regrets?

S: Not really. Maybe just that I didn’t do more, more naughtiness.

RS: Who would you love to collaborate with?

S: If Bowie were still alive, for sure. But I do have two records mixed by Tony Visconti.

RS: No way!

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S: Yeah. I met him in 1980 when I was in the film Breaking Glass, he was the musical director. Later we kept bumping into each other in Soho. During lockdown, I told him I had a song about Denmark Street. He said, “Send me the demo.” We hadn’t even recorded it yet!

Me and Luca fleshed it out, recorded it, sent him the files, and he mixed it in New York, for mates’ rates, because he liked the idea. Then we got asked to do a Bowie convention. Everyone else was playing the obvious hits, but we did Valentine’s Day, a track that’s a bit under the radar.

RS: I remember that one. Beautiful song.

S: It’s the only Bowie track where the original was produced by Visconti and the cover also by him. Some say our version is even better, mainly because Bowie never got to tour it. We gave it a bit more edge. And now the Bowie convention house band plays our arrangement.

RS: The last Bowie album was phenomenal.

S: It took me a year to even watch the videos. He died on my birthday. I had already invited people to the pub that night, so we sat there, just me and a few mates, listening to wall-to-wall Bowie on the pub’s internet jukebox.

RS: There was an exhibition here that moved me to tears.

S: Was it the V&A one? Yeah I went on the last day. I was welling up by the time I reached the final room.

Songs from Blackstar still get me. That line: “Look up here, I’m in heaven… I’ve got scars that can’t be seen…” It’s wrenching.

RS: Bowie’s obsession with the future, space, and stars, mirrors a lot of your work.

S: Totally. Songs like Drive-In Saturday, Man Who Sold the World, and of course Diamond Dogs with all the 1984 references, those sci-fi elements really hit me. I’ve always been into that.

RS: Your songs, like Where’s Captain Kirk?” lean into that.

S: Definitely. I even did a song about Mega-City from 2000 AD. Me and Pete Petrol were the first non-cartoon characters featured in the comic. We brought them our record and they ran a story about it. No one had done a Mega-City song before us.

Where’s Captain Kirk? was massive, and still is massive. But we followed it up with No Room and Spock’s Missing. The I wrote another Star Trek song for the second album, called Five Year Mission.

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So, the first song is Where is Captain Kirk? Then Spock’s Missing, and in the third song Spock comes back. It’s like a Star Trek trilogy, basically the scripts of the first three films before they were even made.

RS: I heard you wrote Where’s Captain Kirk? on a bus ride home.

S: After rehearsal one night, I’d had a few drinks and lyrics started coming to me. I didn’t have a pen, so I kept repeating them in my head. Ran home and scribbled it all down.

So, I went back to rehearsal the next week and said, “Mark, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve rewritten it. Let’s try it, let’s play it.” So, we played it, and we just fell about laughing. We thought it was great.

We had a gig coming up, and we still didn’t have a drummer yet. But we never turned gigs down, we’d just go ahead and do it without one. Jim had a percussive bass style, and Mark’s keyboard playing was quite tappy, so it sort of made up for the lack of drums.

And the audience went absolutely bonkers. At one gig, we played that song eight times. We still didn’t have a long enough set, so we just kept playing it again and again until the crowd got tired of it, which they didn’t. We got sick of failure it eight times!

RS: Was it always called Where’s Captain Kirk?

Spizz: No, the song wasn’t called that at all, it was originally called Nobody’s Who. Only one line remained from the original song, “Nobody’s Who”: “Oh but, it’s true.” And it just morphed into something else entirely. Like grafting a new plant onto an old one.

RS: Let’s switch gears to football. You’re a huge Aston Villa fan, right? And you even made a song for them?

S: My grandfather lived near Villa Park, so he supported them. Then my dad did. Even though we moved further from the stadium, we stayed loyal. I was on Cherry Red Records at the time, and the label head was also a football fanatic. He asked if I had a Villa song for a compilation they were doing of club anthems.

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I said yes, though I didn’t. I came up with the title The Sun Never Sets on Aston Villa, proper grandiose, and later scrambled to write it. My band at the time helped me hammer it out in one night, then we recorded it in the studio.

Later, Villa fans held a poll to choose a new walkout song for home games. My track won, by about 4%. But the club didn’t follow through. Would’ve been a nice PRS cheque…

RS: What’s the chorus?

S: “Whoa, Aston Villa / Gravelly Hill, tenderly forever / The sun never sets…” and on it goes.

RS: Brilliant. So, is that your biggest musical legacy?

S: My biggest contribution to football, maybe! I only stopped playing in 2015, I was the oldest one on the pitch. Striker, number nine. I even played at Wembley once.

RS: As a musician?

S: Nah, as a footballer. I won a competition. This was before they tore the old Wembley down. I was put on an alumni team, the old gits, against a media team full of sports journalists, presenters, and ex-pros.

We had no proper goalie. Our keeper was the film producer’s dad, who’d never played in his life. Plus, we weren’t allowed to wear boots because of the pitch. So, naturally, they scored five goals on us. But then we got a penalty. I’d already told everyone, “If there’s a penalty, I’m taking it.”

No one else volunteered, so I stepped up. Scored it. Sent the keeper the wrong way. Final score: 5–1. But I got the ball, the photo, and the glory. Thousands of footballers have never even played at Wembley, let alone scored there.

RS: Amazing. Last question, actually, I’ll give you two choices:  Did you feel like an outsider during the punk movement, or what was the most chaotic or memorable moment from those early days?

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S: I definitely felt like an outsider. We weren’t considered cool, never part of the Rough Trade scene, or in with the music papers. I kind of liked being in that space.

And when people started calling me a “rock star” because we’d charted on the indie charts, I thought, “Hang on, I can’t even afford driving lessons!” But now? I’ve grown into the costume. Call me a rock star, I don’t care.

RS: Final final question, what do you think the future holds for Spizz?

S: I’m not a businessman, not a commercially-minded musician. I’m not Phil Collins. I hate him.

RS: Why do you hate Phil Collins?

S: He’s a tax-evading bastard.

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RS: He introduced me to drum machines! I saw him on Blue Peter with one. That’s how I started my band. You keep giving me ideas for more questions, what’s the juiciest story you’ll never publish in your autobiography?

S: Can’t tell you.

RS: Who might it involve?

S: I’ll say this:  I was at an artist friend’s place, the guy who did the Tug of War album cover for Paul McCartney. Linda McCartney came over with baby Stella. I shared a joint with her. Then she rang the office and said, “We need a warm bottle of milk.” Twenty minutes later, knock-knock, someone shows up with it. That’s another level of living I’ll never reach.

RS: Do you have kids?

S: Yeah, my daughter just had a baby, so I’m a grandfather now. But I don’t like “Granddad.” I made a T-shirt that says “Grand Spizz.” That’s what I’m called.

RS: Amazing. Do they like your music?

S: Yeah. My son’s 23 and DJs. He didn’t come home last night; he was out playing a set.

RS: Did you name your kids after yourself?

S: Only in email addresses. I wanted to name my son Geronimo, after a South American footballer I loved. My partner said no. She suggested Neo, like The Matrix. So, he’s Neo. Only three letters, you don’t need much room to stitch it into school shirts.

RS: That’s genius. When you were talking about Aston Villa and names, it reminded me, didn’t John Peel name one of his kids after a football team?

S: He named one after a whole winning Liverpool squad, gave her a girl’s name, then the names of 11 blokes.

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RS: Classic Peel. Right, I’ll let you go listen to your radio show.

S: People text in live, so I’ve gotta tune in.

RS: Do you like the sound of your voice?

S: I do now. At first, when I heard it on tape, I thought, “Who the hell is that?” But punk made me accept it. By the time we got to Mega City III, I’d grown into it. I love singing now. One NME reviewer said something like, “He wished Brian Eno had died in that taxi crash, because we’d never have gotten SpizzOil.” Cheers for that one, mate.

RS: Music journalism was savage back then. You’d live and die by what the press said.

S: One review of our Soldier Soldier B-side, our Roxy Music Virginia Plain cover, said it sounded like a Woolworths version. Cheers!

RS: Well, Spizz… thank you. This has been amazing.

S: And don’t forget to visit spizzenergi.com for merch!

RS: Any other plugs?

S: The gold vinyl anniversary issue, 45 years of the number-one indie single Where’s Captain Kirk? Six weeks at number one, 45 years ago this week!

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RS: Amazing. I’ll be tuning in to the radio show, and especially the AI reggae version of Captain Kirk.

S: It’s on this week’s show. Don’t miss it.

RS: Cheers, mate.

S: See you, Richard.

RS: Thank you. Bye!

S: Gonna play one of my records now.

RS: If I had the license, I would! Take care, Spizz.

S: Leaving the room now.

RS: Spizz has left the room.

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