The Dartford gig on Saturday 20th November was an absolute blast. (Setlist, for ease of reference: The Only Fool; We Are The Struts; Rock and Roll Retard; Strange Jane; Rod Serling; Skullhead; Time Is No Cage; The Land That Taste Forgot; Johnny Don’t Care; Happy Birthday To You — this last being trad.arr.Donutsh and rocked up a la Ramones. The birthday girl seemed to appreciate it.) We greatly enjoyed being able to raid the party buffet after the gig finished, and gave out no end of ‘Donutsh’ and ‘Rock and Roll Retard’ badges. Quite did our egos good to see half the party sporting them.
But you’re waiting for me to explain the title of this post, so I shall. Towards the end of the night the end of the pub supposedly reserved for the party was invaded by another band. We never did find out the name of this punk outfit, but we very soon found out that they Don’t Like Skinheads You Know; it was hard not to find this out, since it seemed to be their sole topic of conversation. Several of them cast glances at Camrath’s crew-cut, but luckily he was about twice the size of most of them. “Skinheads are worse than Nazis!” proclaimed one to me. “I saw a skinhead in the audience at our gig, so I stopped playing ‘Rockaway Beach’ and jumped on him.”
“Ah yes, those skinheads and their nasty concentration camps,” I wanted to say, but cowardice stopped me. I’ll say it here though, as the next best thing; arseholes like this are a disgrace to punk music and to all music, and the spirit of Joey Ramone would be turning in its grave if he knew a mean-spirited little sod like this was covering his songs. The Donutsh abhor racism and bigotry, and what’s more, we promise never to stop playing in the middle of a song just to twat an audience member, no matter how much they heckle us.
We gave these mental and musical giants ‘Rock and Roll Retard’ badges to shut them up, and eventually they wandered off sporting them proudly, with no evident idea of the irony inherent in the situation, to be swallowed up by the night — an unsavoury mouthful.