The Mundaynes in glorious techni-blue-colour. From left to right: Ian Greensmith, Tony Page, Paul Simmons, Nick Saloman.

Blue Mundaynes

Nick Saloman – aka the Bevis Frond – is one of Hastings’ most globally renowned musicians, widely acclaimed as “the godfather of grunge” and recently sharing the stage at a sold out Chalk Farm Roundhouse with Courtney Love and Frond superfan Evan Dando of The Lemonheads. Ben Thompson interviews him about the many strands to his life, and the imminent release by his latest band, The Mundaynes.

Until last year, Nick was equally well known on the South Coast as the mild-mannered Mr Benn-style proprietor of Bexhill’s vinyl treasure-trove Platform One records in Bexhill. I asked him a few questions about The Mundaynes, whose debut album Love It! is out next week on Saloman’s own Blue Matter label, and who will make their live debut on Friday 10 February at The Brass on Havelock Road with support from home town feminist hardcore punk heroines Comeback Clit, and fellow debutants BEAU, another new Hastings super-group featuring Otti from Otti + The Voices, Haydn from Borough Council and Colden Drystone on drums (tickets £8+ bkg in advance from Eventbrite or £10 on the door).

When did you realise that the songs now released as Love It! would require a separate identity?
During the Covid 19 lockdown, I wrote loads of songs – there wasn’t a lot else to do once I’d alphabetised my record collection. As I was going through them, deciding which ones were right for the album that became Little Eden, I noticed a number that I really liked but that didn’t seem suitable for the Bevis Frond. They seemed to have quite a punky feel to them, maybe as a response to the frustrations of life at that time, which were magnified in my case by the injury I suffered playing football shortly before the first lockdown began [a multiple fracture of the same elbow Nick Saloman had broken eight times in the 1982 motorbike accident which ended up, via a handy compensation payment, bankrolling the first Bevis Frond album]. That arm was already very weak, so I guess falling on it again on a hard floor almost 40 years later was the last thing it needed, and I was playing the guitar a lot to build the strength back.

What was it about the punkiness of these songs that made them specifically unFrondy?
I’ve always liked my punk, and there’s generally at least one song on every album with a bit of an edge to it, but a whole album of more aggressive songs wouldn’t feel like me. I started to wonder if it might be possible to record them with a different singer and a different guitarist, so it wouldn’t just be Bevis singing them in a silly voice and trying not to play the way he normally plays…

How did you set about doing that?
I asked my friend Tony Page to do the vocals as he’d been the singer in a couple of punk bands back in the day (one was called The Ploy and the other was Apocalypse with Tony Fletcher who edited Jamming magazine). The guitarist Paul Simmons does play with the Bevis Frond but has also been in The Cravats and toured with Jello Biafra, plus his own band The Alchemists were kind of Stoogesy, so I thought it would be fun for him to play in a different style, and it was. Paul and Tony do all the vocals and I play bass, drums and keyboards (credited on the album as N. Mundayne, Candice Hostettler and Ben Diagram respectively). If we do it live I’ll probably play bass and get a drummer in (the drummer, now recruited, will be all round Medway eminence and Dirty Contacts sticksman Ian Greensmith)

What goals were you hoping to achieve with the album as a whole?
The ambition at the start was just to give these songs a punk life of their own, so they wouldn’t just sound like the Frond gone a bit funny, and I hope we’ve achieved that with Love It. This isn’t a concept album, although it almost could be, it’s more of a spin-off, like the first Dukes of the Stratosfear record, which is an album I actually love more than anything by XTC.

Why ‘The Mundaynes’?
Because Tony and Paul have jobs, we mostly met up to record on a Monday, which was the only day we could all get off, so Tony said ‘What about calling us The Mundaynes?’ And the name stuck.

Which track would you direct listeners to first to get an idea of what the album is all about?
I suppose the best way into the album is probably the last track, “Teenage Grandad’s Back Story”, which talks about having a little punk band and trying to make it, but failing miserably. That  is definitely something I’ve experienced, but it’s the mood that’s autobiographical rather than the specifics. I’ve played in failing bands since the late sixties, so it’s not just punk! But I was in a band called the Von Trapp Family in the late seventies and early eighties – we had a couple of singles out and got played on John Peel and we saw a few record labels, but it petered out through lack of success and people in the band losing interest until ultimately they all decided ‘this is pointless’, and I had to agree with them.

That painful moment was the beginning of the Bevis Frond (with a little help from the Camden pothole which upended my motorbike) and I quite like the fact that another multiple fracture of the same arm has given me another new beginning – more power to my elbow! And now I get to release an album about (among other things) not making it on my own record label, Blue Matter. We’d Love It if you bought a copy.

The Mundaynes – Love It (Blue Matter, limited edition CD and LP will be released on 23 January and will be on sale at all good local record shops including Wow & Flutter, Tough Love and Pressing Matters.

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