Steve Treatment – Rather Records – 1978

Taste Your Own Medicine / Danger Zone

Hippy Posed Engrosement / Hooked On A Trend / Negative Nights

Obscure second release on Rather Records, Swell Map’s record label from out of the west midlands. A fair few of the Swell Maps appear on this 7″ single, and you can hear the influence throughout most of the tracks, as well as a heavy dose of Bolan in the vocal stylings.

There is a great site, TOPPLERS.NET which gives a complete(ish) history of this artist so I am pasting it up here:

Steve Treatment, or Steven John Finney as his parents know him, was born in Derby but the Rock’n’Roll dream led him to London in 1975. Always a fan of Marc Bolan and T Rex, he spotted a girl wearing a T Rex t-shirt and struck up a conversation. She said she got the shirt from Marc’s office at 69 New Bond Street so he popped round and was amazed at how easy it was to approach the Metal Guru!
Nikki Sudden, of Swell Maps, also hung about Marc’s office and the pair of them were invited to a T Rex gig at Great Yarmouth where they became friends and declared that they to would one day be as big stars as Marc Bolan!

Steve & Nikki begin busking around London and going to the early Punk gigs. Steve had a job in the HMV shop and used to wear a plastic padlock and chain he nicked from a Uriah Heep display in the window. Captain Sensible had inherited Sid Vicious’ famous padlock and wanted to swap it for Steve’s!!! Marc Bolan wanted to know about punk rock and asked Steve & Nikki their advice – he ended up getting the Damned to support him on his final tour and a few good punk bands got their TV debut on the ‘Marc’ television show..

Steve was spotted by arty film maker Derek Jarman who was starting on his “punk” film ‘Jubilee!’ Steve had the job of taking Polaroid photos of punks at a Ramones gig to appear as extras in the film. Derek thought his age and posh accent would scare the punks away. At this time Steve had long curly hair which he planned to cut off but Derek made him wait so he could film it. This scene appears in Jubilee and was also used in Derek’s anthology film “Glitterbug”. Steve also appears in the book burning scene at the end of Jubilee and received a fiver for his acting skills. Steve Strange was also a Jubilee extra and he and Midge Ure were looking for someone to front their notorious ‘Moors Murderers’ band. Steve was asked but he quite rightly thought the idea was tacky as fuck!

By early ’77 Steve had written most of the tracks for his first record and others including his theme song “you’re gonna receive treatment’ from where his nickname came! Nikki’s band the Swell Maps had now made their first single, the classic ‘Read about Seymour’ on their own Rather Records which was later taken up by Rough Trade records and was a big favourite of John Peel! Nikki thought it would be a good idea to use Rather records to put out singles by other bands and, after hearing tapes that Steve had made on his friend Gary Hill’s Revox tape machine, offered Steve the chance. On June 1st 1978 The Swell Maps and Steve went into Spaceward Studios and recorded the Five ‘A’ Sided Single.

This was one of the best singles of 1978 and although it had all the ingredients of Punk rock, it transcended the three chord thrash associated with punk (it’s best song has only one chord!!!) and has a timeless quality. The Bolan influence is obvious especially on the classic Negative Nights with Christine Isherwood’s beautifull second vocal! There is also a psychedelic and rockabilly influence, with the backwards guitars and double tracked vocals. The whole five tracks sound like a band having fun!

As well as providing musical backing Swell Maps helped design the cover and each single had a personalised inner sleeve handwritten by either Steve or the Maps or their pals. There was an anagram on the back sleeve – Vet Me Tea Set Rut – which turned out not to be a true anagram of Steve Treatment because they got the “u” upside down! Annette, Nikki’s girlfriend at the time, recalls having to type out hundreds of slips of paper to go into the sleeves and make it a competition to “spot the deliferate mistale”

The record sold well and was played in full by John Peel over a number of nights. Steve claimed it outsold the Swell Maps, which is unlikely, and Nikki reckoned that Steve absconded with all the copies for himself! Steve and Nikki did one more recording together but the Maps were now recording their first album and follow up singles so the two drifted apart.

Steve now found himself with a single high in the Independant Charts but without a band and the means to do any gigs (in fact he never did a single live gig untill he formed the Ticket Inspectors in the late eighties.) An old friend Nick Welsh took it upon himself to get Steve a band and by the end of ’78 Steve returned to the recording studio for the second single ‘Step inside a worn out shoe” and ‘Heaven Knows’

The second single was released on Steve’s own record label, Backbone, and is another classic! The T Rex influence is right upfront on ‘Juvenile Wrecks’ with its rolling piano and Bolan-esque lyrics. The other side (only two songs on this one to get more volume!!!) was ‘Step inside a worn out shoe’, a quirky rocker with trademark double tracked vocals (arguing with each other at the end!!!). Steve was never one to rehearse or re-take tracks prefering to show the song to the band and dive in head first with the recording, so this session also produced ‘Change of Plan’ and ‘Head of a Raven’ for his next single which also came out on Backbone in ’79. It contains another three tracks of boppin’ good tunes but sadly was his last release for 24 years!!!

2 comments
  1. luggy
    luggy
    May 25, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    Used to have this one, great that stuff like this and Family Fodder can find new ears to hear it now.
    So many great obscure independent records were released in that period.

  2. Simon Bradley
    Simon Bradley
    February 8, 2012 at 9:07 pm

    I had the 5-A side record too. Bought at Rough Trade in early 1980. I think it was going very cheap, which was unusual there. Or it may even have been given away free with something by the Swell Maps, all of whose records I wanted to get hiold of back then. This was around the time that Rough Trade were reissuing the early Maps singles, I think.

    To be honest, the music never seemed to have the freshness and energy of Swell Maps at their best (does it seem cruel to say that now?) But it was good to be there, hanging around in Westbourne Grove aged fourteen, spending hours buying half a dozen records, and feeling close to the centre of a movement that still seems liberating and adventurous. And the Steve Treatment record was certainly part of all that.

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