The Banned – Little Girl

30th October 2022 · 1970s, 1977, Music, Punk

A lot of bands jumped on the punk bandwagon in 1977, rebranding themselves with spiky hair and safety pins, jagged guitar riffs and estuarine vocals. None were worse, or less convincing, than The Banned.

Words cannot describe how shit their one and only hit, Little Girl, is. Thankfully we don’t need words because have this video.

They got everything wrong: the clothes, the hair, the music (which is far from original).

Everything about them suggests a group who thought they’d take a chance on fooling us that they were a punk band, banking on us being too stupid to see through them.

That appalling drummer/singer with the mullet, Paul Aitken – rebranding himself as “Paul Sordid” – openly admitted later that they got together purely to “try to work a scam to do this punk thing.”

Proving their inauthenticity, two of the others had come from a dreadful prog-folk group called Gryphon: the very worst kind of prog band, with beards and bassoons, whose songs went on for days.

Miraculously, thanks to the eternal bad taste of the British record-buying public, the gambit worked – once – earning them this solitary appearance on Top of the Pops as their single rose to the giddy heights of no.36 in the chart.

Within months of recording Little Girl, the two progsters – bassist Jonathan Davie and guitarist Richard Harvey – had buggered off back to Middle Earth to reacquaint themselves with their jazz flutes.

They should have hung on a few weeks because by the time The Banned appeared on TOTP in December 1977 they had been replaced by “Tommy Steal” and “Ben Dover” (no relation of the porn star, I’m guessing – though who knows!), and someone calling themselves “Sugar Kane” on 12-string guitar.