The Prefects – Bristol Road Leads To Dachau

6th April 2022 · 1970s, 1978, Music, Punk

The Prefects occupy a unique place in music history. They released no records at all while they were together – but put one out one a year after they split.

One of the first punk bands, they formed in Birmingham in 1976, first as Church of England, then The Gestapo, before becoming The Prefects in February 1977.

Their home town did not naturally embrace them, an animosity not helped by to song titles including Birmingham’s A Shit Hole.

The NME Book of Music, published in 1978, describes their music as being “as bleak, cynical and loveless as their personalities, with a perverse humour. Their relationship to orthodox music is tenuous… at its best their music can have a frightening intensity… Their potential for recognition is limited.”

Well they got that right, though their provocations place them as situationist pranksters as much as McLaren’s Sex Pistols. The Prefects would typically open their shows with a seven-second two-chord thrash entitled VD (full lyric: “Help me please help me I’m so weedy I’ve got VD please help me I’m so weedy I’ve got VD.”

Other songs featured a kazoo solo (never a good idea, to be fair), and there was an appalling cover version of Bohemian Rhapsody. They split up after a career consisting of 85 gigs and, somewhat incredibly, two John Peel sessions.

Brothers Paul and Alan Apperley were joined in the band by Robert Lloyd (not the one from Television, obvs), who got them four gigs on the White Riot tour supporting The Clash, The Slits and Subway Sect.

I caught them at two or three of those, including Chelmsford and The Rainbow – a performance for which they were paid four small cans of beer.

They were worth more than that.