Rock 'n' Roll Dreams Come True

Rip It Up, Issue 230, 1 October 1996, Page 13

Rock 'n' Roll Dreams Come True

Three little words are all it takes to spark a reaction from Simon Williams, bass player with LA punk/ska band, Goldfinger. Bad. Boy. Lollipop. “Oh, God, I was hoping you wouldn’t remember that,” he howls.

Six years ago, Williams was a card-carrying member of the Auckland hard rock band, a partner in glam with Damon Newton and Bryan Bell, now of the Dead Flowers. Back then, Williams was know by his stage name, Cecil Langois (a tag inspired by Poison’s CC DeVille), and was a regular face at the Powerstation venue’s Five Bands for Five Bucks nights, where Bad Boy Lollipop often played alongside bands like Push Push and Nine Livez.

“They were the most fun days of my life,” enthuses Williams. “Me and Bryan would get really loaded and go along, and the place would be full of beautiful girls, it was a great time.” Those heady days of chiffon scarves and eyeliner are long since gone for Williams, and classic Lollipop songs such as ‘Bonk City’ are now bona fide blasts from the past. Williams left Auckland in January 1991, and spent six months living with his folks in the arch-

conservative area of Orange County, in California — a period he describes as, “the most depressing time of my life”. After shifting to Los Angeles, Williams enrolled in bass classes at the renowned Musicians Institute, where he met the members of his first Stateside group. Jagglehead, a band “in the mode of Jane’s Addiction and the Chili Peppers”, played two gigs then split up. “It’s so hard to get your foot in the door in LA,” says Williams. “After that I was in a band called Fudge Factory, that were like MCS/lggy and the Stooges, playing sort of East Coast white punk.”

In between band and bass school commitments, Williams worked in Santa Monica, selling shoes in the company of a singer/guitarist called Jon Feldmann, who was playing in another local rock band that was also going nowhere fast. The duo decided to quit their respective groups to put Goldfinger together, and chance their arm in a

new musical direction. “I really like the punk/ska thing,” says Williams. “The Police are the closet to what we want to sound like. They were a band that could mix ska, and reggae, and pop, and punk into this sound that became their own — and that’s what we’ve tried to do.” When Goldfinger emerged two years ago, a slew of punk-cum-ska bands were pouring out of the Orange County region, and the revival soon filtered down to Los Angeles. It would be all too simple to find Goldfinger guilty of trend-jumping, though Williams answers, ‘Why bother?’ “That sort of bandwagon thing happens everywhere you go, it’s almost expected in the 90s. I remember before I left New Zealand, with the Chili Peppers thing, these bands like the Deep Sea Racing Mullets and Rumblefish popped up. It’s frustrating to see a bunch of bands start copying one band, but everybody’s guilty of it,

it’s so hard to do anything even vaguely original these days. “We get accused of sounding like the Beat, and sometimes people might yell NOFX or Green Day, but not as often as I thought it would happen. Everyone in this band is so paranoid about it, but we’re really fortunate we haven’t had any strong comparisons.” In fact, so far, Goldfinger have enjoyed a totally hassle-free existence, and their steady rise to prominence in America has been unbelievably swift. When they released their debut self-titled album in March this year the first single, ‘Here in Your Bedroom’, was immediately placed on heavy rotation at the three biggest stations in the USA, including LA’s KROQ, which virtually ensures airplay nationwide, and achieved blanket coverage through MTV. All that was left was for the band to spread the word themselves. Consequently, Goldfinger have spent the last six months touring America, at various times playing with Bad Religion, No Doubt, and the Sex Pistols, who brought the band down to New Zealand to perform at the old punks’ recent one-off show in Auckland. As Goldfinger continue on their merry way, Williams reveals he often can’t believe his good fortune, and seeing the world while playing music is only half of it. Add to that the fact that, time and again, Williams is afforded the opportunity to mix with his heroes. “The first band to do it for me as a kid was Kiss, and we got to play with them at the Weenie Roast in LA — the first show they’d done for 17 years, with all the make-up and everything — that was the biggest thrill. And playing with the Pistols was cool, but I didn’t get to meet ’em which really bummed me out, ’cause I really loved that band as a kid. They arrive two minutes before they play and leave two minutes after they play, so I didn’t get any photos. Though I did meet John Taylor of Duran Duran backstage at a Pistols show in LA, he’s the reason I play bass.” With Bad Boy Lollipop little more than an embarrassing episode from his past, Williams says that as a member of Goldfinger, his rock ’n’ roll dreams are coming true. “At first it was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to move to LA and get in a band and sell a million copies,’ but within a year I’d given up on that, I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be in a band.’ Now, it’s almost turning out the way I originally wanted when I left, so I guess I am realising my dream.”

JOHN RUSSELL