LENNY HELSING: Well yeah I suppose I never really thought that The Thanes would still be around after so many years but it just kinda kept going on, and indeed still keeps going on…and even although I’m the only one who has been constant in all line-ups of the group, we have nonetheless been known for holding together quite a stable unit now and then.

Yes I’m really quite proud of that period of The Thanes, although there were still a few personnel changes to thwart our progress now and again. Our bass player Denis Boyle left us, to be replaced by Mal Kergan, and then, significantly, co-founding Thanes member, organist and songwriter Bruce Lyall, who had also started The Green Telescope with me back in the dying days of 1980, left us not long after the release of our “Learning Greek Mythology” 12” EP that included Bruce’s “Gone Away Girl”. Bruce’s replacement, Nick Kennedy, had a relatively short tenure in the group, going to live and work in Berlin directly after our 1994 visit to Italy actually, which included an appearance at the second “Festival Beat” event in Piacenza with your old pals The Hairy Fairies, and Barcelona’s The Flashback V. In fact I’ve just completed a page about this very subject for a book that Luca Frazzi is doing in Italy. Nick’s last gig was our lowly appearance at the club Velvet in your home town Rimini! Ian Binns would also stop playing drums with us not long after this time due to work commitments, but I am more than happy to say that the man we got in to replace Ian, Mike Goodwin, is thankfully still playing in The Thanes to this day, and as they used to say back in the olden days before my time and yours, Mike is one of the best drummers in the business! Ditto Mal who played in The Thanes for well over a decade, contributing hugely to what is regarded as some of our strongest material. I’m thinking specifically the LP/CD “Downbeat & Folked Up” for the Screaming Apple label in Germany. As you know Mal now lives in Galicia in northern Spain these days and I’m glad he has continued playing, lending his excellent, distinctive bass style to those (relatively) young whippersnappers The Phantom Keys. And I think that some of the songs we came up with for both the LPs we made during that time, the afore-mentioned “Downbeat…” and the previous “Undignified Noblemen” set for Italy’s Misty Lane label were among our best. After Nick left us we got in new organist, guitarist Angus McPake, an old friend who founded The Rubber Dolfinarium in the early-mid 80s, a group I played drums in. We then became The Beeville Hive V, and the two groups played many great songs that Angus had written, so I knew that getting Angus into the group would mean we would also have another songwriter to bolster the group, as up to that point it had only been me, and occasionally Bruce who had been writing stuff and presenting it to the band. So things began to change a lot around then because Angus is quite prolific with songs and I was happy to have Angus present loads of songs for us to attempt. “It Can Never Be” on the “Downbeat…” LP is one of the best, and also on that LP there was “World Of Stone” and in recent times he has written some choice numbers that we have recorded, and will be recording soon, like “Dishin’ The Dirt” and “What You Can’t Mend” that go down well when we play. I’m still writing too of course but we’ve yet to properly record some of these. 

You just got back from Greece, from the first ever gigs with the Thanes, how was it?

The Thanes are yours truly, still on lead vocals and guitar, Angus McPake plays organ, guitar, 12-string, Mike Goodwin is on the drums, and Mark Hunter takes care of bass guitar and backing vocals. Mark is the newest member of The Thanes, joining us in time for our support slot to The Sonics at New York’s “Cavestomp” event in 2007, which itself was quite an experience. Currently we are working on getting recordings of some of our newest songs together, with a view to getting a release for them sometime later in the year. We are doing these recordings in Angus’s “Ravencraig” home studio set up where Les Bof! – with Angus on guitar – have also recorded their brand new LP which out soon on Germany’s Copas Disques. Hopefully The Thanes will have a single out around summer on the State label here in the UK, headed up by our good friends The Higher State…but we also have some other surprises in store, but I better keep schtum about them at present in case nothing transpires. We also have another project on the go at the moment that involves The Poets, yes indeed the self same and truly superb and unique sounding beat group from Glasgow, Scotland originally in operation way back in the 1960s. Members of The Poets and The Thanes have been hard at work rehearsing, and honing many of their Decca and Immediate treasures which will soon be shared with a live audience or two. There is a taster of sorts taking place on Friday May 6 at the 13th Note in Glasgow’s King St, when The Thanes will be joined for one or two numbers by The Poets’ George Gallacher and Fraser Watson. A much fuller appreciation of this project will hopefully be realised in Edinburgh in late July when Angus and chums’ “The Big Stramash” will take place!!!

We first played Italy in, I think, 1989, or maybe 1990, with a hastily arranged gig playing at an all-night “sit-in” at Milan’s State University, after the initial “squatter” venue in the city was called off as the place was falling apart. We also played in Pisa, Torino I think, and, if it was the same visit?, then we also played at the infamous Forte Prenistino, a social centre / squat type gig that was held in an old castle in Rome, which was run by punks and was quite an amazing affair altogether. Apparently we were pretty lucky to have played there as I’ve been told since that it was only genuine punk bands that were supposedly allowed to play there. But The Thanes played there for sure, on a really high-up stage and we had a pretty good reception. They had a superb vegetarian kitchen in the place and gave us tons of beer and some good money too.

It all started really when I met bass player John Gibbs at a bus stop in Edinburgh’s Leith Walk a couple of days after he was kicked out of The Kaisers in October 1994. He said he wanted to start a new group, so I said I’d be interested in bashing the drums if it was a beat group. Liam Watson at Toerag studio in London also told John that former Milkshakes bass player Russ Wilkins was living in or around Edinburgh somewhere and would be a great choice as guitarist. So once contact was established, we agreed to meet up one Sunday afternoon at The Thanes’ practice basement in Great King St, and quickly found that we all had a great love for loads of amazing sounds; from the early blues and r’n’b to rock’n’roll thru beat, garage, psych into some prog and hard-rock, early glam and tons of great early punk sounds…we also seemed to be able to harness this raw energy and turn it into something of our own making. I mean that very afternoon we, albeit very roughly, recorded about an hour’s worth of our influences, which gave us a great starting block to base the next sixteen years around ha ha.

Currently I love The Higher State’s “Darker By The Day” LP, “Red Dissolving Rays Of Light” LP by The Loons and Os Haxixins’ “Under The Stones” LP and the various attendant 45s from these records too. I’m also digging Paul Messis and his various 45s. On a very different path, I love Barton Carroll’s LP “Together You And I”. He opened for Mudhoney here in Aberdeen last October and was folkin’ great. Great live experiences of late have been Glasgow’s The Hidden Masters who as you know feature our very good friend Alpha Mitchell on bass. The gig they did with The Higher State was incredible. And a bit further back getting to sing with the OUTSIDERS at Rotterdam’s Primitive festival in 2008 was one of the highlights of my life!!!

Well I started off in pop groups of the Bay City Rollers era, but punk was just about to happen, and I just got totally immersed in it all. A friend’s cousin told me about a group in Edinburgh (I lived in a small village about 15 to 20 miles from town) who were just starting and needed a singer. So I agreed to meet the guitarist in town (he was Steve Fraser, who later also featured in The Thanes, playing on our recordings of Syd’s “Scream Thy Last Scream” and The Calico Wall’s “I’m A Living Sickness”) and take it from there. This was in 1978, so by this time a lot of punk action had already come to town, and while I didn’t catch some of the very earliest gigs, I did attend loads of gigs throughout ’77-‘79 including The Damned (with The Dead Boys), The Jam, The Clash (with Suicide), The Boomtown Rats, Dr Feelgood, The Radiators From Space (opening for Thin Lizzy), 999, The Buzzcocks (with The Slits), Siouxsie and the Banshees (one with Spizz Oil, and another with Simple Minds), Ultravox, Adam and the Ants (with The Monochrome Set), The Cure (with The Associates)…plus lots of local groups like Scars, The Ettes, Visitors, The Prats, Matt Vinyl and the Decorators, The Skids, The Valves, The Exploited (very early days), Another Pretty Face, TV Art (who then became Josef K), The Dirty Reds (who then became The Fire Engines)…it was a pretty incredible time really where lots of us young punks would meet up on a Saturday afternoon, mainly just walking about and having a laugh, and knowing that our appearance was being noticed around the streets, and checking out the various record shops and maybe going for one or two (still underage) drinks in one of the few bars that didn’t mind punks coming in. A few record shops like Hot Licks, Bruce’s and Virgin were the main ones where punks were allowed in, even if they didn’t buy anything (not much anyway especially if you are only 14-15 years old and don’t have much money) but just to kinda hang out awhile and hear a lot of what was going on record-wise, and news of gigs etc. Pheonix too was another sympathetic shop in town. A few older punk pals were studying at art college, so a favourite trick when you were with them was to find out where the “private view” functions were being held, and go there first and partake of the free wine and snacks that they had – sometimes the wine flowed very freely indeed ha ha! Also Ripping records shop used to run buses to some of the out of town gigs, that’s where I went to see the Banshees and Simple Minds in Glasgow, also The Clash in Glasgow with Mikey Dread, and The Clash in Dunfermline Kinema with Suicide. Some of the punks there that night hated Suicide and spent most of their time shouting abuse and spitting on them. We on the other hand thought they were great. 

I think it was a mixture of things really. I was already heavily into rock music long before punk came on the scene, so I knew something about a lot of origins of bands anyway. I was reading NME and Sounds and Melody Maker all the time. A pal’s cousin sat us down in the summer of 1973 or 1974 and specifically played us The Pretty Things “SF Sorrow” the US copy with headstone cover, which made a big impression on me, so much so that every time I saw a picture of The Pretties or anything to do with them I cut it out and added it to my growing list of obsessive group-related ephemera I seemed to be building. Then a pal at school in 2nd year loaned me or my brother “Relics” and “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, and that got me hooked on Syd Barrett’s Floyd style much more than the then current “Dark Side Of The Moon”. Then I got into listening to John Peel and he’d be throwing in odd plays of “Oh Yeah” by The Shadows of Knight and “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” by The Electric Prunes, and even weirder UK psych things, like “Wallpaper” by Pregnant Insomia. But then when punk exploded into the mainstream, Record Mirror had a “star chart” each week having a top ten playlist from a rock or punk star, and I remember seeing Gene October from Chelsea putting The Seeds “Pushin’ Too Hard” in there, Lemmy too…and also Radar records just issued “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators”, also the “Gloria” LP by Shadows of Knight etc… and of course quite a few of the punk bands were referencing 60s music, from Generation X and their mod-related fixations, The Damned and their love of The Stooges and MC5, Sex Pistols too. The prime 60s garage compilation LP “Nuggets” too had just been overhauled and given a new sleeve by Sire label, home of The Ramones, and Edinburgh’s The Rezillos even got given a deal with them. And there were other signposts too, like The Radiators From Space covering “Psychotic Reaction” on the flipside of their “Enemies” 45 in ’77, and The Undertones covering another Nuggetty classic The Chocolate Watch Band’s “Let’s Talk About Girls”.  Then we heard the TV Personalities on Peel and things got stranger and more primitive-like…and, well it was then just a short “Pebbles” throw to discover other harder, more primal, more screeching garage punk styled groups and records …

Favourite bands: I know there are way too many bands to mention, but maybe you can give us some names of “lesser known” groups that you feel they deserve to be discovered.