Leeds punk Stevie Vayne remembers Johnny Thunders in Hyde Park ahead of Brudenell Social Club gig
Stevie Hulme was a punk rocker who went into the world of dance music. He tells John Blow about his career as he publishes a new book and plays a special show.
Not much connected the council estates of east Leeds with the notorious 1970s American punk band The Dead Boys, but sure enough Stevie Hulme – you might know him by his stage name Stevie Vayne – knew the path he wanted to take after first hearing them. It might never have happened had he not drawn a peculiar picture back in his early teens.
“There was a drawing competition and it was ‘draw a picture of God’. Everyone on our estate was entering it, so I couldn't draw but I entered it,” says Stevie, now in his early 60s, over video call from his home in Ibiza.
What he drew resembled Gandalf, he says. He didn’t win but his imagination was enough to earn him a record token anyway.
“I saw an album by the Dead Boys called Young, Loud and Snotty. It was 1977 so I was about 13 or 14, and I said: ‘Oh, I love the name of the band, and I love the name of the album’. And I said to the guy in the Seacroft Centre record store, when I was redeeming my voucher, ‘play the first track’, because he didn't know what it was, either. He put it on and it was a song called Sonic Reducer. Oh my God. I said: ‘Gimme that’. And I was all in then. I thought I was the only person in the world who had this album, but I wasn't.”
After spending his very earliest days in the Cardigans off Kirkstall Road, surrounded by extended family and close neighbours, the family moved to new council housing which had been created in Whinmoor.
Things ramped up in his music career with a tour in the Netherlands in the early 1980s with his band To Be Continued.
“It was raucous. I mean, my first proper tour, my first tour abroad, and I was like, ‘This is me. There's no turning back’.”
Actually the band did split up - and he gave up his day job at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food – as he moved near Rotterdam after meeting a girl on the tour.
It was short-lived and Stevie was soon back in Leeds, setting up the Dead Vaynes in 1983 (morphing into the Vaynes in 1986, then Stevie Vayne and the Slaves from 1990-91) and becoming the frontman.
They would go around Hyde Park telling people they were the best band to come out of Leeds and "people kind of believed us,” he says. “And then our first gig was with Johnny Thunders at the Warehouse.”
Stevie had “mithered” the booking manager, who relented. These tales are documented in his upcoming autobiography, Vainglorious: A Punk In The House, one which also includes stories about the likes of Shakira, Matt Goss and the now disgraced Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.
“Anyway, we played, and we were really good, and they were really good, and we got on immediately,” he says of Thunders.
That was in 1984 and they joined Thunders on subsequent UK tours – others they played alongside include the Gun Club and the Mission - and the New York Dolls legend even stayed in Stevie’s house on Brudenell Road, he says.
“In between tours, he needed somewhere to stay and his manager didn't want him in London. He thought he'd be safe in Leeds. I was like, yeah right, in Hyde Park, he’s going to be safe, are you crazy?’”
He adds that “Leeds 6 at that point, everyone there they would either be a goth or love proper punk rock and roll,” so “Thunders was like a hero in them streets. When they found out he was staying at my house, there was like a vigil outside the apartment.”
He also sampled the local nightlife, Stevie says, going to the Faversham and then “afterwards we took him down to Naffees (curry house) for food”.
The Dead Vaynes released an album called GTF in 1985. A 40th anniversary gig, doubling as a book launch, taking place at the Brudenell Social Club on November 2, will be Stevie’s final gig. Support for the The Vaynes will come from the Rose of Avalanche, Salvation, XLerators featuring Sid Cramp, Nick Toczek, Andy Prowler, Billy Masters, Dean E, Mick Lake and Mark Goulden.
Stevie admits that he lived an excessive life in his youth and says it was Thunders’ death, in New Orleans in 1991, which moved him to clean up his act and change direction.
"I decided that I really liked living and I wanted to taste some good things in life,” says Stevie.
He got a job as an events co-ordinator at the Corn Exchange, not realising that it was overseeing crafts and antiques fairs. But having heard about the rave culture which had swept the UK, he started to put on DJs and dance music.
“When I first did it, I had no respect for it whatsoever,” he says. “I’d never listened to it and never investigated it, and then once I started getting involved in it, I realised house music and club music had very much in common with punk - it was very much DIY, do it yourself. It was lots of working class kids making a noise and trying to get ahead, and so I really then started respecting it and loving it.”
The book details how he decamped to London to work at the Maximus club in Leicester Square, then later to New York City, where he was with Subliminal Records.
In late 2005, he moved to Ibiza, where he went on to become musical director of the Pacha Ibiza nightclub.
Punk, though, has always been in his heart and it will be a poignant occasion when he takes to the stage on Sunday.
As for the book, “maybe it inspires someone to start a band, or to make a track, to become a promoter, or to be a writer," he says.
"But for me, at least, my legacy is done now. It's written.”
Vainglorious: A Punk In The House, published by Armley Press, is out on November 4. The launch event on Sunday, November 2 at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, is £15, which includes the book.