Ned’s Atomic Dustbin

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin have announced the shows they are playing later this year – at Dingwalls in London, on the 27th and 28th November, and at Stourbridge Town Hall on the 4th and 5th December. It is the anniversary of The Ingredients EP, featuring the tracks ‘Aim’, ‘Plug Me In’, ‘Grey Cell Green’ and ‘Terminally Groovy’. We spoke to singer Jonn Penney about the gigs and the EP itself.

“We’ve been trying to come back to Stourbridge since 1988,” Jonn explains, “the last time we played in Stourbridge it was very early days and at the time we still had a female backing vocalist in the band – that’s a line-up that most people never would have seen and wouldn’t even know about. The five original members haven’t been able to get back and play since then, so this is the first time the five of us are going to get back on a stage in Stourbridge since 1988, which is just amazing really. And it was Stourbridge Town Hall the last time us five played in Stourbridge.”

The Ingredients EP was released in April 1990, and Jonn describes it being “a turning point in our career. It was the point we realised we were going to have a career, because up until that point, until that record was released, we had no idea really what the future might be.

There could not have been much of a future, things could have ground to a halt after that. So I suppose what sort of happened with the Ingredients EP is that we put it out there, it did way better than we ever imagined it was going to do, and because of that success we were just out and about everywhere else, everywhere but Stourbridge.

So we didn’t get the opportunity, I guess, to play the songs from that EP to a Stourbridge audience, and we never have had that opportunity, so that’ll be quite special to come back. The fact that we recorded it only a few hundred yards away from the venue. So it’s a celebration of coming full circle, I suppose.”

The EP was recorded in Enville Street, down the road from Stourbridge Town Hall, in a studio called Wrekless.

Jonn explains how “We’d done a previous demo there, but we were so skint when we did that that we had to paint the studios to pay for it, because we didn’t have any money to pay them. Then when it was becoming apparent that we might want to put a record out, we went back to them and asked if we could record the EP there, but it was whenever they’d got spare time available in the little studio room upstairs.

We were obviously really new to it, we were very inexperienced, and at that point in time, I guess you don’t really know what it is you’re listening out for. We knew very well at the time what our live sound was like – we knew how people responded to the live songs – but recording is a whole different medium. At that point in your career, you have to start coming to terms with the idea of how you’re going to represent your songs – are you going to try and make it sound as raw and as live as you can, or are you going to embrace that other method of presenting your music, the different medium, if you like, of recording stuff. So it was a massive lesson for us at the time. We could do a great deal of enhancements recording stuff at Wrekless, but what did happen was that once we’d got it down and recorded, we ended up taking it to London to remix. So, it’s kind of funny that it was sort of representative of the fact that we’ve got our roots in Stourbridge, that we’d written these songs around here, but the next step was always going to be moving away from here. We ended up going to the Greenhouse studio in London and getting it remixed by someone down there who is not as close to the band, and that obviously worked.”

Grey Cell Green is the most popular song on the EP, and the song that, Jonn describes, “took us up a league. We probably, at the time, didn’t realise that it had done that for us, but what happened was that when we got the opportunities to play in front of bigger audiences – other band’s audiences like The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself, Jesus Jones, Mega City Four – you’d see from the crowd’s reaction that this was the one song that they pretty much all recognised. There would be people who’d be watching the bands we’re supporting at several dates, and they would learn some of our songs, but Grey Cell Green would be the one that they would all learn, so it must have struck a chord with a lot of people. And then a little bit further down the line, once we’d caused a bit of a stir in the UK, the record label would push songs out to other countries, and in America Grey Cell Green really broke us over there. We shot a really cheap video for it – we just kind of splattered ourselves and a studio with paint and just performed the song – and it got onto MTV and was on heavy rotation over there. Looking back now you think no wonder we did okay, because that song did so much for us.”

The lyrics to the song seem relevant now as ever, as Jonn describes: “I wrote Grey Cell Green because I had woken up to the fact, at the time, that we were messing with the environment. I very soon after became vegetarian, because I was starting to look around me and think about how we’re overfishing, we’re pumping chemicals into farm animals, there’s chemicals in our milk, GMs are coming in; all kinds of stuff we’re doing to the planet. I started having misgivings about it all, started thinking about where it was all going, and here we are right now.”

Their shows in November are at Dingwalls in London, where the band played around the release of The Ingredients EP. 

“The release of the EP represented that point in our lives where everything took off and we went from being Stourbridge lads (although Rat would argue he’s a Sedgley lad), benefitting from shows from other Stourbridge bands Pop Will Eat Itself and The Wonder Stuff, to taking that leap into the big bad world, and the first stop was London.

We were doing loads of press in London around it and we did our first TV interview straight after sound check at Dingwalls. I think the Dingwalls show was our first London show that sold out, so we were super excited but we were really nervous as well, because we hadn’t got a clue how it was going to turn out.

We were joking about leaving space in our lofts for the spare records we didn’t sell, thinking that when we’re fifty, we’d end up in our lofts saying ‘Ah, that was that career we thought might happen, there’s all those copies of that failed record.’ It really was that uncertain; it got to that point where that record was either going to do it for us, or it wasn’t. And that’s special in itself.”

Jonn reminisces on a funny incident at the Dingwalls gig:

“I’m on stage halfway through the show, and I get a tap on my shoulder – I’m actually singing at the time – I turn around and it’s a lad called Dunc, everyone used to call him ‘Funky Dunc.’ He was someone we used to drink with in JB’s in Dudley.

And I hadn’t seen Funky Dunc in ages, and there he is, onstage, trying to talk to me while I’m singing. He decides he’s going to stage dive and as he dives off his heels clip the lighting rig on the ceiling, and nearly rip the entire thing down.

After the show, someone points out that he’s fallen asleep in the corner, so a few other people who were in London to see us who were from the Black Country thought that they better look after Dunc, so they take him home.

The next morning Dunc wakes up at his house in Dudley and wonders what happened and why he was in Dudley, because he was at university in London.”

Playing their gig at Stourbridge is important to the band, as Jonn explains, 

“What I’m hoping for is that we get that feeling of coming home, which we’ve never really had. Our adopted hometown became Wolverhampton, I guess, and the shows we used to do at the end of each touring year, at the Civil Hall at Christmas, they would represent our homecoming show.

Those gigs turned into a bit of a pilgrimage for people from all over the world that we’d been to see that year flying into this country to see us on home turf. So what I’m really hoping for is that we get that mixture with the Stourbridge Town Hall shows.

Similarly with the London shows. We haven’t been able to do a proper hometown show for a long time, and I just want it to feel extra special because I want to give a little bit back to Stourbridge as well, it’s my hometown, it’s the place I’ve lived for twenty-eight years. It’s a place that has done a lot for the culture of the Black Country, it was a real proper pot boiler of artistic creation in the 90s, and a lot of that has disappeared over time – there isn’t even an art college anymore. I want people to celebrate Stourbridge a bit.”

The shows are planned for late this year, and as Jonn explains:

“We’ve been thinking about doing this and planning this for months and months, so it’s not something we’ve just suddenly come up with and doing on a whim. But of course the current circumstance makes it difficult for you to know whether you should be announcing things and trying to make plans for the future or not.

But we just think, we’ll put it out there and if we’re lucky and events are happening again it’s something for us to look forward to and we hope people don’t think there’s any insensitivity by making plans. We just want something to look forward to, I guess.”

Imogen Baker

Catch the Ned’s live at the following dates:
Friday 27th November- London Dingwalls


Saturday 28th November – London Dingwalls


Friday 4th December – Stourbridge Town Hall


Saturday 5th December – Stourbridge Town Hall