Steve Took's Shagrat

Steve Took's Shagrat it can be suggested was named after the orc Shagrat from Lord of the Rings and was a a contraction of 'Shagrat The Vagrant', the name under which Steve Took had been credited on Mick Farren's album 'Mona'. Larry Wallis offers an alternative explanation. "'Steve Took' was Steve Took's real name as far as we were concerned so he decided to take on another persona, 'Shagrat' who was the guy with the slanty eyes, pointed beard and the suede shoes." Interviewed in 1972, Steve himself offered yet another explanation: "I am gutter Rock, I'm a schneide. That's why I had Shagrat - it was a rat trip. Rats turn over at an amazing pace and they have a lot of kids. Not only do they eat the poison but they thrive on it and get bigger and they can still slip under doorways. It's the ecology trip. Do you know how many rats were killed in New York last year? 'Cos I don't! Hah! I can't remember my figures."

Shagrat comprised the following people: -

Electric Shagrat Steve Took: Lead Vocal, Rhythm guitar, maracas Larry Wallis: Lead Guitar and backing vocals. Tim Taylor: Bass Phil Lenoir: Drums

Acoustic Shagrat Steve Took; Vocal, acoustic guitar Larry Wallis: Acoustic Bass Dave Bidwell: Percussion (tambourine, handclaps)

Initially Shagrat should have featured Mick Farren, however Steve Took and Farren fell out and the other two members: - Larry Wallis and Tim Taylor, guitarist and bass player for the Entire Sioux Nation sided with Took. A drummer, Phil Lenoir, ex of Black Cat's Bones, was recruited.

Wallis in particular was very impressed with Steve and a strong creative and social bond formed between the two. "He was like nobody else I'd ever seen before, he was a fucking pixie!" Wallis recalled. "I remember sitting in this living room with this cross legged pixie, with his little beard, covered in velvet and dripping talismen, crucifixes and scarves and talking like nobody I'd ever seen before. I was completely and utterly mad about him from the moment I first saw him." (from personal interviews by the author). For his part, Wallis was (and still is) an exceptional lead guitarist very much in the virtuoso mould, but with far too much energy to fall into the fretboard-bore category.

With a stable line-up, band concept, and band name, the group developed at a handsome pace. After extensive rehearsal at "a stone hall" late at night, which would apparently disturb neighbours, Shagrat proceeded to the studio, specifically to 10CC's Strawberry Studios in Stockport. There, they recorded a session of which three tracks are known to survive, Boo! I Said Freeze, Peppermint Flickstick and Steel Abortion. Unfortunately the first two tracks were pressed onto acetate at an awkward speed while the disc of the last track is rather seriously crackly. Neither of these problems are insuperable to anyone armed with a tape player equipped with a speed selector and tone control, however, the former fault in particular has caused many to wrongly diagnose Shagrat's sound as 'doomy freak rock' befitting the band's malevolent namesake or, as Mark Paytress put it, 'the obverse of the hippie coin flipped by Tyrannosaurus Rex.'

However, hearing the tracks played at the correct speed, it comes across more like they were quite a wild, fast paced combination of Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop And The Stooges, with a Hendrix soundalike on lead guitar.In particular, the track Peppermint Flickstick, which Nigel Cross compared to Pink Floyd's Astronomy Dominé when heard at the correct speed is more an alternating mix of the pulsating energy of the Sweet's Hellraiser and the opulence of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust title track, although another obvious influence is the rising chromatic chord sequence of Love's "My Little Red Book". In terms of subject matter, Boo describes Steve's aforementioned experiences of tripping out on the motorway and then being picked up by the LAPD in October 1969. Peppermint Flickstick, which Wallis cited as his personal favourite in a 1987 interview, concerns a man who develops a severe crush on the Cadbury's Flake girl (yes, that advertising campaign has been going on for that long!) and consequently goes out and spends his life savings on chocolate bars. He then returns home and spends his days locked in his house eating the Flakes and having sexual fantasies over them! Steel Abortion, the longest track of the three (running to over seven minutes) concerns a convict escaped from jail who quickly drops by his girlfriend's house for sex but soon has to get moving to avoid the police.

Rehearsed and with a demo made, the band were booked for their first gig, at the Phun City Festival near Worthing, Sussex on 24th-26th July 1970. The band played a reasonably successful 30-45 minute set, including all the songs from the Strawberry Studios session plus others (Wallis recalls another song entitled One Stroke, but this is probably just the slow middle section of Steel Abortion.) They got a particularly good reception from the multitude of Hells Angels on show that day, although the performance was given some added energy by Lenoir speeding his way through the set, having downed a considerable amount of amphetamine sulphate beforehand. It is also highly probable that Shagrat's performance was caught on film, as a movie was being made of the festival, however it was never completed (although it was briefly under contract to British Lion) and the footage currently remains untraced. The gig had certainly got the band off to a cracking start, but problems set in immediately afterwards. Phil Lenoir left (Took claimed that they 'never saw him again' after the festival) as did Tim Taylor, leaving Shagrat in search of a new rhythm section.

A new drummer was recruited in the form of Chicken Shack's Dave Bidwell, while Steve himself strapped on the vacant bass (according to some accounts he did this at Phun City too.) They continued to rehearse together in preparation for several live dates which had been booked and Steve received approaches from several record companies. Many of them however were put off by Took and Bidwell's taste for drugs (Bidwell was a long-term heroin addict) and the fact that Shagrat lacked formal management - having had a bad experience at the hands of Enthoven & Gadyon, Steve had been left very wary of the business side of running a band.

Part of the problem was that at that point bands like Alice Cooper, Iggy & the Stooges and Hawkwind had yet to take off big in the UK. As a result, many record companies perceived Shagrat to be deeply uncommercial. When the aforesaid bands all took off a couple of years later, Steve was not in the least hesitant to shout 'I told you so' to the clueless A&R staff. "I rang up this recording man, because we ran out of money, and we kept it going for a few months, but they didn't want to buy 'Steel Abortion' or 'Peppermint Lickstick' [sic]. A bit naughty, the words, but then I'd taken in all this American culture and American society in general, and got chemicalised out of it, a general trip, and put it into words. Now there's Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' and 'Killer', Hawkwind and the general thing there is now and it wasn't there then because they couldn't accept that it was going to sell. I was saying to 'em, 'Look, man, look at the Yanks because we're about three years behind them as far as youth culture is concerned. This is what's gonna sell' and they'd say 'Oh yes, lads, sure, do they really want to hear this sort of thing?...So here we are in this present day lunacy when Hawkwind are stars. I mean they're all Syd Barrett heads.I mean, what a gas, we're taking over." Back in the pre-Glam days of 1970 however, A&R personnel were still primarily interested in arty prog rock at one end of the market, starless session musician-produced bubblegum at the other. This situation was only finally resolved, ironically enough, by Took's old boss Marc Bolan's defection from the underground and the subsequent birth of the UK Glam Rock explosion. Shagrat, like many bands ahead of their time, just didn't fit in.

In the end what finally terminated Shagrat as a performing entity was the fact that Steve was the band's only full time member. Chicken Shack had never actually broken up and during 1970 regenerated into Savoy Brown, taking Bidwell along with it. Wallis meanwhile had joined a band called Blodwyn Pig and not long afterwards got a spot in the band UFO, a period of his career which Larry mainly spent hating lead singer Phil Moog's guts! The upshot of this was that for Larry and Dave, participation in Shagrat became very much an out-of-hours activity. This didn't mean they actually left the band - indeed they conducted rehearsals and a photo session (taken outside Steve's flat during a particularly stormy gale) during late 1970 and into 1971. They continued together as a social group and both would work again with Steve, all together as a threesome on one of the most important recording projects of Steve's career and both reappearing separately at various later points in Steve's career. But with Steve as the only full time member, the band ceased to truly be a band. With gig bookings looming, and Steve not wishing to cancel, his only option was to play those gigs by himself. And that is exactly what he did.