‘It’s good to see there’s a young crowd in here tonight,’ grinned Ed Tudor Pole, scanning the small but appreciative audience at the back of Bath’s Chapter 22 record and plant shop. It was a good joke. Most of the people who turned up to see this punk rock icon weren’t that much younger than the musician who turns 69 next month.
Briefly a member of the Sex Pistols, Tudor Pole has had a fascinating and colourful life and a varied, unpredictable career. He appeared in the Pistols’ film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and was then the frontman of Tenpole Tudor.
When the hits dried up and the Top of The Pops appearances were over, he returned to acting (after being expelled from boarding school he went to RADA where his contemporaries included Timothy Spall) and appeared in cult 80s films Sid & Nancy and Absolute Beginners. And when he got bored of that, he briefly became a household name as presenter of TV gameshow The Crystal Maze before the show was cancelled.
For the past couple of decades, Tudor Pole has returned to his first love of music, performing gigs around the UK.
This show was split into two halves – a short set of songs followed by stories and a Q&A. And despite there only being around 20 people watching, a sweat-drenched Tudor Pole gave it his all.
The songs included newer, unrecorded material and a sprinkling of old favourites. They included He’s Got A Moustache (written about a young nephew who took to wearing a plastic moustache), the Sex Pistols’ song Who Killed Bambi and Tenpole Tudor single Throwing My Baby Out With The Bathwater.
Returning after a short interval, Tudor Pole rattled through a number of vivid anecdotes about his life, most of them ticking the boxes for ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’. A born raconteur, the stories were outrageous, funny and included references to ex-girlfriends (including Chrissie Hynde) and famous people he’d met or worked with including Mick Jagger and Clint Eastwood.
One of the funniest stories was about the time he had a part in a Harry Potter film, only for it to be cut from the final version. It was the talk of his son’s school playground for all the wrong reasons.
He also told the audience he had just finished his autobiography, due for publication next spring. Judging from the stories in this intimate show, it’s going to be a corker of a read.
Tudor Pole finished with his best-known hit single, Swords of a Thousand Men, which had everybody in the room singing along as if it was 1981 all over again. It was a fitting finale from one of punk rock’s true survivors.