The Action Time are a London-based six piece hate-fuelled
gospel/trash/punk soul revue. These three girls and three boys have been
together about a year - they are: Ms C C Rider, Bex Bissell, Eddie Brackett,
Miss Spent Youth, Miss Susie Sparkles and Black September.
Ms C C Rider was one half of the notorious `Switchblade Sisters',
a two girl crimewave across America's Deep South, before she flew into
London on a false passport to escape the clutches of the FBI. She took
up beating the traps as a musical outlet for her latent violent tendencies.
Bex Bissell was hanging out in smoky pool halls and Soho drinking
dens writing his self-published pulp crime novels before deciding that
bass playing was a more fulfilling distraction from his addiction to vice.
Whilst making his Super-8 hardcore porn epic I Was A Cowboy's Sweetheart
Bex commissioned the baby-faced Eddie Brackett to score the film
for him.
Eddie had studied under Phil Spector duirng the sixties but had
since fallen into alcoholism and gambling. After spending much of the
last two decades in bed, dosed up with smack and cheap whiskey he finally
dragged himself back into the music scene a year ago. Abandoning the lush,
orchestral girl group symphonies he had previously recorded he took up
the guitar upon realising that no-one in modern-day London had taken up
the mantle left vacant by the passing of Johnny Thunders and Sterling
Morrison.
Miss Spent Youth aborted a promising career as a go-go dancer after
being linked to the murder of sleazy nightclub owner Harry Ringpiece,
choosing instead to try her fortunes as a chanteuse in the Nancy Sinatra
tradition.
Miss Susie Sparkles played the fictional catsuited crimefighter
Honey Penny in the UK TV series The Revengers before falling on hard times
and turning to karoake competitions to make ends meet.
Black September, the final Action Timer, finished a ten year sentence
in Wormwood Scrubs prison last year, serving time for distributing inflammatory
nihilist political tracts in the street, including the self-penned Kill
Kill Kill For Inner Peace. Emerging into the bright millenium-end sunlight
only to discover the scene awash with "wibbling spacerock" and "fifth-rate
britpop" he realised the only course of action was to form a dressed-up,
messed-up total energy rock'n'roll band to fuck things up again and rudely
awaken the nation's dissatisfied, slack-jawed youth.
By fortunate coincidence these six rock'n'roll revolutionaries ran into
one another at a Northern Soul allnighter last Spring and things haven't
been the same since...
The Action Time have already been described variously as "The Tamla
Motown Sex Pistols", "Shangri-Las meet The Dead Boys" and `like The Stooges
being beaten-up by a teenage girl gang'. Live appearances have often been
so intense that blind members of the audience have found themselves suddenly
able to see, small animals have exploded and electrical appliances have
been vapourized. You have been warned...