“We were doing a gig one time and all these young people came from the suburbs to see us and they weren’t trendy and they weren’t into London people.
Is night begins to shine song a real song tv#
“If you look at the TV or anything, people from the suburbs aren’t cool,” says Members guitarist JC Carroll, who co-wrote the song with the band’s singer, Nicky Tesco. But with Sound of the Suburbs, we finally found a band who truly understood that suburbia could be just as much a rat trap as the inner city. We were the sort of well-off w**kers The Undertones sang about in My Perfect Cousin, living in detached houses with driveways and diningrooms and even a garage to rehearse in. Wracked with middle-class guilt, we felt excluded from the punk narrative because we never lived in tower blocks or sink estates. But there was a whole other oppressed underclass out there who didn’t have a band to rally round – that is, until The Members bounded on to Top of the Pops with their hit single The Sound of the Suburbs.Īt last, here was a band who understood the plight of teenagers stuck in the purgatory of suburbia. For many it was The Clash, The Sex Pistols or Stiff Little Fingers who truly spoke for the nation’s disaffected youth. In the doldrums of the late 1970s, young people everywhere were desperately searching for a band who could articulate their sense of alienation.