Excerpt from 1989 Milwaukee Interview

INTERVIEWER: Now David J (Bass), he had joined up post-Bauhaus, right?

PAT FISH: Yeah, just about the time that "Ziggy Stardust" hit the top 10, they were doing some shows at Hammersmith Pallais, which is kind of a big venue.

Now, I knew Kevin (Haskins-Drummer for Bauhaus and Love & Rockets) and we had a phone call when I was at work. I got home and Alice said, 'Pat, they want us to support Bauhaus at Hammersmith Pallais." I thought, 'FREAK OUT! GET A BAND!"

So we rounded up a few people, we got Rolo (McGinty, guitarist-The Woodentops) and Alice and Max and me and this sax player we used to know.

We went up there and they hated us, it was brilliant. There was 2,000 people going, "FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND DIE!" We'd never been on a stage where there'd been guerrillas to protect us from the audience, but this time there was, so we thought, 'Great! Now we'll do 'Partytime'. Now we'll do 'Love Kittens'', and we just played all these ballads at these rabid gothics, it was great.

And they hated us. After the show, I said to Kevin, 'Well, thanks for asking us to do it, mate. It was quite an experience.' And he said, 'It wasn't me.' And it turned out it was his big brother, Dave, who I'd never met at that stage.

We just got on really well. We all sort of started hanging out. When he joined the band, we knew he was going to leave again. He joined officially for six months, but he ended up doing about ten.

Excerpt from Bauhaus Omnibus box set (2025):

PAT FISH:

In September of ’82 the local paper got wind that we were working on an album (Bath of Bacon) and they published a desperately ahead-of-the-game story about that. The album, of course, wouldn’t actually be released until May the following year! To be honest I was pleased about the coverage, but really didn’t think that anybody would read it or remember it. So imagine my surprise when I came home from work one night in October to find my girlfriend waiting with a barely credible story about how I had to contact some bloke to secure a support slot with Bauhaus at the Hammersmith Palais. The whole thing seemed totally unreal, and to be honest I suspected a wind up. I had met Kevin (Haskins) once or twice by this point, so I vaguely assumed that he was behind this. We lined up as Rolo Mcginty on bass, Louis Leroi on sax, Alice Thompson was issued with a Casio and accidentally started her pop career (shortly afterwards  forming  the Woodentops with Rolo), Max Eider on electric guitar and myself acoustic and vocals. I remember that we had a guest list allowance too, so we smuggled in loads of mates under the spurious guises of “manager” or “hairdresser” and felt incredibly smug that we had “got away with it”.

We opened the show that night. We started with Partytime. Let me just say that we had not yet reached the days when we could start with this number and silence a room full of people. Well, in fact these were the days when we started with Partytime and – within seconds – were facing a full-on howl of hostility.

Their (Bauhaus) chart success had attracted loads of new fans who cared nothing for Northampton or, indeed, for most of Bauhaus’ collected works…they were there to see the funny-looking blokes play Ziggy and that was that. The last thing they wanted to see or hear was a bunch of normal-looking kids playing nightclub music over a primitive drum machine. 

It was actually really exhilarating. Throughout the half-hour set the distant roar of outrage and contempt ebbed and flowed as we ploughed through things like Love Kittens. I remember looking at the nervous security boys in front of the stage and thinking “Ahaaaa…THAT’s what you guys are for…brilliant!” We knew that nobody could actually hurt us, so on we went, delighted that we could elicit such a reaction and still keep going.

We finished with Zombie Love. We did get some applause, and I do know that some people who were there that night went on to follow our band, some even up to the present day. But my chief memory is of an awful lot of folks who had just decided to “become Goths” being really, really angry that we had even showed up.

After we played, of course, we got plastered and I remember talking to Kevin and ventured to thank him for inviting us onto the bill. He looked genuinely baffled and denied anything to do with it….it was only a year or so later  that I finally found out that Kev’s big brother had seen that rather premature article in the local paper and decided to invite these weirdoes so that he could find out what they were about. Of course, before long he ended up finding out more about us than he probably ever needed to know.
Credit: Andrew Brooksbank 2025-02-06 (Thursday, 6^th of February 2025 - 16 days 8 hours ago)