{"id":31002,"date":"2026-05-06T05:30:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T09:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=31002"},"modified":"2026-05-07T07:19:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T11:19:21","slug":"armageddons-first-and-last-stand-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/06\/armageddons-first-and-last-stand-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Armageddon’s First and Last Stand (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"Martin Pugh:<\/b> So I called Aynsley Dunbar, who I had known from England; he had actually tried to get me to join his band, Retaliation. I said, \u201cYou know what we\u2019re doing; we\u2019d love you to come down.\u201d And he said, \u201cMan, I wish you\u2019d called me earlier, but I\u2019ve just signed a deal with a band called Journey.\u201d But he said, \u201cAnyway, here\u2019s the number of a guy in in L.A. who you might want to call.\u201d And it was Bobby.<\/p>\n

I called Bobby; he came down and we kind of auditioned him, but it was just a no-brainer. After we played three or four songs, it just fit right in. We were playing \u201cBuzzard,\u201d which is obviously not in 4\/4 time signature. A lot of drummers had been playing it in four, but Bobby just hit it straight off; he was right there in the pocket.<\/p>\n

We carried on rehearsing at the soundstage at A&M, and after a short period of time, Bob Garcia came in one day with Jerry Moss. They stood at the back of the soundstage listening for probably four minutes, and then they walked out. And we were like, \u201cOh, dear. I guess we\u2019ve offended somebody with our playing!\u201d And then Bob came back in and said, \u201cJerry wants to see you in his office.\u201d We went in there and he said, \u201cWe would like you to join A&M Records.\u201d<\/p>\n

We had already had a thumbs-up from Peter Frampton, who was also on A&M. Louis knew Peter quite well, and I knew him fairly well. When my Les Paul was stolen after a Lyceum gig, we were playing the Marquee Club the next day. Peter loaned me his Black Beauty to play that night.<\/p>\n

(A weird story: About four or five months later, we were playing the Lyceum again. And this plainclothes English police officer walked into the dressing room and said, \u201cMartin Pugh, I believe this belongs to you,\u201d and gave me my Les Paul back. What happened is that I had initially bought the Les Paul from Orange Music on Shaftesbury Avenue, and the guy who stole it tried to hock it there. They said, \u201cWe don\u2019t want to buy it, but Sound City down on Shaftesbury Avenue, they\u2019ll buy it from you.\u201d He took it down there, and the police were waiting for him. But the fact that a CID guy would come to the gig with my guitar, it\u2019s unheard of these days! Anyway, I got it back.)<\/p>\n

When Armageddon started, did you compose songs ahead of time, or did the songs grow out of improvisation as they had done in Steamhammer? <\/b><\/p>\n

A little bit of both. I come up with things all the time in practice; I\u2019d come up with something, and say, \u201cOh, that kind of sounds good.\u201d And then I\u2019d throw it at the other band members. The beauty of that \u2013 as opposed to now where you send files around and wait months to see if you got something right \u2013 is that you\u2019d play it, and the drummer would go like this<\/i>, and you\u2019d go, \u201cOh, yeah; that\u2019s great.\u201d And then the bass player would [do something]. That\u2019s how it came about a lot of times. And Keith would have his book of lyrics; either he\u2019d come up with fresh lyrics or he would take something out of the book.<\/p>\n

The first time I heard \u201cBuzzard,\u201d it made me think of the new wave of British heavy metal, something that wouldn\u2019t come along until five or six years later. The song sounds well ahead of its time. Who are some of the guitarists who inspired the approach that you were using in those days? <\/b><\/p>\n

Earlier on, it would have been the three Kings [Albert, B.B., and Freddie]. With Steamhammer, I was fortunate enough to back Freddie King on two UK tours. Kieran and I would play a song, and then we would walk off stage and sit in the front row. Freddie would come on and play with the rest of the band. So during the tour, I had a front seat watching Freddie every night. He was a character!<\/p>\n

I have a story I\u2019ve told a lot of times. When I first met Freddie, I had a [Gibson] Firebird. What we used to do was buy a banjo string and put all the other strings down from there. So we had essentially an early set of Slinkies. And that\u2019s what I had on my Firebird. Freddy comes in with his [Gibson ES-] 335 and says, \u201cHere.\u201d [I try to play it but I can\u2019t bend the strings. He plays my guitar and says] \u201cDamn, you\u2019ve got rubber bands on here!\u201d And then he said, \u201cI\u2019ll give you my secret. You want to know the secret of bending those strings? Piss on your fingers.\u201d And then he said, \u201cNice to meet you,\u201d and held out his hand to shake mine.<\/p>\n

But it was two tours of watching Freddy. He\u2019d be playing the Bag O\u2019 Nails, and there would be Jimi Hendrix sitting in the table next to us, watching him. At that point, Freddie was in his early 30s; we were in our early 20s, just cutting our teeth. He had been playing in Chicago, and he was a seasoned bluesman. It was amazing watching him.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s an early influence of mine. Even earlier than that, it would be skiffle groups, Lonnie Donegan, the Shadows, the Ventures.<\/p>\n

We actually opened for Lifetime \u2013 which was John McLaughlin, Tony Williams and Larry Young \u2013 in Switzerland. That changed us quite a bit; at least me and Mick Bradley. It was an eye opener; they went down an absolute storm, and after they finished playing, the audience were just dumbstruck. They didn\u2019t know what to think of it. John McLaughlin was playing through a 100 watt amp.<\/p>\n

Mick Bradley had this massive double drum kit; he was one of the best drummers in England \u2013 or in Europe, for that matter \u2013 at the time. But Tony Williams had this kit that looked like a little child was going to sit down at it! And he would be doing this double bass drum thing with one bass drum, with one pedal. We were at the side of the stage going, \u201cOh my God, these guys are amazing!\u201d I think that started our transition into what ended up being Speech<\/i>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s so many great guitar players. And I\u2019ve always liked the gypsy violin sound of [a guitar] and the way it flows and sings. I\u2019ve always tried to get the guitar to do a little bit more of that. For the \u201cBuzzard\u201d riff, in practicing I would do a lot of paradiddles \u2013 a drumming technique \u2013 with my pick: up strokes, down strokes. And the riff came out of that. I started playing it one day; it began to be like a guitar exercise. [Steamhammer] started playing it in a little different manner, and then it followed us over to the States with Armageddon.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One\u2026 Martin Pugh: So I called Aynsley Dunbar, who I had known from England; he had actually tried to get me to join his band, Retaliation. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,62,64,73],"tags":[5891,5895,5892,5893,5894],"class_list":["post-31002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-rawk","category-reissue","category-vinyl","tag-armageddon","tag-bobby-caldwell","tag-keith-relf","tag-louis-cennamo","tag-martin-pugh","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","cat-64-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31002"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31471,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31002\/revisions\/31471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}