Nardwuar: Who are you?
Bev Davies: Bev Davies

Bev, you have some of your photos here today. What are we looking at right now?
We're looking at a really early arrangement of D.O.A., with Joe and Randy and Dave Gregg when he started playing with them, and we're at the back door of The Smilin' Buddha.

The legendary Smilin' Buddha punk club in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
The one and only Smilin' Buddha. Now I took an entire roll of this film, only one roll of pictures of them and it took the whole roll to get everybody to have a cigarette and everybody to light their cigarette and Chuck to take the paper bag that he always carried around with all his belongings in it and put it out of the picture. And when they finally started posing I said, "OK, that's it. I got what I want" and I left.

What's interesting about this photo Bev is you can still actually go to The Smilin' Buddha and stand in the alley although the club is boarded up, you can still stand in the alley behind and look at graffiti.
Yeah, we did that didn't we? We found one piece of graffiti from The Scissors still there on the wall across the alleyway.

Now Bev, you've taken quite a few photos of D.O.A. over the years and you actually ventured with them on a few adventures and one of the places you went with them was England and here we have a photo from England that you took.
Yeah this is from the Lyceum when Annabella from Bow Wow Wow was playing. This is also the same place that D.O.A. played, one of the places they played while they were there, and they played with The Anti-Nowhere League and The Dead Kennedys and D.O.A.

And in this pic you see it's quite interesting because there's some dancers in the background and Annabella is wearing some very expensive clothing right?
Yeah, it was probably not that expensive at the time. It's made by Vivian Westwood, it's part of her "pirate" look. But, um, it would be really valuable now and the dancers that she had with her on the stage never made it to the Vancouver concert, so it was nice to see the show over there the way it was meant to be before we saw it at The Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.

What do you remember about the performance of Bow Wow Wow that night?
Well [laughs], I remember going there with D.O.A. and I remember that there was one member of D.O.A. that evidently was quite high on acid though I didn't know it at the time, but I heard about it afterwards. People kept coming up to him and saying, "Oh I love the gear you have on" and he didn't know what it meant. He just like, didn't know what that expression meant in England. Anyway, it was a good trip over there. I think we were gone 12 days and they played several gigs all over the place and this is one of the ones we got into free.

And Annabella of Bow Wow Wow of course has many connections to Adam Ant or Adam Ant's band we should say, and here's a picture of Adam and his Ants?
Yeah, it's a picture of Adam Ant that I took on the first tour that he came to North America on The Kings Of The Wild Frontier Tour, and this was taken in San Francisco. I went to a press conference in San Francisco and then went to the concert after that on the same night I think and it was at the California Hall in San Francisco.

And you can see Marco to the left there right, his guitarist who's huge nowadays, was he huge then?
He was pretty mean looking. I hear he was quite nice, but he had this presence on stage like you shouldn't mess around with him. Adam Ant was very, very, very small.

And what a getup he had, eh? He looked amazing!
Yeah, and also you can't really see it in this picture but there's two drummers. Two entire drum kits set up on the stage and Chuck Biscuits said to me that night -he was drummer for D.O.A. - that the reason that Adam Ant had two drummers on the stage instead of one was that they didn't have him drumming for them.

Now wasn't there some special Adam Ant sticker that you were always talking about Bev?
"Black Flag Kills Ants On Contact," that one?

Yes!
Yeah, I was trying to find that today and I couldn't find it, but that was from Los Angeles. The next concert date they did after the California one they flew down to Los Angeles and played two nights there. D.O.A. happened to be playing at The Whiskey-A-Go-Go just down the street from them and Black Flag came out with these stickers and handed them out to people at The Whiskey and on the street in front of the Adam Ant show that said "Black Flag Kills Ants On Contact."

And speaking of Brits, we have another Brit here, Billy Idol, Bev Davies!
Yeah, this is a picture of Billy Idol. He was a particular favourite of mine at the time. He never took, you know... [pauses] what do I want to say?

Well you want to say you like the way he smelled, he smelled very interesting!
[Loud groan] He smelled. I flew to Kamloops, BC to see his show in Kamloops when he played. He played here at the University of BC and went to Kamloops and they let me photograph the entire show in the pit, which is what I hadn't done here. I'd only done the first three songs and by doing the whole show I started to notice even though I was looking through the camera, and I was zooming, and I couldn't tell how far away he was, I could smell his leather pants! They got worse and worse as the show went on. There was a distinct odor as he came near the edge of the stage.

And there's a few other Billy Idol tidbits aren't there Bev? Like you told me, he never has anybody in his band that's taller than him, is that true?
Yeah, that's true. I think that's sort of like Prince isn't it? He doesn't want anybody taller. It must be hard for these short men to find people that are even shorter than they are. He's quite short.

Did he talk about any of his 'punkisms' when you were with him?
No, he didn't talk about that. I think he was trying to sell most of his music to the general population, which would be like, when he came here he did a live interview with (Vancouver radio station) CFOX because his music was actually being played on CFOX. If he'd focused on the punk days with that, they probably wouldn't have played him in those days.

And he said some naughty words on CFOX didn't he?
Yes, the silly interviewer that was interviewing him at the time, and I was sitting in there taking pictures of him, said "Billy, you've been on tour for eight or nine months now. What would you attribute your stamina to?" He said, "I have sex a lot!" and the interviewer just about swallowed his face. Evidently the place to have been at the time was in the program director's office. He was jumping on his desk and yelling and screaming going, "You can't say that on live CFOX radio!" Which, of course, he'd already said it.