‘You should be able to heckle if there’s something sexist on live TV.” In the staff room at the Lloyd Park Children’s Charity in Walthamstow, where he has worked for 30-odd years, Huggy Bear’s vocalist Chris Rowley is reflecting on his band’s appearance on a 1993 episode of post-pub Channel 4 show The Word. Their performance of combustible anthem Her Jazz – three minutes of needling feedback, Cro-Magnon riffing and Niki Eliot’s impassioned howl of “You’re old and out of touch!” – was genuinely anarchic on a Friday night “youth” show that typically passed off stage-managed sensationalism as something more radical.
Then, after a segment on glamour models the Barbi Twins, the group and their entourage – now part of the audience – castigated presenter Terry Christian, with one screaming on live TV that Christian believed “all fucking women are shit”. Cue an abrupt ad break, during which the Huggy Nation were roughly escorted from the studio. “It was scary,” Rowley adds. “We hadn’t intended to create this outrage. But the rabble spoke back.”
