Equipped with a new lead singer and professional equipment, Świdziński and his newly-established band started to play more gigs at the White Eagle Club.
In ’78, after a few pints, we convinced Lech Bogdanowicz to sing for us. We were all into The Police at that time, so we all dyed our hair blond. We gave Lech tapes of our tunes and left him to write lyrics. I managed to buy myself a beautiful Fender bass guitar and with it, a Marshall stack. Bogdan got a Vox AC30 combo with the original blue ‘cone’ speakers and Chris upgraded his drum kit to a Premier kit. We were rockin’! Were we any good? That’s a matter of opinion. We enjoyed what we were doing and that was all that was important at the time.
We successfully played in front of an audience at the club in 1978/79. These gigs were recorded. Our songs include such titles as ‘A Meeting with Lorenzo De Medic’, ‘Hey Pretty Bird’, ‘Andrew’s Song’, and ‘Roger The Paranoid Puppet’ – very original titles…
It went quite well for about a year. So we managed to play... We wrote about ten songs, enough for a set. So we managed to play two or three gigs at the Polish club, during discos organised by Konrad Kądziela. [...] He was about a year older than me, he was in charge of, what was it called, Gniazdo [the nest] I think it was called, the discotheque. But we can't call it a discotheque. We have to call it potańcówka przy płytach [a dance party to vinyl music] because of a legality, because a discotheque would mean that we need security and things like that, whereas a potańcówka doesn't need security [laughter] Something like that. So we used to have these potańcówki przy płycie and during that there'd be a 20-minute break where Lolo, Konrad, nicknamed Lolo, would say, ‘And here are... the band!’ because we had no name… One of the wonderful things about the ‘70s was that lots and lots of pubs had band nights where bands could play. You would get part of the takings on the door if enough people turned up to cover your costs... Bands just blew up in the ‘70s. There were bands everywhere. This was encouraged by punk and then the new wave and we felt ourselves as part of this new wave.
We were very, very influenced by bands like The Cure, New Order. Well, at that point in time it was Joy Division.
After eventually decided to name themselves The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the band came to be an inspiration for other first-generation Poles who saw them perform and decided to experiment with music at The White Eagle Club, leading to the formation of a number of other bands.
During all of this time, we were also encouraging young people in our community. We would leave our equipment in the basement in the youth hall and told them, ‘Look, just go to the manager if you want to, ask for a key and then you can get into a szafka [cupboard] and take out the equipment and practise yourselves’ and we did encourage other musicians to be musical and to do things. And from that, some other bands formed. One of them was Helsinki That Way, which is Piotr Bławat’s band. The Bławaci were very, very musical. All three brothers were very musical. Helsinki That Way you can listen to two of their tracks on YouTube. Also, you can hear some The Umbrellas of Cherbourg tracks on YouTube.
The catalyst for the formation of all of these bands was the space they could use to rehearse at the White Eagle Club.
And it's just interesting what a platform the club gave us, to do with all this creativity, to be creative, to do things. In that same long summer of 1979 two young ‘would be’ punks, Staś Metelski and Adam Stelmach, decided to create a music fanzine. They both loved the music scene in South London and regularly came to watch us practise at the club. Looking for an outlet to express their love of the new and refreshing music scene at the time, they decided that a fanzine would be the best platform.
The original fanzine they created was named ‘Headbanger’. This incarnation lasted two issues before being rebranded in 1980 with the title Über Alles – after the Dead Kennedy’s song ‘California Über Alles’. This one, too, had only two issues. Staś and Adam contributed to fanzines by writing articles and managed to encourage contributions from like-minded friends. They then edited, typed up, and photocopied the issues for release or sale through major alternative music stores such as Rough Trade, Compendium and Phoenix. In the late 70s, Staś travelled every summer to Poland. There he met with friends who were also into punk and new wave music, and through them learned a vast amount about young Polish bands at the time. During his stint on the fanzines, Staś managed to write two articles about punk in Poland, mentioning Polish bands like Kryzys, Deadlock, Poland, Kajaki Varieté, and KSU.