Edward Tudor Pole

Edward Tudor Pole : Bambi Lives! 

Ed Tudor-Pole, the Sex Pistols, Robert De Niro, Netflix & ‘Who Killed Bambi?’

How did a half-forgotten, goofy punk rock ditty end up having a central role in a slick Netflix blockbuster starring Robert De Niro? Charmed by the incongruity, Carl Loben tracks down singer Edward Tudor-Pole to talk about ‘Who Killed Bambi?’, the Sex Pistols, his subsequent band Tenpole Tudor, and the enduring legacy of punk.

Words: Carl Loben

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“Malcolm McLaren made me sing it really badly. He kept saying, ‘Do another take, you’re singing too nicely. Be more punk’.”

Edward Tudor-Pole (“Don’t call me Eddie!”) is sitting in a pub in Stoke Newington in the London borough of Hackney, talking about the new lease of life for ‘Who Killed Bambi?’, the song he sang in the Great Rock & Roll Swindle in the late 1970s which came out partially under the Sex Pistols name. “So I just kept trying to be more extreme in each one. We did about 40 takes, until I could take no more. Then they chose the maddest bits from every take and made a composite. It’s not a song that’s trying to be liked.”

On the face of it, ’Who Killed Bambi?’ is an unlikely track to feature in a slick Netflix blockbuster. It stars Robert De Niro as a former US president who returns to public life following a heavy-duty cyber-attack on the country. ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ recurs throughout the six-part series, in increasingly discordant versions. It stalks De Niro’s psyche and seemingly soundtracks the former president’s spiral into some form of dementia. “That’s very fitting,” exclaims Ed, who hasn’t seen the series as he doesn’t subscribe to Netflix.

It’s later revealed in Zero Day that — spoiler alert! — the president’s son committed suicide and the song playing when De Niro’s character found his dead body — he’d OD’d on smack in the White House — was… ‘Who Killed Bambi?’. The question remains in the series: is former President Mullen the victim of reactivated neurological cyber-weapon Proteus, or simply suffering from dementia episodes?

So anyway, how did Zero Day end up with this particular song being interwoven throughout? It turns out that the series producers were watching Adam Curtis’s fascinating geo-political documentary series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (still available on BBC iPlayer), where at the end of the first episode ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ plays over some archive footage of former Chinese premier Mao-Tse Tung and other Communist party apparatchiks, just after a segment on conspiracy theories. “When we heard it, we were like, ‘This is the perfect sort of freaky, bizarre, strange tune to be inside George Mullen’s head,” Zero Day co-creator Noah Oppenheim told movie site decider.com.

“I think Bob got tired of it,” adds fellow co-creator Eric Newman, referencing De Niro. “We never got tired of it. Bob definitely got tired.”

“Murder murder murder / Someone should be angry / The crime of the century / Who shot little Bambi.”

Initially, in the late 1970s at the height of punk in the UK, there was to be a Sex Pistols film called Who Killed Bambi?, directed by cult US filmmaker Russ Meyer and with a script by noted US critic Roger Ebert. It was to be the punk version of Beatles caper A Hard Day’s Night, a vehicle to help the Pistols break the vast American market, but was abandoned due to internal disagreements. “Russ Meyer the director had a deer shot, and all the British film producers thought it was cruel and walked out,” is Ed’s take on the reason the original film production fell apart.

McLaren’s film idea morphed into The Great Rock & Roll Swindle with Julien Temple directing, and amidst the relative chaos, Ed — who’d by now entered the Sex Pistols world — was tasked with writing a song for it. “Malcolm suggested the title,” he recalls. “I took ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ as maybe being about the death of innocence.”

“Malcolm kept coming round my house to see how I was getting on with the words to the song,” Ed continues. “He’d say, ‘I like that bit, but when I come back in four hours I want the other bit better’. I couldn’t really think of what words to add, so his girlfriend at the time, Vivienne [Westwood, fashion designer extraordinaire], came up with some words. Is that the only released song she’s ever written? I think you’re right.”

Your hack is curious to know more about the song. Did he memorise all the words to ‘Who Killed Bambi?’, or read them off a sheet? “Well, after 40 takes you didn’t need to… I knew them,” Ed says. “It became a hit record, yes, but I think anything with Sex Pistols on was automatically a hit in them days. So I was in the odd position of being in the charts but not being able to take any credit for it. Considering it was just me and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the record — and they’re essentially a covers band — it means that I was the whole of the Sex Pistols, logically.”

Disney-style strings and brass permeate ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ from the start, although Ed says he missed the RPO — who McLaren had hired to also turn Pistols piledriver ‘God Save The Queen’ into a symphony for the film — recording, as when he turned up to the studio they were all packing up their instruments. “It would’ve been really nice to have seen that.”

“Never trust a hippie / ‘Cause I love punky Bambi / I’ll kill to find the killer / In that rotten roll army.”

The ‘Never trust a hippie’ line in ‘Bambi’ became one of the standout slogans from the punk movement. “It wasn’t me, I think it was McLaren, he was always thinking up… he was the most inventive, artistic member of the whole lot of them,” Ed says.

“When the hippies started out it was all peace and love and everything, but they were all very middle class; if you tried to talk to them, they were pretty arrogant. Then along came punk rock, with hate and destroy on their leather jackets, and there was much more peace and love in the punk rock community than there ever was with the hippies. They were just arrogant, disdainful, aloof, stoned, unfriendly. Whereas the punk rocker was the opposite of all those things. They weren’t stoned from cannabis; they were probably drunk from Snakebite, but very friendly, everybody in the punk rock world was.”

Pausing for thought for a moment, he qualifies the statement somewhat. “It’s just a line isn’t it? Jargon. It’s not like you shouldn’t trust every single hippie. I suppose I was a hippie when I was 14, when I had me hair long. I believed in peace and love at the time, it sounded like a very good idea to me.”

In The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, filmed in early 1978, Tudor-Pole plays Tadpole, thus named by celebrated British actress Irene Handl. Dressed in a maroon uniform as a cinema employee, he sells confectionary to various cinema attendees (including Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, who steals loads of chocolate and hides it in his overcoat) while goofily singing ‘Who Killed Bambi?’, pogoing about like a demented Beaker from the Muppets. “Oh shut up Tadpole,” quips Irene Handl at the end of the sequence. “She was lovely,” Ed remembers.

In the flawed but essential rite-of-passage movie for punk rockers through the ages, Tudor-Pole also sings Bill Haley classic Rock Around The Clock and contributes vocals to the title track with Steve Jones, Paul Cook and others. But how did Ed end up in the Sex Pistols world? He begins by saying that the Stones were his Damascene moment when he was a kid (“they really shocked society”), and that when punk came along he immediately ‘got it’.

“I was at RADA and I had to finish off the course, so I left in April ’77,” he says. “I wasn’t going to get a job auditioning for provincial theatre, so I thought ‘Come on!’ The punk rock thing was exploding, so I bought a copy of Melody Maker and saw ‘Wild frontman wanted’ — and I got the job immediately.

“They were a bunch of middle class boys and they said, ‘We’re obviously going to make it because we can play, and those punk bands…’” Hang on, we ask, what band was this? “It was called The Visitors. They were completely missing the point. But I was just pleased to be in any band. I just learned the songs; they were very difficult to perform, they were very fast in their rhythm.

“We played The Marquee supporting someone, and we got a review that said ‘This is a great band, apart from the bug-eyed cretin on vocals’,” he continues, apace. “So the band said, ’Sorry Ed, you’ve got to go’. They had me round, and they sacked me at a meeting. They said, ‘You’re holding us back, it says so in the Melody Maker’. So I left, very depressed.”

A few weeks later a fan of The Visitors — “we didn’t have many fans, we only did 12 gigs” — phoned him up. “He said, ‘Ed, have you seen the ad in the NME? The Sex Pistols are auditioning’. I said, ‘No’. He said, ‘You’d be perfect for that, go along’. I said, ‘When?’ He said, ’Tomorrow’. I said, ‘Where?’ He said, ‘Duke of Yorks theatre, 11.30’. If I hadn’t taken that phone call I wouldn’t have known to go, and the rest of my life might have been different.”

He talks about how he gave it his all when he was going to be the new Sex Pistols singer after Johnny Rotten’s departure. “We did about six rehearsals in Denmark Street, what fun that was!” he exclaims. “But then things started to go downhill…

“When Malcolm McLaren said the band couldn’t play, it was a good line but complete lies,” he continues, animatedly. “Steve Jones was fantastic! I really loved Steve, he was very kind to me. Even though I wasn’t a cockney like him. Anyway, the plan went down in flames with the death of Sid Vicious. So I went away and formed my own band.”

“Gentle pretty thing / Who only had one spring / You bravely faced the world / Ready for anything.”

Perhaps unexpectedly, ’Who Killed Bambi?’ peaked at No.6 in the UK charts, and off the back of the Sex Pistols association Ed assembled a Tenpole Tudor band, who signed to Stiff Records and released the album ‘Eddie, Old Bob, Dick and Gary’. Swashbuckling single ‘Swords Of A Thousand Men’ — all kettle drums, a rockabilly swagger and a rousing chorus — saw these viking vagabonds crash into the pop charts, the single also peaking at No.6.

Ed reckons that it was every 12-year-old boy in the country — “all 350,000 of them, and no one else” — who bought ‘Swords Of A Thousand Men’, making it a smash hit in 1981 and turning him into a pop star. “‘Swords’ is the perfect pre-pubescent song — knights in armour, it’s in the DNA of everybody, back through history,” he says. “It catches the imagination of a young boy just before puberty. It was on the radio a lot and became a playground craze, like how the yoyo became a schoolyard craze. Was I on Cheggers Plays Pop? Yeah, loads of them.” He talks about how he was on a German TV programme with Kim Wilde, Alvin Stardust and Robert Palmer; details when the band played with Madness and The Pretenders and The Undertones; and believes promoters couldn’t understand why their gigs were half empty when their records were high in the charts. It was because all their fans were 12 and in bed, he thinks now. “We did have a couple of matinee shows, but not enough obviously.”

The band crashed and burned, splitting in 1982. “It’s hard being a pop star, there are a lot of internal pressures, you’re in the van all the time,” he says. “You don’t get a day off, the record company gets its pound of flesh alright. You work every single day, you’re constantly touring — or miming on television shows — always in each other’s company.”

He speculates as to whether it was money that caused the band to split. “I was getting a bit more because I’d written the hit. So the next song we all co-wrote, but it didn’t become a hit. What happens with bands is that if you overwork them, you grind them into the dust. It’s nothing that a three month break wouldn’t have cured, probably.”

This fine raconteur ruminates about the line-up of the band being not quite right back then. “If there’s one wrong person in a band, it doesn’t work,” he says. “That’s why The Beatles got rid of Pete Best. But anyway, my heart was broken when the band broke up. And then the acting doors opened, so I just went in there — I thought, ‘I’ve got to do something’.”

Sipping red wine in the Stoke Newington pub and sporadically running a hand through his spiky, tousled moptop, Ed’s looking quite dapper in a tweed jacket and brown brogues. Now 70, he’s lived around Stokey for quite a while, he says (“I know all the rough characters”), and declares that he likes pubs because people are real in them. “It’s a lot rougher and more theatrical and Dickensian in the pub,” he believes.

As a jobbing actor he was in Absolute Beginners, Peter Greenaway film Drowning By Numbers, Clint Eastwood film White Hunter Black Heart, and several Alex Cox movies including Sid & Nancy, Straight To Hell and weird western Walker. “Three months with Ed Harris in war-torn Nicaragua, with Joe Strummer,” he raves. “That was a hell of an adventure.”

The rest of the 80s have generally left him with a scathing view of the acting profession, however. “Everyone seems to think that acting’s so great, but it’s an absurd profession. ‘What do you do? Oh, I just wait around hoping for the chance to pretend to be somebody else’. It’s just a circus trick. It’s no work for a serious man. Far better to write music. Music lasts forever. The actor is the lowest of the low.”

He says the acting profession became intolerable for him in the end. “All the unemployment, and impotence. At least in a band you can make something happen — write a song, do a concert, record a song, have a rehearsal, you can make stuff happen. As an actor you’re just praying for the phone to ring. Sod that for a lark. I managed to escape that, I ran away to television and presented The Crystal Maze. They don’t offer bit-parts to gameshow hosts, so that got me out of acting.”

Ed took over from Richard O’Brien presenting labyrinthine TV challenge The Crystal Maze. (He’d also taken over from O’Brien playing Riff Raff in the stage adaptation of The Rocky Horror Show.) He says he enjoyed the show on the whole, although he didn’t like the TV bosses “taking the Mickey out of the contestants, who were all a bit nerdy. I was with them for 12 hours, so we bonded and I felt protective towards them. When I heard these carping comments in my headpiece I asked them to turn it off. It was a big day for them, they’d never been on telly before, it was our job to give them a good time.”

He claims to have only watched a couple of episodes of The Crystal Maze himself, and wasn’t too bothered when Channel Four didn’t renew it after he’d presented for two series. “It would’ve been a lot better in the third series, once I’d worked out how to do it. The first series I was a bit all on the same tone — it needs high and low dynamics. I didn’t mind, I was not sent into this world to be a game show host, man. I think I was sent into this world to be a music hall artist and entertainer. Make them laugh, get them singing — what more do you want?”

“I’m happy that you lived / For your life is mine / What have I except to cry / Spirit never die.”

After the acting, Ed ventured forth with his guitar to try to earn a crust as a singer again. “And to my delight and amazement, I was wholeheartedly welcomed back like the prodigal son by everybody on the thriving alternative rock scene,” he says. “They wanted me back, and they made it abundantly clear where I belonged and what I should be doing. And I did a gig every weekend for the next 15 years.”

Until Covid, 2020. During the pandemic he started writing his autobiography: The Pen Is Mightier. “It took quite a while to come up with that title,” he says. “For a book you write loads and loads and loads and then filter it down, it’s like the distillation of a whisky or something.”

His solo shows have picked up again now and consist of songs, then an interval, with the second half consisting of Ed telling stories. “I reckon they prefer the stories to the songs,” he smirks. “It’s like taking the proverbial candy off a baby. They’re gripped to my every word. I say things like, ‘…and that one’s not even in the book’, and then they laugh and it becomes like a running gag. So there are elements of stand-up comedy — it’s a show, you want them laughing.”

He talks about playing acoustic guitar with a pick-up, and a pedal that he has that triggers three-part harmonies to, he wryly claims, turn him into the Everly Brothers. “The reason that Tenpole Tudor was successful is that we could do three-part harmonies,” he reckons. “We were just as rough and ready as the rest of them, but that’s what distinguished us. Everyone loves a harmony.”

What do the other band members do now? “I’m not sure. I’m in touch with the bass player, Dick Crippen, he’s a very fine man, he’s got his own recording studio and is a very good producer. The drummer I don’t really know about and the guitarist has a normal job now.”

A live football match comes on the telly in the pub. Ed reveals that he supports Newcastle. “They always treat me very well there, they give me loads of work, they’re lovely people,” he says. “It’s another country up north. Really friendly.”

He says he likes being relatively anonymous in London and the south-east. “In The Midlands, Yorkshire, the north-east, the West Country, South Wales and Scotland I’m very well known,” he says. “Ultimately, you don’t want to be that famous that you can’t walk down the street.”

Talk soon turns to the Sex Pistols reunion (“Well, Steve and Paul need to work”), and how he’d love to see Steve Jones again. “What starts out as being very revolutionary and shocking always gets absorbed by the establishment in the end,” he exclaims, sagely. “The Sex Pistols at the Albert Hall says it all, doesn’t it? It’s quite sweet, I like it.”

“It’s funny, when you look back on those times, it seems so long ago,” he continues. “The Sex Pistols almost seem like quaint folk heroes now — not remotely threatening or anything. At the time the establishment was quaking in its boots.”

He also says he’d love to spend an evening with John Lydon. “He’s a very talented man, Lydon, he’s ever so funny and clever. I’ve read all his books, and I agree with most things he says.” He talks about meeting him once, at the launch of Lydon’s first book, No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. “Did he hold anything against me? No, he said, [puts on funny Rotten voice] ‘Oh hello Tenpole, I don’t say very nice things about you in my book. Mind you, I don’t say very nice things about myself in my book’. It was all fine. I think he refers to me as ’Some wanker called Tenpole Tudor’ — I can take that.”

“All the spikey punkers / Believers in the ruins / With one big shout, they all cry out / Who killed Bambi?”

This writer actually first met Ed 40 years ago, backstage at the Fulham Greyhound at a gig by long-lost 60s-inspired band The Montellas. We remind him that he was on about starting a post-Tenpole band named Hitler Loves Sue that night. He grins. “That was tongue in cheek, I was just trying to imagine that when Hitler was a 12 year old boy, he might have had a crush on a girl called Sue. Some people start off as babies and toddlers before growing up to be a brutal dictator and mass murderer — weird to think about really. Me and Pete, the bass player in The Montellas, were always talking about that at school, it was an old schoolboy joke. The graffiti doesn’t really exist.”

He tells the story of how he’s actually descended from Richard III’s niece, and how Malcolm McLaren twisted this to say that he was descended from Henry VIII. “Then these rough lads would say, ‘You’re the rightful king of England!’ And I’d say, ‘No I’m not’. That was funny. Nothing too serious.”

We tell him that we didn’t know he had a book coming out, and he says: “I guarantee that it’s entertaining, and serious at times. A few insights, y’know?” From here we start recounting to Ed exactly when ‘Who Killed Bambi?’ is used in Zero Day; for instance, when the president is about to give a speech in front of a live TV audience to millions of Americans, and all he has going round his head is “Who killed Bambiiiii?’ “That is so funny,” says Ed. “Extraordinary.”

Ed says that he wasn’t asked to give permission for Zero Day to use the track, but that he hopes his publishers have negotiated a reasonable fee for its use. “Musicians don’t often get paid, it’s nice if they do. For [the TV ad for] Haven Holidays, my publishers negotiated a reasonable fee to use ‘Swords’. It was played every single day in the pandemic for two years. The song was obviously built to last, I’m very chuffed by that. The thing is, two years later you’ve spent it all and you get a fucking tax bill.”

Does he always play ‘Bambi’ in his sets? “Oh yes, but my latest thing is that when someone shouts out from the crowd ‘Who killed Bambi?’, you say, ‘Well, no one killed Bambi — Bambi didn’t get killed, durrr!’ It was the mum that got killed, of course. It actually took me 25 years for someone to point that out to me!”

* The Pen Is Mightier: Autobiography of a Punk Rocker by Edward Tudor-Pole is out on April 22nd via Oldcastle Books.