A couple of Wild Boys tracks from play were released on cassette - Roddy Radiations former band.
2023 saw the passing of Michael Boyd. Michael was an artistic director for the RSC but began his career at the Belgrade Theatre. Not only did he produce the landmark play Risky City, written by Ron Hutchinson, but he also produced many of the Coventry mystery plays.
The early 1980s and Coventry was an uncomfortable place to grow up in. And the more violent side was the theme of Risky City.
It was a play of huge contradiction. On one hand it depicted disaffected youth who were, apparently, all sticking together for the common cause.
On the other those same 'friends' were kicking each other to death over a pint of lager. Such were the priorities held, and what was deemed important, within the city at that time.
In the edition of 'Something Else' that focused on Coventry, one of the saddest attitudes presented of the city was that of the local kids to the theatre - 'It's all Shakespeare innit?', and in the past the choice of plays made by the Belgrade has seemed determined to foster such an unpromising opinion.
When 'theatre' means The Wild Boys and bands in the foyer, there is then an immediate interest established, and I hope that there is to be more collaboration with the Youth Theatre in producing drama that has direct appeal to the young who normally would sneer.
More a series of scenes interspersed with music from the band than a play - it's far too rough and crudely put together for that - Risky City tells the true story of Eddy who was kicked to death in one of the city centre car parks over 'the price of a pint of piss warm, low-cal, overpriced lager' and of the CID officer on the case who discovers that one of the attackers was his own son Ellis.
Tensions between a father and steady dependable copper attitude to the city and that of his son, who represents the disenchanted youths of a boom town gone terribly wrong, rise. As Ellis puts it in a marvellous extended venomous diatribe against his birthplace, it is 'a ring-road with a dump in the middle or a dump with a ring-road round it?' .
This impression of the city is perfectly captured in a stark set of ring road and subway with a backdrop of the skyline, and it is from these epitomes or urban development that the kids come to the stage front in menacing gangs, evincing boredom, anger and frustration.
'Saturdays we have a few, have a few, kick a few heads' – they then go to the pub to watch The Wild Boys - those that don't get pushed out by the bouncers. But it was in such a club that Eddy spilled some of Dave's beer and his fate is decided when they accidentally meet in the car park.
Risky City pulled no punches about the desperate plight of Coventry at that time. A play from the heart that acted as a mirror to what had been seen by its writer Ron Hutchinson. Ron, by his own admission, wasn't a sociologist. But he wanted to deliver a message about the culture of violence in Coventry. But, as he also mentioned, it was up to others to solve the problem.
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