Acid Tablas / Word Peace A Dream? / Scully’s Reel / Bali Citra / Scully’s Jig / Piece Of The World / Acid Tabla Dub

Ananta Snake Dance / Return Of The Mozabites / Sanaiscara Saturn / Paintings Of A Cave

Debut recording by Suns Of Arqa mixed by Adrian Sherwood in 1979 and released on Suns Of Arqa’s own imprint Rocksteady Records in 1980. The material on this LP is completely eclectic with all kinds of genres being featured on the tracks. Whether that is Dub, Irish or Indian with also a little flamenco thrown in for good measure. This LP has a certain ONU Sound quality which makes it a worthy addition to the KYPP site. This band inspired lots of other outfits notably Sabres Of Paradise, Transglobal Underground, The Orb, Invaders Of The Heart and more recently Zion Train.

Theft of live photos above, courtesy of sunsofaqua.co.uk.

Theft of wordage below, courtesy of RHO-Xs blog:

Suns of Arqa creator and mentor Michael Wadada has been continuously investigating the supernatural potential hidden in the Classical Raga structure of the music of India. His mission – to mix the cerebral and illusive cosmological vibrations of Raga, with the mother earth rhythms of Niyabinghi drumming that were surfacing in England in the guise of Dub Reggae.

In 1979 Wadada set about recording the ground breaking Suns of Arqa album ‘Revenge of the Mozabites’ with his friend Adrian Sherwood. Together they formed the ‘4D Rhythm’ label – the world was not ready! Wadada retreated to the Pennine mountain range in Lancashire, Adrian Sherwood went on to create the formidable ‘On-U Sound’ label. Next came the legendary collaborations with Prince Far-I, which can be heard on ‘A Brief History of SOA’ . 7th December 1982 Prince Far-I did one last show in Manchester with Suns of Arqa; on his return to Jamaica he was murdered by an unidentified gunman. This last performance can be heard on ‘Suns of Arqa Live with Prince Far-I’. In 1982 a very curious Peter Gabriel came across a rare copy of that first Suns of Arqa album; he was putting together the very first World of Music and Dance festival (WOMAD), and asked Suns of Arqa to come and perform.

Produced by Michael Mafia and Adran Ridims (Sherwood)

Biggest hugs and best wishes from all the Kill Your Pet Puppy online collective to Phil Ritchie who celebrates his birthday today. Hoping you had a super day throughout. x

When Fate Deals It’s Mortal Blow / Burnout / The Spin

Rev Head / Set It On Fire / Blood Red River

Nitro / Solid Gold Hell

I Cried No Tears / Crazy Heart / This Life Of Yours

The Scientists performed a fair bit in London venues around the mid 1980’s. I was lucky enough to see the band a handful of times at various places; The Broadway underneath the Clarendon in Hammersmith, The Broadway’s big brother The Clarendon, Bay 63 in Ladbroke Grove and at Dingwalls in Camden. Maybe one or two more places that I can not recall right now. Always a great live act, the rhythm guitarist cutting up his fingers badly whilst thrashing the guitar strings so hard trying to ‘out Stooge’ Kim Salmon on the lead guitar, blood all over the pick ups of his lovely Fender Jaguar. The Scientists were that kind of band!

Uploaded today are the records that I first heard that got me into the band in the first place. The recording sessions for both these releases took place in 1983, although the 12″ EP ”This Heart Doesn’t Run On Blood’ came out in 1984. 

Text below is a Kim Salmon interview by Patrick Emery for i94bar.com website and following that are some notes for this era of the Scientists from scientists.com.au website.

Kim Salmon claims to have a patchy memory of the recording of The Scientists’ debut mini-album, “Blood Red River”, which the band will play in its entirety as part of the Don’t Look Back concert series.  Recorded in Melbourne’s Richmond Recorders in 1983, eighteen months after The Scientists had arrived in Sydney to pursue their musical prospects, Salmon describes the recording process for Blood Red River as “speed-addled and alcohol-ridden…midnight-to-day recording sessions”.  But the passage of time hasn’t quelled Salmon’s pride in the album, or the period in the Scientists’ life that it represents.  “There was very good chemistry in the band,” Salmon recalls.  “It was formative, but also its defining days.  It was the best period for us.”

Salmon had formed the first line-up of The Scientists in Perth in the latter part of the 1970s.  The first line-up included James Baker, at the time recently of The Victims, and subsequently a founding member of Le Hoodoo Gurus, the Beasts of Bourbon and The Dubrovniks, together with a revolving door of notable musicians, including Roddy Radalj (Hoodoo Gurus, Dubrovniks, Surfing Caesars) and Boris Sudjovic. 

The first incarnation of The Scientists bears only marginal resemblance to the swamp and grunge of the 1980s version, with the band’s repertoire more attuned to Baker’s attraction to the 60s garage tradition (see the Citadel CD re-release “Pissed on Another Planet” for a survey of the Baker-Salmon era Scientists).  “The songs from the first line-up of The Scientists came from a songwriting partnership between James Baker and myself,” Salmon says.  “We wrote what came naturally to us.  But that style of music wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do when I was gripped by punk rock,” he says.

The apex of The Scientists Mark I’s tenure came arguably with its appearance on Australian pop music show Countdown where they played “Last Night”:.

The Scientists returned to Perth, where its prospects appeared limited.  Salmon, for his part, was gravitating back to the dark, jagged and swamp shade of punk he’d initially been attracted to.  “As the first line-up of the band peetered out I became interested in The Cramps, and renewed my interest in The Stooges,” Salmon says.  Salmon hooked up with fellow Perth residents Kim Williams and Brett Rixon to form Louie Louie.  “Louie Louie was the prototype for next version of The Scientists,” Salmon says.  “’Swampland’ was written in that band.” 

Around the same time Salmon bumped into former Scientists bass player Boris Sudjovic, who’d recently moved across to Sydney.  Sudjovic was looking for a musical outlet, and suggested to Salmon that The Scientists were likely to find a more receptive audience on the eastern seaboard.  His interest piqued by Sudjovic’s description of the Sydney music scene, Salmon set about rebuilding the Scientists.  “I asked James Baker, but he was already in Le Hoodoo Gurus,” Salmon says, “and Kim Williams wanted to stay in Perth”.  Louie Louie drummer Brett Rixon assumed drumming duties, while the second guitar spot was filled ultimately by Tony Thewlis, another Perth resident. 

“I spoke to Tony, who’d wanted to join the previous pop version of The Scientists,” Salmon says.  What Thewlis didn’t know immediately was that the band he was joining was a different creature to the band he’d wanted to join a few years before.  But that didn’t stop Thewlis embarking on the long car trip to Sydney to seek the band’s musical fortunes.  “All of us went to Sydney,” Salmon says.  “I had this idea of what we were going to do.  Brett knew what we were going to do because he’d been in Louie Louie.  I think it was more that Boris had a problem with it,” Salmon laughs.

Sydney in 1981 was still in the grip of the Radio Birdman legacy.  “When we first went to Sydney it was very much post Radio Birdman,” Salmon recalls.  But The Scientists’ sharp deviation from the prevailing Motor City twin guitar style didn’t seem to hamper the band.  “We were very aware of the Radio Birdman thing when we moved to Sydney,” Salmon says.  “We didn’t want to continue with the tradition of paisley shirt and the Talk Talk retread riff,” he says.  “We had our own agenda.  I think for a lot of people in Sydney it didn’t occur that could do anything different”.

Salmon muses that The Scientists sound – later described as the progenitor of the ‘grunge’ style that swept through the independent music industry in the early 1990s – was the zeitgeist waiting to happen.  “When we recorded and played ‘Swampland’ people loved it,” Salmon says, “so there was something going on”.  Salmon says that the sound was striving to achieve was born of an interest in Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Cramps and The Gun Club (at that time arguably at the peak of their creative powers). 

“A band like The Cramps has a definite schtick,” Salmon says.  “With us – or with me – it was very much a case of looking for something that hadn’t been done”.  Salmon suggests that part of the attraction of The Scientists was its multi-faceted character, or conversely, the difficulty of pigeonholing the band’s sound. 

“People heard in it what they wanted to hear,” Salmon says.  “Some people thought we were a psych band, some people thought we were a garage band, and other people thought we were none of those things,” he laughs.  So were you looking to define the band’s sound, or to explore it?  “That’s interesting,” Salmon replies.  “It was a bit of both, I think,” he says. “To me I can hear things in that band all the time,” Salmon says.  “I can hear Can in the band, and Krautrock,” he says.  “And there’s a lot of jagged edges in that band as well”.

Withing a short period of moving to Sydney The Scientists were building a reputation for impressive live shows – despite the band’s lack of enthusiasm for sound checks. 

“Dave Graney asked me the other day ‘So, are you going to do a sound check?’, because we didn’t sound check in those days.  One time we came to Melbourne to play the Seaview Ballroom and we got straight out of the van and just started playing,” Salmon laughs.  It was also in Melbourne that The Scientists met Bruce Milne and Greta Moon, at the time principals of the AuGoGo independent record label, which would go onto release “Blood Red River”.

“I’d seen Fast Forward [the independent music zine published by Milne, which came with a cassette compiling independent bands of the time] and thought it was a good idea,” Salmon says. “I gave Bruce a copy of our cassette we’d made, and I did an interview with him about what I thought rock’n’roll was all about.  Later on he offered to put out our mini-LP,” he says.

Twenty-five years later “Blood Red River” withstands even the closest scrutiny.  Rumbling beats, jagged guitars that hurl a spear through your musical senses, with Salmon’s peculiar guttural vocal chants describing vivid tales of confusion and angst that could have been procured from a Edgar Allen Poe short story.  “Set It On Fire” – replete with Salmon’s hair raising screeching chorus – remains a certifiable classic, while the fatalism of “When Fate Deals Its Mortal Blow” is as harsh as any convict novel. 

“Those songs were my first attempt at writing lyrics,” Salmon says.  “It was life seen through the eyes of a 20-year-old living in Sydney.  Someone described it once as ‘a filthy sub-world of hate and lust’,” Salmon laughs.

For all of the imagery in the songs – the title track itself is worthy of a post-graduate academic treatise – Salmon says there’s nothing much to the lyrics.  “It wasn’t particularly apocalyptic, even though some people thought it was,” Salmon says.  What about the song Blood Red River?  “There was cowpunk around the time, and I think it was influenced by that,” Salmon says.  “They’re just lines, they don’t mean anything”. 

That said, some of the tunes – “Burnout” and “Revhead” especially – give a clue to the members’ backgrounds in Perth.  “We were all from the suburbs of Perth,” Salmon says, “not from Caulfield Grammar”.

Salmon is keen to pay tribute to Chris Logan, the record’s producer, who achieved a ‘fat’ sound on the record later Scientists recordings were unable to replicate.  “He was doing our sound at a gig, and he came up to us later and said ‘you guys are a wild bunch’.  He was a pretty idiosyncratic chap – he looked disturbingly like Francis Rossi from Status Quo.  He was very particular about what he did, and very dedicated to the craft of making sound – he was a slide rule sort of a guy,” Salmon says. 

Listening to the record now, Salmon is still impressed at Logan’s production efforts.  “It’s very fat, and it’s got a lot of bottom end,” Salmon says.  “Thanks to his meticulous skill and those fantastic side burns he managed to get a great sound,” Salmon laughs.

And it wasn’t just Logan’s production skills that did the trick – Logan also claimed an empathy with The Scientists that turned out to be authentic.  “Chris believed he knew what we were about, and he probably did,” Salmon says.  “Chris deserves a lot of credit that he probably hasn’t ever received,” he says.

In 1984 The Scientists packed their bags and headed to Europe, joining the exodus of Australian bands including The Moodists, The Birthday Party and the Go-Betweens.  “We eventually ended up leaving Sydney.  Brett had had enough, and he was a bit frustrated, and he said ‘we’ve got to get out of here’,” Salmon says.  “We ended up in London in 1984.  It was a very difficult thing to do, but it was lucky in a lot of ways”.  Despite the mythology of poverty, squats and tinned food that’s regularly promulgated by historians of the era – a mythology that fellow expats of the time like Mick Harvey still objects to – Salmon says The Scientists found almost immediate favour.  “We ran into Ken West who gave us some names that we called up,” he says.  The manager of New Order arranged for the band to go to Manchester (“he said ‘our bass player would like this’ “), and things quickly fell into place.  “Straight away I found myself talking to a whole lot of enthusiastic journos,” Salmon says.  That said, there were the occasional negative commentators. 

“Some Perth journalist who was working for NME said we were copying the Birthday Party,” Salmon says, rolling his eyes.  The notoriously fickle English music press had plenty to say about The Scientists, not always in tune with what the band was thinking itself.  “The thing about NME was that later on when we’d lost the plot they said ‘they’ve lost that post-crucifixion blues thing’,” Salmon laughs.

Eventually the The Scientists’ European sojourn ran its course, as the band’s sound began to stray from its original course – the Human Jukebox period of the band is a precursor to where Salmon would pick up with his next outfit, the Surrealists – and the relationships within the band began to fray.  “One day I got fed up with that angsty sort of thing,” Salmon says.  “Then Brett left.  The stuff afterwards was never as good,” he says.

The band had also been plagued with legal problems, after its relationship with AuGoGo went pear shaped.  Salmon isn’t keen to discuss the legal dramas in detail, though it’s clear he learned a lot about music contracts (albeit the hard way) from the experience.  Suffice to say, AuGoGo asserted its rights under the contract, and the band disputed those rights, and never the twain shall meet.

Salmon eventually returned to Australia, and embarked on a final Australian tour in 1987 before retiring the band for almost 20 years.  Salmon formed the Surrealists shortly after the demise of The Scientists, before teaming up with ex-Scientists Boris Sudjovic and James Baker (and Tex Perkins and Spencer Jones) in the Beasts of Bourbon. 

In 2000 Salmon put together a rotating band of musicians to promote the release of the “Blood Red River” CD release, followed by another series of shows in 2002 (this time featuring Tony Thewlis on guitar and Boris Sudjovic on bass).  In 2004 Salmon formed a new line-up of the band featuring Stu Thomas (who’d played with Salmon in the Surrealists and the Business) and Leanne Chock (who’d joined The Scientists’ not long before its demise in the late 1980s), undertaking a short tour of Europe. 

In 2006 The Scientists, this time with Sudjovic and Thewlis on board, were invited to play at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in England, which became the catalyst for the band’s appearance as part of the Australian leg of the Don’t Look Back festival.  The Scientists will play “Blood Red River” in its entirety, together with a selection of tracks recorded around the same time, including “Happy Hour”, “Swampland”, “Fire Escape” and “We Had Love”. 

As the interview winds to a close, Salmon reflects on the potency of The Scientists in its “defining” era.  “I don’t think there’s even been a band that could play two notes as good as us,” he says.  But Salmon is also quick to dismiss any suggestion The Scientists was a simplistic musical outfit.  “I spent a lot of time dumbing it down and making it simple like The Ramones, when it really wasn’t,” Salmon says.  “I invested a helluva lot in that band – there’s a lot of things going on in there that people hadn’t done,” he says. 

Salmon’s reference to the Ramones leads me to muse self-indulgently on the paradoxical skill of rock’n’roll to continually explore the near-infinite artistic reaches of three chord riffs – a contrast, I suggest, to the multi-dimensional orchestral layering of Mozart.  Salmon’s response is swift.  

“The Scientists are like Mozart!” he says, without a hint of sarcasm.

PATRICK EMERY

1. (SUB)URBAN MYTHS

So much has passed since the sounds on this LP were first generated that it feels as though they were created by a different set of people. But it is in fact Boris, Tony, Brett and I who are guilty. It was indeed us who travelled some 2000 kilometres across Australia to form a band never having played together before; who decided to grow our hair long to be different from everyone else in the early eighties; who got bottled off stage by a disgruntled crowd of 1000 at the Parramatta Leagues Club after 15 minutes of supporting pub rock stalwarts, The Angels; who, prompted by a good review from Barney Hoskins in the NME, left behind a promising future as Australian ‘pub rock’ icons ourselves to languish in relative obscurity in the UK; who got booked into a whole pile of European festivals by a long haired chap called Willhelm in a Dutch agency called Mojo because he took one look at our photos and thought, “these Scientists [with their long hair] are kindred spirits”; who had fewer rehearsals than the number of songs in our repertoire over our entire history; who did a couple of European tours by rail, getting the clubs to provide backline; who would methodically all walk off in four different directions on arrival at each foreign station to have Leanne, our tour manager, round us up; who hated the idea of playing to an audience that was more inebriated than us; who believed that we were the greatest rock and roll band in the world with absolute conviction and no irony.

2. THE BOYS

It was Tony Thewlis who I spied one night playing some absolutely superb guitar with some absolutely godawful band at Hernando’s Hideaway in East Perth. He thought The Scientists I was offering him a place in was the earlier brash ‘pop’ group he saw on national pop TV show ‘Countdown’. He moved to Sydney to join up but when it dawned on him it was something else entirely, he began extracting all manner of dissonant, jarring, downright rude sounds from his guitar, probably to piss everyone off as much as anything else. Tony found his entry into the maelstrom one day listening to Like Flies On Sherbet by Alex Chilton. After that…..try and get him to not be spontaneous! He would refuse to play anything vaguely approaching a rock solo. He would be twice as inebriated as the rest of the band – he didn’t drink beer so matched our beers glass for glass with cider or wine. He was quite a sight with his Johnny Thunders-style teased hair throwing his guitar at the floor, the ceiling, his amp or even audience members (this stopped when Boris’ girlfriend, Pip, ran out to retrieve it from a thieving punter) all whilst wearing a fur coat on inside out.

Drummer, Brett Rixon, brother of two years running Penthouse Pet of the Year, Cheryl, had on his wrist, a self-inflicted tattoo of a safety pin with two lines representing the bridge of skin the prong passed under. He was described by one Robin Gibson of Sounds magazine as having “the demeanour of an assembly line misfit blankly contemplating murder”. He did have a dark sense of humour. For example, there is a tape in existence of him in a ‘discussion’ with Boris on the relative personality merits of two chaps they knew, one of whom had attempted suicide by hanging. Brett’s argument against the other chap was that, “If you were to find him dangling you’d give his leg a tug”. But Brett had an understanding of the brief. It was with me and a fellow called Kim Williams back in Perth in a band called Louie Louie that we first successfully got onto the ‘primitive’ tangent – Swampland was originally a Louie Louie song and a co-write with Mr Williams.

Boris Sujdovic liked to act dumb to be left alone but was actually a smooth talker when it suited him. Importantly, his laidback disposition made it very easy for him to adapt to the idea of two note bass lines. In fact, he was the one that started all this by persuading me to reform The Scientists in Sydney with him on bass. He was the tallest and meanest looking of us but was actually the one most likely to make a friend at the bar. He was also the member most likely to have a joke at the expense of the others. Band members often acquire nicknames amongst themselves. Boris’ was ‘Ogre’. (My nickname was Wilf. Obviously I didn’t pick it. The protocol with nicknames is that you don’t get to pick them or change them if you dislike them. I acquired mine through a trick of the light giving me a ‘codgerish’ appearance in one photo. I think I said something to the effect of, “Fuck, they’ve made me look like Wilfred Bramble [of Steptoe and Son]“. It was either Brett or Boris who could not resist it and that was the end of it. From then on it was Wilf this or Wilfy that.)

I believed these guys were the perfect raw materials to work with (or just leave alone as the case may be). I thought I had it sussed. All they had to do was go on being themselves and let me point them in the right direction, that is, compose the right kind of material.

3. THE MANIFESTO

First off, we did not want to align ourselves with anyone. We wanted to be left alone to do what we wanted without the encumbrances of so-called ‘artiness’, rock and roll traditionalism, ‘pure perfect pop’ craftsmanship or anything else that might stand in the way of our intentions. These were not to bury rock ‘n’ roll but to strip it back and rebuild it to our specifications (a bit like a ‘hotted up’ car). We loved rock ‘n’ roll’s tradition but despised traditionalism, hated artiness but naively believed what we were doing was art (when it worked). We believed we were on a mission to take rock back to its most basic primal essence. Only then could we add our own flavours which would be spontaneously concocted out of Companion fuzz boxes, beer, various chemicals, anarchy and whatever else was handy at the time. At times it would be beautifully simple, at others quite tricky getting it right. Real rock ‘n’ roll was dumb and sophisticated, serious and funny. A paradox. You couldn’t hide behind a joke. You had to be prepared to go out and be a joke. The path of riotousness was the path of righteousness and only we were on it. We didn’t just believe, we knew that we would be misunderstood first, worshipped and adored later. Clinton Walker, author of Stranded – The Secret History Of Australian Rock And Roll was the perfect example. At first he didn’t get us and thought we were ‘daggy’ but then later went on to sing our praises, over and over, for magazines such as RAM and Rolling Stone. We did not want to change the world. It could sod itself. We wanted only to be left alone… and admired from a distance.

4. PERTH

We left Perth behind. It had rejected The Scientists’ first incarnation so the reincarnated Scientists rejected Perth without giving it a second chance.

5. SYDNEY

In 1981 Sydney’s inner most suburbs of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills were home to a rock scene whose mecca was Detroit, home of The Stooges and MC5, even though Surry Hills and Darlinghurst were as far away from blue collar Detroit spiritually as they were geographically. But of course no-one knew that or even cared. Radio Birdman was every Sydney ‘underground’ band’s mentor. This ‘Sydney’ legacy didn’t mean much to westerners like us. We simply didn’t buy it. Inner city Sydney was, however, a tantalisingly wicked place for a bunch of Perth suburban boys who got taken in very quickly and nurtured down an inebriated path from their home in Nickson Street, Surry Hills to the Southern Cross Hotel, to the Sydney Trade Union Club and out into the oblivion of Sydney’s pink bat-ridden night.

Early in 1982 we got a Friday night residency in neighbouring suburb Ultimo’s Vulcan Hotel. We were still working on our sound and image but Tony could always be relied upon to ‘chuck a wobbly’ and Brett and Boris were presenting a very granite-faced deadbeat hair in the eyes demeanour as we thrashed our way through a set that each week had fewer chords and more noise. Although we replaced the mandatory ‘Detroit’ buzzsaw guitar three chords with atonal guitarscapes and two note bass lines our shtick was too ‘dumb’ to be art rock. Thanks to a supposed but actually non-existent allegiance and some wild shows it wasn’t long before the Vulcan was packed with paisley-shirted and mini-skirted regulars singing along to Swampland.

6. MELBOURNE

Occasionally we would go down to ‘arty farty’ Melbourne which in the absence of its beloved Birthday Party lapped up a sound as loud and as ugly as ours. For instance, I remember doing a show opening for a bunch of brass playing ‘penguins’ called the Hot Half Hour at the Seaview Ballroom in 1982 before we even had a record out. Greg Perano, fresh out of Hunters and Collectors, had some clown with him who was heckling us and our hair. The jibes quickly changed to cheering once we began making a noise.

7. ‘OZ’

Releasing Swampland as a single ensured our reputation spread to Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. Then when a video for Blood Red River seemed to be followed by a demand for us outside the sacred sanctum of Sydney’s inner city we found ourselves playing more and more frequently in the beach suburbs to the “deadset mate” and “filth” brigade. In a complete turnaround, agencies that gave us the bums rush when we first graced them with our presence were trying to get us onto their books. Dirty Pool offered us a tour supporting The Angels which culminated in the infamous Parramatta Leagues Club bottling incident. Sydney’s 2JJ were very supportive and gave us a Live at the Wireless slot from which we derived We Had Love, probably our finest recorded moment to that point. We Had Love even charted briefly on AM radio somewhere in Sydney!

It seemed to me at the time that suburban pub rock Australia was indeed promising itself to us. But before it could be had we were in London leaving the way open for The Celibate Rifles, Died Pretty, Painters and Dockers, and a plethora of post-punk rock bands to fill a new demand for ‘underground’ hard rock.

Some images that I have from those Sydney times are: Brad Shepherd biting beer cans in half up against the stage at the Paddington Town Hall; big holes in the low fairy light studded ceiling just above Tony’s spot at a venue called the ‘Talking Tables’, Brett’s winkle picker-clad feet entwined with a pair of stilettoed fish netted feet protruding from under the toilet door at the Strawberry Hills/Southern Cross; Boris and I rabbiting on with amphetamine-fuelled drivel into the night leaving for Sydney in our friend Peter Simpson’s Commercial van after conquering Collingwood’s ‘Tote’ Hotel one more time; James Darroch dancing his arse off and looking very Mickey Dolenz-like up the front at the Vulcan; Ron Peno mocking and admiring us with in a tarty red wig: and last but certainly not least, a floor full of gyrating punters lifting off the ground in unison, each trying to out do his or her neighbour just as the loud bit of We Had Love kicked in.

8. 1984 – UK AND EUROPE

At the time, it seemed as if none of us did anything for the first year in the UK but stand in queues and pay exorbitant VAT- inflated prices when we got to the end of them. In retrospect, and at the risk of boasting, I can only be amazed at how far we got in that small amount of time. Firstly, we had a local release for Blood Red River on Rough Trade. Next we virtually walked into All Trade Booking Agency and got a whole stack of shows at places like Dingwalls, The Electric Ballroom, The Lyceum and The Clarendon Garage. As well, Tony and I rather cheekily wrote Kid Congo a letter telling him we were going to support the Gun Club on their UK tour. There was no talk of this with the agency – we just did it ‘off the bat’ and that seemed to clinch it taking care of exposure over the rest of England for us. The next step was for the Dutch fellow previously mentioned to walk in to All Trade and see our photo and then book us into ‘Futurama’ in Belgium and the ‘Pandora’s Box’ festival in Rotterdam. At ‘Pandora’s Box’ we found ourselves in front of a huge jampacked room which moved back a full metre the moment we launched into our set. After that we got our picture taken a lot and I ended up having to do loads of interviews for foreign mags that I would never be able to read unless they were in the three sentences of Deutsche that I know. As Boris pointed out to me, this gig set us up for Holland and Belgium over the next couple of years. It wasn’t long after these festivals that we made it to Paris and then Hamburg.

Back in the UK, our audience at this stage was comprised partly from the network of Cramps and Gun Club fans who had been alerted to our existence by the tireless efforts of Scotsman and Next Big Thing writer Lindsay Hutton and partly from a curiosity amongst punters as to what kind of act could draw the particular kind of adjective from the ink of the three British trade papers, NME, Sounds and Melody Maker, that we did. I was quite happy at that stage of my life to be referred to as the “lowest form of uncaring anti-social filth” in what amounted to a music tabloid with a circulation of hundreds of thousands so long as they meant we were great. We got quite a bit of coverage and most of it was positive in that kind of way. At Pandora’s Box a Belgian chap called Paul Delnoy asked if he could make a record with us on his label. He did not seem to have enough English to understand ‘no’ (we were tied up contractually) which is why we ended up in Brussels at the end of the year trying to make up another record from scratch that didn’t overlap with the material we were working on for our next proper album.

We were there a week in Paul’s studio and the usual scenario went like this:

Me: “What’ll we play guys? That thing I showed you last week or shall we jam on something new?”

Tony: “I don’t ‘jam.”

Brett: “I’m feeling concave. I need a burger.”

Boris: “Get the guy a burger. I’ll have one too.”

Tony: “Does it have to be a burger? They’ll put onions in mine for sure. They always put onions on when I specifically ask them not to in the English-speaking world so I haven’t got a hope here.”

One hour later, after everyone has eaten:

Brett: “I’m too stuffed to play. Let’s go to a bar.”

For about half an hour of that week the band managed to be in the mood to play something and the tape happened to be running. It was rough as buggery but in my humble opinion there was enough power and feeling committed to tape in that time to make up for the rest of the dicking around. That session became the Demolition Derby 12 inch.

Images I have in my mind from the time are: Peter Weening from the Vera in Groningen with loads of plastic bags full of Indonesian takeaway for us to eat on our first visit, our next visit and the one after that (and hopefully my next visit – it wouldn’t be the Vera otherwise); Boris, in a fit of pique, smashing up his amplifier into pieces so small they could fit into a jar backstage at the ‘Opera Night’ gig in Paris; Tony’s account of an elderly concierge lady bursting into his room with a blow torch to thaw out the pipes; endless riders of Grolsch; endless ratatouille provided by a procession of Dutch and Belgium promoters; standing behind Joe Strummer every week in the Barclays Bank queue watching him deposit thousands of pounds at a time; the rabbit warrens a band had to find its way through to get to the stage at those bigger London venues just like in Spinal Tap; and Boris, Tony and I getting into a fight with some abusive Dutch yobs who persisted in calling us kangaroos outside the Melkweg in Amsterdam. These ‘yobs’ turned out to be the club bouncers and we ended up being turfed out onto the exit bridge in the middle of the snow whilst having the fire hoses turned on us. I still have the burgundy satin shirt with it’s ripped tail from that incident. 

This is how I remember some of what happened to me, Boris Sujdovic, Tony Thewlis and Brett Rixon as members of The Scientists from the beginning of 1982 to the close of 1984.

She Does It Right / Boom Boom / The More I Give / Roxette / One Weekend / That Aint The Way To Behave / I Don’t Mind

Twenty Yards Behind / Keep It Out Of Sight / All Through The City / Cheque Book / Oyeh / Bonie Maronie / Tequila

Uploaded on this day, May 1st, the International Workers’ Day and also the beginning of the pastoral summer season celebrated in the celtic Beltane festival are Canvey Island’s finest musical export to the U.K and the rest of the world, Dr Feelgood.

Dr Feelgood had a rough sound and a rough look. 

This band of toughs who would not have looked out of place holding sawn off shotguns during a bank blag in an episode of  The Sweeney, one of the better TV dramas  from the mid 1970’s, performed quick chaotic three minute R & B garage thrashers from the pubs and clubs of the day.  A choppy guitar sound that cuts through the R&B basslines like a hot knife in butter, tight Keith Moon inspired thumping drums, and a manic leaping frontman (plus his harmonica) adding to the mix.

Dr Feelgood were spitting in the faces of both the stadium performing prog rock bands and the glam rock movement in the early 1970’s, many years before the Sex Pistols claimed similar scalps through some year zero style P.R. at the beginning of 1976.

This debut LP and the two LPs that followed, ‘Malpractice’ and ‘Stupidity’ are well worth getting hold of for some prime examples of aggressive speed induced mid 1970’s British R&B that is not a million miles away from the sounds of  those bands that were part of the original Eel Pie Island and Crawdaddy Club scene over a decade earlier, some of those bands were to become the forerunners of the emerging mod scene of 1964.

Text below courtesy of drfeelgood.org.

Canvey Island, Essex, was an unlikely birthplace for Britain’s finest R&B band. Its bleak industrial skyline set against the cold waters of the Thames estuary, keeps it from inclusion in most holiday brochures, but in the 1960’s it was home to teenage friends Lee Collinson, Chris White and John Sparkes.

The trio shared a strong interest in music, and with like minded friends, formed a skiffle band which would doggedly play outside pubs and clubs in the Canvey area until they were invited in to play a couple of numbers.

The band’s name would change almost as quickly as their line-up, but the day that White and Collinson went to see Howlin’ Wolf at a gig in Ilford was to have a profound effect on them both.

Soon after, Collinson started learning to play harmonica.

Time passed, and whilst Collinson and Sparkes continued to play together in an outfit called The Pigboy Charlie Band, White went to Drama School and, having changed his name to Chris Fenwick, began to enjoy a number of acting parts in films and notable TV programmes of the day.

The Pigboy Charlie Band continued to suffer line-up instability over the months and following a chance meeting with an old acquaintance recently returned from a trip to India, John “Wilko” Wilkinson, the pair invited him to join the band.

Wilko agreed, but all parties decided that a name change was well overdue, and after a number of suggestions, the name “Dr Feelgood” was agreed upon, after a well-loved Johnny Kidd and the Pirates version of a blues standard.

Whilst the band began to attract a degree of local interest, it was their old friend Chris “Whitey” Fenwick who was to provide the band with their first foreign engagement.

Fenwick had made the acquaintance of a Dutch promoter whilst at a wedding in Holland, and, already practised in the art of role-playing, had passed himself off as a “well known English DJ” who just happened to know a great little band who were “ready to go”.

Unfortunately the band were not quite “ready to go” as their drummer at the time was on home leave from the Army, and was unprepared to suffer the consequences of going AWOL to join them.

Wilko suggested an old friend, John Martin, might be interested.

John Martin (nicknamed “The Big Figure” for his striking profile) was a professional “old school” drummer from a musical family. He had already cut his teeth playing with numerous bands in the Essex area, but had slid into an unsatisfying role playing drums with a number of “covers” pop groups, in addition to a permanent position with local band, Finnean’s Rainbow.

Martin agreed to help out, and with a cheap, but dangerously un-roadworthy, second hand van, Chris Fenwick, and Dr. Feelgood sailed for Holland.

The run of five gigs proved to be the turning point for the band, and whilst on route back to Canvey Island, all agreed that, almost by accident, they had the makings of something, which should be pursued at all costs.

Collinson changed his name to Lee Brilleaux, and with Chris “Whitey” Fenwick at the managerial helm, things were about to change… and fast.

After their second trip to Holland, Southend resident, Heinz Burt, the former bassist with 60’s outfit The Tornados, contacted the band.

Heinz had long since reverted to a day job selling advertising space in the local paper, but continued to supplement his income by occasional appearances on the revival circuit.

He suggested that the band became his backing group for a few gigs, and, with the chance to play still all too rare for the band’s liking, they agreed.

The union was short lived, but culminated in a memorable appearance alongside Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley and MC5 at the Wembley Rock’n'Roll Festival in 1972.

As the band returned to work the local circuit throughout the following year, a change was occurring within the capital’s live music scene.

Almost in defiance of the popularity of increasingly larger venues, the “Pub Rock” scene was starting to gather momentum, hosted by a number of increasingly crowded London pubs.

The band quickly developed a reputation as a no-nonsense, “in yer face” act, who’s gritty “anti-fashion” appearance and stage antics caught the attention of the music press.

In an article in the NME, journalist, Charles Shaar Murray, famously likened their act to “Hiroshima in a pint mug”

By 1974, the band’s reputation secured them a contract with United Artists, and following tours with Brinsley Schwarz and Hawkwind, the band’s first album “Down by the Jetty” was released in January the following year.

Throughout early 1975, the band toured with Kokomo and Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers on the Naughty Rhythms Tour, before returning to the studio later in the year to record their second album, “Malpractice” released in October.

A year later, the timely release of “Stupidity” the band’s first live album, saw it rocket to the number one spot after only a week in the album charts. For the time being, at least, Dr Feelgood could do no wrong. Sadly though, oblivious to all but the band, dark clouds were massing on the horizon….

The relentless UK touring schedule, an unhappy American tour, and the constant demand for Wilko to produce more songs had lead to a deep rift between him, and the rest of the band.

Feelings worsened, and following a disagreement to use the, ironically named, Lew Lewis track “Lucky Seven” on the bands fourth album, “Sneaking Suspicion” Wilko took the decision to leave the band.

The virtually unknown, John “Gypie” Mayo from an Essex jazz funk band based in Harlow, was recruited as a replacement, and throughout 1977’s hectic tour schedule, quickly established himself as a worthy replacement, gaining critical acclaim from both the rock media and an anxious fan base.

The departure of band’s only songwriter, however, would mean that, for their next album, “Be Seeing You” the help of a few old friends would be required.

With Nick Lowe producing, and lyrical inspiration from Larry Wallis (ex-Pink Fairies) the album was released in September that year.

“Private Practice” followed a year later, and from it, the single “Milk and Alcohol” was to prove the bands biggest selling single. Written by Nick Lowe and Gypie Mayo, it tells the tale of the near disastrous events of the band’s “real life” encounter with the LAPD on route back to their hotel after a John Lee Hooker gig

Another live album “As it Happens” was released in June 1979, and a further studio album “Let It Roll” followed in September.

The following year, the band turned, once again, to Nick Lowe to produce the album “A Case of The Shakes” which featured the song writing talents of Lowe, Larry Wallis and former Brinsley Schwartz keyboard player, Bob Andrews.

The album was something of a return to core values for the Feelgoods, and was duly noted by the music press, describing it as “Their best album for years”

The band set about continuing their gruelling tour schedule across the globe, but the lengthy periods away from his young family began to take their toll on Gypie Mayo.

On stage, he had proven himself to be a worthy replacement for Wilko, and off stage, had shown a flair for fast-living excess that matched any of his bandmates.

Eventually, however, Gypie Mayo decided that it was time to concentrate his attentions towards his family and, once again, the band set about the difficult task of recruiting a new guitarist. 

Bongo Man / Narration

Narration cont / Malorat (Passin Thru) / Poem / Four Hundred Years

Poem / Song / Lumba / Four Hundred Years

Ethiopian Serenade / Oh Carolina / So Long

Grounation

Grounation cont

Born Oswald Williams circa 1928 in Jamaica, as a boy Count Ossie became involved in the rastafarian community via of the teachings of a rasta elder by the name of  Brother Job. Other than the doctrine side of rastafari Count Ossie also learnt hand drumming and the vocal chanting technique that reverberates back to pre-slavery days in Africa.

By the late 50’s, he had become a master drummer and had formed a group of other percussionists around him. The Count Ossie group were all living together with other rastafarians in makeshift dwellings high up in the Wareika Hills above Rockfort in east Kingston.

This Count Ossie based rastafarian commune had followed in the example and ideals of the Leonard Howell rastafarian commune at Pinnacle St Catharine which was developed in 1940. This earlier rastafarian commune was destroyed and the occupants violently displaced into the slums of western Kingston (mainly at the ‘Back-o-Wall’ ghetto near the Kingston waterfront) by soldiers in the 1954.

In the decades following the destruction of the Pinnacle settlement it was incredibly dangerous to be aligned to the the rastafarian faith and beatings and deaths would occur frequently. This oppression would normally happen at the hands of the police or the army for those Jamaicans who choose to ‘locks up’ and thus Ossie’s followers would begin to wear large wollen hats known as ‘tams’ to cover the dreadlocks from public view to avoid too much grief on the occasions they had to leave the commune for any reason.

By the turn of the 1960s Count Ossie was more of a cultural icon than pop star, and it was only the ingenuity of Prince Buster that made him a part of reggae. Buster, ever eager to get one over on his rivals, was looking for a sound that no one else in Jamaica had managed to put on a ska record. Buster knew about Count Ossie, but everyone told him that Ossie would never agree to work on a commercial record, particularly since Buster was a Muslim and Ossie a Rastafarian. However, Buster went up into Wareika Hills and returned the next day with Ossie and several drummers in tow.

The first and most famous record they made was “Oh Carolina” and “I Met A Man”, featuring Ossie and ensemble thundering away on funde and kette drums and the vocals of the Folkes Brothers out front. The record was a unique combination of ska, R&B and grounation fundamentalist music that scored heavily both in Jamaica and on the London mod scene.

Subsequent sessions for Coxsone Dodd followed accompanying the Mellocats’ “Another Moses”, Bunny and Skitter’s “Lumumbo” and Lascelles Perkins’ “Destiny”.

The Count Ossie drummers were present at the welcome of  H.I.M Haile Selassie’s April 21st 1966 visit to Jamaica and his subsequent meeting with Rastafarian elders including Ossie and Mortimer Planno. Despite his own adherence to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the visit of the Emperor Of Ethiopia gave a marked boost to the rastafarian movement: Haile Selassie’s death in 1975 coincided paradoxically with the beginning of rastafarian’s most spectacular period of growth, sustained in part by the international popularity of reggae music in which rastafarianism found expression. Because of Selassie’s visit, April 21 is still celebrated as Grounation Day. It was during this visit that Selassie famously told the Rastafarian community leaders that they should not immigrate to Ethiopia until they had liberated the people of Jamaica.

The Count Ossie drummers  made some records under their own name including “Cassavabu” for Prince Buster and “Babylon Gone” for Harry Mudie around the mid 1960’s and then the group refrained from recording until 1970, when they issued “Whispering Drums” for Harry Mudie, “Back To Africa Version One” for Lloyd Daley, and “Holy Mount Zion” and “Meditation” for Coxsone Dodd. Around this time, Count Ossie’s drummers were augmented by a horn section led by Cedric I’m Brooks, and the group took the name Mystic Revelation of Rastafari.

In 1974 they recorded a triple album set, “Grounation”, which is a landmark recording in Jamaican music. The set included treatments of Charles Lloyd’s “Passin’ Thru”, the Jazz Crusaders’ “Way Back Home”, Ethiopian melodies, improvisations, hymns and poetry. This album remains one of the most important cultural record releases to come out of Jamaica in the 1970’s.

In 1975 the group recorded a follow up album, the similarly excellent “Tales Of Mozambique”. Shortly after this on 18 October 1976  Ossie died, some say in a car accident, some say after succumbing to injuries that occurred after being crushed at a riotous crowd escaping a cricket match. But although the Count passed away unexpectedly he and the band he formed left behind a unique legacy, to be carried on by Ras Michael and The Sons of Negus, Light Of Saba and several less noteworthy outfits.

Grounation is the title of a new album by the magnificently named Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari.

This set is not just unique for the quantity and quality of the music, or for the fact that the liner notes are thorough in dealing with the music and its culture. It is unique because it makes available for the first time rastafarian music proper, a fact which is important because the music and its culture has for years played an integral part in the development of Jamaican music without being recognised as such. The music here is not typical of the music which Jamaica has produced since the early sixties, yet rastafarian music is as familiar to Jamaicans as reggae.

In the evolution of its music, Jamaica has never produced musicians who have regularly made rastafarian music except perhaps for Count Ossie and his band who backed The Folkes Brothers on “Oh Carolina”  back in 1961, and perhaps a few others have done so when the idea was trendy.

But the existence of the rastafarians in Jamaica has social, economic, and political consequences which focused attention on the sect and enabled their countrymen to become more aware of their historical and cultural roots, and the rastafarian ideals. These have continually provided Jamaican musicians, rastafarians and non rastafarians alike, with sources of influence and inspiration.

Thus, over the years we have had songs such as “Marcus Junior” by Don Drummond, “A Place Called Africa” by Lee Perry & The Upsetters, “My Ancestors” by Jimmy Cliff, “400 years” by The Wailers, and “Rivers Of Babylon” by The Melodians which have reflected the rastafarian influence.

Count Ossie and his band represent a total embodiment of the rastafarian tradition. “Grounation” describes a way of life that identifies in every way possible with Africa, the rightful homeland of Rastafarians, and the music deals with this ideology. Moreover, the set, with its eloquent narrations and poems traces that part in the black man’s history which deals with his enslavement and colonization. And the music’s strong African feel helps in the digestion of the Revelations.

The complete text of “Narration”, a track that lasts over thirteen minutes is included in the liner notes. The method of production here, percussion and narrative, are simple yet stunningly effective. More so than The Last Poets for instance whose use of the same techniques is too crude to be enlightening. “Narration” tells it like it was and like it is, so does ”Four Hundred Years” which has a meandering tenor and flute accompaniment and is the most poignant of the four poems.

Percussion is the dominating aspect of all rastafarian music. In both “So Long” which is a chant, and in major parts of “Grounation” which lasts for over half an hour and features a type of communal singing praising the doctrine of rastafarians, the drums, the bongos and the shouts are all tribal. They echo the sounds associated with Africa and they are angrier than the native war drums.

On two of the best numbers “Bongo Man” and “Lumba” brass is prevalent. In the former, the baritone and tenor saxes interwine and the plodding bass and lazy trombone and baritone gives this number a very jazzy feel. In “Lumba” trombone and tenor duet and the baritone riffs effortlessly. A flute solo along with intermittent vocal shrieks and vibrant percussion, combine to make this a tremendously haunting piece which conjures up images of toiling slaves under the painful persuasion of the slave driver’s whip.

It’s no coincidence that “Way Back Home” should follow as the next track. In this context it has much deeper meaning than the original by The Crusaders.

If you’re looking for musicians with ‘feel’ then Count Ossie And The Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari are one very hot bunch of brothers.

CARL GAYLE

BLACK MUSIC DECEMBER 1973

St George saving the maiden in Beruit. Ethiopian fresco circa 1600 AD.

A different take on St Georges Day this year, Mark Stewart And The Maffia uploaded last April 23rd, The 4 Skins the April 23rd before that.

This take on St Georges Day takes KYPP back to the old English colony of Jamaica to bring for you one of the most respected recordings that was ever undertaken and released in that country. Count Ossie, Cedric I’m Brooks, Brother Samuel Clayton and the rest of the Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari jazzing out all over Afro Jamaican nyahbinghi rhythms to create a piece of work that is more in tune with the late Rex Nettleford than the late Bob Marley. Wonderfully produced and engineered by Arnold Wedderburn (Wedderburn which convienately happens to be my wife’s maiden name).

This triple LP is the most important cultural musical work ever created, recorded and released from this small island of Jamaica.

Ignorance Is Bliss / The Church Says / Ugly People / Behind Closed Doors / Play Dead / Blood Is On Your Hands

Monkey Man / Old Soldiers / Genocide / All Creatures / Wrong Word / Free You’re Not

A cassette only release by Dewsbury’s Instigators punted out via Rob Challice’s Brougham Road based 96 Tapes imprint in 1984.

Recorded live at Venos in Nottingham, August 1984, this cassette captures the original line up of the band just before the release of  the ‘Blood On Your Hands’ 7″ and the recording and release of  the ‘Nobody Listens Anymore’ LP both for Bluurg Records.

Hammy the drummer for this version of Instigators operated his own tape label called Peaceville from his bedroom and went on to perform in the Dewsbury based bands Civilised Society and Sore Throat. Peaceville Records has for many years now been one of the premier neu metal labels respected world wide, so a great success from a very basic start. Great stuff.

This version of Instigators split up in 1985 with all members leaving for one reason or another. A new Instigators formed in the ashes of the old band lead by a couple of members of Xpozez, a great band from Huddersfield. This new version of Instigators were influenced more with the speedy hardcore punk thrash from the U.S.A than the more anarcho Conflict inspired sound favoured by the old version of the band. The new version of Instigators lead the way for the wearing out of many pairs of converse plimsoles during many of the bands energetic performances all over the U.K and the rest of the world. Jumping all over the place that band was!

This post dedicated with respect to Nic Bullen who is celebrating his birthday today. Nic has been a constant supporter of this KYPP site from the early days, so thanks to him for being there or thereabouts.

Hope you had a nice day throughout Nic.

“ATTENTION ATTENTION ALL PUPPY ALLSTARS. KILL YOUR PET PUPPY SPECIAL KILLING JOKE EDITION”:

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Another Version of the Truth by A Malicious Damage Operative.

Cue.

Intro.

I once met Larry Page.

The Kinks producer / manager of the 1960’s, not the Google Guy.

It was at Midem, the annual music convention in Cannes, France. I sat down at his table in a coffee bar. I didn’t know who he was.

“Hello, I’m Larry.” he said when I asked him to pass the sugar,

Tell me something, how did you get started in the music industry then?”

“Well,” I replied, “I helped start a DIY punk rock label in 1979 with some mates in Ladbroke Grove”. Larry turned to the man he was sitting with and exclaimed,

“Told ya, didn’t I?”

They’d obviously been playing people spotting. I hadn’t a clue at that point who Larry Page was. He is certainly a larger than life character, so I just dived in with,

“And what do you do then?” His friend spluttered into his coffee when I asked that. Larry just shrugged,

“Oh, you know,” he said, “A bit of this and a bit of that”.

Larry Page went on to say something to me that I have never forgotten. It went something like this -

It’s a shame, you know, it happens with so many bands.

They lose the people they started with and they go around after that saying, oh they did this deal and it was bad. Or they messed that up, they were rubbish. And these bands forget that at the time, before they were famous, when nobody wanted to know about them or their songs, these rubbish people almost always worked their socks off for little or no pay and they nearly always did the best they could do in the circumstances.

They got the best deal that they could get that band at that time.

It is easy to be wise after the event.

Everyone on the planet can tell you the winning Lottery numbers from last week, can’t they? 

Crossfade.

He told me another story, too, about managing bands and their short term memory loss. (Later on, after I found out two things; who he was and he was right I saw a BBC documentary with him in it and he told this same story in that).

It went like this.

A band gets a manager.

The manager knocks on doors, beats up walls, rips out hair, and finally gets them a paid gig. They get £100.

The manager goes to pay the band. Manager says, they paid us £100. I am on 20%. So that’s £80 to you and £20 to me, ok?

Bands says, yes mate, that’s great.

The manager goes out and does it again.

This time he gets them a gig and they get paid £1,000.

End of the night, he’s paying it out.

That’s £1,000. I am on 20%. So that’s £800 to you and £200 to me ok?

Band says, yes, I suppose so, if you say so.

The manager goes out and does it a third time.

This time he gets them a gig and they get paid £10,000.

End of the night, he’s paying it out.

That’s £10,000. I am on 20%. So that’s £8,000 to you and £2,000 to me ok?

Band says, fuck off! All you had to do is make a phone call.

And that, Larry Page says, is what managing bands is like for most people. I am one of those people who preach LARRY PAGE IS RIGHT!

And for those of you who don’t know who Larry Page is, this is what it says about him in Wikipedia:

“After changing his name to Larry Page (from Lenny Davis) in honour of Larry Parks, the star of The Jolson Story, the teenager began a recording career as a singer.

Page tried to magnify his fame through the wearing of unusually large spectacles, as “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage”. He toured the UK and appeared at top venues, including the Royal Albert Hall. He was a regular on TV Shows like Six-Five Special and Thank Your Lucky Stars.

He later became a successful manager, record producer and record label owner. Much of his producer/manager success centred on his efforts with The Kinks and The Troggs, and his ownership of Page One Records and Penny Farthing Records. Producing such classics as “Wild Thing”, a track remodelled by Jimi Hendrix into one of his greatest of all covers, as well as all of The Troggs hits. Apart from The Troggs and The Kinks, Page’s Larry Page Orchestra gave Jimmy Page (later of Led Zeppelin) some early exposure when he played on Kinky Music.

Larry Page is also credited with introducing Sonny and Cher to the UK.

As of the 2000s, Page has been living in Avoca Beach, New South Wales, Australia.

Page has been involved in producing the song for Chelsea Football Club in the UK. The song is called “Blue Is The Colour” and is still played at the end of home matches”.

Stop.

Cue.

Go.

Nervous System / Turn To Red

Are You Receiving

“The Choice Is Yours”

I think about that conversation when I sometimes think about the early years of Killing Joke.

It was started in a house, 11 Portland Road, Holland Park, London W11.

This was a house in a very posh part of London, in a very posh street.

It was directly opposite the offices of Miss World, there was a private drinking club at the end of the street where Mick Jagger socialised when he was in town. It was also known as The Winchester in the hit TV series Minder. The exteriors were filmed outside there. John Cleese used to park his Rolls Royce outside of our house sometimes. It was the late 1970’s, so Fawlty Towers was just beginning to slay the world. We saw him in meetings in the burger cafe on the corner, but never thought to go in and ask him for an autograph.

One didn’t do that sort of thing in Holland Park.

Brian Taylor lived in Portland house with Dick Laban, Frank Jenkinson and Christine Atkinson. Paul Ferguson the drummer was Christine’s boyfriend and he stayed there and after a while Adam Morris ended up sleeping on a mattress in Dick Laban’s room. These were anarchic and hedonistic times.

I am sure that Portland house would cost you a few million today. Back then it was on the fringes of what was still known as Free London, or Frestonia, the area between Latimer Road tube station and the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout whose main artery is Freston Road. Chrysalis Records is based there these days, near Olaf Street, which is where Ear rehearsal studios was then.

The names Killing Joke and Malicious Damage Records came out of long and endless inspired debates in the Portland Road house that often lasted all night and sometimes went on for days. Brian Taylor finally came up with the name Killing Joke and the double edged slogan “laugh at your peril” that was later turned into a badge, along with many others, by the iconic punk badge company Better Badges.

Paul Ferguson was a brilliant drummer playing in a band called Matt Stagger at that stage, a band that Jazz Coleman later joined. It was a paid gig for them, but they had no musical input and they were unhappy with it. By then, Jazz was coming round to the Portland Road house too, whilst we were shopping in Rough Trade record shop almost on a daily basis. We were all heavily into the DIY punk scene that was tearing up the nation at that time. We’d been in the white riots that The Clash sang about, they were happening just down the road.  And we knew what the Pistols said was true, there was no future in England’s dreaming.

Around the time Killing Joke was put together, we were listening to some amazing music. Joy Division’s first album had been released and we spent days debating whether or not it really was the greatest record ever made or not. We had no money at all of course, not a pot to piss in as Adam Morris was prone to say, but we always seemed to find the cash to buy records. “The Modern Dance” by Pere Ubu, Public Image Ltd, “Pink Flag” by Wire became blueprints for us, along with Stiff Little Fingers and the Irish bands on the Good Vibrations label. We loved reggae – Dr Alimantado, Tapper Zukie “Man A Warrior”, Hugh Mundell “Africa Must Be Free”. We loved everything as long as it was good, or stupid. Or both. We wanted some of it. Actually that’s not strictly true, we wanted ALL of it. In the end we decided to try and get it.

Brian took out a mysterious ad in the Melody Maker and hired Ear Rehearsal room for the day. Luckily for us, it turned out to be the rehearsal and storage HQ for Motorhead and Girlschool. It was run by a man called Phil and he lived there with a pet fox called Victoria. Victoria was bright red and had a huge brush, she strolled around as if she owned the place, which she probably did.

That became the rehearsal and storage HQ for Killing Joke too. From the day of that audition onwards until the original band originally broke up, generally perceived to be after the Iceland saga, but before the liver and maggots on receptionists head incident. 

Geordie was the first guitarist that auditioned; he got the gig within minutes of plugging in. Geordie is an awesome guitarist. Back then he could copy any guitar player you could name for him. He had the ear, he could hear something once and replay it instantly, a talent that earned him the name, “The One Take Wonder”. 

Finding a bass player proved more problematic. Youth and Raven both auditioned but neither got the gig first time round. Youth was already in a band at that point – the 4 Be 2’s, who had a singles deal with Island Records. If memory serves, he wanted to be in both bands, which seemed a problem if both bands took off. Raven had similar dilemmas.

But as time wore on, the trio found that after trying many other players, there had been no-one better than the Raven, or if not him, then Youth. You wouldn’t say that Youth was the tightest bass player in the world at that time, but that was fine, that was punk rock. He had many other qualities to bring to the table and he kept coming back to the Portland Road house, asking to be reconsidered.

In the end, he decided to leave 4 Be 2’s and the other three took him on, which proved to be a good move on several levels.

Apart from the obvious (embryonic Meister-producer) Youth was very photogenic. He could have been Sid’s twin. The first time we saw him, we opened the door at the Portland Road house to him and thought it was Sid Vicious standing there. He had with him his best friend Alex Paterson, later to become Dr and start The Orb. Alex dressed like Johnny Rotten in those days and they made a formidable pair with attitude. “The Beatles”, Youth used to say, looking at you as if you had made him stand in dogdirt, “they’re a bunch of Kants! And you’re a kant if you like them as well!” Then he’d chuckle, because he thought that was so funny.

This essentially became the team. Or rather teams. It was always intended as two teams. One was a band called Killing Joke. The other was a label called Malicious Damage. The label worked with several acts, three in fact, the main band Killing Joke plus Red Beat and Ski Patrol. They were added very early into the equation.

The origins of the Malicious Damage name have become blurred with time.

Adam Morris has recollections that a girlfriend he had then, a lady called Jolie Hughes, came up with the name when they were standing at a bus stop one night. She started to read the notice which said “Malicious Damage, £50 fine”. Jolie said, “Malicious Damage that would make a good name for your punk rock label”. 

And it was. We were so pleased with it we got a Badge of Honour made up by another Joly, Joly MacFie. This Joly was the man who ran Better Badges. He recalls Brian Taylor coming to his old garage in St Stephen’s Mews with the original designs. Ours said, “Malicious Damage Operative” on it and we all wore it with pride.

This was the core, along with operative Danny Phelan and Mike Coles. Mike was Brian’s friend. He didn’t live at Portland house, but he did do all the graphics for the band from the start.

Malicious Damage was a record label. Brian Taylor managed the band Killing Joke, later Ski Patrol as well and for its short life, Red Beat. He and the bands had a management contract drafted and signed. Brian then licensed the band Killing Joke to the label Malicious Damage Records.

The summer 1979 came and the band went to live in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. They moved into Jazz Coleman’s parents’ bungalow and spent their time writing songs and learning how to play together as a band. 

The first Killing Joke music we heard came from that time. It was a cassette recording made in the Coleman’s garden. The band set up their equipment and a tape recorder and ran through an embryonic version of “Pssyche”. It was deliberately spelt with two s. They played about three and a half minutes worth before the police turned up and ordered them to turn off their racket.

There was enough to hear on the tape to know that they were ready to go into the recording studio to make a record.

We booked Gooseberry Studio, which at that time was located in a cellar in the Chinatown area of London, off Shaftesbury Avenue.

Why did we go there?

Because it said on the back of the Public Image Ltd LP that was where they had recorded that record and we wanted our record to sound a bit like the Public Image Ltd LP. There was also a recording engineer who worked there called Mark Lusardi. He turned out to be a budding dub genius later to be involved with Shaka Sound System classics such as “Hard Times” by Pablo Gad and the “Dub Conference in London” LP. 

The band cut a single over a weekend, now known as the “Turn To Red” EP.

The band, or rather Jazz Coleman, paid for those recording sessions. He borrowed the money from his girlfriend, Jasmine. The Malicious Damage Operatives then paid for all of the other costs. Pressings, label and sleeve print, insert print, graphic designer’s bill, advertising.

Brian Taylor put most money in, Danny Phelan invested some in it, everyone chipped in what they could. Adam Morris borrowed the money off his mum, Milly Mason.

We pressed a 10 inch single at Lyntones in the Holloway Road.

First of all we designed a 10 inch record with an eleven inch card and four postcard-type inserts rather than a standard 7 inch single in a picture bag. It was a good idea, but it was expensive. Then we couldn’t find anyone who made eleven inch plastic bags to bag all this print, so we had to buy 12 inch bags, which gave us a one inch plastic flap and made our hot new release look a trifle floppy.

And we weren’t planning on leaving a flop about.

Brian, of course, solved this problem as he always seemed to do. I don’t know how but he realised that if he got a steel ruler and a soldering iron he could strim an inch off the plastic bags and the hot iron would seal the cut as it went down the bag.

So we turned Frank Jenkinson’s room in Portland house into a bagging plant as August ended. We strimmed and inserted a couple of thousand bags. It took us a few weeks, but the soldering worked. This almost turned out to be our equivalent of Factory Records famous Durutti Column sandpaper sleeve LP – i.e. so difficult to handle, no shop would stock it.

I just dug out an original of the old 10 inch and that seal is as good today as the day it was cut.

Middle of September 1979, the 10 inch record was ready. The first thing we did was take it to the BBC for John Peel to play. He hadn’t heard it, when we say – Peel to play, we just knew that he would play it when he did hear it. Brian Taylor did this trip, with Adam Morris and Paul Ferguson. They arrived at the BBC building in Portland Place hoping to bump into Peelie, but of course they didn’t. John Peel always sneaked in by a back entrance because the lobby was full of people like us. DIY record labels and bands holding records in mailers hoping to give Peel their hot new poop. It was okay though, the DJ’s at the BBC had pigeon holes, so you can leave things for them. We left our 10 inch in a mailer with a note with our phone number on, then we went home again via the pub probably.

Next morning, 10am, the phone rang. Adam answered it. It was John Peel. Adam couldn’t believe it. He was starstruck, as he often was when placed near musical genius. He didn’t know what to say, so he handed the phone over to Brian and let him deal with it. Basically our 10 inch trick had worked, Peel had played our record first because nobody really bothered making 10 inchers back then. So ours stood out in the pile.

We’d blown his head off. He just wanted to check that it wasn’t a spoof, The Stranglers (because of the keyboards) or someone like that in disguise, playing a joke. When Brian told him, no, it’s a brand new band, first single they have made, Peel was smitten, for a while anyway. He loved our first record so much; he played all three tracks that night. We taped it of course, spending the rest of the week rewinding and replaying the parts on the tape where Peelie said good things about the band.

He played all three tracks again the next night and the night after that too. The first time was Tuesday. By Friday our phone was on fire and by the following Tuesday we were in discussions with Virgin Records about the parameters of Killing Joke’s recording deal. On 17th October 1979, we were in the BBC recording studios in Maida Vale recording the first John Peel session. The session included two tracks that were rapidly shelved – “Nuclear Boy” and “Malicious Boogie”, the latter a jam featuring the collective vocals and noises of the original the Portland Road house Malicious Damage operatives.

And Peelie said on the night the session was broadcast;

“And you heard Killing Joke. As I say, the record on the programme on numerous occasions, and excellent it is too. I’m very pleased to have a session, especially as I managed to get them so quickly after the record came out. The first from the band is Wardance.”

Plays “Wardance”

“Admit you’re impressed. That’s Killing Joke and Wardance. A session produced by Bob Sargent, incidentally. And the Band: Jaz Coleman on Keyboards: Geordie aka A Lizard on guitar; Big Paul on drums, and Youth aka Pig Youth on bass”.

“These are Killing Joke and Pssyche.”

Plays Pssyche

“Eeh Gods, that’s good. I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me. You know, even after all these years, a session as good as this one, particularly when it’s the band’s debut session. This is Killing Joke and that was called Pssyche. And according to Brian . . . .”

“. . . . . and probably better than the record they asked for anyway, it’s Malicious Boogie.”

Plays Malicious Boogie (complete with Malicious Damage personal on whoop whoops!)

“Get Down! If I may say so. That was Killing Joke and that was called Malicious Boogie. The last from Killing Joke. The last of a gem of a session, it’s called Nuclear Boy.”

Plays Nuclear Boy

“Killing Joke. And that’s the last from them, and my thanks to the band for a truly classic session. And I know that I say that all the time, but it’s true in this case, and also for Bob Sargent for producing same”.

The next week we were lunching on Richard Branson’s boat. Cracking the music industry is easy, we thought, it took us about a month!

We were wrong of course.

We didn’t sign that deal. We didn’t think it felt right and we wanted to hold out for the best deal we could. Youth talked Island into licensing “Turn to Red” on a one off deal. They issued a four track version on a 12 inch with an extra track, “Almost Red”. But they didn’t promote it because they decided they did not want to sign the band.

We resisted the flirtations of the record industry throughout the winter months, living on a diet of vegetable stew, cheese on toast and A&R executive’s expense accounts. In fact, we became business lunch whores. We’d meet anyone with a label and an expense account, as long as they bought us a large dinner. We had found a lawyer, the best we could find at the time, a Beatles lawyer in fact, which is probably why the Beatles are wankers comments first stemmed from. This Beatles lawyer had offices behind the Charing Cross near Trafalgar Square in London. Old school, an Old Etonian or Harrovian we suspected. Once he told us what it was like the day after the first Beatles film “A Hard Day’s Night” was released. Back then, they still got paid their cut of the takings in CASH. They had sacks of it everywhere. “My dears”, he said, “It was pissing money”. 

We did whatever we had to, to keep the band going. Kept rehearsing at Ear studios, where they also finished off writing most of the material on the first Killing Joke LP. We liked Ear because we had the room after Motorhead. So we sat in on their rehearsals sometimes, whilst they blasted through their set. Motorhead were the LOUDEST band in the universe, by a country mile. The Clash moved in there too, but that came later.

It wasn’t easy, no-one would ever claim that. It was hard and it was unpaid and we made some horrendous mistakes. But we did the best we could at the time and in the circumstances we were in.

Wardance

Pssyche

We made a second single at the beginning of 1980 – “Wardance” and “Pssyche”. This time, Malicious Damage paid for the recording and it was manufactured and distributed by Geoff Travis at Rough Trade. We mailed it out to the media from Rough Trade too, in a joint mail out with a single by Teardrop Explodes on Liverpool’s Zoo Records called “Treason”.

The man doing promotions in Rough Trade at that time was the legendary Scott Piering. He was later to become one of the greatest of all independent radio pluggers and the man responsible for getting bands like The Smiths, the KLF, The Orb and Pulp onto national radio and TV. Its his voice on the intro of the KLF’s classic, “OK everybody, let’s lie down on the floor and stay calm”.

Brian Taylor liked the radio and he was brilliant at befriending the best DJ’s. There was (almost) a second John Peel. In Seattle, Washington, US of A. This one was actually called Norman Batley and he had a show called “Your Skull Is My Bowl”, “LIFE ELSEWHERE WITH NORMAN BATLEY” broadcast on K-RAB SEATTLE. Brian and Norman hit it off from the first time they spoke. Norman had been mailed Killing Joke from Rough Trade and he became their biggest U.S. Fan. He hammered the band on K-RAB Seattle, regarded as the most influential station amongst the youth of America at that time. In fact I believe the red label “official bootleg” single of two tracks from the second John Peel session was motivated by the need to give Norman something of an exclusive to play.     K-RAB was run by student volunteers and fans such as Bruce Pavitt, who had started a fanzine called Subterranean Pop. By issue 4, Bruce had shortened the name of his fanzine to Sub Pop.

In 1986, Bruce Pavitt issued his first release on the Sub Pop record label. It was a compilation LP limited to 5,000 copies called “Sub Pop -100″. This is now acknowledged to be the birth of what now we call grunge.

“Sub Pop -100″ was a 17 track album featuring bands with names like Steve Albini, Sonic Youth, Naked Raygun, Skinny Puppy, Boy Dirt Car, Shonen Knife and “Barry White Ending”. It was imported into the UK by a company called Shigaku Trading based in The Metrostore in Acton West London. MW from Better badges worked in the Metrostore by now, at that time for a company called Fat Shadow. If you collect the reggae records (in particular) from that era, the name Fat Shadow may ring a bell with you. That’s because it is printed on the back cover of a lot of those records, because MW distributed them through there.

Another volunteer working at K-RAB was Chris Cordell, at that time a bass player in a band called The Shemps, later, in 1984, to form a band called Sound Garden.

One of the most inspired listeners to Norman Batley’s K-RAB show was a young man called Kurt Cobain, later to form Nirvana, who recorded their first album, “Bleach”, for Sub Pop Records as well.

By 1986, the original band Killing Joke and the original Malicious Damage organisation had both disbanded. By the end, after Adam Morris had left and Brian Taylor had lost his beautiful hair and well before being thrown off the Killing Joke bus; Dick Laban attempted to manage the unmanageable as we were calling one of their songs by that point. After a few months, he gave up too. Brian and Dick walked away from the music industry at that point, destined to become forgotten heroes, never to return. Opinion seems to date the exact point of break up of the original Killing Joke as sometime after the Iceland incident, but before the maggoty liver saga.

Adam Morris was working with his team mates in the Shigaku Allstars by then. He vowed he would never speak again to a human being who could sink as low as tipping a box of maggoty liver over anyone’s head, let alone that of a young lady and her hair. He rarely spoke of these previous connections when Seattle was visiting. He did not wish any association with a person who could behave like that to someone who worked for someone who merely expressed an honest opinion. But then he had never studied Mein Kampf as bedside reading either. That’s a book written by Adolf Hitler by the way.

The Shigaku Allstars were the team that imported and distributed almost all of the independent punk rock labels from the USA and Australia that hit these shores during the second half of the 1980’s. At the same time, they exported UK independent labels the other way. Dutch East distributed the debut Sub Pop LP, “Sub Pop – 100” in the USA and Shigaku imported it into the UK, where they sold a few copies to one of their earliest wholesale customers, Mickey Penguin who also got many other exclusive records during this time.

On reflection, the never ending list of modern classics that the Allstars brought in, including the only tiny amounts of Nirvana’s “Lovebug / Big Cheese”, the bands first single “members only” release to the Sub Pop Singles Club that made it to these shores. Shigaku brought in “Bleach”, Nirvana’s first LP as well. “Hate Your Friends” by The Lemonheads. The Allstars warehouse favourites included Dinosaur Jnr singles along with “My Pal” by God, “Disgracelands” by Elvis Hitler and “Dickcheese” by The Hard Ons.

They also ran two independent UK record labels.

One was called What Goes On, who issued the first LP by Yo La Tengo.

The other label was the European branch of Homestead Records, the label that issued “Atomiser”, the first LP by Big Black. This now legendary band, founded by Steve Albini along with Jeff Pezzati, Santiago Durango and Dave Riley also had roots in K-RAB. Albini was another of the Seattle gang, obsessed by Naked Raygun. Naked Raygun were another Homestead artist whose album “Throb Throb” was also distributed by the Shigaku Allstars. Steve Albini visited The Metrostore whenever he was in London, everyone knew when he was coming because the code words “Raygun’s back” would go up when we knew he was on his way.

Malicious Damage Records released one more record after the “War Dance / Pssyche” single.

Change

Tomorrows World

There was the forgotten third Killing Joke single, that’s the official bootleg single with red labels and no text featuring two tracks from the second Peel session – “Change” and “Tomorrow’s World” cut to keep Seattle happy. This was mastered by another industry legend, the vinyl cutter Porky of Porky’s Prime Cuts fame and sold to fans by mail order and at gigs in Europe whilst Batley hammered Seattle.

In the spring of 1980, following Killing Joke’s appearance on three glorious shows with the legendary Joy Divison, Malicious Damage finalised a deal with E.G. Records for the recording services of Killing Joke. It was a very good deal at the time. E.G. Records was home to Roxy Music, Brian Eno and Ferry, King Crimson and other stella names. It was considered by many to be the best label in the land at that time. So Malicious Damage held out for the best they could get. It is true, though, on reflection, we all expected it to start pissing money and it didn’t. Killing Joke got all the money from that deal, Malicious Damage got nothing.

But we know the real reason why that is too. The 11th February 1980 incident.

But that’s another story.

After the E.G. signing, global windows of opportunity were opened for Killing Joke.

What happened next is another story waiting to be told.

End.

Outro.

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The version of the formation of Killing Joke that appears in Wikipedia differs from our version of the truth somewhat: 

This is what Wikipedia says:

“”Big” Paul Ferguson was drummer in the Matt Stagger Band when he met Jeremy “Jaz” Coleman (from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) in Notting Hill, London. In October 1978 (or early 1979), after Coleman was briefly keyboard player in that band, he and Ferguson left to form Killing Joke. They placed an advertisement in the music press which attracted guitarist Kevin “Geordie” Walker and bassist Martin “Youth” Glover. According to Coleman, their manifesto was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form”.

By September 1979, shortly before the release of their debut EP, Turn to Red, they began the Malicious Damage record label with graphic artist Mike Coles as a way to press and sell their music; Island Records distributed the records, until Malicious Damage switched to E.G. Records in 1980. The songs on Killing Joke’s early singles were primitive punk rock sometimes mixed with electronic (“Nervous System” and “Turn to Red”). Turn to Red came to the attention of legendary DJ John Peel, who was keen to champion the band’s urgent new sound and gave them extensive airplay. They quickly progressed this sound into something denser, more aggressive, and more akin to heavy metal, as heard on their first two albums, Killing Joke (1980) and the more abrasive What’s THIS For…! (1981). They toured extensively throughout the UK during this time, and both fans of post punk and heavy metal took interest in Killing Joke through singles such as “Follow the Leaders” (1981).

Well. As Johnny Rotten said on that first single PIL released, there are two sides to every story.

And this side is ours.

YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE THE DIRT DIDN’T YOU?

EVEN THE PUPPY! 

WE DIDN’T THINK OF THE NAME KILLING JOKE FOR NO REASON

IF THAT HAD BEEN YOUR MUSIC ON THE TRAIL,

THIS PAGE MIGHT SAY

CLICK HERE AND BUY ME.

OR WILL IT?

THIS HAS BEEN AN EXERCISE CALLED:

“DID YOU ENJOY OUR LITTLE INTERNET GEOGRAPHY LESSON THEN?”

“LAUGH? I REALLY DID BUY ONE.”

SO THERE!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

KILL YOUR PET PUPPY IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE KING PENGUIN ALLSTARS, MR MODO, A STRANGE BILBAO ST BERNARD, APHEX DELCID AND THE GFG.

THE OTHER ENDING DOES EXIST. IT’S FINISHED.

WE LEFT IT WITH THE HARTS AND ONE WITH A MORRIS.

AND IN RESPONSE TO ANOTHER QUESTION, YES THE PACE EGG MAN IS REALLY CALLED JC. THERE ALWAYS WAS ANOTHER JC WHEN WE WERE ASKED IF WE UNDERSTOOD AND WE SAID, YES, OF COURSE WE DO. WE DIDN’T MEAN WE WERE YOUR SERMON FLOCK, WE MEANT THE PACE EGGER. JC JOHN CAUNCE. ADAM MORRIS FATHER. NOT THE ONE YOU MEANT. DUNNOCK.

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT PACE EGGING IS, ASK JOHN PEEL!

THANK YOU, GOOD NIGHT AND GOD BLESS

 HOW DO WE SAY HARTHOUSE IN ENGLAND?  

HARD

SO WATCH YOUR MOUTHS AND MINDS IN FUTURE

ATTENTION ALLSTARS FACEBOOK THANK YOUS and EXTRACT OF ANOTHER VERSION IF YOU WANT TO SCROLL FURTHER

THANKS TO:

NINE INCH NAILS

The idea for our version of another version of the truth came partly from:

“Another version of the truth” by Nine Inch Nails.

http://www.anotherversionofthetruth.com/

Click on the nice photo and you will see.

Do not always believe the Public Image.

Our Facebook pipe-bomb is The Ultimate Killing Joke.

Long tail viral marketing CONCEPTS by The Shigaku Allstars.

It is dedicated to Ian Lowery, wherever his buffalo roams, Sean White, I’ll see your face again, Clifford Hart and all the other forgotten operatives everywhere. This side was written by A Malicious Damage Operative. No individual operative is credited, as all deserve equal praise. Rich Hart’s got it if we ever have to recall it.

Clifford Hart died of diabetes. So did Sean White. We are promoting a fund raising drive for this charity on their behalf. What are you doing about it?

We will release one section of Another Version of our truth whilst you are here. Scroll down for Larry if you want to see it.

The research was compiled with thanks from contributions made by:

Frank Jenkinson (original photography). B. V. Taylor, Adam Morris (Mr Modo / Shigaku All Stars), Dick Laban, Michael Baxter (King Penguin / Shigaku All Stars), MW Trading (Shigaku All Stars Dub Central), Joly BB MacFie, Simon Keeler you teapot (Forte Distribution / Shigaku All Stars), Peter Keeley (Shellshocked living legend / Shigaku All Stars) Mr Keeley also got all of the white labels before they came out. Larry Page.

We would especially like to thank 3 Hart House twins, the vicar of St Thomas Church, Upholland, Wigan. The Upholland Ladies Luncheon Club and everyone else who participated without realising it. It’s called long tailing. You were guinea pigs. 

And Mr R Ashcroft for the best song “some blind geography teacher whose arm fell off or summat” never wrote either.

Special thanks also to the nice man from Pink Floyd who installed the first domestic modem ever seen in a PC in Sheffield 1993. It’s hard to navigate when you first get it. You have to learn your way around. We got that modem, so we thought we’d teach you some long tail internet geography.

The copyright in “Another Version of Another Version of the Truth” is owned by A Malicious Damage Operative 01/04/10. All rights reserved. And no may not use any of this copyright for nothing to help make your wikiscript film good or anything else without payment.

As John Kennedy said to us once,

“Now if Meatloaf strolled into your kitchen and started eating all the food in your fridge, you would expect financial restitution wouldn’t you? So why do you think you can ask for my intellectual property for free?”

If you want to use our intellectual property, you can jolly well pay us what we properly deserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony#Song_credits

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Here’s Larry!!!

Larry Page was the Kinks producer / manager of the 1960’s, not the Google Guy.

It was at Midem, the annual music convention in Cannes, France. I sat down at his table in a coffee bar. I didn’t know who he was.

“Hello, I’m Larry.” he said when I asked him to pass the sugar,

Tell me something, how did you get started in the music industry then?”

“Well,” I replied, “I helped start a DIY punk rock label in 1979 with some mates in Ladbroke Grove”. Larry turned to the man he was sitting with and exclaimed,

“Told ya, didn’t I?”

They’d obviously been playing people spotting. I hadn’t a clue at that point who Larry Page was. He is certainly a larger than life character, so I just dived in with,

“And what do you do then?” His friend spluttered into his coffee when I asked that. Larry just shrugged,

“Oh, you know,” he said, “A bit of this and a bit of that”.

Larry Page went on to say something to me that I have never forgotten. It went something like this -

It’s a shame, you know, it happens with so many bands.

They lose the people they started with and they go around after that saying, oh they did this deal and it was bad. Or they messed that up, they were rubbish. And these bands forget that at the time, before they were famous, when nobody wanted to know about them or their songs, these rubbish people almost always worked their socks off for little or no pay and they nearly always did the best they could do in the circumstances.

They got the best deal that they could get that band at that time.

It is easy to be wise after the event.

Everyone on the planet can tell you the winning Lottery numbers from last week, can’t they? 

Crossfade.

He told me another story, too, about managing bands and their short term memory loss. (Later on, after I found out two things; who he was and he was right. I saw a BBC documentary with him in it and he told this same story in that).

It went like this.

A band gets a manager.

The manager knocks on doors, beats up walls, rips out hair, and finally gets them a paid gig. They get £100.

The manager goes to pay the band. Manager says, they paid us £100. I am on 20%. So that’s £80 to you and £20 to me, ok?

Bands says, yes mate, that’s great.

The manager goes out and does it again.

This time he gets them a gig and they get paid £1,000.

End of the night, he’s paying it out.

That’s £1,000. I am on 20%. So that’s £800 to you and £200 to me ok?

Band says, yes, I suppose so, if you say so.

The manager goes out and does it a third time.

This time he gets them a gig and they get paid £10,000.

End of the night, he’s paying it out.

That’s £10,000. I am on 20%. So that’s £8,000 to you and £2,000 to me ok?

Band says, fuck off! All you had to do is make a phone call.

And that, Larry Page says, is what managing bands is like for most people. We are some of those people who preach LARRY PAGE IS RIGHT!

And for those of you who don’t know who Larry Page is, this is what it says about him in Wikipedia:

“After changing his name to Larry Page (from Lenny Davis) in honour of Larry Parks, the star of The Jolson Story, the teenager began a recording career as a singer.

Page tried to magnify his fame through the wearing of unusually large spectacles, as “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage”. He toured the UK and appeared at top venues, including the Royal Albert Hall. He was a regular on TV Shows like Six-Five Special and Thank Your Lucky Stars.

He later became a successful manager, record producer and record label owner. Much of his producer/manager success centred on his efforts with The Kinks and The Troggs, and his ownership of Page One Records and Penny Farthing Records. Producing such classics as “Wild Thing”, a track remodelled by Jimi Hendrix into one of his greatest of all covers, as well as all of The Troggs hits. Apart from The Troggs and The Kinks, Page’s Larry Page Orchestra gave Jimmy Page (later of Led Zeppelin) some early exposure when he played on Kinky Music.

Larry Page is also credited with introducing Sonny and Cher to the UK.

As of the 2000s, Page has been living in Avoca Beach, New South Wales, Australia.

Page has been involved in producing the song for Chelsea Football Club in the UK. The song is called “Blue Is The Colour” and is still played at the end of home matches”.

We think you DO know your geography there, don’t you?

Extract end

Happy Birthday to the Ripped And Torn and Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzine founder and editor, our very own Tony D.

God Save The Queen

No Feelings

A record that was manufactured and ready for release that was then very quickly withdrawn by A&M Records and most copies destroyed in March 1977 due to the general ill manners of the band, and especially Sid Vicious who decided to chin some hippie down The Speakeasy. This specific hippie carried a lot of weight due to him being the presenter of a half decent late night music programme (which got even better, as a young Penguin was coming of age musically). The band and management was payed off due to the terms of the contract being cancelled by A&M Records.

Thumpingly great record. As it happens being thrown off A&M Records was the best thing that happened to this band, due to this record being delayed and coming out the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee via Richard Branson’s Virgin Record label and possibly hitting the top of the charts for that week. Another record deal, another advance, another story.

This post is uploaded tonight after hearing the sad news of the death of Malcolm McClaren from cancer earlier today. Text ripped off from telegraphonline.

Malcolm McLaren, who has died aged 64, came to public attention in 1976 as the manager of the Sex Pistols, the punk band which he steered to fame and notoriety before their implosion barely two years later.

Presenting himself as svengali and arch media manipulator, McLaren went on to create and promote other bands such as Bow Wow Wow, wrote an opera, appeared on television as a pundit on the phenomenon of punk, and considered running, in 2000, as a candidate for mayor of London.

He once said: “I am a product of the Sixties. All I have ever felt is disruptive — I don’t know any other way.”

The son of a Scottish engineer, Malcolm McLaren was born on January 22 1946 in Stoke Newington, London. He was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Rose, who encouraged in him a subversive spirit. At school he developed a talent for manipulating his class-mates, on one occasion luring them to a rubbish tip and making them get into a large cardboard box he had saved in order that they could be his “Box Gang”.

At 18 he went to Harrow Art School, where he lost his virginity to a talented designer five years his senior called Vivienne Westwood. He also met Jamie Reid, who would later create the Sex Pistols’ provocative and influential graphics.

In the late Sixties, McLaren drifted through several art colleges, immersing himself in the writings of the Situationist International (SI), the French provocateurs whose new media practices included manifestos, broadsheets, pranks and disinformation; and he loitered on the fringes of King Mob, an SI splinter group.

For an unfinished film made while still at art college, he wrote a manifesto which would sum up the underpinnings of punk: “Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates.”

In 1971, with Vivienne Westwood (who by now had had a child by him), McLaren opened a boutique at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea. At first called Let It Rock, and then Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, the shop sold then-unfashionable 1950s Teddy Boy drapes and crêpe-soled shoes to a new generation.

By 1974 the shop, now renamed Sex, and later Seditionaries, was selling Vivienne Westwood’s proto-punk bondage gear and t-shirts printed with lettrist-inspired slogans. Run with the help of Jordan, a girl from the suburbs who favoured S&M gear, the shop was a hangout for a cast of young, bored and frustrated misfits, among them Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock.

In 1975 McLaren went to New York, where he became obsessed by the New York Dolls, a glam-metal male band who performed live in high heels, Lurex tights and make-up, though in an aggressive style which would make them influential to punks. Led by the singer David JoHansen and guitarist Johnny Thunders, the Dolls were the toast of the city’s underground scene, having just signed a record deal.

McLaren soon talked his way into becoming the band’s manager. His first move, the better to shock bourgeois Americans, was to put the Dolls into Maoist Red Guard outfits and have them play in front of a hammer and sickle flag; but New York was unimpressed by the band’s new image and, disillusioned by the sudden downturn in their fortunes, Thunders and the drummer, Jerry Nolan, quit soon afterwards.

Undeterred, McLaren returned to London, intent on creating a band in the way that the Fifties manager Larry Parnes had moulded such stars as Billy Fury and Marty Wilde. When Steve Jones pestered him to find a rehearsal room for his band, McLaren did so; and with the addition as lead singer of John Lydon, another denizen of Sex, rechristened Johnny Rotten for the state of his teeth, the Sex Pistols were born.

Controversy was always high on the band’s agenda, and it was McLaren, primarily, who ensured they achieved it. In May 1977, during the week of the Queen’s silver jubilee, McLaren booked a boat trip down the Thames where the band were to perform their single “God Save The Queen” outside the Houses of Parliament. The boat was raided by police. McLaren was arrested.

Whatever resentment the establishment had for him after this, it was soon to be magnified by the band themselves. The following year The Sex Pistols embarked on a tour of the US. They would return on separate flights. The band split up after a series of arguments, with members accusing McLaren of mismanaging them and withholding money.

After the demise of the Sex Pistols, McLaren continued to put out unreleased material by the band, until the aptly-named Flogging A Dead Horse album of 1979. The band sued McLaren in 1986 for royalties, eventually receiving £1 million in an out of court settlement.

In 1979, McLaren was invited to provide a new image for the band Adam and the Ants. For a consultancy fee of £1,000, he came up with a combination of American Indian and pirate garb, before suggesting to the band’s guitarist and rhythm section that they abandon their singer, Adam Ant, and join a new group McLaren was forming called Bow Wow Wow.

With 14-year old Annabella Lwin on vocals, Bow Wow Wow released the single C30, C60, C90, Go (1980), a driving, Burundi-influenced paean to home taping composed by McLaren. This was followed by the cassette-only EP, Your Cassette Pet.

Bow Wow Wow’s powerful and innovative sound was eventually rewarded by Top 10 hits with Go Wild in the Country and I Want Candy; but after a number of publicity stunts, including a photograph of Annabella Lwin semi-nude with the band in an album-sleeve pastiche of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, the band folded in 1983.

That year, McLaren made his own recording debut, Duck Rock, a collection of songs based on “field recordings” made in Africa and incorporating New York’s fast-growing hip-hop style, exemplified by rappers The World’s Famous Supreme Team.

Although he was accused of plagiarism at the time, McLaren’s appropriation of musical styles from around the world would soon be much imitated. The album included the Top 10 hits Buffalo Gals (the first British record to feature scratching) and the quirky Double Dutch.

After releasing Would Ya Like More Scratchin’ (1984), McLaren then turned his attention to opera, producing the hit single Madame Butterfly and the album Fans (1985). Other albums mixing hip-hop and ethnic rhythms followed.

In the Nineties McLaren moved into television, producing commercials and, in 1991, a poorly received Christmas show, The Ghosts of Oxford Street, which featured The Pogues, Tom Jones and the Happy Mondays.

He returned to recording in 1993, signing to the French label Vogue and releasing an album, Paris, which gained poor reviews. In 1998 he attempted unsuccessfully to launch a group named Jungk, consisting of five beautiful Chinese girls.

McLaren co-produced for the film adaptation of Fast Food Nation, shown in 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the same year presented the documentary series Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London for BBC Radio 2. This was followed in 2007 by Malcolm McLaren’s Life and Times in LA.

Also in 2007, he was due to appear in a reality television show for ITV, The Baron, which had to be postponed owing to the death of his fellow contestant Mike Reid. He was later due to appear in a series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, set in the Australian outback, but pulled out at the last moment.

Malcolm McLaren’s son by Vivienne Westwood, Joe Corré, became proprietor of the successful lingerie shop Agent Provocateur.

No Doves Fly Here

I Hear You Laughing

No Doves Fly Here Original White Label Mix

Uploaded today is in my opinion, a very special 7” single released on Crass Records in 1982. This release was eagerly picked up from Small Wonder Records by a much younger Penguin. One of my favorite bands of the time releasing material on one of my favorite record labels of the time.

For this post I have tried to get first hand knowledge of this classic release via two band members, Josef Porta and Mark Mob, just to give a little bit of extra information that would not be found on any other sites…Thanks to those two for letting me pester them into getting something down on this site. Pats on the back must also go to Nuzz who supplied the original No Doves Fly Here flyer just below this text and to Fod who supplied the picture of Mark at the bottom of the post.

Josef remembers thus;

As I recall Penny and Pete Wright were engineering with John Loder. We were in Southern the day after Alvin Stardust. The usual Crass approach in the studio was rigidly Stalinist – as I recall bands really had no say in what went on. Not a bad idea really, as no one can fuck up a recording session like a bunch of musicians. Mind you, we had a good laugh at the crying babies after we heard it. We weren’t invited to the mixing, and it was presented to us as a finished recording – I don’t recall there being any ‘what do you think of this’ in the matter, not that it would have been any better for us being there.

I think we did it over two days. There was no fraternizing before or after, we came up on the bus from Hackney and went home again each day. I never went to Dial house with the Mob, and I presume Mark chose the tracks for the single. I don’t recall it being discussed with the other Mob members at the time.

Personally, I think the artwork is the best thing about it. The tracks seemed flat. My drumming is clonky and inappropriate. Curtis’ bass is, as always, superb, but the overall sound is limp and apologetic. The same I felt with the Zounds effort. I don’t think Penny really knew how to produce electric guitars – I’m not saying I do, but I know a man who does, and you can hear the difference. The electric guitar is the essential element of any punk record in my personal opinion, and unless it sounds like the Sex Pistols on ‘Holidays in the Sun’ then it’s a waste of time.

Mind you, I’m happy to have been a small part of the whole Crass thing. I thought it was magnificent at the time. Can’t say it changed my life significantly, but it was an experience not to forget.

I only ever did four shows supporting Crass, three were with Zounds in the North West – Manchester Mayflower, Liverpool and one other town and venue that I forget. Once with The Mob at the Zig Zag squat all day festival.

Mark remembers thus;

The recording was done over two days in September 1981 at Southern Studios, with Penny and John producing and engineering the session. Various other folk including Crass members were milling around for those days, doing little jobs when needed, like changing leads, moving amps about, and more importantly making copious amounts of strong tea.

I recorded the vocals to both tracks on the second day, one word at a time for the recording of the No Doves track, this was quite a change from the previous two releases (Crying Again and Witch Hunt both on All The Madmen Records) as the vocals on those records were recorded live. As you can imagine this was rather frustrating and somewhat draining on the spirit, but we assumed Penny and John knew what they were doing so I carried on regardless, and the single turned out  well, so good on them for pushing me to record the vocal track in this way.

I choose both the tracks, No Doves because it did not sound like any obvious Crass label recording and I Hear You Laughing which was a live favorite of the Mobs followers and supporters.

There was no pissing about in the studio, no drug use or anything. There was though many pots of tea being supplied and I also have a memory of Churchman Counter Shag rollups being smoked by Penny and the band (when offered to us). I believe this tobacco could only be obtained from around the Epping area, so I had never tried it before the session or indeed since.

On the second day, one of the studio hangers on was told to go out and hire a four foot diameter gong, bring it back to the studio and set it up to be recorded for the No Doves track. Most of the band had a go at trying to hit this gong correctly. Spent over an hour getting the gong sound right in the mix. Whether Josef’s gong sound went onto the final mix is anyone’s guess. It may well have been rerecorded after the band had left the studio. After over an hour of hearing just a gong sound it all sounded much the same and it could have been any of the recorded takes on the finished recording. Perhaps even my effort.

Around a month or so after the recording sessions I was sent a test pressing of the No Doves 7” single. This version had the gong, the drums, the bass and my vocals. The other track I Hear You Laughing had the baby crying added towards the end of the track. In the package with the test pressing was a letter from Penny suggesting that more should be done with the recording of No Doves. I agreed to let Penny work on the recording in the studio without my or the other members of The Mob’s interference.

Wilf sent me some artwork that was, as usual for Wilf, excellent, and that artwork was sent down to Gee Vaucher for her immediate attention to which she added the usual Crass style lettering printed in the ring around the front of the record sleeve.

I got sent a ‘finished’ copy of the release that would become the only Mob record released on Crass Records and got a bit of a shock when I heard the synths and the choir that had been added to the No Doves track.

Wilf was happy with the finished product mainly due to seeing his artwork reaching a wider audience. The previous two 7” singles had only sold about 2000 copies between them by this time in 1982 and he was the artist for the sleeve artwork on both those previous releases. So to get his work on both sides of a massive poster on Crass Records was good for him.

Crass got something else from this release apart from sales when it was eventually released in 1982. Great Britain had gone to war in the Falklands in 1982 and the words to No Doves Fly Here were printed out onto a massive Crass flyer that was handed out at Crass gigs and pasted onto walls around this time. The same text from the flyer also ended up in the Mindless Token Tantrums booklet that Crass printed up sometime later that was included with their box set release Christ The Album.

The Mob, although first meeting Crass on the Weird Tales Tour with Zounds and Androids Of Mu in 1980 (the bus breaking down around Epping and getting help to continue on route to a gig in Bishops Stortford via Dial House) were never actually meaning to become a ‘Crass’ band. I went to Dial House on a few occasions but as a band we did not really need the imagery and we were not aiming to be part of the Crass scene. We had our own scene and followers by this time, partly in the South West and partly in the squats of London. We were never asked to partake in any further projects by Penny on behalf of Crass Records.

We did perform with Crass once at the vacant Zig Zag club in West London, organized I think by Mick Lugworm,  Andy Palmer from Crass and various other Black Sheep housing Co Op members. Some help also came from myself and Andy Martin along with some of the KYPP collective and a whole host of other people. I seem to remember that Crass hijacked this gig, as originally they were not going to play but turned up on the day and then set upon taking charge, getting bands to play in order of tickets drawn out of a hat and limiting all the band playing times to 30 minutes. I was in the Zig Zag the previous night with Lugworm and others to help organise things in the morning, preparing some food and so forth. Full beer barrels were found still stored in the cellar so that was useful for the night before and for the day ahead.

One time The Mob did not perform with Crass was at Stonehenge in 1980. The Mob members and friends had visited this site on the summer solstiace since 1976 and The Mob had performed there yearly since the bands formation and including 1980. We played our set in the afternoon and suddenly 100’s of studded leather jacket ‘Discharge’ type punks turned up. I saw a bit of The Epileptics set but retired away somewhere to dabble in various chemicals. Before I knew it 100’s of these Kings Road punks, that were never ever seen at Stonehenge before that year, were getting beaten up by bikers who took offence at the punks being there. Crass never performed that night. I think Grant Showbiz had a fair bit to do with trying to stop the fighting. Grant Showbiz engineered the first Mob 7” single Crying Again.

It was great getting a record out on the Crass label, as obviously they put the money forward to get it released. When I think back I do not think The Mob ever paid for any studio recording sessions and record releases. Youth and Witch Hunt were paid for by Max, No Doves by Crass, Let The Tribe Increase LP was paid by Lugworm and Al, I think the Mirror Breaks single was as well.

It was nice to have Penny and John at Southern Studios working on the recording. The single looked great and sounded fine. I think it reached a high placing  in the independent charts when it was released. Maybe number three? I can not recall exactly.

I have added the original test pressing version of No Doves Fly Here as mentioned by Mark in his text above onto this post so you can compare both versions.

This post is dedicated to Mark from The Mob whose birthday it is today, regular browsers of this site might possibly remember that Mark shares the same birthday as my little boy Aaron who is two today.

Happy birthday to both of them, and many thanks again to Josef and Mark for the memories they have shared on this site.

Sound Dimension - Real Rock – Original Version Of Rhythm – 1969

Dillinger - Fountain On The Mountain – 1975

Willie Williams- Armagideon Time – 1978

Jackie Edwards – Git Up – Original Version Of Rhythm – 1977

Danny Ray – Revolution Rock – 1977

Mexicano – Dub Rock – 1977

The Clash – Armagideon Time – 1979

The Clash – Justice Tonight / Kick It Over – 1979

The Clash – Revolution Rock – 1979

The Clash, to me, were extremely inspirational, whatever you think about the band, one thing that can not be denied is the band’s real love of Black music and culture, reggae music was no exception. If it was not for The Clash promoting authentic reggae via the media, via namedrops on original compositions and also covering some of the songs of the day, thousands of people, like me, may not have been touched by this music. Sure there were other bands around the time also, and The Clash did attempt ‘Police And Thieves’ and ‘Pressure Drop’ in a more punked up style, but when it came to 1979 this band found out that they were far from just a ‘punk’ band. With Mickey Gallagher and other musicians in tow, the band recorded the sessions that would result in the formidable ‘London Calling’ LP way down deep in Highbury, North London.

Straight onto the B-Side of the massive ‘London Calling’ single goes ‘Armagideon Time’ a recent hit in JA for Willie Williams voiced onto a well known rhythm going way back, almost a decade before the Willie Williams hit. The Clash’s version of this song is so good, even champion soundman Fatman carries the Clash tune in the big box marked ‘Special’. I know this for a fact as Daddy Fatman dropped it one night, when myself and Kevin Webb RIP ex-Conflict were the only non Rastas in the hall! The Rastas seemed to be cool with The Clash’s version and the dub version, that was spun next…

On the ‘London Calling’ LP one of the highlights (for me anyway) was the band’s version of Danny Ray’s ‘Revolution Rock’.

A relatively recent import from 1977, with the help of The Pioneers imprint Golden Age Records, this rhythm was cut several times, originally releasing ‘Git Up’ voiced by old Jamaican legend Jackie Edwards, who had been around since the 1950’s, and who had also helped Chris Blackwell organise Island Records at a time when Blackwell was selling records out of the back of his Austin Mini. Hope he got his cut further on down the line…Probably not.

The much younger vocalist, and less well known in Root’s than his favoured U.K. Lovers Rock circles, Danny Ray voiced this tune in the same year for Golden Age Records. This is the version that The Clash covered.

Eddy Grant’s brother, Mexicano was taken into the Stoke Newington Coach House studios to voice the DJ cut, again for Golden Age Records. Incidently the rhythm for this track was originally created in Jamaica, but all the versions uploaded here were voiced in the U.K.

*** Wanted to add another track for Mick Slaughter from the ‘Londons Calling’ era Clash and the original track from way back on Rio Records by The Rulers. The Clash copied the track with repect and even kept the false start on the recording!

The Rulers – Wrong Em Boyo – 1966

The Clash – Wrong Em Boyo – 1979

The Clash of course went on to do great work with the now deceased Mikey Dread, there is a post on this site, if you search for it, celebrating Mikey Dread on the day of the saddening news that he had died.

A quick link to the Mikey Dread post HERE

This post dedicated to Richard Kick, ex Brigandage member and N.M.E. writer whose birthday it is today. Have a super day Richard.

Richard championed a lot of KYPP type bands (that nowadays are uploaded onto this site)  for his own fanzine ‘Kick’ and for the N.M.E. from the late 1970’s and through the early 1980’s and beyond…

New Age

Fatigue

My favorite Blitz 7″ single is uploaded tonight and as I like all the records that this band released that means a fair bit. This Blitz release though was the first release on Future Records, a ‘progressive’ sister label to the better known No Future Records and was the last release from the classic Blitz line up that produced the ‘All Out Attack’, ‘Never Surrender’ and ‘Warriors’ 7″ singles. Carl, vocalist and Tim the drummer were in the next version of Blitz and kept the band name for the ‘Telecommunication’ 7″ single and all the following releases, the ‘Solar’ 7″ single and the ‘Second Empire Justice’ LP. Nidge and Mackie guitarist and bassist went onto form Rose Of Victory and continue to record for No Future Records.

Blitz appeared on The Tube, a popular primetime friday night alternative music showcase programme with this release, and it was played on the radio one shows a fair bit after the eight o clock watershed by Kid Jenkins and John Peel. Sold bucketloads as far as I can remember. A great and glorious bowing out for this line up of the band.

The next single ‘Telecomunication’ was in a more Joy Divisionish vein and I remember some fallout with that release including a very upset Skinhead writing into Sounds weekly music paper to complain that he had a Blitz tattoo inked into his face around the time of ‘Warriors’ and that the last single (‘Telecommunication’) had made him feel ashamed to go outside with his bonehead mates! Poor sap, hope he got over that one…

This record was played by me a fair bit all those years ago in 1983 and over twenty five years later it still sounds great. I have not played it for at least that long! Nice to dig it out tonight, and get chummy with it again.

Text below from Ian Glaspers book ‘Burning Britain’ and lifted from the nofuture.co.uk site

Like Riot City, No Future was a very prolific label for a very short time, riding the exciting crest of punk’s second wave with gleeful abandonment, and crashing to oblivion almost as quickly as it ascended. But for the short time they were in existence, their bands and releases dominated the Independent Charts, and have remained hugely influential to this very day. “It was around about 1980, I think, when I left school and went to work for the Ministry Of Defence in Malvern,” begins label co-founder, Chris Berry. “I was in a big open plan office, and I got friendly with this guy, Richard Jones, who, along with Iain McNay of Cherry Red in London, had his own promotions company. He used to put on gigs at the Malvern Winter Gardens, and even used to sell records he would buy from Rough Trade in London on a stall there, and I ended up going along, working on the stall, and enjoying all these bands. Richard taught me a lot about music, and if it hadn’t been for him, I would probably still be listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd… I was quite happy with all that until I was introduced to punk rock.

“One day we were chatting, and we decided to start our own label, and we put an advert in Sounds asking for ‘punk and skinhead bands’. At the time that was what excited us, and we thought there was a market for it… Riot City had just started up, and Cherry Red had just had great success with the Dead Kennedys.

“The name, as cheesy as this may sound, came from the Pistols’ song. It always used to amaze me when people said the Pistols couldn’t play – they were fantastic musicians, that guitar sound was amazing… although they were more rock ‘n’ roll than anything really.

“Anyway, after that ad, we were swamped with demo tapes! Not only that, but I’d been stupid enough to put my home phone number on the ad, and I still lived at home with my parents, so I’d get in from work, and my mother would have my tea ready… but it would go cold ‘cos the phone was always ringing! My parents were very accepting really, ‘cos I had some really weird and wonderful people ringing up all the time.

The best demo they received was from a New Mills band, Blitz, whose superb four-track ‘All Out Attack’ debut EP was the label’s first release, and was an incredible, unexpected overnight success story.

“The Blitz demo had so much aggression and power, and the sheer sound and presentation of it was far beyond anything else we’d been sent,” remembers Chris. “It was ready to go as it was, in fact, ‘cos they’d actually bothered to go into a good studio and do a decent recording. Blitz always were a little different from the other bands we worked with – they had their heads screwed on and knew what they were doing and where they wanted to go. Unfortunately in the end, they started to believe their own hype a bit too much.

“We did one thousand copies to start with, ‘cos that’s all we thought we’d sell. So we didn’t even bother getting any labels pressed, we just used white labels and stamped them. I took them off to London to Rough Trade, and they bought the lot, and said, ‘We think you better press some more – and quick!’ So we did another two thousand, and they sold all those too, so then we did another five thousand… it all just took off. Garry Bushell picked up on them, and it went from there.”

Suddenly able to fund further releases far easier than expected, No Future began snapping up punk talent from all around the country, quickly garnering a strong roster that between them turned out many a much-loved punk classic. The Partisans, a young band from Bridgend in South Wales, were next with their rabid ‘Police Story’ single, closely followed by Brighton’s tongue-in-cheek Test Tube Babies, and their eminently lovable ‘Banned From The Pubs’ EP.

“We never looked too far ahead – just the next release, the next gig,” reckons Chris. “We were too busy trying to look after all these bands we were signing, a lot of whom portrayed this ferocious image, but in person, were quite the opposite – a lot of them were actually very immature. Some of them were literally kids. I remember The Partisans were asked to do quite a big gig in Bristol, with Vice Squad I think, and I had a phone call from one of their parents, and was told that they weren’t allowed to go unless there was a chaperone, haha! Their parents just wanted their best interests, obviously, but because of their ages, they were a contractual nightmare.

“We weren’t really into contracts though, to be honest. We had help on the legal side of things from Cherry Red, who ended up doing our publishing for us, but it wasn’t really fair to have young kids signing twenty-three page contracts or whatever. So we had very basic, simple agreements. I wanted to model the label on Mute Records, who released Depeche Mode; they were just starting to get quite big, but they carried on for years without any official contracts being signed. We didn’t really achieve that goal though, and often ended up getting people to sign stuff that we didn’t even fully understand ourselves!

“Things went badly wrong with the Test Tube Babies in the end though, but that had a lot to do with their manager, Nick McGerr. Looking back he was far more professional than we were, but he took away any fun we might have had working with the band. He would think nothing of driving up to Malvern from Somerset to have a rant! I remember we did a No Future gig at the Lyceum, and Peter slagged me off from the stage for about twenty minutes, which was… well, different! But musically they were brilliant.”

One of the label’s earliest releases was the ‘A Country Fit For Heroes’ 12″, a low-priced sampler that compiled, much like Crass Record’s ‘Bullshit Detector’ series did, the best tracks from some of the many demos the label had been sent.

“That was Richard’s idea really, I have to give him credit for that. There were a lot of bands who had one great song on their demo, but who weren’t worthy of a proper deal. We just decided to do a 12″ to give some of them some exposure. We did it all on the cheap really – we nicked the front cover photo from a book without crediting the source… and we were really naughty and didn’t send out any free copies to the bands! We wanted to keep the cover price as low as possible, so it was all done on the cheap, but it did incredibly well for what it is. Bushell really championed that one.”

Several of the bands that appeared on the 12″ went on to sign with the label for further releases – The Samples, from Worcester, who Chris actually managed; Attak and The Violators, who were both from the same area as Blitz; Crux from Nuneaton, who went on to do a split 12″ with Crash; and the excellent Blitzkrieg, who opened the sampler in fine, electrifying style with ‘The Future Must Be Ours’ and then released one further single for the label.

“We used to get on quite well with most of our bands, especially before they got too big; they would treat us quite respectfully ‘cos we were putting out their records! I used to like working with Blitz, especially Carl, and I can remember crashing over on his bedroom floor, and talking into the middle of the night and his mum ended up shouting at us! I would have these bands come stay with me, too, and I was still living at home. My mum and dad were always very tolerant of all these mohicans turning up at all hours on our doorstep.”

Not all the bands were quite so easy to work with however. “I gotta tell you about The Blood!” laughs Chris, further confirming all the rumours that the band were essentially an unmanageable force of nature. “Bushell put them in touch with us, and we did this brilliant single with them. They came up to the office for a meeting, and they all seemed to be about six-foot tall! I first met with them in London at this really dodgy pub, where the landlord had this huge dog and a shotgun behind the bar… and when it was turning-out time, he just used to let the dog out from behind the bar!

“Anyway, they turned up at Adelaide House with at least sixteen cans of lager each, to sign these contracts, and within the first hour, they filled the whole building with cigarette smoke, and drank the bloody lot. I was completely phased by the time they left. One single with them was quite enough, haha!”

After a very prosperous few years, when it seemed that everything pumped out by the label would be snapped up greedily by the record-buying public (Blitz’s ‘Voice Of A Generation’ album even spending a month in the Top Thirty of the National Charts), No Future’s fortunes took a dive in 1984, when Chris hit some serious cash flow problems.

“I think I went a bit loopy really,” he confesses. “The music scene was changing, the initial excitement for punk music was waning, sales were dropping… and effectively we were spending more money than we had coming in. Had I known then what I do now, we should have had someone to do some financial forecasting – but all we had was a local accountant that just prepared our books. I didn’t have anyone telling me, ‘No, you can’t spend that much in the studio’, so I just went and spent it! ‘Cos I was personally convinced that things were going to carry on as well as they had been forever. Soon we owed money to the pressing plants and everything.”

One of the things that Chris did to try and stop the rot, perhaps suspecting the label had painted itself into a corner, was start up Future Records, an offshoot where he could release more experimental material.

“I set up Future mainly to release Blitz, when they went all weird. Carl had gotten involved with Tim Harris, who had previously produced the band, and they did a single, ‘Telecommunication’, which actually sold very well – it got a lot of air play on Peel and Jensen, but then things went a bit too arty. And ‘cos they were my biggest band, they wanted to use bigger and better studios, so all of a sudden instead of paying the usual rate of £10 or £15 an hour, we were paying £35 an hour or whatever.

“We lost credibility in the eyes of most punks about then, and we definitely lost the support of Bushell. I’d probably had enough too – I was getting tired of it all, and we released a few distinctly dodgy records towards the end that really should have never came out.

“I went on to do Future for quite a long time after, working with a band called And Also The Trees, who were very successful in Europe and did a lot of touring out there. They were kinda like The Cure, and I worked with them for three or four years, but wasn’t earning any money when I desperately needed to. In the end, I decided that I couldn’t work with them any more. I had my own flat by then and couldn’t afford to pay the rent – it was a bit of a sad day really, but I went and got a real job. I felt it was time to move on.”

Chris now runs a retail business in the Cotswolds with his partner, but still regards his time as a punk rock magnate with philosophical fondness, and has even been contemplating a return to the fray of music management since being interviewed for this book.

“Like I said, we were caught up in the whole thing, and just enjoying the scene, and we were attracting a certain type of band… we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time, we were just putting records out. It was definitely all about the buzz for me; finding a band, getting them in the studio, cutting the single, releasing it, and watching it climb the Indie charts… the whole enthusiasm of it all. At the time, we were only nineteen or twenty or whatever, and we just did what we did. I’m very flattered, and more than a little gobsmacked to be honest, to think that what we did is still regarded as so important.”

This post is dedicated to Monti, ex Sons Of Bad Breath and member of the infamous Hackney Hell Crew, now residing in Bristol whose birthday it is today.

Happy birthday to you, have a nice day with your muckers and Fred the hound. Monti (from around 1985) is pictured on the right with Ollie and Martin, two other members of the Hackney Hell Crew that are happily still with us…Sadly Simo and Pus never made it passed the eighties.

Original line up of Blitz with the debut release ‘All Out Attack’ uploaded and posted HERE