Virgin Prunes

Guggi @ Ace Brixton

Im pretty sure this is Chris' tape and I have no idea how it came into my posession, its a live set from Brighton in 1981, and I can easily picture  him clutching that old school cassette recording brick to his chest as the chaos unfolded around him.
Theres a couple of tracks from the headline band (the Fall) and that places it as 21st October at the Regency.
I didnt go to this show, only time I saw them was at the Ace when they supported the Birthday Party and were filmed for the TV(thats where the photo is from). That performance was fairly staid so I never saw the confrontational and charged theatrics that made their name and maybe because of that didnt really accord them the same reverence as my peers at the time.


Virgin Prunes

Set from the Virgin Prunes, Brighton 21/10/81 (24mb mp3)

Rachels Pilchards



Rachels Pilchards Live outside theTiptree Co-Op.



"Their Songs go on for hours,

Their Musics' worse than ours

What Is Oil are shit (crap) shit (crap)

What Is Oil are shit (crap) shit (crap)

What Is Oil are shit."

Okay so Rachels Pilchards were a Kazoo band from Maldon Essex, who in the '80's would play any and every where normally to an unreceptive if not downright hostile audience.

Steve Fish and Rolf Pilchard (Chris McKenna) were the ringleaders and other members came and went , often with a song added to the set in "tribute":  "we're a whole lot better since we kicked keith out", "Neils got a big nose" and "Lord dikky is Missing".

There were a raft of Cassette releases recorded live, in a transit van, around a campfire and even a studio demo which was a real disappointment - the end result sounding just as you'd expect an all night night session by a bunch of arhythmic-drunken-atonal-drug-dealers-with toy instruments to sound like: "oooh look theres a button with echo written on it - press it AGAIN!!!"

Little Ugly Girls




LUGS @ The Arthouse

LUGS @ The Arthouse

Little Ugly Girls Photos courtesy of the Tom Lyncoln Archive.

 And sometimes the tape is all there is, no seminal single, no genre defining first album (no tricky 2nd) - in this case not even a rough-hewn potential laden studio demo . With the LUGS I always blamed this lack of progeny on Hobarts industrial strength bucket bongs, but thinking about it now, it was probably that other bane of the creative soul: the desire for perfection.

   

The band are playing a one-off (we hope NOT) show this month, Im guessing a lot of the people there will only know Linda and Beans' current projects (Bulls,Diacos) and Im hoping the band will still have it in them to deliver exactly the same awesome, primal, visceral punk, noise that cemented their reputation.

The first time I remember seeing them was at the Evelyn: Bean, Sloth and Cameron all eyes down and simmering, intent on their precise , clever, intricate and deafening riffage while the little Angry Girl up front tried to get something far bigger and badder than we could ever imagine out of her system.
Linda on stage was a constantly morphing onslaught of full-on claws-out feminine savagery, her huge voice filling the room, a taswegian compound of  Kat Bjelland, Leslie Rankine and the Avengers Penelope Houston turned up to 10.




 

This track is completely un-representative musically but is just as troubling as the noisier stuff, its Linda , on her own reciting a poem /spoken word/stream of conciousness/therapy session that conjures up images of family holiday nostalgia,  child abuse and a painful coming of age in a few sour verses.

Boxenhoodahayda - LUGS














The artwork is all by Linda too, I remember when we (s:bahn) stayed at LUGS central I was blown away by her huge photos around the place: lurid bodies at sex-crime scenes, a nightmare of Cindy Sherman meets "Rivers Edge" . The band are as creative now as then, Bean and Linda owning the Melbourne live-scene with the Diacos, Cameron going strong with the Legends of Motorsport and Sloth enjoying great success with his "Head Gap" recording studio.

The Litle Ugly Girls Demo , 1996 (29mb mp3)

slip,
tractor,
the dead sea,
bunny-hole luck,
the pit,
boxenhoodahayda.





Red Lorry Yellow Lorry

Red Lorry Yellow Lorry were another singles band: the compressed sounds and 2 1/2 minute duration of the 7" format suiting them ideally, "Take It All" was my favorite of the 4 pre-LP releases with its stomping verse  and the "sister ray" vocal phrasing crashing into that circling guitar motif in the chorus.
 Ive always had a soft spot for drum machines: the 'Lorries, Cocteaus, Big Black, Sisters of Mercy, Godflesh .....I dunno , its probably that discipline thing again: It means the music has to be focused , no wanky "jamming " or  ad libbed make-it-up as-you-go-along extended solos here sonny.
I think Albini used to cheat with a foor pedal, and anyone who witnessed the epic version of Jordan Minesota  that Big Black ended with upstairs at the Clarendon one night knows just what you can do in terms of dynamics, emotion and atmosphere with a beefed up click track.


Take It All - Red Lorry Yellow Lorry


For some reason I taped the whole of the support band at this show (probly cos the singer was a babe...) but only some of the lorries, let me tell you time has not been kind to the skeletal family, on this  they sound like bloody Terminal Burnz on a bad night ...

 Live at Imperial College London, 3rd Feb 1984 (29mb mp3)
instrumental,
beating my head,
sometimes,
silence,
alone?,
take it all,
monkeys on juice.

Heres some more from the next year but north of the river...





Live Kings College London, Feb 1st 1985 (35MB mp3)
take it all,
this today,
sometimes,
alone,
?
hollow eyes,
hand on my heart,
talk about the weather.

La Muerte

Our local Music website messandnoise.com had one of their free lunchtime shows today in the 1000 Pound bend hipster haunt off Eizabeth street. And I have to say I saw probably the best chinese rock band ive ever seen - '"PK14".
Well ok thy are the only chinese rock band Ive ever seen....  (I think theres only about 8 to choose from anyway). They didnt sound like the fall, joy division , gang of four or fugazi (get a new publicist guys) but they were entertaining - gotta love a singer who round-house kicks and swings the mike around  -at lunch time to an audience of office workers....

La Muerte are definitely the best Belgian Rock band Ive ever seen. ( Ive never seen Plastic Bertrand and Im sure he would have been in the running if i had...and there dEUS I guess , but really who else? ).
The guys voice is awesome and he did one of the best Nick-Cave-release-the-bats "dentist drill" shrieks north of brisbane.

Lucifer Sam - La Muerte
Ok the Birthday party influence is there but songs like " Evil Land", "Haschassin" and "Tiny Bones" have a noise/punk thrust that other Cave derivatives never had. The helter-skelter down-escalator guitar riff of "Blame on you" is a classic and the band only shows a taste of the mediochrity that is to come on "Blues Heaven or Hell" : the debut album was a turgid lowland-swamp blues by numbers job with none of the sense of urgency or credibility the previous 12" had.

LA Muerte,Bay 63 London, 1985
1. Evil Land
2. Haschassin
3. Blues, Heaven or Hell
4. Tiny Bones
5. Blame On You
6. Lucifer Sam
7. Wild Thing

GBH

It seems like every week theres another bunch of wrinkley punk rockers hopping off the jetstar from heathrow and demanding their hard earned share of our retro-punk-nostalgia-dollar. Weve had buzzcocks, uk subs, the addicts (for gawds sake) as well as the more highly suspect lure of a pursey-less sham 69 and weller-less Jam.
From what I see in facebook it does sound like this phenomena has reached epidemic proportions in England with reformations blocking out the calendar like the locusts we expect here in victoria.
GBH are playing a decent sized venue so they are one of the few who may get more out of it than a free holiday and a last bask in pub backroom  glory.

Good luck to them, they will certainly play this litle beauty .... but ...its on sunday night and Im washing me hair (neh neh - yes I'still got some). Its not that Swanston Street is too far to go to revisit the past, its just GBH belong in my teens not the centurys'.

Gimme Fire - GBH




I remember there was this party at Kirstys flat in Epping, somehow Weed got control of the music just as the Acid kicked in, he managed to slip in Killing joke , GBH and then Discharge before nomal service was resumed . My fried brain was converting the audio input into ultra high definition footage of a giant steel and chrome machine pounding and grinding up meat. I still use that experience as my hardcore yardstick: close your eyes and see how scary it gets - it would be a shame to find  the benchmark compromised by age.


This was probably my first real hardcore gig, I remember the vibe was not exactly what you had at your typical Rubella Ballet gathering....but it was an amazing night.

I didnt tape this one , I bought it later cos the show just blew me away, theres no tracklisting but its got all the hits: gimme fire, drugs party, dead on arrival, diplomatic immunity, necrophilia (the chorus : "no remorse : screw the corpse" a personal favourite).

GBH Live at Crocs Rayleigh, April 14 1983 (38mb)

Otomo Yoshihide and Yamatsuka Eye

I went to a (largely improvised) noise festival on saturday night and I have to say one of the highlights was the Agents of Abhorence who are local boys and pretty much an old school grindcore band... you see what they had was starts and ends...I like starts and ends. The rest of the evening was just endless middle...with a few drawn out starts here and there.
I can handle music without rhythm/tunes/coherent lyrics but you need some discipline lads.
This tape is from at the London Musician Collectives 1994 Festival of Experimental Music, at  Conway Hall, Holborn. Phil England (Roachmill Drummer) was one of the organisers and gave me a copy, Its from the desk and exellent quality - I believe he released some ofit on a Resonance 7" single and ts worth noting that this set predates the one on the Blast First Hellshit/Carcrash CD by a year.
Yoshihide and Eye
Yamatsuka Eye is of course famous for his work with the Boredums and Otomo Yoshihide with Ground Zero, this collaboration was like nothing Ive seen before or Since. Yoshihide had a turntable and a huge stack of records that wound up all over the floor smashed to bits, he also had an extreme metal guitar and often he used both simultaneously - Over this cacophony Eye growled, shrieked and emitted allsorts of terrifying vocal spasms.
None of the songs are more than a minute so theres heaps of starts and ends, and I like starts and ends.
Yoshihide and Eye, London 1994 (30mb zip)
The initially restained applause from the seated and bemused jazz crowd is pretty entertaining too..