Once Fetish Records failed to sign me on the strength of The Metal Tape I came to a realisation - not that I would probably have to get a real job once I left school after all, but that there probably wasn't much point saving up all my amazing ideas for the twenty-four track studio, and my foreseeable musical future almost certainly lay with cassette tapes; so I continued as I had started, not quite having decided on the name Do Easy at this stage, and still with those formal, blandly descriptive titles, most likely founded upon the hunch that any more expressive title I chose would almost certainly sound ridiculous within a couple of months because left to my own devices I'd probably call the tape Genetik Sutcliffe Konstruktions like the fucking knob that I was, or at least had the potential to become.
Speaking of which, The Second Metal Tape features my earliest overt attempt to be Throbbing Gristle in the form of The Function, which was more or less Persuasion adapted to the horrors of being sixteen in a small, fairly rural town at the arse-end of a decade in which rape had generally been regarded as naughty fun, kind of like pinching a pair of knickers from a washing line or something. Being a sensitive lad I attempted to address the inherent sexism of my contemporaries in this track, but it ended up sounding extraordinarily shit, as you will hear, despite my having a second go at it.
Daredevil is a bit of an odd one. Four girls from the year below mine at school had gotten together and written an ode to - I'm guessing - female empowerment, or maybe kid empowerment, and they roped me in to provide some music for it presumably based on having seen me stood in the music room holding a guitar at some point. I suspect they may have been coming at this thing from a sort of Bonnie Tyler or Elaine Paige angle, which was a little at odds with my own interests, but they were girls and they were talking to me (something which didn't really happen that much), and Rebecca even lent me the Heaven 17 album so obviously I wasn't going to say no - that would have been fucking crazy. I'm not sure what they made of the results - my instrumentation added to a tape recording of them singing - but have a feeling it may have exposed my conspicuous lack of musical genius. Oh well.
Excepting the mumbled poetry on Pearl of Death - clumsy horror inspired by the mortuary scene in the recently broadcast BBC version of Thérèse Raquin - I seemed to have worked out my limitations for the rest of this cassette, in so much as that from Sounds of the Eye onwards, it still sounds decent, at least to me. Perhaps there isn't much here that would have given Pierre Schaeffer cause to shit himself, then pack it all in and go back to working on the bins, but then I was sixteen; cut me some fucking slack.
Speaking of which, The Second Metal Tape features my earliest overt attempt to be Throbbing Gristle in the form of The Function, which was more or less Persuasion adapted to the horrors of being sixteen in a small, fairly rural town at the arse-end of a decade in which rape had generally been regarded as naughty fun, kind of like pinching a pair of knickers from a washing line or something. Being a sensitive lad I attempted to address the inherent sexism of my contemporaries in this track, but it ended up sounding extraordinarily shit, as you will hear, despite my having a second go at it.
Daredevil is a bit of an odd one. Four girls from the year below mine at school had gotten together and written an ode to - I'm guessing - female empowerment, or maybe kid empowerment, and they roped me in to provide some music for it presumably based on having seen me stood in the music room holding a guitar at some point. I suspect they may have been coming at this thing from a sort of Bonnie Tyler or Elaine Paige angle, which was a little at odds with my own interests, but they were girls and they were talking to me (something which didn't really happen that much), and Rebecca even lent me the Heaven 17 album so obviously I wasn't going to say no - that would have been fucking crazy. I'm not sure what they made of the results - my instrumentation added to a tape recording of them singing - but have a feeling it may have exposed my conspicuous lack of musical genius. Oh well.
Excepting the mumbled poetry on Pearl of Death - clumsy horror inspired by the mortuary scene in the recently broadcast BBC version of Thérèse Raquin - I seemed to have worked out my limitations for the rest of this cassette, in so much as that from Sounds of the Eye onwards, it still sounds decent, at least to me. Perhaps there isn't much here that would have given Pierre Schaeffer cause to shit himself, then pack it all in and go back to working on the bins, but then I was sixteen; cut me some fucking slack.
Tracks:
1 - Induction
2 - The Function I
3 - Three Soundtracks
4 - The Function II
5 - Daredevil
6 - Sounds of the Eye
7 - Radioland
8 - Drones
9 - L/R
10 - Pearl of Death I
11 - Pearl of Death II
12 - The Tow
13 - The Best of Shirley Bassey I
14 - The Best of Shirley Bassey II
15 - Ending
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The link goes to Die Brücke - 1983 - A Time and a Place, not this release
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, the Die Brücke tape is probably a lot better, but thanks for letting me know. The link should work now.
ReplyDelete