More half-assed shite and attempts to be Soft Cell on my Yamaha Portasound keyboard. I'd just learned that my vocals sounded more convincing when double-tracked, so there's a lot of that here, which isn't to say that the vocals were necessarily anything amazing, but that's why most of these tracks were songs rather than the usual atonal instrumentals for which I was running out of inspiration. In my defense, it seems I had just about grown out of wanting to be Porridge, and despite a few Numanisms, the biggest influence on my er... songwriting was a desire to experiment with different sounds, noises and effects so as to avoid the entire thing being me whining over a keyboard. I had no electronic effects, so anything which could vary the sound was welcome, and the glockenspiel on Cow Shit is actually just differently sized lumps of wood nicked from the woodwork room at school, then arranged in order of pitch and played. Additionally I was mucking about on the guitar, trying to play things very much unlike anything I would ordinarily play or even listen to, just to see if I could get something original out of it - hence Executive Wife and Visions Go Away for two.
Lyrically it was mostly teenage shite hidden beneath layers of laboured dream images and bad poetry so as to avoid the problems which might arise should anyone understand what the fuck any of it was about; and at least some of it was about my friend from school, the other kid who had Throbbing Gristle records and who had begun taking himself so seriously that it shocked even me, so there's some anti-Porridge material here, which I'm sort of proud of even if it's mostly unlistenable bollocks.
Pouring Out the Soul features glass objects filled with water used as percussive instruments and was about how much I hated the group Nine Below Zero.
So there you go - hardly a masterpiece but I suppose it could have been worse, and it sounds less shit the more you listen to it.
Tracks:
1 - Executive Wife
2 - Cow Shit
3 - Image Control
4 - Torrey Canyon
5 - Mountains, Rain, Slate, Engines
6 - Visions Go Away
7 - The Purple People Breeder
8 - At Any Time
9 - John Everett Millais
10 - Robot Death
11 - United States of America
12 - Irish Republican Army
13 - Pouring Out the Soul
14 - I'm Lucky - I've Seen Johnny Morris
15 - Neil's Tongue
16 - Balilla Pratella
Return to Index
No comments:
Post a Comment