Monday 25 July 2016

F*** F****** - Enjoy! (1991) C60


So as to save time, please refer to the entry for 1988's Stupid C15 for all the relevant explanations, excuses, apologies, and secret origin - although don't bother downloading it (assuming you haven't already done so) as the whole thing turns up as the first six tracks on the album, and as I noticed whilst digitising the thing, these versions are of marginally better quality for some reason.

Excepting the stuff from Stupid, some of this was recorded on a four-track portastudio albeit still with the same basically careless approach as the earlier stuff. Some of these are almost okay, for what they are, although I must admit there are a few I remembered as being better, but never mind.

By 1990 I was living in Lewisham and had a job with Royal Mail. I was also still reading a lot of comic books, which is reflected in this material. Terminator, for example, is directly inspired by a specific Skip Williamson strip from the old undergrounds, and the influences of Crumb, Bill Griffith, Drew Friedman and others will probably be obvious to anyone who knows their work. IQ3 is a cover of an Anthropod Lithontriptic Band song, Anthropod Lithontriptic Band being Graham from the Pre-War Busconductors; and The Arthur Young Workbench is an old Sexton Ming number. Mrs. Sullivan expresses my frustration with a Mrs. Sullivan to whom I delivered mail in my job as a postman, and who was a whining old battle axe. This being over twenty-five years ago, I guess she's dead now, so it looks like I had the last laugh after all.

The cover image was from a birthday card my grandmother sent me that very same year, even though I was in the second half of my twenties, and the title Enjoy! comes from a game played by Carl Glover and myself one afternoon, each drawing imaginary album covers for popular artists of the time in an effort to shock the other into either hysterics or stunned silence. Carl won the game by proposing a new Kylie Minogue collection entitled Enjoy!, the cover of which would be a close up of a ringpiece. You probably had to be there. The title and general spirit of Bad Time Blues also came from the same game.



Tracks:
1 - I Don't Wanna Have to Hurt You, Baby
2 - Beat You Up
3 - Stupid
4 - Terminator
5 - Rockin' Amoeba
6 - Violence
7 - You Won't Like It
8 - We Watch Our Favourite Shows
9 - Neck Tie Party
10 - Stupid (live)
11 - Bad Grades
12 - Badder Than All the Rest
13 - IQ3
14 - Shoot Thy Neighbour
15 - Transylvania
16 - Comic Books
17 - Bust Your Ass
18 - In the Summertime
19 - Beer Drinking Competition
20 - Mrs. Sullivan
21 - Bad Time Blues
22 - Disco Stomp
23 - I, Robot
24 - The Arthur Young Workbench
25 - Too Much Fun

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Friday 15 July 2016

Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies III (1987) C90


Here we go. You probably know the score by now with this stuff. If not, please refer to previous posting of Spinning Pygmies material as can be found listed in the index. This was our fourth rehearsal, now just myself and Carl fucking about at my place - Hollytree House, Otham, Kent as shown above - almost certainly in my room which would have been the nearest one on the ground floor with the window open. We had a guitar, a Roland Cube with its fuzz thing, some bits of drum kit, and my Casio SK1 keyboard. We made stuff up and recorded it on a tape recorder, if you can imagine that. I'd say this stuff is only really likely to be of interest if you were actually in the band, but fuck it - I personally find it all very listenable now, although I suppose I would say that.

Fuck it. No-one's forcing you to download the thing.


Tracks:
1 - Burning Black & Blue I
2 - Burning Black & Blue II
3 - Why Did Chris Move?
4 - Runciter Swing
5 - Oi! Rides Again
6 - Piece of Meat
7 - Cheesey Cheesey
8 - Ain't No Light
9 - Do the Frug
10 - Check Out Your Pants
11 - He Writes the Songs
12 - Louie Louie I
13 - Sister Ray
14 - Hey Joe
15 - Are You My Mother?
16 - ChogI!
17 - What Elvis Said to Me
18 - Hubba Hubba Frug
19 - Kiss Me Blind
20 - Against the Law
21 - Hold Your Hand
22 - Louie Louie II
23 - Strawberry Feels Fever
24 - Magical Mystery Tor Johnson
25 - Here He Comes Again
26 - A Little Hell from My Friends
27 - Prince Chow Mein

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Friday 8 July 2016

Do Easy - Purifier (1986) 3C60


In the unlikely event that anyone has been following the semi-regular posting of downloads of the stuff I recorded as Do Easy, you might also note how I've been posting this stuff more or less in the order of release; so with the most recent cassette having been The Fourteenth Metal Tape, that brings us to Five Track Compact Cassette and Exquisite Torment, both from 1984, and both being C15 cassette singles (for the sake of argument) sold for fifty pence in an effort to reach a moderately wider audience, or just an audience.

Five Track Compact Cassette comprised new improved versions of earlier songs - ActorsI and the Village, SongImage Control and Second Brain Product - and I put a bit of effort into getting them sounding as good as I could, having begun to grow tired of tracks which sounded shite next morning once the excitement had worn off. I'm not saying this was classic material, but it was okay compared to some of the rubbish I'd produced, and I know a couple of people who still seem to view Five Track Compact Cassette with something resembling affection. It might have been my best seller too, fifty or sixty copies or something like that.

Exquisite Torment was recorded a couple of months later, just the two tracks this time - Knife in My Side and The Ecstacy of Spite - and you can tell I was starting to go a bit mad. I was due to be turfed out of my home seeing as my parents were split and I was going away to college, I was suffering from severe testosterone poisoning, and I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Marc Almond or William Bennett. Also, I'd just read a load of stuff about use of subliminals, so I tried them out on these tracks in an effort to persuade a naked lady to have sexual intercourse with me, and it fucking worked too. Get in there.

Anyway, with these being just C15s, and seeing as how I want to finish posting all this crap before I die of old age, it seemed a better idea to just offer Purifier, which is the name I later gave to the three tapes on which I had kept all the master recordings for the cassette singles and all the tracks I'd started churning out for inclusion on other people's compilation cassettes; and particularly as this three-hours worth of material neatly bridges the gap between The Fourteenth Metal Tape and The Thirty-Fifth Release, which is the next full-length Do Easy tape in sequence - except for the fucking awful Damned cover version which was tossed off in 1986 for the sake of filling up side six.

Okay, so here we have the two cassette singles, plus tracks which appeared on compilations such as Another Lost Cause (Refill Tapes), Political Piggies (Anal Probe) plus I think at least one other cassette by the Grey Wolves lads, and Inhibitor and Kill Technology which Larry Peterson of Cause For Concern asked for but never used - I have the tapes, but not here with me in Texas, so I can't really check what was what at the moment and it was a long time ago. Also, having embarked on a career in the yartz in September 1983 - or at least signed up for an art foundation course - I'd started making vaguely industrial videos in an effort to be more like Cabaret Voltaire, yielding soundtrack material which didn't really fit in anywhere else, so that's included here too. If anyone really needs to know what the videos looked like, there are some screen shots here. I watched a VHS copy of all my video work back in 2011, then wrote this obituary, and decided it really wasn't worth the effort having them converted to something I could upload to YouTube, seeing as how they're mostly shit.

I had a vague intention of releasing this as a three tape set but just never got around to it. There are a couple of stinkers for sure, but mostly it seems generally listenable, at least by my standards. The lyrics are often hilariously earnest and at least one track sounds like The Heat is On by Glenn Frey (mortifying seeing as I was actually trying to sound like Alternative TV), but fuck it, I expect you've downloaded much worse.

Synthnerds - the analogue synth you can hear on some of these tracks - All My Friends, The Ecstacy of Spite etc. - was a homemade job built from the pages of Practical Electronics (or one of those mags) by my friend Justin's dad, and which I purchased for thirty quid. It had two oscillators and was great while it worked, but just sort of conked out before I was really able to discover what all the knobs were for, Captain Peacock. 


Tracks:
1 - Inhibitor
2 - Kill Technology
3 - My Remaining Eye
4 - British Movement I
5 - Let Down
6 - British Movement II
7 - Improvisation
8 - Documentary
9 - Distortion (film soundtrack)
10 - Nuove Tendenze
11 - Vicar Vicar Straight into the Public Lavatory
12 - All My Friends
13 - Waterside at 12

 ...and the second one here.


14 - Inspecting the Experimental Grain Fields at Ostia Near Rome
15 - The Discipline
16 - Kick the Dwarf
17 - Actors
18 - I and the Village
19 - Image Control
20 - Song
21 - Second Brain Product
22 - The Silence Deepened (video soundtrack)
23 - The Fart
24 - Domestic Control Section (installation soundtrack)
25 - Portrait of a Minority (installation soundtrack)
26 - Intolerance (video soundtrack)
27 - The Voice of Reason
28 - Winter Again
29 - Thee 23rd Message to thee Temple

...and the third volume here.

30 - Knife in My Side
31 - The Ecstacy of Spite
32 - Our Tune
33 - Nobody Can Describe How We Truly Feel
34 - Republic of Saló
35 - In the Moral Hit Parade
36 - Pair of Trousers
37 - Mussolini & a Plate of Gruts
38 - Over the Bay of Naples
39 - Lie Through My Teeth
40 - Don't Cry Wolf

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Monday 4 July 2016

Die Brücke - A Time and a Place (1983) C60


Here's another one I actually haven't asked permission to offer up as a freebie on account of the fact that I fell out with the bloke, or he fell out with me, which is probably a lesson in the shelf-life of friendship. Sometimes there's a reason why you lose touch with people.

Anyway, Die Brücke was Paul Mercer of Apricot Brigade - whose work can be found elsewhere on this blog - plus Sarah, his girlfriend of the time, playing an SH09 synth. The cassette was just a compilation he made for me, I gather, hence the last minute inclusion of an Apricot Brigade track I don't actually remember having heard before (I guess it's been a while since I played this) which must surely date from 1985 if not a little later. I remember him joining Apricot Brigade, and I didn't meet him until September 1984. Anyway some of these tracks he recycled as Apricot Brigade material - notably Trust and Prove Myself to You. Some of them he may even still be performing now as part of his one-bloke-on-stage-with-guitar-and-a-copycat thing. I don't know.

Anyway fuck it - regardless of anything, I still say this material speaks for itself. Paul Mercer should by rights have ended up churning out one album after another and been sickeningly famous as a result. This was post-punk just before some clown decided it was goth, and it pisses over most of those comedians you find on the Mick Mercer compilations. Quite frankly I would have given my left one to have written just one song as good as Watching from Outside.

Never mind.


Tracks:
1 - Christiana
2 - The Black Bridge
3 - Unnamed Dead
4 - Watching from Outside
5 - Our Heads are Acid
6 - Goodnight
7 - Some Insane
8 - Perfection
9 - By This Person
10 - Trust
11 - The English Assassin
12 - No Sound
13 - The Fleshcrash
14 - Standing Close
15 - Some Insane (version)
16 - Prove Myself to You (fragment)
17 - Heartclock
18 - Prove Myself to You
19 - Things I Never Wanted [Apricot Brigade]


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