Friday 29 September 2017

Tryouts - The Look On Their Faces (1983) C30


I always felt Tryouts should have achieved some sort of vaguely legendary status. I'd read about them in Sounds music paper (the clipping of which is reproduced on the cover of this cassette) even before they turned up on one of Larry Peterson's compilation tapes, and eventually on one of mine too. They had a synthesiser, a Casio VL1, a crap tape recorder, and that was about it, and their songs had puerile titles suggesting common ground with the sort of shite I myself had been recording for the previous couple of years.

Strangely, when the tape turned up in the post, they weren't quite as I expected. The toilet humour was merely an aspect of their work rather than an actual jihad, as it had been for the Pre-War Busconductors. They sounded a bit like someone in the group wouldn't have minded being in the Human League, but were let down by the pitiful circumstances of their recordings, and yet this shambolic quality was at the same time part of their charm. You could probably call it outsider art, or at least you could if you were a fucking tosser.

They were from Scarborough, and I don't know much else about them, and if I still have any of their letters, I can't find them; so just listen to the tape and feel the realness.


Tracks:
1 - Introduction
2 - Tryouts Theme Song
3 - Intramural
4 - He Wears Underpants
5 - Damn Her
6 - Sitting On the Bog
7 - Am I Really Having Fun?
8 - We Cannot Avoid the Mad
9 - Dr. Who
10 - All Alone
11 - Haven't Got the Time
12 - The Look On Their Faces
13 - Here Comes the Train
14 - Motorway
15 - Don't Let Those Spots
16 - This is Life
17 - Goodbye from Tryouts



Return to Index

No comments:

Post a Comment