Adventures of Twizzle were Saul Pol Koatep and Jude Wilton Keel, or at least that's how they signed their letters. They lived in Newcastle and were responsible for a series of noisy, low-fi and occasionally surreal cassettes distinguished by application of a well-developed sense of humour. The first one I heard was Hitler's Trousers After the Blast, from which point on I was immediately a fan. They also wrote great letters comprising peculiar flights of fantasy lavishly illustrated with wax crayon. One of my favourite was a postcard, a publicity shot from some old film to which Jude had selotaped a sachet of tomato ketchup and amended with what was either a joke or philosophical inquiry:
Q: Who is the Dada Jack?
A second postcard settled the issue about a month later:
A: Tommy Steele's Reggae Bagpipe.
Obvious really. Anyway, Party Ritual Extensions was a live tape they sent me and told me I would be releasing on my Do Easy label, which I did. The performances were two years old by then, but they seemed worth hearing. Listening to them again in 2017, this stuff is a bit basic but it still sounds good to me, and the tape makes for quite a powerful experience listened to in its entirety.
We lost touch soon after this, or specifically they wrote to me and I never bothered writing back. The two of them had apparently been nicked for fare dodging and had a massive fine to pay, so they photocopied a stack of legal stuff relating to their prosecution and asked if I could help them out, which I couldn't because I was a starving student and living on tinned potatoes at the time, so the request struck me as a bit fucking saucy. Then nearly a decade later, Jude saw my name mentioned as a member of Konstruktivists in an issue of Music from the Empty Quarter and so wrote a letter to Glenn explaining that he knew me of old and that I was in the National Front* and possibly also the Freemasons. It turned out to be a joke, just a bit of a wheeze, albeit one of those jokes which seems funnier when you've had your head stuck inside a bong for three days. So we corresponded, and he was clearly abrim with genuine regret at having libelled me for wacky fun-filled chortles, and explained that he had lost touch with Saul and was now a Hare Krishna. There didn't seem to be a lot to say after that.
Saul phoned me a few years later, mid-nineties some time, but it was at three in the fucking morning when I had to be up for work at five and he sounded somewhat off his tits, so I don't recall much of the conversation apart from that I found it heavy going. He'd found my number in an issue of The Sound Projector because I had stupidly included it in an advert for Ce Acatl tapes. He told me he was behind a label called Hypnagogia, of which I had actually heard, and sent me a few CDs and a 10" by Anomali, his most recent musical endeavour; which was nice, and at least better than writing to any of my friends and claiming to remember me having been on trial at Nuremberg.
Nowt so fucking queer as folk, eh readers?
*: Seriously - what do you fucking think?
Tracks:
1 - The Basement, Newcastle 22/6/83
2 - Widdershins
3 - Morden Towers, Newcastle 16/11/83
Return to Index
No comments:
Post a Comment