Envy - 1987 Demo (1987) C20

I'm quite excited about this one as I thought it was beyond hope, having already tried and failed to digitise the thing as I explained here. But, having recently discovered that the other player on my double cassette deck can just about cope with tapes which have otherwise succumbed to wow and flutter, here we are. It still sounds a little wobbly in places, but I'd say it's listenable, and at least it no longer sounds like Bourbonese Qualk outtakes. There's a programme called Capstan, I think, which one can download and use to eliminate wow and flutter, but I don't have it. If anyone wants to send me a couple of hundred dollars so I can buy the thing, that would be great.

 

I've had my tape deck repaired and a new motor installed since writing the above and it turns out the Envy tape now plays fine, so I've redigitised it and replaced the drunk versions with what you should have heard first time - link same as before.

 

Anyway, this was, on reflection, possibly my favourite line-up of this band (including the one which had me as a member) and these are fucking great songs, at least providing you like that sort of thing, which I did, or still do in the case of this tape. I've a feeling Paul was pulling towards being the Swans of Chatham (hence being named after one of the seven deadly sins, just like Greed) while Rajun and Prez were pulling in what was almost the opposite direction, which is why it worked so well, in my opinion. Someone should track down the master of this and stick it out as a 12" - fucking brilliant stuff.

Download the quintet of ditties and associate visual component by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - A Suicide
2 - Killing Man
3 - Prove Yourself
4 - Fear of the Dark
5 - Just For You


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Do Easy - Don't Talk (1987) C60

I should have taken my own advice and kept my mouth shut for the duration, but never mind. This was almost the last tape I recorded as Do Easy, mostly recorded in the college sound studio on a four-track TEAC, and thirty or so years later, I'd say it sounds mostly decent providing you don't pay too much attention to the words. I was young. I wasn't very happy. I hadn't had sexual intercourse in well over a year. I looked funny and people kept calling me names as a result. Musically speaking, this was mostly me, although Information through to Animation of Life, and also Down in the Echo were collaborations with Garreth Roberts, so that's mostly him singing or speaking on those; Steve McGarrigle also contributed in some way to In One Day and the remix of This Can't Go On Forever; and the sonic dog's dinner which was Sound Levels in Arabia additionally features Paul Fallon (who was also in the Spinning Pygmies with Garreth and myself for about forty seconds) and some bloke called Matt, about whom I don't remember very much at all.

Let me see...

Information was recorded as the soundtrack to a video piece, as us artists call them. The video comprised stills of drawings by Dennis Nilsen, and Garreth is reading out poems written by the same on the soundtrack, as you can hear. The point was that the material is only identified as having been the work of Nilsen at the end of the video, so everybody goes ooh! and agrees how playful and subversive it all is blah blah blah audience expectations blah blah blah. The drum machine pattern on Sound Levels in Arabia was originally written for the only song I wrote for Envy, which mercifully we never recorded because it was shite. Caroline A was me deciding I wanted to be the Jesus & Mary Chain and to record a proper pop song with a video of an actual band playing it, and I was going to give copies of this demo to my loyal recruits so they could learn how to perform my masterpiece, but luckily I lost interest and never got around to it. HSC was recorded after hanging around with TD and is pretty much an inferior rip-off of a track he recorded as Frenzied Encounters, which I've yet to digitise.

...and no, I never got around to a formal release of this one either, so no fancy cover I'm afraid.

Don't worry. I'll post a proper tape next week.

Download these twelve track by clicking on this link, if you must.

Tracks:
1 - Paper Tiger
2 - HCS
3 - In One Day
4 - Information
5 - Complicated Animal
6 - Sound Levels in Arabia
7 - Animation of Life
8 - This Can't Go On Forever (remix)
9 - Don't Talk
10 - Caroline A (demo)
11 - I Want You
12 - Down in the Echo

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Acrobatic Champions (1985) C15

This was a solo tape by Paul of Die Brücke, Apricot Brigade, Envy, and a million other musical identities. You may remember he had a couple of tracks on Moraals, possibly. I asked him if I could put some of his stuff out on my crappy label, and he said yes, picking the name Acrobatic Champions from either a TV documentary or a kid's book about bats, which are apparently quite acrobatic in their own way, and which appealed to Paul's sense of humour.

A full sixty-minute tape was to come, but first there was this because I liked the idea of putting out C15s for fifty pee (inc. P&P) on the grounds that it was cheap, no-one else seemed to be doing it, and it seemed like a good way to get the music out there. Flowers and Skylight were both composed as soundtrack material to a film and a video piece of the same names made by Paul as part of his degree at Maidstone College of Art, both recorded in the sound studio associated with our course. The third track was just something he came up with to bring the whole up to fifteen minutes. I watched him record it then asked what it was to be called, and he said, I'll name it Piranha, after the tape, because the C15 master copy was a brand of cassette manufactured by a company called Piranha. Crazy times.

For what it's worth, the distortion you can hear on Flowers is part of the music rather than the result of a knackered old cassette. Paul was somewhat ahead of the curve in his use of deliberately distressed sounds, at least in a blatantly composed and musical context. He really should have been disgustingly famous.

Download the C15 and its cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Flowers
2 - Skylight
3 - Piranha After the Tape


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Dovers - Hammersmith and Chatham (1988) C90

The Blue Lagoon was a popular Chatham venue in the basement of an American style diner owned by Mr and Mrs. Amin and run by their son Prez, bassist for the Martini Slutz and a later incarnation of Envy, and all around great guy. The above photo, taken by Andy Fraser of the Martini Slutz and - more recently - Unlucky Fried Kitten, clearly shows Prez undertaking some guest vocals with the Dovers, who were Carl Glover and myself. This gig was at the Blue Lagoon, although I don't think it's the one on this tape which was in March, and those look suspiciously like Christmas decorations up on the wall behind Carl. Someone other than Carl performs guest yelping on the final track of the Blue Lagoon set on this tape, but I've a feeling it may have been me. The above photograph might not have anything to do with this tape beyond it showing the same venue and people. I have no idea. Regarding the bands and venue, this is still more information than you'll find in this history of music in the Medway towns which somehow manages to mention Tim Webster just once, despite being over five-hundred pages in length.

Anyway, both of these gigs were supporting Envy and the Uninvited Guests, so I suppose you could call it a tour if you really felt like it. Collectively, we (not necessarily including the Dovers) had enough of a following to van a load of fans up to London in a minibus, so this tape comprises the mid-week warm up and then our collective attempt to crack the capital. It's probably not the greatest live recording ever, but it's not like I'm expecting payment for it, so whatever. Carl attempted to liven up the Blue Lagoon gig by staging a competition with whoever managed to cheer the loudest winning an album autographed by not only the Dovers but also Prez. The album was Tiffany's debut featuring the hits Danny and I Think We're Alone Now. I recall Sarah Cook winning the album, but it doesn't sound like she did on the tape, so I've no idea.

You can also hear Eleanor Ronchi talking to Prez at the beginning of the Hammersmith gig, which is nice, at least for me. I fancied Eleanor something rotten, but it just wasn't to be. Oh well.

I should write a book about this shit. 

Download the fourteen songs and related booing by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

Blue Lagoon, Chatham 20/3/88
1 - He Believes
2 - A.I.D.X.
3 - The Insect
4 - Louie Louie
5 - Beat Me Black & Blue
6 - Misery List

The Clarendon, Hammersmith 24/3/88
7 - He Believes
8 - A.I.D.X.
9 - The Insect
10 - Louie Louie
11 - B.L.A.C.Clowns
12 - Are You My Mother?
13 - Beat Me Black & Blue
14 - Hail Fellow Well Met
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More Dovers Stuff...

Every Sunday I stand before the shelf of about three hundred cassette tapes thus far liberated from the slightly larger collection still at my mum's place back in England, then pick a couple of tapes to digitise - usually something by the Pre-War Busconductors which no-one reading this is ever likely to hear, and something for this blog based on whoever hasn't had a tape on here for download in the last couple of weeks - just to mix it up a bit and keep things moving, alternating between lost classics and the stuff no-one but me cares about. This week I picked a Dovers tape and noticed that it contained half of a gig in addition to the usual rehearsal material. The second half of the same gig had been recorded on a different tape in the name of maximising space and avoiding ownership of too many cassettes with just a few things recorded on the beginning of side one. It seemed a bit mad to present a recording of a gig in separate instalments, so I've digitised the lot and rationalised the material into the equivalent of three cassettes (as listed below).

Download the tapes by clicking on the titles and following the links:

The Dovers - Rehearsals 7 & 8 (1988) C90.

Both rehearsals at my miserable bedsit in Glencoe Road, Chatham and recorded quietly so as to avoid enraging the stinking alcoholic in the next bedsit. Tracks 1 to 11 date from Sunday the 10th of January, 1988, and I think the rest were Saturday the 16th of January with this bloke called Andy Bibby sat watching, smoking my snouts, drinking my tea, and probably chuckling away in the background. One of these tracks slags off a load of Medway bands, but I'm not going to tell you which one so you'll just have to download it and listen to the lot if you care that much. Fatback is the Link Wray song, obviously.

Tracks:
1 - Callin' My Boots Dave
2 - Wanna Buy Me Some Boots
3 - Beat Me Black & Blue
4 - The Insect
5 - Misery List
6 - Batman's Personal Friend
7 - Wanna Buy Me Some Boots
8 - Callin' My Boots Dave
9 - Fatback
10 - Mammy
11 - Come Off Everybody
12 - Brown House Music
13 - Piece of Meat
14 - Pizza to Go
15 - Come Off Everybody
16 - Beat Me Black & Blue

The Dovers - Rehearsals 9 & 10 (1988) C90.

Our numbers expanded seeing as we had a gig coming up. Chris, our drummer from Total Big, was available once again to bash the skins, plus Martin de Sey was now living in the gloomy bedsit directly beneath mine, so it seemed like it might be fun to have him play bass. Martin was a founding member of the Cravats and had previously been in To The Max with Carl and Chris - and also Smilin' Paul Mercer of Apricot Brigade and Envy if anyone is interested. This rehearsal (the first eighteen tracks) was in the garage of Chris's dad's house in Kemsley on Sunday the 17th of January, 1988. I'm not sure about the date of the remaining three tracks, except that we were back down to just Carl and myself in the wake of the Sunset Strip gig and Carl had obviously just got hold of his Yamaha REX-50 effects thing. Many Years Ago is a cover of a Sexton Ming song - whom both of us worshipped as a God at the time - and I'm Not Telling You was just us mucking about with the riff from I'm Telling You by the Sceptres, which was Martin's previous band.

Tracks:
1 - I Wanna Be Your Dog
2 - He Believes 
3 - Hail Fellow Well Met
4 - Batman's Personal Friend
5 - Top of the Pops
6 - A.I.D.X.
7 - Louie Louie
8 - I'm Not Telling You
9 - Pizza to Go I
10 - Pizza to Go II
11 - Are You My Mother? I
12 - Are You My Mother? II
13 - The Breakthrough I
14 - The Breakthrough II
15 - The Insect
16 - Big Girl's Blouse
17 - Rock Sandwich
18 - Silver Machine
19 - Many Years Ago
20 - The Insect
21 - The Breakthrough (extended) 

The Dovers - Live Sunset Strip 27.1.88 (1988) C46.

It was billed as a duos evening, and we had been asked because we were ordinarily a duo. Typically there were four people in the band by the time the gig happened, although Martin had stepped in to replace Alan Mason who hadn't been able to make it after all. Alan had also been supposed to play with us at a gig at the Half Moon in Putney (or wherever it was) on Thursday the 14th of January, except that one had fallen through. Anyway, we played but not very well, or at least nothing like as "good" as it had been at the rehearsal. The other acts were Whistling Vic and Rocking Richard - featuring former Dentist Ian who particularly impressed me by puffing away on his pipe whilst drumming; and then Billy Childish and Russ Wilkins who put on a fucking astonishing performance - just two men with guitars, bellowing away and stamping their size fifteens to keep the rhythm. It was amazing.

I'm not sure who is singing on the final track. I suppose it's Carl, although there are mutterings about getting in a guest vocalist just before the track starts. We had talked about getting Andy Fraser of the Martini Slutz and Unlucky Fried Kitten in - which is probably why he's mentioned on the poster - but he reckons he was fitting a carpet at his mum's place that evening, amongst other things. Maybe it was Prez. Maybe it was me.

Tracks:
1 - (introduction)
2 - Hail Fellow Well Met
3 - He Believes 
4 - Beat Me Black & Blue 
5 - I Wanna Be Your Dog
6 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burning
7 - The Insect
8 - A.I.D.X.
9 - Are You My Mother? 
10 - I Wanna Be Your Dog

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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.

Download the nineteen tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

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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Envy (1986/7) C46

I wrote a bit about Envy here, and if you've been following this blog you may be familiar with Apricot Brigade, their earlier and probably slightly better incarnation. I wasn't actually aware of being in possession of any recordings of Envy until I was looking through a couple of compilation tapes of all sorts of shit and noticed I had this, which was nice as I thought nothing had endured from my brief couple of months of pressing buttons in this band. It isn't actually a C46 so much as one side of a C90 also featuring some crap I recorded in Wales on an art college field trip and er... FLM by Mel & Kim taped off the wireless (and which is surprisingly better than I remembered it being) - but a fair few of the tapes I've slapped on this blog are listed as C46, C90 or whatever mainly so as to indicate duration rather than to attribute origin. Sometimes the material doesn't even all come from the same tape, but listing them as a C60 or similar just seems tidier (and besides, who cares?)

Anyway, tracks one through to sixteen comprise a rehearsal conducted around Andy's house at some point during the summer of 1986, most likely August; and the title My Sorrow is just a guess as I have no memory of the song or what it was called. I could have edited out all of the pissing about and false starts, but I didn't want to so if you want just the songs themselves shorn of mysterious silences and Rajun noodling about on his guitar, just delete anything which isn't actually a song once you've downloaded it. Unfortunately the tape upon which I recorded this stuff was kind of fucked and a bit stretchy in places. I've done what I could to clean it up, and I think it's listenable, but it should probably be noted that any tremelo effects you can hear weren't our doing.

After I was chucked out of Envy, Andy was replaced by Rajun's brother, Prez, and this line up recorded a fantastic five track demo tape in 1987, produced by Tim Beeby and Dave of DTS Studios (it says here on the cover). I was going to supplement the rehearsal tracks with the five later studio recordings but by ridiculous coincidence, that tape is also fucked. I managed to digitise A Suicide but the other four sounded like they'd been drinking cough syrup; which is a pisser, but I suppose at least I rescued A Suicide, which is nice because I honestly think it's a work of art, easily the best thing this band ever wrote.

Download the eight songs and related fucking about by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
2 - Twenty One Years
4 - Pale Orchid
6 - We Will Fall
8 - Cut So Deep
12 - Cut So Deep II
14 - Cut So Deep III
16 - My Sorrow
17 - A Suicide

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Apricot Brigade - Practice September 1985 + Demos (1986) C60

Apricot Brigade were Paul Mercer (guitar and vocals), Rajun Amin (guitar), Andrew Weatherall (bass), and Alun Jones on drums. They played live in and around the Medway towns and had a reasonable following. Alun Jones went on to play drums for the Dentists, to be replaced by me pressing the start button on a drum machine as the band changed its name to Envy, which is another story. I'm not sure quite what the creative dynamic was in Apricot Brigade, although a few of the songs were written by Paul, and as such exist somewhere in earlier form as the work of whichever name he was using for his solo material at the time - Killing Them, for example, was essentially a reworking of his own Tin Men. Paul gave me this tape either prior to my joining the band when they turned into Envy, or because I had asked for a copy of their demo or whatever. The rest of the tape was filled with material relating to his own solo work as No Fun KXK, three tracks recorded live at the Good Intent, and some instrumentals recorded as backing tracks for a live performance - also a truncated studio version of Tin Men.

So it's a cassette of odds and sods with Paul Mercer as the element common to all of the tracks. Personally I always thought he was an immense talent - although his greatest work (in my view) was probably the solo studio tape for which you have some of the backing tracks here - Not This Time and others - but I don't actually have that tape with me, so here's this one. In sticking this tape up for download I've broken my own personal code of at least asking people before I hand their shit out to strangers for free in so much as I've made no attempt to get in touch with Paul Mercer and ask him if this is okay, because he'd probably tell me to piss off on principal, so bollocks then. We fell out. I don't even know why. Apparently I think I'm cool, but I'm not, or something. Whatever.

Anyway, even with this in mind, this tape still sounds fucking amazing to me, and Jesus this line-up of Apricot Brigade were good!

Download the eighteen songs and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
Apricot Brigade
1 - Killing Them
2 - Trust
3 - Pale Orchid
4 - All Our Tomorrows
5 - Howling Moon
6 - Dawn in the Hollow
7 - Parry
8 - Martha
9 - Pale Orchid

No Fun KXK
10 - Tin Men
11 - Heart Like Glass
12 - Camilla
13 - The Black Bridge
14 - Not This Time
15 - No Sound
16 - Tin Men
17 - Tabbs
18 - Memorium

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