Regular - Regulation Issue (1988) C60

Regular was the work of John Jasper, the man behind the Joneses and with whom I worked on the Illyana Rasputin tape. I already wrote plenty about him on the blog entries for those two, so please feel free to have a quick look at them so as to avoid my having to repeat myself. I can wait.

John recorded a ton of this stuff, and due to the general indeterminacy of his character, it wasn't always easy to tell when he'd run me off a copy of his new shit, or whether he'd just nicked a few bits and pieces from obscure On-U label records and failed to mention that they weren't actually by him. Anyway, the point is that he was very prolific, and this was definitely all his own work, and presumably the stuff of which he was most proud judging by the fact that he went down to that place on Rochester High Street which had a colour photocopier, ran off a load of covers, and decided it was an album. As you can probably tell, he was significantly influenced by On-U, Sherwood, Tackhead, Scientist, all of those guys, and for my money he definitely brought something new to the table.

The credits found on the insert were mostly pulled out of John's head, although let's face it, we've all been there with our own imaginary bands. I'm not credited but that's my voice you can hear on A Voice in the East, and also my cheapo Casio sampler which lived around at John's house for about a year. Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists lived just up the road from John around this time, and I definitely remember them attempting to record something together. The voice on Naked They Go does actually sound a little like Glenn doing one of his characters, but I suspect it's something John took off the radio or another record. Janine, John's girlfriend of the time, can be clearly heard vocalising on Punjabi, but beyond that I've no idea where to draw the line between fantasy and reality. I'm not sure why Regular either - knowing John it was probably some esoteric nod to Reg Varney.

John was the most violently unreliable man on earth, but also a lovely guy and very funny, and I still sort of miss him. More than anything I wish he'd spread a few more of these tapes around, or that someone had chucked a load of money at him and forced him to put out a record; but never mind.

Download the sixteen tracks, cover and insert by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Mission Impossible (Martial)
2 - Come into the Room
3 - Ghetto Swinger
4 - Touch (dub)
5 - Echo Bass (dub)
6 - A Voice in the East (a Memory)
7 - Naked They Come...
8 - Naked They Go
9 - Touch (Seikh Massacre)
10 - Touchdown
11 - Punjabi (Vaca-Dabi)
12 - Powder Room
13 - Bone Rattle
14 - Swing Low
15 - Likrish Tash
16 - Massacre

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The Dovers - Water Pistol Filled with Beer (1991) C90

This is what rock and roll used to look like, you autotuned assholes.

Here's another Dovers tape, and definitely one of the better ones. All of this stuff was recorded on various portastudios. The first eleven tracks were recorded at Carl's flat in Bermondsey over a long, hot weekend in the late eighties, as I've written on the inlay card. He Writes the Songs through to Do the Frug were apparently recorded at John Jasper's house in Chatham on his portastudio around the same time. The rest were recorded at Carl's flat from winter to spring 1991. The aforementioned inlay card was too boring to be scanned and is thus absent from the download. As I may have mentioned before, whilst these tracks transfer to my own iTunes in the right order, they'll probably download in alphabetical order for you, depending on what you use and how you listen to them, if you listen to them, so I'd advice rearranging them in the correct sequence shown below, not least because a couple of them segue into each other. I'm primarily digitising this shit for my own entertainment, so I'm not going to give them titles like A9 Work That Body! because it offends my pedantic sensibilities. If that's annoying, screw you because it's not like I'm charging anything, unlike Radiohead and Oasis, and what you get is about a million times better than Radiohead or Oasis, so great bolshy yarblockos to thee and thine.

Some of these tracks also appear on the album that never was. The versions on The World of the Dovers are probably mixed a little better, but there's probably not much in it. Carl, as pictured above, handled most of the vocal stylings and programming, and I played guitar and can usually be heard giggling in the background. I'm not sure about the photo, as I think that's Carl from when he was in a group called Churchill's Shoe, possibly, which was before we met.

Download tracks.

Burn to a plurality of CDRs.

Slap in car stereo and drive down to Camber Sands and eat ice creams on a hot day.

Job fucking done.

You're welcome. 

Download the twenty-five tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The End
2 - Eggs, Beans & Mayonnaise
3 - Blue Moon of Kansas
4 - The Insect
5 - Sentimental Fool
6 - You Were Better When You Were Crap
7 - After a Particularly Uplifting Sermon...
8 - I Am Mr. Bennett
9 - Work That Body!
10 - When the Power Falls
11 - Fly in the Ointment
12 - He Writes the Songs
13 - Worm
14 - Sentimental Fool
15 - Beat Me Black & Blue
16 - Do the Frug
17 - Make My Flesh Crawl
18 - Do You Use Your Brain?
19 - Everybody's Got to Change
20 - Horrible Glam Thing
21 - Surfing On My Mind
22 - State of Pigs
23 - Vale of Tears
24 - John Piss-take
25 - Business Biscuits etc.


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Illyana Rasputin in Pittsburgh (1988) C60

This was myself and John Jasper, the man behind the Joneses, thirty minutes of which can theoretically be found by referring to the index. I had been recording my own stuff under the name Do Easy since about 1982 or thereabouts, the problem with which was - as I began to realise - lack of quality control and the absence of any clear idea of what I was doing. Pieces of music which were obviously rubbish were taped over at source, but unless it was completely shit, I usually stuck it on a cassette in the hope of someone buying it. Additionally there was the problem that my tapes would vary wildly in style and quality from one track to the next. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell, Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Leonard Cohen, so it probably all sounded wildly inconsistent. By the time 1988 wheeled around I fancied a fresh go at it with a new name and efforts made to ensure that successive tracks would at least sound like the work of the same person. Illyana Rasputin was a character whom I fancied from the X-Men comics, of which I was reading a ton at the time due to having very little in the way of a sex life. It sounded vaguely exotic and not even remotely industrial, so that was what I went with. This tape was recorded on and off throughout 1988 around at John's house. I and the Village, Pure Finger Point at Earth Scum, In the Ruins of Becelaere, Waterside at 12, Let the Bayonets Speak! and Groove 1889 all came from previous incarnations as Do Easy songs, or at least demos left at varying stages of completion, but half of these compositions are John's doing, and he's the reason I can still listen to any of it without wincing too hard.

The details at which I still wince are entirely mine, and time hasn't healed the wound. Because it was the eighties and I had everything Throbbing Gristle ever recorded (including the ludicrously rare private Death Factory tapes from '76, so nyer nyer nyer all you Johnny-come-lately part-timers) I spent at least some of the time exploring controversial ideas and imagery, just like every other sad fucker with a delay pedal and a copy of that Emlyn Williams book about the moors murderers. Accordingly one of these songs is named after a painting by Adolf Hitler, and another was one of Mussolini's catchphrases, to whom there are a number of additional lyrical references for the sake of flavouring one's Riesling with just a splash of urine for sake of texture. Personally I always saw the referencing of the transgressive as roughly in the tradition of the Surrealists and their like. It honestly never occurred to me that there might actually be genuine Hitler enthusiasts out there strumming acoustic guitars whilst singing about Himmler being a bit like some nice flowers, and getting away with it because industrial music fans are generally as thick as fucking pig shit. When not making daring references to bad 'uns, I was mostly singing about how I hadn't had it off in ages. Why this should have been so is obviously a mystery to me.

It actually took me a couple of years to get around to shoving this tape out under the banner of Runciter Corporation, a name stolen from a Philip K. Dick novel under which I also produced various comics and fanzines. I ran off about fifty or so copies, so far as I can tell, although I'm not sure how many of those I actually sold. The tape was also released by Carl Howard's Audiophile Tapes in the US. I'm not sure how many Carl sold, but from what I can tell by looking at his facebook page, he doesn't appear to own a yacht, so US sales may not even have hit single figures. I probably should have recorded a better tape, I suppose, although for all its innumerable flaws, I've heard worse - even if I do say so myself. I only wish the good bits had been my fault.

Whilst I'm here, I feel I should mention Space Patrol!, Carl Howard's net radio show for which there is a facebook page to be found here, and a dedicated group here. It seems like something worth supporting, so you know what to do.

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

Tracks:
1 - Rorschach Love Song
2 - I and the Village
3 - Sad Fascination February 1988
4 - Pure Finger Point at Earth Scum
5 - In the Ruins of Becelaere
6 - Scavenger
7 - Waterside at 12
8 - Let the Bayonets Speak!
9 - Musik in My Gasmask
10 - Pittsburgh
11 - Groove 1889


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The Joneses - Keeping Up With The Joneses (1989) C30

The Joneses were John Jasper, just one bloke with a portastudio who lived around the corner from me in Chatham, Kent. John was musically prolific, recording his own rhythmic dub material heavily influenced by Adrian Sherwood and the On-U sound under the name Regular. We also collaborated on a cassette recorded as Illyana Rasputin, and then there was all his other stuff - things which just never quite seemed to fit in anywhere else. Foremost amongst this most severely mutated material was one side of a cassette he gave me containing these fourteen tracks. The Joneses were unlike his other imaginary bands, particularly in terms of the raw force of sarcasm utilised during recording - assuming it was sarcasm, because frankly it was sometimes difficult to tell what the hell he was playing at. The Joneses most obviously rips huge streaks of piss out of the Smiths, but also seems to take sideways potshots at Mark E. Smith, the Cocteau Twins, and possibly Alan Bennett. The other side of the tape appeared to be taken up by something called Reg Varney's Mobile Coconut Shy.

John was a lovely guy but a pain in the arse, one of the least reliable, most pathologically flaky people I've ever met. He would lend me tapes of Keith LeBlanc albums and swear blind they had been recorded by a friend of his, some guy who lived in Devon. Then he was going on tour, playing bass with Wolfgang Press - really he was. He would fail to show if you arranged to meet him at the pub, or you would go around to his house and he'd pretend he wasn't home. He seemed, at times, a bit mad, and thus provided some evidence in support of that equation about the thin line dividing madness from genius, as expressed in his music. The Joneses, with all its deliberate mistakes, tape distortion, pointed crash edits, and armpit farting noises is a long way from the Barron Knights tradition of satire, comic send up and note perfect pastiche, so far in fact that it exists more or less on its own terms and as such predates Chris Morris and Blue Jam by nearly a decade.

I don't know how well this stuff will translate. Maybe you had to be there. All I know is that the Joneses still make me cry with laughter a quarter of a century later.

He sometimes likes to lie in his bedroom and remove his trousers,
But sometimes his trousers remove him...

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

Tracks:
1 - Edwardian Trout Feef
2 - Reg
3 - Tossing and Turning
4 - Bending Down, Naturally
5 - Don't Eat Sausage
6 - Cor - Strewf!
7 - Night-time Biscuit Horror
8 - Walnuts
9 - Horror in the Office
10 - Spoons
11 - I 'Ad a Ake
12 - Ronnie Rowe
13 - Bedtime Cigar Interruption
14 - Fluffy Fluffy Big Pink Man

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