Network 10 (1982) C60

No proper tape cover so er... that's my artist's impression of Phil Beesley, the man behind Network 10. I haven't been able to find anything on the internet either.

Back in May 1985 I was sharing a student rabbit hutch in Leeds village, near Maidstone in Kent with a poet called Steve. Steve was hard work at times, but we sort of got on, and he let me release his Lead Shoes tape on Do Easy, my tape label. Phil Beesley was his pal from back home, possibly from school, who came to visit and stayed over the weekend. Typically, everybody liked Phil a whole lot more than they liked Steve. He was a big bloke, like a Rugby player, but fairly quiet, almost to the point of seeming shy. It also turned out that he played a shitload of instruments and recorded his own music, and this is the tape he lent me.

Anyone who saw the name Network 10 and started pulling on their army boots and camouflage pants in fevered anticipation of a good old EBM stomp and a frown whilst thinking about how Mussolini actually had some good ideas will probably have stopped reading by this point, saving me the effort of suggesting they fuck off. Network 10 actually sound like the Dead Hedgehog band that got away, and they even have a song about a hedgehog - influence of Cabaret Voltaire and Wire conspicuously absent, softly psychedelic pub rock with a touch of early Quo, and no apparent fear of novelty records. It was the sort of thing I shouldn't really have liked, but there was something infectious about it, and Phil clearly had an ear for a tune. I know some of it skates close to the edge, notably the chorus of oh no don't do it, Percy, but fuck it - rather listen to this than whatever boring shite the Wire is banging on about this week.

Not sure about the last three tracks. I get the impression they may have been from some other demo which I simply taped on the end. Phil had initially started off recording under the name Army Sergeant (which thankfully didn't last because it sounds like Frank Sidebottom's take on industrial techno), and I have a feeling the last three tracks may actually be an Army Sergeant demo.

There were a couple of years back there where Henrietta Blues I turned up on every single here, you have to listen to this tape I did for anyone.

Wherever you are, Mr. Beesley, thanks. This was some good stuff.

Download these twelve tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Invitation
2 - Henrietta Blues I
3 - Percy
4 - Jigorama
5 - 25 Too Much
6 - A Day in the Life of the Suburban Hedgehog
7 - Mediterranean Holiday
8 - Come Tomorrow
9 - Henrietta Blues II
10 - Killing Me Softly
11 - Don't Talk About Fashion
12 - Delirious

 
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Do Easy - Gravesend (1987) C90

I'd pretty much lost interest in Do Easy by 1987, and finished art college that summer meaning I no longer had access to any decent recording equipment, besides which I was playing guitar for Total Big by then so if I had energies, I expect that's where they were going. Gravesend was a tape which had been laying around unfinished for a while, never really considered for release, and which I suppose took form as part of a ferric spring clean during which (I assume) I added the two versions of Saxon Chief and gave titles to tracks which had been without one up until that point. Typically, considering it's basically here's some shit I had left over if anyone cares, it's probably a better tape than any of the earlier ones into which I put a bit of effort.

Rubbish Like You was a postal collaboration with Trev Ward, then recording as Nails ov Christ. He sent me a tape and I added to the noise. I assume it may have appeared in some form on his Fear Eats the Soul, but I'm not certain because I never actually had a copy. He probably didn't know where I lived by the time it came out; or he thought I was a bit of a knob or something.

We Can Build You was similarly a postal collaboration with Thomas Docherty of Trilogy. I'm not sure if this was me roping him into the whole Death Pact International tape thing, or something in its own right. I think the percussion track you can hear eleven minutes in was from a live improvised thing by Steve McGarrigle, Garreth Roberts and myself which I'll post here at some point, if I haven't already.

Arnold Layne was recorded with this guy, and I have no idea why. I don't even like Pink Floyd, and I don't remember ever particularly liking them.

Life is a Domestic Bliss cover. I have a vague feeling I was collaborating more and more, or trying out cover songs (which I'd never done before) in an effort to reignite my enthusiasm. Anyway, Domestic Bliss were probably what you'd call local heroes when I was growing up. They released a single called Child Battery, of which Life was the b-side, and Simon Morgan worked in Discovery Records, my local independent store, and was as such the man who sold me my copy of Never Mind the Bollocks. Simon is a great guy and his more recent works can be found on his Bandcamp page. I might ask him if I can digitise Child Battery for this blog. It's still one of my favourite punk singles, and the original of Life somewhat pisses all over my slightly whinier version.

Saxon Chief, arbitrarily named after the pub in which I spent most lunchtimes while at art college, was the very last thing I ever recorded on my beloved Sharp double tape deck before it gave up the ghost back in 1985. I never really worked out what to do with the track as it steered a bit too close to Depeche Mode even for me, so it remained instrumental and ended up on this tape because I realised I was never going to get around to finishing it off. The drum machine was programmed by Mex, by the way.

Sound Levels in Arabia is here remixed from the original in an attempt to make it less shit, which didn't really succeed.

Music for Carol happened because someone called Carol asked me to do some music for her. I think she was going to write songs and sing over whatever I came up with, but I don't think she liked what I came up with, so never mind.

All That's Left apparently also features Steve McGarrigle and Paul Mercer playing in some capacity, but I accidentally taped over it and this was all that was left of the track, hence the title.

I've a feeling the track I've called Gravesend was actually something I recorded and sent to Trev for finishing off under the Death Pact International banner. Who knows?

The title of both the tape and the track of the same name was added much later for the sake of completism, probably early 1988 when I went for a job interview in Gravesend and found the place depressing beyond belief. The similarly arbitrary photo chosen to illustrate this blog post (taken in Leamington Spa in 1984) because this one doesn't really have a cover, just an inlay card which isn't really worth scanning... ahem... the similarly arbitrary photo was chosen because it looks how I felt when I caught the bus to Gravesend on that not particularly fateful day.

Anyway, this one is probably better than you might expect from my Eeyore-esque hard sell, and despite the moment where I shout I'm surrounded by fools! Honest.

Download the twelve tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Rubbish Like You
2 - We Can Build You
3 - Arnold Layne
4 - Life
5 - Saxon Chief I
6 - Sound Levels in Arabia (remix)
7 - Music for Carol
8 - All That's Left
9 - Love is Dead
10 - Time Killer
11 - Gravesend
12 - Saxon Chief II

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Lead Shoes - Lead Up the Garden Path (1985) C46

Unlikely Records - whom I suppose might be best remembered for an early release of those Milovan Srdenovic numbers which were eventually reissued as Songs from West of the Pelvic Girdle - sent out a request for material. Put your best stuff on a C50, suggested Robert Cox, and if I like it we'll release it on Unlikely Records. I put together a Do Easy tape, which was rejected for obvious reasons, but I also mentioned the proposal to Steve Coots, with whom I shared a house. Like myself, Steve was on the Time Based Media course at Maidstone College of Art. To be honest, he could be fucking hard work at times, but he was often funny and I really liked the music which he recorded in the college sound studio under the name Lead Shoes.

 

Unfortunately, Unlikely Records didn't seem to like Lead Shoes any more than they had liked Do Easy, so I offered to put the thing out on my own label. Lead Up the Garden Path, was Steve's best of tape. There's a potted history of the band on the cover, included with the download, which I can't be arsed to type out here, but for what it's worth I recall Eat Your Peas as being fucking great, and I really wish I'd kept a copy, or that Steve had included it here, but never mind. Steve was into a lot of music which I couldn't stand and still can't - Pink Floyd and Genesis, but also Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and those guys, the influences of which you can probably hear on this collection. Neither the Cockney Rejects nor Sham 69 had established much of a presence in his record collection. I'm not even sure he owned a copy of Machine Gun Etiquette. Mental.

 

Lead Shoes were named after a pseudo-surrealist film by Sidney Peterson which Steve loved, although I wasn't that impressed when I saw it as part of our film course. Steve later ended up in a somewhat laboured wacky folk band with Charles Thompson called Heads on Springs. They were a sort of trying too hard hey kids, poetry isn't just for squares type operation which I prefer not to remember in detail, just as I prefer not to remember sharing a house with Steve in detail, but even with such unpleasantries in mind, it has to be said that the guy recorded some fucking great music. It also has to be said that Steve McGarrigle's wonderful trumpet playing on a few of these tracks didn't hurt.

 

This tape makes use of Brian Eno's old EMS synthesiser and the poorly quantified involvement of someone from ...and the Native Hipsters. There were two covers because the first one didn't photocopy very well, featuring a photograph of the head of a tailor's dummy called Norman. Steve had Norman placed at an upper floor window of an earlier house in which he'd lived so as to cause innocent passers by to shit themselves when they caught sight of him.

Download the twelve tracks and two covers by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Sniffing Glue
2 - My Street
3 - Baseball on Sunday
4 - Beautiful Dreamer
5 - Drowning in a Coffee Pot
6 - Submerged
7 - Blink
8 - Night Soiler
9 - Holding My Nose
10 - Four Legged Friend
11 - Waltz
12 - Happy Feet


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v/a - Moraals (1985) 2C90

I'd already done one compilation tape, and I wanted to do another, but an hour just didn't seem long enough to include stuff from all the people I knew, either by mail or in person; so a double C90 set it was, and I figured I may as well throw in some sort of accompanying booklet of band artwork seeing as that was what everyone else had been doing, or at least what Larry Peterson had been doing. By the time it all eventually came together I had moved out of my parents' place and was half way through taking a degree at Maidstone College of Art, and the thing had been dragging on for ages. My enthusiasm was therefore probably a little diminished, although honestly it probably didn't make a lot of difference. The thing was always going to be what it was, although I gather certain contributors were somehow shocked when their contributor copies turned up in the post, having somehow garnered the impression that I was some kind of luxuriously funded arts institute and individual copies of Moraals were to be presented as 180g collectors' vinyl discs encased within a hand crafted marble lecturn supporting a hardbound edition of artwork pressed in gold leaf on hand crafted paper. I was fucking eighteen and financed by pocket money, a paper round, and then a student grant, most of which I spent on beer and fags. It was the best I could manage at the time, and bollocks because I still think it sounds pretty great. The "booklet" was actually hand photocopied sheets inside an artisan clear plastic envelope of the kind purchased in packs of twenty from WHSmiths, but then I wasn't going to blow half my grant at the printers without some sort of indication that people might actually buy the thing. I sold a few copies as I recall, but not many, although my publicity machine was kind of winding down by that point. Yes, that's probably the reason.

Anyway, here's the lot - all three fucking hours of it split into two separate downloads so as not to clog up your internet connection and spoil the enjoyment of anyone who happens to be watching episodes of Ice Road Truckers on Netflix in the next room. The cassette cover - as designed by Klive Humberstone of Tex Mirror H, who also suggested the title - is included with the second download, and both cassettes had the same cover, in case you were wondering why there only seems to be one of them. Also included in the second download is a folder containing scans of all of the booklet artwork I have at my disposal. The pages for Mex and Opera For Infantry are missing as they all featured naughty pictures which I felt uneasy about stuffing into my luggage when I flew back to England to retrieve this material, and I'm not sure there ever was any Family Patrol Group artwork.

Mex produced some of the greatest pop music ever recorded so far as I was concerned, and it was a great moment when he sent me a tape for my compilation. I would have punched the air if I'd been American back then. He is still in existence today, and you should conduct further investigations here.; Trilogy was my friend Thomas Docherty (not to be confused with etc. etc.), author of some of the greatest weirdy sounds of that whole era, and I'll be ripping some more of his old tapes once I can rescue them from across the seas but if you're unable to wait, have a rummage in his YouTube channel.; Members of Tex Mirror H achieved wider recognition as In The Nursery and, as I say, Klive provided the cover and title of this compilation. They also had a track on an Adventures In Reality compilation.; Saul Pol Koatep was half of AOT 418 who released tapes through both myself and Anal Probe and others. I think they had something to do with the New Blockaders, and Saul was behind the Hypnagogia label, if anyone remembers that.; Do Easy was obviously myself, apparently trying hard to turn into John Cougar Mellencamp at the time of recording, although I definitely don't remember it as a conscious ambition. Still, the other two tracks are all right, I suppose.; The RSM, standing for Rob, Shend, and Mart, were an improvised music project initiated by my friend Martin, who also contributed as Mart E. Knee. The Shend and the Rob in question were Cravats and later Very Things whom Martin knew fairly well, having been a founding member of the former. Martin's YouTube channel can be found here.; Scram Ju Ju was David Lebens-Wankling, formerly of Urge with the semi-legendary Kevin Harrison, and whom I first encountered as a contributor to Gary Levermore's Rising from the Red Sand compilation. Apparently I was the first person to write to him as a result of the Third Mind tape, which is kind of depressing. He should have done a song about a murderer or summink.; Anarchist Angels were a bloke called Steve from Sunbury-on-Thames plus friends, and their As the Innocent Suffer tape remains one of my all time anarchopunk faves and is as such due for a ripping just as soon as I can get hold of my copy. Steve's tracks are probably my personal favourites of the whole compilation, possibly excepting those by Opera For Infantry, who of course later scared the living shit out of everyone as the Grey Wolves. Trev said something in his letter like we were feeling a bit sad when we recorded this stuff, and he's probably ashamed of it these days, but I still think these two tracks are wonderful. I also have a tape of Opera For Infantry rehearsing as a punk band with guitar, drums, and Trev yelping about TV standing for technological valium - just trying something different, and another one for the retrieval list.; Thee Unkommuniti, as you're probably aware, was Tim who later achieved wider recognition with Stereolab, of whom you can hear formative traces in this stuff if you listen closely. Vinyl-on-Demand put out a boxed set of Unkommuniti material a while back, but it costs about a million quid and anyway I still have all the tapes, thank you very much.; Lead Shoes were two Steves from my degree course, one of whom was much nicer than the other one and with whom I am still in touch on friendface. I think he's some sort of dance/techno luminary these days.; Also from my degree course was Paul Mercer who named his thing after a phrase in an article about bats which described them as Acrobatic Champions. For some reason he found this funny, but then he was kind of gothic in certain respects, and I always thought his music was excellent - in fact I still do, even though apparently we hate each other's guts these days - and there is some more of it here.; NKVD is Glenn from Konstruktivists who sent me these early versions of tracks which ended up on Black December.; I started writing to Family Patrol Group after I saw them supporting Whitehouse in Birmingham. They had split by the time I was putting together this compilation, but Colin suggested I lift some sections of noise from their tape Fear Death By Water, which was what I did.; and the rest were mostly people I was writing to or swapping tapes with at the time.

Download the twenty-two tracks of the first tape by clicking on this link...

Tracks:
1 - (introduction)
2 - Mex - The Kid is a Little Monster
3 - Trilogy - Do Not Forgive Them
4 - Tex Mirror H - Out of Reach
5 - Saul Pol Koatep - Thou Shalt Not Kill
6 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Len Fairclough
7 - Human Trapped Rhythms - Fish Tale
8 - Tryouts - Superior Human Beings
9 - Do Easy - Inspecting the Experimental Grain Fields at Ostia Near Rome
10 - The RSM - Rounds A No. 14
11 - Scram Ju Ju - After All
12 - Anarchist Angels - One in a Million
13 - Help! Help! I've Got My Head Stuck Down the Bog! - I'm In Love (With My Lavatory)
14 - Unkommuniti - Winterkill
15 - Do Easy - Nobody Can Describe How We Truly Feel
16 - David James - Pooh Disease
17 - Lead Shoes - Baseball on Sunday
18 - Anarchist Angels - Sick But A Shepherd
19 - NKVD - Eastern Vein III
20 - Acrobatic Champions - Three Minutes
21 - Scram Ju Ju - Ruled by the Heart
22 - Opera For Infantry - Time Is...

...and download the second tape, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - David James - Untitled
2 - Tryouts - If You Take Advantage of Me
3 - Human Trapped Rhythms -The Message (Roll Down and Die)
4 - Tex Mirror H - Absorption
5 - Family Patrol Group - Extreme Nature
6 - Mart E. Knee - Bone Structure
7 - Unkommuniti - To Us Unseen
8 - Anarchist Angels - Untitled
9 - Do Easy - Our Tune
10 - Opera For Infantry - It's Later Than It's Ever Been
11 - Lead Shoes - Sniffing Glue
12 - WEOJ - Pyromania
13 - Family Patrol Group - The Fight Is On
14 - Acrobatic Champions - Order and Disorder
15 - Cause For Concern - Me Mucking About
16 - Anarchist Angels - Force His Mind
17 - NKVD - Eastern Vein IV
18 - Do Easy - Pair of Trousers
19 - AOT 418 - Beckie's Mission
20 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Eggy Soldiers
21 - Family Patrol Group - Fear Death by Water
22 - Mex - Simplicity

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