An Oral, Narcissical, Narcotical, Industrial Affair (1983) C30

I suspect this was one of those ideas which didn't seem quite so amazing to its creator next morning. I don't think CFC025 ever made it into any of CFC's photocopied lists of available tapes, and having slipped it onto the sticker with which he tried to promote the live Nocturnal Emissions cassette which was eventually vinyled as Chaos (tough - if all you beardy hipster shitbags can have your 'vinyls' then I get to use it as a verb), Cause for Concern's Larry Peterson seemed reluctant to further push the thing.

'What the hell is it,' I asked.

'You wouldn't like it,' he said.

'But what is it?'

'It's nothing. Anyway I've deleted it now.'

etc. etc.

Somehow I eventually managed to diddle a copy out of him, no art, no cover, just a tape with those generic CFC labels designed by Kevin of We Be Echo; and I listened to the thing, and it all became clear.

Actually, contrary to Larry's expectations of the morning after, I found it very entertaining.

Download whatever the hell this thing is by clicking on this link.

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Allegory (1992) C40

Allegory was a compilation put together by Mark of Impulse, the only one which wasn't associated with an issue of the mag, and, so far as I recall, dating to the time he was making a go of running his thing as a label - see also Konstruktivists AGM tape and the Muslimgauze 7" he released. I'm sure you're both all familiar with most of the contributors here - Pure Motorised Instinct was Stephen Jarvis from Nagamatzu, Tautologize represents Mark's brief tenure as part of the factor X pyramid scheme, and so on and so forth.

To briefly adopt my Negative Neddy persona, I have to say, thirty years later and I'm still fucking mystified by the brief descent into industrial rock karaoke with underwhelming cover versions of chart smashers by Front 242 and the Throbbing Gristles, not least because I seem to recall Another Headache being somewhat better than this one might suggest; but never mind. Maybe it's just me. Once over those particular humps, the tape settles into a very pleasing rhythm of not-quite-ambient sound concluding with Dark Star's stunning P2C2E.

There was also a tiny wee booklet of artwork with this one, some related, some not at all related and therefore maybe pertaining to persons who failed to stump up their tracks in time (guessing here), so I've scanned that and it's included in the download.

Download the nine tracks, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Pure Motorised Instinct - Shaking Death's Hand
2 - Voltoid - Tragedy for You
3 - Another Headache - Hamburger Lady
4 - Antonym - Cinnamon Air
5 - The Impulse fX - Tautologize
6 - Attrition - The Third House
7 - Brume - Suck Your Bones
8 - Konstruktivists - Untitled II
9 - Dark Star - P2C2E
 
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Chris Duncan - The Broken Crucifix II (1981) C60

While it's generally true that I've hung onto more or less everything over the years - tapes, letters, whatever - there have been occasional clear outs, possibly just for the sake of proving to myself that I could do it, and thus I no longer have cassettes by Two Daughters, Storm Bugs, or La Otra Cara De Un Jardín. I gave them a listen and apparently found them underwhelming, so I gave them away (probably to Jim MacDougall) which I would now regret were there any point in regretting that sort of thing. Amazingly though, I somehow kept hold of two tapes by Chris Duncan, both passed onto me by Glenn Wallis, so I was briefly the Jim MacDougall of Glenn Wallis. I think I kept hold of them for sarcastic reasons, because they seemed rudimentary beyond belief, and maybe there was a little bit of guilt in knowing that someone had put some effort into this work, by some definition, and yet here I was regarding it as crap. I think this general sense of disdain may have developed following a conversation in the pub with Andrew Cox, talking about the good old days of ten years earlier and the DIY tape scene. We realised that we both had tapes by Chris Duncan, and I vaguely recall Andrew suggesting that Duncan had been sending his stuff out to a lot of zines or weirdy DIY artists at one point, and it was all a bit too basic for its own good. Andrew even had some vague memory of Duncan coming up with some amusing sounding name - Duncophonics or similar - for some recording technique he had "invented" which involved something at the technological level of selotaping a toilet roll tube to the microphone. Oh how we laughed.

Nearly thirty years have passed since Andrew and I got pissed and spent an evening laughing at silly simple Chris and his crap tapes, and approaching forty since those same tapes were produced; and amazingly they still play okay, or this one does, despite the unimpressive condition of the Boots CRXII cassette on which my copy was recorded.

To briefly digress, last week I checked my Twitter feed for the first time in ages and there found a response to my sharing the link to a previous tape posted on this blog. It came from a contributor to said tape and the thrust of his argument was what the fuck have you done to our track? - it sounds shit, or words to that effect. What I'd done to his track was digitised it and shared it on this blog, pausing only to clean the cunt up a bit so as to reduce the hiss. Otherwise it sounded more or less as it had done on the tape, the tape from thirty long fucking years ago, or slightly less shit if anything. I got in touch with our man to point this out. I don't recall whether I actually suggested he travel back in time and take the issue of quality up with the person who put out the offending tape in the first place, but I feel I would have been justified in doing so. He rephrased his objection saying that there was no point giving the thing away for free because it was such terrible quality. I still don't know who I was supposedly hurting (apart from His Royal Highness, apparently), and actually, but for some wow and flutter, the track sounds fine to me; and objecting to something from an ancient tape on the grounds of it not sounding like it was taken from a CD recorded at Abbey Road and produced by Trevor fucking Horn seems overly precious to a degree suggesting that our search for the industrial Elton John is finally over, given that I'm retroactively promoting the existence of his generic hasn't been Joy Division tribute act out of the goodness of my own fucking heart and at no actual charge.

Anyway, this unpleasantness has inspired me to a greater degree of sympathy for the under-represented likes of Mr. Duncan, those of us who did what we could without a massive budget, expensive technology, or the patronage of some more famous weirdy music superstar of the day. I say us because this time around I've noticed that there's not a whole lot of difference between Chris Duncan's work and my first few dozen Do Easy tapes; and given the titles and content, I sort of suspect he and I had roughly the same influences - Throbbing Gristle and a bit of Whitehouse, but based on reading about them without actually having heard the records. Chris falls on his arse a few times on this tape, but at least he was trying, and with not a generic Joy Division bass line to be heard; and with hindsight, providing all techno-snobbery is checked at the door, I've heard much worse than The Broken Crucifix, and worse on a better budget. I still don't know anything about Chris Duncan, what happened to the first Broken Crucifix, who he is or was - not beyond this tape and The Vanishing Mother. This tape was seemingly issued as being by Congress of Paris, and by the time he recorded The Vanishing Mother he was Kris Duncan with an industrial K, and that really is all I've got.

In light of previous accusations, I'd like to point out that the wow and flutter on Sputnik seems to be a deliberate effect on Chris Duncan's part, given that the track on the other side of the tape in the same place is unaffected, and the effect is itself entirely limited to Sputnik. Aside from that, I've done nothing to this except clean it up because there was, unsurprisingly, a ton of hiss; and I did that because it's the sort of thing I do, because I give a shit. You're most welcome.

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

Tracks:
1 - Introduction
2 - Hungarian Wedding
3 - Working Brain
4 - Locked Up I
5 - Locked Up II
6 - Military Tattoo
7 - Sputnik
8 - Child Sex I
9 - Child Sex II
10 - The Broken Crucifix
11 - Pedestrian
12 - Final Program
13 - Dark Blues
14 - Lonely
15 - Hello Hello (Is There Anybody There?)

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Total Big - Rehearsal 13 & 14 (1986) C90

Total Big at Max's Kansas City showing(left to right) Porridge, Carl, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Dr. Who, and Loz.

Fans of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV will most likely be aware of Porridge's proposed formation of a band with Ian Curtis of Joy Division, as referred to here.

'I was very good friends with Ian Curtis from Joy Division. In fact, I was the last person he spoke with before he died. We used to talk about Frank Sinatra's early records and how they influenced our phrasing. That crooning style we both had was knowingly done. And the two of us had a plan. Joy Division and Throbbing Gristle were going to play together in Paris, and at the end, Ian and I would announce that we were both quitting our bands to start one together. It was not to be, though.'

However, few will know that Porridge was not telling the whole truth here, because not only did it actually happen, but the full line-up also included television's famous Dr. Who - none other than Peter Capaldi. Porridge played bass and crooning. The singing was handled by both Carl Glover and Ian Curtis of Joy Division, although Ian Curtis of Joy Division tended to sing the more serious words about German cinema of the 1920s and so on, because he was better at the sort of thing and didn't keep laughing half way through. Guitar was handled by myself and that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor, and Chris played the drums. We were called Total Big because, as Porridge explained, it sounded a bit rude like it might be referring to a large penis, and also the initials were TB which acknowledged the thematic continuity with TG, his previous rock band, and also stood for tuberculosis which is a virus, sort of like the word virus which his famous friend William Burroughs used to write about, so that was playful and subversive*. This is a tape of a couple of 1986 rehearsals. Tracks one to fifteen were recorded on 4th May in Chris's dad's garage in Kemsley, Sittingbourne, Kent, and the rest was at my place in Otham, near Maidstone on May the 10th - both a Saturday I think. Unfortunately neither Porridge, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, nor Dr. Who were able to attend either of these rehearsals, so it was just me, Carl and Chris. Further information about Total Big can be found by referring to the index at the foot of this blog entry.

'Art and life really are the same, and both can only be about a spiritual journey, a path towards a re-union with a supreme creator, with god, with the divine; and this is true no matter how unlikely, how strange, how unorthodox, one's particular life path might appear to one's self or others at any given moment.' - Genesis P. Orridge.

Download these thirty-two tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - He Believes
2 - He Writes the Songs
3 - Rock Sandwich
4 - Hail Fellow Well Met
5 - Cold Sore Herpes B
6 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
7 - Are You My Mother?
8 - Call It What You Want
9 - Do What I Want
10 - Louie Louie
11 - Sister Ray
12 - Hey Joe
13 - Armchair Maniac
14 - In My Head
15 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
16 - Hail Fellow Well Met
17 - He Believes
18 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
19 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
20 - He Writes the Songs
21 - Rock Sandwich
22 - Walking in the Rain
23 - He Believes
24 - Sanity Hose
25 - Are You My Mother?
26 - Call It What You Want
27 - I'll Crawl
28 - Louie Louie
29 - Sister Ray
30 - Hey Joe
31 - Cold Sore Herpes B
32 - Madonna
 
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*: Most of this is a lie.

Trilogy - Other Input (1985) C90

This week features a special guest post by the man who actually recorded the thing on the grounds of our having kept in touch (but for a couple of decades somewhere in the middle), and that he naturally has a more informed take on this collection than myself. I'd already released a couple of his tapes on my Do Easy label (which can be found listed in the index linked at the foot of the page) and I had the impression this one was something in the order of tidying up loose ends so as to allow greater focus on the cassette he recorded as Sin, which will probably follow in a couple of months and is a masterpiece in my view. Tom didn't really have a title for this one and suggested I should come up with something, which was unfortunate because my suggestion was so fucking awful I can't even bear to type it out - I'd been very taken with the surreal grammatical phraseology of Lennart Eilersen of Enhoenta Bödlar, author of the mind-boggling Pok-a-Tok fanzine, and this was my lame attempt to weave gold of similar carat. For the purposes of this download, I've opted for Other Input, which Tom wrote on the master copy and which I choose to regard as the proper title from hereon.

Anyway, over to the man behind the music...

Tape to Some Bizarre (2:42) (Dec 1983)
This track started life as a letter to Some Bizarre Records asking Stevo if I could make films and videos for them. I then thought that something as prosaic as a straightforward request was hardly going to get the attention of these “arty” types – so I cut up the text and broke up the words and reassembled it as a kind of poem – with a few stray remarks about hating taxi drivers and Christmas trees (which I don’t – but it was a left over bit from an early recording I made while tripping – which I'm surprised I didn’t suggest for this comp). Anyway the cut-up letter still didn’t quite make it as far as I was concerned and being a Marc and the Mambas fan, I tried singing it over Empty Eyes. That really worked – so after double tracking it to make it more murky and bring in a repetitious quality to my chant, I sent the thing off to Some Bizarre. I never got a reply, but years later I heard from someone who worked at Some Bizarre that my tape had become something of a cult favourite in the office – though no one could figure out what the hell I was asking them for. Well at least I made an impression.

If anyone wants to see the “lyrics”...

“Cut-up” (6:25) (Nov 1983)
A very early piece when I was limited to a Casio VL-Tone, an old reel to reel which I’d picked up for £5 in a jumble sale and my still relatively new Sharp tape to tape. The title is more interesting than the track – which features no “cut-ups” at all – just me muttering and saying the phrase cut-up against overlaid Casio cycles.

Blows to the Head (1:42) (Mar 1984)
More experiments, but with a good deal more purpose. I now had the Roland SH-1000, so I could produce somewhat more gutsy sounds and I had refined the tape to tape echo effect quite well. Although this short tryout of a chugging white noise blast against an ultra high frequency “tune” wasn’t really developed, I recycled the basic sound a month or so later for Our Patience will End.

Such A Lot (2:58) (Nov 1983)
This particular experiment – only my 3rd “musical” recording - was my first attempt to create a song with lyrics and a recognizable tune. While primitive, it’s quite sweet but the just because she has an ugly face… stanza makes me cringe a bit.

Cosmetic Surgery (5:53) (Dec 1983)
First track to use my newly acquired Roland SH-1000 – probably around Dec 26th or 27th 1983. This SH-1000 was a demented beast of a synthesizer which could always be trusted to make the sounds I least expected. I loved it, although I discovered it was useless live. Back in the early seventies my mum had a brief stint as a “Studio Beauty Advisor” selling cosmetics door to door. Given how painfully shy my mum could be this was a truly heroic thing to try, especially in such a tough-sell area as recession hit Cumbernauld. It could only mean my parents were going through some hard financial times – something I was never aware of at the time. By 1983 all of that was a thankfully distant memory but the introductory record was still around – voiced by none other than The Jaw himself, Patrick Allen.  So I mangled the recording and riffed over it with my synth. I think I made two passes – each time double tracking the previous layer – and introducing some stereo panning via my twenty channel Equalizer. I was pretty pleased with the result. I felt I was now in a brave new world of synthesizers. In retrospect I wish I’d called it Cosmic Surgery – but at the time I would’ve probably shuddered at such hippy like connotations.

Elation (8:49) (Feb 1984)
An early SH-1000 instrumental with a nice free form quality to it. This is actually about half of the original recording – the original had a lengthy meandering opening – and either Lawrence or myself probably decided to cut it for tape space purposes. It’s like a pleasant version of something from TG’s Second Annual Report and the double tracking and EQ panning have developed to the point where there is some nice syncopation at various points.

Our Patience Will End (version) (13:36) (April 1984)
By April '84 I was tired of the somewhat ambient stoned sounding instrumentals I was doing and I wanted to create a really full on piece – something that would actually hurt people’s eardrums. Well, how better to kick this off than with a few samples of Adolf H and Goebbels taken from a documentary my dad recorded. (As Lawrence might say, I was in industrial bad lad mode). I had enormous fun creating and recording this one, really getting into the frequencies. I experimented with channeling the two German samples through the Roland and was delighted to find the syncopation of the speeches bleeding into the frequencies. Finally I recorded a ninety second highly rhythmic version of the Blows to the Head sound onto my reel to reel and was able to give the piece an even more manic feel by manually stopping and starting the tape – basically scratching. I think the original was about twenty minutes long and outstayed it’s welcome by about ten, but from this point onwards I felt I had a clear vision of where I was headed musically. The title is the translation of what Hitler is actually ranting. Incidentally almost all of these tracks were recorded in my bedroom in my folks' caravan on the tarmac site we were living on at that time. Given that my folks were never more than fifteen feet away you might think tracks like this caused a lot of disagreement, but I always worked with headphones on and almost never played what I was working on through the speakers. This is another reason that the few vocals I recorded in this period are very subdued.

Do Not Forgive Them (8:10) (May 1984)
(or playing in traffic with microphones)
A shortened version of this full strength Frenzi piece, one of a quintet of feedback based pieces recorded over a few weeks in May 1984 (in retrospect a very productive time). This recording is one of several road-side performances / freak-outs I carried out at this time - in which I risked road-rage from Essex drivers by creating pieces of noise and visual performance live. Armed with my tape to tape this one took place one evening at an underpass just outside Waltham Abbey. Using two handheld microphones (one for each channel) and the natural echo and ambience of the concrete tunnel - this begins with several minutes of feedback music (sounding a bit like enraged whales) then proceeds to some full-on vocal screaming and invective from Frenzi. My "audience" was at best bemused - apart from a disgruntled motorist (at about 2:02) who tries to end both the performance and me...

Batora (3:00) (June 1984)
I was very interested in Martin Denny at this time, having heard Momba from a PTV tape compilation – but when I tried to get hold of one of his albums all I could find was a much later piano only album with no bird sounds to be heard. So I decided to create my impression of a Martin Denny track – with a very tribal vibe. This was one of those tracks that came together incredibly quickly, in about an hour when I was on lunch break from my summer job – working for Tarmac Construction in Hatfield.

Soul Mind (4:50) (Sept 1984)
This is a much more formally experimental piece – with the premise of meeting a girl on a date and the many ways it could go - most of them horribly wrong, but all ending with the same line, and then I went home and I wept. This was a pretty frustrated time for me sexually so I let my imagination run rampant, writing eight different scenarios which I then read over one another, assuming a different version of myself for each. I wanted to see if a meaning would emerge through the jumble of words and different voices. I then added a melancholy melody on the SH-1000 and this is the result. For a while I was unsure of whether I actually wanted to put this out – since I was genuinely uncomfortable with some of the scenarios I created – but in the end I think Lawrence persuaded me it was worthwhile.

Power Control (4:56) (July 1984)
An attempt to do something a little more poppy than my usual – with a lot of scratching on the TV commentator – from a program about propaganda.

Existence (2:24) (Aug 1984)
The second recording using my new echo machine, and my first attempt at synchronising Super 8 footage to my music – although I never committed the results to video. Throughout this summer I was filming material with a video-music project in mind – this would lead to Disease by Sin. So this is a kind of dummy run at themes I was developing for that one.

Point One (4:54) (Aug 1984)
This very spacey sounding piece was my first recording using the Boss echo machine – and boy do I use it. I relished the way even my Casio suddenly sounded rich and luxurious and this would feature on virtually every recording I made from this point on.

Waking Dreams (17:24) (6th Nov 1984)
This one was created simply to fill some space on side two of this compilation. Essentially out-takes and isolated parts from Words Cannot Describe & Pagan Orchestral (as it was later known) which appeared on the Disease: First Movement tape. Since I had just recorded the latter I still had all the separate bounce tracks of the various layers and so I created a somewhat new track for this compilation. 

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

Tracks:
1 - Tape to Some Bizzare
2 - "Cut-Up"
3 - Blows to the Head
4 - Such a Lot
5 - Cosmetic Surgery
6 - Elation
7 - Our Patience Will End (version)
8 - Do Not Forgive Them
9 - Batora
10 - Soul Mind
11 - Power Control
12 - Existence
13 - Point One
14 - Waking Dreams


 
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Opera for Infantry - Scumworld (1984) C60

Here's the second tape I put out by Opera for Infantry, and God only knows why they gave me such free reign with their covers. I think I'd just bought Meet the Residents that week, and that's where the phenomenal pop combo gag comes from.

It's okay. If you need to roll around a little longer, pounding one fist on the floor and crying with laughter, I can wait.

As you will be able to hear, this is essentially a live tape but with the backing track used for the performance taking up the first side on the grounds that it sort of works as a bit of music in its own right, or works as a bit of noise in its own right if you prefer. The gig itself comprises a set of several numbers, but I've digitised them all as a single track, as I suspect that's how it was intended.

As you may well know, Opera for Infantry eventually became the Grey Wolves, so for the benefit of anyone who has a problem with that, or who still suspects the Grey Wolves to have been some sort of covert British Movement recruitment drive, Scumworld is probably as revealing an insight into both their founding and actual political sympathies as you're likely to need - Crass meets Throbbing Gristle if you'd rather get it in primary colours: just listen to the words of the live performance (and the tape is pretty decent quality, all things considered, so they're fairly clear), then reacquaint yourself with Reality Asylum if the penny still hasn't quite dropped. Of course the images were horrible, because they were supposed to be horrible, because it was supposed to get you thinking rather than just nodding your head and agreeing that vivisection was a bad trip. I sort of wonder if it wasn't the frustration of Opera for Infantry actually having to explain that they weren't hoping to bring about some totalitarian state (when their stance was fucking obvious if you bothered to listen), which ultimately drove them to greater extremes as the Grey Wolves. I still have a ton of correspondence from Trev from around this time, and it's obvious that he was frustrated by a certain complacency which he saw as having overtaken the anarchopunk scene. So there you have it, I suppose. 

Thirty years later, I'm surprised at how good this one is - not at all the racket I remember. It sort of makes me wish some enterprising sugar daddy had whisked them off to IPS studios and got some of this material recorded with some kind of sound quality.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Before Scumworld
2 - Scumworld (Amesbury Sports Centre 2/8/84)

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Trilogy - Tapestry (1984) C60

The first full length cassette released on my Do Easy label by someone other than myself was Hopscotch by Opera for Industry (February 1984 I think), and the second - about four months later - was Tapestry by the Complete Trilogy. The Complete Trilogy, whom I seem to recall having been named after some book I'd never heard of, was the work of one Thomas Docherty, whom I suspect got fairly tired of having to explain that no, he wasn't the former manager of Manchester United. He wrote following Larry Peterson having given me the big up in Scum #6 fanzine. He had pretty much the same limited set up as myself, with everything being recorded onto a home stereo, but he seemed to achieve quite a lot with very little, as can be heard on Tapestry - from which I nicked his technique of playing several copies of the same recording out of sync so as to create a sort of budget echo effect. Anyway, I liked the tape so I released it, once I was certain TD - as he signed his letters - understood that I probably wasn't going to make him famous.

The tape sold quite well by my standards, more than thirty, probably not in excess of fifty copies from what I can recall. A couple of the tracks appeared on Black Dwarf's Ars Magna et Ultima compilation, so maybe that was something to do with it. Actually, I seem to recall TD being quite good friends with Tim Gane and the possibility of a Trilogy / Unkommuniti split album was discussed at one point.

Due to his parents' trade, TD lived on a building site in Hatfield and had one of the most amusingly industrial addresses ever, and myself and my friend Grez drove down there to meet him during the summer of 1984. We all bonded instantly over our shared obsession with Laurel & Hardy and TD played us a new track he'd recorded called Words Cannot Describe, elements of which apparently derived from recordings made inside some giant metal pipeline he'd found. To this day Words Cannot Describe remains, at least for me, one of the scariest pieces of mutter mumble industrial music I've heard outside of Heathen Earth or Psykho Genetika - turn off the lights, wack up the volume, and maybe you'll see what I mean.

A few months later, TD decided to shorten the name to Trilogy and revise the tape, replacing Metallic Grey with Words Cannot Describe. Personally I wasn't too sure about this, believing that music albums should be left as products of their time, but I did it anyway. Words Cannot Describe is probably the better track, although oddly I find that Metallic Grey - despite the obvious Throbbing Gristle influence - seems to foreshadow the twisted cabaret sound of TD's later material recorded as Frenzied Encounters. Anyway, I've digitised both versions of the tape, so once you've downloaded I suppose you could shuffle either track six or seven to see which version of the album you prefer; or just keep them both because they seem to work together just fine, I'd say. I should probably point out that the recording volume on the original tape varies wildly, presumably so as to give greater dramatic impact to the really noisy stuff such as Our Patience Will End. I've done what I can, but you may want to fiddle with the volume a bit, and you'll definitely need to wack Words Cannot Describe right up for full impact.

TD is still in existence today and can be found here on YouTube, along with some of the stuff he's worked on over the years since Tapestry.

Download the tape, two covers, flyer and TD's additional notes by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Tropical
2 - Non-Malignant Breakthrough
3 - Our Patience Will End
4 - Clean Recording
5 - The Dark Night
6 - Metallic Grey
7 - Words Cannot Describe
8 - Tapestry
9 - Orchestral

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Matfield & the Pond - Paem Wyrd (1982) C90

I didn't think I was going to have much to say about this one - the work of Matfield & the Pond, a duo comprising David Luery and David Andrews - but in the booklet accompanying the Cause for Concern label's Paranoia is Awareness C90 compilation, I find:

Matfield & the Pond were formed way back in 1975 completely by accident in Dave's bedroom one night. This historic occasion was actually captured on tape for posterity. The initial flood of creativity brought forth songs such as Klingon Jumper and Supergirl, culminating in the legendary Rough Acres tapes recorded in Borough Green. For reasons known only to the Davids, the Pond then split up. One David left after the band had recorded the Pond's Christmas single, and the other David went on to form the excellent band Infants' School.

During this first period the Pond played their only gig at a party in Matfield. General comment among punters was that they had pre-empted the punks' attitude to concerts by some eighteen months. The band deny this and that it merely confirmed their suspicions that concerts were boring to do, and that songs should be written and recorded - full stop.

In late 1979 the Daves reformed. One David actually bought a bass guitar at this period. Later Casio, Harmonium, and Waddingtons' Computone were added. Contrary to popular opinion, the Pond have never used a synthesiser or a studio. Both are unnecessary - studios especially are the death of many good bands. Without them all you have left is your initiative and your own creativity.

Regarding Paem Wyrd, the David with the typewriter describes it as one side songs, the other side based on the Middle English epic Beowulf, all songs recorded at Pond Studio 3 in Matfield, Christmas '81 to Easter '82. I'm therefore assuming Paem Wyrd to be the cassette referred to but otherwise unidentified by Music Emporium's Phillipe Collignon on this Discogs page referring to a later Matfield & the Pond vinyl compilation which I'd never heard of until I checked just last week, and which now regrettably costs a fucking fortune.

Matfield & the Pond were formed by accident in the attic of a small cottage in Matfield. It was a direct response to the punk revolution in that it entered the spirit of anyone can do it. A musician and a non-musician exploring the idea of write, record, forget. It was an entirely non-profit making collective that released three cassettes on the alternative home recording circuit. No promotion, entirely word of mouth.

Pondsongs and Beowulf was the first double release in about 1980. It sold about three-hundred copies. The price was the cost of the cassette plus nine pence to cover the cost of the Revox it was recorded on. It sold a lot in Europe, noticeably in Italy and Holland. (A video recently surfaced on YouTube constructed by an Italian fan). This cassette was the culmination of their appliance of non-musicianship combined with musicianship plus strongly written songs. [some other cassette, the account seems a bit vague here] sold 787 copies worldwide purely on word of mouth and prior to the internet. It was released in 1982. It has been compared to Syd Barrett, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Comus. It doesn't sound like any of them. They also appeared on the compilation Paranoia Is Awareness along with Throbbing Gristle and the Apostles.

Not Quite ‘It’ was a compilation put out by a record company in Bexhill. The band refused to accept any money. All of their material is currently unavailable although it has been digitised and remastered.

Well, I suppose that roughly squares with the first version. I bought this from Larry Peterson who released it on Cause for Concern with the catalogue number CFC024, and I bought it because Toxteth had been one of the best tracks on Paranoia is Awareness. That said, I've never quite been sure what to make of the full length tape. I'm assuming the name might be some sort of pun on Canterbury progsters Hatfield & the North, and certainly Paem Wyrd betrays certain proggy tendencies, not least a few slightly wearying attitudes about what counts as proper music; but on the other hand, it's tuneful, generally nicely done, and with a few belly laughs here and there.

Enjoy.

Download the twelve tracks, cover and information sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Talons So Finch
2 - Toxteth
3 - St. Francis of Assisi
4 - Calculator Zombie
5 - The Pond Go Jazz
6 - Fanfart / I Give You... Cod
7 - En Ni Wun Kan B
8 - Les Bleus
9 - Spaced Out Laid Back West Coast Hippy's Lament
10 - Earwigo
11 - Tenderly
12 - Paem Wyrd


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The Dovers - Nobody Never Told Me Nothing About No Lights (1992) C90+

That's Maydew House in Bermondsey which would be where we recorded the material on this tape, because I can't be arsed to scan a boring generic cassette inlay card. Carl's flat would be somewhere at the bottom on the right, and I think Danny Baker lived on the floor above at some point. The arbitrary title of this cassette derived from a conversation I had about double negatives with fellow Catford based postman Micky Evans who said this was his favourite one, as uttered by some bloke on a television documentary. The tape was recorded by Carl Glover and myself on Carl's portastudio between Sunday the 27th of October, 1991 and Saturday the 25th of January 1992, except Tim Song, which wasn't on the original tape. Tim Song and the recordings immediately before and after were recorded on Saturday the 11th of November, 1991 with Christine - Carl's girlfriend - as part of a tape letter sent to my friend Tim. This seemed as good a place for it as any. There are plenty of other entries concerning the Dovers to be found elsewhere on this blog so if you're still confused about anything, please refer to the index which can be found at the foot of this one.

 

As for the stuff which isn't self-explanatory - 8-Ball 8-Ball Martin De Sey, named in honour of a former Cravat, was us going through my address book and insulting everyone in alphabetical order. There's a longer, probably funnier version on one of the other tapes. Cheer Up, Gen is the very definition of self-explanatory but I mention it so as to request that anyone of my acquaintance who happens to know him please refrain from grassing me up. It was a long time ago, he probably wouldn't get it anyway, and yes - I'm sure he has a great sense of humour. Ghost Dance is almost a Prince Buster cover. Telstar Air Strip was done for a Joe Meek themed compilation done by Chainsaw Cassettes, but the bloke didnae like it.

 

The Glenn referred to in passing at the end of the tape was, as is probably obvious, Glenn of Konstruktivists, Whitehouse, former Throbbing Gristle handler etc. etc., this being around the same time Carl and myself recorded stuff with him which ended up on some Konstruktivists CD or other. Anyone who calls themselves a true fan of the Gristle will therefore already have this material on the luxurious 360g splatter-effect vinyl triple album released by Waitrose Org a few years ago, much to the envy of those lightweight Johnny come lately part timers who were still listening to Captain Beaky when we were snorting nose candy off Chris Carter's gristlesizer backstage at Knebworth.

 

Crazy times. 

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Partial Bastard (version)
2 - American
3 - 8-Ball 8-Ball Martin De Sey
4 - Tell Him About the Rabbit
5 - Tales of Tom
6 - Two Men Standing on a Rock
7 - I Can't Wait
8 - Cheer Up, Gen
9 - Wooden Head
10 - Don't Know What to Do
11 - Measuring Rooms
12 - Everyman
13 - Big Mouth
14 - Ghost Dance
15 - Telstar Air Strip
16 - Pink Brick Town
17 - Ed is Great
18 - Alan Retentive
19 - (Maydew House 16/11/91 I)
20 - Tim Song
21 - (Maydew House 16/11/91 II)

 
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