Family of Noise - Rough Versions (1996) C60

Bit of a dud this week, I'm afraid, but no-one's forcing you to listen to this shit and maybe it will sound as amazing to you in 2019 as it apparently did to me in 1996.

Yes, 1996: I'd just left Academy 23 (or possibly UNIT - can't remember what we were called at the time) because learning all those progressive rock symphonies was beginning to feel a bit too much like homework and I was getting tired of playing other people's songs, not least because I thought mine were better. I was going through a bit of a pre-mid-life crisis crisis and trying to reinvent myself as something less ridiculous, and thusly decided there was no good reason why cunts shouldn't be learning to play my fucking songs for a change. The clock was ticking, so I placed an advert in Melody Maker calling out for musicians with the intention of Family of Noise becoming something which played gigs and got paid. I got a few replies, more than I expected, and made up a demo tape to send out to the authors of those responses which hadn't obviously been prank calls. I was going to reinvent myself as some sort of hybrid of Courtney Love and Marc Almond and these were to be the songs you will be playing, I told my potential minions, should you be good enough to join my amazing band.

The first guy was an Elton John style keyboardist and an American then living next door to Emma Thompson. He said my tape reminded him of Fad Gadget, which seemed fair enough, and he was probably the gayest man I've ever met. He was also massively talented and way out of my league, so I suspect had replied more for the sake of making friends with other weirdos in a foreign country.

The second guy was about fifteen and lived in Chatham with an older, seemingly long-suffering girlfriend. He raved about Hummingbird and then strummed and sang one of his own songs, proposing we might add it to the set. It was called Morphine and suggested not so much that he'd had experience of the drug, but that he listened to a lot of Nirvana records. I reversed from the flat giving a series of positive McCartney-esque thumbs aloft signals, got back to London, then phoned the poor cunt and told him I'd changed my mind.

Finally I met Gareth who, so it turned out, lived around the corner from me. He was already in a band, specifically a popular Queen covers band as their John Deacon, and I don't think he'd been particularly impressed by my tape, but something I'd said had apparently given me away as a fellow Doctor Who fan (this was before it came back to the screen and was shit in 2005), so he got in touch mainly out of curiosity, and we never formed a band but have been pals ever since.

The universe was trying to tell me something, and that was to not bother forming a band. With hindsight I realise that the universe was probably right. While these tracks aren't entirely without their qualities, I couldn't really sing and the lyrics of which I was once so proud are unfortunately spattered with all sorts of faintly ludicrous references intended to make it sound a bit edgy and dangerous, which it actually wasn't.

The first four were from New Golden Age; I don't think My Remaining Eye ever appeared on anything; Hummingbird and The Girl Who Has Everything were eventually recycled as War Drum tracks; New Breed became UNIT's This Hour's Mine, which is a bit of a sore point; Cenotaph, my token dalliance with martial industrial bollocks, turned up on some UNIT tape I haven't got around to digitising (and probably won't bother); and Shit Factory (which was massively influenced by Third Door from the Left and was recorded in Lewisham with the involvement of the late Andrew Cox of Pump and MFH) ended up on War Drum's Year One tape which I haven't bothered digitising as most of the tracks were from other tapes. Also, the original master is a C54 which truncated the end of Shit Factory. As this tape is a compilation, and not so much a straight digitisation as a reconstruction from the original source tapes, there didn't seem to be much point in truncating the last track for the sake of authenticity, so it's the full version.

Download these ten ill-advised tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Song of the Snake
2 - New Face in SE13
3 - New Golden Age
4 - Tin Men
5 - My Remaining Eye
6 - Hummingbird [inst. version]
7 - New Breed
8 - The Girl Who Has Everything
9 - Cenotaph
10 - Shit Factory
 
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Ceramic Hobs - The Garage 21/6/03 (2003) C40

This was a Mad Pride event of some description, hence the opening address by Tim Telsa who wrote something in the Mad Pride anthology put together by Robert Dellar; and this is a tape of the gig I was sent by Stan because I'm on it, so not an official release or anything. I had joined the Ceramic Hobs on stage for about thirty seconds during their previous appearance at the Garage, improvising some shit or other so as to prevent Simon reading excerpts from the Qur'an - which he threatened to do in the event of no spontaneous audience contribution being forthcoming. This time I wrote out a whole thing as an LDB performance, which is track six. I spent a few weeks memorising it, and still forgot a few parts. I'd sent Stan a tape of what I planned to do over an arbitrary loop from Illmatic, assuming the Ceramic Hobs would probably just jam while I dropped science, as we say in the rap biz, but for some reason they used the loop and just sort of noodled over it. I hope no-one was under the impression I was expecting them to use that loop from Illmatic, but never mind.

The gig was recorded due to Stan of the Ceramic Hobs suggesting I hang onto the tape recorder, except I was performing, so I left it with Dave (Apostles, Academy 23, UNIT etc. etc.) and my friend Eddy who had come to the gig, possibly to lend me moral support, or even immoral support. Anyway, that's why you can hear myself, Dave and Eddy yacking away at the beginning and then again at the end of the tape. You can also, if you listen closely, hear Jim MacDougall loudly delivering edgy comments and observations from elsewhere in the audience just in case anyone had stopped thinking about him for a moment. Crazy times.

Sound quality is a bit rough, but it sort of works, I think. Apart from me, it was a pretty great gig, which I'd say comes across on the tape.

Download the evidence by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Introduction (Tim Telsa)
2 - Knight's Move
3 - Native American Healing Chant
4 - Would You Like to Kiss Me?
5 - When I Was a Little Boy
6 - We Don't Do Like That feat. LDB
7 - Xanadu in Veins
8 - Amateur Cops
9 - Lone Twister
 
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You Are Hear 21/10/03

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This week's free shit will probably be of limited appeal beyond my wife and anyone who was actually on the show, but it's a recording of a radio broadcast: You Are Hear presented by Jim Backhouse and featuring me as a guest, plus a live session by Noxagt, which went out on Resonance 104.4FM back in October 2003. Jim invited me on to play a load of Mexican stuff and then attempt to form sentences giving account of the same, which was more difficult than you might think. So I suppose you could call it a podcast, if you really want, despite the lack of quirky ukulele music.

 

It's here on my blog because I am very, very vain, but also because the music is mostly worth hearing, and Jim put on a good show. This is as much of the show as would fit on a hastily located C90 at the time, so it's not all of it, but it's probably as much as you need (and is in any case as much as I have). I've glued the end of side one to the beginning of side two so as to allow for continuous play as a single track, and I haven't broken up any of what Jim played into individual tracks because that would be fucking stupid.

 

I'd like to think that I'm a bit more able to string a sentence together these days without all the mumbling and gasps of exasperation as I labour to recall even the simplest, most obvious words, but my more recent performance on the Raconteur Roundtable podcast shows that this simply isn't true. Oh well. Hopefully you can get something from this regardless. There were a couple of digital glitches here and there, but I've kept them because I'm lazy and I think they were part of the show, and ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ON LIVE TELEVISION. That's also me you can hear asking whether everything is okay immediately following Noxagt accidentally eating their own drum kit during broadcast. They were playing in the studio downstairs, requiring that I go down and check that no-one had actually died, which thankfully they hadn't. Crazy times.

 

Featured music comes from Hanatarash, Kovert, Palais Schaumburg, various unidentified Zuni and Tepehuano musicians, Delfino Guevara, Antonio Zepeda, Tribu, Noxagt, Ceramic Hobs, the Noblemen, DJ Tranquilizer, UNIT, War Drum, and one other whose name I can't work out.

Download the show by clicking on this link.

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War Drum - Complex Adaptive System (1998) 12"

This would have been a five track 12" EP except I never managed to get the money together to have the thing pressed, and the longer I waited, the more I realised no-one would buy it or even want to distribute it, and eventually I stopped caring. I seem to recall that Mark of Impulse fanzine (and Konstruktivists) ran me off twenty-five CDR copies, but my disillusionment with CDRs had set in by the time they came in the mail and I never did anything with them. It was recorded at JTI Studios in Brixton with Ian McKay engineering - same place as various Alternative TV and Skullflower records, and (as I've only realised just now) Ramleh's fucking fantastic Blowhole album. It would be nice to think some of the magic rubbed off, but it probably didn't. Anyway, I was at JTI recording a load of stuff with UNIT, probably material for the album which never happened and (frankly) would have been about a million times better than the one which did, and I've a feeling there were a couple of days we had booked upon which it turned out that Dave or Pete or someone wasn't going to be able to make it. Andy was going to ask Ian, who ran the place, if he could just have his money back for those days and let someone else make use of the studio, but I said I'd pay for those days and use them to record some of my own stuff. So that's what I did. This was January and February, 1998.

 

As you can probably hear, I was suffering from neofolk poisoning at the time, but never mind. Penitent wasn't really supposed to be on the non-existent 12" EP, but I recorded it seeing as I had some time left after we'd finished the first five. Lonesome Town is a Ricky Nelson cover, for some reason which made sense in 1998, and the other tracks, excepting Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G, are fancier versions of things I'd already recorded on various War Drum tapes, as can be found elsewhere on this blog. Most of this was just me, although Andy Martin sang backing, played drums, and delivered the spoken vocal on Shoemaker. Ed Pinsent, whom you may recall from either Pestrepeller, Mystery Dick, Sound Projector magazine or his Resonance FM show, played guitar on Shoemaker.

I don't know. It all seemed to make sense at the time.

Download these six tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - A Marriage
2 - Toltec Inheritance
3 - Hummingbird
4 - Shoemaker-Levy 9, Fragment G
5 - Lonesome Town
6 - Penitent
 
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War Drum - War Drum by War Drum (1998) C90

Usual terms and conditions apply as previously stated here, particularly regarding martial shit, the token bit of neofolk karaoke, and Thanksgiving because it's fucking awful and sounds like one of those shitty Ibiza comedown tracks, all hopefully mitigated by potentially bewildering covers of material by Link Wray and All Saints. I was fairly pleased with this one, for the most part. The tracks came out more or less how I hoped, and it was all recorded on a four-track with access to more technology than had been customary for me. So pleased was I that I splashed out on a two-colour cover so as to invoke the national flag of my beloved Mexico. 

By this point I had given up on rock, pop, industrial, and other music made by white people because it had mostly turned to shit. I went through a period of just listening to old classical albums, and by the time it came to this cassette I was getting into rap, garage and R&B, thanks mainly to people at work, and the influence of that stuff can be heard here in places; although Twilight Years owes its existence to my encountering the first seven studio albums by Iron Maiden in a junk shop on Lordship Lane for the same number of quids and all in good nick.

Andy of the Apostles, Academy 23, and UNIT handles the vocals on Flaying of Men, and whilst we're here, America, Awake! was my adaptation and repurposing of Academy 23's Europe, Awake! to hopefully less dubious seeming ends given that the perspective is changed from that of a white European to a Native American. I wasn't a Native American at the time, and I'm still not one now, but my intentions were noble.

Download the twenty-four tracks, cover and lyric sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - One Handed Tormentor
2 - Protomammal
3 - Plains Dweller
4 - Crusader
5 - Nanautzin
6 - Twilight Years
7 - Soul Rebel No. 1
8 - Blood Garage
9 - His Day Sign Was Fortified
10 - Take Everything
11 - Rollergirl
12 - Ce Quiahuitl
13 - Sixth Extinction
14 - Scapegoat
15 - Java Sunday
16 - Thanksgiving
17 - Fat Back
18 - My War Drum
19 - Flaying of Men
20 - Remembrance Day
21 - America, Awake!
22 - Love for the World
23 - Yei Mazatl Quecholli
24 - War of Nerves

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