Acrobatic Champions - Inbuilt Psychedelia (1986) C60

Here's the last I have of Mr. Mercer, another one of those I would have released on my Do Easy label but for being skint and having lost all enthusiasm for underground tapes at the time. I didn't actually even ask for this one. He just gave it to me as a compilation of previously unreleased material, even though I hadn't got around to doing anything about releasing Strange Days, his previous tape. All I can remember is that he'd been recording a tape called On the Beach in the college sound studio - all on TEAC using Eno's old EMS suitcase synth and with a bit of a Gira influence on his vocals, fucking excellent and maybe the best thing he'd ever done, I thought - and that was going to be a Do Easy tape, and then suddenly it wasn't and he gave me this instead, and I disliked the title due to my hatred of Pink Floyd; and then nothing happened until last week when I digitised it, and here we are.

With hindsight, this may be the best thing I've heard done by the man - given that I never had a copy of On the Beach: moody soundtrack or ambient work which pisses all over Lustmord, quite frankly, and does a lot of those things which would allow Nine Inch Nails to buy Charles Manson's old house some years later.

World of Alun seems to have been some sort of dig at the late Alun Jones, the former Apricot Brigade drummer who went on to play with the Dentists for a while. Whatever our boy's beef was, I expect it was most likely unjustified and I actually happened to think quite highly of Alun, so I was going to abbreviate the title to just TWOA or something, but ultimately couldnae be bothered. You can't really make out the words anyway, so I don't suppose it matters.

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

Tracks:
1 - Music for the End of It All
2 - Fish Head
3 - Pointless Song
4 - Another Pirhana After the Tape
5 - World of Alun
6 - Be Myself Again
7 - Marriage in a Western Town
8 - So Excited

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Acrobatic Champions - Strange Days (1986) C60

Here's another one from the former bestie who no longer talks to me because I think I'm cool. Oh well. This was to be a tape on my Do Easy label, but never came out because I'd lost enthusiasm for the whole enterprise, and crap and inferior though my tape covers were, I wasn't sure how I felt about Paul going against my Rotring pen minimalist aesthetic with his admittedly superior cover art. Also he'd taken to changing the name under which he recorded about every three months, and by this point was apparently calling himself Pröl, derived from his spelling his name Porl, which I find a slightly irritating affectation; so it's still Acrobatic Champions, so far as I'm concerned, just as it was with the first two tapes.

Not sure what to make of this one. It's not as amazing as I remember it being, possibly because I'd forgot about the inclusion of live tracks, material he'd been trotting out since Die Brücke - and I wouldn't be surprised if he's still playing some of that stuff in pubs even now. On the positive side, I still genuinely love most of this material, and think they were great songs, and that Paul could have been fucking enormous but for his tendency to keep shooting himself in the foot, time after time after time, ultimately alienating even hardcore sad sack fanboys such as myself. In his defence, he was - shall we say - unwell at the time of recording some of this, a combination of certain unfortunate recreational habits and circumstances described on Nightshift - actually the soundtrack of a video he shot about working nights in a plastics factory, which apparently wasn't as much fun as it may sound.

If only Situation Two or one of those labels had chucked a bunch of money at the poor fucker and got him started with No Heart and Tin Men as a single. We'd still all be talking about what a great record it was now, but never mind.

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

Tracks:
1 - Not This Time
2 - No Heart
3 - Tin Men
4 - Compression
5 - Watching from Outside (live)
6 - The Audience (live)
7 - You Fill Me (live)
8 - Hallo Hallo Hallo
9 - Tabbs
10 - Nightshift
11 - Heart Like Glass (live)
12 - The Car
13 - Secret Architecture
 
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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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Acrobatic Champions (1985) C60

Not to be confused with its predecessor, the similarly untitled C15 with a cover which looked almost exactly the same and which can be found here. This was the album released in the wake of the hit single, I suppose, and everything useful (or otherwise) I may have to say about the Acrobatic Champions has already been said here - and that's the same link as was provided in the previous sentence, in case you already clicked on it.

 

So that leaves us with just the music, which is probably better heard than discussed. Most of this was recorded in the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art on a couple of four track reel to reel machines, making extensive use of Paul's own WEM Copycat echo - as you will doubtless notice. Most of it is just Paul, although I played bass on the first two tracks and electronic percussion for the two performances - both played in different areas of the aforementioned college with audience comprising whoever felt like standing around and watching for a bit.

 

On reflection, I realise that most of this music would now be termed dark ambient, except of course it's about a thousand times better. I know I've had my differences with the bloke, but Jesus - this was some good shit, yes siree.

Download the C60 and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The Sound Room
2 - You Fill Me
3 - AV142
4 - Mirror Glass
5 - Performance 1
6 - Hand on White
7 - Flowers (part)
8 - Performance 2
9 - Negative as Before
10 - The Audience
11 - Carmilla


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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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Do Easy - This Can't Go On Forever (1987) C90

Here's another Do Easy tape which was really just a collection of stuff rather than anything intended to be listened to as an album of any description, and it's actually a C60 but I found Improvisation 1986 and Pause on the end of another tape, and they seem to have been from around the same time as the rest of this stuff, so here they are.

 

The first four tracks, which you may notice sound marginally less shambolic than the remainder, were intended as demos for some sort of 12" EP I had a vague plan of recording - seeing as how I had free access to a studio and Brian Eno's old EMS suitcase synth and everything. The idea would be that I'd re-record them without all the screw-ups at some point, then cut a disc and become rich and famous, but I had no money to pay for pressing or any of that shit so I lost interest. I was experimenting with perfect pop, like all those dudes in the pastel suits, whilst additionally influenced in equal parts by the Apostles and Nocturnal Emissions' Songs of Love and Revolution album (an influence which extends to a few of the other tracks on this tape), and it's probably significant that Slowing Down is basically a rewrite of That Was Then but This Is Now by ABC, although I didn't notice it at the time; and yes, I know the lyrics are fucking terrible.

 

Steve McGarrigle played trumpet and almost certainly aided with programming on the first three tracks. Pete Avery sang backing vocals on Slowing Down, which was a bit of a mistake on my part - having backing vocals both louder and better than the main vocals, but never mind. Charlie Adlard, he of Soul, the Cosmic Rays, and who now draws The Walking Dead comic (and is as such probably the man to blame for why you can no longer turn on the telly without seeing zombies) played drums on Fucking Bastard and fire extinguisher on Lies - which was inspired by a dream I had featuring a Target Doctor Who novel apparently called Lies. The cover was predominantly yellow and featured Sea Devils drawn by Chris Achilleos. Ian Elliott is the gentleman with the Newcastle accent who can be heard enthusiastically agreeing that Steve Kütz is a fucking bastard on the song of that name, for that's who it was about, because I'd shared a house with him and the guy was a pain in the arse, quite frankly. Possibly ironically, Steve Kütz plays bass on Garreth is a Pervert, which was just the three of us mucking about. I guess he was less annoying that day.

 

Do Easy was never really intended to be anything but me and whoever else could be bothered, but Garreth Roberts probably came closest to making it a duo. He features on this tape on Fucking Bastard, Groove 1889, Garreth is a Pervert and Lies, and most of the singing which obviously isn't me was by him. I later re-recorded Groove 1889 for the Illyana Rasputin tape but Garreth failed to show, so I still prefer this version. Smilin' Paul Mercer sings on Decay. Improvisation 1986 was performed by Steve McGarrigle, Garreth Roberts, and myself - the TBM department at Maidstone College of Art was built in such a way as to make a sort of natural arena of the roof of the ground floor printing department, formed by the four inner walls of our own first floor department. Garreth, Steve and myself were bored so we set up a load of percussion instruments out there and just banged away for a bit, and I recorded it.

The woman you can hear laughing on Surveillance II achieved brief infamy a couple of years earlier when she appeared accessorised with her dead grandad's false teeth on the front page of The Sun newspaper as an example of why punk rock was an affront to common decency and all that good stuff.

Download the fourteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - This Can't Go On Forever
2 - Human Fly
3 - Slowing Down
4 - Fucking Bastard
5 - Groove 1889
6 - Garreth is a Pervert
7 - Your Arms
8 - Lies
9 - Who You Are
10 - Spit Hop
11 - Decay
12 - Surveillance II
13 - Improvisation 1986
14 - Pause

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Do Easy - Italia 1912 (1986) C90

This wasn't so much an album as a tape of bits and pieces which eventually filled up, at which point I decided it probably would be an album if I ever got around to doing a cover, which I didn't. The title probably refers to some Futurist thing which had caught my attention and which I liked because it sounded exotic and mysterious, or possibly ominous. You know how it works, I'm sure. The er... title track wasn't actually the title track up until last week. Both tracks six and fourteen had self-consciously wacky titles up until I digitised the thing and decided to change them, or at least disguise them in the case of PJWFY-F, which originally stood for PJ Wears Fluorescent Y-Fronts.

'What shall I call this one?' I asked Steve McGarrigle.

'PJ Wears Fluorescent Y-Fronts,' he quipped in jocular fashion, and thus was it so.

Anyway, here we have three tracks of Steve and myself rehearsing with Peter Jones in preparation for the gig which was recorded on the previous tape. Steve plays trumpet, some keyboard, and programmed most of the the Yamaha RX15 drum machine for these rehearsal tracks and elsewhere on this tape. Also the piano coda - I suppose you would call it - of Italia 1912 is actually myself trying to play one of his compositions. It's what was on the tape which I recorded over, which is why you hear it at the end, so when I was mixing this thing I guess I thought fuck it, and left it going. Peter Jones, or PJ of the alleged fluorescent underwear, played either bass or keyboard on the rehearsals for the live set, but I can't remember which - probably keyboard.

Talking of live material, track five is an eighteen minute live improvisation. I set up a load of instruments, or at least things which generate noise, on the three landings of a stairwell in the illustration department at the art college. The idea was that anyone who happened to be passing could join in and make a racket, and the three performers, whoever they were, would be unable to see each other, so no-one would know who else was contributing to the sound. According to the inlay card, the performers, aside from myself, included Martin Smith, Mark Orphan, Steve McGarrigle, Peter Avery, Brendan Mooney, and Martin de Sey. I recognise Martin de Sey hooting away at the end, closely followed by some comments from Kirsten Butler and Charlie Adlard - the Walking Dead guy. Brendan Mooney is the one who turns the thing into Johnny Kidd and the fucking Pirates, the little bollix. He ended up as guitarist in Dave Vanian's Phantom Chords, as a point of probably negligible interest, although it links my rock family tree to the Damned, which is nice.

By the way, the more observant members of my huge fanbase may notice that some of this material actually predates that which appears on the previous tape, but I don't think I filled this tape until afterwards - in case that one's keeping anyone awake at night. 

The rest of the tracks were things recorded in the college sound studio, which was fairly nicely equipped with several four-track reel-to-reels, a Wasp synth, an old EMS suitcase synth bequeathed to the college by Brian Eno, a mixing desk, vibes courtesy of Bob Cubitt who was one of our tutors and something to do with ...And the Native Hipsters, and a brand-spanking-new Ibanez harmoniser. Mostly I was just fucking around, seeing what I could come up with. Some of these tracks ended up as soundtracks to videos. Gaze Upon the Doom That Was Foretold! was er... inspired by the cover of an issue of 2000AD comic; and Live in Fear was Jane Hanley and myself just seeing what we could come up with. Jane sings and plays the flute on that one, which is possibly why it's a bit easier on the ear than the rest of this crap. According to my notes, Paul Mercer did something on tracks seven and thirteen, although I've no idea what. Maybe he was stood in the corner of the studio making balloon animals. That's the sort of thing he used to do all the time, that and the Punch & Judy at the weekends. Oh how that man loved to make us smile.

I'm kidding, by the way. I don't really think it's crap. Actually, considering some of the clunkers I've posted here, I mostly quite like this one.

Download all fourteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Protein Suppressant
2 - Cover of a Magazine (rehearsal)
3 - Something In Me Isn't Right (rehearsal)
4 - Salute the Future! (rehearsal)
5 - Maidstone College of Art, Maidstone 22/10/85
6 - Italia 1912
7 - Gaze Upon the Doom That Was Foretold!
8 - Live in Fear
9 - This Says It All
10 - In Control
11 - Tachyon & Neon
12 - Hello David
13 - Galley Slaves
14 - PJWFY-F

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Do Easy - In the New Southern Territories (1986) C60

I was eighteen-nineteen and I'd just left home, moving from Warwickshire to Kent, so the title was intended to invoke the bold spirit of adventure 'n' shit, and particularly because this was the first Do Easy tape recorded entirely in a county other than the one in which I was born. It was also the first Do Easy tape for which I never got around to making a cover and flogging to strangers through the post. I recorded it, gave it a name, wrote on the inlay card, and stuck it in a box with the rest; which I suppose might be a shame given that it was arguably better than at least the previous five or six tapes I'd turded out under the assumption of quantity and quality being more or less the same thing - not saying it was a classic, but it definitely wasn't quite as shit as some of them.

At some point during the recording of this tape (May 1985 to January 1986), Thomas Docherty of Trilogy (whose tapes I also released on the Do Easy label) came to stay at the house in Leeds village for a couple of days. We spent a lot of time talking about recording and I picked up a lot from him, not least multitracking tapes so as to produce the echo effect heard on Wrist Job Alley. I think the title of Tom's Kitchen - which was recorded in the kitchen at Hollytree House in Otham - was some sort of acknowledgement of his influence. Also around this time I started to make use of the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art (at which I was taking a degree) which had a four track TEAC and a ton of relatively fancy equipment - not least being Brian Eno's old EMS suitcase synth. Let the Bayonets Speak!, had I ever finished it, would have been the first Do Easy 12" single - or so I had decided. Obviously the plan never came to anything because I was unable to generate money, or even to not spend it on records, which is probably for the best given that I was simply exploring controversial ideas and images in borrowing the title from one of Benito Mussolini's zingers.

The multi-talented Steve McGarrigle programmed the rhythm on Let the Bayonets Speak!, it being his Yamaha RX15, and also for the live set at the Good Intent in Rochester, for which he additionally played trumpet and possibly some keyboard too. The live set came about because Paul Mercer of Apricot Brigade was booked to play a solo set under the name of the Acrobatic Champions - himself with a backing tape, guitar, and a load of effects. He asked if I wanted to support and I said yes. I recruited Steve and Peter Jones and between us we worked out a rough framework around which to improvise on the night, which is what we did. It probably wasn't the most amazing night anyone ever had seeing a band at the Good Intent, but we enjoyed ourselves and that's the main thing. I think Steve later became some sort of jetsetting DJ producer type and he has a couple of releases listed on Discogs as Saturnalia.

The chorus of Bayonets was shouted by Steve McGarrigle, Melissa Darvall, Peter Avery, Mark Enright, Garreth Roberts, Jon Storey, and Nick Scullard. The rhythm on Something In Me Isn't Right was programmed by Paul Mex, and the rhythm you can hear intermittently on Tom's Kitchen is from a tape Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire made for Kevin Thorne of We Be Echo and which Kevin kindly copied for me. One of the loops used on Tom's Kitchen was recorded by Nicola Percy, I seem to recall.

So there you go - as with most of my stuff, the tape suffers from terrible teenagery lyrics inspired by my continued failure to have sex with girls, and a general approach to music production amounting to fuck it - that'll do, but for the most part I'm still able to listen to this one without too much wincing. 

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Something In Me Isn't Right
2 - Wrist Job Alley
3 - Let the Bayonets Speak!
4 - Tom's Kitchen
5 - The Good Intent, Rochester 8/11/85
6 - Push You Down the Stairs
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Do Easy - The 35th Release (1985) C60

So I'd started at Maidstone College of Art and had already been insulted by Traci Emin. I'd successfully gained entrance to a nude female lady of the opposite sex, at the same time pissing off my oldest friend who had been labouring under the illusion of her being his bird - as described in more detail here; and then in a display of irony so massive that interstellar travellers could have settled on it and started a new life, she'd dumped me for some fanzine bloke. I wasn't a happy bunny by any description of the term. Worse still I seemed to have mislaid what I regarded as my musical mojo. The tapes had dried up. I'd recorded a few things but the complete change of surroundings combined with my discovering pubs had proven confusing. Additionally, I think I may have begun to realise that my Do Easy material wasn't as amazing as I had originally thought, so I had grown frustrated with my inability to produce anything which still sounded all right the next day. Partially this was because since The Fourteenth Metal Tape and the er... singles, I'd put out a compilation, was working on a follow-up, and had also released tapes by Opera For Infantry, Trilogy, Sin, Acrobatic Champions, and Adventures of Twizzle, all of which even I could tell made my own stuff sound amateurish and poorly realised.

Anyway, by 1985 I had vaguely enough new material for a full C60, and this was it. The live recording from 1984 was mostly improvised by myself with Henry Probert and Dave Browning of the Shining, and improves substantially once I've got the pound-shop William Bennett out of my system. Dave and Henry came over to my house in Shipston the week before and we'd worked something out together, and it ended up sounding like this. The remaining tracks are a mix of things recorded as soundtrack material - a fuller account of which can be found here - and generally disappointing attempts to recapture the Do Easy magic of yesteryear. I was miserable, but not very good at articulating it without sounding ridiculous - although I still quite like What's the Fucking Point?

This ended up being the last Do Easy tape I released, the last for which I did a cover and which I sold to anyone through the post. I continued to record music as Do Easy, particularly when in the second year of the course I was granted access to the college sound studio, and although I always intended to sell tapes of that stuff, I'd stopped caring about the tape label by that point and never bothered.

This one's some way short of a masterpiece, so download at your peril. The one thing in its favour is that it almost certainly sounds worse to me than it will to anyone else. 

Download the full hour of unrelenting misery by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Green Dragon, Stratford-upon-Avon 6/8/84
2 - Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck Up '86
3 - Project
4 - Pagan Filth
5 - All in the Mind
6 - Within These Walls
7 - What's the Fucking Point?

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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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Family of Noise - New Golden Age (1992) C90

Family of Noise was what I did after Illyana Rasputin - same kind of deal but with a slightly different approach to composition. This time if I fucked up, I recorded it again, and kept on doing so until it sounded all right - as opposed to just deciding that'll do and leaving in the mistakes because I'd read somewhere that mistakes were interesting. Having been recording my own stuff for about a decade by this point, I was getting a bit pissed off at the continued failure of my work to translate into cocaine and blow jobs, so Family of Noise - name taken from a shared love of both Luigi Russolo and Dirk Wears White Sox - was a sort of year zero thing, going back to the start and trying to not fuck it up this time. Most of this cassette was recorded in a single week of May 1992, as noted in an audio letter to Tim Griffiths dated to Saturday the 9th of May, 1992:

It's about a quarter past ten and I've had an absolutely brilliant day. I'm on holiday this week, and instead of going away as I was going to do - I was going to go to Glenn's place in Norfolk - I'm going to stay at home. I've borrowed a mountain of stuff - instruments and recording equipment  - from Carl and Andrew. I've been going at the music like nobody's business today. I haven't felt this good in years. I've recorded three unfinished pieces, unfinished because they still require vocals. It's been good stuff. I've been very pleased with it.

The other good news this week is that I got a letter from Paul Mex. He's given me the go-ahead to do a cassette of the very best of Mex, the early years, taken from the cassettes he did in the early eighties which I always thought were brilliant. Earlier today I recorded a cover version of one of his songs as it happens, although it's instrumental only. I won't be able to record vocals on any of this stuff until the end of the week at the earliest when I've mixed all the music down to two channels.

Anyway it's about half past ten now - time for a cup of tea and a fag, read a few comics and then go to bed. Tomorrow I'll be up about six, go for a walk, go to the bottle bank, walk over to Greenwich park, get some inspiration, come back and have breakfast, and then I'll get down to some more recording.

Then in an audio letter to John Powell dated Thursday the 4th of June, 1992, I report:

I was on holiday recently for a week and I was going to go and stay at Glenn's place but I just couldn't get my act together to save up some money for it, so I stayed here and borrowed loads and loads of equipment from Andrew and Carl and spent an entire week recording music. It was a really good week. I really enjoyed it. I'd get up at half past six every day or something ludicrous, then just get out, go for a walk; I've got my bus pass so I would go somewhere I had never been before, then walk around and think about it. It was nice weather that week as well. I'd get a bit of inspiration, come back, have an enormous fried breakfast, and get down to recording at about ten, sometimes working solidly right through until eight at night. I got most of the music for the Family of Noise tape recorded then, including also a version of Have I the Right? by the Honeycombs for the Joe Meek themed compilation that Chainsaw Cassettes are doing. It's probably the worst bit of music I've ever done in my life, but I'm quite proud of it in a funny sort of way. It sounds like a cross between the Bonzo Dog Band and something off the first Psychic TV album.

Back to the Family of Noise tape, I did quite a few cover versions. I had a system of working which was to do a cover version - something I insisted on doing such as Song of the Snake; then an updated version of an old Do Easy track such as Knife in My Side or Kick the Dwarf; then do a new bit, which is just something I'd have roughly worked out like Charlotte or New Face in SE13. I recorded about three tracks a day, and when I'd done that I'd go over to Carl's place and mix them all onto chrome tape, and because Carl's portastudio runs at ordinary tape speed I could then take that tape and add a couple of vocal tracks on what would ordinarily have been the second side. Some of it worked out okay, but I only have a very rough mix at the moment. The vocals on Rain are appalling. The mix will be different on the final thing, as well as the running order because the last two tracks, Theme and Interlude were really just an afterthought and to make up the time on the cassette, because it was the end of the week and I didn't have time to record anything else.

As you will have noticed I did a version of your own Psychosis, which I'm very pleased with actually. I borrowed Andrew's sampler and managed to lift some of the original sounds from your tape. I've been listening to your tapes and have only just realised you did a vocal version, because what I did was lift phrases from your letters and use those, to do nothing is to do everything which was something you said of Sid Watches Telly, that sort of thing.

Some of the stuff could be better, I mean in the case of tracks like Knife in My Side and Within These Walls. They're both quite old and I could have changed the lyrics because they're not quite appropriate to me in 1992, but I couldn't be bothered, so they're more or less the same as they were first time around.

That's probably more information than you really need. To condense it further, Knife in My Side, Kick the Dwarf, Within These Walls, and Mеня Зовут Яд are revised versions of old Do Easy tracks, the latter having originally been titled Image Control; Into the Valley covers a classic by Mex rather than the Skids, and Rain was originally written and recorded by Exhibit A and appeared on The Thing from the Crypt compilation on Mex's Dead Hedgehog label (still available here); the Virgin Prunes-esque Song of the Snake was my cover of the superior Thomas Frenzi original, and was apparently about Porridge based on some unfortunate personal experience; Psychosis and Tin Men were similarly covers of songs by people whose fame was about equivalent to my own, tape-wise, respectively John Powell of Hoax! zine with his musical hat on, and Paul Mercer of Envy - who appear elsewhere on this blog.

As noted above, I never actually finished this tape in that this was never intended to be the final mix. I think I just began to feel a bit self-conscious about having borrowed Carl's portastudio for probably a year or more, so when I gave it back and failed to buy one of my own, New Golden Age was pretty much forgotten. I suppose it's a shame, maybe. I still quite like some of this, or at least the ideas were decent, if not the execution. You can probably tell I was listening to the Severed Heads quite a bit.

As for what any of it's about: mostly about it having been a great many years since I'd previously had sex with a naked lady and my frustration with this sorry state of affairs, about what total knob's certain people were (my friend Rajun's girlfriend and her SWP pals in the case of Charlotte, then a fanzine editor and some guy from a band I was in - but not Glenn or Carl, obviously) in the case of Life's Mistake; and about attempting to remain optimistic despite reasons as to why this might seem foolish in the case of the title track.

Download the seventeen tracks and inlay card by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Theme
2 - Into the Valley
3 - Sometimes I...
4 - Knife in My Side
5 - Song of the Snake
6 - New Face in SE13
7 - Kick the Dwarf
8 - Psychosis
9 - New Golden Age
10 - Interlude
11 - Mеня Зовут Яд
12 - Rain
13 - Mean Streets
14 - Within These Walls
15 - Tin Men
16 - Charlotte
17 - Life's Mistake

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