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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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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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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