Peter North - Singing Fish (1984) C30

Here's another tape that wasn't actually a tape (but which I've labelled C30 because that's probably what it would have been were it a tape). These were five tracks Larry Peterson sent to me in case I wanted to stick them on a Do Easy compilation, presumably because Peter North had sent them to him and he was winding down his tape label by then. I was also winding down my own tape label at the time so nothing came of it. Peter North sent me a few tapes and I seem to recall one of them being three C60s with hand-tailored artwork (possibly Laminated Studies), and there was another tape when he morphed into Nort BC, which was the name he used for the two of the cassettes which appear on the Discogs page. They featured hand tailored covers - photocopies with rubber stamps and felt-tip colour, - but all I can recall of them was that they mostly sounded like Fish at Liberty, which you have here - someone dropping marbles onto a glockenspiel through an echo box for a long time. So, although they sound kind of interesting in small doses, a little went a long way, which is probably why I no longer have the tapes he sent me although I sort of wish I did.

 

I know. I'll bet you can't wait to hear it.

 

I still don't really know what to make of this stuff and I have to admit it didn't get a lot of rewinds from me back in the day, but listening to this now in 2024 I'd say the man was ahead of the curve with the weirdy tape manipulation stuff. With hindsight, I'd guess three hours of this was just a bit too much to work as my introduction, but I'd still buy a vinyl reissue if there was one out there.

Word of warning - there's also, as I have just discovered, a significantly better known Peter North who worked in the adult entertainment industry, so Google may let you down in this respect if you wish to know more; and if you came here looking for more of the star of the North Pole series, I'm afraid you're very much in the wrong place. This Peter North lived in Clapton in east London and wrote nice letters.

 

Download the halibut, perch, tench and Nemo by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

1 - The Singing Fish
2 - Fish at Liberty
3 - Walking with Mr. and Mrs. Fish
4 - He Fish Here in Gaps
5 - She Fish Here in Gaps

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Man's Hate - President Botha Kills Children (1986) C30

 

I'm going to assume you're already familiar with Man's Hate, having downloaded this one, stuck it on a tape, then flogged it on eBay for a monkey after describing it as a rarity from my collection, you tosspot. I'm sort of cheating here because this was never an actual tape so much as five tracks on a cassette which Andi sent to me for my third Do Easy label compilation, the one which never happened because I'd run out of steam by that point - which was a shame because these Man's Hate tracks were, as you will hear, fucking gorgeous. Much as I often felt a great deal of sympathy with the anarchopunk cause, listening to those records often felt like being back at fucking school, so thankfully some people made the effort and gave you a reason to listen to their stuff, sweetening the message and thus - in my opinion - communicating it with more force than the increasingly traditional monochrome rants about Thatcher; and Andi Xport sweetened the message with killer tunes and a soulful voice. So enjoy.

More punky scrapings from somewhere beneath the barrel next week, readers! 

Download the righteous fury by clicking on this link.

Tracks:

1 - Men and Women on Horses with Dogs
2 - President Botha Kills Children I
2 - Dewhurst the Master Bastard
2 - A Dog's Tale
2 - President Botha Kills Children II

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Deadly Fish - First 1 (1985) C30

 

From the age of about fifteen to some point in my mid-twenties I made up a series of compilations which I anarchistically named The Illegal Tapes, and for which I drew covers and everything. It was shite I'd taped off the radio or borrowed from friends - anything which wouldn't fill a whole C60 because I didn't like loose ends. The series ran to 122 volumes before I could no longer be bothered, all of which I still have, you probably won't be surprised to learn. Anyway, having recently discovered that most of them still sound fine despite being forty years old - with the exception of anything recorded on a Sony CHF - I've been working my way through and digitising anything which seems like it should be preserved, notably demos or similar recordings sent to me while I was running my tape label, Do Easy - if someone sent me three tracks on a C90, well obviously I was going to fill it up and include it in the series. So that's what will be happening here for the next month of so...

I have no idea who the Deadly Fish were. I recall it as being one tape of many given to me when my friend Carl cleared out the office of Maidstone College of Art student union, notably including all the demo tapes he'd been sent by people who were after a gig. I assumed that Deadly Fish must have been one of them, except the cover mentions Yelverton, a village in Devon which is one hell of a distance from Maidstone meaning this tape probably came from somewhere else unless the Deadly Fish moved to Maidstone in search of fame and fortune - which seems a bit unlikely. Anyway, I taped over the worst of these demos, but not the Deadly Fish. They sounded sort of shambolic, and hardly the sort of thing which would have done well on an art college stage in 1984 given that we'd all just discovered James Brown and were pretending we'd always liked him, but - I don't know - once you get past the slightly self-conscious cover of Strychnine, I personally find it hard not to be swept along by the general enthusiasm and driving bass of their pissing around in a village hall. Maybe you will too.

 

Download all nine tracks plus artwork by clicking on this link.

1 - Strychnine
2 - Disillusion
3 - Wild Thang
4 - Live in the Living Room
5 - Thrones
6 - Dead Fish are Smelly
7 - (Wilder Than) Wild Thingy
8 - Untitled
9 - Week-End

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Headmen - 1986 Demo Tape (1986) C30

Here's some more material excavated from the tapes to which they were copied, and reconstructed much like one of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. The Headmen sent me the first six tracks inviting me to pick something for the third Do Easy compilation tape - which never happened, in case you were wondering. I think I was going to use Resolution, so the bloke did a new mix and sent it to me along with something else he'd been working on, so those are the last two tracks here. He also sent the above page for the proposed booklet which would accompany the tape, but obviously didn't in the end.

...and that's about as much as I know. I didn't keep the bloke's letters (hard to believe but I don't actually hang onto everything) although I have a vague impression of his name being Richard Smith, or Richard something, or maybe John Smith, or somebody or other Smith, and possibly from Reading... maybe. There were tracks by the Headmen on a couple of volumes of Mindscan Tapes' UK Electronics series which I assume would have been the same operation, so maybe Rob Maycock would have an idea, assuming he's out there somewhere.

Shame I don't know more because I was quite impressed with how expensive this material sounded - far from the usual tapes of people's lawnmowers I was getting sent at the time. It's something in the general vicinity of Nagamatzu or early Attrition if you need further inducement.

Download the octet of tracks plus cover by clicking your rodent on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Resolution
2 - Snake Eyed
3 - The Magus
4 - Waiting
5 - City 7
6 - Glass
7 - Resolution (version)
8 - Untitled
 
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Frenzied Encounters - From The Mind of Frenzi (1986) 2C60

Here's the final double tape spectacular recorded by the being which had already given us the Complete Trilogy and Sin, now reborn as Frenzied Encounters. Unfortunately by this point my enthusiasm for almost anything at all had taken a bit of a nosedive, so I never got around to releasing it despite recognising it as potentially the Physical Graffiti of the weirdy tape scene. Now over to the man himself...

Thanks to Lawrence’s dedicated digitising of his tape archives, the double tape album I made for his Do Easy label finally sees the light of day after thirty-three years.

Almost eighteen months elapsed between Disease and From the Mind of Frenzi, in part because my studies were taking up more of my time and musically I was changing direction. I’d gone as far as I could with industrial type music and wanted to collaborate with others. This period also saw my transition from my old tape to tape method of building tracks to working with a Tascam four-track, meaning I could remix and re-record elements with a flexibility I didn’t have before. All of this changed and refined the sounds I was creating and while I was in no hurry to create a new tape, I built up quite a backlog of material and experiments. As a result From the Mind of Frenzi is more of a collage than previous tapes, with a polished feel to it and tracks segueing organically into one another.

Another element that changed was that I’d begun performing live. In early May of 1985 I met performance artist/film-maker Kaprice Kea. With him and his group You Stink of Fish I made my first documented live appearance – at Dingwalls Dance Hall in Camden Town. This whetted my appetite for live work and Kaprice became an important friend, film and occasional music collaborator. Between the You Stink of Fish show and the following year I performed three times live, in wildly differing circumstances.

The first was as a last minute entry in a contest of the bands at Battersea Arts Centre (which You Stink of Fish also entered) in June 1985 – and at which my band Sin improbably won third prize, performing four songs using backing tapes and with percussion from Jeff Thomas – who was a full time mortician and sometime member of TOPY. This performance came together in about thirty-six hours as Jeff, his girl-friend Joolz and myself worked around the clock putting together a backing tape, which we then rushed to the place and performed the drum and vocal bit live.

Incredibly, it all came together – giving me the illusion that all shows could happen this easily. Jeff, his girlfriend and I seemed to have real rapport, so it was a bit of a mystery that the collaboration went no further. In addition to the third prize, I also attracted my first ever girl-friend.    

So this was why people played live!

The second performance occurred in a Ramsgate squat at a New Year’s party, in which Kaprice performed percussion and manipulated the backing tracks. The squatters were about to be evicted so didn’t care what happened to the house and were literally tearing the place apart as we performed.

The third was almost pedestrian by comparison, a self-organised gig at my Bulmershe College in Reading. For this last show I actually didn’t use backing tapes and played a fully live set as Sir Thomas and the Frenzied Encounters Machine, with Mark Manhattan from You Stink Of Fish on guitar and college friend Steve Middleton on drums. That show started well, but disintegrated after the half way mark into a series of half-baked improvisations.

During this time I also recorded sporadically on my own, and had begun work on the soundtrack for Kaprice’s film Virtues of Nature, as well as several non-gig performance and spoken word pieces. I’d also started recounting my dreams into a cassette recorder each morning, all of which material found it’s way onto the following track list.

Listening to it now, it’s an odd mix of vaguely poppy songs, one or two raw freak-outs, some stabs at Blake inspired poetry and some genuinely powerful stuff; but it really represented who I was at this time, and to anyone listening, you’re probably closer to the real me (circa 85-86) than just about anyone I knew at this time – other than my friends, Mssrs. Burton and Kea.

Tape 1 - Side A

You Who Do Not Live (*)
This was the first song Jeff and I performed at my first official gig – at Battersea Arts Centre.  Since the show wasn’t recorded, I simply overdubbed the backing track a few days later. My voice is a bit cracked because I blew it out in the gig itself. Joolz plays double bass lending it a classier than usual feel. A deceptively low key start to an intense tape.

Slander (spoken) / Ill Met by Moonlight
Two for the price of one here & quite a pairing!

I let rip about what I thought of most people I knew circa April 1985. Not quite through the first year of my Film & Drama Degree course, I was increasingly disenchanted with those around me, and a number of London friends too. One night after a few snakebites it all boiled over in one of the more blistering few minutes of ranting. The funny thing is I still agree with every word. This recording is also important because I coin a motto which became a lifetime credo - aspire to inspire. Listen to the track and you’ll understand.

At the end of this a Baran Drum starts beating and we have a slow fade in to Ill Met. I think Ill Met is my strongest song and it’s important to know how it evolved. It started life with that persistent pounding drum beat, recorded one afternoon in cemetery junction after I came home from College. It was eight minutes of concentrated drumming and at the time I didn’t have a conception of what it was for. A few days later I borrowed a friend’s guitar, loosened all the strings and laid down a menacing bass line with the drums. Then I played some sort of guitar line on top (very messy because I never learnt to play. This was certainly an atmospheric piece but I had no idea what to add next, so I laid it aside.

Another couple of days later, I came home, thought I should try putting a vocal to this piece, plugged the microphone into the Tascam, started to intone – and this is what happened. For the next few minutes I became two characters, a middle aged man and a small child. As I sang a tragic story emerged. I was totally 'in the zone' while performing this and it just came together' in one horribly perfect take. When I finally hit stop I stared at the machine for possibly thirty seconds, just completely numb and then slowly felt the tears well up inside me. I’ve never felt like this before or since in a recording situation.

It’s a song I returned to several times over the years, live with backing tracks in 1987:

...and a 16mm short I made with Mark Manhatten in 1992:

Lullaby / 28th December '82 (spoken)
Another mix between two tracks. Lullaby was a little throw-away thing I wrote for my second year video, which was called Video Nasty and dealt with censorship. The song was written for a scene with a homeless girl who is mugged as she makes her way to sell her ghetto blaster. It’s deliberately sacharine and sung in a very high key so as to be like a nursery rhyme. As Lullaby mutates into a decaying series of sounds we next hear a spoken word recording from four years earlier. 

28th December '82 is the date of my first acid trip at age seventeen, which I took at a friend’s Christmas party and which was still in my system as I returned home the next day. For most of the party – even while I was tripping – I’d concentrated on reading the Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive – for some reason from the end to the beginning. So the next morning – in full Morrison mode, I felt inspired to write and then declaim this piece about the various people at the party and what was going on in my head. Somehow this crazed recording was made with my parents in the next room – with no idea how wired their son really was. I always liked it.

Easy Way Out (aka They Always Fail) (****)
Probably the last track recorded for this. Originally titled They Always Fail, this bitter-sweet love song with Casio backing was recorded in summer 1986 in my room in the house I lived at in Reading. I was very besotted with a beautiful Swiss German lady I’d met by the name of Lisa, and for about eight weeks that summer I was a very happy chappy – although I realised it couldn’t last. Lisa unfortunately was married to a member of Psychic TV, then touring Europe and she wasn’t about to leave him. So this song already predicts what will happen. By the time I mixed From the Mind of Frenzi, Lisa and I were already a thing of the past.

Aspire To Inspire (hidden track)
A noisy revisit to the moment in Slander where I coined the phrase.

Tape 1 - Side B

Have Mercy on Her
Another strong track, recorded only a few minutes after I completed Ill Met. I needed to work out the truly horrible feelings I had after Ill Met, and turning the tape over, I played the track backwards, and did so with a new vocal and a fragmentary Casio melody line. Again this was in real time. I start off chanting in a pseudo Japanese voice. I wanted it to sound like a religious ceremony – and as the backward voices from Ill Met built up, I began calling out and singing phrases, the first one being don’t be so clinical before I started the Have Mercy on Her lament. Never as well regarded as Ill Met, this one has a special place in my heart. One thing I like is the texture – dense, Satanic and yet clearly compassionate.

Shock Effect (spoken)
This was one of my morning dream recordings, rife with bizarre sexual imagery.

Over Her Head (*)
A fun and mischievous little song, concocted by myself and Kaprice for the Ramsgate New Year party. It has a slightly similar riff to Baseball Bat Song from Disease, but here I’m just being silly, singing about teacher’s giving me a lesson in a squeaky voice. Percussion is Kaprice and I pounding on a various objects with the microphone inside them. Despite any conclusions which might be drawn from this track, I was not public school educated.

Wiggled My Way Out (**)
The closest thing to rock n’ roll in this album, and the most personally revealing track on this tape. It’s a live one from the Bulmershe gig which I wrote on the last coach back from London to Reading. The lyric as performed is a furious onslaught of anger and frustration, not all of it aimed at others - starting with my continued disappointment over the gutlessness of my fellow students and the emerging political correctness. However, as it progresses the real target becomes clear, the singer himself – whether demanding the listener disembowel and devour me, and most important to me, articulating my confused sexual identity at that time. It was liberating to write it and felt great to perform, even if I so smothered that central message with other ideas.

Funny enough the only bit of self-censorship I practiced was when I changed a lyric from shit and grime in the rehearsal to rock 'n' roll in the performance! Mark plays bass and Steve drums. Probably the best performed song of the show.

See the actual performance here, although it's poorly lit: 

 

Pursuit (spoken)
Another dream account to round out tape 1.

Tape 2 - Side A

The Princess with Red Hair
Basically an audition piece for Kaprice Kea’s film, which was eventually released as Virtues of Knature with this song in the opening credits. I think Kaprice wanted to be sure I could create more ethereal music for his film and so I attempted to create something, which would sound as if it was taking place in a haunted forest and created a back drop of slowed down whistles and echoing bird-calls. The melody, rather obviously inspired by the opening music to Rosemary's Baby was sung with an undertone played on none other than my ancient Roland SH-1000 which I would occasionally drag out when the mood struck me right. I remember staying up most of the night to record this one Friday in Reading and taking the mixed tape with me to play to Kaprice at a pre-production costume and photo session the next afternoon.  

High Anxiety (*) (alternate version)
This is another live-ish track from the Ramsgate show and is quite different from other versions of High Anxiety I performed over the years. Whereas they are rather sinister and  mock-preachy as I intone Aleister Crowley’s parody of a Christian hymn (from his diaries) – here, although using the basic structure, I turned it into a more upbeat, slightly surreal Christmas tune. Music at the beginning is from a Weimar documentary and the spoken words (which I thought were Aleister Crowley) are actually from the last broadcast of Lord Haw-Haw, which actually work better in retrospect. Penny whistle and recorder are played by Kaprice.

For a sense of how I normally performed this one, see this 1987 performance:

Ascendance (spoken)/ Not Maya
Me at my most dramatic. Ascendance was written during a magical stay in Paris, with Kaprice and the lovely Rosali and Rebecca who put us both up and were the best of hosts. On day three after a mystery tour of driving – collecting clues and directions – we arrived at an amazing garden party in the suburbs.This was July 1986 and there was a new drug in town called Ecstasy. While I missed out on the chance to have any myself (I was broke and it was very expensive) I somehow managed to 'fly by association' and at the end of the day I took Kaprice and his girlfriend Jools to a Paris roof top, and as the full moon shone on us, improvised Ascendance to them. At their insistence I wrote it out the next day

This blends into the first thing I ever recorded on my Tascam four-track, only now with an added vocal, all about Lisa. I actually cringe hearing this now, but I meant it at the time.

Dali Song (**)
First of two songs from the Bulmershe college gig. Dali Song is a more energetic reworking of You Who Do Not Live, with some rather mean spirited lyrics about Salvador Dali who by then was in a very poor state. Mark and Steve again provide instrumental backing

Song of the Snake (**)/ Instrumental
My biggest hit! But only because I recorded the rehearsals. Many years later, Lawrence Burton played this on Ed Pinsent's show on Resonance FM as a lost something or other from the eighties. That was flattering, and even more flattering was when Lawrence revealed he had actually recorded a cover of it in 1992, by which time we were out of contact.

Anyway back in Feb '86, I wrote this one for our show and on the first rehearsal, which is what you’re hearing, it came off pretty well. It had a perky sub-Virgin Prunes feel to it and I really looked forward to seeing the audience react to it. However, the actual performance was a whole different deal. Mark started in the wrong key, fumbled the syncopation, then abandoned the riff and improvised. While I didn’t mind jamming, this was a song I wanted done right so the result was not fun for me at all, and survives in all it’s horror on a video I have and will never show. But you can hear what the audience didn’t.

Tape 2 - Side 4

The Joys of Existentialism
Near the end of my Bulmershe time, a sardonic entry into a talent contest. This is basically a radio play that I enacted in front of the audience, including a TV set which I attacked with a baseball bat at the end. Lawrence was intrigued enough by this to ask me to repeat a performance at Maidstone College,  I can’t remember whether I did it or not (he didn't and I don't remember asking - Ed.), although I did show the Disease video.

Wedding of I Am / I Bleed for You (***)
This is a crazy percussive piece I recorded on Coca-cola cans – one of the last things I recorded on my tape to tape set up. It fades into another recreated track from the Battersea Arts Centre show – a quite haunting little piece full of echo with a somewhat whiny vocal from me that suddenly turns the tables on the listener. Instrumentation is very exotic sounding Casio and Joolz playing double Bass. What’s missing is the pounding drum beat Jeff provided live which really raised it to another level.


Ave Maria (*)
This was the last track Kaprice and I played at the Ramsgate party – and in a highly appropriate gesture of absolution to the crazy party-ers it contains a scratched and reworked version of Liberace playing Ave Maria, with snatches of the Ill Met drum – which had survived under the recording of Liberace entirely by accident. This is quite a powerful piece – with yelling and chanting from Kaprice and myself and a really pulsating dark quality and felt like the right place to end what turned out to be the last tape-album I created and a real time-piece from a very interesting moment in my life.

I don’t think Lawrence actually put this out at the time, so this actually represents its first release.

Hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Additional Musicians: Kaprice Kea (*), Steve Middleton & Mark Manhattan (**), Jeff Thomas & Joolz (***), Lisa Von Erb (****).

Download the first tape by clicking on this link...

Tracks:
1 - You Who Do Not Live
2 - Slander / Ill Met by Moonlight
3 - Lullaby / 28th December '82
4 - Easy Way Out
5 - Aspire to Inspire
6 - Have Mercy on Her
7 - Shock Effect
8 - Over Her Head
9 - Wiggled My Way Out
10 - Pursuit

...and the second tape by clicking on this one.

Tracks:
1 - The Princess with Red Hair
2 - High Anxiety
3 - Ascendance / Not Maya
4 - Dali Song
5 - Song of the Snake / Instrumental
6 - The Joys of Existentialism
7 - Wedding of I Am / I Bleed for You
8 - Ave Maria

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British Blood (1986) C90

The above image isn't the cover, because there never was a cover. Instead it's some photocopy of a collage knocked up presumably by Trev upon the back of which one page of a letter was written, because we used to write to each other quite a lot. Trev, as you probably know, is best known as half of the Grey Wolves, and I knew him because I released Hopscotch by Opera for Infantry - a previous incarnation of the Grey Wolves - on Do Easy, my tape label. I gather that at some point in 1986 Trev had said he was going to send me a new tape for release on Do Easy by Nails ov Christ, the name under which he had taken to performing at the time, but, as he explains in the salient letter...

What I have done instead, and which I think is better than a tape with the two tracks by Nails ov Christ, is send you a C90 that features recordings and excerpts from the very first Opera for Infantry session through to the present with Nails ov Christ and Irritant. As you were the very first label ever to release a tape by OFI, I think it's very suitable that Do Easy release this tape. Please call this historical document, second annual report, or however you would describe it, British Blood. I've enclosed a sheet with the details of tracks featured. It's entirely up to you if you want to include the names of the people who recorded each track. If you'd rather leave them out, that's okay. Hope you like it. You can charge £1.50 (or more if you want) and keep any profits towards running costs of Do Easy. Please design a cover with any artwork or writing you think is suitable. There is nothing I want added to the cover except for the cross on the other page - on the front or on the inside, it's up to you. Please send me a copy when you've done the cover as you have the only copy.

Anyway, the tape never came out, reasons being that 1) I was thoroughly fed up of the whole weirdy tape scene at that point, and 2) it bothered me that Trev had asked me to issue a tape called British Blood with a symbol associated with the British Movement on the cover. I'd already released an Apostles tape with a swastika on the cover against my better judgement, and I wasn't keen to establish a pattern of this particular kind. I understood where Trev was coming from, and I understood the Grey Wolves' two-man mission to scare the living shit out of the rest of us, and I had no objection to the tape existing under either that name or with that imagery, but I didn't want to be the one flogging it to people. So, no-one has heard this thing in three decades, apart from me. This is probably a shame because it's actually a pretty decent collection, and certainly would have been one of the better things on my label had I stuck it out. Here Opera for Infantry sounded more like a primitive Throbbing Gristle than the power electronics tour de force into which they eventually transmogrified - and honorary mentions to Jess Hopkins who also appeared on a couple of these tracks.

By the way, just in case you missed the final sentence of the quote from Trev's letter, I had the only copy. This means that when you see some tosspot selling one of these for sixty fucking quid on eBay bleating about how he taped it off a radio station back in the eighties, don't buy it or anything else he's selling, grass the cunt up, get him chucked off eBay, then go around to his house and do a poo in his pond*.

Download the twenty tracks and information sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - [introduction]

     Opera for Infantry
2 - [excerpt from first recording session]
3 - Hopscotch [excerpt]
4 - Self Discipline Not Self Oppression
5 - Io Pan
6 - Anne Bonny
7 - Genocide
8 - War of the Roses [live excerpt]
9 - Feedback
10 - Destroyer
11 - Shorty

      Grey Wolves
12 - Pursuer
13 - Sands
14 - Golgotha Requiem [live]
15 - Programmed to Kill [live excerpt]

      Irritant
16 - Dissection Fuck Up
17 - British Blood [excerpt]

      Nails ov Christ
18 - Vatican Victims
19 - Smash the Sinners [excerpt]
20 - Attack to Caress

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*: This inducement to harassment is entirely rhetorical and is made exclusively for the purpose of entertainment. I strongly advise all who read this blog against taking this course of action, apart from the bit about getting the twat responsible chucked off eBay.

Network 10 (1982) C60

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download these twelve tracks by clicking on this link.

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

 
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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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ESP Kinetic (1985) C15

Neil Campbell sent me Mission, the ESP Kinetic live album on one side of a C90 with a whole load of other stuff on the other side. I've digitised it, but I'm still engaged in the detective work of trying to deduce what the extra tracks are called, so while we're all waiting, here's something else from the same stable. This was a C15 Neil sent me featuring tracks for what would have been my third Do Easy compilation tape. I was going to use Metropoline and the tape would have been called Avanti!, but it never happened and I don't even remember why. I've a feeling I may have given the master to one of the contributors - possibly John Jasper - so he could record his thing directly onto the tape, and I never got it back.

Anyway, this is quite a nice little tape in itself, dating from what I imagine must have been near the end of ESP Kinetic's existence as a band, and which I still think would have made a great 12", but for the fact that no-one would have bought it because they'd spunked away all their pocket money on another unlistenable live Psychic TV album. There's nought so conservative as the avant-garde. Speaking of which, in case I never mentioned it before, I saw ESP Kinetic as one of those bands who sounded how Psychic TV should have sounded but didn't due to the Porridge effect - sharing certain interests with the noise weirdies but not scared of a tune or occasionally sounding happy.

...and finally, Cyril?

Finally, Esther - I should probably mention that this is a tape Neil sent directly to me, presumably a one off with a handmade sleeve - bits of photocopies glued to the front and the track list written in biro. Therefore if you see this tape for sale on eBay, sold by some bloke in Bulgaria mumbling something about how he recorded it off the radio, and if he's selling it for forty bucks, and if you buy it for forty bucks, then that's your tough shit. I mention this only as the fucking clown in question is flogging an old Opera for Infantry tape for about the same, having downloaded it from this blog; and I know this because when I digitised the tape, it came with no track listing so I had to listen to the thing and come up with names for the tracks based on Trev's vocal - and those same titles appear on his expensive collector's item, hopeless wanker.

If this is yourself reading this, oh eBay retailer of my downloads, get a fucking job.

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

Tracks:
1 - Metropoline
2 - Integrity
3 - Storekeeper Reward
4 - Absolute Relaxation
5 - Sieve

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Tryouts - On the Outside Bog (1983) C30+

I'm not sure why it's taken me a full year to post this second Tryouts tape, but better late than never. You'll possibly remember them from last September when I posted the first tape, except as I've found Jon Sykes' letters in the meantime, I realise the first tape I heard was actually their third, and this is their fourth.

Tryouts' fifteen seconds of fame came when The Look on Their Faces was mentioned in Sounds, wherein it was written...

At a time when Cassette Pets seems full of either grim dabblers or brainless would-be pop stars it comes as almost refreshing to be confronted by the Tryouts' complete daftness (and they don't even try to turn this natural trait into a selling point). On their new tape, The Look on Their Faces, they occasionally slip into vulgarity - He Wears Underpants (titter) and Sitting on the Bog (giggles) - but are able to redeem themselves with the splendid minimalist pop of Damn Her.

Anyway, what I can piece together of the whole story is that Tryouts comprised Jon Sykes, Rob Blackburn, Grant Hodgson, and Chris Hugill - although I believe this last guy left before they recorded On the Outside Bog. The Look on Their Faces was their first cassette to feature real musical instruments. Previously we used pots and pans and all that stuff, as Jon wrote in one of his letters, in which we also find...

DISCOGRAPHY

Jon Sykes' Brain is in the Lost Property Office (April 1981) C90 - 29 copies sold as of February 1984. No musical ability, all pots and pans and stuff. Nothing like the next cassette.
Rigamortis - never released. It was that rubbish, we put it in the bin!
The Look on Their Faces (1982) C30 - 20 copies sold as of February 1984.
On the Outside Bog (December 1983) C30 - 18 copies sold as of February 1984.
In Front of a Crowd (August 1984) C30 - a proposed recording of our first ever live performance at Staxton Village Hall in the not too distant future. All the songs except one will not have been released before. Jon gives the date 20/8/84 for the performance. The next letter states Tryouts have had an up and down career since I last wrote. We did a successful gig at a place near Whitby and at the Totley site of the Sheffield City Polytechnic. The Whitby gig was released as our fourth cassette album. It's quite good. However at Easter we played at the same place near Whitby again. This time the crowd was awful. Only a handful of people enjoyed our set, but the rest sat there with depressed faces longing for us to get off. Anyhow they got some abuse thrown at them by yours truly. The thing that really annoyed me was that those people never even gave us a chance. They had already made their minds up that we were shit.

So there you go. They sent me this C30 on side one of a C60 with a couple of extra tracks on the other side, both of which I used on a Do Easy compilation, and those are also included here. Funnily enough, I've only just now noticed that the album version of Superior Human Beings omits some disgruntled mumbling utilising the F-word. This stuff still surprises me. A lot of it is like the most awful teenage poetry set to music, and yet it has a sort of disarmingly awkward honesty which you just never got with the likes of Morrissey or any of those other studiously dispossessed types, habitually moaning about loneliness whilst posing on the front cover of some shitty music rag, week after week after week.

Wherever you are now, Tryouts, I raise my glass to you.

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

Tracks:
1 - The Outside Bog
2 - In the Cage
3 - You're Turning Into Someone I Hate
4 - Those Bloody Questions
5 - Those People
6 - Stop Feeling Sorry for Yourself
7 - One Short Word
8 - End of Side One
9 - We Must Always Help
10 - Drink My Blood
11 - Ignored
12 - Superior Human Beings
13 - Walls of Queniboro
14 - Pornographic John
15 - If You Take Advantage of Me
16 - Superior Human Beings [uncensored version]
 
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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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Death Pact International - Fear Eats the Soul (1986) 2C60

All this Grey Wolves has set me to thinking about how I'd once collaborated with them as part of something called Death Pact International, and yet never heard the finished result. In fact I think I only realised that it had ever existed when Stream Angel, another contributor, had mentioned it on facebook. The deal had been that various persons with whom Trev of Opera for Infantry (or probably Irritant by that point) regularly corresponded should send in a tape of sound, noise, music, or whatever, and that it would all be processed, mixed together, and used as part of Death Pact International; so I suppose you could say it was a weirdy music supergroup on some level. Anyway, I sent him something called Rubbish Like You* - a title I'd pinched from Pok-a-Tok fanzine as produced by Lennart Eilersen of Enhoenta Bödlar - and that was the last I heard, although to be fair I was moving around a lot at the time so it's likely Trev either lost my address or that a copy never got forwarded to me from somewhere I'd been living. Anyway, duly reminded of this tape I had a look around for an MP3 version on the internet, but was only able to find one on a site which, for whatever reason, wouldn't let me download stuff. However, Nils Inge Graven was able to download the thing and thus kindly furnished me with a copy of the files, which was nice. So here, by way of a slight swerve, is something I haven't actually digitised from my own collection, but am sharing because I'm on the fucker.

The files I received took the form of four sides of the double tape each digitised as a single continuous track, which offended my sensibilities so I've put it all through Audacity and re-edited the thing, cleaned it up and so on, although as with Tomorrow We Live, the distinctions I've made as to where one track ends and another begins are guesswork on my part. I've also cleaned up the scans of the accompanying artwork and booklet. You're welcome.

Fear Eats the Soul is collectively the work of members of Opera for Infantry, Con-Dom, Kapotte Muziek, ESP Kinetic, Sperm Culture, Do Easy, Face in the Crowd, and a few others I haven't heard of. My recommendation is that you listen to it as though it were a single two-hour piece.

It's great to hear this thing at last, and I feel sort of proud to have been involved. 

*: The original track as it was when I sent it off to Trev can be heard on Gravesend.

Download the twenty-three tracks and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Bass / Roots Intro
2 - Madrid de Dia
3 - Sucked In
4 - Crawl
5 - Rubbish Like You
6 - Dumb Dogs
7 - Trigger Mechanism
8 - Mutation Nation
9 - Raw Aktion
10 - Piano //?
11 - Daddy, Fuck My Head
12 - Affirmation
13 - Rage Beater
14 - Clear Blue Sky
15 - Burning Down the Walls of Fire
16 - FDN
17 - What Are You Doing Tomorrow?
18 - Tentaciones
19 - Troops Rape Grenada
20 - Red Peace
21 - Ever Forward
22 - Kill at Will
23 - Banned Exit
 
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Opera for Infantry - Band Sessions (1984) C60

Back in 1984, Opera for Infantry - Trev Ward and David Padbury who eventually went on to form the Grey Wolves - briefly spent some time as a punk band with guitar, bass, drums, and songs. It was really an experiment, an exercise in audience expectation, as Trev wrote at the time:

We've been busy working out a set for our next gig which is going to be on May 12th followed by one on May 26th that is a benefit for the ALF. What we'll be doing at these gigs is some punk stuff so that people will think that is what we are, and at the gig after that we are going to do something completely different so as to shatter their expectations and to let them know things are not as they appear to be. They couldn't stand it at the very first gig when we played Hopscotch (very loud) and smashed all this metal stuff to pieces. 99% of the crowd left the hall as soon as they could and after our set they filtered back in moaning about the violence of it all, the unbearable noise. We couldn't stop laughing as we cleared the mess up. So next time they'll get what they want, so they'll think we have changed and then we'll hit them again with something different. I find that these people who call themselves individuals and open-minded like the punks in this area turn out to be very conservative and don't like change, preferring to stick to their safe 'rebellious' music which actually isn't rebelling against fuck all or changing anything.

In case that all sounds a little cynical, I seem to remember another letter which claimed it was just a case of diversifying, appealing to a different audience - although I can't seem to find that letter right now, but given all the punk bands Trev put out through his label, and all those OFI supported, I'm sure it wasn't just Trojan horseplay; plus it's worth taking into account that the music is actually pretty fucking great, and hardly the work of someone who is merely faking it for the sake of knowing industrial chuckles.

This stuff comes from a tape I compiled myself, because everything Trev sent me was always on the cheapest shittiest car boot sale cassettes money could buy, so I usually copied the music onto a TDK or something; and this particular TDK contained the three tracks contributed to my Moraals compilation on Do Easy, only two of which I actually used, recorded when we were feeling a bit down, I seem to remember him saying, and possibly the best things Opera for Infantry ever recorded in my opinion. The rest of the material is from the rehearsal tape, complete with fuck ups, false starts, chatter and so on. Some of the titles are self-evident, but I've had to guess at a few of them. Trev is on vocals, and I definitely came across a letter (which I now can't find) referring to a drummer named Chris, and I don't know about the rest. There's a segment of the tape where Dap is mentioned, something about working out something for the bass for when Dap turns up, so I'm guessing he wasn't on this recording.
 

Download the eighteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - It's Later Than It's Ever Been
2 - Self Discipline not Self Oppression
3 - Time is...
4 - (introduction)
5 - Technological Valium I
6 - Brenda Spencer I
7 - Brenda Spencer II
8 - Men of England
9 - Brenda Spencer III
10 - Chemical Warfare
11 - Policed
12 - Massacre
13 - It Could Be You
14 - Burning (false start)
15 - Burning
16 - Nothing's Wrong
17 - Don't Worry, Animal
18 - Technological Valium II


 
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Another Lost Cause (1984) C90

Little bit of politics there. My name is Ben Elton. Goodnight!

No, I don't remember this one making much of a showing in that year's design awards either, but this might have been the first compilation tape to which a stranger had asked me to contribute (although it could have been Anal Probe's Political Piggies - it's all a bit of a muddle) so that makes it amazing in my book, even though, with hindsight, my tracks probably weren't. Another Lost Cause was the follow up to Refill Tapes' similarly wistfully named Reflections of a Past Age compilation. I suspect it was also their last offering as I don't recall hearing anything from them after this one. I think the tape-buying public's general lack of enthusiasm for Refill product was beginning to get them down; and before anyone says anything, yes I know their tapes looked a bit low budget, but fuck it - they made for some decent listening - apart from my tracks, I suppose.

 

If you've been following this blog, chance is you may already have some of this stuff. Mine appeared straight off the master copy here, for what little it may be worth; at least one of the Opera for Infantry tracks came from Hopsotch; I'm pretty sure all of the Family Patrol Group material is taken from Fear Death by Water; and the Bomb the Day Nursery stuff all comes from the album they released as Enhoenta Bödlar, although you might do best to get it from their Soundcloud page which additionally features a whole bunch of other stuff. I never quite worked out why this same material appeared credited to both Bomb the Day Nursery and Enhoenta Bödlar (and not just on this particular compilation) but assume it would be something to do with Roger Karmanik and Lennart Eilsersen eventually falling out with each other given that Roger went on to record under other names utilising the initials BDN, Brighter Death Now being the best known. The Yttersta Tagghudingen tracks eventually resurfaced on a 12" EP which I'll get around to buying one of these days, although I'm not sure if they're the exact same versions. Yttersta Tagghudingen were also something to do with Lennart Eilersen - or Uddah Buddah as he was also known, and possibly still is.

As for the rest, there are more details in the booklet, which I've scanned and which comes with the download, and which is as much as I know. This is a little annoying as I now realise I really should have sent for that tape by the Rattle when I had the chance. I've rooted around for any trace of it or them on the internet but can find nothing. I never really noticed them at the time, but I think the two tracks on this tape are fucking astonishingly good - My Bloody Valentine with a Casio VL Tone.

Download the twenty-three tracks, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Astral Joe & the Nighthawks - Our Friends in America
2 - Do Easy - Documentary
3 - Yttersta Tagghudingen - I Trek from Down Yondah
4 - Opera for Infantry - Playing with Fire
5 - Family Patrol Group - (live)
6 - The Rattle - The Party's Over
7 - Bomb the Day Nursery - That Blind Tormentor
8 - Opera for Infantry - Shoot to Kill
9 - Astral Joe & the Nighthawks - Theme
10 - White Elephants Over Jamaica - Pyromania
11 - Do Easy - Vicar Vicar Straight into the Public Lavatory
12 - The Rattle - She Loves You
13 - Family Patrol Group - Fear Death by Water I
14 - Astral Joe & the Nighthawks - The Dark
15 - Opera for Infantry - Hopscotch
16 - Bomb the Day Nursery - The Only Way to Survive is to Commit Suicide
17 - Yttersta Tagghudingen - I'm Nailed to the Barn Door
18 - Astral Joe & the Nighthawks - Where Do I Go?
19 - Do Easy - Nuove Tendenze
20 - Yttersta Tagghudingen - Golliwog
21 - Family Patrol Group - Fear Death by Water III
22 - Bomb the Day Nursery - Heathen Nordic Temple
23 - Astral Joe & the Nighthawks - Astronauts / Voice of a Psychic
 
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