Family of Noise - Rough Versions (1996) C60

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracks:
1 - Song of the Snake
2 - New Face in SE13
3 - New Golden Age
4 - Tin Men
5 - My Remaining Eye
6 - Hummingbird [inst. version]
7 - New Breed
8 - The Girl Who Has Everything
9 - Cenotaph
10 - Shit Factory
 
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Power to Destroy (1993) 2C60

Usual terms and conditions apply regarding imagery which is probably supposed to upset you, aside from which, Trev really surpassed himself with the packaging of this one and probably would have won a design award were it not for all the pictures of rotting corpses. The cover was photocopied onto card, with each one presumably individually assembled so as to resemble something like a cigar box, with the tapes kept in a slide out tray thing. The tape itself was likewise pretty decent, with a fair bit of sonic variety, and certainly more than you might have expected from the scarier end of the electronic landscape. A few of these are unlikely to require any introduction (and the Ramleh track is blistering, by the way), and I'm sure you're perfectly capable of Googling the others, because I've never heard of them either.

Four of these tracks actually came from me, these being the work of Konstruktivists (of which I was a member at the time), Family of Noise, and Dada X (both of which are represented elsewhere on this blog, so please feel free to have a poke around in the index linked at the foot of this entry) and, at the risk of offending purists, I've actually replaced the tracks as digitised from my copy of the compilation with copies digitised from the master tapes. So they're the exact same tracks, just better quality through not being fourth generation copies.

Download the twenty-one tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Final Solution - Right to Hate
2 - M. Behrens / Junta - Soundtrack for Original Torture Performance
3 - Agony for Pleasure - Primal Scream
4 - Konstruktivists - Monsieur Y
5 - Sudden Infant - Destroy Your Manipulators
6 - MAUTHAUSEN - Kill the P.A.S.T. (1992)
7 - Con-Dom - Patriotism
8 - Ramleh - Melt the Cube (live)
9 - Family of Noise - Upwards and Outwards
10 - Genocide Organ - Kill Useless Nations
11 - Had.It - Interrogatorio a Pietro Maso
12 - Academy 23 / Grey Wolves - Terror Intensifies
13 - Exit
14 - Smell & Quim - Cunnilinguaphone
15 - Family of Noise - Sometimes I
16 - Taint - Orifice Training
17 - Dada X - Chocolate Disco
18 - M. Behrens - Splatterdance (II)
19 - Sudden Infant - Birth is the Beginning of Destruction
20 - Nailchrist - Nails and Blood
21 - Third Organ - Fuck Your Organs
 
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Impulse 4 (1992) C40

There would have been another Apostles tape this week, but the one I digitised was - so it turns out - copied onto a C180, amounting to three fucking hours on a single cassette, and most of that being extras that Andy stuck on there which aren't officially on the cassette, and hence aren't listed on the track list - so it's going to take me some time working out what the fuck is what with that one. I didn't even realise there had ever been such a thing as a C180 until this week.

While we're waiting, here's Impulse 4, which I apparently misfiled between Impulse 5 and Impulse 6 rather than Impulse 3 and Impulse 5 like some crazy ketamine fuelled anarchist mental case, hence my not having posted it before. As you will be aware, this was a cassette given away with Impulse mag, although I don't have the magazine, for some reason. Seems a bit weird my having mislaid this one seeing as I'm actually on it, but never mind.

Attrition you will surely know by reputation, and same with most of the others if you've regularly been following this blog. Michael Mantra, one of the two names with which I was not familiar, is some big cheese in American improv circles, or possibly was; and as for Sexus - even at the time their contributing seemed like a bit of a scoop being as they were famous and had been lumped in with that whole Romo thing which Melody Maker was desperately trying to get happening, and ended up releasing a single on ZTT. Shame it never really took off. Even if the hype was pure wank, the music pissed over all that other Thousand Shed Present toss which everyone except me and a select band of my fellow cool kids* were listening to.

*: This term is utilised with a certain quota of irony in mockery of anyone attempting to use it as a serious criticism, as has happened on occasion, because yes, we were soooo fucking cool hunched over a pile of envelopes and a stack of photocopies in our freezing bedsits in nowheresville - which is nice because being perceived as cool was obviously a big deal for us.

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

Tracks:
1 - Attrition - The Next Day (Revisited)
2 - Another Headache - Go Slow
3 - Antonym - Xchne Arcae
4 - Ozone Bandits - Empty Lizard (Slight Return)
5 - Sexus - How Can You Live Without Me?
6 - Michael Mantra - Glistening Air
7 - Family of Noise - Don't Look Back
8 - Aerschot - Chuckle
 
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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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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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War Drum - War Drum No. 2 (1998) C90

I've already made most of the apologies, excuses and disclaimers I might make for this cassette here, so read that if you haven't already done so, otherwise this one probably won't make a lot of sense. Here I was beginning to get fairly pissed off with the limitations of my equipment and tracks recorded by bouncing from tape to tape, hence the inclusion of "previously unreleased" (ho ho ho) material recorded a few years earlier as Family of Noise: two ill-advised neofolk covers and Patriotic Hymn, which was named after the painting by Giacomo Balla and shouldn't as such be taken as indication of my ever having been a raving Nazi. I've always found nationalism interesting, particularly in cases (notably that of Mexico) where it has an arguably positive influence, serving to unify an oppressed underclass in conjunction with revolutionary and hopefully socialist ideals; and the sweeping condemnation of nationalism as a principle is often as much about class (or sneering at the thickies) as it is about politics. Anyway, Patriotic Hymn was supposed to be part of some longer pseudo-classical thing which I actually began to compose as music on that special paper with the five lines and staves and shit, but never finished aside from this and Communication which was on the previous tape. As with the more misanthropic themes on this effort, and the martial aesthetic arising from my fixation with an essentially martial culture, I hopefully shouldn't have to explain that such ideas reflect my interests of the time rather than my most cherished personal beliefs.

The rest of it more or less explains itself, I would hope. The tracks from Mitochondrial Eve onwards benefit from Eddy Walsh kindly lending me a ton of equipment, including a lovely four-track portastudio, hence the dramatic improvement in sound quality for the rest of the tape. I feel there's also a dramatic improvement in War Drum as a musical entity which can be heard on this tape as the new age power electronics evolves into a sort of er... ritual ambient R&B, or summink. War Drum No. 2 probably isn't a masterpiece, but fuck it, this one still sounds pretty good to me.

Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists provided the rhythm on Education as War by the way, if that makes it any more likely that you'll listen to the thing.

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

Tracks:
1 - Paynal II
2 - Ash Scatterer
3 - Till the Living Flesh is Burned
4 - Blood Against Gold
5 - Patriotic Hymn
6 - Your Time Will Come
7 - Mactlactli Ollin
8 - Toltec Inheritance
9 - Mitochondrial Eve
10 - Bioweapon
11 - A Marriage
12 - Drift Strain
13 - Education as War
14 - La Llora
15 - Hummingbird
16 - Topa Inca
17 - We Will Survive
18 - Overload
19 - Active Force
20 - New Species
21 - Atonement
22 - Longest Day

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