Real Time 7 (1983) C90

I posted a previous volume of this series back in January, and here's another picture (as found on Discogs) of Robert Cox, the handsome fellow who compiled these tapes and recorded as Rimarimba.

Everything I said about Real Time 5 seems to apply here, pretty much, particularly regarding stonewashed jeans bands; and yet like Real Time 5, this is nevertheless a mostly decent compilation with not much fast forwarding required. Robotghost was John Grimaldi, formerly of Argent whom older boys and girls will recall had a hit with God Gave Rock and Roll to You; Len Liggins you should recall from both Real Time 5 and International Sound Communication 10; Gambit of Shame and Mex should be known to you if you've been following these blogs, and No Bounds and 18 out of 20 seem to be variant mixes of those which appeared on their classic 7" - still one of my favourite singles from that era; I've posted about Adventures of Twizzle before as I put out a tape by them on my Do Easy label, although this track was originally on Hitler's Trousers after the Blast; I'm drawing blanks on Magnificent Everything, If All Else Fails, John Ralph, Terry Crocodile, Nine Dangerous Fish Inc., Personal Effect, Martin Barbour, and Three Damn Cheers, although for what it may be worth, If All Else Fails' Sand is probably my favourite track on this tape after the Gambit of Shame numbers; Stress you really should have heard of, being the vehicle of Alan who used to edit Adventures in Reality and Phil Clarke who produced (I think) Damn Latin zine and was (possibly) in the Stick Insects.; leaving just Rimarimba which was Robert Cox's own material, possibly occasionally involving either Smell or Quim of Smell & Quim, according to Discogs.

Dream Syndicate sounds a bit Chris Morris to me.

Download the twenty-five tracks, cover and info sheet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Robotghost - Museum of Fakes
2 - Robotghost - Studio 54
3 - Len Liggins - Boxes (All I Want is a Womb with a View)
4 - Len Liggins - I Know You Know
5 - Gambit of Shame - To Hell with the Carnival
6 - Gambit of Shame - No Bounds
7 - Gambit of Shame - 18 out of 20
8 - Mex - Born to be Killed
9 - Adventures of Twizzle - On and On and On
10 - Magnificent Everything - Blue Sky North Street
11 - Magnificent Everything - Big Casino
12 - If All Else Fails - Sand
13 - If All Else Fails - Blood on Her Produce
14 - John Ralph - Star
15 - Terry Crocodile - Velvet
16 - Terry Crocodile - Dream Syndicate
17 - Nine Dangerous Fish Inc. - Shake
18 - Nine Dangerous Fish Inc. - Lobsters on the Boil
19 - Personal Effect - Tired and Emotional
20 - Martin Barbour - The Other Way
21 - Martin Barbour - Attarine Street
22 - Three Damn Cheers - Peur
23 - Stress - Nothing New
24 - Rimarimba - Steady State
25 - Rimarimba - The Melting
 
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Another Bouquet on the Grave of Free Enterprise (1982) C60

This is, I'm afraid, the last of my Dead Hedgehog tapes, and possibly my favourite by virtue of how many hits it yielded - To Hell with the Carnival, The New Breed, Celia's Crazy, and Architecture being way up in my personal list of favourite songs ever to come from a humble cassette, and of course the magnificent Flying Beechcraft who really should have been massive on the strength of their three songs that I've heard - Tez Mitchell and their contributions to the similarly excellent Thing from the Crypt, which you really need to buy, if you don't have it already.

 

Most of what you need to know is detailed on the cover, which I've scanned, and which is A4 because this was one of those wilfully annoying tapes with artwork folded to the size of a 7" single and inserted into a plastic cover of similar dimensions. You've probably heard of the Swell Maps and the Apostles. You will have heard of Mex if you've been following this blog. Magits was the guy or possibly guys who ended up forming Rudimentary Peni. Cult of the Supreme Being were Mex and the late, great Robert Dellar as memorialised in this book.

 

Anyway, I asked Mex if he had anything he felt like saying for this blog post, and thusly didst he speak:

 

Twenty-first century reflections on

Another Bouquet on the Grave of Free Enterprise, 1982

It's funny how something from your past is almost erased from memory until it's brought up again, then it suddenly feels like it occurred only yesterday with every detail falling back into place. Well that's the scenario for me with these tapes the late Robert Dellar and I used to compile and distribute back at the beginning of the '80s, when DIY indie music culture hit its pinnacle.

Our main motive for doing it was because much of the material was never going to have any other outlet if we didn't do something about it, but primarily because it was just fun to do and it kept us off the streets!

Ultimately the scene was small and it was primarily friends and friends of friends who ended up getting these tapes in their possession. Probably at most only around a hundred and fifty people got to hear each cassette, although that's a damn sight more than would have heard the music outside of the gigs, had we not issued them in the first place.

Another Bouquet came on the back heels of its predecessor Bouquet of Barbed Wire, which was by far one of our most favoured releases. To my mind Another Bouquet had a more diverse and slightly extra developed sense to it from the aforementioned tape, with the fantastic S-Haters 1980 opener, which I adored, especially the tremendous and incredibly powerful intro performed on it by Fiona Branson. That was the highlight of the compilation for me, although there are other little gems in there that bring back great memories from a more carefree time, which evoked an energy that anything was possible and the world was our oyster. On top of that we were all little rascals and if you told us you couldn't do something, rest assured we'd sure enough find a way to do it! So although our compilation releases didn't echo those with the gloss by corporates such as K-Tel, only being produced on standard shop bought cassettes, photocopied sleeves and sold via mail order (eat your heart out Amazon, we were ahead of the game!), our passion exceeded all, demonstrating where there’s a will, there’s a way.

We didn't exactly set the world on fire but we did produce a microscopic alternative in music against the mainstream of that time, which not only provided us with a backdrop to our own youth, but for a few others as well. With that we are left with great memories and some marginal music that astoundingly still resonates in certain quarters today, and is kept alive all these years on with its continued elevation by progressive luminaries such as Lawrence Burton and Dark Entries Records' Josh Cheon. That is testament alone and makes me gratified to have been involved with a whole scene and bunch of interesting creatives at the time, proving our youth certainly wasn't wasted on the young!

- Paul Mex
Original DIY music architect, DHE co-founder and music producer

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

Tracks:
1 - S-Haters - 1980
2 - Gambit of Shame - To Hell with the Carnival
3 - Kable Truth - Split Head on Paper
4 - Flying Beechcraft - Tez Mitchell
5 - Mex - Born to be Killed
6 - Apostles - Red
7 - Crunchy Christians - Ask Joe
8 - Magits - A Pawn in the Game
9 - Cliff Silver's Stormtroopers from Hell - Extramarital Affair
10 - Swell Maps - Spitfire Parade
11 - Cult of the Supreme Being - The New Breed
12 - Khmer Rouge - Take Me (Across the Floor Tonight) in Dub
13 - Leitmotiv - I'm Going to Run
14 - Angry Dufflecoats - Celia's Crazy
15 - Jasbir Chhina - All My Loving
16 - Flash Butler's Jazzmen - Architecture

 
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Godless Pinkoes - Waiter, There's a Communist in My Soup (1982) C46

If you regularly follow this blog, you should have heard of Paul Mex's Dead Hedgehog Enterprises, and this was one of his, or maybe their's. You also should know the name of Robert Dellar, possibly. If not, he now has his own, admittedly brief, Wikipedia page, and me and a few others put together this book in memorial of him, his life and work - which is touching, funny, inspiring, and all proceeds go to Mental Health Resistance Network.

I've a feeling Robert might have been slightly bewidered by this unearthing of material he recorded with the Godless Pinkoes, at least going by the look of long-suffering patience on his face when I first met him, greeting him with the exclamation, 'you're that bloke from Cult of the Supreme Being!', that being another band of which Robert was a member. Anyway, this one was recorded with Adam Penwarden and Flash Butler, and I expect Paul Mex was in there somewhere (can't really tell from the artwork, which is a bit of a dog's dinner once you're past the track titles). I'm not sure what Robert's role would have been, but most of the vocals sound like him to me.

 

Waiter, There's a Communist in My Soup is pretty basic and will probably just sound like a tape of three young lads pissing about with instruments upon first hearing, but the more you listen to it, the more it sinks in as a winning combination of punky enthusiasm and surprisingly infectious tunes. Actually, some of it reminds me of New Order, except that it's better.

 

Rest in peace, Robert. We still miss you.

Download the eleven songs and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Communists
2 - Hell is Other People
3 - Within You, Without You
4 - Dictator
5 - Hiroshima Day
6 - Virgil's Breakfast
7 - Action Man
8 - Camouflage
9 - Acid Drops
10 - Virgil's Breakfast (dub)
11 - Sanctuary


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v/a - Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1980) C60

This was Dead Hedgehog's first compilation tape, a wonderfully tuneful collection of punk, pop, and post-punk serving as a time capsule to where some of our heads were at in 1980, particularly if you were living in Watford, which I wasn't. Regular readers will probably know who Mex is by now, and this is one of his. Furthermore these files were kindly supplied by the man himself and as such are therefore better quality than what you probably would have heard had I digitised my copy of the tape. You can read about the individual artists on the cover, as included with the download - an entire A4 sheet scrunched into a cassette case - which I remember finding quite annoying at the time; but I suppose a few additional words might be in order.

Exhibit A really should have been huge, but never mind; Soft Drinks still remain one of my favourite things ever; this version of the Bears' Motoron seems to be a sort of weirdy Copycat echo remix - Tigerbeat records put out a full length retrospective vinyl album back in 1986 with an (I think) much better version of the song, which is well worth grabbing if you happen upon a copy; as for the Steam Settee, I assume you all recall Nikki Sudden from the Swell Maps, yes? ; and these Fire Engines seem to be an Exhibit A offshoot and as such are nothing to do with the Scottish band of the same name. I don't know what else to say about this bunch other than that I still find it mystifying that Dead Hedgehog never ended up a household name, which I suppose is testimony to the power of payola over a good tune, or something. Listening to the Traumatics, or the Notion, or the Garden, or Exhibit A - I don't know about anyone else but I have to remind myself that no, I didn't see them on Top of the Pops banging out 50:50 or The Signs Were Sure back in 1980, even though it feels like I should have done, especially considering the shite the rest of you were buying at the time.

While we're here, I should probably mention that Mex has a new album out, so you know what to do. Details at Mex One.

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

Tracks:
1 - Traumatics - SAS
2 - The Notion - Human Zoo
3 - Soft Drinks - Dangers of Drink
4 - The Garden - Worried Man
5 - The Bears - Motoron
6 - Traumatics - 50:50
7 - Passion Killers - X-87
8 - Exhibit A - Me and You
9 - The Beatles - The Lonesome Death of a Hedgehog
10 - Jasbir Chhina - Nowhere Man
11 - The Garden - Zoot Swim Suit
12 - The Steam Settee - Cramped in Dr. Zombie's Vaults
13 - Exhibit A - In the Wilderness
14 - Soft Drinks - Pepsi Cola
15 - Goddish Robs - Schoolgirl in Love
16 - Fire Engines - Here We Go
17 - Mex - Feature Film
18 - Exhibit A - Echoes
19 - The Garden - The Signs Were Sure
20 - Fire Engines - Silver Machine 

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v/a - A Sudden Surge of Power (1983) C90

You may have noticed how I'm in the habit of apologising for the stuff I post here, occasionally even writing something amounting to I wouldn't bother if I were you; well, not today. A Sudden Surge of Power gets my vote for the greatest compilation tape of all time, and it's probably no exaggeration to say this thing changed my life when I first heard it. This collection tipped me off to a lot of stuff without which my life would have been significantly poorer, and of the eighteen individual contributing artists, there remain just eight whose work I never subsequently hunted down on vinyl or on other tapes. Fuck - I even ended up knowing a few of these people as friends. Third Mind's Red Sand is the one which always seems to get the publicity, and which is fondly remembered by industrial music historians who weren't actually fucking there; and Red Sand is great, and yes, I would never have bothered checking out DDAA were it not for that tape, but Sudden Surge was the one you actually listened to for pleasure because it was such a fantastic and varied assemblage of the weird and wonderful with a good few of those Wild Planet big names we were all gagging to hear.

Some trivia:

• Laugh by Mandible Rumpus may actually be the greatest song ever to appear on a compilation tape. Their 7" single wasn't as good though. Shame.
• These two Mex tracks come from the lad's Happy Life 7" which, at the risk of hyperbole, is probably one of the greatest 7" singles of all time, alongside Gambit of Shame's wonderful 18 out of 20, in which Mex also had a hand. Complete your Mex collection here.
• Cult of the Supreme Being were Mex and the late and greatly missed Robert Dellar, in case anyone was wondering.
• These are still my two all-time favourite Attrition tracks. I've heard a million versions of Monkey in a Bin but this one remains the most powerful for me.
• John Balance had something to do with Cultural Amnesia, but I'm not sure what - unless he just supplied the artwork for them or summink.
• Behold - even Chris & Cosey's track sounds great!
• Dave Henderson's favourite track was apparently Strangeways (because that's what he told me, so it isn't really apparently at all), and wouldn't it have been fucking wonderful if 400 Blows had lived up to their initial promise at least long enough to make a decent album?

The tape came with a highly informative 24-page A5 booklet with contributions from everyone involved, which I've scanned and included in the download along with cover, flyer, and a CFC tapes catalogue of the time.

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

Tracks:
1 - Mandible Rumpus - On the Floor
2 - Mandible Rumpus - Laugh
3 - Mex - Happy Life
4 - Mex - Veins
5 - Gambit of Shame - Gambit of Shame
6 - Section 10 - Mr. Parker
7 - Cult of the Supreme Being - Chlorine Fills My Lungs
8 - Cult of the Supreme Being - God is Thicker than Water
9 - Attrition - Hang Me
10 - Attrition - Monkey in a Bin
11 - Test Dept - Shockwerk
12 - The Cause for Concern - Disturbing Visions
13 - Martin Howard Naylor - Modulation 4/5
14 - Cultural Amnesia - Colourblind
15 - Cultural Amnesia - The Pigs Are Coming
16 - Paul Kelday - Angel Hair
17 - New 7th Music - Apocalypse
18 - Chris & Cosey - Light Fantastic
19 - We Be Echo - Survivalist I
20 - We Be Echo - Sex Slave
21 - Ramshackle Ammunition Band - Space Song
22 - 400 Blows - Strangeways
23 - Twelve Cubic Feet - Fred's Song
24 - Red Herring - UAB Advert
25 - Red Herring- Crispy Wrap

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Khmer Rouge - Year Zero Disco (1981) C46

I asked Mex if it would be okay to slap this one up here as a freebie (along with a couple of other Dead Hedgehog releases) and not only did he say yes, but he very kindly sent me his own digitised file of the tape, meaning 1) I didn't have to do nuffink, and 2) being closer to the source, the quality may be marginally better than it would have been taken from my copy.

Anyway, I don't really know much about Khmer Rouge beyond what can be gleaned from the artwork, all scanned and included with the download. The late Robert Dellar apparently plays some keyboard on this one, for what it may be worth, and of course Mex was involved and should require no introduction, but in the event of your having missed all the memos, please refer to this website and don't be afraid to buy an ice cream while you're there. One of the things I always appreciated about Dead Hedgehog Enterprises was their obvious love of disco in an era and culture in which it had become more or less a dirty word. There were plenty of tapes with the circled A of anarchy doing the rounds, but only Dead Hedgehog slapped DISCO! on the cover of their tapes in that font you otherwise only ever saw used on the signs of newsagents.

Year Zero Disco is punky and low-fi by the standards of your regular disco artist, but it rewards repeat listening, and begins to sound like something in the general direction of Public Image Limited, LCD Soundsystem, Shriekback and those guys, once you're accustomed to it.

The tape came in a plastic sleeve of the kind you would buy so as to protect the cover of a 7" single, so the artwork - two sheets of A4, were folded over so as to fit into the package. This annoyed the hell out of me at the time, so I made my own cover from photocopies of the original so as to fit a cassette in a jewel case neatly filed away under K, between my tapes of David James and Killing Joke as nature intended. I've also included a scan of my reconfigured cover in with the download just in case anyone gives a shit.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Boogie 'Til You Drop
2 - Come Dance With Me
3 - Love Like Dynamite
4 - Take Me (Across the Floor Tonight)
5 - Tuesday Relay
6 - Disco Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the tape by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Something In Me Isn't Right
2 - Wrist Job Alley
3 - Let the Bayonets Speak!
4 - Tom's Kitchen
5 - The Good Intent, Rochester 8/11/85
6 - Push You Down the Stairs
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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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v/a - Moraals (1985) 2C90

I'd already done one compilation tape, and I wanted to do another, but an hour just didn't seem long enough to include stuff from all the people I knew, either by mail or in person; so a double C90 set it was, and I figured I may as well throw in some sort of accompanying booklet of band artwork seeing as that was what everyone else had been doing, or at least what Larry Peterson had been doing. By the time it all eventually came together I had moved out of my parents' place and was half way through taking a degree at Maidstone College of Art, and the thing had been dragging on for ages. My enthusiasm was therefore probably a little diminished, although honestly it probably didn't make a lot of difference. The thing was always going to be what it was, although I gather certain contributors were somehow shocked when their contributor copies turned up in the post, having somehow garnered the impression that I was some kind of luxuriously funded arts institute and individual copies of Moraals were to be presented as 180g collectors' vinyl discs encased within a hand crafted marble lecturn supporting a hardbound edition of artwork pressed in gold leaf on hand crafted paper. I was fucking eighteen and financed by pocket money, a paper round, and then a student grant, most of which I spent on beer and fags. It was the best I could manage at the time, and bollocks because I still think it sounds pretty great. The "booklet" was actually hand photocopied sheets inside an artisan clear plastic envelope of the kind purchased in packs of twenty from WHSmiths, but then I wasn't going to blow half my grant at the printers without some sort of indication that people might actually buy the thing. I sold a few copies as I recall, but not many, although my publicity machine was kind of winding down by that point. Yes, that's probably the reason.

Anyway, here's the lot - all three fucking hours of it split into two separate downloads so as not to clog up your internet connection and spoil the enjoyment of anyone who happens to be watching episodes of Ice Road Truckers on Netflix in the next room. The cassette cover - as designed by Klive Humberstone of Tex Mirror H, who also suggested the title - is included with the second download, and both cassettes had the same cover, in case you were wondering why there only seems to be one of them. Also included in the second download is a folder containing scans of all of the booklet artwork I have at my disposal. The pages for Mex and Opera For Infantry are missing as they all featured naughty pictures which I felt uneasy about stuffing into my luggage when I flew back to England to retrieve this material, and I'm not sure there ever was any Family Patrol Group artwork.

Mex produced some of the greatest pop music ever recorded so far as I was concerned, and it was a great moment when he sent me a tape for my compilation. I would have punched the air if I'd been American back then. He is still in existence today, and you should conduct further investigations here.; Trilogy was my friend Thomas Docherty (not to be confused with etc. etc.), author of some of the greatest weirdy sounds of that whole era, and I'll be ripping some more of his old tapes once I can rescue them from across the seas but if you're unable to wait, have a rummage in his YouTube channel.; Members of Tex Mirror H achieved wider recognition as In The Nursery and, as I say, Klive provided the cover and title of this compilation. They also had a track on an Adventures In Reality compilation.; Saul Pol Koatep was half of AOT 418 who released tapes through both myself and Anal Probe and others. I think they had something to do with the New Blockaders, and Saul was behind the Hypnagogia label, if anyone remembers that.; Do Easy was obviously myself, apparently trying hard to turn into John Cougar Mellencamp at the time of recording, although I definitely don't remember it as a conscious ambition. Still, the other two tracks are all right, I suppose.; The RSM, standing for Rob, Shend, and Mart, were an improvised music project initiated by my friend Martin, who also contributed as Mart E. Knee. The Shend and the Rob in question were Cravats and later Very Things whom Martin knew fairly well, having been a founding member of the former. Martin's YouTube channel can be found here.; Scram Ju Ju was David Lebens-Wankling, formerly of Urge with the semi-legendary Kevin Harrison, and whom I first encountered as a contributor to Gary Levermore's Rising from the Red Sand compilation. Apparently I was the first person to write to him as a result of the Third Mind tape, which is kind of depressing. He should have done a song about a murderer or summink.; Anarchist Angels were a bloke called Steve from Sunbury-on-Thames plus friends, and their As the Innocent Suffer tape remains one of my all time anarchopunk faves and is as such due for a ripping just as soon as I can get hold of my copy. Steve's tracks are probably my personal favourites of the whole compilation, possibly excepting those by Opera For Infantry, who of course later scared the living shit out of everyone as the Grey Wolves. Trev said something in his letter like we were feeling a bit sad when we recorded this stuff, and he's probably ashamed of it these days, but I still think these two tracks are wonderful. I also have a tape of Opera For Infantry rehearsing as a punk band with guitar, drums, and Trev yelping about TV standing for technological valium - just trying something different, and another one for the retrieval list.; Thee Unkommuniti, as you're probably aware, was Tim who later achieved wider recognition with Stereolab, of whom you can hear formative traces in this stuff if you listen closely. Vinyl-on-Demand put out a boxed set of Unkommuniti material a while back, but it costs about a million quid and anyway I still have all the tapes, thank you very much.; Lead Shoes were two Steves from my degree course, one of whom was much nicer than the other one and with whom I am still in touch on friendface. I think he's some sort of dance/techno luminary these days.; Also from my degree course was Paul Mercer who named his thing after a phrase in an article about bats which described them as Acrobatic Champions. For some reason he found this funny, but then he was kind of gothic in certain respects, and I always thought his music was excellent - in fact I still do, even though apparently we hate each other's guts these days - and there is some more of it here.; NKVD is Glenn from Konstruktivists who sent me these early versions of tracks which ended up on Black December.; I started writing to Family Patrol Group after I saw them supporting Whitehouse in Birmingham. They had split by the time I was putting together this compilation, but Colin suggested I lift some sections of noise from their tape Fear Death By Water, which was what I did.; and the rest were mostly people I was writing to or swapping tapes with at the time.

Download the twenty-two tracks of the first tape by clicking on this link...

Tracks:
1 - (introduction)
2 - Mex - The Kid is a Little Monster
3 - Trilogy - Do Not Forgive Them
4 - Tex Mirror H - Out of Reach
5 - Saul Pol Koatep - Thou Shalt Not Kill
6 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Len Fairclough
7 - Human Trapped Rhythms - Fish Tale
8 - Tryouts - Superior Human Beings
9 - Do Easy - Inspecting the Experimental Grain Fields at Ostia Near Rome
10 - The RSM - Rounds A No. 14
11 - Scram Ju Ju - After All
12 - Anarchist Angels - One in a Million
13 - Help! Help! I've Got My Head Stuck Down the Bog! - I'm In Love (With My Lavatory)
14 - Unkommuniti - Winterkill
15 - Do Easy - Nobody Can Describe How We Truly Feel
16 - David James - Pooh Disease
17 - Lead Shoes - Baseball on Sunday
18 - Anarchist Angels - Sick But A Shepherd
19 - NKVD - Eastern Vein III
20 - Acrobatic Champions - Three Minutes
21 - Scram Ju Ju - Ruled by the Heart
22 - Opera For Infantry - Time Is...

...and download the second tape, cover and booklet by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - David James - Untitled
2 - Tryouts - If You Take Advantage of Me
3 - Human Trapped Rhythms -The Message (Roll Down and Die)
4 - Tex Mirror H - Absorption
5 - Family Patrol Group - Extreme Nature
6 - Mart E. Knee - Bone Structure
7 - Unkommuniti - To Us Unseen
8 - Anarchist Angels - Untitled
9 - Do Easy - Our Tune
10 - Opera For Infantry - It's Later Than It's Ever Been
11 - Lead Shoes - Sniffing Glue
12 - WEOJ - Pyromania
13 - Family Patrol Group - The Fight Is On
14 - Acrobatic Champions - Order and Disorder
15 - Cause For Concern - Me Mucking About
16 - Anarchist Angels - Force His Mind
17 - NKVD - Eastern Vein IV
18 - Do Easy - Pair of Trousers
19 - AOT 418 - Beckie's Mission
20 - Morris Dolby & the Bouncy Lobster Band - Eggy Soldiers
21 - Family Patrol Group - Fear Death by Water
22 - Mex - Simplicity

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