Tryouts - The Look On Their Faces (1983) C30

I always felt Tryouts should have achieved some sort of vaguely legendary status. I'd read about them in Sounds music paper (the clipping of which is reproduced on the cover of this cassette) even before they turned up on one of Larry Peterson's compilation tapes, and eventually on one of mine too. They had a synthesiser, a Casio VL1, a crap tape recorder, and that was about it, and their songs had puerile titles suggesting common ground with the sort of shite I myself had been recording for the previous couple of years.

Strangely, when the tape turned up in the post, they weren't quite as I expected. The toilet humour was merely an aspect of their work rather than an actual jihad, as it had been for the Pre-War Busconductors. They sounded a bit like someone in the group wouldn't have minded being in the Human League, but were let down by the pitiful circumstances of their recordings, and yet this shambolic quality was at the same time part of their charm. You could probably call it outsider art, or at least you could if you were a fucking tosser.

They were from Scarborough, and I don't know much else about them, and if I still have any of their letters, I can't find them; so just listen to the tape and feel the realness.

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

Tracks:
1 - Introduction
2 - Tryouts Theme Song
3 - Intramural
4 - He Wears Underpants
5 - Damn Her
6 - Sitting On the Bog
7 - Am I Really Having Fun?
8 - We Cannot Avoid the Mad
9 - Dr. Who
10 - All Alone
11 - Haven't Got the Time
12 - The Look On Their Faces
13 - Here Comes the Train
14 - Motorway
15 - Don't Let Those Spots
16 - This is Life
17 - Goodbye from Tryouts


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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Download the fourteen tracks by clicking on this link.

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

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Do Easy - Death in a Milan Square (1984) C60

Death in a Milan Square was my live album, as distributed by Anal Probe Tapes - the label set up by Trev and Dap of Opera For Infantry who eventually became the Grey Wolves. I'd released their Hopscotch and Scumworld tapes on my label, and Trev kept asking if I had anything he could release (or at least he mentioned it a couple of times, just in case it sounds like I'm trying to give the impression of my being some kind of hot property). I sent him this cassette of two live performances because it seemed more like the sort of thing he would be into adding to his catalogue. The material was fairly noisy - unusual for me as I spent at least some of 1984 apparently trying to sound like Haircut 100. Trev came up with the title and the cover in reference to my interest in Mussolini and Fascist Italy, which had come from my interest in Futurism and was - seeing as it apparently needs spelling out - largely historical with just a pinch of pleasure taken in upsetting people, and also the fact that I find bald, fat men fairly amusing, especially when they're angry.

The live performances were both held in the afternoon in the sculpture studio at the Mid Warwickshire College of Further Education, Leamington Spa, because I was on the art foundation course at the time. I'd done a couple of performances back in November, 1983, basically just abusing the audience and calling it performance art. This was an attempt to do something similar with a vaguely more musical element, or at least something I might be able to get away with doing in a pub before a paying audience.

The first set was on Thursday the 28th of June, 1984 and featured Jez Diston on guitar, with Graham Pierce and Stephen Webb of the Pre-War Busconductors on fashionable metal percussion. The shouting, electronics, and tapes were all down to me, except I was too pissed to really get anything together - having medicated my pre-gig nerves with a lake of lager down the Star & Garter. I borrowed an amplifier from Jon Hunt of the Ideal Husbands which I think I somehow managed to blow during the proceedings, which was a bit embarrassing, but only for me as I think most of the audience fucked off after the first five minutes.

The second set - performed because the first had failed to resemble the power electronics tour de force I had hoped it might be - was on Monday the 2nd of July, again with Jez on guitar, but with Dave Browning and Jim something-or-other of the Shining pounding the scrap metal. My diary commemorates the occasion thusly:

I spent the morning setting up all the equipment, then got some booze at dinnertime. Jez arrived after that and we had a sort of rehearsal and got drunk. At three we put on another Do Easy live performance, which seemed to go well and was enjoyed by all. We had some great percussion from Dave Browning and the other guy out of the Shining. I borrowed an amplifier and delay pedal from Dave Hirons. I am very pleased with the results and feel a bit randy.

No, I don't know, although there was probably a good reason given that I was eighteen at the time.

Both of these sets were captured on VHS video by Tim Griffiths - who can be heard asking Alan Partridge style questions at the end - and the sound was taken from the video recording. The videos still exist, but aren't that interesting even to me, and I can't be arsed to pay a million dollars to have them converted to a YouTube friendly format. Trev's cover suggests sets comprising individual tracks, following my admittedly vague plan for how each set should progress prior to performance, but it all sort of went out of the window in recording, so each set has been digitised as a single long track - also, the original C60 release chopped off the end of the first set which it then continued on side two, so I've stitched its tail back on, so to speak. The final track is Trev trying to flog other tapes from his label just like that Victor Kiam with his razors, and is included here as a snapshot of the time.

We did it all again on Saturday the 15th of September at Amesbury Sports Centre supporting the Subhumans and Opera For Infantry.

I seem to recall playing more or less the same set, but getting it right. I also seem to recall Jez being there except he isn't mentioned in my diary, which states:

Today I started off depressed for no reason I know of. At one point I was in tears but I still don't know why. Me, Grez and Anders went to Amesbury and met Opera For Infantry and their pals, that is Trev, Dap, Charlie and others. Then we played live at the Sports Centre. We also met the Subhumans and a lot of nice punks, one of whom gave me a go on his joint and said my set wasn't too bad. The Subhumans were good people, especially Trotsky and the guitarist whom I also spoke to, and Dick as well. Opera For Infantry were really good live. It was a really good day.

I'm pretty sure Charlie - whoever he was - handled the guitar for me. I'm not sure what Grez or Anders did but I suspect they were concentrating mainly on their drinking. Unfortunately no tape exists of this performance, so let's just assume it was fucking amazing, unlike the shite you've probably just downloaded. Winky face. Winky face.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

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F*** F****** - Enjoy! (1991) C60

So as to save time, please refer to the entry for 1988's Stupid C15 for all the relevant explanations, excuses, apologies, and secret origin - although don't bother downloading it (assuming you haven't already done so) as the whole thing turns up as the first six tracks on the album, and as I noticed whilst digitising the thing, these versions are of marginally better quality for some reason.

Excepting the stuff from Stupid, some of this was recorded on a four-track portastudio albeit still with the same basically careless approach as the earlier stuff. Some of these are almost okay, for what they are, although I must admit there are a few I remembered as being better, but never mind.

By 1990 I was living in Lewisham and had a job with Royal Mail. I was also still reading a lot of comic books, which is reflected in this material. Terminator, for example, is directly inspired by a specific Skip Williamson strip from the old undergrounds, and the influences of Crumb, Bill Griffith, Drew Friedman and others will probably be obvious to anyone who knows their work. IQ3 is a cover of an Anthropod Lithontriptic Band song, Anthropod Lithontriptic Band being Graham from the Pre-War Busconductors; and The Arthur Young Workbench is an old Sexton Ming number. Mrs. Sullivan expresses my frustration with a Mrs. Sullivan to whom I delivered mail in my job as a postman, and who was a whining old battle axe. This being over twenty-five years ago, I guess she's dead now, so it looks like I had the last laugh after all.

The cover image was from a birthday card my grandmother sent me that very same year, even though I was in the second half of my twenties, and the title Enjoy! comes from a game played by Carl Glover and myself one afternoon, each drawing imaginary album covers for popular artists of the time in an effort to shock the other into either hysterics or stunned silence. Carl won the game by proposing a new Kylie Minogue collection entitled Enjoy!, the cover of which would be a close up of a ringpiece. You probably had to be there. The title and general spirit of Bad Time Blues also came from the same game.

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

Tracks:
1 - I Don't Wanna Have to Hurt You, Baby
2 - Beat You Up
3 - Stupid
4 - Terminator
5 - Rockin' Amoeba
6 - Violence
7 - You Won't Like It
8 - We Watch Our Favourite Shows
9 - Neck Tie Party
10 - Stupid (live)
11 - Bad Grades
12 - Badder Than All the Rest
13 - IQ3
14 - Shoot Thy Neighbour
15 - Transylvania
16 - Comic Books
17 - Bust Your Ass
18 - In the Summertime
19 - Beer Drinking Competition
20 - Mrs. Sullivan
21 - Bad Time Blues
22 - Disco Stomp
23 - I, Robot
24 - The Arthur Young Workbench
25 - Too Much Fun

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Post-War Busconductors - Come c/w Jimmy Savile on 45 (1982) C10

In the fairly unlikely event of anyone having paid close enough attention to wonder, aside from digitising the stuff already available on this blog, I've also been digitising millions of cassettes of material by even earlier bands with which I've been involved, namely the Pre-War Busconductors and others. There hasn't been much of this stuff posted here for free download on the grounds that 1) one former Pre-War Busconductor is terrified of people hearing that which he recorded as a kid and subsequently realising that he wasn't always as cool as he is now - which only works if you have half a fucking clue who he is and accordingly regard him as having been cool at some point, which you almost certainly won't if you know him, so the two kind of cancel each other out. This isn't what he actually said, but it's how I interpret his slightly pushy email describing nebulous fears about how once you put something online it's there forever and people will use it against you.; and 2) it's mostly fairly shit and occasionally massively embarrassing.

So it's always nice when I come across something which doesn't feature the aforementioned former terrified Pre-War Busconductor, and to which I can listen without wincing too loudly; and here's one.

The Post-War Busconductors was my solo work, although Eggy of the Pre-War Busconductors is responsible for the cymbal and coke can effect on Come, whatever that was. The personal computer revolution had not yet quite filled local branches of WHSmiths with those natty little C15 cassettes, but I'd started opening up cassette shells and making my own tape loops and cassettes of unorthodox lengths. Cassette singles had been a thing since Bow Wow Wow did one back in July 1980, so this was an experiment both in terms of format, and as one of the first things I recorded on the twin tape deck of our newly acquired home stereo, which seemed like Abbey Road compared to previous efforts recorded on mono portables.

Come could have been named Come to the Bean Shop but I'd just read about a band called Whitehouse in Flowmotion fanzine so I was experimenting with ambiguous titles. The bean shop thing references running jokes of the time, mostly sourced from Jason Roberts at school whose sense of humour was mostly fried breakfast based. Typically he would insert weirdly incongruous references to toast, fried eggs, or baked beans into his essays, yielding belly laughs all round as they were graded with ticks and well done from teachers who had quite clearly ceased to give a shit about our education. Part of what made fried breakfast based humour so entertaining was that no-one else found it funny, or even realised it was supposed to be; which is as good an explanation of what this song is about as I can manage. Just pretend it's Nurse With Wound or Faust or something.

Jimmy Savile on 45 references the Stars on 45 phenomenon, crappy replayed medleys of hits set to a disco beat, so my version lifted the words of Jimmy Savile from broadcasts of his Old Time Record Club on Sunday afternoons, setting them to an attempted disco beat played on cardboard boxes. We all found Jimmy Savile weird, slightly creepy, and hence funny, which seemed as good a reason as any to record this track. Given recent revelations regarding the man, you could probably regard this piece as sharing the general spirit of all those Whitehouse tributes to assorted bad lads, should you feel so inclined.

Download the cassette single and cover by pogoing on this link.

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v/a - Circumcise the Foreskin of Your Heart (1983) C60

Here we go. Everybody and their milkman had a compilation tape clogging up fanzine column inches and I was determined that I shouldn't be left out. Additionally I had certain ideas about the sort of thing I wanted to hear on a compilation tape, and the sort of thing I didn't want to hear, and had already begun to formulate cynical thoughts about those independent tape labels which quite clearly just wanted to be EMI, or at least 4AD, and were only slumming it with the rest of us because they couldn't afford to do otherwise, wankers; and, to be more ruthlessly honest, it had also occurred to me that no-one could say what should appear on my tape but me, and I'd sent tracks off to a few tape labels only to be told either that my stuff was shite, or was else not worthy for inclusion on the grounds that I didn't know anyone from SPK.

Fuckers.

Anyway, at the time I was corresponding fairly busily with Larry Peterson of Cause for Concern tapes, architect of the genuinely wonderful A Sudden Surge of Power C90 featuring Chris & Cosey, Attrition, Test Dept and all sorts - the finest compilation of that entire era, I would argue. Larry encouraged me to get a compilation of my own together, and then fobbed me off with a few tracks he'd been sent but obviously didn't want to use for his follow up to A Sudden Surge of Power, and also he put me in touch with Kevin Thorne of We Be Echo who accordingly sent me a track out of the blue without my even having to ask. Plus, I wasn't entirely without my own resources so...

Some of these you may as well just look up on Discogs or wherever given that I never really knew much about them. I understood Citipati, for example, to be something to do with the excellent Adventures of Twizzle (who came up with the title Circumcise the Foreskin of Your Heart, which is from some religious source, possibly), with whom I was in correspondence, but Discogs seems to think they were some sort of New Blockaders side project; and The Prison was the best song on a five track demo which Larry passed on to me, a demo by a band which never actually responded to any of my letters, so I thought fuck it and stuck the track on there anyway. It seemed to fit. I guess it's the same track which appeared on something called Sing As We Go from the previous year. Oh well.

The Desolate Accountants were Pete and Graham, my two friends from school and half of the Pre-War Busconductors, which also included myself and Eggy. The Pre-War Busconductors were a fairly raucous (not to mention stupid) cardboard box drum kit punk band, included here mainly so as to annoy anyone anticipating a fifteen minute track of mains hum by Coil's dentist and named after Aleister Crowley's favourite holiday destination, but also because we all enjoy having our bollocks whipped from time to time, don't we? I included the two Desolate Accountants tracks because I always loved them, and thought they were the most musical of our imaginary bands, the one name from the bunch which could justifiably fill a Vinyl-on-Demand release without too many people asking for a refund.

The Cause for Concern was Larry Peterson having a go at noise as he did from time to time before he realised there was no money in it, and none of the bands on his tape label would ever be famous. I realise with hindsight that Mike Finch was a pseudonym used by Dave Fanning of the Apostles and later Academy 23 with some frequency, so I assume this may have been something to do with him given that he did stuff with Larry on a couple of occasions. He also played bass for Three Heads Nodding, or so I heard somewhere. Three Heads Nodding were, so far as I know, Neil, Kev (possibly) and some others who lived in a squat in the Brougham Road in Hackney just a few doors along from the Apostles. Neil also drew and wrote Ka-Ka Komik back in the days when Viz was still a fanzine sold in Newcastle pubs. Ka-Ka Komik was fucking mint!

NKVD was an alias of Glenn of Konstruktivists to whom I had been writing since A Dissembly came out. I think this version of Mansonik No. 2 may be the original portastudio demo which Glenn later took into the studio and had fancified by Dave Kenny ready for its appearance on his second album. I could be wrong about that, although it sounds different to me.

Asepisis was my friend Jez from school, another Gristle fan who recorded a load of stuff on my equipment, and actually seemed to make a better job of it than I did with the whole noisy electronics schtick. He did a great C60 called The Glory of Punishment for whatever the Grey Wolves' tape label was called at the time, but we fell out (which was my fault). I'm still trying to work up the courage to ask him if I can reissue his C60 here as a free download.

Do Easy was myself, obviously, sounding a lot more Numan-influenced than I remember being the case. Neither did I realise my voice was quite that nasal, although it was pointed out to me, in fact it was even pointed out to me by the bloke out of ABC. Oh well. I still say some of my lyrics were decent, even if the execution left something to be desired.

Probably the best tracks on the whole thing were from Irsol, a band which featured Ash from Attrition and a couple of his friends. Irsol put out two exceptionally wonderful cassettes which have recently been given the vinyl treatment, two exceptionally wonderful cassettes which remain amongst the absolute best of the entire cassette scene to my ears. I've a feeling they may have been a bit pissed off upon discovering that their lovingly recorded tracks ended up sharing tape with an assortment of tossers rummaging around in a broom cupboard and a song called Whip My Bollocks. I actually had my mum drop me off at one Irsol member's house on the Kenilworth Road in Coventry so I could leave four complimentary copies of Circumcise with his dad, or whoever the guy was. They never wrote back. I suppose it might have been the wrong house.

Anyway, that's your lot. It didn't set the world on fire. I think it sold about sixty or seventy copies over the space of a couple of years. There were worse compilations. I'm not sure what else I can say.

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

Tracks:
1 - We Be Echo - Soma Improvement
2 - Desolate Accountants - Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree
3 - The Cause for Concern with Mike Finch - Look in the Mirror
4 - Do Easy - My Remaining Eye
5 - Three Heads Nodding - Sloven Song
6 - Pre-War Busconductors - Whip My Bollocks
7 - NKVD - untitled
8 - Citipati - Improvisations April '83
9 - Irsol - Time Domain
10 - Do Easy - British Movement
11 - Three Heads Nodding - Hitch Hiker
12 - Konstruktivists - Mansonik No. 2
13 - Asepisis - Accidents with More People
14 - His-Create-He - The Prison (that Jack Built)
15 - Irsol - The Stranger
16 - Desolate Accountants - Interview

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The Post-War Busconductors - The Nightmare Begins... (1981) C60

I joined my first band in September 1980 at the age of fourteen. We were called the Pre-War Busconductors. Pooling our resources we had an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, a borrowed semi-acoustic bass, and an Action Man radio which came with a microphone and could be used as an amplifier. We made drum kits up from cardboard boxes and recorded scurrilous tapes of improvised toilet humour songs about people we didn't like at school. After about a year of churning this stuff out in various bedrooms, garages, and even the bogs in the Telegraph Street car park on one occasion, I decided it might be nice to see if I could produce something more serious, or at least something less obviously stupid. I was already recording solo tapes as the Post-War Busconductors, and so that's where this came from. The Nightmare Begins... was never my first album, but it was the first one without bum jokes.

I had heard a little bit of Throbbing Gristle, some Residents, and quite a lot of Public Image Limited, and I wanted to produce something comprising pieces of music rather than songs as such, principally because I couldn't really sing. Whilst I wrote a mean lyric - or so I believed - once beyond subjects such as which kid at school was rumoured to have shagged a chicken, I was less confident and thus elected to allow atmosphere alone to communicate whatever it was I had to say. So I had an acoustic guitar, a cheap electric guitar and amplifier, a knackered toy ukulele found in a charity shop, a recorder, harmonica, two mono portable tape recorders, and that was more or less it, aside - I suppose - from a sort of percussive activity center I had made out of Meccano. I had no means of creating sophisticated effects, and no means of multi-tracking beyond a hissy tape played on the second tape recorder positioned next to the first. My theory was that, creatively speaking, what I did was of greater importance than the technological sophistication of the means by which it was done, and mostly it was a question of judgement - knowing what to do and when to stop, and recording within the limits set by my musical ability, which has never been great.

Aside from girls and their non-availability, I've no idea what any of this was about, although my whistling the march from Carmen would have been a reference to my then recently departed granddad who used to whistle it all the time. Certain musical quotations - notably theme tunes from some BBC motoring show and Noah's Castle - were used probably just because I knew how to play them. Lacking the literary credentials which would have given this work the philosophical weight I felt it needed, I fell back on Doctor Who references (which will be obvious to those who look out for such things), one being the name of the tape. Accordingly, the tune appearing at the end of The March (Nestene) was originally an earworm which came to me years before as I lay ill in bed reading Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion by Terrance Dicks. I would have been about eight, and I still have no idea whether this tune was something I picked up from television, or whether it may even have been an original composition on my part.

So, to summarise, this be some creaky-ass shit, poor quality, kind of repetitive, and with an unusually low point arriving at the end of what was originally side one when I start singing - comically obtuse lyrics in a voice which can't decide whether it wants to be Bowie or Numan, but not so loud as to draw the attention of my mum who was probably in the kitchen making my fish fingers at the time - but now that I've listened to it again, after a break of about thirty years, I think fuck it. It may be piss-poor shite, but it's my piss-poor shite, and is as such still superior to the entire careers of In The Nursery, Porridge, Skinny Puppy, whoever is on the cover of The Wire this month, that bloke from Ministry, and his mate - that drummer, the one who has been in every single industrial rock band ever at one point or another. Even though The Nightmare Begins... failed, I was only a sodding kid for Christ's sake, and at least I tried; and I'm still pleasantly surprised by how the last track actually sounds okay, like it happened on purpose, so screw you!!!

Download the ten songs and cover by clicking on this link, if you're feeling brave.

Tracks:
1 - India
2 - Drown
3 - Three Viewpoints of a War
4 - Jazz Undertow 1 (10/12/81)
5 - Jazz Undertow 2
6 - The March (Nestene)
7 - The Contest of Wills
8 - Remembrance Day
9 - Precambrian
10 - The Sad but Expected Death of Aluminium

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