Do Easy - Don't Talk (1987) C60

I should have taken my own advice and kept my mouth shut for the duration, but never mind. This was almost the last tape I recorded as Do Easy, mostly recorded in the college sound studio on a four-track TEAC, and thirty or so years later, I'd say it sounds mostly decent providing you don't pay too much attention to the words. I was young. I wasn't very happy. I hadn't had sexual intercourse in well over a year. I looked funny and people kept calling me names as a result. Musically speaking, this was mostly me, although Information through to Animation of Life, and also Down in the Echo were collaborations with Garreth Roberts, so that's mostly him singing or speaking on those; Steve McGarrigle also contributed in some way to In One Day and the remix of This Can't Go On Forever; and the sonic dog's dinner which was Sound Levels in Arabia additionally features Paul Fallon (who was also in the Spinning Pygmies with Garreth and myself for about forty seconds) and some bloke called Matt, about whom I don't remember very much at all.

Let me see...

Information was recorded as the soundtrack to a video piece, as us artists call them. The video comprised stills of drawings by Dennis Nilsen, and Garreth is reading out poems written by the same on the soundtrack, as you can hear. The point was that the material is only identified as having been the work of Nilsen at the end of the video, so everybody goes ooh! and agrees how playful and subversive it all is blah blah blah audience expectations blah blah blah. The drum machine pattern on Sound Levels in Arabia was originally written for the only song I wrote for Envy, which mercifully we never recorded because it was shite. Caroline A was me deciding I wanted to be the Jesus & Mary Chain and to record a proper pop song with a video of an actual band playing it, and I was going to give copies of this demo to my loyal recruits so they could learn how to perform my masterpiece, but luckily I lost interest and never got around to it. HSC was recorded after hanging around with TD and is pretty much an inferior rip-off of a track he recorded as Frenzied Encounters, which I've yet to digitise.

...and no, I never got around to a formal release of this one either, so no fancy cover I'm afraid.

Don't worry. I'll post a proper tape next week.

Download these twelve track by clicking on this link, if you must.

Tracks:
1 - Paper Tiger
2 - HCS
3 - In One Day
4 - Information
5 - Complicated Animal
6 - Sound Levels in Arabia
7 - Animation of Life
8 - This Can't Go On Forever (remix)
9 - Don't Talk
10 - Caroline A (demo)
11 - I Want You
12 - Down in the Echo

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Total Big - Rehearsals 9 & 10 (1986) C90

There's not really much that I can say about Total Big which I haven't already said here, here, here, or here. If you liked the last four tapes, then you'll probably like this, and you'll probably like the other four of these things I still have left to digitise. If you didn't like any of the last four tapes, then this one is almost certainly unlikely to change your mind. It was all recorded in the kitchen of Hollytree House, Otham, Kent. The first sixteen tracks are from our ninth rehearsal which occurred on Saturday the 22nd of March, 1986, concerning which my diary of the time records:

We had a Total Big rehearsal, and Charlie came around to watch a load of Doctor Who videos. We went to Ian Elliott's party after that. It was okay but there wasn't enough dancing.

Charlie was Charlie Adlard who draws the Walking Dead comic and is as such now rich and famous. If anyone gives a shit I think we probably watched Warriors of the Deep and subsequently spent most of the time laughing like drains.

The remainder of the tracks were recorded on Saturday the 29th of March, 1986. The day began at Chris's house in Sittingbourne. Apparently I had fallen asleep on the sofa watching Catch-22 while Carl bleached his hair.

This morning we watched some episodes of Blackadder II on Chris's video. Then we went to the flea market and I bought a pair of sunglasses with white plastic frames and saw Mandy who used to go out with Paul. Then we went to Carl's mum's house in Hoo where his two sisters provided the entertainment with a display of wrestling. After that we went to Craig's house, and then we visited Paul for a bit and came home and had another Total Big rehearsal. Garreth and Steve came round. Carl and Chris left, and so did Steve, but Garreth stayed the night.

Garreth really did spell his name with two Rs. He isn't famous so far as I am aware, and he still has my fucking drum machine. He ended up in the Spinning Pygmies with me and Carl. Frankenstein is a New York Dolls cover. I was briefly obsessed with the song and even adopted it as my showbiz name for a time, not that anyone noticed.

The still is from a video we made for Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'.

Download all twenty-nine tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Sex From Behind
2 - He Writes the Songs
3 - Rock Sandwich
4 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
5 - Call It What You Want
6 - Are You My Mother?
7 - Cold Sore Herpes
8 - Louie Louie
9 - Sister Ray
10 - Falling in Love with My Voice
11 - Hail Fellow Well Met
12 - Ugly Baby
13 - Rock & Roll
14 - I Own the World  
15 - Why Did You Forget My Name?
16 - I'm Not Losing Sleep
17 - Cold Sore Herpes B
18 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
19 - He Writes the Songs
20 - Rock Sandwich
21 - Are You My Mother?
22 - Call It What You Want
23 - Hail Fellow Well Met
24 - Frankenstein
25 - Louie Louie
26 - Sister Ray
27 - Here We Come
28 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burnin'
29 - Total Big & the Nutty Rhythm

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Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies IV (1987) C60

Spinning Mbilikimo walikuwa Carl na mimi mwenyewe kujaribu kuweka kwamba Jumla ya Big uchawi kwenda kufuatia kuondoka kwa Chris, and for youse thick fuckers who never made the effort to familiarise yourselves with Swahili, most of the relevant details may be gleaned by perusing previous postings of Spinning Pygmies material, as can be found by referring to the index, as linked at the foot of this blog entry.

The first five tracks represent a rehearsal at Hollytree House in Otham, some time during the summer of 1987 it says here - presumably the rehearsal which convinced us it wasn't working and would probably forever remain an unlistenable racket and therefore the final Spinning Pygmies rehearsal. Saxophone was played by Mark Smith, Carl sang, and I think Garreth and myself alternated on guitar and Casio SK1 keyboard. I probably haven't bothered listening to this thing since we recorded it, although three decades later it sounds a bit like Faust to me, or one of those bands. If it doesn't sound like Faust to you then that's your problem.

The rest was just me filling up the tape. The story behind the sixth track can probably be deduced by referring to this excerpt from my memoirs. It's not a great recording but if you wack the volume up and listen close you can probably just about hear some sounds of excitement and the phrase as my producer said to me... Tracks eleven and twelve were Carl and myself at my flat in Chatham during autumn 1987, which is where the rest of the tape was recorded, or at least filled up (and we had probably taken to calling ourselves the Dovers by that point). The last three tracks are myself and Martin de Sey, whom I knew from college but who had moved into the bedsit directly below mine. I can't even remember if he'd formally joined the band or just fancied a kick about, but anyway he'd been drafted in to play bass for us at a gig at the Sunset Strip, so this was presumably just the two of us working things out in advance. I know the singing sounds incongruously mild for the material, but neither Martin nor myself were gunna be on the mic on the night innit.

Download the eighteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Slip Inside Me
2 - Where Have All the Good Times Gone?
3 - Something New Around
4 - Less of the Gun
5 - Good & Gothic
6 - Amanda B******* Being Shagged by Man Resembling Ronnie Corbett
7 - Daughters of Darkness
8 - Carry On at Your Convenience
9 - Twelve Bar
10 - Silence Network 7
11 - Less is More
12 - Never Be Without Your Hand-Truck
13 - Misery List
14 - You Bastard
15 - I Wanna Be (a Punk)
16 - I Wanna Be Your Dog
17 - Precinct
18 - No Lip

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Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies III (1987) C90

Here we go. You probably know the score by now with this stuff. If not, please refer to previous posting of Spinning Pygmies material as can be found listed in the index. This was our fourth rehearsal, now just myself and Carl fucking about at my place - Hollytree House, Otham, Kent as shown above - almost certainly in my room which would have been the nearest one on the ground floor with the window open. We had a guitar, a Roland Cube with its fuzz thing, some bits of drum kit, and my Casio SK1 keyboard. We made stuff up and recorded it on a tape recorder, if you can imagine that. I'd say this stuff is only really likely to be of interest if you were actually in the band, but fuck it - I personally find it all very listenable now, although I suppose I would say that.

Fuck it. No-one's forcing you to download the thing.

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

Tracks:
1 - Burning Black & Blue I
2 - Burning Black & Blue II
3 - Why Did Chris Move?
4 - Runciter Swing
5 - Oi! Rides Again
6 - Piece of Meat
7 - Cheesey Cheesey
8 - Ain't No Light
9 - Do the Frug
10 - Check Out Your Pants
11 - He Writes the Songs
12 - Louie Louie I
13 - Sister Ray
14 - Hey Joe
15 - Are You My Mother?
16 - ChogI!
17 - What Elvis Said to Me
18 - Hubba Hubba Frug
19 - Kiss Me Blind
20 - Against the Law
21 - Hold Your Hand
22 - Louie Louie II
23 - Strawberry Feels Fever
24 - Magical Mystery Tor Johnson
25 - Here He Comes Again
26 - A Little Hell from My Friends
27 - Prince Chow Mein

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Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies II (1987) C60

I've already told the full boring story in as much detail as anyone could possibly need, so I refer you to this previous blog entry in order to avoid repeating myself. This second tape featured our second and third rehearsals, such as they were, with a line up of Carl and myself augmented - if that's quite the right word - by Garreth Roberts, usually playing second guitar, and Mark Smith on sax depending who had bothered to turn up on time. Both sessions occurred at Hollytree House, Otham, Kent during the Spring of 1987, and actually most of this is the second rehearsal but for tracks ten to twelve as listed below, which comprise the third.

Preamble was recorded some time later by myself with a guitar and a Casio keyboard sat in front of a tape recorder, hence the distinct difference in quality. It's actually one of four tracks on the original cassette which I presume I recorded alone for the sake of filling up the tape, and one of these tracks mentions the Dovers - the group we became in the wake of Spinning Pygmies - so it must have been a bit later. I haven't included the rest of these solo tracks in the download because the other three are all just me impersonating Carl and singing about being gay and how I regularly entertain sailors in my flat and so on - this being an example of my retarded sense of humour. I would argue that the censored tracks are too inept and stupid to be mistaken for genuine homophobia, but listening back to them now makes me nevertheless uncomfortable mainly because they're shite even by my unambitious standards, and just not very funny.

Mind you, I'm not saying the rest of this is particularly amazing, but there are probably bits you could play to Wire reading arseholes as obscure Faust outtakes or something, especially the stuff with Mark playing sax.

Download the twelve tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Money Can't Buy
2 - Appreciate You Being Round
3 - Noise
4 - No Cigars
5 - Makes No Sense
6 - Preamble
7 - Black and Blue
8 - Deliverance
9 - Duelling Kazoos
10 - CNAM
11 - Here's Fatty I
12 - Here's Fatty II

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The Dovers - Rehearsals 1 & 2.1 (1987) C60

The Dovers were Carl and myself, which you will know if you've been following this blog. If you don't know, I refer you to the search function somewhere near the top of the screen, or the links to previous tapes on the left. Have a look around. It's not that difficult. This cassette is, as you may deduce, simply a tape of our first rehearsal, and some of our second - the rest of that one being on a different cassette. Sadly it doesn't really have a cover which is worth the effort of my bothering to scan the fucker, just the usual inlay card with song titles, so this week's vaguely related visual is a photograph of myself in sunglasses and Carl with dyed red hair accompanied by our friend Martin at some party or other. Martin and Carl were previously in a band called To The Max, and Martin was in the original line-up of the Cravats.

This tape was never released in any form, as is probably obvious, and will doubtless be of extremely limited interest to anyone who wasn't in the above photograph (except Martin), and if that's a problem, screw you - nobody's forcing you to download this stuff. It's my blog and I'll post what I want to post.

A brief history of the Dovers is to be found here, in the event that you couldn't be arsed to look for it during the first paragraph. The material on this tape is essentially Carl and myself seeing what we could come up with between us, having given up on the idea of recruiting new members following the Spinning Pygmies thing. Some of these songs were Total Big numbers. Others we came up with more or less on the spot. Both rehearsals were at Hollytree House in the village of Otham, Kent during the summer of 1987, and between the first and second session (which was specifically on Saturday the 22nd of August) Carl bought a Roland DR220E drum machine, so that isn't a live drummer you can hear on the final six tracks of the tape. It's minimal and pretty rough, being spawned by just the two of us with a fuzzbox and a crap tape recorder, but it still sounds good to me, particularly Counting Song - which is a work of genius by my reckoning and I have no idea why we never took it further.

Listen to me - I can count to ten!
Listen to me - I can count to ten!
If you don't believe me...

Brilliant.

Download the sixteen songs by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Callin' My Boots Dave
2 - Wanna Buy Me Some Boots
3 - Are You My Mother?
4 - Counting Song
5 - The South Bank Show
6 - Lessons in Glam
7 - Keep Your Dreams A'Burning
8 - He Believes
9 - Batman
10 - Do the Frug
11 - Here He Comes Again
12 - Baby Bankrupt
13 - Beat Me Black & Blue
14 - Do the Frug
15 - He Writes the Songs
16 - B.L.A.C.Clowns

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Spinning Pygmies - Spinning Pygmies I (1987) C60

This is what the album cover would have looked like in the unlikely event of our having signed to Blue Note. Left to right is Carl, Garreth and myself (I don't have any pics of the other two).

My diaries of the time record a gig by Total Big at Maidstone College of Art on Tuesday 9th December 1986, then a Dovers performance at a party at 5, Terrace Road, Maidstone on Friday 19th June 1987, and nothing musical occurring between these two events because I was better at beer consumption than I was at keeping a diary, or playing guitar for that matter. Total Big were myself with Carl Glover on vocals and Chris New on drums, but Chris moved to Dover and we eventually slimmed to a two-piece using a drum machine named in honour of the coastal town in which our rhythm section had purchased a house. However, prior to re-emerging as the Dovers like some sort of slightly pungent butterfly with kids' drawings of dobbers on the wings, Carl and I spent some time mucking about with various friends of varying degrees of musicality in an effort to form a band which wasn't just the two of us with a drum machine. These were all people we knew from the college's Time Based Media course. Mark Smith had played saxophone at the last Total Big performance, or at least had played the saxophone in proximity to the last Total Big performance; Garreth Roberts had been involved with quite a lot of the music I'd recorded in the college sound studio as Do Easy; and Paul Fallon had time to kill before the pubs opened, I guess.

We were called the Flaps - named after a feminine anatomical feature - until Garreth came up with Spinning Pygmies, which was funnier. I'm fairly sure the material on this first tape derives from a single Saturday afternoon, early 1987, kicking off with just Carl and myself, then Garreth turning up in time for Dinosaur Man, then Mark and Paul until we're all jamming away without any real idea of what we were doing, or how any of this could ever be turned into songs. I recall these improvised sessions as a fucking racket, which is essentially what they were, but the more I replay the tape, the more it all begins to sound like a rockier version of one of those German groups from the seventies. Some of the later pieces could almost be described as grooves, particularly those with Mark's sax honking away like a lonely seal.

Ordinarily I would have chopped out all the fannying around, people asking is it recording?, me saying rude words into my Casio SK1 sampler then playing them back at different pitches whilst giggling, and so on, but it was difficult to divide this tape up into cohesive tracks, and in the end I've left it more or less as it is. Make of it what you will.

Download the nineteen(ish) songs by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Concrete Shoes
2 - Hard to Dance
3 - Burned from Behind
4 - Breasts Painted Black
5 - Dinosaur Man
6 - Going No Place
7 - Here's Fatty
8 - Free Jazz
9 - Ramoneo & Juliet
10 - General Pissing Around
11 - What Do You See?
12 - B&B
13 - Louie
14 - What's Going On In My Pants?
15 - Can't Get Enough I
16 - Can't Get Enough II
17 - Bad Disco
18 - Who Owns the Flaps?
19 - From Space

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