Konstruktivists - Forbidden BC (1991) C90

Many thousands of years ago I was in a band called Konstruktivists, as formed by Glenn Wallis and still very much a going concern today. I wasn't properly in the band for very long partially because of geography - the difficulty of being in a band with two other people living so many miles apart - and partially because I could never quite work out why I was in the band in the first place, excepting possibly as thanks for having painted a couple of the album covers. Anyway, at the end of February 1991 we recorded an album called Forbidden in a studio in Harlow, Essex. Forbidden was released by World Serpent distribution and apparently sold well in a relatively short space of time. Unfortunately Forbidden was one of a number of albums which World Serpent had produced which later succumbed to disc rot and thus became unplayable - something to do with the ink on the label side of the CD apparently, and all the work of one particular pressing plant. I'd always looked forward to the day I got to put out a proper album, so it was kind of a pisser when the thing came out as a mere CD rather than PROPER VINYL, and as a CD which degraded to an indeterminate slush of zeroes and ones after a couple of years.

To whine further, to this day I still don't know what to make of Forbidden. Some of it is great (Autonomen, Hurts So Good), but some of the tracks I never really liked that much - Tic Tac Toe, She Loves It, and the somewhat comical Konfess - six minutes of pantomime evil and scary faces so cock obvious it would surely embarrass even Marilyn Manson fans. Then there was the recording process, three days during which I would tear around at work like a blue-arsed fly in the morning, rush to get home as soon as I could, get a bus to Liverpool Street, and then a train to Harlow to catch the last couple of hours of studio time that day, then back home and up again at fucking five for work the next day. The tracks had already been recorded and required just my guitar part, which I had to work out there and then in most cases. I disliked this way of working and had initially imagined I might, being in the band, be included in the process of composition in a more collaborative capacity

'It's just how it is,' Joe would shrug because it was somehow beyond his power to have included me in the initial creative process, this being Joe with all the samplers, Joe who lived a five minute walk from the studio. Being accustomed to improvisation, some of my guitar sounded all right I thought, but on a couple of the tracks they may as well have just given me a fucking tambourine to play. I spent the playback of one number noodling away, finally working out something I thought I could do, only to be told it had been recorded and was therefore a final take, and Joe's massive grin was probably this is how wild and crazy we are, but felt kind of like some weirdly passive-aggressive expression of victory. I got the impression he didn't particularly like my being in the band, and our communication seemed restricted to bewildering phone calls informing me what his close personal friends Chris & Cosey had been up to that week, then later to whining as to his having no photographic representation on the album cover, which was put together by myself and Carl Glover. I had asked him over and over for a photo we might use, and honestly had the impression he'd stopped caring about the band now that World Serpent were putting out his solo CDs; although to be fair I seem to recall that Chris & Cosey were considering buying a new fridge freezer at that point, so obviously he would have had a lot of other stuff on his mind.

Anyway, for many years I've been unable to listen to my copy of this album, but then remembered I have a tape of it, copied from the DAT at the time as I recall. Because I've a feeling Forbidden may have undergone further EQing prior to pressing, and because my tape copy leaves off the end of Dark Exkursions (faded here so as to spare you the abrupt cut) and includes Sole Street (which didn't make it onto the album), and a load of other stuff with which I filled up the C90, I've stuck this here as Forbidden BC (before compact disc or summink) as a copy of my cassette rather than the album it became. For what it may be worth I understand that cogs are in motion for the proper rerelease of Forbidden.

Tracks 1 - 11 were recorded at The Square in Harlow 28/2/91 to 2/3/91, and were recorded in the order in which they appear here by Glenn Wallis and Joseph Ahmed with me on lecky guitar. I think you can actually hear me playing the Coronation Street theme on that one track they recorded without telling me, whichever one it is. Serves them right.

Tracks 12 - 15 were recorded by myself and Glenn on his portastudio at his place in Norfolk a little later in the same year, so far as I recall. I personally preferred these tracks and they are closer to how I felt Forbidden should have sounded.

Track 16 is actually by the Dovers, who were myself and Carl Glover with Chris New on drums. This is from a live gig at the Sunset Strip, Chatham on 23/12/87. We were able to coax Glenn up from the audience to provide guest vocals and general yelping. To be fair, he didn't actually require much coaxing.

Tracks 16 & 17, so far as I recall, were recorded by Glenn, Carl Glover and myself at Carl's place in Bermondsey, probably 1991 or thereabouts.

Download the eighteen tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Housewife's Choice
2 - Tic Tac Toe
3 - Sole Street
4 - Friendly Fire
5 - Heute
6 - She Loves It
7 - Hurts So Good
8 - Autonomen
9 - Konfess
10 - Face of an Angel
11 - Dark Excursions (fade)
12 - Sin Título III
13 - Sin Título I
14 - Sin Título II
15 - Sin Título IV
16 - He Believes [The Dovers]
17 - Sin Título V
18 - Sin Título VI  

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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 Shining - Green Dragon 2/8/84 (1984) C40

I don't really know much about this lot, but they were a local Stratford-upon-Avon band whom I saw live a couple of times. The line up at the time of this gig was Penny Green (vocals), Dave Browning (guitar), Henry Probert (bass), Jackie Lowe (sax), and I'm pretty sure the drummer was called Jim. Apparently they changed their name quite a few times and had previously been known as That Statue Moved after a song by Slow Children. Anyway, my diary first acknowledges their existence as the Shining in an entry dated to Friday the 30th December, 1983 as follows:
 

Sarah and Penny, who is also in a band called the Shining, came over to do some recording. Jez came over too a bit later. We watched Grez's Agfa video tape of various pop videos. The Devo one was great. Sarah and Penny did their track. I like Sarah. She is really sweet, and not one of those Bauhaus types at all. The same goes for Penny.

Yup. I fancied my best buddy's girlfriend something rotten, and it all ended in a terrible mess, none of which really relates to the Shining whose activities were next recorded in my diary on Tuesday 3rd April, 1984: 

I went to see The Fab Eight, The Shining, and Trees Kill Two at the Green Dragon with Jez, Eggy and the delightful Sarah. What a nice lass she is. I also saw Martin, Andrew Bird and some others, and I might have joined a band. I'm not sure. Glenn Wallis phoned while I was out at the gig. The Shining were great by the way.

I've a feeling the Fab Eight were some sort of conceptual side project involving Henry Probert, Dave Browning and six cabbages arranged around a microphone like backing singers. You probably had to be there, and I was, but I can't really remember what happened. Anyway, on to Saturday 12th May 1984...

Today I had a letter from Maidstone: I'm in! I also had post from Gordon Leitch and also from Doublevision who want to see my video work! Later I went to see the Shining and the Fab Eight at the Green Dragon, which was ace. Jez, Martin, Jane, Grez, Louie, Eggy and Sarah were also there. I sold Sarah a copy of Five Track Compact Cassette. I will be supporting the next time the Shining play live. The Shining are fucking good.

Yeah. It was all happening for me, apparently. Five Track Compact Cassette was a tape by Do Easy, the name under which I had been recording vaguely underwhelming experimental music for about a year, and by this point I was beginning to think about the possibility of gigs. Word of this got back to Dave and Henry of the Shining who promptly offered to help out, and thus, following something you wouldn't quite call a rehearsal at my house, aided in my vaguely improvising some sort of noisy efforts, initially at college in Leamington Spa - no Henry, but with Jim banging bits of washing machine (yer trendy metal percussion at least beating sodding Depeche Toad to the party, if admittedly no-one else); and with Jez playing guitar because I hadn't yet pissed on my chips by entering his girlfriend.

This was Monday the 2nd of July, 1984. Jim is wearing the plaid shirt as Dave bashes something powerfully and Jez rocks out on the right. Those paintings of life size cut-out figures in the background are by my famous friend Jason Pierce of Spacemen 3 and later Spiritualized. He was on my art foundation course, at my college, and he wasn't at your college, therefore nyer. One day he said to me, 'I would like to form a band, but I don't have any inspiration. What would you recommend, Lawrence Burton, my close personal friend and mentor?'

'Have you tried that skag?" I quipped.

He seemed thoughtful. 'I'll look into it, but I can't very well form a famous pop band without a name - that's my other problem.'

'How about Spacemen 3,' I suggested, smiling beatifically.

That's how it happened, or would have done except I didn't know the guy and apparently he was asleep for most of the year. Henry, Dave, and Jez - but no Jim - augmented my pitiful Genesis P. Orridge impersonations at another Do Easy performance, this time at the Green Dragon on Monday the 6th of August, 1984, the recording of which will probably be digitised and posted on this blog when I really start to run low on decent stuff. This was, I suppose, a sort of postscript to Thursday the 2nd of August, 1984:

Today was the usual shit except that I saw the Shining supported by the shitty Magus weak disco. The only good records they played were Killing Joke's Eighties and the first Public Image Limited single, and it kind of spoiled the night. It was the last Shining gig, which is a great pity. I saw Jez, Grez and Sarah - who cheered me up with a letter. I hate cult weirdos.

I think this last reference, along with the one to Bauhaus types made earlier, comes from a general dislike of fashion victims, this being before anyone had coined the term goth. The Shining would probably have been described as goth had they endured, but at the time I never really thought they required whatever descriptions were available - either post-punk or positive punk or whatever it was that month. They reminded me a little of a couple of bands I already liked, notably Siouxsie & the Banshees, yet had something of their own thing going on, particularly with that wonderful saxomaphone, and I still think the lyrics were great. I'm guessing this tape was from the last gig. For some reason I never bothered to write the date on the cassette inlay card, but I probably wouldn't have thought to tape the first one I saw back in April, not having any idea what they sounded like, and the first thing you tend to notice about any cassette recording made in the presence of Eggy is the aforementioned presence of Eggy gurgling and squeaking away next to the microphone, so I doubt it was the May gig.

Thanks to Penny for this pic...

Anyway, I've derived much pleasure from this recording over the years, not least whilst drunk and melodramatically inclined; and it's been a very pleasant surprise to revisit this thing and to realise what great quality the recording was; so er... you've probably never heard of them, and none of this will mean anything, but this be some good shit. Enjoy.

...and also this one.

Download the eight tracks by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The Back Room
2 - Twentieth Century
3 - Infatuation
4 - Embarrassment
5 - My Cindy Doll is a Transvestite
6 - Whispering Blades
7 - Oubliette
8 - The Girl

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The Dovers - The World of the Dovers (1991) C60

I probably already wrote as much as you really need to know about the Dovers here, but if you can't be arsed to read all that for whatever reason, the Dovers were myself and my good friend Carl Glover, although I actually still think of us as the Dovers even now for what it's worth. I played guitar, Carl programmed the drum machine and sang, and we played live quite a lot. Needless to say, we sounded kind of basic, although I personally prefer the term primal, but were fun to watch according to at least a few of the people who saw us and then bothered to turn up at a second gig. I sort of enjoyed the gigs, but I always worried that we might sound a bit like Carter the Unlistenable Sex Machine or one of those baseball-cap-festival-and-references-to-Blockbusters bands of whom there were far too many at the time. We started recording on portastudio around 1990 or so, and took the opportunity to produce something a bit more layered than what we had been doing live, something with room for nuance 'n' shit. We recorded a lot of material but somehow never quite got around to doing anything with the tapes. The World of the Dovers was vaguely intended to be our first album, at least by me, and would have been released through my Runciter Corporation tape label had I got around to it, but for some reason I never did.

I remember this stuff sounding decent, but I'm surprised at how good it sounds now, at least to me - thankfully more reminiscent of Wire or maybe bits of Mark Perry's Alternative TV with an Iggy influence than Carter or Pop Will Regard Itself With Studied Irony or any of that auld shite. I'm also surprised at how good that drum machine sounded, pissing over most of those tedious work / obey marching bands. Actually, listening to this stuff, I really don't understand how we failed to be fucking famous.

Oh well.

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

Tracks:
1 - Chief
2 - The End
3 - Screaming the Blues
4 - So Many Fools
5 - West Midlands
6 - Sentimental Fool
7 - Wide Open to You
8 - When the Power Falls
9 - Call It What You Want
10 - Be My Valentine
11 - You Were Better When You Were Crap
12 - Jimmy Stewart
13 - Fly in the Ointment

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Do Easy - The Metal Tape (1982) C60

If you coped with The Nightmare Begins... posted a coupled of weeks ago, then you can probably handle this. Do Easy was what I did next, having concluded that Post-War Busconductors seemed a little cumbersome as a name; and also I fancied a fresh start, an artistic break from the imaginary band responsible for Jimmy Savile on 45 and endless songs about different kinds of poo. Old man Burton had splashed out on a fancy Sharp music center at Christmas, one with a double cassette deck by which I could bounce tracks from one tape to another and back again, and I was thus suddenly able to achieve something resembling sound quality, at least in comparison to the coal fired mono portables I'd been using up to that point. Of course, there was still the problem that I lacked instrumentation, equipment, and any coherent idea of what I actually wanted to do. I was keen to produce my own version of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, and yet at least knew to avoid being too screamingly obvious about it - so Manson references are fairly thin on the ground. Ultimately I opted for free experimentation and avoiding anything which would too obviously expose my weaknesses, which is why there isn't much singing on this cassette, and what there is was recorded fairly quietly.

This cassette was recorded from February to April 1982 using what instruments I had to hand, home made tape loops, found sounds, the piano at school and so on. I have a vague memory of starting it earlier in the year then wiping the first four tracks I had produced having concluded they were too shit even for me, which may possibly have been the first flowering of my critical faculties, for whatever that may be worth. Listening back to this thing, I'm surprised at how much I like it. It's nothing startling for sure, and much of it could have been done better, or even raises the occasional question as to why I bothered, but fuck it - I've heard worse. Of course at the time I felt I had produced either a work of genius or something which would one day be revisited and pored over as the first fascinating steps of a musical and artistic tour de force; and so I wrote to Fetish Records because they had just put out a Throbbing Gristle boxed set and Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo, and I felt fairly sure they would want to sign me, or however it worked. Because I was still a school kid living on pocket money and what I brought home from a paper round, I wrote explaining to the nice man at Fetish Records that he would need to send me some money for a blank tape if he wished to hear my masterpiece. Amazingly I got this reply dated Thursday 13th May 1982 from Rod Pearce:

Lawrence - great letter! Here's a ₤1.00 - you deserve it. We're not signing anything new until autumn but send the tape. Perhaps it's the undiscovered secret we need. Hope you catch Skidoo if they're anywhere near you on their tour. They're the first band we've ever had on tour. We're so professional...

Don't tell anyone I sent you a free record (i.e. hopeful musicians etc.). They might get the idea it's a liggers' paradise here.

The free record was a copy of Z'ev's Wipe Out 7". What a nice man, I thought. I sent him a copy of my tape, but never heard back, which probably isn't that surprising, not least when I recall the gushing overenthused most-likely ten page letter I sent with it and which almost certainly revealed me to be way out of my depth. Still, the interest, fleeting though it was, gave me a massive ego-boost and convinced me that I had at least some potential beyond shoving crap through letter boxes in the pissing rain for a living.

So here it is - The Metal Tape because the master copy was recorded on a Sony metal tape in pursuit of finest possible quality, and I was generally sticking to blandly utilitarian titles for fear of saddling myself with anything which sounded too obviously like I was trying to be Throbbing Gristle, even though I sort of was, or at least Nurse With Wound. Do Easy - both the name under which I was recording and the DIY tape label came from The Discipline of DE, the original name under which I recorded this material, itself taken from William Burroughs' Exterminator!

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

Tracks:
1 - The Metal Tape
2 - On Higher Ground
3 - More Than...
4 - 592
5 - Clouds Over Mountains
6 - Aluminium
7 - Actors I
8 - Really Dried Out
9 - Tape Strangled
10 - Auditory
11 - Random
12 - Actors II
13 - Repeat Another?
14 - Are You Still Going to Paint the Library Wall?
15 - Brass Section

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Manslaüghter - Sofa, So Good... So What? (1992) C15

I'm not absolutely sure quite how this masterpiece came into my possession. I've a feeling that the band originally sent this copy to some fanzine bloke or other, someone who didn't like it and figured it was the sort of preposterous shite I would probably appreciate, which I did. In fact I appreciated it so much that I wrote to them and got a copy of their follow up, South of Hebburn which features the terrifying Sofa Bed of Doom and which will be appearing on this blog at some point in the near future, once you've had time to digest the RAW AWESOME of Sofa, So Good... So What?

Manslaüghter were from Kenton Bar, Newcastle upon Tyne and they looked like this:

This photograph came with the tape, along with a letter of introduction which reads as follows:

The Manslaüghter story continues to get bigger, better and faster by the minute. Here, at last, is the long awaited Sofa, So Good... So What? demo by the world's number one Furniture Metal outfit.

The current line-up of the band is as follows:
Mr. Speed - guitars and vocals.
Leigh O'Slayer - vocals and guitars.
Wort Stockholme - drums.
Samurai Spatula - bass.

The band was formed in the new year of 1990 when three bored flatmates decided to buy instruments and learn to play. The name Manslaüghter was chosen, and they decided to play thrash metal as it was easy. Their primary influences included Slayer, Metallica, Megadeath, Tankard, and The Antiques Road Show. Out of this melting pot came the concept of Furniture Metal.

Early hits included the songs Tea Break and Can't Be Arsed which involved tuning up and then going down the pub. To the original trio of Wort, Speed, and Slug Troll on bass, a second guitarist Y. Axl Cyderblent was added. Slug Troll was soon dropped from the line-up however, as (unlike the rest of the band) he was tone deaf and lacked any coordination. Y. Axl moved to bass and Leigh O'Slayer was recruited from the Strapponz to sing and play guitar. Y. Axl soon left to pursue a singularly unsuccessful solo career playing Kiss covers on the cello. The new bassist was the legendary rock 'n' roll veteran Samurai Spatula. The present set contains a range of hard hitting tunes from the power thrashings of Manslaüghter and Sideboards of Destruction to the fast uncompromising rock of Broken Strings, and the raging speed of Oh! Such Hatred. Also included is some of the already classic material from the band's early days.

 
So there you go - a bit like speed metal or death metal, but make no mistake - this be Furniture Metal. I don't think there's anything more I can tell you, because the music speaks for itself.

People eaten in their homes,
Their corpses strewn like garden gnomes,
Ripped to shreds by evil sideboards,
Fight them off with knives and swords...

Download the seven (well, sort of) songs and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Manslaüghter
2 - Sideboards of Destruction
3 - Oh! Such Hatred
4 - Watch Out, Granddad
5 - Can't Be Arsed
6 - Tea Break
7 - Twilight Zone

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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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