William Scanlan Murphy - Spreading the Cream Cheese Gospel (1990) C15

I don't know much about this or its author and presenter, but I taped it from the radio back in 1990, specifically from BBC Radio 4. According to stuff on the internet it was first broadcast on the 7th of May in that year, then repeated on the 13th of November. It's a fifteen minute documentary about a cult which took over a small German town in the 1930s. The cult was based upon the notion of cheese as having supernatural healing powers, and if I still need to sell you on the idea, then you probably have something wrong with your brain. Just listen to the thing, okay? You won't regret it.

This is doubtless copyrighted material, and I am obviously not the owner of that copyright; but really I just want to spread the goodness, this being more or less the greatest thing which has ever been broadcast on Radio 4, and no-one has yet put it on a CD or whatever so far as I am aware. Anyway, there's no point in suing me because I live in Texas and I don't have any money.

By the way, the tape was terrible quality so I had to clean it up on the computer, which worked but has left it with a sort of mildly autotuned sound, but at least you can now hear the thing without it sounding like you live next door to the Grey Wolves.

Download the programme by clicking on this link.

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Andrew Cox - Methods (1980) C46

Andrew Cox was my friend and he's now dead. I wrote about him at some length on my other blog here, so there's not much point my writing it all out again. Methods was one of my favourite home-produced cassettes even before I met the guy, and here it is in full. It's not that it does anything exactly unique, any noise never before originated by some bloke with a synth and a few tape recorders, but what it does, it does exceptionally well, in fact better than most other works I've heard of this kind. Andrew was a genuine talent and I still miss him. Anyone interested should note that further material by both Andrew and MFH, the group of which he was one half, is available from the good people of Forced Nostalgia.


Whilst we're here, Andrew was also on Nurse With Wound's Sylvie & Babs album in some capacity in case that makes you more likely to bother.

Photograph: I think that was where Andrew grew up, and where this tape was recorded.

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

Tracks:
1 - The Bridge at Evening
2 - Méduse
3 - Rachael's Favourite Song

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My Catholic Enemy (1996) C90+

It was Jim MacDougall's idea. Every other week he came over to stay on my sofa for the weekend. He was good company and very funny. He was also mad, and mad not in the sense of wearing keraaaazy t-shirts and opening up a cafe selling kid's breakfast cereal in fucking Hoxton, but mad meaning he'd made a lifetime commitment to a course of prescription drugs on the grounds that when he didn't take them, he thought he could fly and would head for the nearest tower block, usually ending up sectioned under the mental health act. We both liked noisy, offensive music, and someone had offered Jim a slot at a Mad Pride related live event to be held at Chat's Palace in Hackney, so we formed a band. I programmed all of my boxes and worked out something which could be performed live and not sound too pitiful, Jim would sing, and Smike of Earth Creature - a friend of Jim - would turn up to augment our sound with his weird abrasive guitar stylings. Jim had been recording stuff at the CORE Arts Studio - possibly something to do with Homerton Hospital - and he'd been recording using the name Aural Guerilla. I guessed he decided our thing was to be something separate, and he told me we were to be known as My Catholic Enemy. I had no strong objection. It was Jim's deal, and he was the vocalist. I recorded a live instrumental run-through of what I had, everything plugged into my stereo, then made a copy of the tape for Jim so he could work out some lyrics, or at least vocal material. Then we had another run-through in my living room with Jim doing his thing for what it was worth, some of which certain listeners will find offensive, which was presumably Jim's intention. The day of the gig came - Friday the 3rd of May, 1996 - and so I went along to the venue and met Smike who told me that Jim had been sectioned only that morning. We performed an instrumental set, just Smike and myself. It seemed to go down fairly well from what I can recall, and I'm sure I taped it, although I have no idea where the tape is.

...and that was that. We never discussed it again. There didn't seem much point.

This cassette features two versions of the same proposed live set, one instrumental, the other featuring Jim making shocking and offensive observations; plus some Casiotone crap filling up the tape, just me screwing about. Jihad was originally a song - and a great song - by All Flags Burn, here reduced to something you might hear over the closing credits of an episode of Crackerjack. Additionally, I've found a second take of the instrumental set on another tape, one using a compression pedal to beef up the TR606 a bit. It sounds better to me so I've included it here, hence the plus in the title, because it wasn't on the original cassette and this is one long-ass download. Just delete the one you enjoy less.

Download a million hours worth of noisy shite and a cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - MCE No. 1 instrumental demo
2 - MCE No. 1 vocal
3 - Jihad
4 - Noise
5 - MCE No. 1 inst. compression

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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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Apricot Brigade - Practice September 1985 + Demos (1986) C60

Apricot Brigade were Paul Mercer (guitar and vocals), Rajun Amin (guitar), Andrew Weatherall (bass), and Alun Jones on drums. They played live in and around the Medway towns and had a reasonable following. Alun Jones went on to play drums for the Dentists, to be replaced by me pressing the start button on a drum machine as the band changed its name to Envy, which is another story. I'm not sure quite what the creative dynamic was in Apricot Brigade, although a few of the songs were written by Paul, and as such exist somewhere in earlier form as the work of whichever name he was using for his solo material at the time - Killing Them, for example, was essentially a reworking of his own Tin Men. Paul gave me this tape either prior to my joining the band when they turned into Envy, or because I had asked for a copy of their demo or whatever. The rest of the tape was filled with material relating to his own solo work as No Fun KXK, three tracks recorded live at the Good Intent, and some instrumentals recorded as backing tracks for a live performance - also a truncated studio version of Tin Men.

So it's a cassette of odds and sods with Paul Mercer as the element common to all of the tracks. Personally I always thought he was an immense talent - although his greatest work (in my view) was probably the solo studio tape for which you have some of the backing tracks here - Not This Time and others - but I don't actually have that tape with me, so here's this one. In sticking this tape up for download I've broken my own personal code of at least asking people before I hand their shit out to strangers for free in so much as I've made no attempt to get in touch with Paul Mercer and ask him if this is okay, because he'd probably tell me to piss off on principal, so bollocks then. We fell out. I don't even know why. Apparently I think I'm cool, but I'm not, or something. Whatever.

Anyway, even with this in mind, this tape still sounds fucking amazing to me, and Jesus this line-up of Apricot Brigade were good!

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

Tracks:
Apricot Brigade
1 - Killing Them
2 - Trust
3 - Pale Orchid
4 - All Our Tomorrows
5 - Howling Moon
6 - Dawn in the Hollow
7 - Parry
8 - Martha
9 - Pale Orchid

No Fun KXK
10 - Tin Men
11 - Heart Like Glass
12 - Camilla
13 - The Black Bridge
14 - Not This Time
15 - No Sound
16 - Tin Men
17 - Tabbs
18 - Memorium

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F*** F****** - Stupid (1988) C15

There were a number of factors contributing to the formation of the F*** F***ers, in so much as it is possible to form a band with oneself. These factors were as follows:

1) Kall-Kwik on Chatham High Street (or Prontaprint or whatever the place was called) offering a high quality and relatively cheap colour photocopying service which made me wish I was still shoving out crappy tapes of my music, because it would be great to do one with a colour cover.

2) Carl of the Dovers introducing me to his friend Alan, an enthusiastic Scotsman whose enthusiasm was at that point seemingly focused on his collection of thrash records, or at least that's the impression I got. I'm fairly certain he used the term thrash in reference to music of a specific type, generally American in origin, about five-hundred times during the course of our first meeting, which amused me because I had no idea what or who he was talking about, and to this day I'm still not sure. It was during this encounter that I first heard Big Black because Alan had their album, although I'm not sure if that's relevant.

3) My increased frustration at how difficult it had become to record music since my stereo blew up when our house was struck by lightning, and because I was no longer a student at Maidstone College of Art and was thus without access to their sound studio. I had been doing some things with John Jasper on his portastudio, but John was fairly unreliable; thus did I get to the point where I just wanted to record something quickly, and to enjoy recording it without giving too much of a shit about whether the end result resembled a Jim Steinman production.

In addition to the above I was horrendously depressed, living in a shitty bedsit, and listening to a lot of Foetus records; and I had a burning need to record something similarly vile, which unfortunately explains the rapey tone of the first track. I suppose it might have turned out less shite were it better produced, but that probably depends on whether you regard G.G. Allin as something to aspire to. I don't, and never really did, but as I say I simply felt like producing something vile and indefensible. I had a guitar, microphone, fuzz pedal, a couple of basic drum machines from which I could generate preset rhythms, and John Jasper had lent me a karaoke machine with two tape decks and a limited echo effect, allowing me to multi-track by bouncing sound from one hissy cassette to another. I Don't Wanna Have to Hurt You, Baby turned out sounding somewhat ludicrous to my ears, and so having decided to keep going, it seemed wise to play to my strengths rather than continually fail to emulate Jim Thirlwell in a twenty-four track studio. So I started to have fun with it, improvising lyrics live onto tape, mostly inspired by a combination of Sexton Ming, the Born Bad albums which Carl had been lending me, and a ton of comic books - both mainstream X-Men type things and the undergrounds of Crumb, Skip Williamson and others.

The name came from the song F.F. America by the Leather Nun, as it is discreetly listed on the compilation album upon which I first heard it. The track made me laugh without obliging me to give much thought to the possibility of it referring to a practice with which some people might actually engage themselves; and so that became the name, because it's both disgusting and funny. A person of my former acquaintance suggested I change it to the Fist Funkers because then people would hear the name and look at each other and pull that face Terry Scott pulls when he thinks he's heard June Whitfield say bollocks in front of the vicar, and she actually said bollards, a quite different word. That way, the person suggested, I would be able to get a record contract and have my songs played on Steve Wright in the Afternoon, because that's always been an ambition of mine. Everyone would be able to join in the fun, he proposed. I've censored the name here so as to avoid casually outraging delicate facebook relatives and Google searches undertaken by perverts.

I did these six tracks as a C15 in a run of ten, or possibly a couple of runs of the ten, and just gave them to friends as something short and stupid with a fancy cover, something you weren't obliged to take too seriously

Download the six songs 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

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I still maintain that this is one of the best songs I've ever written, and am amazed that it was improvised. Feel free to humiliate yourself by singing along.

STUPID

There's one thing you must do in life,
For you to get along,
In order for you to get it right,
You got to get it wrong,
It ain't a lot of money,
Ain't no arrow from Cupid,
In order to get along,
Well - you got to be stupid.

Duh!
Ug!
Duh!
Ug!

I used to be intelligent,
I used to be able to read and write,
Then I learned the truth,
And I finally got it right.
I threw away my spelling books.
I changed my looks.
I wore flared trousers.
All of a sudden I was stupid.

Duh!
Ooh ooh!
Duh!
Ooh ooh!

[shit guitar solo combining Bod theme music with Ants Invasion by Adam & the Ants]

Thank you, Jimi!

Duh!
Ooh Ug!
Duh!
Ug!

I never knew a thing,
But then I learned to sing,
And now I'm very stupid,
A fact that no-one can deny.

Duh!
Ohh ooh!
Duh!
Well, what's that word just there say?
Oh!
I understand.
It says dog.
That's one of those things with a tail, isn't it?

Do Easy - The Fourth Metal Tape (1982) C90

Amazingly I was still single.

By the time it came to recording my third Do Easy album, as I definitely considered The Fourth Metal Tape to be, I had apparently taken to a specific methodology. Usually the discovery of some new means of generating or treating sound would warrant an entire track built around the same, or even a number of tracks. By September 1982 I'd worked out how to open up the shell of a cassette tape and respool the innards so as to produce backwards sound effects, and so a fair old chunk of side one was based around a copy of The Second Metal Tape played backwards; and as with The Second Metal Tape, this one features further doomed attempts to recreate some of that Throbbing Gristle magic, here by vaguely emulating the crap bass style of Zyklon B Zombie and others whilst keeping those embarrassing industrial vocals low in the mix so as to make it all mysterious 'n' shit. I'd like to think Good Old Rock 'n' Roll represents a ground breaking foray into industrial whistling, but it was actually just me trying out different things, exercising poor judgement, and listening to Aladdin Sane far too much. The similarly puzzling final track results from my having a listen to my mum's Leonard Cohen album, then having a go myself (and just think, I recorded this track back when Death In June probably still sounded like Skrewdriver!). If nothing else, I suppose I at least take comfort from these tracks showing that I can't have been quite that desperate to resemble Cabaret Voltaire - aside from a couple of predictable experiments with cut-up text.

I don't know. Some of this still sounds okay to me, once you get past how minimal it was. Pisses all over Psychic TV anyway, and they were grown-ups.

In the unlikely event of anyone wondering what happened to The Third Metal Tape, it was actually called Backing Tracks and Alternative Versions and was a C90 of the same, outtakes and, you know - the really rare Do Easy stuff which hadn't spent a million weeks at the top of the fucking hit parade. Don't you just love it when cassette artists no fucker has ever heard of describe something they've done as a rare recording? Anyway, being fairly sure I would soon be famous (and ignoring the fear that it would be for the wrong reasons and I would be viewed as the industrial Gary Numan), I compiled several volumes of Backing Tracks and Alternative Versions mainly for the benefit of the hardcore fans. This also explains the recording of the historic occasion of my phone call to Fetish Records who had by this point gone unusually quiet on the subject of my impending record contract, the fuckers.

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

Tracks:
1 - Fetish
2 - Shipston at Night
3 - Heavy Metal
4 - Track IV
5 - Television
6 - Burn
7 - Good Old Rock 'n' Roll
8 - Haemoglobin
9 - Destruction is Required
10 - ReDestruction
11 - Not Me At All
12 - Do Easy I
13 - Do Easy II
14 - Their Ugly Urges
15 - Org-Ser
16 - Untitled I
17 - The Power
18 - Desolate Accountants
19 - Untitled II
20 - 6:52
21 - Am I Who You Know?

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