v/a - Real Time 5 (1983) C90

This one was released by Unlikely Records in 1983, which was the organ of the above Robert Cox of Rimarimba, amongst others.

I seem to recall Real Time as a fairly regular series of compilation cassettes, and that Robert had a policy of including something by every hopeful who sent him material (although I could be wrong about that - it was a long time ago), which is why a few of these artists were a bit Alan Partridge, I suppose. Then again, musical history seems to have conveniently forgotten all those stonewashed jeans bands you used to see playing in regional pubs at Sunday lunchtime, usually with a cover of something by the Police in their set, and I suppose they deserve to be remembered as much as anyone.

Aside from the cod reggae, there's actually only really one band I disliked on here - MWAB who just sound a bit of a mess to me; but otherwise it's a surprisingly decent collection, plenty of variety and a few surprises. You may have come across UV Pøp, I'm Dead, and Sirius B - whom I'm sure I recall being the next big thing for a couple of days, at least according to Dave Henderson; you may even recall Len Liggins from this tape; and you'll possibly recognise the Attrition track from their Third Mind cassette. My personal faves would be by the Insane Picnic and the exceedingly proggy Trekellion Skyway, but not even Discogs seem to know anything about them, which is a shame.

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

Tracks:
1 - UV Pøp - Superstition
2 - UV Pøp - Some Win This
3 - Faction - Realisation
4 - I-Jog & the Tracksuits - Optimism
5 - Chapter 29 - Before
6 - Chapter 29 - Silence Hammers Down
7 - Death Pop - Antichrist
8 - Death Pop - Walk With Me
9 - Kix - Close Encounters
10 - Len Liggins - Sandwiches
11 - Len Liggins - Lead
12 - Party Day - Party Day
13 - Sirius B - Is This the End?
14 - Sirius B - Chain of Thought
15 - Attrition - Onslaught
16 - Still Screaming DC - Holy Wars
17 - Innerpropriates - Bryn to Drym
18 - The Insane Picnic - Chaos Control
19 - Trekellion Skyway - Black Brook
20 - MWAB - Dirt
21 - MWAB - Mik Bum
22 - MWAB - Ooee Ooee Oo Song
23 - I'm Dead - Whispers
24 - I'm Dead - After Life
25 - Jonathan Rush - Horizons
26 - Jonathan Rush - Show Tonight

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

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

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

 

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

 

Rest in peace, Robert. We still miss you.

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

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


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Opera for Infantry - Scumworld (1984) C60

Here's the second tape I put out by Opera for Infantry, and God only knows why they gave me such free reign with their covers. I think I'd just bought Meet the Residents that week, and that's where the phenomenal pop combo gag comes from.

It's okay. If you need to roll around a little longer, pounding one fist on the floor and crying with laughter, I can wait.

As you will be able to hear, this is essentially a live tape but with the backing track used for the performance taking up the first side on the grounds that it sort of works as a bit of music in its own right, or works as a bit of noise in its own right if you prefer. The gig itself comprises a set of several numbers, but I've digitised them all as a single track, as I suspect that's how it was intended.

As you may well know, Opera for Infantry eventually became the Grey Wolves, so for the benefit of anyone who has a problem with that, or who still suspects the Grey Wolves to have been some sort of covert British Movement recruitment drive, Scumworld is probably as revealing an insight into both their founding and actual political sympathies as you're likely to need - Crass meets Throbbing Gristle if you'd rather get it in primary colours: just listen to the words of the live performance (and the tape is pretty decent quality, all things considered, so they're fairly clear), then reacquaint yourself with Reality Asylum if the penny still hasn't quite dropped. Of course the images were horrible, because they were supposed to be horrible, because it was supposed to get you thinking rather than just nodding your head and agreeing that vivisection was a bad trip. I sort of wonder if it wasn't the frustration of Opera for Infantry actually having to explain that they weren't hoping to bring about some totalitarian state (when their stance was fucking obvious if you bothered to listen), which ultimately drove them to greater extremes as the Grey Wolves. I still have a ton of correspondence from Trev from around this time, and it's obvious that he was frustrated by a certain complacency which he saw as having overtaken the anarchopunk scene. So there you have it, I suppose. 

Thirty years later, I'm surprised at how good this one is - not at all the racket I remember. It sort of makes me wish some enterprising sugar daddy had whisked them off to IPS studios and got some of this material recorded with some kind of sound quality.

Download the tape and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Before Scumworld
2 - Scumworld (Amesbury Sports Centre 2/8/84)

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v/a - Meridians 1 (1983) C60

It was going to be Vittore Baroni's TRAX 0682 compilation this week, but at last minute I noticed someone had already stuck it on CD, so you should probably buy it if you want to hear it, mkay? Anyway, Larry Peterson sent me Meridians 1 as a swap for something I'd sent him which I remember thinking was quite a lot better, so I was briefly miffed, not least because it seemed obvious that someone had given him the tape as a freebie and he'd thought it was shit and so passed it on to me. So that wasn't a great start, and there was something I didn't like about the cover (and I'm usually a fan of Malcolm Garrett too), and the whole enterprise felt like the Hayward Gallery getting involved in the tape scene and showing us uncultured fucks how we should have done it instead of all those tacky pictures of Hitler adorning our shit Woolworths cassettes of short-wave radio noise. There was something a bit up itself about Touch, or so it seemed to me.

So imagine my surprise when I pluck this from the shelf as a last minute replacement for TRAX 0682, digitise the thing, and discover that it's actually pretty decent, as I would have realised had I listened to it more than once. The contributors were mostly established artists with record contracts, or close friends of established artists with record contracts, but the music is mostly decent, or the very least, interesting. Most of this lot shouldn't really require an introduction, although for what it's worth, NOTi is also Andrew McKenzie, and the Ludus track seems to feature SPK's Graeme Revell on saxomaphone and Dave Formula from Magazine tickling the ivories. You may notice that the track list given on the sleeve does that fucking annoying thing of featuring mysterious interludes identified in predictable lower case but with no artist, as though they was done by a fucking ghost or summink! This is a pain in the arse for a digitiser such as myself given that I have to divide everything into proper tracks, regardless of stray snatches of speech scattered hither and thither in the name of art. Anyway, I've followed the track list given on Discogs which blows the whistle on himself of the Hafler Trio as author of all the scrappy bits of art challenging the listener's preconceptions about something or other. I should probably also mention that I'm not entirely sure I've correctly labelled tracks 14 through to 17, or whether one of those is actually another one of Andrew McKenzie's medium questioning excerpts from an episode of Nationwide.

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

Tracks:
1 - Matador - Nowever, Ornever
2 - AC Marias - The Whispered Year
3 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil one
4 - Pascal Gabriel - Machu Pichu
5 - Matador - Mother Earth Film Music
6 - Touch 33° - Oral Tradition
7 - Graham Lewis - He Said "Argh..."
8 - John Foxx - The Quiet Man IV
9 - Simon F. Turner - Wash
10 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil two
11 - Current 93 - Salt
12 - Touch 33° - The Crucible
13 - Test Department - Efficiency
14 - S/Z - Text
15 - The Pathfinders - Long Shadows
16 - NOTi - Diagnosis
17 - Andrew McKenzie - sigil three
18 - Ludus - Corpse Candle

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Trilogy (1984) C15+

This was the second thing I released by Thomas Docherty, then recording as Trilogy - three tracks on a C15 for a mere fifty pence and a stamped addressed envelope. I seem to recall it sold fairly well by my admittedly humble standards, and quite right too given the quality of the music. This was July 1984, following the album which I'd put out a couple of months earlier.

 

Astute readers will probably notice that what you have here are thirteen tracks amounting to sixty minutes of music, hence C15+ rather than just C15 in the title of the listing. This is because it seemed to make more sense to digitise the chrome TDK master copy of these recordings than the WHSmiths C15 sub-master for the sake of quality, and seeing as TD had filled the tape with related material - some of which ended up on compilations, some of which was just stuff he happened to be working on at the time and which remains unreleased until now - you may as well think of this as the extended version of the C15 with DVD extras.

 

...and no, I don't know why there are two versions of Words Cannot Describe or what the difference is, aside from one of them being shorter.

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

Tracks:
1 - Batora
2 - Emily
3 - Slave
4 - Feedback Assault
5 - Do Not Forgive Them
6 - Dialogue in the Background
7 - Train Recording I
8 - Power Control
9 - Recorded in an Hour
10 - Words Cannot Describe I
11 - Words Cannot Describe II
12 - First Recording with DM
13 - Train Recording II

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v/a - A Person's Healthy Guide to Listening (1991) C70

This was a cassette release by Regelwidrig Recordings, the work of one Simon Kelly whom I vaguely recall as a wonderful guy with whom Glenn Wallis, myself, and Paul Condon shared pints at Bradley's Spanish Bar in Hanway Street. Annoyingly, it was one of those cassette releases which came clad in fancy, fiddly packaging which meant you couldn't just slot it in with the others on the shelf. I appreciate the effort to keep things interesting and special, but there were a few people guilty of this sort of thing and it was always kind of annoying, and the end result nearly always seemed kind of half-arsed and never as good as the artist presumably hoped it would look. This one came in a large card box with a photograph slapped on the cover at an angle and an apostrophe missing from the title; and anyway, should it not be A Person's Guide to Healthy Listening? Wouldn't that make more sense? Anyway, opening the box - which is no longer necessary since it all fell apart with age and now looks even crappier - caused bits of paper to spill forth across one's listening space - track lists, information, and bits of artwork which I presume to have been supplied by the individual artists because they're all different shapes and sizes and only five of the contributors are represented in this way.

Which is probably why I never listened to the fucking thing more than once, which is a shame because Simon clearly put a lot of effort into it and spent some money on getting it properly mastered and so on, as you will hear. In fact, this tape makes for pretty convincing listening once you've sat down, having swept up a million bewildering pictures of Islamic shoes supplied by Bryn Jones, the man who invented the racist instrumental, it could be argued.

You should probably know of at least a few of these artists, and of the ones I hadn't heard of either, there's not much I can tell you. I always assumed Shock City was something to do with Stefan Jaworzyn of Whitehouse who briefly ran a similarly named label and publishing imprint, but apparently not.

Anyway, enjoy!

Download the thirteen tracks and various related scans by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Nocturnal Emissions - Raised Beach
2 - Shock City - One World Before the World's Ways Waste the World Away
3 - Das Kunst - Probe
4 - Bourbonese Qualk - O Sonambulo
5 - Konstruktivists - Desire (part one)
6 - Konstruktivists - Desire (part two)
7 - Asmus Tietchens - Lemminge
8 - Jouissance - Delirium Dosage
9 - Illusion of Safety - Musikfuck
10 - Shock City - Alienateaghurkin
11 - Due Process - RRRadio WCVW Extract
12 - Contact with a Curve - Balloon
13 - Muslimgauze - United States of Islam


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Acrobatic Champions (1985) C60

Not to be confused with its predecessor, the similarly untitled C15 with a cover which looked almost exactly the same and which can be found here. This was the album released in the wake of the hit single, I suppose, and everything useful (or otherwise) I may have to say about the Acrobatic Champions has already been said here - and that's the same link as was provided in the previous sentence, in case you already clicked on it.

 

So that leaves us with just the music, which is probably better heard than discussed. Most of this was recorded in the sound studio at Maidstone College of Art on a couple of four track reel to reel machines, making extensive use of Paul's own WEM Copycat echo - as you will doubtless notice. Most of it is just Paul, although I played bass on the first two tracks and electronic percussion for the two performances - both played in different areas of the aforementioned college with audience comprising whoever felt like standing around and watching for a bit.

 

On reflection, I realise that most of this music would now be termed dark ambient, except of course it's about a thousand times better. I know I've had my differences with the bloke, but Jesus - this was some good shit, yes siree.

Download the C60 and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - The Sound Room
2 - You Fill Me
3 - AV142
4 - Mirror Glass
5 - Performance 1
6 - Hand on White
7 - Flowers (part)
8 - Performance 2
9 - Negative as Before
10 - The Audience
11 - Carmilla


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