I have very little interest in talking ‘about’ records as objects, rather than as a collection of songs or a document of a band. I can definitely get down with 1001 nights spent yakking about the various merits of different stages of any given back catalogue, but you can roundly fuck off if you think I care to know what pressing of what you have, or how much you paid for it, snoozevilles. Procurement stories are cool and interesting, receipts and dick measuring are not. Yeah, pokemon punks and their ‘gotta catch em all’ disposable income derby do very little for me, in fact it makes me feel a bit nauseous if I am honest. I’m not up for scoring points about who had the most dough to give to eBay that month, to cleave a chunk of someone else’s story off and hold it in a dustcase forever. Ugh. The magic of finding and buying records in unexpected places, sure, that’s a thing I love, and the simple pleasure of exploring parts of a city you never otherwise would by mapping out its secret spots, definitely. I’ve just always found the weird competitiveness that seems to rear its head in that game rather a poor substitute for people who are just super stoked on actual music on the records, which should surely be available to all interested parties regardless of income status. With the continued prominence of filesharing as a neat way to try and achieve that goal, not to mention the upsurge in cool tape cassette demos, it occurred to me last week that I had been neglecting my actual physical collection of records somewhat. In the interests of remedying this, I’ve been having a dig about. Here are five LPs (and Minutemen technically-EP) I listened to this afternoon:
Ultimo Resorte – Post Mortem (Radikal)
This was first up, because I got given this last week in the cinema, an eight month late birthday present, but by no means unwelcome. Thanks Ralph. We had gone for an afternoon movie (one of the mobile phone networks here run an offer that means you get half price movies on a Wednesday, meaning that I haven’t been to the cinema on any other day for at least five years) and the place was somehow deserted. I opened the mailer in almost total darkness and had to decipher what LP it was. Exposed nipple, red fishnet, slightly pixelated art… ah-hah. I had been told this was ‘their goth record’ but this is way more bouncy than it is funereal. The glossy insert is almost entirely in Spanish, which is slowly becoming less of a problem as I rekindle the reasonable ability I once had at school, not least through my new band with a lady from Madrid of all places, where I have to sing backs up in Spanish. I digress! Spooky is an overused adjective in these times, and this hits a way more Neo boys-y or even Kleenex style spot than any kind of melodramatic lace trimmed vibe, but still with all the frugal darkness of both the aforementioned bands.
The Minutemen – Project: Mersh (SST)
Layla gave me this record the last time I was in San Francisco, and it’s pitiful that I’m only just now getting around to hearing it. With its sonic departure founded on a ruse to pillory bands out purely for commercial (‘mersh’) success, and presumably play havoc with the climate of the time where SST were pissing out half-arsed records, it strikes me that only a band of this calibre could attempt such a bizarre feat, detouring at Steppenwolf covers, bringing in vocal harmonies, pushing the limit to nearly six minutes on ‘More Schpiel’, with not a small amount of Doors-esque fripperies, and yet still make such an interesting and let’s face it sort of awesome record.
Combatwoundedveteran – I Know a Girl who Develops Crimescene Photos (No Idea)
The records in this room have not been strictly alphabetised for a long time. There are, loosely, three sections: ‘go to records’, ‘new purchases’ and then a heap of records that is basically anything I bought pre 2004, that tend to get ignored, but for some reason cannot be parted with. My propensity for nostalgic retention is at its wildest worst when it comes to these records. I could have sold some stuff, but absolutely missed the boat on selling anything of worth that could be called ‘screamo’ (a tag, incidentally, that got slapped onto anything vaguely chaotic sounding during the trend’s latter years, and caused for a lot of good shit to get overlooked.) This could well be the case to some degree for Combatwoundedveteran, whose Floridian desctruction of various kinds is arguably at its peak on this LP, which I’m shocked to see came out way back in 1999. It totally destroyed me when I first listened to it, and every subsequent obsessive spin. I couldn’t tell you when it fell out of regular favour, probably around the time that bands like bloody Righteous Jams started to seem like a serious prospect on this island. Ouch. I thought the CWV artwork was cool as shit and tuneless oblivion of the songs blew my mind although I had no frame of reference for it. Returning to it now, there’s a kind of knowingness to some of it, that irks me a little in the same way that a lot of bands like the locust do, even though teenage me somehow heard more in them than just hollow stylized self-regarding turd music for the same brand of turds that I know see it to be. CWV save themselves from that fate though, because there is nothing ‘sassy’ about this record (remember that tendency? certainly didn’t age well) and the lyrics are stark and unapologetic (if a little zany in places) and play off well against the music’s opaque tunelessness. The songs are way more standard sped-up, distorted hardcore than I remember, but are definitely still raging and definitely have me a little regretful that I never got that crazy looking boxed set. That the label that released this, Twelve hour turn (another ‘special place in my heart’ band) The Swarm and even the terribly monikered but I-won’t-apologise-awesome I Hate Myself, is now mired in heinous beer-d koozie plaid rock ‘lol’bro rape joke cheese fest singalong chest pump hell, is a savage downturn, but hey. Hey. (& Hey, I got shit for that opinion after publication, so for the purposes of internet archiving and truths, let it be known I don’t/didn’t mean to suggest for a secoooond that the label bods at No Idea are someshow down with hating women/ rape jokes, duh, just that way too many dudes who love their output seem to be from my experience, weirdly/suckingly.)
The Radiators from Space – TV Tube Heart (Chiswick)
So I said I hated talking about records as a commodity, but that doesn’t, I don’t think, preclude a fascination in the strange enduring physicality-in-the-age-of-digital they still have, especially the real old ones. DNA swabbing some sleeves like this one, released on Chiswick, first purchased in 1977, would yield some pretty varied results, I imagine. I can totally see, in that sense, why first pressings have a charm that some people just can’t get over, the endurance of ‘the original’, and all the hands that have touched it (eek) in age when everything is geared towards disposability. I picked up this LP, battered to shit, from the record exchange in Notting Hill after my dearly departed to Australia friend Maya paid me in vouchers for the place, for proofreading her dissertation. The only safe currency! Just like this one’s sleeve, the songs on here are pop tunes perfectly ragged and ripped around the edges. ‘Contact’ is the clear hit on here. Obviously it has the record exchange’s trademark stickers with the squares that illustrate just what kind of bargain you are getting, and also how long the record has sat in the shop, as they mark down the price each week. Just inside the sleeve, there are marks of many a previous resell, including one from a shop called ‘John Sheridan’s’ of Hull, proprietor of all kinds of second hand wonders, it seems. If the trend for marking one’s records with a name/something to show what belonged to who (‘sup Tim Yo) had persisted, we would have an even less ethereal history to wonder over – I love the idea that each record would come with a list of previous owners inside the dustsleeve, too, but it may just be a little late to introduce such a trend.
The Men – Leave Home (Sacred Bones)
I bought this a while ago and (see above) somehow hadn’t listened to it yet. It seems that bands talked about excitedly by punks need not, in these heady times, necessarily fulfil the criteria of being anything other than loud and exciting. The first song on this record, after the quiet intro, sounds very much like the Stone Roses on weak acid. That I’ve read reviews of this previously that dropped in some heavy shoegaze references is probably testament to the known fact that people who get paid money to review music often only get as far as the first song, those lazy payroll fucks we all hate. Right? Right. Second tune is a huge, bombastic garage stomper, but the parts are chewed up and spat out and it makes for a confusing, urgent listen, a feeling that continues all the way through. Weirdly, I feel like I can hear elements of the more recent Fucked Up material, major-y sounding euphoric chords nailed against hardcore drums, but in being largely instrumental, The Men don’t have the jarring incongruity that Fucked Up’s laudable experiments in that field sometimes fall victim to. This recording’s also beautifully orchestrated, like really full and blown-out without sounding like that was their only instruction. Third tune, Think, is a sweetly furious banger. When the singer does come on strong with the vengeful admonishments, he sounds a like Greg Mantooth of Slices (and MRR, way back when) at least in this song.. The last song on the LP is a slow, unexpected ‘throw the drums down a flight of stairs’ moment, quite different from the others on this side, bringing in almost Bastard noise levels of misanthropic bass nadirism, especially so at its drums-and-coughing-fit conclusion — one that, so the liner notes inform, reaches a climax worthy of Justice Yeldham with two ‘glass and metal’ players credited. The other side continues the separate but equal feel of each song, so much so that it almost feels like a mixtape, something that probably comes about because the players switch up roles a lot. The guy playing Clarinet (apparently?! I must have missed that) on Side A, lends some Goo-era-T.Moore-meets-Piciotto vibes to vocal proceedings on ‘Bataille’. Seriously, I don’t know, this is fucking great. File it next to that Merchandise record for an LP that blows holes in what you expect, demanding 100% attention. Whether they’ll pick one of these styles to plump for, and go Rites of Spring or Spacemen 3, is still up for debate, but the fusion is not too much to stomach as far as I’m concerned. If this is a sign of where punk-rooted bands will be going, or where the new shoots of that same spirit are growing fastest, whatever in the hell that might mean, I’m not sure, but I hope they prove me right. (*They didn’t. ugh)
**
For real, it’s going to get cold here soon, I’m staying home, maybe I’ll leave the house in June. Til then, send care parcels to 80 Lilford Road, London, SE5 9HR.
“Fascist aesthetics… flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.” – Susan Sontag Under the Sign of Saturn (New York, 1980)
We can start with a workable assumption that a lot of people in the world are fucking weirdos. ‘Tis true. Indeed, a lot of people, weirdos included, are total scumbags. A large amount of both types have been moved towards some form of creative output. Normal, well-adjusted people make art, too, but more often that not, it’s the creative output of the batshit crazy, the loners, freaks and dropouts that gains notoriety, sometimes because it’s awesome, and sometimes because of the cult personality and that often what repels us can also attract us. Hey, plus more than a few punks have been gross scummy people with bad ideas and big tunes (or no tunes at all) that we somehow still can’t take our eyes off.
You might have noticed there’s a trend within some punk circles just now for exploration of the more, let’s say extreme, with all the baggage that term has, set of aesthetics that are sometimes more than a bit… crypto-fascist. A few years ago it was Burzum and black metal, and now it’s “neo-folk.” There’s nothing more dangerous than a racist with a bit of charisma (and a silly hat, Boyd, I’m onto you.) Punks are absolute suckers for charisma, willing to forgive the most outrageous behaviour. Apparently, we’re also way into flirting without conclusions. Come on guys, you’re giving all these rubbish Goth Hitlers a major case of blue balls.
I guess the similarities to hardcore are all there, social alienation, visual metaphors, some ‘noone understands me’ jive — but from where I’m standing, if you’re a punk then your home team is one that has certain views about the function of hate, i.e. ignorant dickbags have no truck in this house, well then you can’t really easily take a day trip to Nazi central to tot up your edgy points, make you feel a little darker, impress your peers, get off on the apparent “complexity” of it, without expecting to be called out for it…that’s if there is indeed anyone left who isn’t a sophomore in this school for Terminal Dullard Shock Jockeys, scratching runes into the science benches, jerking off over the Priestess of Odin. Like, do what you want, I’m not the cops, but don’t expect me not to laugh in your face.
I get that it is very easy to sink into just having a debate about semantics of what compilation was made by who, and who knew what the artwork for it would be, etc. etc. when the issue, for all its potency, will never directly affect you in the same way as if you were part of the supposed ‘untermenschen’. It stops being academic pretty much there. It’s the same way I can’t ever really explain with efficacy to the boys frothing on my Facebook feed over Odd Future’s rape rap why I find it so gross and infuriating. (Well, actually I can, but let’s stick to punk because the rap side of this coin is a slightly different argument.) As a side point, I think England doesn’t join the dots in the same way because we don’t have the White Power contingencies that parts of America still do, and our national psyche has reconciled the untruth that racial dimensions do not enter into public life anymore, and are the preserve of a minority of nearly-dead old men. Not exactly true.
Last month, I got an email about a local goth club in London hosting a Sol Invictus and 6 Comm gig (projects of Tony Wakeford, Above the Ruins etc and Patrick Leagas, both formerly of Death in June.) The woman who emailed me was incandescent about this show happening, after a previous Luftwaffe (subtle) and NON (Boyd Rice) show had happened there last year. She was most worried about the Boyd Rice connection, he of, amongst many other things, the R.A.P.E Manifesto, where he opined
“Rape is the act by which fear and pain are united in love. It is the triumph of harmony through oppression. Rape teaches balance, the natural balance of man=above /woman=below. This balance is a lesson which woman must learn, and only man can teach her.”
He’d later claim it was tongue in cheek (of course mate, and Peter Sotos is just a misunderstood genius…) So this woman was seeing if me or anyone I was linked to could organise a protest at it. I was kind of lukewarm on the whole thing because I’m bored enough of hearing about this pseudo-edgy bollocks from within punk without having to engage the twelve goths who go to these thing, on a subject that I am not that well-versed in other than to say its shit and boring. I wished her luck. Over the next few days, she must have emailed the right person or something because that shit blew up like ankles on a Boeing and before you know it, hordes of Antifa manarchists are polishing their Vegetarian boots, a lot of pale fash-pologists are responding to blog posts, the police and the council are involved, and the whole issue is getting very confused. The club hosting the event is a seemingly inoffensive place called Slimelight in Islington that usually just provides a safe haven for London’s curiously persistent contingent of cybergoths. Rock Against Racism’s offspring, an organisation called Love Music Hate Racism, put out this foaming-at-the-mouth press release when they caught onto the whole thing, which kind of did more harm than good because they got some bits about who was playing and who organised it totally wrong, and, I have to admit, blew the whole thing out of proportion, not by making it bigger than it was, but just changing the shape a lot, distorting it. By this I mean that their release made it sound like this was gonna be the Goth Nuremburg, a National Front Tea Party © with a little more neon plastic hair.
This is the thing, as far as I understand, the actual race hate sentiment is expressed through visual metaphors and espoused philosophy, not through whatever shitty tape loops are at hand (I guess guitars are too ‘negro’ or something, what did Varg Vikernes say, remind me mysterious fanboys? Pfffsh..) maybe some rune casting, epic flailing by bald fat white dudes, and thus to some degree, it is hidden in plain view. It’s intellectualised, enacted through names and references rather than, at the point of performance, at least, any headstomping.. Whereas with the strains of racist music that our culture (aside from those secret Rock-O-Rama record collectors, but they aren’t really punks any more than your local white power Philatelist is) has already decided is rotten, by which I mean Blood and Honour all that jazz, their racist ideology is an overt call to action. Go and fight someone. Indirect/direct. Love Music Hate Racism tried to make one sound like the other because it sounds like more of an immediate threat. What they missed, I think, and what Ms. Sontag above so obviously seems to be saying, is that aesthetics are a massive part of fascism, completely integral to it. They are fascism. The reason why some of these people are extra dubious to me is that they have made a career (although I doubt a very successful one, what with Rice’s business dabbling interests in a Tiki Bar in Boulder Colorado…) out of outwardly denying being fascists, and instead working on making the concepts behind fascism slightly less risible and unacceptable to fans of their music, bringing them into the mainstream in a way, or trying to. Which is kind of even worse than being the EDL (English Defence League) member that recently suggested Britain was under attack from “Muslamic ray guns.” Whether interested parties are sensible enough to avoid the fools errand of disentangling medium and message is up to them, but punk-identifying sorts dabbling in such an esoteric pool do so at their own risk of looking like idiots.
Regardless of what an interesting record The Guilty Have No Pride might be, a little temperance and sensitivity doesn’t go amiss, because not everyone is armed with the information to read beyond whatever you’re projecting, keys to the special box. Why make it complex? Like, If you have to worry about being mistaken for a racist, is it really worth rocking a shirt with a massive Totenkopf on it? Death in June for example (which is still obviously way less of a sketchy interest than Above the Ruins et al) were after all once members of Crisis, both of which were at various points sonically intense, Douglas P. is gay, and they did drop T. Wakeford when he joined the NF. All reasonable arguments, but to what degree can we/should we place things in historical context and furiously distance/disassociate, when you’ve already made your opening ambiguous statement? I guess its all about finding how to strike a balance between being able to detach enough to appreciate something that you’ve found which might strike with you as ‘art,’ without becoming a defensive apologist pseud. The lines are not always clear.
For punks, at least, the enthusiasm seems to be primarily about the attraction of the vaguely sinister, and the quick thrill of endorsing something that other people (mum and dad punks?) disapprove of. But come on. Punk is thirty years older than the swazis and spit Bromley contingent ever thought it would be, and our systems of representation work different. More refined, I hope, maybe crystallised into something that can last longer. I guess if you do jock all this tiresome mythmaking, then at least have the ovaries/testicles to appreciate why some people totally don’t. Of course noone’s ever going to agree all the time, but we can still make choices that benefit everybody, and take actions that do more than pay lip service to ideas meant to separate us from the worst excesses of the straight world, ideas that work to the common good and establish consensus, hopefully in the realm of things that don’t make large swathes of people feel fucking unsafe and/or alienated.
By the way, the show did happen apparently, there was a pretty fruitful successful leafleting campaign, conversation with gig attendees, and it was all pretty respectful, apparently. You can read more about the whole debacle on this great website here if you like: www.whomakesthenazis.com
So is disassociation dangerous, or a necessary tactic for enduring this ‘orrible world? I don’t know. Tell me: bryonybeynon@gmail.com Next month: Skrewdriver. (kidding. Kind of ..)
This column is brought to you in a brief moment of calm between trying to do a hundred things at once, or at least five or six.. including taking lessons for my driving test, booking a summer of Big Takeover shows, finishing the content for and laying out a return to the old fanzine (issue five, finally) playing shows, practicing with three bands, co-running the London wing of the Hollaback project and handling the media enquiries for it, putting out and doing the art for three records plus a zine and record mailorder hustle, while working a 40 hour a week job and finalising our impending trip to Texas and triumphant return to the Bay area, all whilst trying to keep my increasingly rubbish body from quite literally imploding.
Trips to accident and emergency aside, it’s been a fun, clammy month in London. I’m sat in my sister’s flat at the other end of the city on a cat-sitting mission. Said feline belongs to her landlady and is a totally sanctimonious princess, trotting about refusing to eat, requiring four different ‘supplements’ and cream to stop her gums smelling bad, mushed into truly foul smelling mini-tins. To add further insult, the flat is tiny and peppered with strange ‘motivational’ decals stuck to the walls at eye-height, for example ‘To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you’ Gross. To counterbalance this, I’ve been poring over a slew of fanzines purchased from the delightful Don’t Buy Records distro (the name’s ironic dummy, Lammie sells 7” and LPs – dontbuyrecords.blogspot.com) which included the latest Ratcharge, Accept the Darkness and Spit on the Major (as well as its sub-zine Alta Intensidaz.) I will admit that in my endless procrastinating on getting the next Modern Hate Vibe out (its been no less than a year, ugh) I had eased off buying zines, because with each awesome page I felt more guilty about my inability to get shit done, albeit sometimes due to tardy responses from interviewees etc, but isn’t that always the way? Similarly, shitting out something reasonable for Maximum has been my priority, because only about four people will read MHV. Either way, I’ve been a foolish, because all these issues are bloody excellent.
Firstly, Accept the Darkness. Shiva is the Tavi Gevinson of Confuse Gai charged-haired teenage bedroom punks! Reading ATD is always fun because you can see new avenues for sonic exploration being found with each issue, and his commitment to reflexivity in regards to what he covers and how, lends a super endearing ‘see what I did there’ness that totally doesn’t need to apologise for itself quite as much! A super self aware punker whose musical knowledge at his age is a bit mindblowing, but kind of cool in that its clearly a digested and pondered exploration, not some kind of intense filesharing cum dump. But you knew this already, right?
Teo gave me a copy of Alta Intensidaz at a gig last week, and Ellie and I spent a woozy drunken train ride back to London reading our copies and quoting him incessantly. Think I’ve got a new manifesto. Teo’s writing is the coolest and most exciting. I think that his descriptions, written in English, lay bare a universal struggle with writing about music, regardless of language ability, which is how to describe something sonic, visceral, corporeal, with something as inadequate as words. I’m ashamed of the stupidly overinvolved metaphors I’ve dreamt up in the past because the words are so direct and well-chosen so that you feel like he is shouting every phrase, spitting in my eyes and maybe spilling beer on my shoes while he does it: “We are living in oppressive reality, in an awful world plenty of authority and its reflex is our noise. The noise is freedom and I never be tired of noise because noise is pure life. The society wants to make you a perfect worker with a perfect family, but the noise, the punk hates the job and family and this boring society. The society wants obedient artists and musicians but we like to shit in the society and its artists and musicians.” In both of his zines, he writes with infectious passion about Iberian, Catalonian and Euskadian raw punk from the past (mostly in Spit on the Major) and spreads the gospel of new bands in Barcelona and surrounds moreso in Alta Intensidaz. In addition to this, the comics are the funniest and most on point I’ve read, and his handwriting reminds me of Aaron Cometbus (rest assured that’s where it ends though.)
I had been familiar with Ratcharge for a while but I think this is the best issue I’ve come across. I was so happy to see Alex is writing for MRR now! Writing that’s world-weary without being jaded, obsessive without being dry. Brilliant use of pull quotes and the content reprinted from MRR on both French singing punk bands and Vaneigem/sketchybros vs. realism were all the more awesome read back to back and in the context of his own zine. Alex is also not afraid to ask questions that don’t implicitly compliment or pander to the interviewee thus making for something staid and overly comfortable, which is something I sometimes struggle with and am working on (expect some downright rude questions in MHV!) A good incident of this is the in the extensive Counterfeit Garbage interview where Alex asks the editors why their zine is ‘such a dudefest [with] pretty much 100% of the bands covered are 100% band?’ I am always interested in these kinds of exchanges in a male context because generally people rarely have cause to question the gender makeup of bands when everyone looks and acts like you do. The first response given to this question is obviously more defensive than the other, which gives the resulting immediate impression that the former has a way bigger chip on their shoulder about this than the latter. May well not be the case, but funny anyway. There’s some weak ‘inclusion, feminism and anti-homophobia is blown out of my head at the breakdown of ‘World Peace’ and the bass line of ‘Nothing’ retort, which I love because I’ve heard variations on that one thousand times before. In reality, World Peace induces the same brick-throwing sentiment in me and damned near every other Cro Mags fan, lack of possession of a dick to swing about during the breakdown notwithstanding. The next line is ‘All that’s left is blood boiling rage and violence.’ If any dude thinks plenty of women into hardcore aren’t driven to the same rage by the same riffs, they’re dreaming, but I speak only for myself and those I know when I wager the violence in OUR minds comes from the alienation and frustations of lived reality in a rape culture, except the freedom that you feel to mosh, permission to ‘lose it’ implicitly granted by a room full of yous, isn’t always shared by the smattering of women who, quite often, the moment they do express themselves in that context, are suppressed by the weight of expectation to behave a certain way and lampooned for it. Bummer, right? Not always, of course, but often, and often by other women, ugh. Explaining this to someone without direct experience of it is nearly impossible, but the choice to ignore this stuff just strikes me as lazy. Of course this is a massive extrapolation from the original context and I’m sure the editors of CG are neither lazy nor consciously sexist, but the mark of a brilliant fanzine is one that can take you on that mental journey, so well done again Alex Ratcharge. It also touches on something that has been bugging me since time immemorial – WHERE ARE ALL THE FEMALE FANZINE WRITERS? Music fanzines, I mean. I will be addressing that loaded question in full in MHV, but goddamnit if you want to prove me wrong/be the exception to this sad rule, or even tear down my argument altogether with a barrage of awesome printed material, then send your zines to 80, Lilford Road, London, SE5 9HR. YEAH!
Postscript: Last night, my ‘local’ social centre, Ratstar, a large high street squat, in which several Big Takeovers took place last summer, was raided in a ridiculous pre-Royal Wedding show of force that synchronised with police attacks on other above-ground radical spaces, on the pretext that the lunatic spectacle of gilded horse-and-cart aristocracy would somehow be relevant to those engaged in active political struggle against the government. Despite searching for most of the day for the stolen goods that were supposedly hidden in the building, the only thing they could find to arrest people of (squatting is not illegal in the UK) was ‘abstraction of electricity’, apparently this warranted ten shielded police vans and at my count at least fifty members of the Territorial Support Group. Whose territory is your high street?
Post-postscript: In the no-doubt arduous task of editing last month’s column, a police tactic of containment got edited to read ‘kittling’ – while this sounds potentially like something delightfully fun to do with bowling, its actually ‘kettling’ incase you wanted to look it up or something!
It feels like I’ve taken the MHV name in vain for everything else other than the OG purposes intended. It’s taken more than a blasted year, but here it is.
MHV5, a5, 48 pages.
Interviews with Nu Sensae from Vancouver, and Hygiene from London, who have an indepth conversation about the heritage, town planning and punk creds of Croydon and Stevenage (touching on everything from Saxondale to AK Chesterton) plus words on The Waitresses of Akron (yes, that Waitresses) and live reviews of Satellites of Love, Woolf, Violent Shitt, various bits and pieces re: moshing, punk girl problems and youth media conspiracies, plus top ten NYHC bangers and Hackney’s DIY history.
In person:
£1.50 per copy.
Posted:
UK: £2.80 inc p&p
EU: €3.60 inc p&p
US: $6.00 inc p&p
paypalled to bryonybeynon@gmail.com
“I had a dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears.. as if they had stepped out of a Goya painting” – Stravinsky
‘Professional’ music critics are 98% thoroughbred chode. (Of course I’m probably jealous, but more on that later.) And yet, in an era of instantaneous connection we’re living through, in a young future society where the onus is placed on the ability to voice one’s (even when sorrowfully misinformed) opinion, well, like Igor says, they breed like rats (and you’re no fuckin’ better, but that’s a sideline for another time.) I’m not talking about zine writers, writers of reviews for their blog, facebook wall, or anywhere else where stakes are low and opinion is a fun tussle, not the bread on the table, or even those whose diverting passions are built on a compulsion to tell the world that’s more of a delightful personality disorder, an earnest deaf drive to total sonic annilihation, a platform for the overlooked, who thus has far more in common with the common or garden ‘fanatic’ of yesteryear, you understand. No, I’ve in mind a critic, a wily, obsequious and slippery handed toad-beast, a he or she that puts his money where his word count is, and believes himself a citizen of every musical universe, master of the full gamut of known language that could used to describe it, to the degree that preexisting terms, or indeed the sacred shared language of the seekers-of-the-new-old-rare-cool , is deemed inadequate for the next big thing…either that or, more often than not, they have an eager dollar-eyed commissioning editor breathing down their sweaty neck, hoping to spot something, a kernel of a trend, just about anything that the publication can then legitimately (or otherwise) lay claim to having championed, helped nuture, or even by very act of reviewing, have somehow originated. ‘Invention’ ironically becoming everything, even in a world where musicians fight over fetid scraps of re-re-rehashed ideas….
Okay, and as I tie myself in unbecoming knots looking to justify this superfluous process-of-getting-to, let’s be clear that today I’m thinking about a term that’s been laughed out of town by many but persists, a term that seeks to supercede more obvious connotations that others might come to first, a term that precisely sums up the kind of inflated rhetoric and unnecessary trend-seeking far to prevalent in musical journalism. I am talking about hypnagogic pop. In the words of my non-fool suffering housemate Gav…*long pause and look of disgust* “….Come on man.”
I, like, many, first encountered this term flicking through the subscriber copies of Wire magazine that previous tenants of our house, persons unknown, evidently forgot to cancel, so we kept receiving them. Wire is a curious beast, in that I enter into a reader/read relationship with it on the strange ground of assuming for a fact that there is no chance I have heard of or heard any of the artists and musicians reviewed, and 5% of those referenced, which can result in (if you don’t just put it in the recycling at this point) reading the criticism as some kind of almost impure literature. A good review cant just resort to ‘sounds like’ when you’re doing the equivaluent describing a particularly beautiful sunset to a blind person. Unselfconciously intellectual (you won’t find the kind of turgid ‘Yeah, this plain rocks’ record company pleasing, jewel CD quote fodder and all round platitudinal shit that rags like the NME churn out), I do enjoy reading The Wire magazine when it occasionally falls on our matt for these reasons, and I have learnt some new and exciting non guitar based music, but there are occasional spats of such ridiculously extrapolated analysis, particularly when it comes to punk rock, that I have to put it down and go and listen to some really, really dumb hardcore to compensate.
It could have been David Keenan, one of the Wire’s journalists, originated the term, or it could have been someone else. He describes it thus: ‘’Hypnagogic pop is music that reaches beyond its performers’ abilities. It refashions 80s chart pop-rock into a hazy, psychedelic drone. It is listening to Beverly Hills Cop and hearing the music of the spheres. It is the sound that remains after the boys of summer have gone.”
……Come on man. Listen to the music referred to by this term and hear the kind of post everything ennui filled tuney-glare of empty sound and… wonder who listens to this? The ethereal and the dreamlike seem to be the modes these bands are going for, but it seems very much a spiritual dead end. Of course theres a clumsy, fun art of making up ever more niche genres, but its also a little embarrassing and I definitely don’t want to see this game in the service of shifting units for the laebsl of megacorp shitsystem inc.
What worries me further is that a band I cannot stop listening to, who to me have nothing in common with the indistinct neutrality of overblown references found in so-called hypnagognic pop, have been described such in a few places I wish I’d never been to. That band is from Tampa, FL, and it is called MERCHANDISE. For the rest of this column, I will talk about their LP, one that I am certain you’ve already heard/cherished/discarded, but still I can’t quite yet. Strange songs in the dark. There are few more descriptive titles. It’s different to my usual audio territory and that might be why I rate it so highly.
On first listening, you could be forgiven for thinking that this group’s sonic aims equals every song you’ve ever heard played backwards and forwards at the same time. It has that that sort of totality, matched weirdly by a strong sense of accident in the presentation and unfolding/unravelling of what are, undeniably, some huge, huge tunes. Tasteful poppy croutons (minus the banal, this is not yr friends tweegaze band) bobbing in a thick, fermented stew, and lightly detuned like the sounds you catch yourself singing when engrossed in some other activity. Tangentially, the vocal remind me of Patrick Wolf, a UK mid-noughties multi instrumentalist and once glittery darling of a queer (both senses) brand of electrosynthy-neo-folk thing. Sounds gross, right? I fear his star may have faded (or indeed intensified) with age, as I read some thing about police being called to his posh flat in some bizarre drugs sex coup, anyway, but Merchandise’s vocalist has the same lush fey tones, like a luded-up Moz with his dick in his hand, still, mastery in every octave, all buried in indifferent, cosy, expansive fuzz. Fuzz with intent, not as a comfort blanket. Something’s happening. Half remembered, mumbled words, aimless, barely repeated vocal hooks floating over the scree, and they are kind of addictive. It’s the Best of New Order through a ham radio. It’s noisy, lurching and hugely listenable.
PS. Addendum, dear weeder, I wrote this column in ten minutes whilst dubbing tapes to take to the Merica, and when I get back, you can totally have one too: goodthrob.tumblr.com
Reading, Berkshire. If you’d told me five years ago I would one day know its not-quite-a-city charms very well indeed, from its pretty canalways (replete with the least covert, most organised drug dealing operation, walky talkys and all) to shining examples of the glass-and-concrete town centre ‘mall’ developement now favoured in settlements from Swansea to Sheffield, I’d probably have laughed in your face, or at least become troubled by the thought. Fact is, I am fond of the place for two main reasons called Louis Harding and Ashleigh Holland, plus one auxilliary reason called Munchie’s Cafe (where they will serve you flat cherry aid in a greasy cup.)
Ash recently directed and shot this short film entitled Less than Nothing, with her co-editor Alli Albion, both now highly successful alumni of Newport Film School (another town I’ve come to know rather too well) which was shot entirely in Reading, Berkshire, and features yours truly, and top secret band practice footage. Woah. I don’t know shit about filmmaking but watching how much time and effort this took, together with a lot of on the hoof, lateral thinking solutions to continuity issues was a real eye-opener, and the finished product is super endearing and fun to watch and makes me think about French theory types de Certeau or Henri Lefebvre, both of whom had some cool ideas on the poetics/practices of everyday life, on how to see things differently, which I think this little film def does. Sadly, my lip synching to the entirety of Queen’s ‘Who wants to live forever?’ which I worked very hard on lies cruelly on the cutting room floor.
Here it is:
(PS. No apologies for liberal usage of the This Recording ‘In which’ meme)
There’s a momentous clattering of glass. Only just discernable through the yellow haze of cordite from smoke bombs are a small group of figures collectively wielding a traffic diversion sign high above their heads, smashing it against the frontage of the Ritz. They have all hidden their faces and they have all chosen not to participate in the A-B police-approved march today. They probably don’t know each other. That march is organised against the cuts to public services, including the proposed selling-off to the highest bidder of the system that allows everyone in the UK free healthcare, which is also Europe’s biggest single employer. The media, almost without exception, will later report on this, the biggest demonstration in eight years as having been ‘spoilt’ by ‘violent extremists hell bent on destruction.’ They charge now at a hotel whose doorstep is perennially slick with Arabian Oil profits, corridors cloudy with the baying laughter of the idle rich. Their symbolism isn’t hard to read, nor is it meant to be. “Only actions matter in this moment.” The shattering that sounds like the end of the world is gone in a few seconds, but photographers are somehow faster than police, so the only thing captured is this image, and these breakers of glass, ciphers for decontrol, havoc, and referred to variously as ‘thugs / anarchists / morons / the violent minority / black bloc’, all of which are a little off point, well they are faster still, long gone before that acrid smokescreen has any hope of lifting.
—-
I was there, for a little while. On a lunch hour while working a pointless temp job that involves sitting in a room in case a telephone rings. I’d trotted around the west end (an archaic sort of ‘downtown’ for tourists and cinema goers) and ended up just short of Regent’s street as I stop for a rest. Even in their dress-down yellow jackets, even as they pose for tourist photographs, I am mildly uncomfortable at the police presence, and mindful of them as I slouch against a lamppost, watching the awesome array of embroidered Union banners float by, chewing on a strawberry. There are no protesters or demonstrators here, outside of the small section of the Union organised demo march that is visible from the square, which is following its pre-planned course. The atmosphere is that of a normal public event, where rarified clement weather brings out shorts in ever hopeful middle-aged men, and the march is quiet and obedient to the degree that I nearly move to inform the copper behind me that one of the diversion signs has fallen over and I’ve seen two curious tourists nearly trip on it. I find myself moving on up another closed street as there’s nothing else to see and I need to buy some Jeans. I’m nearly at the door of the shop, all of which are still open for business, when there is, out of nowhere, a very loud explosion. The thin smattering of tourists and shoppers that I’m walking nearby make sudden, wide eye contact with each other. We can’t help it. Still, most of them move back towards the source of the noise with interest. I’m nearly a mile from work at this point, and the realisation that I’m alone and that I could get trapped suddenly dawns on me. The police tactic of containment or ‘kettling’ has done well to quite successfully deter me, and I suspect thousands of fellow lily-livered armchair anarchists from attending protests of recent months, and even on my lunch hour, today is no different. I make a u-turn and try to discern what the lines of cops, still standing to attention but allowing people through, might be saying. I study their faces. They have long batons. They all seem to be men. I am overwhelmed with fear and mistrust out of nowhere now, even though I have no trigger, no direct experience that would give me reason to be. Just stories, overheard, and images, studied and returned to. I imagine many citizens of other countries, even friends in America, feel this way as an active daily lived default setting but our police do not have guns here. (I am more scared of guns than I can possibly explain, I’ve never even seen one close up in real life. It makes me want to be sick and I couldn’t tell you why, really.) They are like lined up here like soldiers, bustling now in the wake of the first blast. An armoured vehicle speeds down the closed street. I figure it was some kind of smoke bomb with a sound much louder than its visual impact. Who threw it? There are, to reiterate, still literally no protestors in sight here, just tourists and the small visible section of the main march, a never-ending snake of marching unionists and hospital staff in the south west corner of the Square. Another louder bang. The last time a pig moved that fast it was flying. There is still noone here who looks like they could possibly have thrown an exploding missile, but the mood has suddenly and irrevocably shifted, although at this point I’m not in the business of soaking up the mood, eyes shifting to a possible exit, as road I walked down to get here becomes impassable within a split second, now sectioned off by a line of police who have suddenly donned helmets. As such they are unable to hear the plaintive requests of families of shoppers looking to get out, but still they seem as uncertain as to what is about to happen as anyone else. You can sense it as they shift from foot to foot. Each of them seems to be at least 8ft tall. All men. I edge to the wall to attempt to sneak past them. Again, the march is still moving, and as I’m let through I start moving faster. There is a clattering sound, it seems far off but persistent and as I speed-walk towards Leicester Square, I look up a sidestreet and am stopped in my tracks. A thick line of completely helmeted and shield riot police with batons raised. They charge. In that glimpse, that moment, you can tell what is to come for the rest of the night. The headlines and the tutting. What this event will be ‘written off’ as. I freeze frame that exact moment, aas it all begins to kick off. Later on the Ritz will be smashed and the following morning a right wing tabloid newspaper will announce ‘Ritzkrieg!’ and spread unsubstantiated froth about ammonia-filled lightbulbs. I think about taking a photo, and then decide to get the fuck out of there before I get stuck again. I hightail back towards the relative safety of Covent Garden, where my office in the museum is, that is very unlikely to play host to anything more civilly disobedient than a particularly raucous street performer who has paid thousands for his license to entertain tourists. My ears are still ringing from those two little blasts as I climb the stairs and slouch back down in my office chair.
If I had stayed indoors and carried on reading the websites instead of heading out there to watch the march and eat some strawberries, I’d have known that, a few streets north at that very moment, a blac bloc was weaving itself through narrow streets, smashing up banks in targeted rage, decimating the odd window as they went, completely evading the police. That line of riot police I witnessed about to charge was the very moment they caught up.
At the same time, a PR-savvy “peaceful direct action” group called UK Uncut had been honing in on their targets on Oxford St, the city’s main shopping drag, where were mostly the flagship stores whose parent companies known for government-assisted tax evasion. The occupation and ‘conversion’ of these stores into makeshift ‘art schools’ or ‘hospitals’ is their aim (techniques: paintbombs, banner and some theatrical improvisation) a playful ad-hoc detournment making a real point, that has gained them celebrity fans and some media respect. They operate with a fluid honesty that’s hard not to like and generally speak sense. As such, they are a threat to this government in a way that neither A-B marchers or the so-called ‘violent minority’ are (who are mostly just written off as being unrepresentative of ‘real British people,’ because having reservations about capitalism and voicing them seems to be the fastest way to get discredited as a crackpot idealist) This is why, after being repeated told by a senior officer that they were being contained by police in the high-end department store they had occupied (a known tax avoider not to mention the ‘Royal Grocer’) for their own safety, 138 UK Uncut affiliates were systematically arrested and held for in some cases 18 hours without food, strip searched and DNA tested. This is the state response to a non-violent group of young people, suggesting that big business should pay their taxes according to the law of this country, too.
Manning the unringing telephones in a locked annex in a dead museum. Listening to the helicopters. After lunch has settled, I am as close as can be to downing tools completely and heading out, but it doesn’t happen. I’m alone with my thoughts until the sirens stop quite suddenly around six pm, although the helicopter buzz stays for far, far longer. The official reports of the day are done, statements will be released, cells prepared, they could have been (and in all probability, were) written the night before, such is their predictability. So as darkness falls and all the major media outlets have filed their stories, it’s just the right time for the police to seize upon a peaceful sit in at Trafalgar square, ruthlessly battering young men and women without provocation, breaking one man’s arm and clobbering hundreds into hospital, a ‘tactic’ based on a lie over attempted property damage to the fucking Olympic clock.
There has always been and will always be elements of an up-for-a-ruck-with-the-filth mentality mixed in with a political prerogative whenever you get in large crowds of dissenting civilians, but the hazy ground between the two is a frayed edge as old as time, and no doubt any form of civil disobedience that’s ever even tried to manifest itself. The assertion that somehow only those who can articulate their rage or affiliate their feelings in a certain language are worthy of being listened to is a trite one. Indeed I can think of many of my peers who feel just slightly too hazy or disconnected to outwardly express that sick feeling. Engaging those people is crucial. The images of direct action from today are arresting, even though the content of these actions (always limited to property damage) in a global city, are not really so dangerous or all that unusual in themselves. I think of the broken windows all along Brixton’s backroads, of graffiti and property damage as a common language of every brick in this city (whether its tolerated, tutted at or ignored, its never an outrage) – these quotidienne attacks on property are pretty small time in the scheme of daily socialised acceptance of rape, abuse and murder, much less the state sanctioned violence against the very most vulnerable people that are about to be rushed through our parliament. There are different forms of violence and their outcomes differ to, as do their significance and their capacity to be either seized upon by a frenzied media or washed over with a weak ‘we’re all in this together’ sigh of economic fatalism that neatly discounts the fact that these cuts tear massive holes in the last few remaining safety nets available for the most urgently vulnerable people. All this from our Frankenstein bro-alition excuse for a lousy sham of receding hair suited pricks in parliament, complete with no less than thirteen millionaires and a prime minister with a face like the inflamed end of a recently discharged penis, obsequiously serving corporate interests, squeezing Thatcherite ideology from dribbling neo-liberals, looming ineffectually as particles of marketisation seep into every aspect of public life, waiting ready only to blame the previous administration when countering the lies they had to tell to get even halfway elected, and always with the stale mantra that they didn’t have access to the real figures, that they could never have known the true weight of this country’s debt when they made those ‘promises’ to the electorate.
What happened last week in London will undoubtedly be condemned as an anomaly of the violent left, in opposition to the will of ‘reasonable people’ and democracy, the argument being that those with genuine political grievances would never resort to such violence (that is to say, the apparently heinous crime of low level property damage.) In the coming months, every moment of improvised, creative and defiant direct action taken will represent a tiny, decisive tear in the vast tarpaulin of grief and shame shrouding this small island, where the police do not carry guns and the parties in power got less than 25% of the public vote. We must act on the freedoms we do have, because that light, I suspect, is demanding to be let in.
I think this is from 336 but I couldn’t say for sure? Wah
Sun on my face and frozen wind in my eyes. This is springtime in London, and I’m fully aware of this persistent tendency I have to open every column with some pithy and not-altogether necessary comment on the weather. Soz for that. Brain is everywhere, facts is nowhere. Today I started a proper job in a good museum. Yesterday I was in a national newspaper, looking weirdly tuffstyles/urban (the photographer kept asking us to look moody) in relation to an anti-street harassment project that a friend and I co-run. It’s been weird,. I think my Dad was a bit freaked out that my first ever in-print quote (outside of beloved thing you hold in your hands, cuz whatwedoissecrettt, duh) included the phrase ‘Nice Tits,’ but he was still proud, I think. It’s deeply strange cos the issue of the newspaper in question was guest edited by Annie Lennox — formerly of 80s UK androdge/anodyne 80s synthsters Eurythmics, now mostly known for being an ‘acceptable’ feminist and a bit of a posh Scot — who soundtracked all of my childhood journeys crammed in the back of our ailing Mazda 626 long before I could see over the dashboard, in particular (which is even weirder) a creepy banger of a song called Sex Crime which my sister always told me off for singing along to even with my extreme lisp that rendered it more like Theckth Cwime. The world turns on a strangest axis.
/
New band jumped on the second day a two-day women’s rights benefit staged at a anarchist social centre that’s something of a quasi-institution in the north of England, where the criteria for the fest that weekend was that all bands booked had to have at least one woman member. I thought it sounded cool even though the bands would not all be to my taste (going by the ‘organic dub ska’ descriptions anyway.) There had been some revealing intra-band bickering over whether playing a gig based on these criteria in fact serves only to further ghettoise and patronise female musicians, and that putting on gigs should only ever be rationalised on the basis of the bands being musically ‘good.’ I feel pretty diametrically the opposite to said viewpoint, perhaps predictably so, and we talked about this, but as is always the case with two strong minded people who know each other very well, its almost impossible to really change opinions, especially when it’s a dude and thus even harder to explain the innate value and secret sort of magic of being surrounded by women in an environment that’s in the UK punk scene gotta be normally at least 95% male. To me, the ideal musical punksphere is loads of totally amazing bands that are full of dudes AND ladies, so in making a space that albeit artificially enforces that gender balance as a reality, the organiser of the gig was practicing a neat-o experiment in prefigurative politics. That all the bands didn’t suit my tastes obviously means its less enjoyable for me than it otherwise might have been, but when was the last time every band on a fest did, and it seems that in creating a situation where the focus is on women actually being IN the bands, members of the audience might be inspired to start some that don’t suck, too. (Sidepoint: I feel like I constantly have to reinforce how rare mixed gender bands is in the UK, for MRR’s international audience that might think I’m being a nitpicking harpy, but seriously, this island’s a cock forest like you’ve never seen before, especially in hardcore.) This discussion having taken place before the gig itself, I didn’t know what to expect really. As a new band still very much finding our proverbial feet, we hadn’t had these kinds of conversations, really, and suddenly after playing we found ourselves sitting in the newly refurbished roof of the 1 in 12 being interviewed for a radio show about these very topics by a rad girl whos name I think was Jen. I had sat with her and some other girls that I knew and did not know and realised that intentionally or otherwise the organisers of the cringingly named Equal Fest had done something special because here was rad fun time camaraderie and failed skateboard dream talks for real — and noone was talking about knitting tampons either. Her radio show was on something called BCB anyway. The presence of a Dictaphone and a stranger can be a very calming thing amongst a group of fiery personalities, I learnt. Everyone stared at the floor and we speak in low tones with more implicit respect than we might normally show in more casual times when less seems at stake but actually its more), and with a special lack of certainty that shoots big holes of possibility into the walls people usually carry around ready to erect at the first sign of a conflicting idea because oh but aren’t you meant to agree with every aspect of your band mates outlook just by virtue of playing in time with them? (as cruel and unusual punk rock assumptions, that one is up there.) Yeah, the enduring myth of a band having one cohesive idea about everything… after all, Nation of Ulysses we ain’t (mores the endless pity) and while beautifully written 90s punk rock cryptomythologies were oh so sexy and alluring (well, maybe, I sure get off on that shit, I don’t know, don’t we all wanna be the UFO dictator of our own secret cadre of libidinal hipbone revolutionary aesthetes?) but back in theee IRL that shit can’t ever really ring true unless only one of you speaks or matters or you’re all on drugs or something. As Ashleigh said as we climbed the rickety stairs out of the attic, having committed our sometimes wildly conflicting ideas on the subject to tape with accidental communal grace and really not too much of a stuttering… ‘Wow, that was cleansing.’
Later that evening, we travelled to another different anarchist social centre in a different post-industrial Yorkshire town (wild, right?), to play a club night put on by the charming hep cats responsible for Niche Homo fanzine. We had the south African contingent with us, so Glenn and the Moolmans play a killer Black Mamba Beat set, then Andrew jumps up and Matthew from Black Time appears like a skulking puzzled panther from the infinite haze of his own mystique/hair. Their band Wake Up Dead played a quick set, belting out Misfits/Gun club style bangers including a paean to Andrew’s Mancunian girlfriend, titled Northern Girls. I notice a woman is gyrating wildly and gesticulating in a way that’s inscrutable but a little bit unsettling. She keeps grabbing at his mic stand, and standing a little too close. Still, she seems to love it. The euphoria of a lightning speed set over, suddenly I’m grimacing and looking away as this woman, limbs all loosened and out of sync, high either on the ecstacy of presumed righteousness or the cheap speed you can get up there, or both, grabs the mic and begins to ramble she-thinks-authoritatively yet without any consonants, something about patriarchy, lambasting Andrew directly seemingly on behalf of all real ‘Northern girls’ as ‘oppressed women’. I die inside, knowing that this person’s choice to be wastehammered, mean and rude, producing an incoherent ramble clearly with the intent to publicly shame instead of directly engage with her perverse argument, will sit neatly in the column of crazies stacking up against logical feminist human punkers everywhere. GAH. Battles picked and lost. Later on, someone will scrawl ‘Equal Fest = Tokenism” with a jizzing cock motif on the dancefloor in fat chalk letters. I’m too drunk to work out who did it and what they were even driving at. I pour beer over the cock anyway. Within mere minutes, frenetic dancing shoes return it all to a random distribution of meaningless dust anyway. I’m nursing a finger swollen and red from an ill-judged guitar playing/stabbing angle. Unsure now from where the blood is coming, but nonetheless delirium drunk with the only saints I know, we just keep moving and it feels alright.
Squinting eyes. Mousy brown hair cropped unevenly around a small head. Leather boots proud and dirty at the end of two gangly legs, moving independently of each other but somehow leaving their owner stood in one place. He writhes now, at the front of this small assembled crowd, rarely facing us. Blinking, twirling and twitching, he is constantly twitching, consumed by something not present in the room. He’s pale with a smattering of moles, and you can see his collarbones through his shirt. The three men behind him are expressionless but for furrowed brows and a look of palsied fear as this, their first public expression, starts to overpower its reigns. When one songs stops those charged, lean limbs slump momentarily, as another begins he could be operated equally by stomp pedal or cattle prod. His is not a violent dance, at least not in thre traditional sense. Noone is touched, or moving out of his way, there is no question of interaction because we are watching through a vast impenetrable wall of booming, gnarled and twisting warmth, sounds too loud to even attempt to speak through. Changes in movement are unpredictable and uneven, and occasionally his mouth will open, a dark purple hole full of teeth as imperfect but real as everyone else in the room. At irregular points, he exhumes a rasping, wheezing expression that repeats itself far below the highest frequencies of the guitars either side of him. His sound is the echo of an echo, persistent and narrating a play noone has seen or heard of. Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine. The convulsions of St. Vitus embodied in a boy that wants only to levitate, an expelled ballerina that cares nothing for the crowd. Loud and lush in tone, it’s a dazzling output that seems to have partially replaced the air in this room. There are perhaps fifteen people watching. All they can do is witness these throes, submit to them. There is no bass guitar and this is somehow absolutely right. Those oversized boots belie their owner’s light-footed steps, as the daintiest stomp unroots a cable from the end of a string of connected colourful pedals that refuse to stay in line. For a brief second that deafening duvet sound sea drops half its tog and, still rasping and barely audible over just one of the guitars that are now functional, the boy says ‘oops’ into the microphone. As signal rushes back through the circuit within a second and the jolt of now comfortable pain returns to jaw sockets, rattling through sinus cavities and now coarsing through limbs all loosened and out of sync, the rasp returns and it’s very clear that it doesn’t matter.
/
Despite personal promises that I would tune my own guitar, at the eleventh hour I succumb to the patient ‘Like so…’ tuition of someone who could do it faster and with a modicum of certainty, watching in powerless desperation as the shifting orange lights turn green. I am, however, armed with the accidental acquired knowledge that touching the headstock lightly against this borrowed guitar head brings me to the very brink of bearable in terms of piercing feedback, and I take full advantage throughout our set. With the cheapest distortion pedal you can buy blinking playfully in its pink plastic housing at me (I have only recently become its master) hands start to move. Something about muscle memory. I don’t remember anything but the buzz between strings making contact and its quite conceivable I suffered an electric shock as it was roughly 20,000 times louder than I’ve ever played before. Set free by amplification, I realise I’m drowning out the drums, for better or worse, I hear me plus a rumble, which I think must be Ash, stolidly rhythmically reliable in a way I will never be, plus Ellie’s hateful but well-annunciated (and, I notice for the first time, somehow delightfully British) growls. I see suddenly why everyone plays that bit faster live. Moving hands in what I know is the right sequence is strangely hypnotic. I realise after we finish that there was a mirror facing me to the right, covering the whole wall, but I do not see myself. We cover The Weirdos – Life of Crime and Black Easter – What the Fuck. Ellie says she forgot the third verse, I did not notice. I try to move, propelled by the distant crawling bass, and feel the balls of my feet rock backwards and forwards, and this is all my body will do. It feels enough. We played a song I had written the riff for 48 hours prior, alone in the garage, freezing and mildly terrified at what would happen if my hands forgot everything. The next song begins with me. My hands.
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‘WE ARE ANTI-MUSIC! WE DO NOT NEED YOUR CLAPS. YOU CAN SHOUT WITH US AND YOU CAN MOVE…. YOU CAN BROKE YOUR SHIRT BUT WE DO NOT NEED CLAPS!’ The message has been understood and received to varying degrees. The sound that starts now will inform the rest. The ensuing wall of feedback barely penetrates the industrial and unforgiving buzz of a guitar through a small black box that will remain engaged throughout proceedings, with the words “MetalZone” in a rounded font on its lid. There are two dark-haired men, one with glasses and one without, begin to shout. Mostly in Spanish. Sweat is already pouring from the man with the guitar’s forehead, but he does not remove his glasses. The glasses are small, round and dignified. His trousers are worn high on the hip and secured there with three bands of metal studs, where a plain black guitar (the make and model of which is of no consequence, but is an Epiphone Special II) has been modified to read “Odio Al Musica” on the top part, and “Odio al Sistema” on the lower part, separated by a circled capital ‘A’. The material used to write this is electrical tape. Most of the crowd here cannot speak Spanish. This is of absolutely no consequence. The first fifty seconds of sound are punctuated by both players shouting ‘VIOLENT! SHIT! VIOLENT! SHIT!’ Because we have seen both the promotional material for this event, held in the corner of a pub in South London, and also the small table adjacent to the bar which is covered with a large illustrated flyer that reads VIOLENT SHITT, we know that they are actually shouting ‘VIOLENT! SHITT! VIOLENT! SHITT!’ The request of no applause proves unneccesary as there will be no appropriate gap for these kinds of formalities. No let up. Atonality as a manifesto. They are both going fucking mental, dear reader. During what turns out to be the last ten minutes of the set, the woman who sang for Good Throb is invited to take the mic. She had been informally asked to make ‘animal noises’ at a previous point, but had been given no further instruction. Without hesitation she begins to pant and groan like an animal in slaughterhouse death throes. This mutates into rabid canine crowing, the wheezing squall of her voice already broken from the exertion of a previous set. Suddenly the barking stops and is replaced by a more identifiably female scream. Insistent comes the command: ‘FEED ME LIKE A DOG.’ More noise, more feedback, the Spanish men are all but oblivious to her presence and yet the three are totally locked in. ‘FEED ME LIKE A DOG.’ Peace in decibels. ‘FEED ME, FEED ME, FEED ME LIKE A FUCKING DOG.’
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Wolf with two ‘ohhhs’ take to their instruments (cuz there’s no real stage this time) with a certainty as yet unseen. It’s not like, routine, never no never, but its got a lets-do-this air that’s imposing and powerful without the unnecessary nerves, Psychic no wave power jams for Dulwich witches scratching uncontrollable itches. Every band you ever wanted to form but didn’t because you couldn’t wouldn’t shouldn’t and the pressure that stopped you distilled into a static buzzing sudden quiet loud explosion that doesn’t matter what pitch or how shrill the scream is just that it propels us forward. Yeah its ‘all girl’ if you must, but not token or g-d forbid ditzy or droll or aware of anything but the catalysm-rhythm of a drummer that stays standing throughout, using her whole weight against the floor tom, punishing it for unspeakable sins, sometimes with a maraca. Sometimes songs will finish with whispered refrains that leave the assembled crowd (still shifting from foot to foot with uncertain pace that changes just as a hand gets used to tapping, so you admonish your limbs for being so certain) wondering when to clap. Woolf don’t need ‘em either, but they don’t even need to say. Instruments switch between members but not too many times, hands often cover over mouths as they warble and sputter into mics, not in embarrassment, more a sort of ownership, denying that spectacle, of sounds not yours to see. ‘This is a lesbian folk song’ the now-familiar intro that announces one moment hurrying into the next with a frenetic pace that you wish was a tiny bit slower, just to spite the members of assembled crowd who will crow on about not ‘getting it’, when what is there to understand, those who are waiting for this to be over with impatient desperation so they can get back to their pints and their record collections, and so you silently will that last triumphant buzzing scree to reverberate a little longer, just to, you know, annoy the squares.
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Noel, Ralph, Tom and Jop – Satellites of Love / Ellie, Louis, Ashleigh and Me – Good Throb / Paco and Teo (featuring Ellie) – Violent Shitt / Irene, Sophie, Colette and Georgina – Woolf / The Bird’s Nest – 4th February 2011.
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X Ray Spex was the first female-fronted punk rock i really got into, and when I sang in the Sceptres it was the one comparison that never erked me even though it seemed predictable.. because it was the hugest compliment, the Guardian might misquote you and the BBC might reduce you to a crackpot Krishna or suggest that Glen Matlock knew the significance of Oh Bondage Up Yours! but they’ll never know what you mean to a global bedroom of girl punks – we’ll always know difference. When I first read Virginia Woolf talking about the need to create new, non-familial genealogies of inspirational women whose writing and whose work we could claim influence and spiritual sustenance from, I thought immediately of trailblazing fore-mothers like you – every girl punker past present and future will remember yr voice.
Bye bye poly xx