ARACHNOPHOBIA
Funny how it works... I saw the Flyin' Spiderz on TV once, when I was about 10 years old, and I remember it was a load of tuneless noise. It was on a very popular daytime show where little kids would compete playing xylophone, juggling, talking backwards, etc., interspersed with some real "grown-up" acts. At the time I didn't catch their name, but I did get the announcement that this was a Real Punk band. All I knew about punk was that it was disgusting and a bunch of noise; that's what I'd read anyway. So I guess that's why the Flyin' Spiderz sounded like a disgusting bunch of noise to me. Years later when I (a seasoned punk aficionado by then) found their 2 LPs secondhand, it sounded much too slick and poppy for my liking! Nowadays, another 20 years later, my taste has stalled somewhere inbetween those two extremes and I've ended up really liking them. Their second LP Let It Crawl (1978) is the only early Dutch punk record that's sorta semi-easy to find. It's even slicker than their debut LP, but it's still got a lot of energy. This LP is right from that ultra-short period when musicians had grown bored with yer standard punk rock, but weren't sure what to do next. After punk, but before postpunk, if you wish... This period gave us Alternative TV, the Saints' Prehistoric Sounds, the Damned featuring free-jazzer Lol Coxhill, loads more very interesting (but not always necessarily great) stuff. On Let It Crawl the Flying Spiderz are trying to stretch out as well, which sometimes works (the 60's-pop of "Paper Girl" - I'm sure the Rousers must have heard this song) and sometimes doesn't (plodding rock songs with brass sections). But at least they were trying! Singer Guus Boers mixed the usual lyrical fare with some more socially relevant stuff: "They are killin' the city" is a pretty prophetic song for 1978. (He also co-wrote Nasmaak's "Hondepoep" which tackled the problem of dogshit on the sidewalks!)
By 1979 the (shortened) Spiderz, like a lot of ex-punk rockers, had finally found their new style: robotic electro-wave. They released 2 more LPs (which you don't want to hear) before splitting.
Alive
Killin' The City
S.O.S.
Paper Girl
posted by Niels at 20:54
9 Comments:
i was about to post this record too. i like it so much more than their 1st lp. killing the city is my fav track on this one. great!
hmm...can't seem to download the tracks...
Anonymous,
You might have to wait 10-20 seconds before it starts downloading/ playing, because it's from an IP address.
Nice write up! A few weeks ago I found a copy of the "Let It Crawl" LP here in Chicago for $4 at a record show. So I guess it's not too hard to find, unless I was just lucky. The guy selling it had no idea what it was and it was just lumped together with a bunch of mainstream rock records. Maybe it was sitting in his stock since the 70s' (?). Now if I just could just find an original copy of the 1st Ivy Green LP at one of these record shows...
-TONY
The FS were a very cool band and nice guys as well. I still have some press stuff of them lying around.
They belonged to the 'musicians that played punk' people before it became 'punks that played music'.
'Marionettes' is my favorite song of the 2nd album.
Tony,
That's a nice find! I found my copy for $5 but it's a little scratched (as you can hear on the mp3s). Finding the Ivy Green LP might prove to be a little harder though...
...but who knows, I once read somewhere it sold 6,000 copies, which is not really super-rare!
hmmmmh the links don't work, too bad curious what they sound like i used to have the album like 24 years ago, remember seeing them in kaasee where they were spit upon by alex from den haag and mickey meteor for "being posers" they had to cut the performance short....
Has somebody post the whole album let it crawl from the flyin' spiderz?
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