BULLSTHETICS

For a short while, I went to school by bike instead of by bus; I could keep the money I saved, which went directly into punk vinyl of course. This short while actually lasted exactly one month: April 1983. As of yet, scientists all over the world have been unable to come up with an explanation why this month has been the wettest month by far in the whole 20th century. Every day, I'd enter the class room soaking wet. On the first of May I bought another month ticket for the bus. But the cycling had paid off; the great Bullshit Detector compilation was among the records I got. Compiled in 1980 from tapes sent to Crass by budding hopefuls, one might expect this to be some sort of Anarcho Punk Parade. Well, o.k., there are a couple of Crass wannabees; Sinyx have the Penny Rimbaud marching band rhythm down pat, while Counter Attack seem to have put more hours into designing their intricate logo than actually practicing. But there's also a lot of stuff on here that's more in the Messthetics/ Fuck Off records vein, and since that particular subgenre is undergoing some sort of revival I thought it might be fun to check this out again. Opening track "Jazz on a summer's day" features punk poet Andy T alternately blowing into a flute and shouting stuff like "do it!", backed by a jazz record played at varying speeds (very beatnik...). Then there's some tracks with people drumming on chairs, playing beat-up acoustic guitars or a harmonica, reciting lyrics that sound like they're written by a 4-year-old... It's the complete lack of any kind of quality control that made this LP sound so fresh, especially since these tracks are sandwiched in between "regular" (albeit lo-fi) punk stuff. It's as if they just grabbed whatever tapes were lying on top of the stack. Although about 80% of the songs are about war (of course), there's also a number of tracks in the Desperate Bicycles "we are you" anti-rock star vein, most notably Clockwork Criminals' er... "We are you", which I remember was a great song to cycle really fast to (hearing it inside my head, as the walkman wasn't invented yet). Bullshit Detector's motto seemed to be "dare to be bad", and some of it is really bad. Back then, playing it gave me a great feeling of freedom, of anything goes; I thought it would be easy to pick a bunch of tracks to post, but on hearing it back 20+ years later I found most tracks to be merely... irritating! That's how it goes, I guess. Well, whatever, here's some of the least irritating tracks:

Clockwork Criminals - We Are You
Sinyx - Mark Of The Beast
Reputations In Jeopardy - Girls Love Popstars
Amebix - University Challenged
Icon - Cancer
Frenzy Battalion - Thalidomide
The Sucks - 3