Eet U Smakelijk

UTREG PUNX ON YOUTUBE

2008-05-02T23:53:00.003+02:00

Me want more! Where's the DVD?

JUBILEE EDITION

2008-03-09T13:18:00.009+01:00

As astute Eetusmakelijk readers will have noticed, postings became scarcer over the last few months, culminating in a record-breaking 7-week gap between the penultimate post and this one. Well, I'll just come clean about it: after 86 posts I've felt I've said about all I had to say within the narrow confines of this blog, plus posting mp3s is getting more and more useless since just about everything has already been posted/ is available on CD/ can be found at p2p programs like soulseek, etc. Add to that the fact that I've switched from a part-time job with access to a computer and lots of time on my hands, to a full-time job without access to a computer... But the last straw for me was when, inspired by Erich's posting of the first Bad Religion EP, I decided to post the first Offspring 45; after a bit of Googling it turned out that not only had KBDrecords already posted it 2 years ago, but I had commented on the post and totally forgotten about it! So, I'm sorry to say, Eetusmakelijk will be on er, eternal hiatus from now on. I'm thinking of starting another blog but it won't be (strictly) about punk (or even music), i.e. it won't automatically attract a niche of interested people like this blog did, in which case I wonder if it's any use... Anyway, thanks for checking me out, listening to the music and commenting!

I've posted something by my own (first) band, Gepopel, before, and am glad to announce there will be an LP out very soon of all of our old recordings (check it out here). But that LP won't feature the earliest (1982-83) recordings I did under that name. Those were tracks I recorded by myself in the attic, using old broken-down and borrowed equipment and "ping-ponging" onto a 2 track tapedeck. March 1983, exactly 25 years ago today, I released my very first tape called No One Can Stop Advance. It sold 30 copies; I still remember seeing the row of finished tapes and thinking: "Wow, I've just mass-produced something!"

Musically, it was a grab-bag of punk, proto-HC and more post-punky stuff, reflecting the records I'd been listening to just before it got all Hardcore. To me, it's part fun, part embarrassing hearing it back and thinking: "Oh, I copped this from a Siouxsie record...Stole that from The Ex..." Tracks 1 to 11 were on the actual tape; the other 11 are from the same time but were never released. I feel a little weird about posting this, sorta like showing someone baby pictures of yourself, but I hope there's sort of an early-80s charm to it (a writer's block-free era, as you could always write about The Bomb! Wish it was still as easy nowadays). I've also put up the booklet showing my first attempts at being John Heartfield.

Only one or two songs (like Eenheidsworst) made it to the later "actual band" Gepopel, although we recycled the chord structure of The Day After (sped up about 8 times!) for Two Days After. Not every song tackles nuclear war; the curiously-titled I Will Put Him is about much-reviled Dutch TV personality Henk van der Meyden and his bad English, while Cock Is Dead was about our (me & Henk Gepopel & Ruud Indirekt) Latin teacher, Mr. Cock (Nomen Est Omen). Come to think of it, I wonder why I never wrote a song about our German teacher, Mr. Goebbels?

Gepopel - No One Can Stop Advance (1983)

The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan
The Day After
Eenheidsworst
NATO
Dallas
Toy Town
Smashed Up Slums
VWO
OSL
Mushrooms
Recession

Booklet cover
Booklet 1
Booklet 2
Booklet 3
Booklet 4
Booklet 5
Booklet 6

Bonus tracks

Why Spoiling Your Youth
Annual Ceremony
Cock Is Dead
Dull
I Will Put Him
Pride
Autarky
Living Death
The Govern Tower
God
Two Stamps

THEY WHO CANNOT BE NAMED

2008-01-23T16:40:00.000+01:00

A pre-skin Skrewdriver in front of Blackpool Tower, 1977.

By now, everybody knows the Skrewdriver story: early punk band with no political inclinations adopt skinhead look, as a result attract violent skinhead following, are dropped from label and can't get gigs; band implodes. Years later, singer starts new band using old name, adding ultra-right wing "White Power" agenda, thereby forever tarnishing their name. If this was just any run-of-the-mill band it would be merely pathetic; what makes it sad is the fact that first-incarnation Skrewdriver were one of the best bands around. One of the very first punk records (spring '77) from the north of England, debut platter You're So Dumb is a sizzling scorcher with vocals that make your hairs stand on end. All Skrewed Up (the first 45 RPM LP ever?) from later that year was very good too, and shows they could do more than just bash it out; on the mostly acoustic "Where's It Gonna End" the singing is more melodic, in fact it reminds me of Scream's Peter Stahl (!) every time I hear it. For a while, Skrewdriver were loved and respected by music press and fellow musicians alike, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Damned, the Jam (whose notoriously fussy Paul Weller even lent them some of his gear after their van got stolen) and Motorhead. In fact, their equal parts 60's R&B/ heavy rock sound occupied a sort of middle ground between both aforementioned (and soon to become huge) bands. For a band always branded as godfathers of Oi!, the music has actually very little to do with it; there's no football-chant type chorus in sight, the playing is tight rather than sloppy (in that light, the Faces are far more proto-Oi) and Ian Stuart sounds more Transatlantic than Cockney. Alas, one ill-judged style change and it all went down the drain.

Those great early Skrewdriver sides were never reissued by Chiswick/Ace, who understandably didn't want anything to do with what they had become. Try to find an original copy on eBay and you won't find a thing: the very word "Skrewdriver" is forbidden on that oh-so humanitarian auction site! So you try Soulseek; next thing you know you get a deluge of Skrewdriver mp3s, both "old" and "new", thousands of them, from users with scary names like i-kill-commies and skullsplitter. Well, I guess that unavailibility really worked! It's like Mein Kampf: why not just make it freely available, so everyone can find out for themselves it's a load of crap? I remember in the 80's there were quite a few PC-baiting fanzine types who thought it was really smart to insist those later Skrewdriver records were really great, all in the spirit of "it's like Celine, ya know, judge it by art, not politics!" Well, I've listened to some of it, and I can tell you it sucks. But don't take my word for it, go find it out for yourselves. I guess that's one of the good things to come out of the mystique-busting mp3/P2P-era...

Anyway, I'll leave you with three blazing tracks from their 1977 Peel Session, so you can reminisce about what could have been.

Anti-Social
The Only One
Unbeliever

BELATED CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

2007-12-28T22:47:00.000+01:00

No, you're not going to get any punk Christmas songs from me. But, just a couple of days after Christmas, I thought of something Christmassy to post anyway. It's a recording of the legendary Rock Against Religion festival held at punk club Kaasee, Rotterdam, on Boxing Day 1979, featuring the cream of Dutch punk like the Squats, Tandstickorshocks, Ketchup (of the prophetic song "Herman Brood Val Dood") and Jezus and the Gospelfuckers. Live recordings as well as on-the-spot interviews were broadcast by VPRO radio the week after; I was too young to hear it first-hand but luckily someone recorded this from his/her radio so we can plunge into the hissy depths of history now... (If someone has better recordings of this, please get in touch!)
The broadcast starts off with a sort of VPRO Theme Tune which I'm pretty sure is played by Dorpsstraat, the ramshackle neo-60s-without-knowing-it outfit whose "Lepeltje" was the second best track (after Ivy Green's "Pak 'm Beet") on the Uitholling Overdwars comp. Then it's over to VPRO's resident punk Marjoke Roorda, whose chewing-gum-in-mouth delivery sounds a bit studied to these ears now. She announces first act Jules Deelder; now this guy became very famous over here later on, and it's my guess that the TV showing of this very appearance, that showed him getting soaked in phlegm, might just have helped a tiny bit...! Now you can hear for yourself what it was all about; legend had it he never flinched under the Green Rain that poured down, but aural evidence shows he did lose his cool towards the end.
More than the music (great though it is, although I'm still looking for recordings by Tandstickorshocks; I have the part by Neh but didn't post it cuz it's boring), the interview bits are fascinating; some hippie VPRO guy walking around asking some random bystanders smart stuff like "Are you here for the music or for the anti-religion message?" What strikes me most is that back then, everyone still had their own regional accent; you can hear if someone's from Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Nijmegen (home of the Squats, who apparently took a bunch of fans with them). These days it seems like everyone in Holland has adopted the posh Gooi accent with the flat "R"...
When interviewing Jezus of the Gospelfuckers Himself (well, it was his birthday after all), the VPRO guy starts talking how some Youth for Christ guy he knew "felt just like his mother was raped" after reading their band name... It's the clash of the "We're sooo permissive (as long as...)" 70s and the "Fuck shit up!" 80s.
I've cut the broadcast (or the part that I've got) up in 4 parts; I haven't separated the music from the talking; a big apology goes out to my non-Dutch readers!

Theme Tune/ Jules Deelder
Ketchup/ Interviews
Squats/ Interviews
Gospelfuckers/ Interview

P.S.: These recordings were done by the RAR organisation themselves, straight from the mixing desk, and lent to the VPRO, who apparently were so slow in returning the tapes that a planned compilation LP never materialized! Too bad, as this would have been the first Dutch DIY punk comp.

D-A-M-P-S-Q-I-B!

2007-12-16T18:37:00.000+01:00

Now what really kickstarted punk into being? The masses of untutored teenage hordes taking to the streets armed with guitars, or a bunch of journalists, pissed-off because the subjects of their writings were getting too rich and famous to hang around and do drugs with anymore? Fact is, the writing was there (on the wall, if you wish) before the music. As early as 1971-72, critics like Greg Shaw and Lester Bangs had a notion something new and exciting had to come along, dragging forgotten bands like the Sonics and Count Five from their graves as examples of how it should be done. Bangs' 1971 piece on the Count Five was set in a fictional distant future, in which he's telling his grandchildren:

"I recollect another mighty sad downer stretch long about the beginning of the seventies... 'xcept that one lasted so long we damn near dried up an' boycotted records entirely till Barky Dildo and the Bozo Huns showed up to save our souls..."

Barky Dildo and the Bozo Huns! Now if that ain't Punk Rock prophesized, I don't know what is! The truth is, of course, those Barky Dildos weren't illiterates; most early punk rockers grew up spelling every inch of their favourite music mags, so to many a teenage Creem reader this article might have been just as (subconsciously) influential as, say, a Stooges LP.

Some punk rockers actually were writers having a go at doing it themselves: some of them, like Lenny Kaye, Metal Mike Saunders and Jeffrey Lee Pierce did a pretty good job of it. For others like Charles Shaar Murray (Blast Furnace & the Heatwaves), it was just a lark. I'm not sure which category Giovanni Dadomo and his one-record-only Snivelling Shits belong to; fact is, their sole 45 is a stone cold classic.

Giovanni Dadomo's career as a rock journo goes back at least as far as 1971, when he did this interview with none other than Syd Barrett. (Just a side track: upon reading the interview I was surprised at how lucid Barrett sounds... Until I realized he's contradicting himself all the time; first he says he "learnt to work hard at art school", then later on he mentions his "art school laziness"...!) I don't know how much of a Harbinger of the Future Mr. Dadomo was in writing, but I know both Snivelling Shits tracks are right on the mark; he's razor sharp, wordy and incredibly funny at the same time, like a Cockney Cooper Clarke or Devoto. The music's as sharp as the singing, with weird effects thrown in (courtesy a young Steve Lillywhite, rumored to have been a temporary Snivelling Shit himself on bass guitar), and B-side I Can't Come goes on (without ever getting boring) for 6 minutes; must have taken balls in 1977!

Post-Shits, Dadomo co-wrote a couple of Damned tunes like I Just Can't Be Happy Today (typing this, I imagine hearing the classic lines "They're closing the schools/ They're burning the books/ The church is in ruins/ The priests hang on hooks" in his voice). Sadly, he passed away a couple of years ago.

Terminal Stupid
I Can't Come

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD

2007-12-06T16:47:00.000+01:00

I was talking to 433rpm about tapes I put out back in the Stone Age, when it turned out he owns a copy of the most "famous" of them all, the Alle 55 Kort sampler. Given the incredible quantity of music he manages to post I won't be surprised to see the entire tape up there soon; in the meantime I'll give you some hand picked tracks...

Around 1984 I'd make Hardcore mix tapes for friends that would sometimes contain 80-100 tracks (learnt to write really small back then!), and I figured it would be fun to put out a tape comp with as many Dutch/Belgian bands on it as humanly possible. As it turned out - because of some bands contributing 2- or even 3-minute (god forbid!) tracks - 55 bands filled up a C90 tape, still no mean feat. While hunting down bands I got a pretty good overview of the Dutch "scene", prompting me to write a Dutch scene report for MRR which you can find here and, in hindsight, is about as captivating as a page out of a phone directory.

I sold about 350 copies of Alle 55 Kort; I never dared say this in public, but I actually made a small profit from it. Shock! Horror! I'd found a small electronics store at the Sarphatistraat that sold C90 tapes of just-about-passable quality at 2,50 Guilders ($1,25) each. The tapes (including booklets) sold at 7,50 Guilders, retail; a nice addition to my scant pocket money! Of course, if I'd told this to anyone back then I would have been keelhauled or something; it wasn't merely unthinkable to make any profit, it was actually suspect if you were breaking even. People would specify in detail how many Guilders they'd lost on their latest zine/ record/ whatever, to show how punk they were. Of course, at the same time they were on the dole, ha ha; well, let's call it state money well spent...

Most of the tracks on Alle 55 Kort were pretty lo-fi; due to no quality control from my part, there were quite a few one-off/ spoof tracks, sometimes played by one person in their bedroom, which gives it a Bullshit Detector sort of vibe. Lots of "famous" bands like BGK, Pandemonium and Funeral Oration submitted tracks, but I'll give you some tracks by lesser-known bands.

Oigasm - Brutal Bugger: first track on the tape; I had a soft spot for this half-skin/ half-punk band that were living in a small village in the middle of the Bible Belt; heard they were getting shot at in the street, stuff like that...

Dasbreetels - Cowboy Henk: just a fun song by a little-known band from near Rotterdam.

Larm - Don't Want To Pay Their Debts: great lo-fi practice recording.

Black Vampire - Punker Parents Plan: from Limburg, like Pandemonium, but not as well-known. Drummer Han was later in Swampsurfers. I think this band is still around in some mutated form or another...

Chlorix - Suicide: these guys were from Hengelo in the east, played some rough but still melodic punk; I think one of the members was later in indie rock band Cords (or that's some other bloke called Marcel Morsink).

Kotsbrokken - Growing Older: band from the same area, same kind of sound, know nothing about them.

Sesamzaad - Ave Vis: these guys, also from the East, had some nice melodic HC songs on Holland HC 2, but I liked this slower track even more (even if it took up the space of 3 or 4 "regular" HC tracks!).

M.O.G. - Do, Bo and Al: didn't really realize it at the time because of the muddy sound, but these guys were already progressing away from their early HC sound towards the brilliant stuff on their classic Radio Rock EP.

Keine Fax - Masked Fascism: closes the tape. These guys handed me their tape in person at some gig, they were about 10 years old! Shit-Fi-aficionados, prick up your ears...!

A nice moment of glory came a few years ago when, while sleeping at this guy Clint's place in London (he runs Short Fuse records and is crazy about old HC), we were talking about obscure records; he'd show us one insanely rare record after another, then he opened some drawer in order to show us the piece de resistance, the Family Jewel...and out came a copy of Alle 55 Kort!

SOLID BARROOM SKRONK

2007-11-23T12:16:00.000+01:00

As a little kid I already wondered why the music I liked most - be it wild 50s rock 'n roll or mid-60s Kinks/Who-type stuff - seemed to have bloomed for a very short period, to be quickly discarded and replaced by more boring stuff. In contrast, the boring stuff (disco, barroom boogie rock) never ever seemed to go away. Later I found out this holds true for just about any musical genre I like: ska, psych, garage, rockabilly, bebop, even early New Orleans jazz: all disappeared after 1 or 2 years in the limelight. Why? Maybe these were all particularly combustible musical forms that appeared at moments of big social change so the music had to change with it.

But invariably, after some 15-20 years, these styles would all get "revived". Is that good, or bad? You can blame the revivalists for living in the past, but does that mean any boogie rock band playing music that never went away is better? The problem is, of course, that you can imitate what's on the surface but you can never duplicate the feelings and times that caused the music to sound like it did.

Somehow with Punk Rock there's a little twist in the tale. It never disappeared because it was never mainstream in the first place. Instead, it kept on mutating and branching off, all these little branches spawning their own little revivals every couple of years. One piece of bark off the punk tree didn't lend itself to reviving, though: those weird, squeaky, Beefheartian pieces of noise that labels like Rough Trade released around 1978-80. In New York they called it No Wave, though some critics preferred the word Skronk which I like too as it sounds like a blast from James Chance or Ted (Blurt) Milton's sax. These records, by bands like Essential Logic, Lemon Kittens, Slits, Blurt and many more, sounded like a bunch of kids were let loose in a toy shop; that's because these bands were kids let loose in a toy shop; DIY was in its infancy and for a while there were no rules. I guess that's why, after the little kids themselves grew up and learned to play properly, nobody could ever "revive" this kind of music.

The catchy named PragVEC, though very much part of that Rough Trade/Post Punk scene, were odd ducks in a way because on their EP you can hear they already knew how to play properly; the guitar squeaks and skronks with the best of them, but there's always this foundation of bluesy fluidity underneath. Susan Gogan's great vocals veer in all directions, from soft to loud to distorted, but always in control; guess that's why she got compared to Pauline Murray of Penetration a lot (Virgin passed them up using that as an excuse). Then there's the mock-French in "Existential", showing they knew their Beatnik roots. I don't know much more about PragVEC, except that their second 7 inch is pretty good too, though a bit more "poppy". Oh yeah, and the famous Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell played bass for them later on. An old NME piece on PragVEC says they rose from the ashes of "Trotskyite R&B combo the Derelicts". Trotskyite R&B? Now that explains it all!

Existential
Bits
Wolf
Cigarettes (1978)

(Actually, come to think of it, there actually was a revival of sorts of this type of music in the late 80s, with UK bands like Dog Faced Hermans, Badgewearer and Stretchheads, bands that I thought were much more exciting than their recycled-USHC peers of the time.)

ZILVERENBAGAGEDRAGER

2007-11-07T17:01:00.000+01:00

In my earliest days as a punk rocker I had a pretty broad taste; I enjoyed bands like the Jam, Au Pairs, Comsat Angels as much as the more "hardknor" stuff. But then, around 1981 there wasn't a strict dividing line yet; in fact, some "new-wavey" records, like for instance the Jam's great Funeral Pyre, packed more punch than some of the standard-issue punk of the day. One year later, this had changed irreparably; while American Hardcore took over the fasterlouder camp, most of the cool bands on the other side either broke up (Jam), went disco (Gang of Four) or went Top 40 without really changing but were of course verboten from then on anyway (U2). The watershed moment for me was when I read about a new band some ex-Au Pairs members had formed, called Apple on the Drum. Apple on the Drum! You think I'm going to scribble that on my jacket? To make things worse, they said their music was "really funky". Really funky, eh? Well, have a nice life! It was this New Wimpiness that made my subsequent immersion into hardcore that more rewarding.

That said, in the middle of those hardcore days there were two bands around that I thought were brilliant even though they had nothing to do with HC: Morzelpronk and Zowiso. Morzelpronk was Dolf (of the famous Koeienverhuur studio) Planteydt's band, a strange mix of surf, exotica, Les Paul and Robert Fripp that couldn't have been more out of step with the times. I'll post their first EP as soon as I get that spare copy Mathijs (ex-Morzelpronk, now De Kift) promised me...!

Zowiso's 2 tracks on the Oorwormer LP showed a band that had great ideas, but not yet the chops to put them into practice. Two years later, they'd evolved into the thumping, throbbing, wailing monster you hear on the great Beat Per Minute EP. Singer John Hollander was one of the best around, throaty and soulful in that typical "right-on English socialist" way.

My band once played at some blockade in front of a judicial building; it was us, Frites Modern, Zowiso and Morzelpronk on top of a truck. It was a pretty grim situation; the riot squad was fending off the building while a bunch of local right-wing hooligans were rampaging left and right (excuse the pun). In the middle of this grimness and violence Morzelpronk started playing their first song, "Koeienwals" (Cow Waltz), the most beautiful melodic piece of twin-guitar exotica Calexico never made. Surely one of the most surrealistic moments in my life (on a par with the day I saw Steve Ignorant walking while holding 8 beer bottles between his fingers and one between his teeth!). I'd love to post that one, but it was only ever released on the super-obscure Support the Miners' Strike comp LP which I don't have (also featuring the Ex and some great tracks by Zowiso, by the way). Zowiso's drummer Aad lives in Zurich and is still playing in a rootsy band called Trio From Hell; John's an insurance agent these days.

Army
Nuclear Power Train (both from Oorwormer comp. LP, 1982)
Blacks Prison
Mailbox (both from Beats Per Minute EP, 1983)

QUITE INDEFATIGABLE

2007-10-18T15:03:00.000+02:00

In punk mythology, Virgin Records are often described as clueless hippies who could only get the Sex Pistols after all the other labels pulled out. Well, they sure were hippies, but clueless? Apart from big names like X Ray Spex and Magazine, some of the most out-there punk singles of 1977-78 were released by Richard Branson's bunch; the brilliantly named Avant Gardener come to mind (that one's been blogged here and there), and of course The Table! Formerly called Can I Have This Table, Virgin asked them to saw off a piece of their name and released the classic "Do The Standing Still" single in early '77, making it one of the first eight or ten punk singles ever (months before Virgin became involved with the Pistols). It's a great piece of jittery pre-rulebook punk, and you've probably heard it/ own it. But the second leg of the Table saga, "Sex Cells", is not as well-known. Chiswick released it after Virgin dumped them (clueless hippies!), and it didn't do much; in fact, the Table kinda fizzled out after that. Too bad, because "Sex Cells" is even more frantic than their first one, a catchy pop-punk tune hidden behind weird dissonants, irregular rhythms and super-fast Rat Scabies-style drumming. Kinda reminds me of the Suicide Commandos a little. Maybe those two A-sides were really the pick of the bunch; both B-sides don't do much for me; "Standing Still"'s flip "The Magical Melon of the Tropics" goes on for too long, and second B-side "The Road of Lyfe" even starts off with a snippet of "Magical Melon"'s intro, as if to say they knew it was no great shakes either...? Still, I hope someone can prove me wrong and point me to some great lost Table cuts!

Do The Standing Still (Classics Illustrated) (1977)
Sex Cells (1978)

ONE AND A HALF DOZEN OF THE OTHER

2007-09-30T20:27:00.000+02:00

Why post something by The Ex? All of their stuff is still available, and the chances of anyone reading this blog not having heard (of) them are pretty slim, what with dozens of records out and almost as many tours under their belt. Well, I think their second LP History is What's Happening has sorta fallen between the cracks of their imposing oeuvre. Primitive-but-catchy 1980 debut Disturbing Domestic Peace will always hold a special place in the hearts of old punks, as it was basically the only Dutch D.I.Y. LP available for a long while. At the time of third LP Tumult (1983) their trademark experimental/eclectic style was more or less into place, and they started getting noticed abroad. History... sounds nothing like those two, in fact back then a lot people thought it was a disappointment. But hey, to me it was one part of the Holy Trinity that got me into Dutch punk (for the other two parts look here and here), and being fourteen and having about 5 or 6 punk records altogether I had no choice but to play it a thousand times and loving it! That said, it did take me some time to get into it; in contrast to the trebly in-your-face sound of their debut, History... sounds kinda muffled, almost as if they're playing in the next room. The words are hard to make out and the guitar is nearly inaudible, pushing (ex-Rondo) Wim's imaginative drum patterns and Rene's barbed-wire bass lines to the forefront. An Ex-member once told me he thought the LP was too rushed, but it's the unfinishedness that appeals to me. Some of the 20 tracks last only 40-50 seconds, and there's hardly any repeating verse-chorus-verse stuff going on in any of the songs. In hindsight, it's the closest thing to Wire's Pink Flag I've ever heard, not as an imitation, but as a similar "cut out the fat and get to the point" statement. Anyway, here's what this 14-year old was grooving to in the summer of '82 (not exactly "Someone Loves You Honey")...

Six of One and Half a Dozen of The Other
Barricades
Life Live
E.M. Why
Who Pays
Equals Only

(Occasional bleeps courtesy of my MiniDisc player)

VILE CHERUBIC UNREST

2007-09-19T10:38:00.000+02:00

Maybe the worst thing about the musically dire mid/late 80's isn't so much the stuff that sucked (which was about 99% of what was going on), but the stuff that was good back then but led to stuff that sucked. Let's, just for the heck of it, look at some DC area bands I was into at the time... I loved Fugazi when they started out, but what did their type of angular-punk-meets-singalong-rock lead to? To the plodding PC pomposity of Pearl Jam (the worst band of the 90's), and in particular their monster hit "Alive" (the worst song of the 90's, and basically Fugazi's "Suggestion" with the chords reversed). When it came out in '86, the Bad Brains' I Against I was a great comeback record fusing their early HC style with metal and funk; the next decade, 50,000 dreary "crossover" clowns doing the same thing, only badly. Rites Of Spring: brilliant, but unintentionally causing, gulp, Emo to happen.

It's the more obscure DC bands that seem the most untainted by the passing of time. Unrest put out their first LP in 1987; according to zine ads of the time it was called Tink Of SE, but my copy has "KILL 23 SHEEP" stenciled on its cover. Apparently, every record cover was a hand-made piece of art; I think 20 DC artists did 50 covers each (could be the other way 'round). I bought the LP because of the DC/Dischord connection, but it turned out to be a wholly different, and very tasty, kettle of fish. While Unrest also presaged a lot of stuff that was to happen, in their case it's actually all cool stuff. Their whole lo-fi anything-goes approach clearly influenced the likes of Pavement, and the muddy catchiness of "Die Grunen" has Guided By Voices written all over it. There's even a prophetic White Stripes-type of feel to it; just listen to the (almost) bass-less one-two beat and mock-upper-class English singing in "91st Century Schizoid Man"! "Laughter" sounds relatively dated, but I'll still include it because it was a mix-tape-for-girls-I-fancied staple of mine back then (along with the Descendents - carefully avoiding "Pervert" though!).

Another "different" DC band were the Vile Cherubs, who I knew nothing about until I picked up their posthumous LP, recorded in 1988. Post-Humorous Relief is actually one of the last of the illustrious Dischord-joint releases that were given half or even quarter catalogue numbers; this one's no. 33-and-a-third! I guess it's another limited edition; it's on coloured silkscreened vinyl and the sleeve is also silkscreened (printed over a stock sleeve design a la the original Flex Your Heads; Must be Jeff Nelson at work here...). I remembered this being sort of 60's/garagey, but on hearing it back I think it sounds a lot like Boston bands of the era, that typical neo-Burma sound. I also found out my copy is badly scratched; must be because at one point I had it hanging on my wall. Not the sleeve, the actual record! Well, it did get me cool points when around '91 Nation of Ulysses crashed at our place, and their guitar player Tim Green shouted "hey, that's my old band!" For your aural pleasure, I've obtained some scratch-free mp3s from soulseek (thanks, you know who you are!).

Unrest - Can't Sit Still
Unrest - Die Grunen
Unrest - 91st Century Schizoid Man
Unrest - Laughter
Vile Cherubs - The Man with the Photograph
Vile Cherubs - Broke My Heart In Three

POISON THIRTEEN

2007-09-12T17:16:00.000+02:00

When I started out a-bloggin' I decided to avoid posting US Hardcore, for the simple reason almost all blogs around back then already did a good job of it. But I have to post this one, because 1: it's one of my all-time faves, and 2: the currently available version (be it CD or mp3) has some songs cut off at the wrong places. Not that it's easy to determine when a particular song ends and a new one starts; from start to finish Poison Idea's Pick Your King debut EP consists of one big screech (o.k., two big screeches: side 1 and 2) without a microsecond of letting up. I guess they edited the tracks as close together as possible in order to have as much music on a 7 inch as they could. (The opposite of the Circle Jerks, who were so embarrassed by the brevity of their Group Sex LP they put extra long pauses inbetween the tracks!) The result is almost something like a hardcore opera; I can't imagine hearing the songs in any other order, or hearing one particular song isolated from the rest. "Last One"-screeee-"Pure Hate"-screeee-"Castration", etc. etc. Even though the songs are ultra-short, they're so fast-moving there's actually lots of stuff happening, lots of words, chords and breaks; it's the most condensed, fat-free record I've ever heard (insert obligatory fat joke here). The sound is also great; primitive 4-track, no overdubs, Ramones stereo (guitar to the right, bass to the left), almost nothing but mid-range (the opposite of what hardcore records sound like today). The drums sound like a toy drum set, the guitar sounds as if it's played through a transistor radio, and yet this is one of the heaviest HC records ever! How did they do that?

This was one of the HC records I held on to long enough to sell it for a "reasonable" price not too long ago. I thought my copy was a second pressing though, and said so, as a result getting not as much as I'd expected out of it. Later someone told me this pressing (black vinyl, red labels) was actually the first one pressed up, but as the pressing plant screwed up (the band wanted transparent vinyl) it was sold after the "correct" second pressing!

Seemed like pressing plants did a lot of screwing up with HC EP's, especially the ultra-short-songs variety. When Swedish band Protes Bengt wanted their 32-track EP pressed up, the plant thought "Oh, that's the one with all the short songs", and accidentally pressed up a second edition of the Mob 47 EP (which is why there's 2 versions of that, with different sleeve designs)! Over here, Larm's No One Can Be That Dumb EP was shoddily cut and pressed off-center (well, at least the copies I saw/ heard). There's Neos EP's in existence with Rudimentary Peni labels on them (or the other way around?). That just goes to show how weird and unusual it was for a band to put that many songs on a small slab o' vinyl. DRI even chickened out and made the repress of their classic 22-song Dirty Rotten EP an LP! For a while, a micro-niche of bands kept themselves busy breaking the world record over and over, putting out EP's with more than a thousand sub-one-second "songs" on them; after that came to a dead end it seemed like nobody's been interested in putting out great 13-, 22- or even 32-track EPs anymore. Anyway, here's to one of the best, in honour of Tom ("Pig Champion") Roberts:

Cult Band
Last One
Pure Hate
Castration
Reggae (I Hate)
Give It Up
Think Fast
Think Twice
It's An Action
This Thing Called Progress
In My Headache
Underage
Self Abuse
(Recorded January 1983)
I put side 2 before side 1; in my head(ache) that always seemed the right order; what better way to kick off than Jerry A. screaming "CULT!! BAND!!"

TODAY'S SOUND TODAY

2007-09-06T19:43:00.000+02:00

(No, there's nothing wrong with your browser, this is The Tommies CD cover) (with the golden ribbon untied as I didn't want to flatten it)

After 74 posts of old stuff, I figured it was time to post something new. A long time ago I wrote about (semi-)local legends The Tommies, 3 girls in their early twenties who, through some weird alchemy, stumbled upon the same great girl-post-punk-sound that bands like Kleenex and Mo-dettes (who roamed the earth years before the Tommies were born) were famous for. They're not "retro" in any way, but just have the same "fuck technique, let's have fun"-attitude. Joost has even compared them to Wormerpunk, which they're never heard of (they think the word sounds disgusting). I had the honour of recording them with my er... mobile recording studio, and here's some of it.

You Want It All
Hip
Electronique
Desert
(All tracks recorded 07-07-07)

BAND INDEX - OLD LINKS

2007-08-28T14:13:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to let you know I've made links to every Dutch band featured on this blog (what can I say, I was a bit bored at my job): just scroll down and look in the column on the right. All MP3s from about November '06 on all still posted, but some of the links are outdated; in such a case, just replace the wrong IP address with the right one: http://212.127.186.65/public/Blog/ (etc.).

NOISE IN THE ATTIC

2007-08-25T20:38:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking about posting Indirekt's Nacht und Nebel EP for a while; 1000 Aspirines mentioned it recently and I think this one's been overlooked in favour of their earlier work (which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact I played drums on it, by the way!). But there's one small problem: the revered Grand Theft Audio are about to release a 2CD(!) Indirekt retrospective, featuring all their records and then some. Now Brian GTA is a cool guy, but he's also very protective of the stuff he (re-)releases. So I'm not going to post the EP. Instead, I'll post some practice tapes we made 5 months before entering the studio, which I recently digitized from an old reel-to-reel tape lying in the attic. The recording quality is a bit rougher than the EP, the vocals especially sound a bit tinny, so... for research purposes only!
In the beginning of '86 I was sitting at home, bored, without a band, fed up with punk and listening to the Smiths, when old chums Indirekt called me up to ask if I could play drums for 3 weeks. Stijn, their second drummer, had quit; something with his girlfriend not allowing him to play in 2 bands anymore (he was also with World War Rockers). Well, those 3 weeks turned into 8 months, lots of gigs and lots of nice memories. Like the time we played with Disorder in Belgium and it turned out they didn't bring anything with them: with guitars, drumsticks, drums and distortion pedals borrowed from us they ripped through their classic More Than Fights and tore up the place (but not our stuff, fortunately). Or the gig in Antwerpen where a toothless Sid Vicious clone wearing a leather jacket inscribed with the words "BORN TO LUL" fell head first into the bass drum while pogoing. Well, you get the picture, grandpaw will get on with the music now...
May '86 we recorded early versions of 3 songs that would appear on Nacht und Nebel; the title track was already pretty much finished, although the EP version also has some sound effects and a great moody guitar solo by Martin Cramer (ex-(late line-up) Panic, also engineer at the great De Domme Lul studio). Prose in C, a very angry song inspired by the girlfriend mentioned before (that's "personal politics" for you!), sounds finished as well. The thing that amazes me is how fast and busy my drumming was back then; fortunately with the EP we had Martin Cramer around to tell me to play slower and more to the point...
Third track Niemandsland, still called Bermtoerisme(?) at that point, has different vocals/lyrics from the released version. Ik Wilde Leven, the EP's closing track, actually was a song I'd written for Gepopel that we never got to play because we broke up; I taught it to Indirekt some time after we did these recordings, so I have no choice but to post the EP version. Go ahead, break my arm, I fuckin' wrote the damn thing. The "funny stuff" at the end is our idea of playing disco; Rick Blom does a pretty good slappin' bass, while Indirekt's "fifth member" Ko plays keyboards (I remember doing the cheesy synth-drum break on the keyboard simultaneously!).
Comparing these "live" practice tapes with the EP tracks, you can hear Indirekt put a lot of work into their records, doing lots and lots of takes until it sounded flawless. But I still like that rough stuff too, in a way...

Nacht und Nebel
Prose in C
Bermtoerisme (early version of Niemandsland)
(Practice, May '86)

Ik Wilde Leven
(EP version, Oct. '86)

PROG PUNKS P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-PART 2

2007-08-15T11:38:00.000+02:00

I have this weird urge to dig into the history of any type of music I happen to like. Whether it's punk, rockabilly or jazz, at one point I'm going to ask myself: "Well, what did the very first *** (fill in the genre) records sound like? And what did the forerunners sound like, the Almost-***-records?" (This process of digging deeper and deeper once got me briefly obsessed with 20's jazz/blues... "Actually, we're not into music - we're into chaos": Steve Jones? No, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band said that in 1917!) It's like, whoever did it first, probably did it best. Although that theory doesn't exactly hold up in practice (the Vibrators' "We vibrate", anyone?), there's always something touching about "the ones that came first", a certain quaintness/ undefinedness coupled with the excitement of treading unknown territory.

The Doctors of Madness were one of these mysterious bands that get namechecked in early punk histories in such a way that you're aching to know more about them. You know, they minutely describe every day in the life of the Sex Pistols, and then they go: "Oh yeah, this band called Doctors of Madness were also around." What do you mean, also around? When they were around in early '76 I want to know more about them! Just exactly how "punk" were they, and why aren't they up in the Year Zero punk pantheon of Buzzcocks/Clash/Subway Sect/etc.? Back in the 80's/90's questions like these remained unanswered; these days, you ask the almighty Google or find that elusive record on eBay for 2 Pounds. Actually, by some strange cosmic blip I found their Sons of Survival LP at a flea market the same week I'd ordered their "Bulletin" single, so there's still hope outside of the internet I guess...

Both records are pretty good: fast, urgent rock with hints of both punk and prog, and Urban Blitz' electric violin has to be heard to be believed. Not "punk" in the John Cale/ Raincoats way, but more musicianly ("Waiting" even has traces of hillbilly fiddle!). Singer Kid Strange sounds like a cross between TV Smith (urgent) and Hugh Cornwell (thuggish), he's a good singer but you get the feeling he's straining to get this "punk voice". (But what the heck, so did Lee Ving.)

Needless to say, Doctors of Madness were regarded "punk fakes" by the music press; the fact they were actually around before the Pistols, briefly had Dave Vanian on (shared) vocals, and co-wrote Adverts B-side "Back from the dead" with TV Smith didn't help. But their records belong to that rare species of first-timers, music being made while it was still being invented, and all the more intriguing because of that. Like, say, in early rock 'n roll you had weird stuff like the Three Chuckles, who used an accordion; I guess Doctors of Madness were the Three Chuckles of punk.

Bulletin
Waiting (single, 1977)
Back From The Dead (Doctors of Madness, from Sons of Survival LP, 1978)
Back From The Dead (Adverts, B-side of Television's Over, 1978)

TWO ONE OFFS

2007-07-28T13:58:00.000+02:00

I'm going away on holiday, here's two U.K. one-offs to keep you entertained. The Rings featured legendary (Pink Fairies, Pretty Things, Tomorrow, Syd Barrett) 60's-70's drummer Twink on vocals (so who's drumming? Rod Latter, later of the Adverts, that's who). A great rocking slab of early UK punk; as the Pink Fairies were often called the English MC5, I guess that makes the Rings the English Sonic's Rendezvous Band!

The Subs, from Scotland, even had "1 Off" as their catalogue number so I guess Stiff records had no high hopes for this bunch. Too bad, as this is great melodic singalongapunk that even copies the intro of Stiff ur-punk record "New Rose".

See ya later!

The Rings - I Wanna Be Free
The Rings - Automobile (Chiswick Records, 1977)
The Subs - Gimme Your Heart
The Subs - Party Clothes (Stiff Records, 1978)

PUNX WIN AT SCRABBLE

2007-07-17T07:55:00.000+02:00

"Why don't you rip off your badges, you look like a christmas tree!", The Ex sang in '82. I guess they weren't too crazy about the identikit "leather, bristles, studs and acne" punk hordes. But for a 15-year-old living in the sticks like me, wearing badges (and writing band names) on your jacket was another means of communicating with kindred spirits. It's hard to believe nowadays, but back then if you saw someone looking slightly "punk", you'd automatically start talking, even if you'd never met. In determining this "punkness", the coolness of the band names on the subject's badges/jacket was of far bigger importance than, say, hairstyles. (A friend of mine who had "NV Le Anderen" written on his jacket was once being followed by a couple of skinheads; after a wild chase it turned out they were actually the band in question, and wanted to thank him!)
Most Dutch punk bands had perfect names for printing on badges: Nitwitz, Svatsox, Zmiv, Bizkidz, Kotx, Ex (!): short and with as many angular characters that would give you lots of points at Scrabble as possible. But the coolest-looking band name of all was Rakketax. For a while, everybody seemed to be wearing Rakketax badges, and I have a sneaking suspicion it was more because of the great name and design than the music. Not that there was anything wrong with the music; both Rakketax incarnations turned out some great stuff.
First there was the female-fronted Utreg Punx line-up; their "Van Agt" was one of the very first mp3s I posted here. With singer Fretje they also recorded a single ("Rats"/ "What's for Dinner?") but that was never released. Fretje left to sing for the Pin-Offs (one song, "Rats" - yes, the same one - , on a comp LP), then became a journalist. While Rakketax' second line-up featured almost all new members, they still played the same kind of intelligent, catchy but still noisy punk. Their 6-song EP from 1981 is also one of the best-sounding records of the period (most studio stuff, for instance the Lullabies EP's, sounded too dry and separated). I love the trebly (Fender?) guitar that alternates between punk thrashing and chimey, almost new-wavey riffs. If you like this, also check out their tracks on Als Je Haar Maar Goed Zit from the following year.

Occasion
Unifil
Status
Harpoon
Labour
Decadence Floor

SLEEPY SOUNDS

2007-07-05T14:47:00.000+02:00

Here's a record I've never seen posted in any blog, so I guess I have to do it. Back when I started digging for early punk sounds there was very little information at hand; I'd look for band names I'd seen mentioned in MaximumRocknRoll, which happened to be mostly Bay Area bands: Crime, Avengers, Mutants, etcetera. I couldn't believe my luck when I came across a Mutants record called "Boss Man", only to find out these Mutants were from England and played disappointing pub-rock. (Ironically, nowadays this record is regarded a KBD punk classic - on eBay...) I was luckier when, around 1985, Cas B. (brother of Antidote's singer Benno) of the Hoorn Dropstyle record store put a box in front of me and said: "This just came in; you can have the whole box at 25 cents each." I checked out its contents and came up with two Frisco punk gems: the first Nuns EP and the Sleepers 5-song EP. I declined his offer to buy the whole box (god knows what else was in there that I didn't know at the time!), and went home with just these two slabs. While the Nuns - which Americana-fanatic Cas B. would be tickled to hear contained a young Alejandro Escovedo - delivered one great song ("Decadent Jew", one of the wildest punk tracks ever to feature piano) and two so-so cuts, the Sleepers just floored me. Trashy, grungy and druggy in that typical San Francisco "beatnik punk" way, but with a dark power that goes deeper than the usual punque roque, at times even psychedelic-sounding (the middle eight of "Linda" sounds exactly like the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"!). The weird thing was: while I was crazy about them (even made my own "Sleepers" T-shirt) they seemed to be beyond obscure. The only info I could gather about them was that one or two members later formed Flipper. Even later, with the revival of old punk nuggets (like, for instance, "Decadent Jew") courtesy of the Killed By Death-bootleg series, the Sleepers' more er... sleepy sounds fell between the cracks, not punk enough for KBD, not arty enough for the Residents/Tuxedomoon crowd. It took a one man crusade by rock journo Jon Savage to wake some people up to the magic of the Sleepers; I even think there's been a CD reissue. This is from my own scratchy vinyl:

She's Fun
Linda
Seventh World
No Time
Flying
(Win records, 1978)

DE GROOT, GRINDPADGELUIDEN!

2007-06-22T17:21:00.000+02:00

The phenomenon called Grindcore completely passed me by. I saw Heresy in 1986 and I didn't like it. When Napalm Death arrived on the scene I thought they were just a joke. In hindsight I think I never gave it a chance, I simply didn't want to like it. Maybe it was because this particular bastard son of Hardcore caught on at a time I was getting away from HC, into 70's and 60's music. Or maybe I was already too familiar with Grindcore's two main ingredients: ultra-fast "steak-cutting" style drumming and The Grunt. As early as 1982, local heroes Blitzkrieg played at grindcore speed. I sorta looked up to them, quite literally as they were all big, tall (and big-haired) guys. They were "Crass punks" who thought they had some pretty serious stuff to get off their chest (but hey, so was I, back then). Their Complete Disarmament LP from 1983 doesn't hold up that well after two dozen years; the ultra-fast tempos often send them flying off the rails, and the tone-deaf singing gets tiresome after a while. But it still establishes them as pioneers in the steak-cutting er... steaks.

One of the first singers to introduce the Neanderthal "undecipherable at any speed" grunt was Hans of Amsterdam's Mornington Crescent. I remember people seriously didn't know if "Possession", their EP's opening track, should be played at 33 or 45 rpm! Mornington Crescent didn't play a lot, and I vaguely recall they were deemed "politically incorrect" by some of the scene's more left-wing elements. But apart from the fact Hans was nicknamed Heinrich, I never noticed anything "wrong" about him when he tried out as a singer for my band Gepopel back in '85. I wanted to concentrate on my guitar playing (as the saying goes...) and he wanted to give it a try. The first song we practiced was In Our Hands; we did the instrumental intro, and then instead of my "baby-voice" (courtesy Tony Nitwit) this earthshaking roar comes in! I remember falling about laughing, unable to continue playing the rest of the song. It sounded great (I wish we'd recorded it), alas, 6 weeks later we'd imploded and it all came to nothing.

Anyway, behold the true roots of Grindcore:

Mornington Crescent - Possession
Mornington Crescent - Dying In The Street
Mornington Crescent - In Bed
Blitzkrieg - System Needs War
Blitzkrieg - Dankbaar
Blitzkrieg - Wat Ben Je Dom
Blitzkrieg - Val

(All songs 1983)

CAN'T STAND MY PRODUCER

2007-06-10T20:22:00.000+02:00

One of those funny ironies in Dutch punk history is that Arjan of Frites Modern - first called Duphar, after Philips' chemical division - later worked for Polygram, Philips' music division. Someone told me he once got to meet Jon Bon Jovi, who in the course of the conversation turned out to be a big fan of punk rock, especially of the early English variety! My guess is his older cousin turned him onto it; Mr. Tony Bongiovi was a successful record producer who, in the 2 weeks that punk seemed to be the "next big thing", produced a couple of Ramones records, as well as the Rezillos' classic Can't Stand The Rezillos LP. How in hell a Scottish punk group got inside a slick American studio is something other internet resources (like punk77.co.uk) can explain in great detail; fact is, the Rezillos were so disappointed with the results it was one of the reasons they broke up soon after. "Our producer thought punk was all about playing as fast as possible, so he made us play every song way too fast", was one of their complaints. Well, the speed coupled with the slick production is one of the reasons Can't Stand... still sounds ahead of its time. But compare the LP version of "I Can't Stand My Baby" with the original self-produced version on their debut 45, and it's clear they originally had a much more garagey style. I like both versions, but I can see their point...
The Rezillos' swan song (not counting spin-offs the Revillos, who formed about 3 seconds after the Rezillos split up), the brilliant 1978 "Destination Venus"/"Mystery Action" single, managed to strike the perfect balance between tight, speedy and garagey. It was produced by Martin Rushent, who would 3 years later work with (ex-Rezillos, then Human League) guitarist Jo Callis again when producing the League's zillion-selling Dare! album. Now what would I come across searching Soulseek for "Destination Venus" but an off-the-cuff live cover version by none other than Phil Oakey & cohorts (in the process inventing the Sigue Sigue Sputnik sound 4 years early!).

MATCHBOX BLUES

2007-06-01T12:20:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it seems like nobody ever gets it right over here. 99% of Dutch music is a potpourri of all the worst bits of the worst bands (of five years ago). Every drummer does the lame, lumpy Red Hot Chili Peppers surrogate-funk rhythm; every singer still has their mouth full of marbles Pearl Jam-style; bass players look to Mark King for guidance and inspiration (I mean, that was already uncool 25 years ago!)... well, you get the picture. Living in the middle of this cultural wasteland, it often boggles my mind how we could get it so right at least twice: first, with the Beat Boom of the 60's; then, on a smaller scale, the DIY punk boom circa '80. How come suddenly, from out of nowhere, thousands of bands popped up in Holland with the right sound and the right attitude? It must have been some sort of primal instinct, just like all over the world everybody laughs and cries in the same way...

But while in the 60's they "had the numbers", the punks of the 70's were fighting a hopeless battle against the demographic curve. Which made it all the more amazing that, out of a micro-scene of no more than a couple of thousand scattered punks, so many remarkable records were released. Records that in a way were actually "more punk" than those made in England: our punk bands really couldn't play, really recorded in their garage and really had no musical ties to anything pre-1977. In the case of one of the most remarkable records of all, the 1980 Tandstickorshocks 12 song EP, it's hard to even find post-'77 influences. They were part of the Rondos/Red Rock scene, but while their "big brother band" often played pretty catchy, fast songs, Tandstickorshocks's music is totally hook- and chorus-free. Though they sound like they're just starting to learn to play, the playing is precise and to-the-point. It's not "energetic" or even aggressive in the usual punk way. In places, the music reminds me of stuff like early Minutemen, Teenage Jesus, Red Krayola and early Scritti Politti, but the difference is those bands (and the Rondos, too) came from an art background, while Tandstickorshocks were genuinely young working class kids. Well, in the TV-film about former Tand... member Pinkel (shown on Dutch TV in 1982) he worked as a wallpaperer, and the great footage of his band playing the Kaasee club shows him and the other singer teasing their hair in the bathroom mirror (one of them had a half-shaven "7 Seconds" 'do), saying deep stuff like "isn't it great, all the stuff you can do with your hair!", so I guess these guys were no hifalutin' intellectuals. I'm not saying intellectuals aren't allowed to play with their hair, but ... you get the idea. Tandstickorshocks were the 70's Socialist wet dream of common workers turning out great, totally original art. Too bad they only lasted about 2 years; they broke up around the same time as the Rondos (about whom I did a post last October) and, apart from 1 or 2 tracks on comps, these 12 songs are all that's left. I wonder if that TV doc will ever turn up again?

To Hell With Shell
Religion Pt. I
Kill For Peace
Tradition
Religion Pt. II
School Army Working Dying
Crisis
Vi Taenkar Anderledes
T Rights
Song For A Guy
It Stinks
The Wall

P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-PROG PUNKS!

2007-05-19T21:05:00.000+02:00

The mid-to-late 80's were something of a double-pronged treasure hunt; while I was discovering all types of cool 70's (post-)punk, I also pulled many a 60's/70's Prog Rock platter by the likes of King Crimson and (early) Yes out of the cut-out bins. Some of my favourite discoveries fell somewhere inbetween: Spizz' Do A Runner LP, Magazine of course, and last but not least, the great Laughing Academy LP by Punishment Of Luxury (Punilux in short). Weird chord changes and rhythm signatures, intelligent lyrics combining politics, sci-fi and surrealism, and the same guitar sound as (fellow United Artists artists) Buzzcocks' Love Bites. It even had a cool-looking gatefold cover that you could hang on your wall, not exactly Roger Dean, but still... I remember at one point my friend Joost and I had amassed so many secondhand copies of this LP we were considering opening up a used record store selling nothing but Laughing Academy's! The funny thing is, whenever the subject of Punilux came up while talking to some older punk, they would either love them or really hate them. "A waste of a good name", was the nicest thing punk photographer Ray Stevenson could say about them in his book. Famous rock critic Paul Morley once wrote an amusing "where are they now"-type piece about them, calling them "a politically correct version of the Stranglers" and recalling some festival where the audience were throwing stuff at eachother; Punilux' singer said something like "we shouldn't fight amongst ourselves!", whereupon the punters took a look at them (already a bit older and losing hair in places), obviously thought "ourselves?", and started throwing the assorted garbage at the band instead. Still, there's the records, and while not every song still stands up, there's a couple of classics that should win over even the staunchest punk. Like their debut single on Small Wonder, Puppet Life. And the great avant-geek-punk of Jellyfish. And if that don't work, the thumping proto-hardcore of Brainbomb should do the trick.

Puppet Life (single version)
The Demon (both 1978)
Jellyfish
Brainbomb (both B-sides, 1979)