Getting The Fear – Various Demos / Practice Sessions 1984

Swell / Before I Hang / We Struggle / Swell / Rise / Before I Hang / Coming Down Fast / Before I Hang / Spirit Ov Youth / Death Is Bigger / Last Salute / Dune Buggy Attack / Fatal Date

A tape given to me by Genesis P’Orridge while he was still residing in Beck Road, Hackney during one of my many visits there. A nice stack of demos and a low key practice track or two on this tape showing some humour and bags of intimacy.

‘My Struggle’ being my personal favourite of the bunch.

Getting The Fear evolved from the ashes of Southern Death Cult whose singer Ian Astbury had jumped shipped towards the end of 1983 to form Death Cult with various members of Ritual and Theatre Of Hate. Bee, an ex member of Danse Society joined the backline of Southern Death Cult namely Buzz, Barry and Aky and started rehearsals to lead up to the recordings of some of the tracks that appear on this tape.

Bee at the time was an on/off member of The Temple Of Psychic Youth and friend of Psychic TV. He was suitably adorned with piercings and tattoos, stabbed and inked by the now deceased Mr Sebastian who operated in his tattoo and piercing parlour along Grays Inn Road near the Mount Pleasant Post Office hub.

The band got a lot of attention from Kill Your Pet Puppy’s fanzine’s successor in all things colour-musu-politikal-magick wise, the wonderful Vague fanzine run by Tom Vague who was a fixture in the same squats and run down gig venues as the KYPP collective and no doubt some of the browsers reading this now. Vague fanzine essays also meant features in the sadly missed Zig Zag magazine which was a nationwide monthly publication.

There was a real buzz about this band and Tom who had a finger in both the Southern Death Cult and T.O.P.Y. camps went onto champion this band and was rightly expecting huge potential from them.

RCA signed up this extremely good looking bunch of alternative boys in 1985 and sold them, as one would imagine, as a flat sounding, over made up pop band ready for the then dwindling Smash Hits magazine market. Not quite as gritty as Vague fanzine or anyone that saw some of the celebrations that were the concerts that Getting The Fear performed imagined them to be. Still…

RCA released one 12″ entitled ‘Last Salute’, with the B side ‘We Struggle’ being the pick of the tracks.

They seemed to be a band that were destined to burn out very quickly which of course they did. 1986 saw Bee and Barry start up Into A Circle and Aky get Fun-Da-Mental together. Bee went to Thailand where he still resides and Buzz went to France where he may well still be…

39 comments
  1. Penguin
    Penguin • Post Author •
    June 10, 2009 at 8:52 pm

    Luckily I ‘get’ both 3 into 1 – loving the moniker…We Struggle…

  2. cravat hatton
    cravat hatton
    June 25, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    ooooh! [im soo excited , just cant help ‘it’]
    i just found this link, when i blatantly & unashamedly googled cravat hatton!!
    wot a surprise dont forget the

    http://www.bigsexyfestyparty.com/newsletter01.htmlhis:

    its bloomin fantabulous…

    lerv cwavat soft qworn [my space, got kikked out of facey]

    vivateeshirts.com

  3. Zeopold
    Zeopold
    August 11, 2010 at 12:49 am

    “After GTF Buzz and Aky were briefly in short lived wannabe kiddy pop band “Joy”.

    So was I, along with the DJ/producer Eddy Temple-Morris, from 85-88

    Initially, we were aiming for a more mainstream audience, and tried to cultivate a ‘funky’ sound along the lines of then-fashionable acts like Hipsway, Love and Money and Chakk,

    We never supported Duran Duran but we did support The Chameleons at the T&C, which was a good gig, and also did a few dates with Killing Joke. The tour wound up at Hammersmith Palais, where Astbury (who was pretty big at the time) gave us a good pep talk before we went on, which I thought was gentlemanly of him.

    After Aky left we aimed for a more psych/west coast kind of sound which fared even worse in popularity terms, recorded a lot of material but none of it saw the light of day

    : )

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