The Apostles / Primal Chaos / Black Flag / The Heretics
Man about town, obscure punk enthusiast and general good guy, Chris Low late of Political Asylum, The Apostles, Oi Polloi, in the 1980’s and The Parkinsons in 1990’s, handed this tape to me on his birthday along with a load of others. I have uploaded this late because it is unfortunately been dubbed / copied onto tape by horrid mono means, i.e it only comes out of one speaker…bummer! Two other tapes Conflict at Brixton Ace 1982 supplied by Mark ‘Vegas’ Palmer starts off stereo then clicks into mono. Sadly to say Lugworm supplied a cassette tape recorded from Spaceward Studios of The Mobs LP recorded there. Not interested in The Mob LP as such but there is an alternative mix of ‘Stay’ which I was absolutely interested in. This track also plays on one speaker. Point of fact – nothing wrong with my cassette playback system!
Any how, I do not like putting up faulty or mono cassettes onto this site, but this has to be an exception because of the rarity value. The Apostles, Primal Chaos, Black Flag, and The Heretics all for the price of…well nothing. Not sure of the history of the tape, no doubt Chris will comment on it. Not sure of the line up, track listing or anything else. Again I hope Chris or his chum Nic will comment. On the B-Side of the tape is a Flux live gig and a Napalm Death practice. All I the info I got what was written on the tape itself, just band names basically. I actually have not heard this tape yet cos wifey needed me to do something so I just let it play…hope Bucks Fizz does not come on half way through the recordings!
Info from Nic:
The Apostles:
Pete The Plectrum (later formed part of ‘The Hunt’ on the first LP)
Some Men Are Born To Rule (the first song the group ever wrote)
Antichrist
? (This isn’t from this time period if I remember correctly – it features the drum machine: is it ‘The Island’, Chris?)
Solidaridad Proletaria (This is the original title at the time of recording: it was later changed to ‘A New World In Our Hearts’ and was re-recorded on both tape and vinyl)
Killing for Peace
Proletarian Autonomy (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Time Bomb
Stoke Newington 8 (later re-recorded on tape and vinyl)
Primal Chaos – Rehearsal 1982:
Systems Slave (This isn’t part of their ‘Fighting for a Future’ rehearsal tape)
Black Flag – Rehearsal 1981:
The Master Race (Earliest version of this song that I heard)
Waiting for the All Clear (later recorded by The Apostles, but this version features Matt Mcleod on vocals
The Heretics – Rehearsal 1980:
No Character
Jake from Heretics on stage with Iggs of Crass 1979
The Heretics
baronvonzubb
January 29, 2012 at 1:48 pmwasnt your ex, the wonderfull anna (r i p) living downstairs too? must have been hard for you all round i reckon.
and btw those two skallies, robbo & wank, when they came off gear a couple years later, they decided to give TB a kicking for some imagined slight.
in the end they had to grovel round to his brothers who had offered them a lengthy stay in the royal free if they didnt apologise.
my point? that social dynamics have a way of being ugly around smack.
and those two obviously had a bit of violence to get out of the system as can be seen from their later paths, full respect and all, of pro boxing and being a parra.
as for the goblin? man i loved st monicas as far as im concerned it was ‘punk’ whereas Campbell Buildings was just, maybe your word is a good one, evil.
how many deaths? how many of our mates completely fucked up from tuinol? pointless killings? craps life in jail?
a great legacy.
Sam
January 30, 2012 at 6:41 pmDidn’t mean to open a very old can of worms Jake. Yeah the smack was bad, bad, bad but something cranked up (haha) a notch in Iverson Rd. I think some places just have bad vibes (man) and it’s hard to tell if it’s residual memory or social dynamics. I think Campbell Buildings was evil too. It was Anna’s place from housing association which we were, in theory, renting. Insane place.
baronvonzubb
January 31, 2012 at 5:36 amno can mate, just chatting innit. i just remember social dynamics playing their part at 66a an all. Was why i left mate!!
after having a brilliant time there me and ian were basically forced out to make way for lee and robbo. he ho 🙂
but you probably have different memories of that. ones memories can be coloured by our place in them i guess.
but for the record i got 107 off the WHA direct from them. I think Anna, charlie and his brother were already there and had a veto on who was gonna be their upsatairs neighbour. it was my name on the list and it was actually a one bedroom, my upstaires room, flat. the rest of you – squatters, all were there cos it was a place for us all. tony was in a box room, that didnt count as bedroom as far as WHA were concerned, and you and keith shared the living room.
so the kitchen was used for that, as im sure you can remember. wankaroo was officially either in richmond with gretch or got messina ave round the corner. we actually had some realy good times there, fleshead, the rubber boy, your brilliant cartoons of them etc. went on after you’d left for Aus i think
but i just think our memories are coloured by our experiances of a place and time and we may ascribe qualities that appear objective to a subjective experience. anywat thats my pennyworth.
no need to worry about worms at all brothaman, its all just old friends passing the time of day here 🙂
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
January 31, 2012 at 7:13 pmZubb, the attrition rate back then is another almost supernatural element. People usually have to experience war to lose that many friends and associates. Not engaging in hyperbole to say that nearly everytime I make an inquiry about someone I knew from the old Brixton days, the answer comes back that they are long since passed away. Even fringe/peripheral characters. There was even a couple mentioned on another thread here at KYPP.
Personal self-destructiveness and individual issues aside, a lot of those tragic outcomes were very avoidable as our own survival proves.
I’m usually quite dispassionate about political leaders and personalities, seeing them as mere ciphers in remorseless ungovernable machine, but I do still hold that fucking woman from Grantham responsible for the deaths of a few good friends of mine. A good officer never leaves their men on the beach. A leader of a country likewise does not abandon half their people and leave them to fend for themselves. I really hope that spineless cunt’s dementia lasts another decade and each second seems like a thousand years.
And I say that without any personal bitterness as such. Just seems a reasonable and fortuitous outcome to me. 🙂
baronvonzubb
February 1, 2012 at 6:05 amfokker, the buddhist in me says she deserves compassion being like us all a mere victim of circumstances beyond her control.
the punk in me says yeah the fukkah deserves it, long and drawn out…
and yup the attrition rate was ridiculous.
im not sure if our own survival helps to prove its avoidable though, for my own part i feel, more so as the years notch up, just a bit luckier than some. so much of it seems wrong place at wrong time or just the cards we were dealt previously left some more able to make less self destructive decisions. i do wonder about it quite a lot as it goes.
sam just to go on the record again …
as i came away from this machine yesterday i realised that i just cant remember clearly enough so many things and that to go on the record is just plain daft, like the precise circumstances of how 107 came into being for example.
so for the record i cant remember mate 🙂
but just wondering about others who may have agreed with your thesis of 107 being evil.
dunno if it was robbo who agreed (cant think why he would in light of things that followed but he may have done) but if it was anna then i can see why she might have had cause to.
apart from having us twats upstairs keeping them all awake all the time – what pigheads we were, thinking that our all night smacked up gooning was more ‘real’ and ‘rebelious’ thus ‘important’ then her flat having to get up for a days graft – but also as came to light later, when gretchin was more than overjoyed that her and charlie split up and was conformed by my cousin who was his best mate, that things with her and charlie were far from good whilst living there.
to put it delicately in this age of FB and us all being connected up etc, mr charles was a bloke with an unchecked temper.
now that didnt surprise me as far as he was concerned but it did as far as it went with anna. i just didnt think she was the sort af lady who would put up with that treatemnt at all. and of course in the end she didnt, good on her.
but i can certainely see her as feeling her time their was spent in the presence of evil, not a person but a force of.
who knows maybe your spot on, and the place had some serious history that caused us all to behave in extreme ways and it wasnt just personal experience colouring memories.
i dunno, just that a few proper evil places and events manifested later on, that just leaves me with my memory of 107 as some kids larking around.
as the immortal phrase, coined by your good self, goes ‘one mans jah is another mans wah’ 🙂
Sam
February 2, 2012 at 2:10 amWell yeah, as you said what goes around comes around and I was not in favour there as (as far as I could tell) I was attempting to go to art school and liked my clobber. Ah well. But it was probably the drugs and smack is evil-er than most. The worst thing it does is to give you this feeling of isolation and superiority to everyone else. I remember Anna coming up and complaining about the noise and me just coming out with this stream of insults without giving a fuck. I bumped into her when I got back from Australia and she invited me to her pad and made me a cup of tea and we chatted for a bit. I’m amazed she ever forgave me.
Leah thought it was evil too for the record. I think I was searching for some kind of family (maybe we all were) and my one fell apart before my eyes.
I had a couple of very strange experiences there. One was lying in bed awake feeling that someone was standing above me but being physically unable to open my eyes or move. This happened a couple of times.
Regarding Fokker’s point about the attrition – I have often wondered about PTSD in subsequent years. I went through a period of being afraid of my body…that some lurking piece of detritus had lodged there and was going to free itself and destroy me.
baronvonzubb
February 3, 2012 at 9:44 amcant ever remember leah being there but as i said i cant trust me memory.
as for family, yeah we all wanted that but the smack was stronger, unsurprisingly.
but i sort of got the impression that you & tony were mates after australia. i saw you breifly at some squat. i was scoring with tony b and ros, you were visiting tony r and mark.
thought from that point on you 2 or 3 were tight till you went to the states?
thats interesting about PTSD and your description of fear of the body.
which brings me onto my favorite toppic, vipassana meditation
http://www.dharmapunx.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81
aint gonna go on but it is a meditaion that uses our relationship with our bodily sensations as its absorbtion focus.
and i can tell you fear of them – sensations – are a huge part.
anthony gormely was heavily influenced by it, said it inspired him to become an artist that was obsesed with the body as a form.
smack works in supra sensational way. it is, in some ways the complete absorbtion of the nervous system – in a warm bath type sensation
vipassana uses exploration & awareness of what ever sensations are present ‘in this moment’.
having been a junkie (an addict to particular types of sensation to the extreme) this type of med practice has been, well, a challenge.
very interesting that you mentioned it.
Sam
February 3, 2012 at 6:17 pmFunnily enough my girlfriend is a yoga teacher and we went to a meditation class a few weeks ago. The irony is that as a 21 year old I had an irrational fear of my body when I was in the prime of my youth, and now I’m an old fart I rarely give it too much thought. However I’ve been working out a lot over the last year. I don’t know if I mentioned it but I had a grand mal seizure in November – probably from stress and exhaustion, but I think I’m ok.
My girlfriend isn’t particularly into the spiritual side of all that. It interests me and people keep sending me meditation links. I instinctively think ‘hippy shit’, which is a bit silly but well, you know. I couldn’t clear my mind completely during the meditation thing and Hounslow West tube station in 1974 kept popping up in my head.
I think there may be some truth in the PTSD thing. After not using for awhile, I think the realization that we’d been playing Russian roulette for years hit home and I’d already known 3 or 4 people who’d died. In one of the biggest epihanys of my life, I remember sitting in my room in Sydney in early 1983 and realizing I could well be next if I didn’t quit. It’s a shock to the adolescent brain to realize that you are definitely, certainly not immortal.
I hung around Robbo and Wank on and off after I got back. I just had too many bad memories of that scene and I wanted to completely move on, which I did. I don’t think I ever told you Jake but I went to this clubbing weekend in Bournemouth in 1984. Drove back with friends and we went round this girl’s house who lived in the street oppostite your place off Westbourne Grove. We were sitting on the big steps out front – glorious spring day, world buzzing by when you appeared with your girlfriend from around the corner. You were both trashed and were supporting each other and you walked right past me weaving across the street. I’m sure you didn’t see me. Everyone went “fucking hell!”. It was like my recent past walked in front of me.
Thanks for the edit Peng!
Penguin • Post Author •
February 4, 2012 at 10:03 pmNo probs Sam; hope you are getting better and stronger; and for your information you placed the 800 comment on this here thread…!
Sam
February 5, 2012 at 8:33 pmYes the seizure happened in early November and no reoccurrance since. I’ve been working out 3 or 4 times a week and a really strenuous one triggered it.
Thanks.
baronvonzubb
February 7, 2012 at 6:52 amdamn, those edits are sooo telling… 🙂
really glad youre on the mend, had no idea.
and very wise that you did move on for sure.
nah we never saw you. we were ‘busy’, but that girlfriend, kay, & me are still together.
we’ve been through ‘a lot’, shes a star.
as for the meditation, yeah its hippy shit which is why i posted the dharmapunx link. although i was into it before i came across D P i had had a very long break from ‘spirituality’ for the same reasons.
D P got me back me into it and has had a very positive effect.
his film ‘meditate and destroy’ was what hooked me.
nothing to lose, check it out. at least it’ll make you laugh.
keep on keepin on mate to full power health and calmness 🙂
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
February 15, 2012 at 7:41 pmI have slowly come to the conclusion that, besides being a fascinating read on the way things were in the dark days of late 70s/early 80s London, this thread has a strange prescient quality.
IRAN: They have had a revolution and kicked out the Shah, which must be a good thing, also they are against America, which we are too. We don’t know whether to support them or not, as they cut off people’s hands, so we will wait until we hear someone else, maybe Crass, talking about it, and then decide what our policy will be.
Call Penny Rimbaud immediately someone.
Sam
February 19, 2012 at 4:54 amIt is a good read and I like to trawl through it from time to time. Also if you take every first, second, third, fifth, eighth, thirteenth and twenty first letter of the thread it spells out the Koran, the Mayan calender and the words for a jingle for the Houndsditch Warehouse.
Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
February 20, 2012 at 1:29 pmShit. You noticed that as well? I first became aware of this after playing the whole thread backwards through text-to-speech software and thereby causing major distortions in the Schumann Resonance of the Earth. I actually aged countless years just listening to those posts about goblins. My clock in the taskbar now says I am lliving in the year 2306.
79HEATHAZE
July 14, 2013 at 11:45 pmThis site is legendary, better than a movie, it’s Ontoglyphic.
The last post dated February, 2012…
Did everyone die?
Lives go on. We read what we all wrote & think…..
But the comments here are legendary. Don’t be shy, However busy or troubled your lives might be, don’t stay away! KYPP Has a truly important thread going.
The Thread is so good, do not let it die.
Gents?
Sam
August 1, 2013 at 5:22 amOnce again Msr Heathaze…reveal your true identity please.
Sam
April 6, 2014 at 7:48 am3am. Read the fucker again.
Sam
January 10, 2018 at 11:12 pmTen year thread anniversary please.
Jon Gunner
September 16, 2020 at 3:30 amLove this! So can any of you hoarders help out. I was the bassist / prime noise maker in Primal Chaos in 81 with Cobby on drums and Peat on vocals. We made a cpl of demo tapes before I left but all my shit got destroyed in a fire in the 90’s and I would really love to get my hands on a copy. We also published a fanzine of the same name, where I did the artwork again any clues to who might have a copy, would be much appreciated! Cheers Jon