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
Sam
May 14, 2008 at 5:35 amI should say they died within 3 years of each other.
Rich Kid
May 14, 2008 at 5:52 pmSammy buoy.Spot on about Epping & punk girls.
But too addled from a day supporting meself to be much in love with it…
Not pertaining to much on this thread exactly but an interesting overview on why civilisation happened where it did
(like why it was the Eurasians who invented the wheel for example)
Is ‘blood, germs & steel’ by Jared Diamond, a US academic
Im gonna set up a new computer now.Might be away a while
Eeeh ooop
Mike
May 15, 2008 at 1:31 pmJohn Stop Calling Me: good post. I find the kids in London suffer a lot more from peer pressure than we did,at least that’s what they tell me. I guess we were as “tribal and easily-influenced” in our own way, just that we had a bigger variation of styles to choose from. It is funny in one way that we tacitly assumed music could get more extreme after Punk, whereas the opposite has happened and even my mum (in her 80’s) finds Coldplay, Keane – Indie “wet”. In my day it was “what’s that racket: you can’t sing, you can’t play, you look terrible. You’ll go a long way” (name that ad).
jahpork
May 15, 2008 at 10:34 pm@Mike-> I don’t think that you could have got any more extreme punk music. Once you cut it down to one chord and one screamed verse, that’s about as for as you can go. But I think that there has been extreme music since… personally I can’t listen to death metal: I’d rather have my toenails pulled out while being made to eat custard creams and watch the films of Sandra Bullock!
Gangsta Rap was/is more extremely violent than punk ever was, and has a higher ratio of swearing per line than any punk song I heard.
Some of the really hard techno was very extreme, I thought (though in hindsight that may have been the E).
Once a cultural signifier like a particular kind of music has lost its power to shock, the next generation have to backpedal and find some other version of it to make extreme in their own way.
The odd thing for me is that today’s youth really only have the same number of styles to choose from that we had, plus one more: punk. But if they choose to adopt punk as part of their look/feel/philosophy, then they’re getting something 3rd-hand at least, because we appropriated a lot of styles for our thing, didn’t we?
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 1:52 amNot sure too much punk music was that extreme. Take JR out of the Sex Pistols equation and you’ve got dirty R & B a la New York Dolls. Mr Lydon was a genius of a late-seventies teenager and definitely did something new – image, lyric and attitude wise. I still think he defines punk. The Ramones did something new too. That Ramones documentary is well worth watching. There’s this brilliant interview with Ritchie (?) Ramone – their third drummer who said he came up with a song and played it to Johnny on the guitar.
[Johnny] What’s that chord you’re playing?
[Ritchie] It’s a minor..it adds suspense.
[Johnny] Well fucking get rid of it.
Unfortunately though we all took the Johnny Ramone school of playing and did it badly. The Ramones had a genius for melody.
Joy Division were more extreme than the Pistols I think. I couldn’t take their music at the time – it was just too relentlessly bleak for me.
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 1:56 amTommy Ramone now has his own bluegrass band and we’re playing a gig with them in a couple of weeks. I hope I get to meet him.
Mike
May 16, 2008 at 11:26 amI think I meant that the mainstream would get a little more…well ‘extreme’ is the wrong word,adventurous maybe.I was listening to XFM Radio at the time and the sheer, I dunno,whining vapidity of it all (someone else in the room had turned it on).I think the Pistols were pretty extreme for their time in that they took rock music back to more primal roots,less insistence on musical aptitude (tho’ in hindsight of course they could ‘play’),more on youthful attitude and sheer excitement.A friend of mine’s older brother used to stand in his doorway whilst we played the Clash,Damned.He would shake his head and hold up his Gentle Giant LPs in silent protest.Rap was pretty extreme lyrically but the music was mainly just sampled from old funk/soul stuff. Death Metal,yes,extreme,but never likely to percolate out of the deepest, darkest underground.US Hardcore probably took the old punk 3-chord fast blueprint and drove into oblivion,Napalm Death and co. ditto in the UK.I’m sure there were plenty of musos in 1976 who thought ‘everything has been done before’ in terms of chord-changes, notes and amalgamation of existing styles,but what was in fact revolutionary was the simple taking of music back to basics,to the roots, that happened with punk.The music itself wasn’t particularly revolutionary, the process of stripping it down again was (for the time).I remember plunking away ineptly on a guitar in 1975-6,the idea that I could be up on a stage playing it a year or 2 later was unimaginable.There were few kids of 15-17 playing live music and those that did were technical wizards in comparison to what we could do.Punk suddenly said ‘that doesn’t matter’ and hey presto,the rest is history.In retrospect it’s probably one of the few types of music where musical aptitude is a hinderance,hence the fact that, outside the really name bands,most punk bands were good for just 1 7″ single.Hearing 3 chord punk today by bands that are more than competent just makes them sound a bit contrived.
What I miss about punk is not so much 3 chords,shouting and spikey hair but the sheer fuck-you exuberance and a million other little things that can’t be replicated again because it would be all too contrived.Probably what I was getting at, a combination of suffering an afternoon of the fucking Fratellis/Pete Doherty/Keane et al on the radio and a gig I went to the same night where I saw a decent friend’s band but then endured 4 others who were just a wishy-washy blur of singer-songwriter angst/gimpy electronica/smug indie-rock.Some guy I was talking to outside said “this is what it must have been like pre-punk!” and he wasn’t wrong.I had the dark thought that maybe an invasion by the old Ladbroke Grove skins would have given it a bit of an edge,something anything.
Sam:Joy Division,I agree,loved the more upbeat tracks back then,taken me years to appreciate the more doomier/slower stuff,but so much a product of their location and the grim,dark arse-end of the 70’s.I thought the first 12″ was flawed but still incredible, as is the boot LP of Unknown Pleasures before it was remixed and overdubs/effects added.Can’t beat the basslines! I waffle enough…
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 2:15 pmHard to know how much of McClaren is/was total bollocks but I remember reading an interview with him in ’78 or ’79 where he was going on about trying to kill rock and roll. I think punk did suceed in doing this. It was the final word in a dialogue that had been going on for (only) 20 years. 32 years later, nothing else of that magnitude has happened. I’m not sure that it’s lack of musical imagination but more that the belief that music or musicians could change the world has been recognized as a bit far fetched. It’s entertainment – it always was, although we dressed it up as something more. Going back to ‘we destroy what we love’ – the media and music business learned a lesson from punk and very quickly started scouring every minor scene for the next big thing. The stuff we complained about – really a lack of youth-based entertainment, did change and improve in the eighties, partly because we took over the media. The change was very noticable to me when I got back from Australia in ’83. Alternative comedy shows all over the place, stuff about drug addiction on tele. I remember seeing Made in Britain with Tim Roth. It really hit the nail on the head at the time. Also, there was an emphasis on broadening regionality in the eighties. You started to get other accents than the BBC accent on tv and in the media. The idea of the media being stupid enough to let The Grundy Show happen again is unthinkable. And who’d really care? Someone said ‘fuck’ during primetime. Big deal really. I remember seeing JR on The Word in the early nineties and he made a complete idiot out of himself by doing his usual ‘I will NOT be misrepresented by the media’ bit and that female Canadian presenter just took the piss…”Hey look everyone! It’s anarchy in the studio!”, she said. There’s an interesting clip on Youtube of PIL being interviewed on TV in the northeast around ’78 I think. Of course Rotten walks off set in a huff and the amused presenters say…”seems like we’ve seen this before somewhere”. John really had his moment and the clips of him early on, speeding, angry and using the media for his own ends still give me goosebumps. It was so raw…it still is but the moment was very brief. It was a cultural revolution of sorts. The cultural revolution of the last 15 years has been a bunch of computer geeks changing the way we all relate to one another. As someone else said – the world of fanzines, independant record labels etc..has been neatly solved by one machine. And here we all are in the future, spread out all over the world and having a nostalgic conversation. Brilliant really. I remember sitting around late at night at Jake’s parents’ house watching Indian musicians on BBC2, taking the piss just for lack of anything else to do. I’m not sure that I’d learn an instrument these days. It seemed so exciting playing loud through an amp. It still seemed very dangerous.
Mike
May 16, 2008 at 2:48 pmHi Sam,yep in hindsight Punk was the last word as you say.Working at R/Trade warehouse in the late 80’s it did amuse me all the record/ journo types running frantically around after the next big thing,which had by then become sub-genres of what were already sub-genres of original genres themselves.That’s how you end up with record shops where everything is categorized by,again,sub-genres.The gig flyers I see around London now are equally culpable:they often describe everything about the bands playing short of an MP3! We used to be taken by the particular design of a flier or the sound of a band’s name,that’s how I ended up seeing Crass for the first time.There was word-of-mouth about them but it was the graffitti and the imagery that intrigued me to discover more.Once everything exploded in summer ’77 then the music often became irrelevant:teen fashion was again marketable and this huge network of labels/mags/shops and venues sprung up and eventually such structures feed on themselves and endlessly recycle.In the late 80’s I remember some drunk NME clown telling me that,as he needed the job,he had to find something new to write about and would,if need be,invent it.About McClaren,he had big ideas after didn’t he,but never managed as big a splash again.I have the feeling that Bernie Rhodes was pretty important in all that too.I’ve not seen Lydon on the TV for a while,last time I thought he was parodying himself,at least his old self.I agree,learning guitar probably doesn’t mean the same thing anymore:last week one of the newspapers here had a free ‘Learn the guitar’ colour supplement.I flicked thro’ it and it contained every cliche and studied pose we’ve been familiar with from the last 30 years.How to play ‘Rawk!’,how to be the sensitive singer-songwriter,the rhythmic pulse, the guitar-hero etc etc.Which just goes to prove that every last inch of any ‘counter-culture’ has been co-opted,drained of genuine meaning, assimilated and thoroughly corporatised.Again,back to punk,the joy was how untutored,naive and simple it was.Everyone was agonising over how many chords when 3 would do! I remember buying a cheap piece of shit guitar from an old junk shop called Bits’n’Pieces,the guy was spitting image of the singer from Mungo Jerry,down to the sheepskin & sideburns.I was over the moon with it,yet the strings were like cuts of wire from a fence.When plugged into a mate’s stereo it sounded like a wet fart.We put the bass in the other channel w/a quality street tin for a snare and stuck the tape recorder on the window-sill at strategic moments to catch the planes landing at Heathrow.It was laughable,but even then I was sure it contained the germ of something better than the latest Rick Wakeman concept LP!
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 2:52 pmSTOP PRESS: PUNK ROCK IN ‘IS DEAD’ SHOCKER…
I’ve just got back from a trip up to Portsmouth’s City Centre, and in the shopping mall there someone had a stall on which he was selling a 3 foot x 2 foot Pistols’ God Save The Queen Poster in a posh wooden frame for forty-four quid.
@Sam-> You’re right, on reflection, not too much punk was that extreme: I’ve just listened to 999’s first album and had the strangest feeling that I’d heard it somewhere before. Then I remembered where: Dr Feelgood! Perhaps it all started in Canvey Island, and not with the Bromley Contingent after all!
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 2:59 pm@Mike-> Dunno, I think that people like the Tom Robinson Band and The Ruts were pretty exciting lyrically, but they were very good musicians (on the ‘Rising Free EP’ Tom Robinson shouts to Dolphin Taylor [hippy name!] “Take It Away Dolphin” and he goes into some proper Keith Moon stuff). The Ruts were musically adept and quite heavy-rockish at times but they were saved from mediocrity by Malcolm Owen’s lyrics and delivery.
Was listening to The Adverts last night: their stuff had a whole a lot of energy I think.
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 3:04 pm@Sam-> With the advent of reality TV, the idea of someone NOT saying “fuck” on prime-tie TV is shocking. The punk attitude has been so thoroughly assimilated into the media (and mass-marketing generally) that people assume anything that isn’t (faux) raw has something wrong with it. The watch-word for the marketig brigade in these times isn’t “you can’t polish a turd” so much as “how can we make this sterile pap smell a bit more shitty?”.
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 3:12 pm@Sam-> “the world of fanzines, independant record labels etc..has been neatly solved by one machine.”
I don’t think it’s the machine as much as the people who create the ideas to use it and the people who then take those ideas and turn them into software. Then of course you’ve got the other creative people who use that software to get their ideas into the pubic domain.
But then as someone with a Computing degree, I probably would say that 🙂
And a tip of the hat is deserved by the uber-geeks who design the hardware and make it quicker and able to store more stuff each year: without them sitting in their sterile labs in their paper “Kennington Police Station chic” suits, we’d still be playing Space Invaders.
And on the punk ‘do it yourself’ ethic, things like open source software (like Linux and OpenOffice) and cheap software components for developers mean that anyone can get into making their own stuff, as long as they have the ideas.
Mike
May 16, 2008 at 3:15 pmPork:yep & to think that wearing that image was a dead cert way to get a kicking 30 yrs back.Didn’t Beckham sport a Crass t-shirt a few years back as well?
999:the frontman had been in Kilburn & High Road w/Ian Dury,so he was from the Pub Rock era.I thought 999 were great live until the skinhead bassist left,downhill after that.
Yep,Ruts were class,but what I meant was that the really ‘inept’ bands only sustained an EP,after which they either split up or improved musically and became something else altogether.For inspired amateurishness,can’t beat the TV Personalities,and they were 2 years after the fact
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 3:33 pm@Mike-> 999 were my favourite band by a long way. Didn’t realise that Nick Cash had been in The Kilburns! Jon Watson was class: The pink and black tiger print t-shirt from ‘Boy’ he wore was the only bit of clothing I went out and bought after seeing someone else wear it. He had so much energy on stage that he looked like a mental chimp on Durophet! [ just had to look that up for the spelling and came across this rather good looking site… http://www.thegooddrugsguide.com/articles/a_dexys.htm ]
David Beckham wearing a Crass t-shirt is just plain ironic, innit? Wonder if Posh bought it for him as a birthday joke, then bought him a dictionary the next Christmas?
Mike
May 16, 2008 at 3:47 pmWeren’t they just so good live.Jon Watson,that’s the name! Years since I’ve heard their singles (is there a CD of ’em I wonder?).What happened to Mr.Watson.Saw them at the Sundown on Charing X Rd,now the Astoria I think,and there were all these metal barriers which,as Sounds reported, were ‘destroyed by the frantically pogoing masses’.I’d just got that ‘I’m Alive’ 7″,the energy level they gave off was unreal,even thro’ the next 2 years.Vinyl never captured a fraction of it.Then saw ’em in late 80’s and no Jon Watson,just a guy w/a beard.Terrible!
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 4:03 pmThink the guy with the beard would have been Arturo Bassick, ex-Lurker. Being of the South London persuasion myself, I’m quite keen on “Tulse Hill Night”, but any of their singles or album tracks from the first 2 albums stands up against anything I’ve heard before or since.
Nick Cash had the FIERCEST voice when he went for it on stage, particularly on stuff like “I’m Alive” and “Let’s Face It”. He made Rotten sound like Whispering Bob Harris!
Don’t know if there are any ‘singles’ CDs out there, but you may well find a torrent or two on IsoHunt.com if you search for “999” with most of their stuff on.
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 4:07 pmThere is ONE copy (vinyl only) of “The 999 Singles Album” now available on http://www.discogs.com/release/832043 if anyone’s feeling proper die-hard about it!
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 4:12 pmSoz for multiple posts, but there is a CD called “Homicide: The Best of 999” available on amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Homicide-Best-999/dp/B000001JM6
Track listing is:
A1 Nasty Nasty (2:02)
A2 No Pity (2:00)
A3 Me And My Desire (3:00)
A4 Crazy (3:35)
A5 Emergency (2:51)
A6 My Street Stinks (1:42)
A7 Feelin’ Alright With The Crew (3:30)
B1 Titanic (My Over) Reaction (3:23)
B2 You Can’t Buy Me (2:45)
B3 Homicide (4:25)
B4 Soldier (2:15)
B5 I’m Alive (2:30)
B6 Quite Disappointing (2:15)
B7 Waiting (3:01)
B8 Action (3:00)
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 4:35 pmWhile having a look for 999 stuff, I came across their MySpace site, which plays 5 tracks of theirs: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=250117867
Also, I came across a site which mentioned that Jon Moss (ex-Culture Club and partner of Boy George) auditioned for 999 and got a knockback (so did Chrissie Hynde – that would have been a fucking strange band!)
Remembered that Moss used to be in a band that recorded a favourite Punk EP of mine: London (the Summer Of Love EP). Couple of tracks from that are available as a free download at http://eetusmakelijk.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_archive.html
(though unfortunately not “Siouxsie Sue” which contained the immortal line “Siouxsie Sue would do it in the park, or in the street, but only if it’s dark. Betjeman eat yer heart out!). Don’t know if it’s about Banshees’ Siouxsie, but I do hope so.
Mike
May 16, 2008 at 4:37 pmTa for that Pork,I actually just checked online and Captain Oi do a load of old 999 stuff repackaged,inc. a singles CD.I’m tempted since my old 7″s are in mothballs.Funnily enough ‘Homicide’ sounds distinctly like some old early 70’s hard rock doesn’t it? I was in Borders on Fulham Broadway yesterday and they were playing Members’ Solitary Confinement and then Nick Lowe ‘Heart Of The City’:1st Stiff 7″,who would have thought it.In 5 years’ time it’ll be ‘Aint No Feeble Bastard’ by Discharge,in 10 a Heretics box set (there ya go Sam,another Google hit).Which reminds me,we’ve strayed somewhat from drugs’n’debauchery
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 5:06 pm“STOP PRESS: PUNK ROCK IN ‘IS DEAD’ SHOCKER…”
My mum, bless her, sent me a shocking yellow and pink ‘God Save the Queen/Sex Pistols’ zip up pencil case for Christmas which I use to keep my toothbrush etc…in when travelling.
Good point Mike.
I remember Scarecrow fixing up whiskey once. It hurt and didn’t provide the early morning pickmeup of Nescafe up the mainline. One of my most unpleasant drug experiences was Benalyn – a whole bottle of it. No real buzz, just this sense of being completely disconnected from myself.
I saw a photo of 999 recently. Nick Cash is a blimp but it was Guy Days that got me. Back in the day he was like a street walking panther with a heart full o’ napalm. In the photo he looked like a grumpy old fucker who shout ‘Hoppit….you little bastards!’ at kids on his allotment. Time is a strange one. Didn’t all this stuff happen yesterday?
jahpork
May 16, 2008 at 5:08 pmOh, man, The Members… what a band! I think “Offshore Banking Business” is still the best bit of white boy reggae I’ve ever heard. Solitary Confinement deserved to be a much bigger hit than Sound Of The Suburbs, but that’s the great British record-buying public for ya!
Nick Lowe was and still is a proper British institution. I had a Stiff Records album in 79 (can’t remember which one) on which he did Marie Provost (the one about the silent movie star who didn’t have the voice for the talkies and locked herself away to die, only to be eaten by her pet dachsund). “She was a winner, that became a doggy’s dinner, she never meant that much to be, but now I see, poor, poor Marie”. Just perfect.
Not really back onto drugs/debauchery but just a reminiscence about the 1980s before this depoliticising that we’ve been talking about…
I was at the Big County Hall RAR gig (last time I ever saw Ruthless, btw, but never got a chance to talk to her) and the Redskins came on stage to a big crowd. Couple of songs into the set, and a bunch of Nazi skins storm the stage and start sieg-heiling and trashing the equipment. There was a few seconds of stunned silence, then one little voice in the crowd started chanting “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated”. With that, the whole crowd starts chanting and within seconds the stage is invaded by huge amounts of ANL folks and the boneheads get the hiding of a lifetime. Lovely!
Also, I dunno if it’s just that I’m getting too old to spot it, but what was the essential difference between the Poll Tax riot and the riot in Manchester the other night when the Rangers fans didn’t get to watch their football on a big screen in a park? I mean, pragmatically, a few cars and shops got trashed and a few Old Bill ended up with a nasty headache, but nobody was really expecting the major organs of state to collapse the next day in either case, were they? Were they both nothing more than a bit of a jape? Or is one more valid than the other because of the motivation behind it?
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 5:10 pmHeretics box set…now you’re talking!
Sam
May 16, 2008 at 5:14 pm“what was the essential difference between the Poll Tax riot and the riot in Manchester the other night when the Rangers fans didn’t get to watch their football on a big screen in a park?”
The foul stench of petuli oil I should think.
johng
May 17, 2008 at 1:13 amdifference:- large groups of some kind of human beings chanting ‘we are u.d.a. we are u.d.a.’ everywhere i went near the centre of manchester,seeing masses of union jack flags everywhere, like i did that day, i always find disturbing.
jahpork
May 17, 2008 at 12:33 pm@Sam-> Don’t tell my partner that… she’s very keen on the patchouli! Funny enough, the smell of that always reminds me of Allen the junkie’s place. Maybe there was a bit of that mixed in with some of that dodgy hash he used to knock out. A whiff of patchouli still suggests a certain moral laxity on the part of the female wearer to me, too. Which is nice.
@johng-> Ironic really that the biggest supposed supporters of the UDA don’t come from Northern Ireland any more. While Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness were jointly commenting on the sad death of Robert Dunlop (the Northern Irish motorcyclist) the other day and expressing their condolences to his family (and at least one of them must have been sending condolences across the religious divide), a gang of Scotsmen were waving Union Jacks and chanting solidarity with a Northern Irish organisation while attacking the police who represent the state of the flag that they were waving. I suspect alcohol abuse may have played with their ability to reason rigorously 😉
I always thought the NF should have been more confused than they were about waving Union Jacks and what it represented, too.
jahpork
May 17, 2008 at 12:42 pmOn the subject of drugs, wasn’t there a bit of a craze at Campbell Buildings for Kaolin and Morphine stomach upset mixture by the bottle?
I don’t know why but I’ve always thought that someone told me that Crow had had some of that and a rake of barbs before he went up on the roof that last time. Also remember being told he’d had to give up fixing because his doctor had told him he had so much chalk from non-filtered Tuinal in his arm that his circulation had suffered to the point that they would have to take his arm off if he did any more of it, and that this was the reason he was swallowing enormous amounts of the stuff: he couldn’t work out the appropriate oral dose to cover the amount he’d been banging up.
What was it that had to be mixed with Tuinal before being dragged up through the cigarette filter into the barrel? Was it lemon juice because the barbs were alkaline? My memory ain’t what it was.
Mike
May 17, 2008 at 1:50 pmYes,Benalyn was a good one.I remember a local band to me singing about ‘huffing Zoff’,which was I think a carpet cleaner,either that or something you put down the sink.Ouch,whiskey! I remember thinking that crushing up downers to inject was a step too far.Last time I had speed it was that Base stuff, the crusty scrapings from the top of the barrel.Never again,I was still ranting on 2 days later.After about 8 hours of it my girlfriend pointed to her door and just said ‘Go!’.Back in ’78-’79 I would come home at 3am chewing my mouth off and my little sister was invariably sleepwalking.I would have bizarre disembodied
‘conversations’ with her for hours in the kitchen then steer her back to her bedroom and shut the door.She could never remember a thing the next morning,perhaps just as well.
Heretics Box set:complete with sociological 25 page analysis by a Mojo writer on the Situationist/Dadaist/Maoist ramifications of kids picking up guitars in the late 70’s,plus added thoughts on the ‘Post War Consensus’, Post War decay,post-industrial revolution and the postmodern irony of learning instruments in a patriarchal/misogynist/post-feminist/racist/ homophobic society.That and sniffing glue.Considering those old Blues ‘Field Recordings’ saw the light of day 40-50 years after the fact, you never know!
Sam
May 17, 2008 at 5:09 pmPlus a detailed diagram on how to saw your own head off.
jahpork
May 17, 2008 at 7:42 pmI think Zoff was (apart from being Italy’s World Cup goalkeeper at the time) a product for getting rid of sticking plasters – they weren’t the nice thin plastic ones then, they were the big claggy cloth-soaked-in-glue ones.
That base speed as a complete animal of a drug. I remember running what must have been nearly a marathon (ran for about 5 hours just to get myself tired), pissed out of me brain, round a park in Bristol in the early hours of the morning after a party where I’d had a bit of that: it was in a capsule that had once contained a cold remedy and I was a bit dubious, but my dealer reassured me. Boy, was he right!
I think the pharmaceutical Dexedrine were about the smoothest speed I had, nice easy comedown. The speckled blues, I dunno what they had in them but they gave you a rush like a wounded buffalo and a comedown like Dante’s Inferno.
I helped to build and run a pirate radio station in the 80s, and the guy who built the transmitter’s mum grew grapes and made her own wine. While setting it all up for a test one night, he spilt some of this home-made wine on his jumper sleeve. “Shame to waste it, it’s the good stuff”, he said, and proceeded to sniff (in the same way that you would glue) the rest of it out of his jumper. A couple of minutes later he looked in a pretty advanced state of refreshment, so I poured a glass on my sleeve, he did too and we finished the bottle like that, cuff-full by cuff-full. Pissed as rats.
Sam
May 17, 2008 at 10:56 pmGlad we’re back onto more solid ground with cheap ways to destroy your mind and body. Always a fascinating topic.
“Kaolin and Morphine “.
I’d forgotten about that. Yes, I remember there’d be a chalky layer from the bottom of the bottle to about 2/3 of the way up. The good stuff’d be the syrupy goo at the top. I don’t remember if this was filtered through anything or just injected like treacle straight into the arm. Crow was the only person I remember doing it. I also remember his chalk lumps. We were sitting there (on the floor) one night when he turned even whiter than his usual pasty palour and announced he’s found a lump moving slowly up his arm. He tied a tourniquet around his bicep as it had moved past his elbow and sat up all night keeping the alien thing under observation. He was convinced (probably correctly) that it would eventually get to his heart and kill him. As Bob said eloquently in his book, there’s no answer as to why he went up on the roof. My theory is that it was quite romantic up there. We used to take cups of tea up there sometimes and look over the City – St Paul’s and the Southbank. It kind of felt like our city. We had no idea we were just borrowing it for a bit. I remember a conversation we had once. I foolishly mentioned I wondered how I’d explain our life to my children. “How long DO you want to live Sam?” he asked accusingly. “Until I’m an old man” I replied. He looked disgusted. Hence – ‘You didn’t have long you even said it yourself’. I’m pleased I lamped one of those policemen who were standing around laughing when they put him in the ambulance. It was the right thing to do. They both tried to grab me and I dodged them and ran off, jumped on a bus but got it in my head that they both needed bludgeoning and jumped off at Waterloo bridge, found a length of 2 by 4 and headed back, weeping like a grandmother. When I rounded the corner of Campbell Buildings, Mitch grabbed me and hustled me up to Ruth’s place. They’d radio’d in and were sending a van full of Lambeth’s finest to find me. Ruth hatched a cunning plan. I hid under her bed and when the police knocked on her door with a search warrant she was lying on top of the bed, topless (if you remember Ruth you’ll understand the shock of this [see ‘Kilburn High Road-Um-be-rellas’] ) reading a magazine. The police were too embarrassed to hang around and off they went.
Another time they were looking for Robbo and he hid in one of the huge water tanks on the roof. He was suspended in there, at night for an hour or so. He described it as being like that movie out at the time ‘Altered States’.
“I would come home at 3am chewing my mouth off and my little sister was invariably sleepwalking.I would have bizarre disembodied
‘conversations’ with her for hours in the kitchen then steer her back to her bedroom and shut the door.She could never remember a thing the next morning,perhaps just as well.”
That’s hysterical Mike. The perfect target for a speedhead. I bet she can mysteriously still quote the correct track listing for It’s Alive and knows which label the Snivelling Shits were on.
I accosted Lemmy at the Electric Ballroom one night just after Bomber had been released. I managed to describe this 2 minute long single to him in ecstatic terms for about 40 minutes. Eventually he made an excuse and hurried off before I had time to get onto the B side. I managed to bore the pants off someone who admits that he’s taken so much speed he no longer has human blood anymore.
Another time I cornered Captain Sensible, also at the Electric Ballroom and tried to persuade him to use The Heretics as a support act. After some time his girlfriend gave me their phone number and told me to call the next day. When I tried the number I seem to remember I spoke to some old lady in Chislehurst who had no idea what I was on about.
jahpork
May 17, 2008 at 11:12 pmSam: Always been proud of you for lamping those bastards, man.