IX Tab - Spindle & The Bregnut Tree

Well, I finally finished the IX Tab album; it's called Spindle & The Bregnut Tree and it's available from here, if you're interested... along with a host of guff and goans about it...

There's a full colour (sort of) 4 page CD booklet with associated information about all the tracks plus a not at all full colour leaflet with the early copies. Limited to 50 or so copies, unless I get more printed...

If it helps, it's sort of themed on West Country bad turns and lost tidings; all of the tracks mean something to me, maybe to you... and there's guest appearances by the usual suspects: Doris Stokes, Glenn Close, Austin Osman Spare, Marshall Applewhite, Gene Hackman, Rock Hudson, Nietzsche, Crackling Dubb and Olivia Newton John...

12 tracks, 70+ minutes of fine slurr, lost sound, crackled graft and logbeats...

You've heard this one:

But here's another:

Second Band

... from punk to post-punk, a wrench in time, a spastic transposing of the timeline from the Sex Pistols USA tour to the launch of PIL into the late 80s, a decade on and nothing has changed; same troubles with the lead singers who more or less get ditched in favour of group chanting (the 'Healy is Dead' chant inspired by our Chemistry teacher who self-destructed in the town centre to the general gossip and bemusement of all) in a vaguely Furious Pig style (The Animal Collective are but a glimmer in the eye, the freakfuckers still years away from the collective mushroom jamborees)...

The Rejected ditched all the musicians, ditched the name and the silly hats, ditched the Crass (crass?) stylings and ditched most of the instruments and replaced them with a Test Dept / Neubauten inspired array of metal girders, steel sheets, chains and oil drums - add in some bottleslide guitar played through fx and a couple of tasty Casio SK5 sampling keyboards (the king of samplers - so small you could strap em on and take em for a ride)and Dada IX Tab was born... a band so loud that we had to do all the recordings three doors down, on a little condenser microphone inspired by the recording of TGs First Annual Report.

If there was a lead singer then it must be the feral guy down the front, just a few months away from vomitting fake blood onto the teaching staff during an orgasmic rendition of Alice Cooper's 'School's Out' in the School Leavers Assembly - the clapping was polite, even through the sheen of blood and wine, the teachers might even have been proud that this time someone wasn't singing The Snowman...

It might have been him but it's quite impossible to tell in the filthy flip of orange semi-dreadlocks and cider-eyes. Foetus in his blood. He's got a scream Bargeld would still die for, doesn't even need a microphone to cut swathes through the multiple crashes from the oil drums and sheet metal; sounds like a guy having his arms mangled up at the steampunk Yeo-Valley cattle factories, at the East Coker bacon ranches, at the Tanneries (where the social club beer is cheaper than life itself).

There was rhythm, in places. Tiny micro-house anthems extrapolated to the Clyde ship yards - thin middle class boys with wild eyes and metal drumsticks specially lathed by my Dad. The slide guitar kept sounding like the cattle at the end of The Butthole Surfers 22 Going on 23. We kept it in. We loved that song. Punk sensibilities disbanded, as Dr Benway never said but we continually misquoted: "This is art, pure art".

It was noise. Catharsis. None of us had girlfriends. I think I was wearing a psychedelically-dyed dentists outfit.

There was more sexual rage in the moaning from the Casios. Sometimes they'd malfunction and we'd get La Marseillaise blasting out, complete with barking dog samples, train whistles and lion roars. We thought about playing an entire gig of thoe preset sample tunes, standing arms crossed like Laibach while they blasted out at Boyd Rice / early Swans volume. Later, Dr. Octagon.

The finale was always the same; a legoland micro-recreation of the GPO / Neubauten ICA gig, where they drilled through the stage and wrecked the place (Did I read somewhere that someone actually tried to recreate this event? - that has to be a worse idea that the remake of The Wicker Man). We threw oil drums around, trapped each other under migraines of iron, blasted the frail walls of the assembly hall with sliding scales of steel.

It sounded less good than that.

First Band

Martin on Crass reminded me of the first band I was in, which reminded me other things which I can't go into.

Our first proper band was called The Rejected (not randomly chosen - we were once rejected from the school common room for trying to play Dead Kennedys tapes ). Fourth year at school: ties worn with skinny abandon, blazers that were really one button Miami Vice jackets, trousers scuffed at the knees from goal mouth heroics. I had a pair of bright red skin tight cords that smelled of Kaolin and Morphine. At school we looked a little like The Libertines, outside like Russell Brand without a sex addiction (actually, we had sex addictions but only in theory).

We had our own logo and everything and put up posters in underpasses with ambiguous references to Philosophy and Politics - we weren't all that happy with Thatcher, if I remember her name correctly. I can't remember the precise political issues we had but I think it was something to do with her hair not moving in the wind. I've always been suspicious of people like that; give me flyaway Kinnock or Foot any day of the week. I have the same problem with early Sean Connery and George Burns.

We did our own songs, with titles like Mr Average and I Like Fox Hunting and Holiday in Hungerford but we really enjoyed doing Crass and Sex Pistols covers because then our drummer, who for some reason always wore a Russian hat, even when it was hot had to martial himself into something approximating a steady beat and couldn't spazz off into jazz hinterlands. Crass basslines were pretty much the only ones we could play -our bass player made Sid Vicious look like Jaco Pastorius and was all the better for it. His chief ambition was to sling his bass lower than Peter Hook and he was saving dinner money to get a longer strap.

We had twin singers, mostly because neither of us could ever remember all the lyrics. Rather than juxtaposing the vocals like Stars or Prolapse we tried hard to emulate each others voices so that no one would see the join. I can't remember why we did that.

Our guitarist later became an ambient, techno, electro God and, looking back, you could see how that came to be because everything he played sounded crystalline and about ten mph too slow... with the result that the siging always raced ahead of the music, chased quickly by the drummer and then the bass player (on his knees from the first chorus, grinding holes through the anarchee patches in his tie-died tracksuit bottoms)

The sound was like Sister Ray, everyone turning up everything until the drums finally stopped pounding (I can emphasise with the John Simm's Master). It never sounded good. If only the drummer would've ditched the hat.

There's still a tape of those early rehearsals kicking around and someone out there has it... the cover of Crass's 'So What' was sublime - the vocals sounding much better while pitch-shifted from Essex to Somerset, giving off an air of real West Country grievance (The SYSTEM took down our posters in the common room) and sounding more or less like The Subhumans, had they been 15 and trapped by hormonal imbalance and trousers too heavy for spindly legs to move. The shuffle of the average teen-indie kid is only partly necessitated by mental health issues and apathy; most is down to heavy-clothed army trousers stuffed full of teenboy fluff: pen-knives, guitar picks, walkmans, tobacco tins, mushroom gathering tupperware.

The Rejected lasted for three rehearsals.


Next: The Rejected disband due to musical differences and Yeovil gets it's own Neubauten.

Twiggwitch

Released simultaneously with the Hubersnaps EP, TwiggWitch's debut CD-R is a three track trawl through tumbles and girders. Most of this is made with leaves. This time the 2001 sample comes from the 2001 sampling of a 2001 sample from Diatribe's lost classic of ethnology 'Recapper'. The recorders are the artists own and the acoustic guitars are played with all the fingers we have.

TwiggWitch - 12 Minutes Over Pevvie

A Yousendit Mourning Crescent

Hubersnaps And Churnings

ee.

Man Caught In Taxi With Ridiculous Excuse is the penultimate track on the impossibly rare, never to be released debut CD-R by The (Other) Door - 2 lads from the dankest corner or the Somerset Levels, sharing teeth, eyes and a breakdancing fetish that asks for nutty wood over lino and pedestrianisation.

It's rretrro urrGoa with twwo twwists, one knotted and keen, the otherr grroaned and humble. The 2001 samples come directly from 9 separate white-label 12"s circa 1991. The sample of the cupboard falling downstairs is conemporary. The lags are still missing.

The (Other) Door - Man Caught In Taxi With Ridiculous Excuse

A Yousendit Shardinky