Dutch heavy hardcore gang LIES! dropped the video for ‘Propaganda,’ which serves as the second preview single from their upcoming album, Mind Pollution, set to be released on 8 December 2023.
Of the track, LIES! shares: “We’re thrilled to have Worst Doubt’s singer Hugo Zerrad on our latest single, ‘Propaganda.’ Our admiration for Worst Doubt’s music dates back quite a while since their debut. They combine Kickback with everything we like in metallic hardcore and metal. Hugo is a phenomenal creative artist. He also crafted the artwork for our album. So, this collaboration is a fusion of two artistic forces.
“The video for the song is a creation of Dark/Half Agency, Alfie, and our singer Rene. It reflects the turmoil described in the lyrics of the song — constantly inciting people, creating division, and addressing abuse of power. The world is in chaos, and this is particularly relevant. The song is short, powerful, and a tornado of aggression. An ideal anthem for moshing and headbanging, the song definitely sets the tone for the entire album, which leans towards heavy hardcore with a lot of metal influences.”
Watch the video here:
AA
PC: Rob van Sleen
Upcoming Shows – Dec/Jan: Dec 18: Neushoorn, Leeuwarden (Netherlands) Dec 28: TBA (Germany) Dec 29: Holz, Niesky (Germany) /w Born From Pain Dec 30: TBA (Germany) Jan 26: Fla Fla, Herford (Germany) Jan 27: Available for booking
The Battery Farm have had a truly extraordinary twelve months: the Manchester foursome released their debut album last November, and have been gigging hard off the back of it, with some pretty high-profile shows along the way. And this is a band that’s driven – not so much by ambition or aspirations of stardom, but by passion. These guys are purveyors of political, pissed off, authentic punk – not haircuts and threads, but sweaty, full-throttle 110% all the way. Benjamin Corry makes for a powerful presence, vocally, visually, and in the interviews he’s given. He may appear a shade scary and borderline deranged, but comes across as affable, articulate, and genuine.
The band exists to rail against the shitness of the world we find ourselves in, and perhaps buoyed by the reception of the album and recent shows, their twelfth single is more amped-up and fiery than ever. ‘House of Pain’ is three minutes of riff-driven fury that blasts in at a hundred miles an hour with a message that needs to be heard. Arguably, that message could be boiled down to the barest bones of ‘fuck this bullshit’, but the expanded articulation is that it addresses ‘the shame imposed on all of us who are scraping by in an ongoing and worsening cost of greed crisis. You do what you have to to survive, and how dare anyone in a position of privilege look down their nose.’
It needs to be heard because, as I was reading only earlier today online in The Guardian, ‘The number of people experiencing destitution in the UK has more than doubled in the last five years – up from 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in destitute homes – a staggering increase of 186% in half a decade.’ That every single supermarket now has a place to donate to food banks speaks for itself; yet our government, whose job it is to protect society’s most vulnerable, simply dispense advice that if you can’t afford a cheese sandwich, to forgo the cheese, and who seem to think that broadband and mobile phones are luxury items the poor should do without, despite the fact it’s impossible to apply for jobs or even maintain benefits without them. The privately-educated governing elite are in the pockets of the likes of the oil industry, and they absolutely fucking hate the poor, and they want you to hate the poor too. And their hateful campaigning and sloganeering is depressingly effective: how else do you explain working-class people voting Conservative? It’s bewildering to think that people in impoverished towns in the north of England would vote for these cunts who’d happily bulldoze every council estate in the country, that they might think that the likes of Bozo Johnson and Richboi Sunak give even a flake of shit about them, let alone represent them – but the increasingly right-wing Tories appeal to the mentality of the impoverished and disenfranchised by apportioning the blame for the state of everything on ‘illegal’ immigrants, who come over here and sponge all the benefits. Stop the boats! Right. Then what?
The Battery Farm are spot on when they describe the current situation in the UK as a ‘cost of greed’ crisis. Everyone who’s already in the money is making on this: banks, oil and energy companies, supermarkets… any increases in costs are being passed directly to customers, and then some, all to protect profits, all to pass on to shareholders, all to give CEOs even bigger bonuses. The injustice, the social division is at a point where something has to give. Sadly, it seems that something is the lives of those at the bottom of the heap.
The Battery Farm can’t change the world, but they can provide a voice and an outlet to the anger at this injustice, and flipside ‘A Time of Peace’ is another full-throttle gritty blast of punk fury, reminiscent of the sound of ‘79/’80 – I’m thinking grimy roar of The Anti-Nowhere League and fellow Mancunians Slaughter and the Dogs by way of references here.
At the time of writing this, four days after release (I’ve been slack / drowning in dealing with everyday life stuff (delete as appropriate); physical copies on 7”, CD, and cassette have sold out, which is a huge achievement and shows just how they’ve built a committed following through a combination of belting tunes and sheer hard slog. This is their strongest work to date.
True revolution will come when the workers own the means of production. This is something that’s emerged in music not through an uprising, but a thoroughly screwed-up state of affairs, but one that’s very much a result of a capital-driven model. Major labels, and a fair few indies, don’t exist for the artists: they exist for themselves, for their execs, for the machine, the mechanism which enables them to gouge maximum profit for themselves, the shareholders, the middlemen, hell, anyone in the chain. And, depressingly it looks like even Bandcamp could be going this way before long. Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about art: it cares only about money, and art is simply another commodity, provided it’s got mass appeal. And who generates the profit? The artist, of course. The model is the same in any capitalist structure: without call centre and admin staff, multinational corporations would simply have no business: even banks need staff to manage the money being poured into them (although retail customers get the least service because they may be many, but they’re just your average pleb on the street, so fuck them and their wanting local branches and stuff that eat into the profit margins). But the staff who essentially generate the wealth are at the bottom of the pile with the worst pay and the worst conditions.
Sure, some artists get rich, but how many Coldplays and Ed Sheerans are there in the scheme of things? And there has been a shift since the turn of the millennium. Massive advances – or any advance at all in many cases – are a thing of the past. But labels have always been behind the time, and the concept of A&R is a longstanding joke in that labels aren’t interested in finding the next movement as riding on the coattails of whatever’s breaking in order to milk it.
This latest offering from Kill, The Icon! marks something of a stylistic shift, at least superficially: less aggro and overtly confrontational, it’s also less guitar-orientated, built around a simple and unchanging synth loop. Nagging, earwormy, irritating… the repetition does become somewhat numbing after a while, but by the end off its three-and-a-half minute duration, you start to consider playing it again anyway.
Talking to me about the single, Nishant admitted ‘It’s really different and I expect will be polarizing in terms of content.’ He’s right on both counts, in that it’s not only a departure, but also likely to alienate a few fans and critics. But this is to the good: as I’ve written before, and will likely do so again in the future, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and nor should you aim to do so. If you do, you’re Oasis or Ed Shearan. Punk is an attitude, not a style per se, punk is creating the music and art you believe in and not giving a fuck about the reception. Kill, The Icon! are punk, and this stylistic detour doesn’t see them budge an inch in their message or tame their fury for a second. Yes, true to their credo, Kill, The Icon are calling out institutional racism and general bullshit in society, and here, specifically, the music industry:
Average White Band / For the average white fan / Making average white music for the average white man
Joshi explains: “Mumford and Sons were the archetypal Average White Band. They had the son of a near-billionaire in their midst. And they made a career out of denying their privilege. They were bankrolled from the very start, and so they had a precious resource that’s not afforded to other bands: time. Most artists are told to play more shows, work harder, network harder. But that’s a huge lie that’s perpetuated by the music industry… Everyone involved in the music industry assures us that diversity, inclusion and equality are priorities – it’s written as much on the website of every festival, booking agent, manager, and record label. But the reality is an utter lie. We’re not all running the same race.”
One benefit of being a truly independent act is that the artistic control is not only retained by the artist, so is the scheduling. That means the pokes in ‘Average White Band’ are still contemporary, as Joshi calls it out:
“Once a band has been elevated, It’s fair to ask what they do with their new-found power: are they maintaining the status quo, or are they actively seeking change to make the music industry more equitable? The reality is that the music industry has been fantastic at improving diversity in indie music, but only to the extent that it champions female-led bands who approximate western beauty standards.”
Sitting on your chaise longue / Writing all your new songs / About cliches of cliches of cliches of cliches
It’s not a matter of sour grapes here: there’s no way Kill, The Icon! are jealous, or would want to be in the position of Wet Leg. But given the same elevated platform, Kill, The Icon! would be telling it like it is and making sure their message had maximum reach. But political bands don’t tend to get maximum reach, especially when they’re from minority backgrounds. Benefits are perhaps the most ‘real’ band with a broader reach right now – Sleaford Mods are simply too obvious are more about commentary than promoting change – but while they’re white, they’re too working class to be embraced beyond a certain demographic. In keeping it real, they’re not likely to get much radio airplay – or earn huge radio royalties – any time soon.
Cirkeln, the black-metal project of the Stockholm-based underground musician known as Våndarr recently unveiled another from track his third album The Primitive Covenant, which is set to be released on November 3rd via True Cult Records.
“Writing this song was probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing for Cirkeln”, says Våndarr. “Usually, the process is quite laborious and takes a long time. There´s rarely a spark of inspiration that then flow naturally into the recording process. But, with the Witch Bell I knew I wanted to take a rawer approach to writing and recording. At that point I knew the mission of the record was to strip away and get down to the basics. I set up the recording as close to a live scenario as I possibly could in my living room-based studio. This meant that the drums were laid down first and then I tracked all the guitars and all the bass in one take for each instrument. There was no editing or refining of the recordings after the fact. There were rarely even second takes. I think this gives the song a sense of unapologetic ugliness and momentum. There was no click track, so the pace of the instruments is entirely dictated by listening to the drums. It’s not the tightest Cirkeln track – but to me it’s the one that sounds the most alive. I also wanted to experiment with incorporating a different vocal technique and style on this album – and the Witch Bell is one of the best examples of this. To me, this is the point where Cirkeln doesn´t allow itself to be confined by one idea of what Black Metal is. There’s more than one shade to darkness.”
On the follow-up to his critically second album A Song To Sorrow, Våndarr is once paying homage to the forefathers of black-metal, yet this time The Primitive Covenant sees the Swedish musician incorporating more elements of old-school thrash-metal, primeval death-metal and even punk.
Let Them Eat Fake may be False Fed’s debut, but the members have between them a substantial catalogue of releases. The band comprises Discharge frontman Jeff Janiak, Amebix guitarist Stig C. Miller, Nausea, Ministry and Amebix drummer Roy Mayorga, and JP Parsons, and collectively, we’re told that this album sees them ‘all stepping outside their musical comfort zones to present an album of discomfort and rage in the face of reality’.
The solid, throbbing bass, glacial synth and squirming guitar that mark the album’s opening with ‘Superficial’ may come as something of a surprise given this preface: we’re deep in dark post-punk territory here, and it’s a huge shift from the hard, attacking pace of either Discharge or Ministry, as well as an immense stylistic departure. Janiak’s vocals, too, aren’t hardcore hollering, but a resonant baritone, at least unto he breaks our roaring and raging toward the end. The vibe is more UK goth circa ’86 than anything else, but this is fitting, given the many parallels between now and then. Yes, so much for progress: we’re right back to the 80s in a climate of fear and a new cold war… and not just a cold war. Instead of coming together to make some kind of effort to address the self-made catastrophe of climate crisis, we seem hell-bent on destroying one another.
‘The Tyrant Dies’ is more what you’d expect from this bunch: industrial-strength hardcore punk with a metal edge: the blasting punk fury of Discharge with the gritty heft of Ministry… but then the bridge slows things and we’re back in goth territory – well, goth as filtered through a strain of Rammstein – and the portentous refrain of ‘we will rise’ feels like a call to arms while at the same time calling on the ‘undead, undead, undead’ refrain of ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’: it’s time for a resurrection.
This album hits harder as it progresses: the guitars drive harder, the drums roll heavier, and goth, punk, and metal tropes melt together to forge something devastatingly intense. I haven’t heard anything that amalgamates these elements – and so successfully – since Alaric’s End of Mirrors, released in 2016 – also on Neurot.
‘The Big Sleep’ is all driving fury, hell-for-leather drums, chunky, chugging metal guitars, and high-pomp vocals echoing from the chest. Meanwhile, ‘Dreadful Necessities’ comes on like Killing Joke with its taut compressed guitar sound and driving beat. It’s dense, and probably more accurately described as steely grey than dark, since it brings a strong, melodic chorus.
The title – Let Them Eat Fake – may be light-hearted on the surface – but obviously has darker undertones in terms of its reference to class division, and that’s one of the major factors behind the album’s anger. And this is an angry album. Let Them Eat Fake is also an album that has a clear trajectory, and it builds as it progresses, becoming louder, faster, harsher, more angry with each song. By the end, it’s positively incendiary, a full-on roar of fury driven with guitars that burn. And ultimately, it makes sense as an articulation of ‘discomfort and rage in the face of reality’. We’re all feeling it. Reality is pain. Let Them Eat Fake tells is like it is.
Heavy music doesn’t have to be po-faced or excessively serious, and there have been a few comedy metal and noise bands through the years. Lawnmower Deth are one which swiftly spring to mind, but the likes of Municipal Waste, and lesser-known acts like Grindcore Cakemakers also make hard noise while being a far cry from the existential rage more commonly associated with their genres. And that’s good. The world needs variety, and there’s more than one way to alleviate the grimness of life on this sorry planet.
This album from Black Shape is perhaps the absolute antithesis of Godflesh’s seminal Streetcleaner. With the lumbering weight of a runaway bin lorry, Black Shape rumble their way through eleven tracks of bin themed absurdity, utilising their knack for writing material that is as colossally heavy as it is varied and comedic. Most of the tracks are around the two-minute mark, with just a couple of four-minute outliers. On the surface it’s a whole mess of noisy shit, but closer listening soon reveals a wildly varied album which incorporatesjazz, spoken word, nu-metal, rap and thrash.
‘The Beast from the North East’ is a dirty, shouty punk effort – more Anti-Nowhere League than The Pistols. Dense, muscular, with filthy sludge guitars, pant-soiling bass, and a wild solo which occupies half the song’s duration. The production is rough and raw, and this works in its favour: the guitar on ‘I Wanna be a Binman’ positively tears from the speakers, and it’s like being at a gig and standing so close to the PA that your nostrils vibrate. If you’ve never done it, you need to at least once, although earplugs are recommended. You still feel the force without fucking your hearing for the rest of your life. It’s a throbbing stomper reminiscent of Ministry circa Psalm 69. Only instead of burning for the needle, it’s a hard craving for lugging refuse. They pillage every style going here: ‘Dogshit Bin Juice’ takes a turn for the choral in the verses between ball-busting glam stomp riff breaks. It’s hilarious, but also makes you think. You sometimes hear that binmen are pretty well-paid. But would you do this, for any money?
If ‘Put Me in the Bin’ is the most overtly old-school punk cut, the recording is again more industrial, which couldn’t be more at odds with the offbeat, off-the-cuff lyrics, while ‘Once a Binman, Always a Binman’ throws a curveball with a gentle intro and unlikely lift of ‘Love Lift us Up Where We Belong’ before going full-slugging nu-metal / grunge crossover, with the meaty heft of Tad bringing the blue collar grit to proceedings. There are some moments of astute observation and social critique which land quite unexpectedly, but it just goes to show that it’s a mistake to write of a so-called ‘comedy’ album – or indeed any comedy – as shallow, lacking in content, or emotional depth. ‘The Story of How I Died’ brings lilting harp and Pam Ayres style narrative.
Beyond bin-related themes, this is not an album that’s predictable in anyway, lyrically or stylistically, with piano ballads pressed against squalling hardcore assaults. And because of the punk / thrash / metal leanings, and the overall daftness of many of the lyrics and the overall concept, Black Shape’s musicianship is likely to be overlooked. But the range is a measure of immense versatility and competence. Black Shape are the Bill Bailey of dustbins, and BINS is a work of sheer brilliance.
Milliseconds featuring Joe Easley (drums) and Eric Axelson (vocals / bass / synth) of The Dismemberment Plan, and Leigh Thompson (guitar / noises / pedal board) of The Vehicle Birth will release their J Robbins-produced debut LP So This Is How It Happens on October 13 via Spartan Records.
After recently premiering the first single ‘Time and Distance’ on Stereogum, the band is now unveiling the second single ‘Fallingwater.’
I have to confess that with so many submissions, I, like many in the ‘industry’ and also the majority of the public in this era of low-attention and time-constrained living, make instant judgements about not only music, but pretty much anything and everything. I’ll read a headline and not bother with the article, or if I do, may only make it through the first paragraph before my opinion is set and I move on. It’s a habit I annoy even myself with, and it’s a relatively recent habit I’ve developed, which I can pretty much pin to the start of the pandemic, in the days before lockdown when I would be checking the same news sites every couple of minutes to see if there were any new developments, for updates on numbers of cases and deaths.
So about ten seconds into ‘Fallingwater’, I’ve already reached the conclusion it’s limp toss, a slightly emo take on pop-punk, with its cleanish guitar sound and sing-song, slightly nasal vocals. But in the time it takes me to process why I don’t like it, I realise that actually, it has qualities I do like. It’s one of those songs that finds its stride as it progresses, and ultimately reveals itself to have more in common with proper 70s punk than the sanitised fully-adult-guys-bouncing-around-and-making-like-they’re-still fifteen-and-represent-the-youth’ punk-pop shit that’s still being released faster than babies are being born around the globe.
Sure, it’s melodic, but it’s got an edge to it, as well as some nifty unexpected changes which indicate some pretty smart songwriting skills, especially as said changes aren’t awkward or jarring. Having revised my position, I decide that maybe this is a song that warrants some coverage, which I might feel like devoting some time to some discourse, even if some of that discourse is around the process of creating that discourse (or deciding against doing so).
Only then, then, do I consider the accompanying notes – because as much as I can find myself drawn by the pitch, I think that what matters ultimately is the music. Great PR won’t make a shit song amazing – although it does seem that some may be blinded by great PR to the extent that some real crap can go massive, even if briefly by generating some kind of mass delusion, but that’s perhaps for another time.
In explaining the song’s inspiration and style, Axelson says, “Musically we felt like we were tapping into Hüsker Dü and The Kinks when writing this. Those chorus chords especially with the high strings ringing out as a drone definitely owes something to Bob Mould, and the riff in seven that separates sections of the song, feels like some early / mid Kinks, or maybe ‘Alex Chilton’ by the Replacements, but in seven. The weird twist comes in the bridge: initially it was just one voice, but in the studio we layered harmonies and it came out a bit Beach Boys, just maybe not as pretty.”
It isn’t, but then, The Beach Boys were just too clean and pretty, too lightweight and sanitised, whereas with ‘Fallingwater’, Milliseconds still bring some bite – more the spirit of ’77 than anything combining the punchy panache of Buzzcocks with the savvy of Wire to make for three and a half minutes of old-school enjoyment.
Since I was first introduced to Salvation Jayne, back in 2017, I’ve admired their energy, their punchy, punky rock tunes (unashamedly not ‘alt’ and straight-up kicking arse). But what happens when a band loses a pivotal member, particularly under rather messy circumstances? It’s nothing new, of course: Fleetwood Mac’s career after Peter Green was both longer and more commercially successful, and the same is true Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett’s departure and post-Gabriel Genesis. Roxy Music lost Brian Eno early on, and Marillion enjoyed a lengthy career post-Fish… and so on, from Iron Maiden to, er, Queen. Arguably, some of these lineup shifts have marked changes for the better. Others… maybe not so.
As far as many were concerned, myself included, Salvation Jayne was Chess Smith. Clearly, Salvation Jayne, releasing their first new music since her departure, would disagree, and they’ve forged on and are now clearly facing forwards and evolving. The arrival of Estelle Mey on vocals is swept over briefly in the band bio which announced a change in sound with the new lineup, describing it as ‘intense, dark and dynamic post-punk’.
It crunches in with warping electronics trilling over a murky bass noise that sounds like a bulldozer before slamming in with some serious force, the nagging guitar reminiscent of post-millennium Pitch Shifter and some vaguely nu-metal vibes, but still retaining the powerful pop elements which defined their sound, and it’s certainly a meatier and more aggressive sound they’re showcasing here. Contrasting shouty verses with a more melodic chorus, it’s a tried and tested structural formula, and they really work that dynamic, and it works well.
The layered vocals add unexpected depths and dimensions, and if there are moments where ‘Thirst’ feels crowded, the level of detail means there’s more to explore and it’s an adventure to unravel with subsequent plays and following the initial impact. Yes, Salvation Jayne are back, and they’ve got a big tune here.
Stewart Home’s career to date has been enviably long by any standards, and extremely varied: emerging out of the London punk scene in the 80s, his modus operandi was – and remains – subversion, playing with form and literary theory in equal measure. The idea that a writer who cranked out lowbrow pulpy trash which was littered with references to highbrow theory, smashing the two together in a fashion that was the epitome of postmodernism confused and annoyed a lot of people, but earned him a substantial cult reputation at the same time.
His style and subject matter have evolved significantly over the years, although – some notable exceptions notwithstanding, in particular Tainted Love and The 9 Lives of Ray the Cat he has continued to utilise certain tropes, elements of cliché, and display a truly audacious streak is evident throughout his work. His work is serious / not serious, and he’s serious / not serious about it.
One defining feature of Home’s career is that it has always been forward-facing, often promoting the next book over the one most recently released (and he’s exceptionally dedicated when it comes to promoting his work). Even when reflecting back – as much of his earlier work did, on youthsploitation novels of the 90s did on the culture of the 70s – Home was anything but nostalgic in his angle, presenting as much of a critique as a celebration. Revisionist, parodic, comedic, yes, but not nostalgic.
Even Tainted Love wasn’t really nostalgic, and nor was She’s My Witch, which was fun and frustrating in equal measures, apart from near the end, when it became so, so sad. Home has the infinite capacity to confound expectations: for all of the overt revelling in ‘trash’ writing that most academics would dismiss as not even being within a mile of the field of literature, and for all of his one-dimensional characters who exist simply as vehicles to carry – often quite thin – plots and stand as ciphers for more theoretical ends, Home is clearly a writer capable of emotional depth.
The circumstances of the publication of his most recent novel, Art School Orgy (which is very much not concerned with emotional depth), are worth considering in terms of what they tell us about the relationship between art and society. It would be too easy to pursue the ‘cancel culture’ route of discussion, but this feels like obfuscation of real issues. Times have changed significantly since the time of Home’s early novels, the violent, pulpy, parodic Pure Mania, Slow Death, and Come Before Christ and Murder Love. The perception is that society has opened up and anything goes now, but the fact he struggled to find a publisher willing to take on Art School Orgy suggests the opposite is true. Publishers are fearful. Fearful of recrimination, and fearful of not clearing their margins. It’s the perfect illustration of why art and capitalism are incompatible, and it was this situation which resulted in the book being published by a record label. Despite the music industry being dominated by a handful of huge major labels, independence and DIY in music are lauded, and aren’t subject to the same snobbery which pervaded publishing, which is still moored to old conventions.
What’s interesting and surprising in some respects about Home’s two forthcoming publications is that they’re both reissues from way back in the past: debut novel Pure Mania, and an obscure and long-deleted CD of punk tunes, Stewart Home Comes in Your Face.
Had Home been touting Pure Mania round agents and publishers now, it’s almost certain none would bite, simply because it doesn’t conform to the extremely narrow prescriptions of what they’re looking for. If it’s not the next Harry Potter or Games of Thrones, or something that will sit beside Karin Slaughter or Lee Child, then most publishers simply aren’t interested. It’s all about the bottom line, and what can sell millions stacked on the three-for-two table at Waterstones.
It had been a while since I’d been in contact with Stewart, other than a few exchanges around the time of my review of Art School Orgy, and even longer since my last interview, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. What follows is a simple Q&A conducted over email, but on a purely personal level, I feel like we achieved some good riffing on some pertinent topics.
ER: Since the material on the album was written in the 70s and early 80s, and then recorded much later, in the 90s, it must feel quite strange to be promoting Stewart Home Comes in Your Faceand making promo videos now. How do you feel about the songs now with the benefit of so much distance?
SH: At first I found it hard to listen to the songs again. They almost seemed like something someone else had done but they grew on me once I got over the fact that my voice is what it is, and much as I’d love to be able to sing like Aretha Franklin that’s never going to happen. Likewise my guitar playing has always been rudimentary. So once I’d learned to accept my musical limitations once again, I found the songs very funny. It also struck me as hilarious that I should keep returning over decades to tunes that had been knocked up very quickly with little thought about arrangement. A decade and a half and sometimes more between writing and recording, then nearly 4 decades before I thought about making music videos for them.
With the music videos it was interesting to see how much I can get into the pretty juvenile state of mind in which many of the songs were written… I actually had no problem with that. I did a video for ‘Destroy The Family’ first because I saw I could fit that with the coronation by using masks of the royals on myself and a couple of sex dolls. The video I’ve shot for the song ‘Kill’ was even easier. I bought a teddy bear in a charity shop, took it into a wood and had a friend film me stabbing it with a large kitchen knife! I still need to edit explosions and other stuff into that, so it isn’t finished but will be soon. And I don’t want to put the music videos out too close together anyway.
I think the distance I have from the songs really helps. I can take them even less seriously now than I did at the time and that enables me to do things visually with them that I might have thought were too crass back then. I also like the way music sneakily builds online and elsewhere. It’s got much harder for my anti-art videos to gain much traction on YouTube, so music videos seem like they might be a way around that. The old content of the songs becomes something that gets people looking at the new content of the visuals, which is what I’m more taken up with now.
Of course I’m also making non-music videos. In terms of books promo, which the music videos link to as the songs also appear in my reissued novel Pure Mania, here is a series of video book sculptures made by me and artist friends where there is a video on small screen and a shelf with a pile of my books. The sculptures have 15 of my books to start but these are for sale retail and with each book sale, the price of the video sculpture goes up because less is more and you’re getting less. For Defiant Pose, I recite an eight-minute passage from that novel while standing on a Swiss ball and being tickled with a feather, so I’m trying to keep my balance and finish the recitation. So that’s a far more conceptual/live art approach to videos simultaneously connected to my novels.
The promo video for ‘Destroy the Family’ has given an old song a new contemporary relevance. Your position on the monarchy doesn’t really require any kind of interrogation, but do you think that Charles’ accession has raised the levels of anti-monarchy sentiment, particularly when the division between rich and poor (and especially those whose wealth is funded by ‘the taxpayer’) has never been felt more acutely or been more closely scrutinised?
I think we’re a lot closer to seeing the abolition of the monarchy than we were 25 years ago. You could say the image has cracked. When the cops busted up the Sex Pistols boat party promoting their anti-monarchist single in 1977, there was no mainstream sympathetic press coverage. Although the same kind of heavy-handed repression went on with the arrests of those expressing anti-monarchist views at the coronation, the mainstream press clearly can’t get away with the type of coverage it did in 1977. The fact that Charles Windsor is clearly an entitled windbag with dodgy friends and family means that many don’t like him. With the cost-of-living crisis, the ostentatious way the royals flaunt their wealth can only add to the fast-rising tide of anti-monarchist sentiment. It is time to strip the royals of their titles and wealth!
In terms of my performance on film, you can see I have been practicing with the martial arts weapons I use to attack the sex dolls with royal family face masks. That said my staff and sword fighting skill is still a little rough and it isn’t as graceful as it night be although still potentially deadly. So I think that mirrors my guitar playing at the point I wrote the earlier songs and also when I recorded them. I had a seven or eight year break from playing guitar before picking it up again for a few weeks to make those recordings.
AA
You described ‘Destroy the Family’ as ‘super-dumb 2-chord sleaze-bag thud’ (a phrase which appeared in the introduction to the second edition of Cranked Up Really High), and have variously been somewhat critical of the limitations of punk. As you yourself came out of the punk scene, to what extent is your own musical work parodic in its use of tropes and cliché? And to follow on, while songs like ‘Kill’ clearly aren’t ‘serious’, is there an element of catharsis and / or a serious element to simplistic sloganeering?
I think there’s a sympathy for the nihilism late-capitalism breeds in many people but also an attempt to make it clear a ‘blow it up’ or ‘hang them all’ response to exploitation should be moved on from. We all need to rediscover our humanity and reclaim it from the ways in which capitalist alienation have deformed us. But to answer your point, yes there is a certain catharsis in there but it’s undercut. In Kill for example it’s subverted where the words in the chorus are changed from “kill, kill, kill, fucking kill everything” to “kill, kill, kill, practically everything”. Hopefully people get the point that there is no one size fits all one time solution to the world’s problems. We have to keep working at them!
Punk should be fun regardless of musical limitations, What I’m critical of is the art punks who make too much of a fetish of not being able to play. You may as well play as well as you can but that doesn’t mean you have to make it complex. I’m a real fan of super-dumb sleaze-bag 2 chord thud when it rocks, what I don’t like is when it’s leaden.
There are few, if any, genres where authenticity is as highly valued as in punk. You’ve essentially built a career since the early 80s with your zine, Smile to ‘stage an ongoing assault on notions of authenticity’ and have espoused the concept of ‘radical inauthenticity’. Yet ironically, with perhaps one or two notable exceptions, such as Tainted Love, you’ve avoided the mainstream by producing work that’s antagonistic to not only the mainstream, but to academia, and the middle-class, middle-brow readership, while at the same time being too subversive and challenging for – sadly – the vast majority, which suggests you’re perversely authentic. How do you reconcile this?
To use a pat formula, I don’t think I can reconcile it while living under capitalist social relations…. But it could also be seen as a dialectical ploy and one that’s not uncommon in more art school orientated punk rock – although that’s not really the racket I make. Even back in the seventies I thought groups like Wire were operating in that way. Or to take a US example Devo. That said, I think I’m more parodying everything from the Clash to the anarcho-punk scene. One of the reasons other than the music I liked bands like Wire and the punk incarnation of Adam and the Ants, was that they just didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously. In relationship to all the phrase “artificial authenticity as authentic artifice” provides perhaps a more than superficial answer to your question. The Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren used the term glorious failure to describe what he wanted to achieve – but I aim higher, since I intended to reinvent world culture in its entirety, even if that takes a life-time.
In terms of books, aside from Tainted Love I think The 9 Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones and She’s My Witch might have reached a mainstream audience if I didn’t already have the reputation I have. Audiences have a certain expectation of what a Stewart Home or Michael Moorcock book is going to be like and will impose that on everything you do. Because reading a book takes more time than listening to a music track, it is harder in the fiction world than the music world to turn around perceptions of who you are and what you do. If people think they’re not into what you do they’re not going to give a book they might like a chance, whereas they could easily be exposed to some music that didn’t sound as they expect it to be more or less by chance.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but many of the original first-wave of punk bands are still plugging away on the gig circuit, and while many are doing so to smaller and smaller crowds, some are doing pretty nicely out of it: The Damned, for example, are currently touring the UK’s 2,000 capacity O2 venues before heading Stateside. Would you consider playing your songs live again?
I guess for people who missed those bands first time around there’s an appeal to seeing them now. For me, I don’t want to go and see Slaughter and The Dogs or Menace because I saw them in the 70s. Also the line-ups are mightily changed from back then and the crowds and atmosphere are very different. I’d rather preserve my memories of how it was by not going to see those bands now. As for The Damned, I saw them in 1977 and compared to that I was even a little disappointed by how they were when they reformed after first splitting up in 1978. I saw them as The Doomed and a few times after that back as the Damned, two or three years on from first seeing them and for me they were never as good. Of course, they weren’t bad at all but for me they weren’t as super-phat and groovy as the earlier incarnation of the group.
I actually learned a lot from playing in bands in the 70s and 80s. I can see how a lot of what I’ve done subsequently with spoken word, live art and stand up etc. emerged from how I learned to present myself with punk and reggae bands. But at the same time I’ve no desire to play live again – I’ll probably regret saying that very soon if I find myself just doing it for some reason. But the songs weren’t written for me to sing, I just wanted to play in the band and have someone else sing them. When they got recorded, the musicians around me were saying you have to sing coz you’ve got a profile and they’re your lyrics…. I feel much happier just making music videos for those songs now coz it means I can develop something new with them. I can dig repetition but going back to playing those old songs live just doesn’t appeal to me and hasn’t for a long time, I have been asked to do it!
Pure Mania was your first published novel in 1989, and now commands a pretty hefty price tag on the second-hand market. I suppose as much as it draws on pulp novels, you could call it a punk novel, stylistically as well as in setting. How do you feel your writing has evolved since then?
It’s punk in that it took a reimagining of London 1976/77 punk as its subject and that I had a bricolage approach to writing which is very punk. But at the same time, it’s also a very postmodern novel. Back then I was still learning how that type of novel is constructed, I moved on to anti-narrative after I felt I’d perfected that postmodern simulation of pulp narrative with the follow up books Defiant Pose, Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death. You can also see my prose being honed very quickly, the journalistic approach to sentence construction is clearly smoother in my second novel Defiant Pose. Likewise the narrative/anti-narrative construction becomes slicker but never too slick. I can say that technically my writing improved through practice. But some like rawness best anyway.
I think there was a fairly systematic working through an evolution of material, despite changes in style, up to Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane in 2013 – if you discount Tainted Love which was me wanting to fictionalise my mother’s life since no one believed it in non-fictional form. Then with The 9 Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones I went back to Tainted Love and took that fictionalisation of family history in a different direction with a different relative. She’s My Witch riffed on the type of woman my mother was but took someone from my generation down rather than my mother’s – but with plenty of morphic resonance. So I think there are two trajectories in my novels and they fall into two groups. Art School Orgy goes back to the first set of novels and hews closer to the earlier trajectory – it is the book I might have written after Whips & Furs if I hadn’t wanted to write 2002’s 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (which was a development of what I’d done in 1997’s Come Before Christ & Murder Love).
Art School Orgy feels very much like a lot of your earlier works in stylistic terms, so I’m assuming the issue for prospective publishers was that the subject was a living artist, and their feared litigation. What were the rejection letters / emails like?
I was only trying independent presses so the rejections weren’t as rude as those I got for my earlier books. Mostly it was a “we’d like to publish you so why do you have to make it so difficult” kind of response. One publisher who doesn’t know me as well as the others said he’d like to do the book but to change the names. Obviously that didn’t work for me. But they feared litigation if the book came out using the names I’d chosen. But so far that hasn’t happened.
AA
A fair few of your earlier books have been translated into Finnish and German. How has the reception been in those nations compared to domestically?
They early books created a much bigger stir in Germany, Finland and Russia than here. In Finland and Russia I had a lot of young female readers, so the audience was also very different. When I had a post box I might go and find a pair of unsolicited used knickers from a Russian fan. In Finland I was the biggest selling writer there for a while in the late-1990s, so I’d had TV crews trailing me around and when I told an old drunk Finnish writer at a literary festival that he should shut up as he was talking through my reading, it became front pages news that I’d beaten him up, although that was an exaggeration. I just gave him a fright by leaning into him and screaming in his ear! I also got asked to appear in a nude celebrity feature in the biggest selling newspaper in Finland, which of course I accepted and I got an all expenses covered trip to Helsinki out of it.
In London I can walk around and no one pays any attention to me but it wasn’t like that in Finland in the 1990s. I went in a record shop to buy some Finnish released records you couldn’t get in London including JMKE, the first Soviet punk band, and they said “You’re Stewart Home you don’t need to buy records!” They gave me everything I wanted to buy and a load of other stuff too as they said I ought to have it. I enjoyed going over to Finland for a week or two and experiencing that sort of thing but I think it would be a drag to experience it full time in London. Anyway, it wouldn’t happen to me in Finland now…. Everything has its moment.
You were recently involved in the publication of Chus Martinez’ novella, The Bastardizer Polishes a Turd, which is a crazy and exciting read. Can you explain Chus Martinez, and also how Simon Strong comes into all of this?
Chus Martinez is a multiple identity project – a lot of different people anonymously producing work credited to the same name – following on in the tradition of projects like Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett. It’s been going in a low key way for over a decade. Chus as a diminutive in Spanish can be either gender and the gendered nature of previous multiple name projects was something those involved with this one wanted to overcome. The Luther Blissett project broke through a lot of earlier blockages but it seemed like gendering was something that still needed to be addressed. Chus Martinez started with a lot of retro-graphics and celebration of the sixties Spanish guitar player Chus Martinez. The first two Chus Martinez novels Copy and Issue came out in 2014 and were published by Simon Strong on his Ledatape Organisation imprint. The novels were written by different people and issued at the same time. Since then Simon has closed down Ledatape, so as there was a new Chus Martinez novel that needed putting out and which Simon had already done the typesetting and graphic design for, so I issued it on my Cripplegate Books. The project involves a lot of different people and although I’m involved, I haven’t yet done a book for it.
The fact that you struggled to find a publisher for Art School Orgy clearly slowed your output in terms of what’s been put out in the public domain, but despite that, you’ve maintained a steady output the last ten years, albeit at a lesser pace that in the mid-late 90s. What’s your method for keeping the flow?
I only write when I have something to say and as there’s plenty that needs addressing in this rotten world we live in, the books keep coming. But I’m constantly writing stuff – not just books and not just fiction. I’d like to write less fiction so I can spend more time on non-fiction. I have another novel written in first draft called Femdom Ninja Lockdown, which was hacked out during lockdown to try and record the experience while also utilising a cut-&-paste composition method closer to IFD and Filmark than Burroughs-style literary cut-ups. I like it but I’m in no rush to get it out. I’ll revise it when it seems like the time is right to publish it. I wasn’t planning on writing a novel, it just seemed unavoidable given the madness of the situation we were all in.
I’ve known a few writers sign up to big contracts with lots of money advanced and it chains them to producing books that they end up hating working on. They’re legally bound to produce these great big books with a literary content when they’d probably rather be writing almost anything else. I’m fortunate never to have been in that position, so I can stay alert to the world and do things that groove me. There is also an issue with those who want an identity as a writer, something that is a terrible drag on actually producing anything interesting. Rather than writing a book because they have something to say, there are way too many people writing novels because they want to appear profound and wise but inevitably they end up coming across as the opposite of that.
I assume you’re still keeping the flow now, so what’s in the pipeline?
Some non-fiction, probably starting with a book on yoga that explores how the term is undefined and defuse, what’s practiced in yoga studios bears no relationship to older Indian meditation traditions that are called the same things. The stretch routines that millions practice as yoga draw heavily on primitive Scandinavian gymnastics but they didn’t receive their confusing name until they were mixed with positive thinking and secularised Christianity dressed up as Hinduism in California at the start of the 20th century. I’ll also look at how the spread of this western yoga is intimately connected to the growth of fascism in the first half of the 20th century. So I’ll provide a corrective to the misplaced idea that some people in the overdeveloped world have that what they practice as “yoga” is a non-political tradition that is thousands of years old and originated in India.
Pure Mania will be published on 17th August 2023 with a brand new cover design in both limited edition hardback, which comes signed by the author and accompanied by an original Necrocard, and paperback, as well as eBook for the first time, via Leamington Books. Stewart Home Comes in Your Face will be released by New Reality Records in September.
There are few things quite as gratifying as seeing one of your own quotes as the lead on a press release. And so it is that Hull noise punks Bug Facer, who I declared were my new favourite band on the release of their debut single, ‘Horsefly’ in Nov ember, praising them for their ‘claustrophobic, pulverising heaviness that leaves you aching’, rage hard on their debut EP.
What are they angry about? Everything and anything: modern life in general. Triple Death may only contain three tracks and have a running time of less than fourteen minutes, but they pack in the fury with a critical mass. The first cut, ‘Eggshell’ sets the tone, and, they say, ‘explores the idea of cycles with no end and how on an existential level we try to apply meaning to struggle.’ This isn’t just noisy shit: it’s noisy shit with some deep thought involved, and ‘Eggshells’ is low and slow, with a hesitant bassline and swirling guitar that swishes around in a gush of treble, and instrumentally it lands somewhere between The Fall and ‘Budd’ by Rapeman, and it’s completed with howling vocals that sound like every syllable is being torn from James Cooper’s lungs. It’s harsh and harrowing and truly the sound of pain leaving the body.
Theirs is an usual setup, with the drummer and bassist contributing vocals alongside co-founder Cooper who plays guitar. I say play: he and second guitarist Josh Burdette torture their instruments, channelling their angst through mangled chords at high volume. Sonically, their approach is unusual, too: they’re not big on riffs or distortion or driving percussion, the popular cornerstones of angry music of many genres: the sound on Triple Death is steely, grey, murky, creating the kind of oppressive sensation I feel listening to Unsane and Red Lorry Yellow Lorry. It makes you feel tense, twisted up and knotted inside.
Picking up the pace with ‘Prod’, which, with the addition of some gurgling synths, steps into a Krautrock groove, before the guitars lunge in and things get messy, the deranged, raw-throated vocals and serpentine guitar lines interweaving in a thicket of discord flay the nerves without mercy. ‘We are all the cattle… We are all the cattle, is the refrain’. And we feel it.
It’s a reworked version of ‘Horsefly’ that closes the EP off, and it’s a cleaner sound that marks the primary difference from the original release of this six-and-a-half-minute trudger of a tune that has the kind of earthy weight of Neurosis. The guitars chime dolorous doom as the bass and drums hammer hard, heavy, relentlessly thudding, so low and slow as to drag your heart down towards your knees.
The clue, I suppose, is in the name. This isn’t just death: it’s triple death, and Triple Death is grim, gloomy, the soundtrack to battling against the tide of shit on shit, when a trip to the seaside is a game of dodge the turds and a tub of butter costs seven fucking quid. When they tell you that inflation is a global issue but the fuel providers and supermarket chains record bumper profits and immense payouts to execs and shareholders while nurses are querying at food banks… fuck this shit. Triple Death is the soundtrack to telling the world, ‘fuck this shit’. One more time: fuck this shit.
