Bruce Russell Metallic OK 2CD Set Glass Redux REDUXCD007 September 2017
Bruce Russell is a New Zealand experimental musician and writer. He is a founding member and guitarist of the seminal noise rock trio The Dead C and the free noise combo A Handful Of Dust (with Alastair Galbraith). He has released solo albums featuring guitar and tape manipulation, and has contributed articles to British music magazine The Wire.
In summer of 2013, Bruce Russell's daughter Olive Russell uploaded a documentary of her father that she shot and edited herself called "27 Minutes with Mr. Noisy: A Documentary about Bruce Russell" to Vimeo.com.
"This will be alien music to many listeners. Guitars tuned to the occult settings of revenants like Skip James and then played with a knife in an uncanny re-contextualising of the sound of beer bottles against guitar strings on the original Metallic KO; massively deformed electronics that sound like swarms of static, that sound like the needle eating the vinyl; radio interference; broke down piano; sledgehammer fuzz… this is the sound of taking a live Stooges meltdown as the keys to the goddamn kingdom and as a secret intimation of the arc of the future. Now here it is"
In the early days of Glass Records, around 1981-82, I was greatly influenced by the Cherry Red label, and via a publishing arrangement got to know the people there pretty well. I was generously supported by Iain McNay and Mike Alway with sound advice and encouragement. I really liked Kevin Harrison's "Inscrutably Obvious' LP that he'd made for them and was thrilled when he agreed to let me release some more of his music, which for some reason or other we released on cassette. People did that kind of thing back then, and so all these years later, when I decided to resurrect the Glass label "Spectro Verdu Est Mort?" was an obvious choice to reissue on CD and DL in full technicolour sound, digitally remastered by John A. Rivers, with whom Kevin recorded the 'Fly" EP for me shortly after.
David E Barker - Glass Redux MMXVI
Notes by Kevin Harrison
I was born in George Eliot Hospital, Nuneaton in 1952 to a working class family. I don't care for anything remotely religious except for a few uplifting hymns with good tunes sung at school. My only solace is when I discover late-night Radio Luxembourg and later the offshore pirates. Rock 'n' Roll & Pop Music! Up until then I've made-do with a broken gramophone, spinning 78's by hand and listening to them at various revolutions. Speeding-up then slowing down, backwards or forwards, it seems a big improvement on playing them in the correct way! In '64 my parents buy a Grundig Tape Recorder. Eureka! I start taping the hit-parade off the radio, but I'm soon bored. I find I'd rather record the sound of my own voice plus nuts and bolts dropping into buckets of water whilst modifying the capstan to produce out-of-this-world effects, (more Doctor Who & Gerry Anderson than anything else I guess. Another favourite childhood thing).
65-66. After seeing a few beat groups at school dances (The Sabres & The Peeps) and at a disused church hall in Chilvers Coton, ('Jack the Ripper' is a big favourite), I decide to start a group with school friends, Ron & Steve. I'm going through the 'teenage rebel' phase and don't have much time for teachers, except for one or two. A person who has a big influence on me is my English teacher, Mrs. Timmins who takes the class to see The Liverpool Poets (Henri, Patten, McGough) and later introduces me to the work of Corso, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and the rest of The Beat Poets. The other love I have is Picasso and later on Surrealism. (Max Ernst, Man Ray & Jean Cocteau).
With the music, I've been through the Bert Weedon/Hank Marvin phase some years earlier first with Mr. Gotobed then Ray, a good guitarist/teacher who plays down the local pub'The Golden Eagle' in Keresley. Things are changing. I'm absorbing a lot of the current pop, soul, rock and folk music. I'm now more interested in The Beatles, The Rolling Stones,
Kinks, Small Faces, The Animals, The Who and particularly Jeff Beck for his amazing eastern-tinged solos for The Yardbirds. I vividly remember trashing my only guitar at the local youth club. A £35 Hofner like Beck smashes into smithereens in Antonioni's film 'Blow-Up'.
I like to go out dancing, favourites are: Motown, Atlantic & Stax. I guess I'm a young mod and all that entails. Then the musical climate alters dramatically. 10/11/67. I see Jimi Hendrix, my absolute idol, The Move, Amen Corner, The Nice, and Pink Floyd (with a disintegrating, dissociated Syd Barrett), all play the same bill at Coventry Theatre.
68-72 - I'm at the local Art School, fall in love with Pop-Art, Dadaism, Girls, Cigarettes and Alcohol. I get into trouble with girls' parents, play my battered acoustic guitar and go to see and hear lots of good bands at 'Mothers', in Erdington. Psychedelic/underground music is now de rigueur and a passion, so, bored with the snobby and strait jacketed conventions of further education I decide instead to rent an Art Studio in Stockingford with my friends Geoff and Aidan. Geoff & I play a bit of acid-folk & record a demo at Fresh Maggots Mick Burgoyne's Home studio (Incredible String Band, Third Ear Band, Tyrannosaurus Rex are an inspiration), I then join 'Whistler', and play some progressive jazz-rock with tricky time signatures (Mothers of Invention, Caravan, Softs), I'm starting to experiment with an ambivalent gender thing, this behaviour often leads to me getting beaten-up regularly at gigs and in the mining village where I live, for the androgyny and non-conformity not the bleedin'
jazz-rock! Roddy Byers (aka Radiation) lives down the road from me and later on suffers a similar fate with the bully boys. On one occasion the same now-mended Hofner guitar gets thrown into the Swanswell, I get badly beaten up and robbed by drunken thugs. Interviewed by the boys in blue they say I deserve everything I got for looking like a f*****g c**t! - Bloody charming. I'm now getting very strong signals about the intolerance and hypocrisy in this society. Around this time I start experimenting with acid. This has an incalculable affect!
Albums I like at this time: Blonde on Blonde, Revolver, Pet Sounds, Younger than Yesterday, The Doors, Da Capo, Are You Experienced, Axis Bold As Love, Electric Ladyland, Sunshine Superman, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Velvet Underground And Nico, ElectricMusic for the Mind and Body, Mr. Fantasy, Freak Out, Lumpy Gravy, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, Spirit, Marble Index, Gris-Gris, A Love Supreme, United States of America, Third, The Madcap Laughs, Music in a Dolls House, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Astral Weeks, Trout Mask Replica and Joy Of A Toy. I also get very excited when I hear 'In C' and 'A Rainbow in Curved Air' by Terry Riley in a record booth in Berwick Street, and later, Steve Reich's experiments with tape going in and out of phase, 'Come Out' & 'It's Gonna Rain'. After forty-days and forty-nights I move to London (Holland Park then Camberwell) with Lynda, in search of fame and fortune, ha! I finally get work in Baker Street and we make good friends with Ken Burns, an Australian who, like myself is interested in William Burroughs' writings and when his visa expires decides to move to Tangiers.
We see lots of live music at the Roundhouse and other venues, the highlight for me is probably the MC5! Funny, somehow Hawkwind always seem to be playing support at these gigs. Somewhere along the way we also get to see Bowie taking Ziggy out for his first test drive at The Imperial College. After only a year or so, psychedelics, a strange chance meeting, and a personal tragedy affect me in a big way. Suffice to say, I'm soon back in Keresley a bit the worst for wear.
Boxing Day '72 I get married. Oh happy day! I'm listening to T.Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music, The Stooges, Velvets, Lou Reed, Steve Reich, and lots of German Musik: Stockhausen, Amon Duul II, Can, Faust, Kraftwerk, Neu! Cluster, Harmonia. I'm beginning to see the light and I'm getting interested in different ways of making music.
73-'76. I must get a job. Money is short and I end up working at Jaguar Cars with a nice bunch of chaps who, without much resistance from me, lead me astray. There's much serious drinking to be done! I do some demos with alto sax and flute player, Mick Gawthorp, another good friend of mine, with his Akai reel-to-reel recorder. (It sounds a bit like Faust). Simon Draper of Virgin seems to be interested, then not. Eventually the job I'm doing is put under the umbrella of JRT and after two years of working there, I take voluntary redundancy and spend some of the money pursuing my ambition of becoming a professional recording artist.
Anyway back to the music - I buy a '75 Fender Strat, EMS Synthi AKS, Hohner Melodica and a Revox A77, I now have some equipment and start in earnest to try to write and record some music. I become good friends with nascent outfit This Heat in London. I'd met Charles Bullen previously in Nuneaton and at The Farm in Burton Hastings, we rehearse under the name Zoastra a couple of times at The Nags Head with Westy and two drummers, hmm. I wish I had recordings! We swap tapes/phone calls and listen to interesting challenging musics (e.g. Can, Beefheart, Philip Glass, Magma, The Residents, Devo, Eno, Miles, Sun-Ra, Harry Partch etc.) and on one occasion in '76, I get asked if I would record an early gig in a London pub, so I travel down to London, with my Revox, Lynda and John Westacott. When I remove the headphones the sound they make blows me away. Fantastic! One of the tracks I record ends up on their debut album, (released in '79 - the blue and yellow one). Charles Bullen and Charles Hayward visit Lynda and myself in Bedworth and some casual recording is done. At Gareth William's invitation, I also spend a few days in Camberwell playing & recording with the trio.
Easter Sunday and our lovely daughter Rebecca is born eight weeks premature,Charles Bullen & Mary are visiting, we spend time in the sun and take photos at the Blue Lagoon in Bermuda Village. (The weather is hot and sunny for this time of the year). Next time they visit, Rebecca is finally allowed to come home from the hospital after spending six or seven weeks in an incubator. Life is sweet again!
'77-'81. Everybody I know celebrates the arrival of 'punk'. The Sex Pistols & The Clash play Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic. I meet Joe Strummer, friendly, positive, and Johnny Rotten,snotty, negative. Perfect! The gig is a great inspiration. We meet twenty or so other punk revellers requiring medical attention in Casualty at Cov. & Warwick Hospital including good mate from Keresley, Roddy Radiation who sometimes pops round to our gaff and records a few demos. Favourite UK bands during this time include The Pop Group, This Heat, Subway Sect, The Fall, Gang of Four, Wire, PiL and Magazine. American 'new wave' artistsI like are Patti Smith, Television, Suicide, The New York Dolls, The Modern Lovers, TheCramps and Père Ubu. Later on I'm also spinning Dr. Alimantado 'Best Dressed Chicken', Tapper Zukie 'MPLA', Augustus Pablo 'King Tubby meets Rockers Uptown', Dillinger 'Cokane in my Brain' and Lee Perry 'Double Seven' and anything else I can find that is produced by 'Scratch'. Completely stoned 'bonkers' genius!
I join 'Transposed Men'. The name comes from a sixties book cover I have glued to the front of an old drum machine. Neol and Brad are already friends of mine and the line-up shows great promise - Neol Davies - Guitar and Vocals, John Bradbury - Drums, Desmond Brown - Hammond Organ, Steve Wynne (aka Vaughan Tive) - Bass, and myself on Guitar & Vocals. I have already recorded a few demos of Neol's songs at Brad's cellar in Warwick at a prior date. Anyway the main bulk of the songs we are playing will become staples in The Selecter's set and many will feature on their first album. Virgin Records are interested but nothing happens. Anyway I digress, when Brad leaves to join The Specials everything falls apart. After a while Neol and Desmond team-up with some of the ex-members of Hardtop 22,Pauline Black joins them on vocals, and The Selecter is born, Steve Wynne eventually joins The Swinging Cats and sometime after that Dexy's Midnight Runners.
'79-'81, I get invited to do a support spot at a birthday party at the 'Rockhouse' in Coventry, The Urge are playing, later they ask me to record a rehearsal session. After a few weeks I join them, I play guitar, electric piano and EMS synth and start to introduce some of my songs to the group. We decide to dispense with the definitive and we are now just called urge. We release our first single 'Revolving Boy' financed partly by student entertainment manager Duff (recorded at 'Spaceward Studios' in Cambridge) on our own label 'Consumer Disks'. When John Peel first plays it we are sitting in a car, needless to say it makes us feel ten feet tall when he describes it as "more Coventry genius!" When Fos joins us as our manager he also doubles as road-manager when we embark on a brief tour of Holland and Germany. After we get back Pinnacle agree to distribute the single for us.
David and I have good chemistry. It turns out to be a good song writing team, and we remain good friends in the future. The first single 'Revolving Boy' takes it's title from a pulp sci-fi paperback, about a pre-pubescent boy named Derv spinning around in zero gravity searchingfor love. It's married to an updated Stax groove and underpinned by an hypnotic dub bassline,music fans! Although things are grim with Thatcher gaining power in the general election, this only seems to feed the desire of Coventry musicians to make a stand and take a strong political stance. Overall, there is a positive, more optimistic scene starting to grow. This is a good period for music in Coventry, there's lots of bands that play different styles of music, who all know (of) each other. There's friendly rivalry for sure, but a sense of unity seemsto be the most prevailing attitude. Importantly The Specials success seems to galvanise the scene. Martin Bowes (Attrition) essential 'Alternative Sounds' is the 'zine with all the dope about what's happenin' locally.
During this period I release a cassette 'On Earth 2' on the 'Ambivalent Scale' label. This Nuneaton collective comprises Eyeless and Bron Area among others. I feel an immediate affinity with them and record some tracks for Side 1 of Bron Area's 'One Year' cassette. (EIG's Martyn Bates later matures into a prolific songwriter and an inspired, idiosyncratic and brilliant vocalist). We try to organise dates where Bron / Eyeless play with urge or myself whenever it's possible.
I start performing local live gigs with my Stratocaster and a tape-delay system, (this consists of 2 tape recorders, both in record mode, the tape spools from the left (tape deck #1) through two sets of recording heads and is taken up on the right (tapedeck #2) the delay is the space between the tape heads, you can then improvise over the top of what you've already played, this is cool as it automatically records the performance. I find out about this system from Brian Eno's 'Discreet Music' album on his Obscure label.
After good press reviews and word-of-mouth for On Earth 2, Mike Alway from Cherry Red asks me if they can release it on their label as an LP. I agree. After a few overdubs, and a sprinkle of 'ear candy' at WSRS in Leamington by the talented and charming John A. Rivers, it becomes Inscrutably Obvious. The cover for this and the subsequent Fly EP are designed by my good friend Mark Osborne, who I later work with quite extensively. Also a compilation LP is released by Cherry Red - 'Perspectives & Distortion' features a track from Inscrutably Obvious. I also produce demos for Coventry bands, Idol Eyes, Human Cabbages and spend a bleak but hilarious time with The Mix in London and at Chris Squire's home studio in Virginia Waters. I would later describe this as very Withnail And I! April '81 urge split up due to insurmountable difficulties with Arista and some acrimonious internal wrangles. This is a very difficult time. A new urge line-up is quickly put together, incl. Lynda, Dave Gedney, Rick Medlock, Dennis Burns and myself. But times have shifted and the elusive chemistry has gone. Chic & funky, we play plenty of gigs, but by this time we've had too much shit kicked out of us, and despite record company interest, we reluctantly decide to call it a day.
Next is a cassette for Glass Records - Spectro Verdu est Mort? This is followed by the more commercial 12" EP - Fly. This features, myself, Lynda on backing vocal, Horace of The Specials on Bass, and Rick Medlock on Drums. It gets good reviews in the music press, (NME like 'Views of the Rhine), and it's played plenty on local radio, but that's about it. Unknown to meat the time was that the Fly EP was a big hit on the Italo Cosmic Disco Scene, with DJ's Danielle Baldelli & Beppe Loda being the main champions.'The Wonderful World of Glass' compilation features tracks by Martyn, Pete, Steve and myself. There is a solo album scheduled, variously listed as Neuro-Atomic or Fraudulent Confessions/True Obsessions. but it never materialises.
"Inscrutably Obvious was the first batch of compiled recordings made at DNA Studio (my home studio) from 1975-1980. Spectro Verdu Est Mort ? was a continuation. Recorded on B&O and Revox 2-track tape recorders it utilises the basic technique of bouncing tracks to achieve sound-on-sound recordings. Instruments: EMS Synthi AKS, Teisco Electric Piano, Philips Philicorda, stand-up acoustic piano, Fender Stratocaster, Hohner Alto Melodica, Denon CRB-90 "Rhythm Box", Boss Dr Rhythm DR-55, MXR-85, MXR Flanger, Watkins Copicat and Carlsboro Echo units, TV/Radio, a cheap bass guitar, bass drum, cymbal and assorted percussion, sound effect records, tape loops, tape echo and a tape-delay system."
Sleeve Notes for 'Glass Hymnbook 1980-82' by Religious Overdose Released August 25th 2017
Glass Records began in 1981, basically to release a single by my band 'Glass', for posterity, seeing as how we'd broken up. Ciaran Harte, who had been the songwriter/singer/guitarist for 'Glass' recorded some solo tracks, on his recently acquired TEAC 4 Track, 2 of which 'Love Is Strange' c/w 'Shimahero' were the second release on the label at which point the idea of a record label became a serious notion.
Religious Overdose, from Northampton, were the first band to send me a tape. It was strange and I liked it. The full sequence of events are lost in the mists of time but basically I asked them if they wanted to make a record, they said yes and, after a trip up to Northampton to meet them and see them play a gig, I got them down to Ciaran's flat in Poplar, East London to record it. They didn't have a drummer at the time thus saving his neighbours a bit of grief. For some reason or other we all liked the earlier two track recording of '25 Minutes' better than the one Ciaran recorded and used that for one side of the single, with his recording of 'Control Addicts'as the other. It sold it's first run of 1000 pretty fast, thanks to John Peel and the relentless flyer/fanzine attack of lead vocalist Alex Novak. 500 more were pressed and the colour on the label of the second pressing was changed to green from orange and the sleeve to black & white from green & black. We had no real distribution, just word of mouth, selling directly to shops like Small Wonder, Rough Trade, Red Rhino up in York. You could do that back then. People were interested. I remember Geoff Travis himself ringing me from Rough Tradeto order 100 more each of the RO & Ciaran Harte releases. It felt like we were part of something. The second single 'I Said Go’ c/w ‘Alien To You' was recorded at in a studio in Rushden, called 'Rocksnake', with added drummer Pete Brownjohn. Plus back at Ciaran’s they cut ‘Blow The Back Off It’ for ‘The Wonderful World Of Glass Volume 1’ compilation LP. The third single, a 12'" double A featuring two long tracks, ‘In This Century’ and ‘The Girl With The Disappearing Head’, was recorded in a studio in Denmark Street, London (the famed Tin Pan Alley) with myself and Ciaran Harte producing. I fancied myself as a producer back then, and ended up as a kind of executive one I suppose. So there you have it really: 3 singles, a compilation track, and a solo cassette album by Richard Formby - ‘Outside The Angular Colony’ (GLASS 006) in less time than it’s taken putting this CD into production.
David Barker,Glass Records Redux May 2017
Sunday, 4 June 2017
DB Interview with Iain McNay from 2009 about the History of the label
Nothing But Happiness • Retour • Glass Redux REDUXCD011 • June 30 2017
"A mainstream rock record from 1991 that was never released", and by today's standards sounds positively avant-garde.
I posted this previously and repeat it here to re-set the scene:
In 1984 I released a compilation LP on the original Glass Records label, called ‘Shadow & Substance (The Wonderful World Of Glass Vol. 2)’, intended to show the label as part of, or at least allied with, the UK/US International Pop Underworld of the day. Alongside tracks by Half Japanese, Cheri Knight & Bruce Pavitt (of Sub Pop, which at that time was a cassette fanzine type thing), sat ‘Nothing But Happiness’ & ‘King Of Culture’, two connected ‘groups’ that I heard, and indeed met in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, through Pam Weiner of Green Records, from Tampa Bay FLA. I used to write to labels or bands I had seen reviewed in Option Magazine back in those days, exchanging discs or tapes with them, which is how I connected with Bruce, Calvin Johnson, Jad Fair and Pam. Cut to: 30+ years later, Glass Records is ressurrected as Glass Redux, to give me something to do in my old age, and I spot David Bowman on Facebook. Next thing you know he’s telling me about the unfinished 2nd NBH LP from 1991, goes off to Seattle to finish it, sends it to me, I love it, and here we are, closing the circle and maybe drawing a new one up.
David Barker, Glass Records Redux
Now the 2nd NBH Album, 'Retour' is set for June 30th 2017 release on Glass Redux on CD and DL.
'All of this comes as a total surprise’
PROFESSOR JON DALE ASKS DAVID BOWMAN SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT NOTHING BUT HAPPINESS, DAVID MAREADY and ‘RETOUR’
Nothing But Happiness released their first single in 1985 – “Narcotics Day”. But what had you been doing before then, both music-wise, and otherwise?
Well, I was born in 1960, which was a great time to be born. I was old enough to watch the ‘60s going on around me and my parents were liberal college professors and so I got the Beatles and Stones and King Crimson records when they came out (as long as I was careful with my allowance money.) Before I got a guitar or a tape recorder, I had to content myself with making album jackets, complete with track lists and timings and labels. Once I got some cheap instruments and a cassette recorder, I started recording the albums to go with the sleeves. I must have recorded a hundred of those, down in the basement of our house in Atlanta. This is when I was 10 and 11 years old. Unfortunately, there are no Nothing But Happiness ‘basement tapes’ from 1970/71, because I only had one cassette that I used over and over, so each time I made a new album, I erased the previous one.
A big thing for me was during the Beatles breakup was when the ‘McCartney’ album came out. I’d read the Hunter Davies Beatles book so I’d sort gotten a handle on wild ideas like overdubbing and multitrack recording. But when I read that McCartney had played all the instruments on the album, had built it from the drums on up by himself – that was a major discovery. How was that possible? I got hold of another handheld cassette player and started experimenting, recording guitar on one machine and playing a ‘solo’ along with the other player recording the results. And I made a point of seeking out more one-person recordings: Stevie Wonder, Shuggie Otis, Peter Hammill, ‘Tubular Bells’, Kate Bush … Anyhow, that was the big ‘eureka’ moment for the future Nothing But Happiness idea.
Another great thing about being born in 1960 was that I was 17, 18 when punk hit Florida (where I was in college.) I’d been playing bass guitar in the school jazz band while majoring in (classical) composition. One day in music theory class, I saw a guy who looked just like Richard Lloyd from Television. He was wearing an ‘Andy Warhol’s Bad’ t-shirt and carrying a copy of ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy). This was Sid Dansby. He had a beautiful Rickenbacker guitar too.
When I answered a notice for a bass player for a ‘new wave’ group, I brought Sid and my sister Rachel along, and a guy who looked exactly like Tom Verlaine answered the door! That was Bill Carey. Anyway, that turned into The Stick Figures, and that was my first experience of a band, and it was extraordinary in every way. I didn’t waste a lot of time playing in cover bands and going-nowhere groups. These guys were great. I’m sure that, at our best, we were as wonderful as anything coming out of New York, or – since at this point were at 1980 – on the records we heard from Rough Trade, Factory, Postcard, Cherry Red. We recorded a bunch of songs and four of them ended up on a 7-inch single. Our manager Pam Weiner, who co-hosted the local community radio ‘new wave’ show with John Dubrule, sent them out to every address from every record they had played on their show. And David Barker of Glass Records replied and said he wanted to make an LP of The Stick Figures!
Things being the way they were back then, we figured we had to move to New York to make that album. We should have stayed in Tampa. Had it been the 80s or 90s, we WOULD have stayed in Tampa. But back then, it seemed like you had to be in either New York or London. On the way up north, we played our biggest (and last) show, opening for The Fall in Atlanta, on their ‘Hex Enduction Hour’ tour. Anyhow, we couldn’t cope with the big city and I was the first to go running back to Tampa. We only recorded three songs for that album and it never came out. However, Pam stayed in touch with Glass, and a couple of songs DID come out on Mr. Barker’s fledgling label: a song from Bill and Rachel’s New York band ‘King of Culture and the very first track credited to Nothing But Happiness, which was myself and a friend Jackie Alexander on guitar.
“Narcotics Day” was the second single on Justine. That label released a small but perfect body of music – singles from Nothing But Happiness, Crash, The Woods, and Ultra Vivid Scene. How did you connect with figures like Mark Dumais, Bill Carey and Kurt Ralske, and what was it about that ‘scene’ that made it so distinct from other scenes in New York?
Well, for one thing we didn’t do heroin. We like the IDEA of it, but we were too straight for that. We were a little late for the ‘no-wave’ scene, and what was left of that – Sonic Youth, Swans, Live Skull – seemed phony and dull. Mark was a friend of everybody’s and I owe it entirely to him that I finally got out of Tampa and stayed in New York. When I moved to the city for the third time in 1984, he took me under his wing, took me to parties, got me an apartment and a job. He also gave me the keys to his apartment where he had the first 4-track Portastudio cassette recorder I’d ever seen. In exchange for playing bass in his new band Crash, helping him put into practice (in a practical manner) his idea for a band that’d somehow combine The Associates with The Mary Chain, he encouraged me to write and record songs in his apartment. And that’s how ‘Narcotics Day’ and the songs that ended up on the first Nothing But Happiness album came about.
One day Mark walked in while I was recording and said Dave, look at this record! It was the ‘Better for Domeheads’ Creation compilation LP. He said ‘If these guys can have their own label and put out bands, so can I!’ And that’s how Justine Records came about. So of course he wanted to put out his own Crash single, and he wanted to put out my track ‘Narcotics Day’.
In the meantime, I’d advised him to get my erstwhile Florida friend Bill Carey into Crash on guitar, and Bill brought along Kurt Ralske, who was a Long Island wunderkind, probably 16 years old, who’d played free jazz until he’d been brought into the last version of King of Culture. Not only did that solidify the Crash sound, it was crucial to get Bill involved, as he’d built a professional 8-track studio in his apartment, and that’s where all of the Nothing But Happiness (and Justine) stuff was recorded. I played all the instruments and sang on the single – on the album I had Kurt play bass and provide noisy guitar when I needed it, as I wasn’t yet a competent ‘lead’ guitarist.
Mark released the first two Justine singles himself and, once again, a mysterious benefactor from the UK heard them somehow. David Whitehead was a higher-up at Rough Trade distribution who wanted to start a label. He liked Mark and he liked the records. So the first two (and only) releases on his Remorse Label were albums by Crash and Nothing But Happiness. The Ultra Vivid Scene and Woods singles were put out by Mark on Justine a little, but not too long, after those albums came out. Crash moved to London to promote the album; my personal history repeated itself as it had done with the Stick Figures – I couldn’t commit to staying in London and just scraping by, so I was replaced by Adam Wright in Crash. And Nothing But Happiness, although we played live two or three things, was never going to be a live band.
Both “Narcotics Day” and Retour feature quotes on their covers – from Zora Neal Hurston, Jean Rhys, Greil Marcus, Nawal El Sa’adawi… This places the records / songs within quite a particular ‘intellectual’ framework. Can you explain this in more detail?
I always had an inferiority complex about being a college dropout. Greil Marcus? Really? No comment.
Tell me about the recording of “Narcotics Day” and Detour. Like the records by Crash and Ultra Vivid Scene, it seems very much like the manifestation of one person’s very distinctive vision.
Well, as far as Kurt and Ultra Vivid Scene goes, he did exactly what I did: he wrote pop songs and recorded them by playing all the instruments himself. The working method ensures that the result seems like ‘one person’s very distinctive vision.’ Of course, he had the support of a record company, both during the recording process and for promotion. Like myself – and like Mark – all three of us, I’d say, we were obsessed with making albums: the record was ‘The Point’. Playing live was a problem for Kurt and eventually led to 4AD dropping him.
The whole premise of the music industry back then was being a live band that also made records. I would never have succeeded in the field. Thinking back it seems crazy that I even considered it. I’m afraid of flying! And who wants to tour year-round as a support band to The Breeders or Nirvana? And play a side-tent someplace like Glastonbury?
Nevertheless, when I finally abandoned ‘Retour’, at the ripe old age of 31, I still hoped to make a ‘career’ of music. The final straw was an audition I did as guitarist for a new band. A guy who’d had success with an ‘indie’ band. He’d broken up that band and signed with a major and my friend Byron was drumming with them. I wrangled an introduction to this ‘cult’ star, had a promising chat with him. He wanted Jason Pierce to produce his new band’s debut, but the record company wasn’t keen. We discussed our mutual admiration for Mr. Spaceman’s recordings and he agreed to let me ‘sit in’ on a rehearsal. Unfortunately, on audition day, he’d had a wisdom tooth pulled and was in a bad mood. And the bass player didn’t show up. I played and it sounded great to me, but it quickly became obvious it wasn’t happening. I realized as soon as I played a few ‘hot licks’ that I’d made a mistake. Also the guy was about a foot shorter than me. He never called me back, thank God.
Back to Ultra Vivid Scene: Kurt made three good albums that were released and found an audience, so now they are a part of ‘rock history’. I made one good record in the same period and it’s only coming out in 2017. So it’s a sort of historical conundrum. A variation of Bishop Berkeley’s ‘to be is to be seen’ (or heard). Or if you’d prefer, that Helen Keller metaphor about a tree falling in a forest, although I can never remember how that one goes. All I know is that I didn’t have a copy of the first Nothing But Happiness record for years and years until I got one off Ebay recently, where they are cheap and plentiful – the copies are helpfully annotated ‘Kurt Ralske! Pre-Ultra Vivid Scene!’
…and what would that vision be, if you had to put it in words?
Well I don’t really think I have a ‘vision’, which seems like an odd word for music in any case … there are certain chord changes, riffs and ‘feels’ that I love, that I’ve heard on records over the decades. I simply wanted to make a record that had all those things I liked and none of the stuff I could do without. And that’s what I did.
You were also a member of Crash, with Mark Dumais. Mark seemed to be quite an inspiring figure – certainly, from other conversations I’ve had about him, he had a strong impact on everyone he met, musically and otherwise. What are your fondest memories of playing in Crash, and making music with Mark?
Probably in rehearsal doing over-the-top covers of ‘Metal Guru’ and ‘Cinnamon Girl’. And recording the ‘Don’t Look Now/International Velvet’ single. Besides playing bass, I talked Mark into letting me add some piano and mellotron strings and that experience was exciting and crucial for the ideas that went into ‘Detour’. It gave me confidence that I could do the kind of studio overdubbing I had been planning.
As for Mark, he was a wonderful guy and he certainly informed and/or confirmed my musical taste. He was also difficult at times, and unhappy … like all of us. An odd paradox about Mark was that he wanted to be a big star but he was really shy and not particularly comfortable on stage. If he hadn’t died I still don’t know if he would have ‘made it’. Another thing he and I had in common was that we were both easily swayed by current fashions in music. So when he came to do the ‘Tangerine’ album for Creation with Pete Justons of Sudden Sway, he’d gone back to doing dance music, hoping to ride the wave of acid house, Manchester, Shoom, rave.
Most of my memories of Mark are non-musical – just hanging out, going with him and some friends to Atlantic City to play the slot machines. All the different places he lived in London: Camberwell, Barking … making tea, watching bad movies … going to see the shows Jeff Barrett put on in Camden, the club Bobby Gillespie had in Tottenham Court Road, the Creation records ‘Doing it For The Kids’ thingy at the Town and Country Club when My Bloody Valentine unveiled their ‘new sound’. Later on, as his health worsened, he admitted that AIDS was a problem – he’d been in a kind of denial before – and he got some nice government housing, first across from Euston Station and then just north of Oxford Street near Centrepoint, and we’d all hang out and listen to records. For some reason the memory that is always clearest of Mark is the night the Great Hurricane hit London in 1987 – we’d been planning on seeing the Sugarcubes but the weather was bad so we stayed at Dave Whitehead’s house in Crystal Palace. When we woke up the next morning, the streets were full of trees and debris and we couldn’t get back into London.
Crash dissolved in 1987/1988, I believe, and Retour was recorded in New York in 1991. What were you doing in the meantime?
I didn’t have the money to keep making records but I ended up being asked to play ‘lead guitar’ in a couple of bands. I played in an early version of Hamish Kilgour and Lisa Siegel’s band ‘The Mad Scene’. And then I did a lot of live playing and recording with my friends Tim and Lori Prudhomme in a group called ‘Bobbo’ that eventually (after my time) became ‘Fuck’ and released a few albums on Matador. This period turned out to be really important: I’d played guitar for years but was put on the spot and asked to deliver wild, bluesy, distorted proto-grunge solos. I was a much more versatile guitarist by the time I made ‘Retour’.
The title of Retour clearly delineates some kind of conceptual relation with its predecessor. Can you discuss this?
To be honest, it was the first thing that popped into my head. It was so obvious. Later, I realized that ‘retour’ isn’t an English word at all … I’ve been reading and thinking in French for so many years that it hadn’t occurred to me. Some of the definitions of the words are interesting in the context of the record, none of them had occurred me before:
A ‘retour’ from exile, a journey etc
‘en retour’ : to be past one’s prime
A beauty or a Don Juan ‘sur le retour’ = an ageing beauty or Don Juan
The backfire of an automobile engine
Back to square one or the drawing board
A flashback
Return after a long period of time to a former occupation
To ‘go back’ over one’s life
‘Change of life’ aka menopause!
You returned to Retour in 2016, after 25 years (and, also notably, 30 years after Detour). How did it feel to find your way back to these songs? Have the songs changed for you, through the intervening years, or are they the same beasts – do they place you back in their time, or do they move forward into our time?
In Spring of 2016, I heard that you and Mike Schulman were planning to release the Justine singles on Slumberland. I hadn’t thought about the stuff in a long time. And it took me awhile to dig up all the songs --- three of them were missing altogether and I have Bill Carey, an impeccable archivist, to thank for rescuing them. Once I had everything together, the running order of the record was obvious: it would begin with the finished stuff and end with the unfinished stuff. It tells a story that way.
As for whether they ‘place me back in their time’ or ‘move forward into our time’ – I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, but there is a spooky quality to the feel of the songs and especially the lyrics. The songs document a fairly traumatic but exciting year in my life: I’d turned 31, I was suddenly unemployed, I’d left a steady relationship with somebody for a series of young crushes. You can actually hear that as the album plays, the singer goes from an extrovert and rather silly person to locking all the doors and rolling around on the floor of his apartment. But actually my 30s turned out very well – I wrote a couple of unpublished novels, got into a very close relationship that is still going on today, got a ‘real job’ at The New York Times, which made my father proud before he died.
My 40s on the other hand – (laughs.) My lost decade and a half, from 2000 to 2015 … it’s all there on ‘Retour’! ‘Pre-cog! Pre-cog!’ as Mark E. Smith would say. So that’s a little bit unnerving. But interesting!
Liner Notes for the CD Reissue of The Trees And The Villages by Bron Area
Martin Packwood
"So Glass Records Redux – re-issue Bron Area album, with bonus tracks!
Dave Glass, the Barker of Chadwell Heath “still sounds as fresh as it ever did boys” - many thanks
Liner Notes – okay – here goes...
Mid-afternoon, talking to Dave on the telephone, standing naked in the hall, 17 years old, my girlfriend, also naked, coming round the corner asking me to come back to bed
Ice cold flat, above a garage where I'd moved in with my mum after she left my dad
Flat roof, big sky, long views, over the town, Nuneaton – between Coventry and Birmingham where locals worked in factory jobs they were proud to have
Here's my idea for the Album's title, 'The Treason of Images' - a picture of a pipe by Rene Magritte, with written underneath it in french 'this is not a pipe' – of course not, it's a picture of a pipe, a representation of the real
Bron Area - 'the trees and the villages' - Dave misheard what I'd said, but it fitted right in, so we went along with it
Went along always with the music, our way in and out, our way to move on
Listening always – the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Elton John, The Carpenters, David Bowie
Friday night discos, under-age drinking, girls, Chic – I want your love
Then when the Sex Pistols changed everything, our corner in the pub became the punk-rock play-box – where we routinely took the light-bulb out above us on arrival
Anarchy on EMI, taking 'God Save the Queen' to school, an emblem of revolt in jubilee year, though we went to the street party anyway...
Eddie and the Hot Rods 'do anything you wanna do' - “I know I must be someone, now i'm gonna find out who”
The Special aka. Gangsters - standing outside the Coton conservative club gig listening in
I traded in my little tape machine and bought a red hofner bass guitar for £28 from Junk City, on the Foleshill Road on the way in to Coventry
Plugged the lead in to my record player and played along with records, just like thousands of other kids up and down the country, learning to play
Playing in a band - having to leave a chemistry class once to do a lunchtime gig at
the local technical college, was okay though 'cos we'd bumped in to it's teacher
at the Iggy Pop gig the week before
The Nuneaton scene focused on a pub, with a hall in the back, the Nags Head
There, strangely, we gathered around us something of a following, could it be that we were influential?
Not that we gave a shit - we were really only doing it for ourselves
Like friends on the scene, martyn and pete, eyeless in gaza, capturing memories, making it real-time, danger of infection / kodak ghosts run amok / photographs as memories
Plowing the same earth, capturing moments, the mute talking, secret places, found, a story...
They may have been better than us, but we were first!
Fanzines, Alternative Sounds / 0533, networks (pre-internet of course) connections made, friends found, collaborations, aspirations pursued, strangely realised, stepping out, on to a wider canvas
The General Wolfe, the Specials, Woodbine Street recording studios in Leamington Spa, our first sessions, straight after Ghost Town had been recorded there - a sure fire hit in the bag, as we were told...
The band Urge, (thank you Kevin), who supported the Specials had a friend, french, Alain Royer, who joined us for a while on guitar (Steve always was a francofile), he had a 2 CV with deck-chairs for seats!
Welcomed us to a wider buzz, brought 'the european' in to our perspective / sights
Led us to Jean-Pierre Turmel at Sordide-Sentimental Records, just after he released singles by Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division
Visiting his flat in Rouen, a wall of pornographic magazines on shelves, floor to ceiling! The original oil-painting / artwork for 'Atmosphere' above his front-door
We stayed in a flat owned by Alain's uncle in Paris, still only 17. Slept on the floor, taking turns to sleep on the couch. Listening over and over to 'Histoire de Melodie Nelson' by Serge Gainsbourg – those bass lines, so cool
every moment
We had no money, no food, took some pictures (see elsewhere), what we looked like, who we were when we made this music
Hard to recognise ourselves now – thin, hungry, angry even if we didn't realise it then
With 30 years between us now, how shy we were then, and how overcoming of ourselves in wanting to make a sound, leave a trail, to rail against the grating late 70's
How did we get so pastoral?
Though the ethereal Nick Drake grew up not far away from Nuneaton.
Revisiting those landscapes, I can't help being reminded of pictures by a local painter called George Shaw, who was apparently growing up in Tile Hill in Coventry at the same time as us - he failed to win the Turner Prize in 2011- but don't hold that against him
His brilliant images evoke the times and spirit of the place, and moment when this record, this collection of songs was born, you should maybe look at them when you listen. Now the boys and girls are not alone..."
Steven Parker
As a teenager I used to go to a town called Roanne in France, which was twinned with my home town of Nuneaton. Roanne was near to a place called Bron and that was where the name Bron Area came from. I played classical piano and had been in a punk band and at the same time Martin played the organ at the local Working Men's Club. It was about 1977 - 78. We had known each other since the late 1960s as we lived in the same street and our friendship developed when we both got into punk.
When Bron Area started we thought about just having two little plastic organs and no other instruments. But then I bought an electric piano and Martin bought a bass guitar so we became a group. To start with we didn’t want any other members and played a few gigs on our own. The tunes were quite melodic - perhaps my classical training and an earlier Elton John influence - although I was more into New York New Wave by then! This was after a visit to the Harry Cover shop in Paris where Ze records started who signed a lot of the New York Bands in the late 1970s.
Martyn Bates wanted to join us but it didn’t work out and he formed Eyeless in Gaza with Pete Becker who we knew from the local punk scene. Pete was more of a music engineer type and helped us to put on gigs. Not long after that a French guitarist called Alain Royer joined us. When Alain moved to Paris, Martyn Bates paid for us to release a single from the money Eyeless got back from their single Kodak Ghosts Run Amok. We had also released a cassette tape before that called One Year. After Alain left the group we signed to Glass Records and released a single and an album. The single was also released by Posh Boy Records in California. Martin and I split up in 1982 but got together to record some more songs in 1995.
What are the best memories? The camaraderie, making music while it rained outside, meeting new people, recording in Kevin Harrison’s house, assembling records in a van in Notting Hill to sell to Rough Trade. Being in Bron Area provided experiences that we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t made music. .
