Lisa Crystal Carver – Drugs Are Nice: A Post Punk Memoir (Snowbooks, 2006)

I’d only ever been vaguely aware of Lisa Suckdog (aka Carver) and her ‘zine Rollerderby in the 90s but my interested was piqued when I saw Stewart Home quoting her book on his web page about Tony Wakeford.

It’s actually not a bad read and is fairly easy to get hold of cheap. The book covers Lisa’s life from childhood up to her mid-twenties with the bulk of the tale focusing on her involvement in the US 90s underground/diy/zine scene.

Lisa writes well and comes across as pretty honest about being fucked up and confused. Maybe too honest – I found the first half of the book infuriatingly breezy in places. But perhaps that’s my problem because I too once fell in love with the idea of transgression and unlimited creativity and living life on the edge. Though, of course I never really went for it because there were a gazillion things that seemed to be holding me back. Many of them, as it turns out, entirely sensible ones. I think I know just as many people who died, or went mental from that scene as ended up being a star or making a living out of it. Of course the larger proportion are people like me who just did (and do) their bit and juggle real life at the same time.

So, part of me is annoyed that Lisa lead this seemingly endless life of adventure hooking up with headcases like GG Allin, doing mad operatic performance art shows across the world, selling thousands of copies of her zine, putting demented records out and generally having a good time.

The other part of me is annoyed because I remember meeting people who seemed self-consciously confrontational, subversive and decadent. On paper they were wildly exciting - in person, they were fucking tedious and self-obsessed.

Obviously I am unfairly tarring Lisa with the same brush – but what is great about her story is the gradual change in emphasis. Perhaps paradoxically she becomes more interesting, not less, the more “conventional” her life experiences become. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the accounts of her mad exploits with French performance artist Costes a great deal and her girly ruminations on US underground culture (which I assume is as male-dominated as the euro variant).

For people not familiar with Lisa’s work I imagine a big point of interest will be her relationship with industrial musician and “occult fascist” Boyd Rice. Like many industrial or neo-folk musicians Rice has constructed a vast mythology around himself which serves as excellent branding for flogging his records. Rice’s mystique somehow allows him to posture as a Satanist, misogynist neo-nazi who is a cool guy really because he likes 60s girl groups and is at prankster at heart.

Carver’s account tells a rather different story. In contrast to his promotion of social darwinism, Rice comes across as completely dysfunctional – a grown man who ponces off his mother to fund his booze habit. A delusional inadequate who beats his partner when he doesn’t get his way.

The deterioration of Boyd and Lisa’s relationship after their son is born makes for uncomfortable reading. It marks, I guess, the end of a particular road for the author. Her subsequent trajectory is an interesting mish mash of questioning and being uncomfortable with a more comfortable lifestyle. Other reviews of the book I’ve read tend to either ignore this and focus on all the mad counterculture stuff, or portray the story as someone having their wild years young and then growing out of it. But it isn’t “just a phase” - far from it.

For me Lisa’s insights at the end were the best bit - still slightly fucked up, no regrets about her past, still questioning the whole ethos of the various roles that society has allocated her. To what degree is it possible to reinvent yourself? Can you ever completely escape the influence of your parents? Do these sort of things matter?

After reflecting on my teenage fandom of Death In June here, it felt quite good to finally purge this flat of their last remaining records.

Unfortunately it looks like it isn’t as straightforward as that:

	MC036 eBay Listing Removed: Hateful or Discriminatory ( 182548222)

Dear john-eden We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following auction-style listing(s):230223972319 - DEATH IN JUNE: Brown Book LP ORIG with insert current93 However, your (s) breaches eBay’s Hateful or Discriminatory policy and has been removed. In accordance with our User Agreement, items prohibited by law or by eBay policy are not allowed on eBay. We notified members who placed bids on the item that the listing has been canceled. You’re not allowed to list items that promote or glorify hatred, violence or racial intolerance, or items that promote organisations with such views on eBay.

I had to laugh. It was nearly as funny as when William Bennett personally got ebay to remove my auction of a Whitehouse tribute record.

“My advice to you all is to take your entire Death in June / Current 93 / Sol Invictus collections down to the Music and Video Exchange and swap them for a copy of THE LEATHER NUN’s “Slow Death” 12″. This record is PROPER Viking Industrial, the sound of AIK Solna’s infamous Black Army waving aloft the freshly decapitated skulls of failed folk musicians, bureaucrats and barmy mystics (ie- pretty much everyone in the Third Reich) as they roar forward on their Kawasakis of Ragnarok, kicking the beejayzus out of anyone caught playing with runes or indulging in ’sex magick’!”

bti, today. With added Xylitol live review.

Stewart Home’s new material on Tony Wakeford et al seems to have generated a flurry of additional information which has now been incorporated into the article on his website.

The shitty politics of the post-industrial music scene AND revelations about the inability of some its “stars” to wipe their own fat arses.

Stewart Home has unearthed more unsavoury revelations from the sad life of stiff-right-arm fanatic Tony Wakeford. (See especially the right hand column, but it’s all worth a read if you haven’t seen it before).

Week 9: Industrial Grab Bag

Some Coil and Throbbing Gristle seven inch singles and related fanzines. I never saw TG live, as I was 11 when they split up. They existed as this weird phantom overlooking many of the bands I got into in the mid 80s. This was before the Mute reissue programme, so the vinyl took a bit of effort tracking down. I eventually got hold of Heathen Earth at the Reading Festival, praying that the record wouldn’t get damaged in the heat or under the DMs of my tent-mate.

I’m keeping the albums, obviously. But the seven inches… original Industrial Records pressings? Camouflage outer bags? Not played in at least 8 years? A no-brainer… ditto an obscure Coil seven inch in blue vinyl and random zines including a Diamanda Galas programme from her awesome performance at the Royal Festival Hall circa 1988.

Result: The seven inches averaged out at about a tenner. The zines for less. Diamanda Galas trumped them all at £11.00.

Week 10: Terminus

I was reaching the end of my tether, really. The novelty had completely worn off by now and I was going through the motions with the listings, barely adding any interesting trivia about the items. Spending Sunday evenings on ebay, Monday evenings packing stuff up and most of my lunch break on Tuesdays in the post office was proving very wearing. I can see the attractions of doing this as a full time job, but I don’t think it’s for me - and anyway I already have a job, and something resembling a life outside it, so this wasn’t strictly necessary. I even lost interest in blogging about it all, so pardon me if I keep this brief!

I finished off with a couple of records I’d bought cheap with a view to flogging them at a later date. One was by “The Burmoe Brothers” - an early effort by Guy Chambers (of Robbie Williams fame) from the 80s featuring Marc Almond on vocals. I think it was a bit jazzy, but I actually couldn’t even be arsed to listen to it again.

The other was a more interesting effort by The Bongos - a NY post punk band on Fetish Records, featuring Cosey from TG on one track.

Also some rare-ish Psychic TV singles and CDs and related fanzines/books. Oh and some bonkers texts from the bloke out of goth group Christian Death about the end of the world and setting up a paramilitary organisation. I am still not clear why he sent them to me.

Result: The rare records I’d acquired to sell on went for 99p each. This alone adequately flags up my complete lack of business acumen. The rest went for roughly what I expected it to.

Miscellania

I ran into Danny in Spittalfields Market and tried to palm a load of occult books off on him. I assumed he must know some freaky people who are still obssessed by all this stuff. My better half was impressed by my new zeal for geting rid of things. But either he doesn’t know any wand-wavers or like me he’s realised that a lot of it is too much trouble.

Get home and divvy up a load of books into 3 piles:

• Recycle: Books which are rubbish and not worth any money.
• Charity Shop: Books which are OK and not worth any money.
• Amazon shop: Books which are out of print and already up there for over 20 quid.

Amazon turns out to be a very slow way of getting rid of things, but people do pay top dollar.

I also found reams and reams of correspondence from the days before the internet. (Christ, that makes me sounds about 80!) A very nice evening was spent revisiting it before it too was savagely recycled. People used to really write, y’know? When I did a zine in the 90s there were dozens of people who wrote back with feedback - lots of them doing letters of 3 pages…

I offered the good people of Dissensus the chance to come and pick up 60 back issues of The Wire magazine and there were no takers, so in the recycling they went.

So that’s it, for now, I enjoyed the experience overall and as you can see it’s given me a chance to reappraise my past tastes. I’m proud of my 100% positive feedback and will probably do this again at some point. In the meantime there are more pressing matters to attend to - more news about them soon.

Week 8: Red Sky at Night, Death In June

It was one of things you end up at, following links. From Psychic TV, to Coil, to Current 93 via little notes in fanzines, on record sleeves, even a couple of sentences in the NME.

20 years ago, at the ripe old age of 17, I asked the bloke behind the counter of Our Price if I could hear “The Brown Book”, an LP by a band called Death In June which I knew nothing about other than that there was some involvement by David Tibet, Rose McDowell and John Balance.

It sounded fantastic - nice and loud over the shop’s great system and headphones. Dark ballads, weird imagery and simple folky songs. The sleeve gave very little away - a skull and the title of the album. The inserts were seriously weird - some leaflets about occult supplies and some very sinister t-shirts.

The final track on side one was a dreamlike spoken word piece over a soundscape. When it finished I handed over my cash.

Death In June were one of the ultimate bands for fans who like a bit of a treasure hunt. Very few clues were ever given away. At 17, before google or discogs had even been thought of, this was quite exciting.

Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together became my new obsession, but when I saw the finished picture I was older and wiser and didn’t really like what I saw. The skull on the cover was a totenkopf and one of the songs on the album was an acapella of “Horst Wessel”. These were the first steps in the “are they dodgy or aren’t they?” tango that DIJ plays with all their fans. The consensus seems to be that everyone can get off on this elitist/faux-nazi imagery without actually being a fascist.

This flogging of “aesthetic fascism as pornography” is dealt with at length in Stewart Home’s definitive Death In June Not Mysterious.

But there were other things which set me on edge as well. Not least this, from one of the group’s newsletters: “1988 (HH) held such promise but, like the man (AH) has only proved to be treacherous”. The bands which followed in DIJ’s jackbooted footsteps took the uniforms, runes and nudge nudge nazi references several steps further without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Musically, the strummy folkiness lost its appeal when I finally got to hear Nick Drake.

The totenkopf tango continues to this day, with Douglas P (DIJ’s only permanent member) doing very nicely out of the proceeds. Dull. I’ve even grown tired of misguided attempts by anti-fascists to get worked up by the band and its posturing. I take some comfort in the fact that I never felt the need to own a Death In June wristwatch.

I didn’t have enough 12″ envelopes to get rid of my vinyl, but I had managed to keep a book about the group written by a fan, some newsletters, fanzines, etc. I knew this stuff was rare and that there would be an eager audience for it. In some ways this entire ebay exercise felt like handing down this material to a younger generation who may or may not be like I was at 17. Needless to say I had very mixed feelings about this and it was all too easy to feel a bit paternal and worried about people who were buying up all this shit off ebay. But the twin realisations that I wouldn’t have listened to anyone else at 17, and that the 37 year old me wanted cash money, stopped me making an arse out of myself.

RESULT:

Sure enough the book was up to just under 20 quid 2 days into the auction. I also received a number of emails begging me to end the auctions early and sell multiple items off-ebay. The book ended up at £26.00, the newsletters at £16.00, the zines etc between £2 and £12.50. Once again, the majority of this stuff went to one person to the tune of about eighty quid. A good week, all in all.

Week 7: Whilst you have the Right to Kill, I must inform you that you are infringing my trademark

I was never a big collector of power electronics and have little to add to what is said by the anonymous author of Bang Out of Order. Noise is something which has always interested me, but even at the height of my fascination with sonic extremity I avoided immersing myself in the work of its muckiest exponents.

I saw Whitehouse at their “come back” gig in the back room of a south London pub in 1990. It was hugely loud and violent, but I didn’t feel the need to experience it again. It is perhaps indicative that the only Whitehouse record I have ever owned has been a fake one which was sent to me at the turn of the century. I’d filed it away after getting a mate to review it and only remembered its existence during a recent conversation with Martin. He assured me that power electronics fans were both rich and gullible enough to want it.

The record is allegedly a “cover version” of an unreleased Whitehouse track which was faked up by northern noise pranksters “Smell & Quim”. I once saw them do a gig with Headbutt and it was fucking bedlam with about 30 people on the stage going mental in various different ways. However I managed to find some speculation on the web saying that it was all the work of legendary Japanese noise-meister Merzbow, so I hyped that up in the auction instead.

It is a cliche that a lot of this stuff is more interesting to think and talk about than it is to actually hear. Next to the “Whitehouse” record was an early 7″ by NON and Smegma which is best known for having two holes drilled in the label to allow more variation in the sounds on the tracks. I recall playing that one at least once.

I also dug out a few fanzines which featured material by Whitehouse-related artist Trevor Brown. I still quite like his earlier stuff - all stark monochrome draftsman-like line drawings. Less keen on his later full-colour work featuring injured girls.

The only power electronics group I had any real knowledge of was The Grey Wolves. It seemed like every letter I received in the early 90s featured several of their tiny flyers. They did “bleak” very well, although after a while their endless parade of totalitarian imagery proved wearing.

What I liked best about them was that they seemed relatively down to earth people. As with Andy Martin of the Apostles/Academy 23 you could write to them and get nice letters back. There was a kind of proley punk aspect to what they were doing which was some distance from the aloof artiness of Whitehouse. Yes, they were named after a turkish fascist group and used runes, skulls and images of blokes with balaclavas and rifles more than was strictly necessary, but they at least were able to make unambiguous statements about not being fascists themselves. Maybe the years between me seeing this stuff and the satanic-nazi chic material of the mid-90s makes me look back on the Grey Wolves with rose-tinted specs, but I see more depth there.

I remember the music as being quite good as well, but their cassettes have long since been disposed of. One compilation album remained (including tracks by “names” Ramleh and Con-Dom) on it went.

I also found reams and reams of printed matter by ye Wolves. If I remember rightly one of them actually had a photocopier in his house which I found kind of amazing in the late 80s. Lots of booklets (mainly reprints of suitably bleak material from text books or tabloids) catalogues and posters.

RESULT:

A small auction of flyers and a letter from USA power electronics “unit” Intrinsic Action generated this entry on their blog: “borders on the disturbingly stalker-ish side of things… personal letters, and all…”. Disturbing the composers of “Sado Electronics” was something I found quite funny.

Intrinsic Action’s work has always been in the shadow of the godfathers of the genre, and this carried over onto ebay. It gave me enormous pleasure to receive the following just two days into the auctions:

Dear John Eden,

Thank you for your recent auction-style listing on eBay. Unfortunately, these items breached one or more of our policies and had to be removed from the site:

230098214766 - WHITEHOUSE (?) - Sweet Tooth / 5.57 7″ RARE MERZBOW

Your eBay fees for this item have been credited to your account and all bidders on this item have been notified of its removal.

The rights owner, Susan Lawly Recordings, notified eBay that this listing violates intellectual property rights. When eBay receives a report of this type of violation, we remove the listing to comply with the law.

Why was your listing removed?
Misuse of trademarks, brand names and logos is illegal and therefore against eBay policy. A trademark is a unique sign (such as a name, word, phrase, logo, or symbol) that a company uses to identify its products or services. Trademark misuse includes inappropriate comparisons to a branded item, selling counterfeit or replica items and keyword spamming.

[...]

The rights owner for the item you listed sent us a signed legal statement telling us that your item infringed their copyright, trademark or other rights. We were therefore legally obliged to remove the listing.

If you have any questions about the removal of your listing please contact the rights owners directly.

Please note: It’s illegal and against eBay’s policies to use a brand name as part of your listing to falsely imply connection between you and the brand owner, or a false sponsorship or endorsement of your listing by the brand owner.

[...]

We encourage you to contact Susan Lawly Recordings directly if you have any questions. You can send an email to:

susanlawly@freeuk.com

I was initially a bit irked at this as my auction listing had made it pretty clear that it the item in question wasn’t by Whitehouse but was a “tribute” or cover version (I can’t recall which, and the listing has been removed).

Obviously William Bennett (head honcho and I assume only employee at Susan Lawly) has a duty to protect his trademark, as does any small-businessman. In fact, in the case of Whitehouse this is probably more important than for any other cult pop group. The reliance on mystique is paramount. It is a bit of a toss up though, whether the mystique is more damaged by piss-taking “tribute” records, or by Bennett spending his working day trawling through ebay for unofficial Whitehouse product.

Having said that, his intervention reminded me to register at the Susan Lawly discussion forum to hype the living daylights out of my remaining auctions, which lead to a very agreeable number of additional bids.

I certainly enjoyed the process of setting up ambiguous situations and seeing what the reactions are. A bit like power electronics, but without the godawful noise and shouting.

It made the actual monetary value of what I was flogging much less interesting.

Week 6: Esoterra and Answer Me

Esoterra began as a little zine covering occulty type stuff and industrial music and gradually became the definitive in-house journal of what they called “extreme culture”. It had excellent production values with loads of great photos and graphics in each copy. I ended up distributing it for a while and was rewarded by receiving one copy of each issue which had an extra silk-screened cover.

Esoterra’s development into a full-blown magazine covering all aspects of the “extreme” mirrored my own interest in it. And by ‘mirrored’ I mean that, step by step, we were moving away from each other.

One thing which this exercise of clearing out has impressed upon me is that I used to really get into the detail of belief in a way I don’t now. I think I was operating on the basis that anything extreme was worth a look simply because it was “forbidden”. As if I was trying to draw a gigantic map of human consciousness by walking around the outer reaches of the coastline.

I am sure that part of this was due to a reluctance on my part to actually amalgamate all of this contradictory (and in some cases ludicrous) stuff into a coherent whole. That would have meant rejecting some stuff out of hand and wondering about how to actually apply all this weirdness in the real world. I think there is something in the psyche of a lot of young men which is attracted to just collecting stuff, of knowing about things that not many people know about. It is probably a substitute for having an identity of your own. Mind you, there are aspects of all that material that I am still interested in, and the experience has obviously been part of a process of growing up and becoming the (cough) well-rounded person I am today.

It is also worth mentioning that it was almost impossible to find out about a lot of things prior to the internet. Now that everything seems to be available, I think these areas have lost their power.

My voyage into the extreme began to hit the buffers when it became clear that there were actually people pushing rigid ideologies under the guise of “information access”, or freedom of speech, or transgression for the sake of it. For example anarchists in the US who seemed to have no problem welcoming the paedo-apologists of NAMBLA under their “anti-authoritarian” banner. And then there were the fascists.

Industrial music and punk had often flirted with fascism and the fascist aesthetic. In the case of Throbbing Gristle the imagery was used to raise questions about conformity and authoritarianism. Some of the bands that followed took the imagery and just ran with that, missing the point entirely.

The mid 90s saw the emergence of a few populist occult/fascist groups and magazines, largely based in the US again. At first some of this stuff came across as refreshingly different, but it turned out to be the same old wine in new bottles. The “movement” began to solidify into a scene, with all the usual cliches and limitations. Just as punk bands were routinely asked about animals rights or Crass, everyone now had to have an opinion on the end of the world or Anton LaVey. There was a love affair with fascism going on but most people kept it at the aesthetic level or at least denied that they held any political beliefs (for example Boyd Rice’s absurd “When I say I am a fascist I don’t mean it in a political way”).

The breaking point came for me when Esoterra issue 6 landed on my doormat. The contents were by and large up to the usual excellent standard. But there was also a full page advert for a group called RAHOWA included. RAHOWA = Racial Holy War. Here was a group with actual connections to political fascism (in the form of the wacko Church of the Creator). Undeniably “extreme”, but a line had been crossed.

I ended up having an argument with the editor and not distributing that issue. He informed me that the group had offered him money for a whole lot more advertising if he published an interview with them, but he had declined. We remained on reasonably good terms after that and no similar adverts appeared.

The next issue featured my interview with Mother Destruction - a brilliant group who managed to avoid all the stiff-right-arm posturing which seemed to be becoming the norm.

After that I think it dawned on me that the music was beoming less interesting compared to other things. It was pointless hanging about and watching an entire scene go down the toilet musically and ideologically at such an exciting time for dance music and other things.

To his credit, the editor of Esoterra continued to send me copies. By issue 9 I could see the funny side. He remains good natured to this very day and even dropped me a message via ebay to say hello and wish me well with the auctions.

Answer Me! was possibly the definitive article in “extreme”. Unlike yer proto-neofolk goths, Jim and Debbie Goad were true outsiders who didn’t seem to give a fuck about anything. Whilst the satanists were busy building up a whole new rack of “off the peg” cliches, the Goads were pouring more ketchup on sacred cows.

Each issue of Answer Me! was tens of thousands of words long, nearly all written by the couple. Rants included “why I hate being a jew”. There were extended articles where the Goads would report on various drug and alcohol dependency meetings, or call suicide helplines. Whilst US anarchists were cosying up to NAMBLA (see above) the Goads conducted a piss-taking phone interview with them.

Within the great writing were a few observations of Jim Goad’s background which revealed that he’d managed to rise above more badness than the average twenty-something satanist could even imagine. He later wrote a book entitled “The Redneck Manifesto” which on the surface was all about race in the USA, but was actually much more about class - a concept completely absent from virtualy all of the counter-cultural posturing I had witnessed. Now, why would that be?

RESULT: Most of the Esoterras went for over a tenner a piece. Some of the earlier ones (including the ultra-limited silk screen covered ones) went for a mere £3.65. Bizarrely Answer Me went for a paltry £1.24, i.e. less than I paid for it in the first place. Weird.

“Every man does his thing a little way different”
Errol Dunkley

“Don’t get downhearted because of the dementors out there, just slip them the odd nasty Debbie Gibson / Jive Bunny megamix or some Merzbow teeth-pulls every now and then to keep em on their toes…”
Loki

This mix is the first one I ever recorded, back in 1998. I’d got a new job a few years previously and used the extra cash, month by month, to gradually sort myself out with a decent hi-fi and then eventually saved up to buy one deck, a mixer, and then another deck.

The mix was originally conceived when I had one deck, a mixer and an ordinary domestic CD player. So, no beatmixing but some nice looooooong ambient pieces. It was eventually reworked with two records and a CD playing at the same time when I had amassed all the kit. I didn’t really do very much with at the time, partly because I had no way of copying tapes and partly because I was still labouring under the illusion that I’d become some kind of shit hot drum and bass DJ. Quite clearly that was never going to happen, but it was great fun mucking about with records. And still is.

A lot of these tunes represent the last gasp of my serious interest in industrial culture before plunging into dub in a big way. With the exception of one track, it still sounds fantastic to these ears.

In many ways it is a sister mix to Paul Meme’s classic Ambient Industrial selection

Another live mix. 48 minutes long because it was designed to fit on one side of a C90 (remember them?).

Download a zipped archive including the mp3 file, cover art and details of how to get a 4 page pdf of sleevenotes from here. (65megs).

Rules:

1) If I see people linking directly to the file, I will take it down. (Link instead to http://uncarved.org/blog/?p=790)
2) If my bandwidth goes ballistic, I will take the file down.
3) A very limited number of CDs are available for dial-up people who have already been in touch with me (or who I know from internet forums, etc) - email me or leave a comment.

The mix will be up for about a week, all being well.