uncarved.org blog

Having a rifle through my tunes tonight I rediscovered three releases from an obscure outfit called “The Christmas Bunch”. Like a fair proportion of my records, these were all bought second hand. In fact I think I grabbed them all for less than a quid over a few years in the late 80s.

They sound OK. Not amazing, but there’s enough going on to hold your attention. And I quite liked the anonymity of it all, after over twenty years holding onto these records I was still none the wiser about the people behind them – (insert ominous crescendo) until now.

The first Christmas Bunch product I found must have been their “Hit No. 1″ single. A one-sided twelve inch with minimal rubber stamped markings and a biro scribbling announcing it as 230 out of 250 copies.

It ain’t bad actually – characteristically stiff “dance” beats which could politely be described as motorik. There are some nice vocal samples and arrangements which remind a bit of the Art of Noise. The actual vocals spoil it for me a little, a bit too earnest and shouty – even for me, ha ha.

“Hit No.1″ also came with this intriguing free gift, made up to look like an executive toy or educational tool:

As you can see, it’s two circles of printed card with a central pin. Windows in the front card reveal words printed on the rear one, in combinations like “glitter [....] ofcorruption” and “hide [...] behindyoureyebrows”. This forthright rejection of spaces between words would be an enduring theme.

So when the album turned up a little while later, I figured it had to be worth another quid or so…

“Get Out Of My Face” is a six track affair. It even has some credits on it, which are difficult to decipher because of the lack of spaces between words. Nevertheless the label yields a useful “all songs (c) 1986″. The back cover states that it was recorded in London, Luton and Sussex and  announces that the group “are Clyde Ely Goldhurst”. I have no idea whether that is one, two or three people cos of the lack of spaces.

Side One is a bit more”beaty” and includes “Hit No.1″ again. “Private Property”and “Dreamtime” remind me a little of Fad Gadget at his most croony – but with a slightly posher voice.

Side Two is more to my liking and verges on electronic chillout territory. “The Elephant Bar” is filmic and jazzy, a bit like some of Barry Adamson’s solo gear. Luckily the only vocals are wispy female operatic ones. (Hmm!) “Last Chance” almost sounds like a more plinky plonky Massive Attack or something. “The Fridge” might consist of pitched down church organs and choirs.

I then forgot about the Christmas Bunch for a while until I stumbled on this record in Brighton one summer:

I think you’ll have to agree that this cover either heralds the magnificent or the tragic.

The back cover reveals that the full line up is “Nick Sample featuring The Christmas Bunch”. Side A is “Marvelous Person” and features Margaret Thatcher doing vocals over an almost adequate “acid dance” backing. Whilst I doubt this ever got played at Shoom, it’s an interesting novelty record and yet another example of old industrial types dovetailing with acieeeed. Or maybe that’s too naive – it’s billed as “Yet Another Acid Cash In”. That guitar solo is a no-no though.

Side Two is all the vocal samples done acapella for all you mash up mixmasters out there. I’ve had some drunken fun with these over the years. Which is why it’s not exactly in mint condition, even by the standards of certain sellers on GEMM.

Actually, hearing it again, I’m not clear if it’s clever editing of Thatcher or a soundalike. She comes out with stuff like “I am a marvelous concept… we must take away the fruits of people’s labour” and stuff. There’s a newsreader type bloke in there as well gobbing off about “profits are modern warfare” and suchlike.

And that was the last I heard of ye Xmasbunch. It looks like they made at least one other record, which judging by its cover might include Michael Heseltine stepping up to the mic. I’m not about to start paying 5 quid for their records though. If anyone has any further information then please feel free to leave a comment below or drop me an email.

So anyway, where does Alison Goldfrapp fit into this? Well after occasionally googling for info on The Christmas Bunch to no avail over the years, this little snippet turned up tonight:

“Alison was born in 1966 — or earlier. She was in a LCP student film made in 1988 (find it on myspace) and also in 1985 also. She was NOT 15 in 1985! She was in a band called the Christmas Bunch. Do the maths.”

(It’s in the midst of a discussion about her age, which I am not remotely bothered about – it’s easy to see why women in the media spotlight might obscure their age, no? For the record I have a lot of time for Goldfrapp – particularly their “Black Cherry” and “Supernature” albums. There’s a lot of inverted snobbery about them in bloggerland.)

To be honest I don’t hold out much hope for an anonymous single source on the internet actually being true. For all I know it’s someone who used to be in the band trying to reignite some interest in their backcatalogue. But it was an unexpected bonus which has added to the mystery nicely.

And… there is an “Ali Blank” credited on the sleeve of the “Get Out Of My Face” album…

In a Madonna stageshow involving gasmasks and kilts, circa 2001.

(See the left dancer’s shirt).

expletive undeleted.

New address! Update your bookmarks and check  the latest entry on Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Hollow Earth: Social Trends 1950-2010.

Matt comes correct with some hard data (and kittens).

Kind of amazed that they also used to do a reggae chart - check this out from 1986!

Apparently the reggae chart only ran from April to September 1986. I have no idea what the selection criteria were, but I’m guessing that actually having a video was more crucial than sales. It would be an unusual chart which featured both King Kong and UB40, I think – not much crossover in their respective markets.

Boris Gardiner’s video is awesomely cheesy and has includes some nice shots of eighties West London.

Moses on the Blood and Fire forum found this clip for me on Youtube. It seems to be the only one on there. In fact, the general consensus is that there weren’t very many of these broadcast. So if anyone else remembers the reggae chart or can post more on youtube, then please let me know!

See also this post compiling links to printed reggae charts from 1976-1999.

History is made at night: We were brought up on the Space Race, now they expect us to clean toilets.

Neil on the moon landings, the decline of utopian futurism, and pop music.

Steven Wells AKA Susan Williams AKA Seething Wells has died.

He was one of my favourite music journalists ever. People will scoff at this and remind me of Paul Morley or Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs or countless legendary articulate literary types.

But I’ve never been all that literary. I always looked forward to Swells’ ranty swearing and pretension-busting championship of pop music.

He also a wrote a lot of the NME’s more political pieces in the 80s, when the music press still had something resembling a backbone. I’ve reproduced his piece on the anarchopunk riot following Conflict’s Brixton Academy gig here, but he also wrote a load of stuff on the Jello Biafra vs Tippa Gore censorship trial and many other things besides.

I distincly remember him on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show taking some christian woman from the National Viewers and Listeners Association to task about her complete lack of knowledge of popular culture. And seeing him do a few readings at the Clerkenwell Literary Festival when he was pimping his Attack Books pulp fiction imprint (which included people like Stewart Home and Zodiac Mindwarp on the roster).

I met him once, after doing a talk about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. He was very enthusiastic about the AAA’s Italian sub-group, the SHITS (SkinHeads as Independent Travellers in Space) and seemed like a top guy on a personal level.

There is something very reassuring about him going to the grave still taking the piss out of Smiths fans and goths, whilst simultaneously praising rioters in Tehran.

Stewart Home’s own thoughts on Swells are here.

“Thom Yorke: My Autobiography. By Steven Wells”

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

7. Test Dept, Hackney Empire, 23/1/87

We’d come down to London to go to a Julian Cope gig in Westminster but it was sold out (perhaps unsurprisingly as it was around the time of “World Shut Your Mouth”, his big chart hit). Tentative attempts were made to chat up some girls outside the venue, with the usual lack of results. I’d scanned the NME gig listings for a back-up option and managed to persuade my partner in crime to head out into the badlands of Hackney to see Test Dept.

We got the tube to Bethnal Green and walked up Mare Street not knowing what the fuck we were doing. It was the first time I’d even been to Hackney.

Peter Rehberg (now of Mego, KTL etc) was in the year above me at school and had been slowly warping my mind with cassettes of Some Bizzare acts like Foetus and Psychic TV. Test Dept featured on the Some Bizzare compilation “If you can’t please yourself you can’t please your soul” - an incredibly visceral tour de force of pulsing metal percussion and shouting. I’d read up on them in the NME and found out about their politics (slightly left of “old Labour” I guess, with lot of support for the Miners’ Strike and righteous scorn for Tory rule).

1986′s “Unacceptable Face of Freedom” LP alternated between propulsive rage and brooding hatred of the effects of Thatcherism. The incredible paranoia of the media at the time is captured especially well with a host of news samples and a general air of cold war dread. There is also some powerful spoken word provided by Alan Sutcliffe, a former miner (who was also onstage at the gig). And it’s easy to forget how funky Test Dept were alongside their anger. The cover was a vast foldout thing with photos of sculptures by Malcolm Poynter (the image above is composed of melted plastic soldiers, for example).

I’d been listening to this kind of post-industrial stuff a lot, alongside more middlebrow rock and pop records. I was reading everything I could as well – books like Tape Delay and RE/SEARCH. But I’d never experienced it live – the gigs either came at the wrong time or I couldn’t persuade people to go with me.

Of course, this was no ordinary event:

Siege of Wapping
Ministry of Power benefit on the first anniversary of the Printworkers’ Strike
With Alan Sutcliffe; James Phillips: The Printworkers’ Choir
- Hackney Empire, London

The Wapping dispute was the next major installment in the UK class war after the defeat of the Miners. Rupert Murdoch’s News International wanted to shift operations from Fleet Street in central London to Wapping in the east. The new shiny plant went hand in hand with new shiny proposed conditions for the workforce, including a “no strike” deal, job losses and “flexible working” (i.e. changeable hours at the bosses’ request). The unions weren’t having it – years of negotiations came to nothing. So a strike was called in early 1986.

The strikers were all sacked. Pickets clashed with the police. Local residents complained of police violence and being prevented from going home. Behind the heavily fortified walls and barbed wire fences of “fortress Wapping”, the presses rolled on and the newspapers continued to be produced. By scabs.

Samantha Fox famously rode through the picket line on a tank as part of an anti-strike story for The Sun. The government backed News International to the hilt.

We didn’t really know any of this when we trudged up Mare Street, trying determinedly to look like we knew where we were going.

My parents are both Church of England Tories (in that order) so that’s where my political evolution began. I was only vaguely aware of things like the Brixton riots and the Miners’ Strike at the time. I daresay I held fairly reactionary views about all that, passed down from my elders.

But I was anti-racist from an early age. I remember being 11 and sitting down next to three boys in the school canteen and them asking me to join the youth wing of the National Front. Their ringleader had even memorised the key points in the manifesto. I wasn’t up for it. On another occasion I stood next to two of my mates – one of whom was Jewish, the other Malaysian, whilst two dozen of our classmates sieg heiled frenziedly around the gym changing room.

These sorts of things lead me into the fringes of the anti-apartheid movement. I figured it was pretty obvious that if racism was wrong, then a nation run along racist lines was also wrong. Around the time of this gig I occasionally walked to school with a guy called Farasat who was Muslim. We had all sorts of mad discussions about religion and Palestine. I knew fuck all about Palestine. But we agreed on apartheid and he’d been involved with protests outside the local branch of Barclays Bank (who had been identified as key supporters of the regime). I tagged along. It was OK. I closed down my bank account there whilst wearing a “Free Nelson Mandela” sticker. The woman behind the counter looked a bit worried. The protests became a semi-regular thing for me on Saturday mornings.

I was photographed on one Barclays picket by the local newspaper. Someone who was a few years younger than me at school said he’d seen me in the paper and his parents thought it was a great thing to do and they supported it all.

In contrast, my parents went batshit mental about it over the dinner table. In their eyes Nelson Mandela was a terrorist – imprisoned for blowing up railway lines, the people on those protests were weirdos, communists etc. Unfortunately they weren’t nearly weird or communist enough for me. With the exception of a couple of anarchopunks, my fellow protestors were also schoolkids or liberal types, Christians and the odd socialist worker.

I hadn’t consciously set out to piss my parents off, it was just the consequence of thinking things through. Which continued, along with the rows. I don’t think I discussed Wapping with them. These days we agree to differ on many things but can have civilised discussions about things like the MPs expense scandal. I suppose they were worried about me falling in with the wrong people. I didn’t. For reasons which are still unclear (but I assume were to do with humiliating me in later life), my Mum ordered a print of the photo from the local paper – I look very young and awkward. I am wearing massive wire-rimmed spectacles and holding a placard.

So, anyway. This was half gig, half rally. If I remember correctly there were speakers and possibly some poets. I don’t remember any of it being hackneyed (if you will forgive the expression) or embarrassing. Perhaps this is because I was still only sweet 17, or perhaps it was actually very good. The Hackney Empire was incredibly atmospheric. We got cheap seats right at the top and looked down at this beautiful old music hall filled to the brim with freaks and lefties. It confirmed the impression of Hackney I had gleaned from reading Vague magazine – an oasis of radicalism and strangeness. If only.

In any case, we were there for the noise, not the politics. When Test Dept came on it was like a blast from another planet. Like the records but more intense, more dynamic, more urgent. I was blown away at the time, but can’t remember too much about it now, except being thrilled to see things onstage which weren’t guitar/bass/drums. Instead there were bits of metal, bagpipes, other stuff which was unidentifiable. Sure it was loud, but never oppressive or painful.

The day after the gig several policemen were filmed at Wapping brutally attacking strikers, journalists and even first aid workers. The dispute ended a fortnight later, an abject defeat for the strikers.

Check out this very good introduction to the strike over at Libcom.

There was a lot of sympathy and support for the miners, the printworkers and the ambulance drivers (who went on strike a few years later). By 1989 I was living in London and ended up in a pub in Bethnal Green for lunch. An old guy came over as I tucked into a chilli con carne and talked about the area. He had some nice memories of the strike, including nicking bundles of News International papers from outside newsagents and throwing them in the canal.

It’s almost impossible to believe now but there was a time when vast amounts of people felt that the unions were there for them – and could make their lives better. Now that has been legislated away by successive right wing governments. Bob Crow and the tube workers are almost universally reviled for having the temerity to stand up for themselves collectively and improve their lot.

I didn’t realise how important this all was at the time. It was simply an amazing gig which also gave me a lot to think about.

One of the reasons I keep harking back to the eighties is because (in retrospect) things seemed a lot more certain then. I don’t think that was just my age at the time. In fact it seems to me that circumstances are now conspiring to make things a lot more certain once again. I take no pleasure in saying that.

8. Psychedelic Furs, Hammersmith Odeon, 19/2/87

Arguably the Furs were well past their best at this point. But the Odeon was rammed, we had good seats and  pogoed away in our leather jackets. Looking nothing like the teenage punks we aspired to be. Punks didn’t get their Mums to ring up the Hammersmith Odeon and buy tickets for them, did they?

This was a good gig, they played a lot of their classic early stuff. But after Test Dept it was just more rock ‘n’ roll…

NOT THE REAL BEYOND THE iMPLODE: 7″ EXPLOSION PT 1.

Martin, with an outstanding series of posts about his fave sevens, what they mean to him, when and where he got them. Top stuff – 6 installments so far…

Previously on “the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

6) Marillion, Aylesbury Civic Centre 28/12/86

This was an Xmas fan club gig, in the band’s home town. Yes, I was in the Marillion fan club as well. Jesus. Probably only for a year though, if that helps.

The fan club was called “The Web” after a song on their first LP. It commences, with typical pomp:

The rain auditions at my window
Its symphony echoes in my womb
My gaze scans the walls of this apartment
To rectify the confines of my tomb

I remember its name only because some spectacularly shit policing linked this fact with the horrific “Ealing vicarage rape” earlier in the year. The scumbag attacker had a tattoo of spider’s web, like hundreds, possibly thousands, of skinheads – none of whom would have had much time for Marillion. The fan club agreed to help the cops with their enquiries, as I guess anybody would even if the investigation was clearly going down completely the wrong track. I remember discussing all this with my parents over Sunday lunch.

Anyway, as well as a possible knock on the door from the old bill, fan club membership got you a magazine and the odd newsletter. And the chance to attend an exclusive gig, strickly fi de ‘ardcore.

Unfortunately I can’t remember too much about the night because I have blanked it from my mind. This bit of light repression is because I now find recalling the event more embarrassing than associating it with having been in the fan club of an 80s prog rock band. We heckled the support band. They were rubbish, we were pissed. We probably had a load of teenage sneery punkish hormones racing round our bodies. They were friends of the headliners and… they were just boring blokey rock. So we hung around at the back and shouted the odd comment, I can’t remember what. Except for one thing.

There were I think a number of asides to the audiences between songs, which is a bit much for a support band. One of them concerned the drummer being involved with a car crash and being out of action for a good while. To my eternal shame we responded to this by shouting “we don’t care!”. I am cringing right now, typing that.

I’m sure by this time the band and most of the rest of the audience had realised we were pissed twats and proceeded to carry on as if we weren’t there. In many other gigs I have attended since, this sort of behaviour might have resulted in a severe kicking. So it’s Marillion fans: 1, me: nil, in the tolerance and goodwill stakes.

The rest of the night passed in a drunken blur. There was possibly more friction between fans and band during “Kayleigh”. One of my mates’ Dads kindly drove us home. It was the last time I ever saw Marillion. By the time their next album “Clutching At Straws” came out, I was much less easily impressed. This was down to the fact that the quantity and quality of gigs I attended in 1987 would be immeasurably greater than what had gone before…