Lemon Kittens - "Live 1980/81) (a Die Or DIY? product) 1980/81

A prolonged absence may have been noted by your faithful scribe,but i have been an unwilling victim of a Co-Vid variant!Despite having been vaccinated thrice, It fucked me over.and I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future during my virus ravaged stupor.I was even planning how to keep the blog running after my imminent death!?

I's Still a bit fucked up,but managed to think of something to write about.....The Lemon Kittens of course?...i really don't know what i have been doing in the preceding weeks,but i'm already forgetting that terrifying dying feeling.Shit man, i was panicking about my estate rather more than yer actual fear of death. Soooooooo......!?

In the lengthening history of 'Out There' during the Rock'n'Roll era, there has been, actually, a gaping dearth  of genuinely fucking weird groups this side of the grand canyon of 'Out'. You've either got it or you ain't,and 99% of 'Weird' just ain't is it? There's trying (embarrassingly Hard) to be weird,Volcano The Bear (one lp on that NWW bloke's label!?) spring to mind, and there's just plain old. Weird. 

Early Residents were effortlessly weird until they discovered computers. Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica is the epitome of Weird ,but he couldn't repeat it!....nah....'Decals' is 'trying' not 'being',like all his post bat chain puller stuff, pretentious, like his shite Art works;but hey we all need to make a living don't we? We also have 'Ill' weird, like Jandek, Daniel Johnston,and anything Outsider. You have to be Normal (conforming to general standards of 'Normal) to qualify as achieving 'Weird' status...like Moondog?

There are plenty of early industrial acts who sound weird,but are far toooo normal to fool me....like the bloke from Nurse With Wound*...but his public schooled mate David Tibet knew he was far too fucking normal, and spent his career languishing in,slash exploiting,the truly weird,and wonderful ocean of Dark Folk...now that certainly IS weird shit brother,but we is talking the world of 'pop' here,and Lemon Kittens qualify as being within the 'pop' format, like Don Van Vliet before them, even though they were regularly featured on 'Industrial' compilations.

"We Buy A hammer For Daddy" (also on that NWW bloke label!?) is easily the equal of "Trout Mask Replica" on the pantheon of Weird,with a better follow up to boot.

I won't bust a blood vessel listing albums I reckon are effortlessly weird,but that list would be a slim volume indeed,dangerously treading on pamphlet territory.

Yup, The Lemon Kittens were effortlessly so.

So,in the light of a lack of new material,here's a quickly cobbled together volume of very rare recordings of Dax and Blake supporting This Heat at the ICA....the bootlegger obviously arrived late and missed most of the Lemon Kittens set...twat....and another one supporting ...erm...Modern English!?...dunno what their fans thought of of it all?

That first Modern English LP was rather good I remember?....certainly Not weird,but classic British pop music;just like Lemon Kittens were classic British Weird.

It's a fascinating subject is Weird innit?

Asking what is the Weirdest Album of all time is akin to asking what is the worst album of all time. Mostly, the same record tops both charts, and maybe even tops the Best Album Charts too.....this has happened to "Trout Mask Replica".Alas "We Buy A Hammer" is far too obscure to feature in any chart,even the Obscure Chart....and dare I say, far too Weird?

*once upon a time, That Nurse With Wound bloke,was selling his first LP to the record shops in Camden,when he approached the infamous Ted Carroll of 'Rock On'.Ted asked what kind of music it was.

"Sort of 'Weird'said MWW bloke.

"Nah!" said Ted, that ain't weird....This is WEIRD!"..and proceeded to play The Human League's, "Being Boiled",newly released on Fast Product.

Y'know what I agree with Ted.

Tracklist: 

1.Intro (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

2.Up In Arms (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

3.Popsykle (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

4.Morbotalk (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

5.Small Mercies (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

6.Bookburner (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

7.Funky 7 (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

8.(unknown) (end cut) (The Venue, London 08/09/1981)

9.Afraid Of Being Bled By Leeches (ICA London 27-12-1980)

10. PVS (ICA London 27-12-1980)

11. This Kind Of Dying (ICA London 27-12-1980)

DOWNLOAD this kind of trying HERE!

Two Daughters – "Gloria / Kiss The Cloth" (United Dairies – UDT 026) 1981

Two Daughters...Two cassettes!? Who'd have believed it?

On this one they courted the ear of Steven Stapleton,yes he of Nurse With Woooooounduh.....sorry, I nearly dropped off there for a minute. 

So this is on United Dairies as a result.

The Burkes,Anthony and Paul, upped the ante in the tape loops department,and eagerly manned the fader knobs on their cheapo mixer. Whereas NON made loops of Nazi marching bands,the Burkes shockingly use 23 Skidoo-style loops of Gamelan orchestra's,something the Skidders took to its logical limit,and please don't do it again,on the studio side of the otherwise brilliant "The Culling Is Coming".

Blatant copying, some call it 'Inspiration' was thinly disguised in the early industrial world,the most popular source of inspiration ,along with many other item's Cab-like,was Cabaret Voltaires' found dialogue method.....of which there are thankfully none on this tape, well-done Daughters.Others went for Cosey's space-echoed badly plsyed Cornet....see 400 Blows (and indeed 23 Skidoo again)for that one;also not nabbed by the daughters. With relief they also don't plagiarise Genesis P. Orridge's obsession with murderers and Nazi's,or any obvious pilfering of anything William S. Burroughs. All clichés that induce within me a inescapable desire to sleep....even more than that bloody Nurse With Wound List for prog rock trainspotters like me. But they obviously had a chat with the Turnbulls of Skidoo fame, who evidently lent them an album of the music of Bali to indulge their zest for making tape loops.

Having said that, if this tape had a couple of Skidoo style funky workouts, it would have wiped the floor with anything the Skidders did......which,frankly isn't saying much.

Update: I just listened to the extended version of Seven Songs and its fucking brilliant...although on a couple of tracks they do sound uncannily like Modern Romance or Haircut 100,but whats wrong with that?..so ignore that last paragraph,print it out, burn it,eat it, and swallow the evidence......but they (23 Skidoo) went shit rather rapidly after that;going Hip Hop is an unfathomable and unforgivable crime worthy of being indicted by the Hague international court of terrible music, of which i am the self-appointed and only Judge.

Tracklisting:

Kiss The Cloth

A1 Part 1
A2 Part 2
A3 Part 3

Gloria
B1 Part 1
B2 Part 2
B3 Part 3
B4 Part 4
B5 Part 5

DOWNLOAD something loopy HERE!

Various ‎Artists – "Hoisting The Black Flag" (United Dairies ‎– UD 06) 1980

Here we go,- a United Dairies compilation!

And what's this, an exclusive but errant Lemon Kittens track?

The ironically titled “Funky 7”,is dance music for quadriplegic psychopaths of all creeds and colours. Personally, I find backwards avant-drone dislocated sound collage very funky. I know i'm white, and “ain't got da funk”, but I’d take to an empty dance-floor if this played at my local Discothèque. If it ain't four to the floor, the average Caucasian can't even attempt the hokey-cokey without several homemade E's stuffed down his or her neck. So please,please,leave black peoples music for black people to make,and the 'whites' to make insane shit like this masterpiece.

Still on the subject of ,(cough), 'Dancing'. I drift back to my adolescence,when many a Punk Rock concert witnessed no dancing at all, and in some cases,like Joy Division, no movement at all. This seemed like a desirable natural state for oneself. Then, slowly, idiots like the fucking Specials started beckoning these same lost youths to get up and Dance???? And they DID!!? The enforced jollity of Ska music is the opposite to the voluntary doom of the music on this beyond fine compilation. This stuff is about finding out where your meat comes from, rather than partying back at the abattoir.

The Dance Music theme returns with tracks by David Cross (was he not in King Crimson mark II?), and Paul Hamilton & Joseph Duarte(aka  the Bombay Ducks), which repeats the disjointed collage feel of the Lemon kittens track.

Whitehouse remove us further from the party atmosphere, with two trademark recreations of an electronic Danté's inferno. It's a Hell preferable to one we're living in now,and I wager that dancing's banned; punishable by being sent straight to Heaven(that has to be the name of one of those 'super-clubs on that hive-minded, voluntary Guantanamo shit-hole, Ibiza!).

Naturally, Nurse With Wound make an appearance with a totally de-konstructed version of hill-billy square dance classic, “Duelling Banjo's”. I suspect, that it just shares the same title as the aforementioned red-neck banjo-off?Wishful thinking hopes it's a cover version that has totally removed all the bluegrass, and replaced it with a dead barren wasteland, adorned by a Black Flag hoisted in place of that KKK flag;or whatever they call that swastika alike confederate rag (Seig Howdy!). A desirable future for the Tea Party Taliban's Fatherland I’m sure we'd all agree? If you don't, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING READING THIS BLOG?

Tracklist:

A1	–Lemon Kittens	Funky 7
A2	–Truth Club	To The Nile Sisters
A3	–Nurse With Wound	Duelling Banjos
A4	–Mental Aardvarks	Bogart Was Three Lemons
B1	–David Cross	Early Dance Music
B2	–Bombay Ducks	Dance Music
B3	–Whitehouse	Her Entry
B4	–Whitehouse	Foreplay
B5	–Mental Aardvarks	What Have You Done (Pieces Of Meat)?

download THE BLACK FLAG here!

The Nihilist Spasm Band – "7x~x=x" (United Dairies ‎– UD 016) 1985

No surprise that Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton likes the Nihilist Spasm Band now is it?
They are probably listed on that silly trainspotter attractor, 'The NWW list' that is bandied about on the internet.
But, don't let that put you off, cus The 'Die or DIY? list, says they are good too.
What you get is more of the same as previously showcased on their first couple of recordings.Mainly, everyone improvises in different time signatures,different tunings, on homemade instruments,with the usual Nihilistic ranting here and there. Verging on the formulaic, which is ideally not what improvising is about in a Nihilistic dystopian universe? There is an order in chaos theory, hence the formula explained below:

7x~x=x: the unique object not identical with itself.

This concept of an impossible object was introduced by Gottlob Frege, an eminent German logician, to designate something arbitrary for improper descriptions to refer to.
Understood?......No?......correct answer.

Tracklist:

A1	This Is A Test	0:46
A2	An Appeal To Reason	2:12
A3	Enough Is Enough	13:40
A4	Fretful	3:33
B1	Stop And Think Shit Heads	9:15
B2	Sinister	9:25

DOWNLOAD this unique object that is unlike itself HERE!

Volcano The Bear ‎– "Five Hundred Boy Piano" (United Dairies UD500) 2001

Wasn't this title a Dr. Seuss story??
VTB goes on a tour of a pretentious chinstrokers mp3 collection on quick scan; we got dark folk, musique concrete, a bit of free jazz, Edgard Varese, the BBC Radiophonic workshop,and more outsider avant garde nonsense. At times this sounds like a lost soundtrack to an episode of Bagpuss, which is no bad thing.
I'm fed up of writing about VTB, so i'll let one of the fabulous Freeman Brothers,(see the write up of Volfur to reintroduce yourself to the brothers Grimm of Leicester), explain more fully,but alas, even more humourlessly!:(

Review from Audion #46 (2002)...
This starts in a totally different world to any Volcano The Bear that we've heard before. Hairy Queen introduces the album as an offbeat Barber Shop Quartet, a side-swipe from some early 1900's musical - totally tongue-in-cheek - it sets the trend for a much more eccentric album, with a largely acoustic footing.
Some of the material is old, and some is new, and there's much more in the way of traditional instruments, lots of different winds, violin, guitars, Aaron's usual nimble drums, spontaneous composition, avant-garde free-folk, archaic chantings occasionally fleshed-out by the patent Volcano loops and industrial grooves. Unusually very vocal, angular and scrappy, some familiar gig ideas resurface, but there's not much rock music in the concoction.
It's all great stuff, though, if not as immediate as past offerings, which I guess is down to the vocal elements, which are sometimes jarring, as well as a lot more "new-wave" cum RIO (elements of L. Voag, Etron Fou, Henry Cow, The Work, et al) mixtures in it, which makes it a rewarding challenge. That is right down to the free-form almost Henry Cow (Fred Frith destroying his guitar) Greasy Truckers feel of Five Hundred Boy Piano itself.
Of course, this could all be down to the "sound of five thousand tiny fingers" to quote the promo blurb. Though, I guess it was just the desire to do something completely different. They definitely succeeded!

Tracklist:

1	Hairy Queen	1:32
2	Seeker	7:40
	The Tallest People In The World	14:17
3i	Being
3ii	Peanut Puppet
3iii	Tic/Toc
	-
4	Wooden Sailus	2:05
5	Five Hundred Boy Piano	14:51
6	I Am The Mould	8:07

DOWNLOAD a five hundred boy piano HERE!

Volcano The Bear ‎– "The Inhazer Decline" (United Dairies ‎– UD 055) 1999

Bookish Leicester Quartet, Volcano the Bear's, first 'proper' LP, on Nurse with Wound's United Dairies imprint, from the end of the 20th Century.
Shove The Residents, Renaldo and the Loaf, Nurse with Wound, Current 93, This Heat,and some carefully selected 'Krautrock', into a Kenwood Chef, and you could possibly end up with this. Plenty of silly voices,Dada-esque lyrics,daft noises, and a veritable rainbow of instruments,played with varying levels of skill and incompetence.Ladles full of 'Too clever by half' poured copiously over the finished product,although the constant invention keeps that particular irritation at bay.
Can get a bit silly, but was there anybody else doing this in 1999?.....er.....probably; but not quite as effectively.

DOWNLOAD the decline of somebody's empire HERE

Lemon Kittens - "We Buy A Hammer For Daddy" (United Dairies UD-02) 1980

Now just a duo, of Danielle Dax and Karl Blake, they produced one of the most startlingly original lp's of the DIY era.Sort of John cage meets the Krankies on bad LSD. The obvious lack of musical technique is more than made up for by that long forgotten ingredient, ideas and originality.
(sample track below)

Tracks:

1. Pain Topics (4:24)
2. Reversal 2 (2:34)
3. These Men of Old England (2:25)
4. Wrist Job / Once Green and Pleasant Land (2:45)
5. Lycanthrothene (3:06)
6. Motet (3:10)
7. Throat Violence (2:28)
8. False Alarm (Malicious) (1:58)
9. P.V.S (1:55) MP3 sample
10. Small Mercies (2:03)
11. Coasters (3:48)
12. Up In Arms (2:34)
13. The American Cousin (1:50)
14. Evidence (2:25)
15. Rome Burning (1:31)
16. (Afraid of Being) Bled by Leeches (2:14)

Download a Hammer For Daddy HERE!

Lemon Kittens ‎– "Cake Beast" (United Dairies ‎– UD 07) 1980

There are few musics that sound like they were made in a mental asylum. Mostly we only hear music that sends you to a secure unit, like Dire Straits,or Beyonce.
The Lemon Kittens are the sound of padded cells.An electroencephalogram made aural of a troubled mind. 
They inhabit a world where playing 'in time' is strictly for 'Normals',and melodies make adults scream for their mothers and children weep for joy.
The music is a feral mix of every bizarre pop and channelled experimental impulse the pair could manifest; bursting forth with all the skewed syncopation  of breaking glass. Somehow pulled through a distorted wormhole from a parallel, inverted existence, into the UK DIY scene. Poof!
So throw on that Electro-convulsive therapy kit you were saving for special occasions , set it to max, and dance to Cake Beast!

Track Listing:

A Kites
A2 Only a Rose.
B1 Popsykle

DOWNLOAD this beast of Cake HERE!

Nurse With Wound ‎– "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella" (United Dairies ‎– UD 01) 1979

Without self released tapes and vinyl the Industrial scene would not have existed. Often dealing with unpleasant and offensive themes, it isn't everyone’s cup of tea. For example, Nurse With Wound's Début release , "Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine And An Umbrella", and its artwork depicting women in various states of bondage, caused it to be banned from the Rough Trade co-operative for its politically incorrect images. Therfore it had to be distributed in other ways. Forming an alternative to the alternative!
The music is the usual tape collage of noise and found sounds, and was probably quite shocking back in 1979.Steven Stapleton was apparently offered some free studio time one weekend, and immediately called his record collecting buddies John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, persuading them to buy some instruments - none of them had played music before. The person who offered them the studio asked if he could play a little lead guitar over their "songs " and they couldn’t really refuse, hence the slightly santanaesque flourishes over huge cacophonous slabs of chaos The first release on Steven Stapleton's United Dairies label.
Have to say, the racket on these tracks do reek of a large smattering of over-cleverness; a trait that can get an artist on my Shit List, but i'll forgive them as this record, along with "Homotopy to Marie", are fine works;if this one does rather try that little bit too hard to be "weird" maaaan.
Nurse with wound are getting more famous nowadays for the "Nurse With Wound List" of "interesting" bands which was included, you would do well to check out. Read the full list here.
Don't think for one minute that Stapleton's taste is immaculate, because thaere is some absolute shite on this list as well as the great; at least PiL is on there,so that's no bad start.

(I didn't write this bit,inspired by NWW, i have cut'n'pasted it from somewhere):

"I doubt that any of Nurse With Wound realised it at the time, but the list that accompanied the first Nurse With Wound album, (and also the revised version, included with their second) has become almost like a bible for the intrepid musical adventurer. Sporting the enigmatic text: "Categories strain, crack and sometimes break, under their burden - step out of the space provided..." it has become legendary, as a reference list of revolutionary music, and a challenge to Nurse With Wound collectors around the world, who curious enough to want to hear all the music on it. Of course, this is not an easy task, as the full list nears 300 artists, and many are extremely obscure! As Steve once pointed out, some artists are listed for obvious reasons, some less-so, some are there just for one track!"

Hey check this out,the origin of the image on the sleeve is revealed:

And i thought Stapleton envisioned and  drew it himself ? I'm not the only one stooping to cut'n'paste afterall?...I suppose it fits in with the NWW cut'n'paste music style.....come oooon, what did you expect?) 

Tracklist:

A1		Two Mock Projections	6:20
A2		The Six Buttons Of Sex Appeal	13:13
B		Blank Capsules Of Embroidered Cellophane	28:19

DOWNLOAD from the dissecting table HERE!