New Crimes Tapes liked their Anarcho-Punk-a-likes-a-lot. Here's The Snails, who could easily be mistaken for Zounds.The vocalist has that trademark 'I Know Something You Don't Know' quality that the singer of Zounds had in bucketsfulls.
The Snails could have been big if they'd released a vinyl LP like their sound-a-like compatriots.
There's no lyric sheet, but somehow I know everything they're ranting about.....the usual stuff....Vivisection, Fox Hunting, Thatcher, The Nuclear Menace,Factory Enslavement, Religion etc...you know.Preaching to the converted was an Anarcho-Punk speciality.Either you agreed with it all or you don't....nothing was gonna change;only for the worse.
Looking back, the Nuclear Threat produced a great era of creativity. Thatcher was a socialist compared to even Corbins labour party today; thanks to her financial support of myself, on both the dole, and Enterprise allowance schemes i've never had to work in a factory,or have a job, in my life.....especially as she had them all shut down, and liberated thousands of slaves from the mines. If anything, Thatcher was the Punk Politician. She wanted the same things as the Punks; more money, a future(ie a job and fuck the rest of you).This is the victorian version of Anarchy, as personal freedom rather than some weird form of communism that Crass promoted.....and everyone doing it for themselves.....think about it. Even Johnny Rotten became a property Baron millionaire, and I shudder to think what ancestoral homes those trust-fund hippies in Crass inherited.
Yep its worse now, but at least Fox Hunting is banned eh?
A1 Think Tank
A2 Factory
A3 Comment
A4 From Foxhunts To Oblivion
B1 Thatcher's Victims
B2 Cocktail Version / Army Manoeuvers
B3 Church
Here's the thing about The Snails tape that I've never admitted before - in 1981 I set up New Crimes Tapes to basically put out music associated with New Crimes fanzine and/or music that I liked - The Snails from Walthamstow sent me a gloriously lo-fi demo on the cheapest make tape imaginable wrapped in sellotape and cardboard, the sound was wonderfully distorted and chaotic, featuring a singer whose voice hadn't even broken, but with some stonking tunes under the distortion and general grunge (by which I mean real grunge, not the Nirvana-led genre that came later that actually sounded quite clean and produced). I was bowled over and said i'd love to release a tape by them if they coud just clean up the sound a little bit. A few months later they submitted their obviously studio recorded demo on which they'd considerably polished up their sound and had either recruited a new singer or the original singer's voice had broken and was now doing the standard gruff cockney punk singer thing, and golden though this tape still is, it was never quite what I had in mind when I put it out. I wish I still had that original rough tape, would be great to put it out as some kind of 'lost recordings' package....
ReplyDeleteJah - that first tape was 'Don't Panic', a gloriously shambolic mess recorded in a bedroom when the band still had their 13 year old singer 'Mad Dog' Muldoon...It had some great songs on it ('Made in Hiroshima', 'The Queen is a Whore', 'Tradition') along with some of the songs that appeared on the second tape 'Shitting Bricks'...Like you, I much preferred that tape to the second tape which had vocals by Paul (from A-Z fanzine and bands such as This Bitter Lesson and Faction) and it's still high up there in my 'Wants' list from that era...
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