All these links will work presumably until I drop dead and fail to keep up payments, so if you want to share all or any of this on yr blog, you can link to my Dropbox if you can't be arsed to download the stuff yourself if you like. All the related booklets which came with the tapes are scanned and in the files too. Finally, I've copy/pasted what I wrote on my blog about each tape just in case you need a bit of context if you want to share any of this stuff yourself, though would prefer if you wrote yr own blurbs. Hopefully something in here is of interest to you. Some of it is great. Some of it is ropey as fuck. Enjoy, possibly!
Apostles - 2nd Dark Age Demo (1982) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vgbgx3ehgg78xxo/AADIymEhgUf9F_r0bcLqQg9ia?dl=01 - The Sures of Time
2 - Thalidomide
3 - King's Cross Etc.
4 - The End
5 - After the Fact
6 - LBW
7 - Red Vote Pole
8 - Hello Mark
9 - The Wicket
10 - Eric's Detachables
11 - The Innocent Bystander
12 - Alien Asian
13 - New Face in N16
One of the first tape labels I ever wrote to was Cause for Concern, run by one Larry Peterson. I'd been hammering Flowmotion for their reissued Throbbing Gristle live cassettes for a couple of months, and now my curiosity had been drawn by Larry's Sudden Surge of Power compilation featuring some fairly big names such as Test Dept, Chris & Cosey, Cultural Amnesia, and others. It was actually a pretty good tape, so I sent for a few of the other things Larry had on offer, one of these being a demo by some band called the Apostles, not so much out of curiosity as to shut Larry up. The tape came, and it looked kind of punky, but I immediately understood why he had been raving about them. I had taken the Apostles for some fringe anarchopunk outfit, the sort which would eventually put out a yappy 7" on Crass Records and then dutifully vanish into obscurity; but the Apostles, as I discovered, didn't really sound like anyone in particular, and didn't quite fit in anywhere. The songs were political, but quite personal too, and a long way from the anticipated slogans about Thatcher and vegetarianism; and they were incredibly tuneful, atmospheric, even haunting - one minute sounding like the angriest thing ever committed to a Woolworths C60, next having you crying your eyes out. 2nd Dark Age Demo remains more or less my favourite indie tape cassette of all time. The songs sound rudimentary in places, just blokes stood in front of a cheap tape recorder for an hour or so hoping it doesn't sound too shite, but Christ - the atmosphere of the thing, the passion, and the uncompromising refusal to perpetuate bullshit or to repeat audience-pleasing slogans; in terms of emotion it still makes James Brown sound like Kraftwerk to me. As chance had it, I ended up writing to the Apostles, then buying everything I could get my hands on, and then about ten years after first hearing 2nd Dark Age I ended up in the band once it transformed into first Academy 23 and then the first version of UNIT. Having now worked with Andy Martin of the Apostles and known him for many years, it's interesting that he should be one of the few people whose real life persona has not spoiled the pleasure I've taken in listening to his early stuff. It's generally true that you should never meet your heroes, but Andy it seems was an exception to that rule. He's his own worst enemy - as he will himself admit on occasion - and the world's most aggravating fucker, but he's also one of the very few people I've ever met whom I still regard as a genius, or as having the potential for genius, despite knowing him. Naturally he now regards 2nd Dark Age as utter rubbish, his exact words being:
The 2nd Dark Age was so long ago and we've released such a wealth of decent quality material since then (well, since the mid 1990s anyway) I no longer care what you release! How you can enjoy that abysmal crap is a major mystery but I'm really glad you do because it means our effort wasn't a complete waste of time.
Anyway, here it is - thirteen songs about racism, homophobia, disability, alienation, self-loathing, and generally failing to function in a society broken beyond hope of repair - track titles based on a composite of the Cause for Concern version, and the one on Discogs - neither of which are actually accurate.
Seeing as we're here, Andy has been putting together some sort of CD retrospective of Apostles releases, at least the vinyl, so you might want to watch this space if interested; and I suppose I should also plug his writings, self-published as breeze block-sized tomes of tiny, tiny print which could be used to stun cattle, or even to mount a rousing defence against an intrusive bayliff and which are available from Lulu Publishing. Andy Nunn reckons Faded Fragments is well worth a look, for what it may be worth.
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Apostles - Libertarian Propaganda (1982) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ya99kbxzmln6st9/AADstXnq6_VbxCdrGdp_sPzda?dl=01 - The Apostles
2 - Kill Your Pet Prole
3 - Kings Cross Etc.
4 - Thalidomide
5 - Fear of Freedom
6 - Eric's Detachables
7 - Fucking Queer
8 - Proletarian Autonomy
9 - Burn the Witch
10 - Libertarian Youth
11 - The Innocent Bystander
12 - Etc. Etc.
13 - Mister Missed Her
14 - The Death Factory
15 - New Face in N16
16 - After the Fact
17 - Alien Asian
18 - 1985
The Apostles demos had slipped way down my list of digitisation priorities, partially due to a bad taste left in my mouth by certain stuff Andy had taken to posting on YouTube. I still maintain that he's actually one of the most right on Ben Eltons I've ever met, but he really lets his love of offending anyone to the left of Hitler get the better of him, and after a while you get a bit fed up of making excuses for people only for their next outing to be an operatic version of Mein Kampf or whatever. Anyway, it's been a while since I last sighed and shook my head at Andy's latest brainfart, and I've now digitised about 95% of my collection, so fuck it - let's convert those Apostles tapes. I know a few of you have been waiting to hear them.
I had 2nd Dark Age back in the day and it's long been a favourite, and yet somehow I came to their other demo tapes quite late. It seemed to be a different person selling them every month, and then the vinyl records began to appear, so I didn't catch up until the nineties when someone gave me a bag of old tapes they didn't want - possibly Larry Peterson - including the first, third and fourth demos. The first was unplayable and unlistenable - a crap WHSmith C120 which unravelled inside the player, plus it sounded like a cheapo mono tape recorder left running in the same room as the world's worst heavy metal band, a very basic rehearsal tape complete with screw ups, false starts, and no-one being able to remember any of the songs. For some reason I had the third and fourth demos confused with those later tapes which were mostly just alternate mixes of the stuff they had released on their EPs, so I was slightly blown away when I came to digitise this one. I had no memory of it sounding this good, possibly in part due to it being a cassette which has hardly been played. Andy seems to take a dim view of these early tapes, but I think he's being picky, and I actually think they're amongst the Apostles' greatest work. Maybe the mix isn't perfect, but the power and feeling of these songs has really been captured. To be honest, I like this stuff a lot better than the records.
I should probably point out that the Apostles vinyl material can be downloaded from the UNIT page on Bandcamp, and as for some of the more suspicious titles to be found elsewhere on the same page, see the first paragraph or take it up with Andy himself. In his defense, I notice some of the more horrendous material from Equinox Screams seems to be thankfully absent from the downloads, and before you ask - no, I won't be digitising Rights for Whites or others of its kind "recorded when I wasn't feeling very well" (as Andy told me), regardless of whether or not such werks should be considered ironic.
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Apostles - Topics for Discussion (1983) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nku6otia13nun18/AADQhf-Fbb4Hp_7HmbBdb6cUa?dl=01 - Skin Deep
2 - After the Fact (NW3)
3 - The Scream
4 - Red Vote Poll etc. (LBW)
5 - We Buy a Hammer for Daddy
6 - Rediffusion Refugee
7 - Just When You Thought it Was Safe to Plug In Your Synthesiser
8 - Untitled I
9 - Hello John
10 - Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan
11 - Chalet en Colere
12 - 1980s
13 - Untitled II
14 - Untitled III
15 - Fucking Queer
More Apostles, and with others still to come. This one seems a bit more patchy than the first two, but still rates a listen, I'd say, and is distinguished by a proliferation of what I suppose we'll have to call jams or presumably improvised numbers which never got re-recorded or recycled as anything else - pretty unusual for one of Andy's groups. Talking of which, I was a bit disappointed to find The Island, which I quite liked and took me fucking ages to learn to play and which I thought was an original UNIT track back in 1997, was actually recycled from the thing at the end of side one of this tape; therefore bah. This tape also sees the apparent arrival of the bluesy influence in the band's music, for what that may be worth; and We Buy a Hammer for Daddy acknowledges Andy's love of the Lemon Kittens, but isn't actually one of their tracks, so far as I'm aware.
Since last week I've discovered that
the excellent Mr. Zchivago of Die or DIY? has a ton of Apostles freebies on his blog, (TeeHee I may change me name to The Excellent Mr Zchivago JZ)including a few I don't have, and even the first one. I'd say I've no idea how I failed to notice this, but then I've only just realised the blog is called Die or DIY? rather than DIY or Die! so clearly I'm not very observant. Anyway, have a look here, then please do yourself a massive favour and have a nose around the rest of the blog because he has some real treasures on there.
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Apostles - Christ! It's the Apostles! (1983) C30
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ycq0dbf0xyb4zi4/AABW0hQB4-sBphsOumdXTNTNa?dl=01 - The Cripple's Radio Show
2 - After the Fact
3 - Skin Deep
4 - Swimmers in the Sea of Life
5 - Class War I
6 - Class War II
7 - The Phoenix
We're now entering the era during which new Apostles tapes tended to comprise remixes of the stuff they were recording and releasing as 7" EPs, which are still available in original form here - at least I assume they're in original form. I have the records so I've never bothered to download the MP3 versions, or whatever format they're in, so if these are all eighties style disco megamixes which Andy did without telling anyone (which I wouldn't put past him), it ain't my fault, guvnor.
This was one of a couple of tapes put out by Protect & Survive as run by a bloke called Christ, Crystal or possibly Chris, depending on what week it was. I think this was Andy helping the guy out by giving him some Apostles material with which to kick off his label. These are mostly variations on tracks from the second EP - which was fucking brilliant by the way - supposedly remixed, although I can't tell with a couple of them; but you're getting this for free and it's still cracking stuff regardless of how it relates to what was on the record, so nyer.
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Apostles - Live at the Recession Club 21/9/83 (1983) C30
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cip6oy0bqry0s4d/AAAmz9vosxGyozYdgPT0YfgGa?dl=01 - The Innocent Bystander
2 - Rediffusion Refugee
3 - The Scream
4 - The Patient
5 - I am a Rock
6 - Splitting in Two
This is my second Apostles tape from the Protect & Survive label, and a bit of an oddity, I suppose. The performance was live at the Recession Club in Hackney which was organised and run by the Apostles, Larry Peterson, and probably some others too - and a lot of your industrial faves played there before you had even heard of them because you were still into Depeche Toad and Howard Jones. I'd heard of them though, but then I was there, mate - well, not actually there at the Recession Club as I was still in short trousers and too likely to get bummed flat if I went down to that London on my own, but I was there in spirit, or at least in the form of a little pile of letters and badges in Andy's house.
I never saw the Apostles live but the legend has it that they could have used a few more rehearsals (which was arguably true by the time I joined, after one name change or another), but on the other hand, this one sounds like it was recorded through the PA - hence lack of audience sound, unless they had all been driven away by Bourbonese Qualk or whoever. Additionally, they lacked a drummer, so instead played as a duo with tapes, but not actual tapes of drums, just tapes, such as a recording of Larry Peterson and Dave having a chat as you can hear during Rediffusion Refugee. I remember finding this a bit underwhelming when I first heard the tape, but now I think it works quite well, particularly whatever the hell that sound is on The Scream. Oh - and I know there's drumming on the first and last tracks, which would be Kev of Three Heads Nodding, sadly no longer with us according to Chris Low, another former Apostle from this era, due to a certain fondness for the old arm candy. Shame - didn't know the guy but he wrote nice letters.
...and the only other thing I have to say is to point out that Splitting in Two is obviously the ATV song, and is chuffin' fab.
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Omelettes - demo (1984) C30
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/l1tga18j4uaezrs/AAAV6CjLr_VCwSVuTdHBN7rYa?dl=01 - Asking For It
2 - The Money Song
3 - What Would We Do Without the Alien Asian?
4 - Hello Deutschmark I
5 - If There Was Anarchy, What Would We Use for Money?
6 - Hello Deutschmark II
7 - You Can Make Good Money Playing the Blues
Here's another one by special request, and the last which will be by special request. I have a couple of hundred of these old tapes to get through, and I plan to digitise most of them and leave them here for free upload. That's a lot of work right there, but I get through it by doing two tapes a week, every Sunday morning, usually one which you lot will never get to hear because it just wouldn't be of interest to anyone but myself, and one of the kind of which a few people may have heard of, the sort of thing I've been adding to this blog over the last couple of years. It's a lot of work, and what makes it fun is getting up on Sunday, going to the shelf, and thinking what the fuck am I going to digitise today?, then picking something I probably haven't heard in two decades and firing up the computer, already burning with curiosity as to what's going to come out of those speakers and whether it will still sound as good as it once did. Therefore, when I get up on Sunday morning and I already have a list of requests because some bloke just can't live another two months without hearing a tape made by someone who used to collect Genesis P. Orridge's pools coupon back in 1978, it sort of sucks the fun out of it for me. So leave requests, by all means, but keep in mind that if I have the tape, you'll get to hear it when I feel like digitising it; and it will still be free; and it will still be something you probably wouldn't have had otherwise, so be happy.
This week's masterpiece is Larry Peterson of Cause for Concern tapes mucking about with Dave and Andy of the Apostles. These tracks were on one side of a tape Larry sent me and which he described as this group I was in called the Omelettes, although I've a feeling it may have been just Larry who regarded it as having been a group rather than just the three of them pissing about one afternoon. If you're familiar with the Apostles, you'll probably recognise these tracks, some with original lyrics, some with new lyrics improvised by Larry - and I came up with the titles, obviously. Larry was later vocalist in some sort of rock group called Many Happy Returns, and he sang backing vocals on Revolution Baby from the Nocturnal Emissions album, Songs of Love & Revolution. I met him a couple of times and he was a wonderful and very, very funny guy, but I really got the feeling he resented his own failure to have become either rich or famous as a result of having been involved with tapes, and he wouldn't fucking shut up about money. He showed me a stack of obscure records and tapes, the kind of stuff I've been posting here, and told me he was getting rid of it all. 'None of this lot will ever be worth anything,' he said. 'If any of these bands were going to make it big, it would have happened by now.'
...and that's why you probably shouldn't meet your heroes.
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Apostles - Fire in the Sky (1985) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p1i2s1zz6tgx4mb/AABs9Jla88UvuEtVwjPOKeTFa?dl=01 - Magnificat
2 - Rights for Whites
3 - Mother Nature Speaks
4 - Oh Death
5 - BDD I
6 - The Dubious Ascension of Mike Finch I
7 - Run For It
8 - Too Much Confusion
9 - Mean Mistreater
10 - Mistreated
11 - Sleazy!
12 - Kill or Cure
13 - Pale Blue Eyes
14 - Rock Against Communism
15 - The Dubious Ascension of Mike Finch II
16 - BDD II
17 - The Bitch (part one)
18 - The Bitch (part two)
19 - Danger Zone
20 - Stop the Rot
21 - Sally
22 - Tomorrow Belongs to Us
23 - Spirit in the Sky
24 - Fire in the Sky
25 - Worker's Autonomy (part one)
26 - Worker's Autonomy (part two)
27 - Mistreated
28 - When You Got a Good Friend
Never publically shared due to tiresome proliferation of proto-edgelord content.
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Apostles - Strength Through Purity (1985) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vkptjeulj1q3edq/AAD38hPnFTXV_U9zwmfE2drfa?dl=01 - Eric's Detachables
2 - Red
3 - Interference
4 - Worker's Autonomy (part one)
5 - The Master Race
6 - The Patient
7 - But is it Art?
8 - Mob Violence (part two)
9 - When You Got a Good Friend
10 - Visions of the End
Never publically shared due to tiresome proliferation of proto-edgelord content.
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Apostles - Will I Ever Be Free? (1985) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qs9qpnjbj37we3l/AAAHGWAOvWRaoYPmvCsP8Fo7a?dl=01 - After the Fact I
2 - After the Fact II
3 - After the Fact III
4 - The Curse
5 - Class War
6 - Proletarian Autonomy
7 - Hello Black Flag
8 - Alien Asian
9 - Skin Deep
10 - Blind Discrimination
11 - Kings Cross Etc.
12 - The Cripple's Radio Story
13 - 1985
14 - Pale Blue Eyes
15 - Hello You Bastard
16 - The Island
17 - Mob Violence
18 - Stumped
19 - The Innocent Bystander
20 - The Phoenix
21 - Mob Violence (part two)
22 - Swimming in the Sea of Life
23 - Libertarian Youth
This probably wasn't the Apostles tape you were waiting for, but it's the one I'm posting. Sorry. I finally finished editing Fire in The Sky, deducing that my copy - bewilderingly recorded on a C180 and lasting three fucking hours - included side two twice, plus Visions of the End - the twenty-four minute industrial opera from the Strength Through Purity C60, which I also digitised just for the sake of checking it was the same version. I won't be sharing either publically because although they're otherwise decent tapes, both include material composed when Andy wasn't feeling very well, as he once put it, these being (for the record, seeing as the shitstorm is puzzlingly still pending regarding this material, and we might as well get it out of the way):
The Master Race - See, this was the first of these songs I actually heard, and it's very obviously taking the piss out of the bonehead community - kill your parents until they're dead, pogo on their fucking heads etc. etc. This was on Strength Through Purity which Andy gave me to put out on my own tape label, Do Easy, and with a big old swastika as the front cover. This made me feel massively uneasy about the undertaking but, given the sarcastic tone of The Master Race, I assumed it was simply Andy indulging in his characteristic leftie-baiting, or just trying to piss people off, or even testing me or something.
Rock Against Communism - Whilst I have no actual problem with the idea of presenting opposition to Communism, it probably depends on what you consider Communism to be, and if you consider Communism to be, for example, lesbian wholefood collectives and other things which annoy readers of the Daily Mail - notably socialism, then you can fuck off, quite frankly. I strongly suspect this one was named after the National Front's answer to Rock Against Racism, and I tell myself that this was Andy's sense of humour (a judgement I'm approximately qualified to make because I know the guy), more leftie-baiting, and an attempt to alienate fans of his own group (which has itself been a common theme over the years) even before we get onto the apparently Marxist, even Maoist tracks recorded by UNIT, Rock in Opposition etc., but even so, being as it's impossible to tell the difference between this song and the sort of shite once peddled by the likes of No Remorse (apart from being more tuneful), it isn't even an argument really worth having.
Stop the Rot - His nibs once told me that the title was originally a chant by a far right paper seller (probably National Front) he encountered in Brick Lane, I think it was - very obviously upper class, waving copies of his shitty rag around whilst trilling stop the rot! in the style of William Joyce. The thrust of Andy telling me this story was not how cool and awesome he thought the guy seemed, and so I've always assumed this one to be - as with the above - another horribly misjudged parody. The cover of Fire in the Sky contains all of the usual impassioned denouncements of racism, homophobia, and so on, but, you know...
Kill or Cure - Yeah, the homophobia - given that Andy is himself gay, and that only a complete fucking idiot could mistake Fucking Queer for anything homophobic, this one is a real dilly of a pickle tangled up with self-loathing and all manner of bipolar shit. I wouldn't even know where to start.
Too Much Confusion - Fire in the Sky's actual Skrewdriver cover version...
As I say, I've known Andy a long, long time, and I don't recall one single instance of him ever having cracked a racist joke, making a racist observation, or anything of the sort, and yet see above. All I can say in his defense is that he's a very complicated man too often let down by his own urge to piss people off, and regardless of the potential for any of these tracks to be no more than innocent parodies of something awful, I have no wish to be complicit in distributing them, so I won't be sharing either Fire in the Sky or Strength Through Purity. I ummed and ahhed over it, maybe figuring full-disclosure might be the best way to go, let people decide for themselves, free speech blah blah blah, but I've decided against it because I don't need the headache when I don't even like these shitty tracks (possibly excepting Master Race because it's funny), and there's already quite enough rightie toss in the world right now and I'd rather not add to it. If the term libtard or anything invoking political correctness as a pejorative crossed your thoughts whilst reading the above, please discontinue your existence. Thanks in advance.
Anyway...
This tape seems to come from the era during which the Apostles were getting quite popular, relatively speaking, and had taken to furnishing interested labels with what were essentially greatest hits collections, being unable to generate enough new material to give everyone their own original tape to release. Will I Ever Be Free? was the one that ended up on Trev Ward's label (and yet somehow I'm the bloke who gets the fucking swastika on the cover) and seems to be mostly material, or variations on material from the first couple of 7" EPs. Presumably superior quality versions of these tracks appear on the Apostles singles collection download which you should buy from the UNIT bandcamp page, but I figured I'd share this tape here because it seems to feature a couple of curiosities of mysterious origin which may not even be on the official download seeing as I don't know where they're from (Larry Peterson singing on Hello You Bastard for example) and because it doesn't seem to include any Jim Davidson covers, so far as I can tell...
Word of warning: the quality is a bit ropey, sounding something like a copy of a copy (nothing to do with me, I swear), but it sort of works as a record of its time. If, after reading the above, you're beginning to wonder what anyone ever saw in the Apostles, then give this a listen.
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Apostles - Cartography (1987) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jyto1kmgybsg1fm/AAD5TI3DEp4PJJ0E5LM9OBioa?dl=01 - Cartography (part one)
2 - Cartography (part two)
3 - Forbidden Love
Cartography was consistently billed as an Apostles album, as distinct from a tape, although it doesn't appear to have been included amongst those reissued on the UNIT Bandcamp page, so er... whatever. The idea was that the tape came with a folder of artwork - all separate sheets rather than a booklet - and the art was part of the whole package and as integral as the music; so I suppose Cartography could also be seen as a dry run for Academy 23's Europe Awake! I'm not sure if this was the last Apostles thing, but it was pretty late and the experimentation seems to suggest them getting a bit weary of tried and tested formats, hence two long pieces of continuous music, each taking up a side of the tape. As you will hear, there didn't seem to be much point breaking them up into the individual tracks listed on the information sheet, so I haven't - excepting the final number at the close of side two which is clearly its own thing and has been edited as such. It isn't listed on the information sheet so I've assumed it's called Forbidden Love.
Side one is mostly just Dave noodling away, and is fairly proggy. It's a fairly understated piece as a whole presumably thanks to the absence of Andy, and prefigures the HAVE tapes Dave later gave away with issues of Harlequin, so it's actually pretty great. Side two is some performance art thing undertaken by the Demolition Company with Dave and Andy somehow involved. It's a live recording and a bit of a racket. I guess maybe you had to be there.
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Apostles - Twelfth Gate to the Underworld (1988) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wfgw8b2c53jbacx/AADRst3OjJxnkL-KpFeMHT-Ra?dl=01 - Pigs for Slaughter
2 - Proletarian Autonomy
3 - Alien Asian
4 - Fucking Queer
5 - 1985
6 - Eric's Detachables
7 - Skin Deep
8 - Class War
9 - The Cripple
10 - Swimming in the Sea of Life
11 - The Stoke Newington 8
12 - The Innocent Bystander
13 - The Creature
14 - The Curse
15 - Blind Discrimination
16 - Kings Cross Etc.
17 - Stumped
18 - Drowning in the Sea of Life
19 - Punk Squatters
20 - Kill or Cure
21 - Rock Against Communism
22 - Our Mother, the Earth...
23 - Pig Violence
24 - Tomorrow Belongs to Us
25 - No More Heartaches
26 - Punk Squat
27 - 5.975MHz
28 - Animals
Never publically shared due to tiresome proliferation of proto-edgelord content.
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Apostles - Live at the Academy 108 (1989) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nz9kyc5mszyczh1/AAD1cM3kn0IFriZ1NUK-VFY9a?dl=01 - We Are All Prostitutes
2 - High Rise Living
3 - Urban Kids
4 - After the Fact
5 - Pigs for Slaughter
6 - Mister Missed Her
7 - Kings Cross Etc.
8 - Thalidomide
9 - The Sword
10 - Daze of the Weak
11 - New Face in N16
12 - Pagga in Pilrig
13 - Mistreated
14 - Our Mother, the Earth
15 - The Hunt
16 - 5.975MHz
17 - The Visitors
18 - Fucking Queer
19 - A Case History
20 - Pig Violence
21 - Walking Away
22 - The Witness
23 - For You
Here's my last Apostles tape, which is a bit of a relief. Weirdly, I have no memory of having acquired this one, or listening to it up until about a week ago - not sure why. This fact seems additionally mysterious given that it may even be their best, or their best which isn't Second Dark Age if you prefer.
'But Loz,' I hear you cry, 'how can that be? The Apostles were notoriously ropey live, and this is surely a recording of some gig.'
Well, yes, but as Andy explains on the cover, it was recorded direct from the microphones and is therefore good quality because there's no audience sound - which I'm sure will make sense to our technically minded subscribers. I haven't read the rest of the cover because I've spent quite enough time squinting at microscopic type over the last month, but I expect there will be some account of how our man did such a good job playing the guitar whilst singing at the same time, something he used to have trouble with. Actually, he seems to be playing a couple of guitars at the same time on a few of these tracks, which must have taken some practice, and was surely a treat for everyone who attended this event which was definitely a genuine live gig with an audience and probably a bloke selling pies at the back.
My guess is that this was some sort of Apostles bowing out thing, hence all the old favourites - and definitive recordings too - plus covers of tracks by Chelsea, the Pop Group, and er... whatever that last track was. Certainly it seems like a precursor to Academy 23, not least with thee spellings which I've ignored because I'm a grown man; and Pagga in Pilrig was relocated to Pilton and became an Academy 23 standard.
If anyone doesn't get the Apostles, this is probably the one to listen to.
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Academy 23 - Europe Awake (1991) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xjjr3f60z7niu0r/AABRzsqwsYz4GN3WWU97oskOa?dl=01 - Helige Tod
2 - Birth-Death
3 - Portents
4 - Dog On
5 - Donor
6 - We Are the Lust
7 - Europe's Freedom
8 - Heroism
9 - Europe Awake!
10 - One Question...
11 - Warfair
12 - New Britain
13 - Interference
14 - If...
15 - One Saturday Night
16 - The Survivor
Never publically shared due to tiresome proliferation of proto-edgelord content.
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Academy 23 - Aonaibh Ri Chiele (1991) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bwrhnod8cyh501x/AADl5OXQ0F6GGfEZZj0xRuaEa?dl=01 - Lally
2 - Scots Wha Hae
3 - The Colliers' Eight Hour Day
4 - Lee
5 - Three Nights and a Sunday Double Time
6 - The Works Outing
7 - The Only Catholic in the Rangers Team
8 - The Weekend Song
9 - Peggy
10 - The Patriarch
11 - The Irish Washerwoman
12 - Highland Lament
13 - Dhòmhnuill Duibh
14 - O'Reilly and the Big MacNeill
15 - Fingal fae Falkirk
16 - The Ballad of Q4
17 - Aberdeen Beach
18 - O'er tha Watter
19 - The John McLean March
20 - Dark Island
21 - The Banks O'Doon
22 - The Fieldmouse
23 - The Culture of Glasgow
Well, looks like we've finally crossed the ferric event horizon here. I wasn't going to bother sharing Academy 23 tapes I didn't appear on, but what the fuck - I suppose someone somewhere wants to hear them, possibly. I wasn't even going to bother digitising this one for my own virtual collection, but I've been doing one of these a week, every week for the last million years and seem to have been carried on by momentum.
This was the second Academy 23 tape, the one which most closely crosses over with Relationships, the vinyl album, if anyone remembers that. This tape is quite well recorded for what it is, but never particularly resonated with me, so this is probably about the third time I've listened to it. I suppose we can at least be grateful that it doesn't seem to have any songs which just happen to carry the same title as a Skrewdriver ditty by massive coincidence; and a couple of the songs are sort of amusing, I guess. There's a whole load of mythology about the recording of this cassette on the cover, but you need special android eyes with a magnification capacity to be able to read any of it, which I don't so I didn't.
More Academy 23 next week, and the couple of weeks after that, but fuck knows what happens beyond that point.
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Academy 23 - Look Back in Hunger (1992) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qq6o0d4c4fsuqko/AABVnet356miakTJ0A4WXfI4a?dl=01 - The Invisible Friend
2 - A Song About Sex
3 - Kill Your Pet Mason
4 - A Minor Adjustment
5 - Face of a Boy
6 - The Outsider
7 - The Boy Next Door
8 - Double Standards
9 - The Stranger
10 - Sweet Dance
11 - Beat of the Blood
12 - Winning the Struggle
13 - Incandescence
14 - The Reptile Kid
15 - Ladies & Gentlemen
16 - Iconoclasm
17 - Dead Cell
18 - The Ville Man
19 - Oculatis Abis
20 - Spit It Out!
21 - Gay Plague
22 - Conspiracy
23 - Simon: Sleep!
24 - War of Words
25 - Single Standards
26 - UK92
Here's another Academy 23 tape unsullied by either my surprisingly quiet guitar or anyone simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, and probably the best one by some way thanks to having a few tunes on there, and some actual corkers such as The Stranger and Beat of the Blood (both written by Dave I think - probably says in the booklet but I can't be arsed to check). The Pink Floyd style psychedelic flanging effect you will hear on the first couple of tracks, then again later on in the tape at one point, is due to the tape cassette getting mangled in the machine, except I think it was whichever tape this was copied from rather than my copy as mine looks fine; so sorry, but that's the best I can do. If it's a problem, please consider that persons of Afro-Carribean origin are presently being shipped "back" to Jamaica despite not having lived there since they were three months old by the shitty British government, so your whining about the quality of something you got for free is really neither here nor there in the great scheme of things.
Actually, I'm not even convinced the first four or five tracks are even by Academy 23 because they sound pretty different; and including a few songs by a completely different band is exactly the sort of thing Andy would have done, so who knows? I don't, but as I said I couldn't be arsed to look in the booklet. Also, when editing the digitised file, I seemed to have found myself with an extra track among those at the beginning of side two, so I assume one of them was actually something with two parts, so I don't actually know how closely my editing and dividing this lot up into individual tracks reflects what was recorded - but it sounds the same so whatever.
In case you're an ignoramus or culturally deprived, Incandescence musicalises the poetry from The Poetry Society, an episode of Hancock's Half Hour and possibly the greatest thing ever broadcast on BBC Radio.
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Academy 23 - Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (1993) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p1eu0il88942di5/AACnhv_V1tx1GVku5mW7TVpOa?dl=01 - A Beast of Prey
2 - So it Goes
3 - Shitfag
4 - Loki's Soliloquy
5 - Biological Catastrophe
6 - I Love Pop Music
7 - Ay Waukin, O
8 - A Post-Modernist Dissertation
9 - The Sole Hygiene of the World
10 - Trilogy I: Nothing Matters
11 - Trilogy II: Hardline
12 - Trilogy III: Sick of People
13 - Nide I
14 - Prelude
15 - Epitaph
16 - The Process
17 - Chant / A Parcel of Rogues
18 - You Sense It / Deutsches Lied
19 - Ein Neue Idee für Europa
20 - Neue Idee
21 - Opus 23
22 - Nide II
23 - Justice for Scotland / Lee
24 - Individuality (hidden track)
This was the one they put out just before I joined. To be honest I've barely listened to the thing as it never made much of an impression on me, which is partially why it ended up in the suitcase during that first raid on the mystic treasury of cassettes still located at my mother's house on the other side of the Atlantic ocean - just curiosity, basically.
Digitising and listening to it now, I can see why it didn't get much in the way of rewinds. It's all right, and in fact it's decent by the standards of most bands so far as I'm concerned, but there's not much that really stands out as amazing. There's the Boyd Rice-isms which seemed a lot funnier then than they do now, at least to me, and the more tuneful stuff is all right but could have benefited from a better mix, or at least a generally louder mix relative to the other tracks; and then there's fucking Shitfag. I really can't work out what Pete was playing at with that one - anti-smoking power electronics. You don't like smoking, dude. We get it. Was it supposed to be funny, at least to the sort of people who chuckle over amusing run-out spiral mottos on early Whitehouse records? Was it supposed to be funny with a serious message, namely don't smoke those fags, you unhealthy fucker. I don't know. Pete was always a bit straight-edge whilst also being quite difficult to figure out, as I realised on the day I picked up some fanzine he'd had printed at Catford Copy Centre on the the grounds of it being quite near where I worked, said fanzine turning out to be some kind of Third Reich appreciation society material. At least that's what it looked like. Hopefully I was wrong.
[edit 9/8/20 - apparently I was wrong and it was the booklet which came with You've Heard it all Before, so apologies to Pete - too much time spent around those simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery and the whole are they or aren't they? deal gets a bit fucking exhausting after a while.]
As a point of possibly minor interest, my own unfortunate encounter with the Terror of Toxteth referred to in Biological Catastrophe is detailed here.
Well, some of this is good. Some of it's pish. It's a tape that didn't quite know what it wanted to be. Not recommended for use at parties.
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Academy 23 - SDS Gegenseitige Vergeltungsmaßnahmen (1993) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9t9drik9c6xe1zy/AAD3wEMUr9aguNi7bGUVYY4ra?dl=01 - Keine Krankheit
2 - Hell Leute
3 - Ulrike Meinhof
4 - Andreas Baader
5 - Uberholt!
6 - Die Fabrik
7 - Ein Gütiger Ungeheuer / Ein Held
8 - Weiss Mann - Schwarz Mann
9 - Vorgeschichte
10 - Aussetzenen
11 - Es Gibt Soviele Dinge Zu Tun
12 - Der Licht Dass Lichten Jeden Mann
13 - Für Nguyen Van Troi (Teil 1 & 2)
14 - Arbeit Macht Freiheit!
15 - Brudi An Die S-Bahn
16 - Noch Fällte Der Regen (Tiel 1 & 2)
17 - Wie Eine Flut Von Kraft Und Licht
I never quite worked out why Andy Martin asked me to join Academy 23, the group he formed in the wake of the Apostles. Either it was because he thought I was famous, having been a member of Konstruktivists (who I'm still not convinced were any better known than the Apostles had been), or because I represented a source of free artwork; but whatever the reason, it almost certainly wasn't because of my amazing musicianship. Well, whatever reason, I was glad to have been asked as Academy 23's uncomfortably titled Europe, Awake! remains possibly the greatest cassette to ever find itself saddled with the term industrial, at least to my ears. SDS Gegenseitige Vergeltungsmaßnahmen was more or less the follow up to Europe, Awake! thematically speaking, the second cassette having been an ill-advised collection of Andy Stewart covers, Donald Where's Your Troosers and the like.
This was the first material to which I contributed - mostly synth (an SH-101 I'd borrowed from Andrew Cox), although I played various woodworking tools and declared I am a good and efficient worker! in Russian on Arbeit Macht Freiheit! because I'd been learning to speak Russian at the time. I liked the letters, and Andy probably encouraged me because he had been learning German. I must admit I found it initially difficult adapting to Andy's methodology as I'm more accustomed to just turning a tape recorder on and seeing what the fuck happens, whereas Andy is very much someone who composes in advance.
So there was this, everything in German excepting the Wire cover (uncredited on cassette sleeve but mentioned in booklet). I'm not sure why it was all in German except for possibly good old why the fuck not? Andy claimed that our cassettes and one CD sold quite well over there, but it could just as easily have been his desire to parade his newly learnt language just to see if he could do it. I don't speak German at all, but am told by German acquaintances that he did reasonably well albeit with a slightly odd accent. Of course this also means that I have no idea what these songs are about. I doubt there's any overt tribute to Adolf Hitler here principally because Andy seemed to be going through a bit of a Marxist phase when we recorded this, as seems to be indicated by what I can tell of the titles, plus Arbeit Macht Freiheit! is approximately Constructivist in spirit, meaning those Russian dudes rather than Glenn Wallis.
...and whilst we're on the subject of work making us free, yes I know - and there's a rune on the cover and it's all in German and the first paragraph makes reference to something called Europe, Awake! Even given Andy's occasional nods in the general direction of Boyd Rice, the answer remains no, at least not beyond his having the political elasticity of a yo-yo depending on who he's trying to piss off at the time. He's come out with some utter bollocks over the years, but I wouldn't have remained friends with the bloke for the last three decades were he of Wakefordian stripe. If you're still not convinced, please take it up with the man himself.
So there you go. The tape originally came with a sixteen page booklet of essays (all in German I'm afraid) with some artwork by myself and others, which is included in the download as scans.
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Academy 23 - Birth in December (1994) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4fk3hnw1io67nxu/AABmTwkMv_iHS19Mz4KwFU3Xa?dl=01 - Patriotic Hymn
2 - Zerstort!
3 - High Rise We'ans
4 - The Collier Laddie
5 - The 15th
6 - Used To...
7 - Right Across the River
8 - Aye, Waukin' O
9 - Cam Ye O'er Frae France
10 - Nide
11 - Cenotaph
12 - Unserer Neue Maschine
13 - Hadrian's Wall
Here's another one, and the really doubtful material was my own, which I'm sure you'll agree makes for a pleasant change. Patriotic Hymn and Cenotaph were both recorded (on Andrew Cox's fancy keyboard) back in 1992 as Family of Noise tracks when I'd been going through a heavy Death in June period, hence my frowning in black clothes with a Bavarian castle in the background. Patriotic Hymn is specifically named after a painting by Giacomo Balla rather than my enduring love of Noel's Telly Addicts, Ginster's pasties, and everything which made Britain great; and Cenotaph was partially informed by the Severed Heads' Nation and represents my thankfully brief foray into martial industrial, which I suppose at least demonstrates just how piss-easy that shit is. What larks! These tracks probably would have remained unreleased had Andy not decided to include them on this tape, so thanks, Andy.
Elsewhere you will find a couple of half decent Wire covers, Nathan's thing which I thought was quite good, and a load of the Celtic stuff. The booklet featured art from people I've never heard of, which I'm sure will make sense if you bother to read the thing; and I assume Birth in December was in fact some sort of canny refutation of the aforementioned Death in June. Clever wording. Cheers.
More chuckles next week, readers.
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Academy 23 - Live in Hackney and Chatham (1995) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/48m7jbs1v4u9bsb/AAC_zNXcH8tOGp2fqdIj6yeta?dl=0Hackney Hospital 18/12/94:
1 - The Quantum Quickstep
2 - Alien Nation
3 - Cam Ye O'er Frae France
4 - King's Cross Etc.
5 - Pagga in Pilton
6 - The Patient
7 - We Are the Lust
8 - Look Into the Sky
9 - Willie MacKintosh
10 - At the Academy
11 - Mob Violence
Churchill's, Chatham 10/2/95:
12 - The Quantum Quickstep
13 - We Are the Lust
14 - Cam Ye O'er Frae France
15 - Look Into the Sky
16 - King's Cross Etc.
17 - Pagga in Pilton
18 - The Stranger
19 - The Patient
20 - Alien Nation
21 - At the Academy
If you've bothered to click on this link then you probably already know who Academy 23 were, thus saving me the effort of repeating myself. If not, then I refer you to this previous entry or have a look at the Apostles page on the excellent Punky Gibbon site, and I'm sure you'll be able to piece it all together somehow. This tape comprised the first two gigs with myself playing guitar, although I think Dave and Andy had played a gig as Academy 23 somewhere in Scotland prior to this. Anyway, this was the line up of the band which eventually transmogrified into UNIT, and these songs were our set for a year or so - some of our own stuff, a few Apostles numbers tarted up with new lyrics, a Death In June cover (to which usual terms and conditions apply) and At the Academy which someone told me is actually a King Crimson number with the plates switched, although I never really cared enough about King Crimson to bother finding out.
The first gig was at the part of the hospital in which both Andy and (I think) Robert Dellar were working as part of Hackney Patients' Council, possibly, so about half of the audience were there because they had been sectioned. They seemed to appreciate the effort anyway, and whilst technically we were probably a bit ropey, it all seemed to go well enough. I think Robert Dellar wrote a little bit about it in his excellent Splitting in Two, which you can buy from this place and I highly recommend. The only problem was my apparent decision to record the gig by placing the tape recorder inside Pete's drum kit, so the tape may bear closer resemblance to early Test Department performances than it really should, although the numbers without drums came out okay, I guess.
The recording of the Chatham gig wasn't much better, originally sounding like I'd stuffed the recording microphone down the back of the pub sofa, but I've managed to clean it up a bit on Audacity. I tried the same with the Hackney recording but there was just no rescuing the music from behind Pete's wall of percussion, unfortunately. The Chatham gig was odd and uncomfortable for reasons I've whined about at great length here and which I don't care to rake over any further, but we played all right, I thought, and the tape sounds decent now that I've cleaned it up a bit, or at least it does to me (even despite my singing on a couple of numbers). Annoyingly, we got carried away with our determination to piss off our host by playing for as long as he had originally said we could play and went over time, meaning the last four hours worth of At the Academy were missed off the tape. I've faded it at the end so it doesn't sound like we screwed up, and eight minutes of the thing should be enough for anyone. There are a load of photos taken from the Chatham gig (along with other band pics) here if you need something to look at whilst listening to this stuff.
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Academy 23 - Chats Palace 4/10/96 (1996) C46
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q82ih9q96r1rycy/AAA98F2gD8IiW9Y8ZxYidjYJa?dl=01 - God of Death
2 - Alien Nation
3 - Quantum Quickstep
4 - Cam Ye O'er Frae France
5 - Look Into the Sky
6 - The Patient
7 - The Stranger
8 - Fucking Queer
9 - At the Academy
This was our last gig as Academy 23. It was supposed to be four gigs, or so Andy told me, but the first was cancelled, and then so were the other two following this one. It was put on by Core Arts, who were associated with Hackney Hospital and something to do with the late and very much missed Robert Dellar, and word came back that they weren't happy about Academy 23 trying to take over the event, as it was phrased. My understanding was that they had asked us to arrange it all and to find a load of bands to play, so who knows? Anyway, Konstruktivists, somehow expanded to a five piece line-up including a flautist, came down from Norfolk and played, and were amazing. Then we played, or maybe we played first. We had been rehearsing for months and it sort of paid off, although I sang on a few of the songs where Andy was obliged to play complicated guitar solos, and my singing was pretty shit, although I had fun at the time. Otherwise this is probably the best tape I've heard of any live event involving Andy. As usual it was a mix of old Apostles songs, some with new, slightly more pompous lyrics and different titles, plus legitimate Academy 23 numbers like The Stranger which was written by Dave and which we added to the set on my request. I dressed up as a bird and was subsequently subject to marriage proposals from a Nigerian gentleman in the audience, so that was an interesting new experience. I also think Jess Hopkins was there too, although I don't think he performed that night.
I doubt anyone will notice, so I'll mention it anyway - but the microphone fucked up so there's a silent second occurring on the tape during the first chorus of God of Death. Using my audio editing software I have rectified this by pasting the equivalent bars from the second time we played the chorus. You probably won't notice the join. This is because I'm amazing.
Nice to have a version of At the Academy on tape. I probably haven't listened to this cassette since the gig, having assumed it to be shite; but we put one hell of a lot of work into learning how to play our ten-minute prog instrumental, so it's nice that, contrary to what I believed, it still exists in more or less listenable form.
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Academy 23 - Bring Back Proof (1997) C90
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/86mx89wpgi0oiry/AABx9HPYWS0TJwOaRHUrhHGXa?dl=01 - The Stoke Newington 8
2 - The Liberators
3 - In the Children's Hospital
4 - Decontrol
5 - Rub Out the Word
6 - Who?
7 - Fucking Queer
8 - Echoes of Adric
9 - Pride & Prejudice
10 - The Dispossessed
11 - The Witness
12 - Loudmouth
13 - Subhuman Debris
14 - Conspiracy
15 - Spit It Out
16 - Show No Pity I
17 - 1985
18 - Altair
19 - The Hunt
20 - The Patient
21 - At the Cenotaph
22 - Paradigm
23 - March of the Cybermen
24 - Love Song
25 - When Jimmy was William
26 - Show No Pity II
27 - Sun Arise
Crivens! Here's another one I probably never got around to listening to, ye ken. I'm credited on the cover of the booklet, but I didn't play on any of this lot and I'm not convinced I was even in the band at the time. Helpmaboab! I have some vague memory of being around Andy's flat and finding myself filled with horror at the prospect of a track called Echoes of Adric, which was proposed at the same time as something called Travels in the Tardis which had lyrics. I read those lyrics and immediately decided that I would prefer to concentrate on my solo work due to musical differences etc., the specific musical difference being that I wasnae gunna be in a band which performed songs about fucking Doctor Who. Jings! Donald, where's your troosers?
That said, this is definitely one of the better Academy 23 tapes, well rehearsed, well played, well recorded, and decent songs rather than too many of the comedy numbers. Even March of the Cybermen, a cover of some Who incidental music from the sixties, is all right. My copy features a bunch of tracks uncredited by either the booklet or Discogs so my guess is that it was a C60 which Andy padded out with other stuff, although it's all good so no problem; plus it's nice to know that I actually do have a copy of his Rolf Harris cover.
Pretty sure 1985 and Altair are the same versions as on the Cameo for Earth 7", but I don't know about other songs which may or may not have appeared on any rare limited EPs which sold a million copies but only in Vietnam and South Korea and which definitely really existed.
Wu're all doomed, Captain Mainwaring!
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Academy 23 - Retrospective (1997) C60
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2lltkww1pnhym9c/AADa8TTZ0Bltun7FQ1lXpUafa?dl=01 - School of Violence
2 - Hard as Nails
3 - All Thought is Telepathy
4 - Cam Ye O'er Frae France
5 - Subfeline
6 - Nachtlokal Jazzmusik
7 - The Psychedlic Racist / Gegluckten Rache
8 - Multicultural Interference
9 - When Jimmy was William
10 - Ode to Hermes
Now we come to the band's* Open University years, as typified by The Educational Booklets, which was a series of A5 zines bearing the above logo featuring, in microscopic print, essays on astronomy, science, maths and all that stuff those punky fans used to fucking love so much. I think Andy did about twenty or thirty in the series, and I don't think they were all written by him. While I'm inclined to regard this development with a degree of retroactive amusement on the grounds that if it's still the nineties and you want to know about astronomy, for example, chance is you'll probably go to a library rather than send off for a booklet written by some guy in a band; but on the other hand, Andy used to fill his version of SMILE with science articles, and I took a stack of SMILEs to sell at the Runciter stall for which I paid at UKCAC, a comic convention held in London around the early nineties, and the fucking things sold better than my own stuff. I even had one little bloke gushing over it saying how he'd been looking for it everywhere, and he was telling his pals about this great zine with articles about mathematics etc. You couldn't fucking make it up.
Anyway, this was the final tape issued after the band turned into something else, and actually a compilation of previously unreleased material (except Cam Ye O'er Frae France which I'm pretty sure featured on more or less every fucking tape). I personally thought the first version of Europe, Awake! I heard worked better with Hard as Nails on there, so it's nice that these tracks finally saw the light of day. These tracks, generally speaking, represent the sort of material which made me want to actually be in the band, but weren't representative of the sort of stuff I ended up playing on. Oh well.
*: For the sake of this gag I'm regarding the Apostles, Academy 23, and UNIT as essentially the same thing.
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