The story of UK DIY: 131 experimental underground classics 1977-1985

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81. THE PERFORMING FERRETS
‘Fallen Tyrant’
(Pig Productions, 1981)

Okay, let’s get this out of the way – The Performing Ferrets might have a few Fall records in their collections. But on their self-titled debut album (back in 1981 they were the Performing Ferret Band), they were doing so much more as well – chiming, downward strums that disrupted the clipped, drawling, almost reel-like trebly guitar lines that creep through their songs; a single-minded rhythm section who are fully intent on getting you there, by the only means necessary – repetition in the music, and they’re never gonna lose it. God bless Chuck Warner and Hyped 2 Death for compiling their music onto the 2008 compilation CD, No One Told Us: get hold of this CD at all costs, do it now!


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82. THE PERIDOTS
‘Open Season’
(Optional Goods, 1981)

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Straight out of Dublin, the peridots – the lowercase spelling is intentional – released only one single, ‘Open Season’, the lead song of which is an odd little thing, where becalmed acoustic guitar, swimming out of a bucolic Syd Barrett session, meets the most intimate of downer vocals (“Sometimes it seems like open season on my life” – you poor dear), before the whole thing is sucked under by a farty synth. Members of the peridots had prior form with Modernaires and The Blades, the former of which are doubtless one of many groups who had to share the stage with the nascent U2. You gotta feel for them. Stan Erraught of the peridots ended up in Stars Of Heaven, one of the more ignored of the ‘80s Rough Trade groups – I haven’t heard many people mention them lately, but their albums are gorgeous, abstract folk-pop things, well worth your attention. You can hear this interest starting to develop on ‘Open Season’.


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83. THE PETTICOATS
‘Normal’
(Bla-Bla-Bla, 1980)

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Writing this article alphabetically has meant that, in many ways, everything’s been a long lead up to The Petticoats’ “Normal” 7”. A justly legendary record in a list that’s not exactly short of ‘em, ‘Normal’ was the only record released by The Petticoats, the concept of one Stef Petticoat, a weirdo visionary who also spent time in Amy & The Angels, and released a collaborative 7” on legendary German label ZickZack with Robert Crash, whose lasting legacy might well be being a member of Psychotic Tanks, one of the earliest 4AD groups. None of which tells you much about ‘Normal’, which sounds like it’s been recorded in one of those street-side photo booths and is all the better for it. Stef has one of the greatest punk voices, totally natural and exploding with joy, along the same lines as Lora Logic or Poly Styrene. There’s something insanely seductive about this record, a compulsive blurt that you can’t help but listen to over and over again; hard to really pinpoint, but maybe it’s all in the forced laugh and then the deadpan “probably not” at the end of the third chorus. Or the spine-chilling scream Stef lets rip, from somewhere close to nowhere, near the end. Perfect.


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84. THE PHONES SPORTSMAN BAND
‘Get Down & Get With It’
(Rather, 1980)

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Another 7” slab that fell off the back of the Swell Maps’ lorry. This one’s pretty obviously the boys letting Phones Sportsman go for it, destroying Slade’s ‘Get Down & Get With It’ with typical bravado. There was something so great about the way the Swell Maps made loose with a dual heritage of Krautrock and glam, forcing the two together in all kinds of weird ways. This, obviously, leans heavily toward the latter, but with a dose of Beano humour.


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85. THE POEMS
‘Posters On The Wall’
(Groucho Marxist Record Co-Operative, 1979)

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Another gem from the Groucho Marxist Spectacular Commodity EP, though I’d really loved to have included the ‘Achieving Unity’ single, which is positively eerie – as Stephen Pastel observed in recent correspondence, is “kind of primitive and murky but still almost on the verge of revealing itself” – but until someone uploads it to YouTube, this will have to do. Still, ‘Posters On The Wall’ captures their aesthetic pretty clearly – an ultra-primitive take on song, with minimal Moe Tucker drums pounding out the simplest of beats behind a crunchy, noise-ridden guitar. Two members of The Poems, Drew and Rose McDowall, would go on to be part of England’s Hidden Reverse, connecting with Coil and Current 93, amongst others; Rose would also have her moment as a pop star in Strawberry Switchblade. Here’s where it all started. (Rose wasn’t on this track, though – here, the drums are by one Gary Waters.)


86. PRAGVEC
‘Existential’
(Spec, 1978)

For some reason, pragVec have always felt like one of the emblematic groups of the weirder end of post-punk, something songs like ‘Existential’, with their dispassionate French lyrics, Beefheart-ian guitar scrunch, and roiling drums, will do nothing to dispel. The group released three singles, the final one a co-release on George Castro & Jean Karakos’ Celluloid imprint (Karakos was one of the inspired minds behind the BYG/Actuel free jazz series of albums which flew out of Paris in the early 1970s). Members of pragVec would also land in The Lines and The Atoms, and they’d count among their collaborators one Jim Thirlwell, who turned up alongside a few pragVeccers on the No-Cowboys ‘compilation’ on Spec, bubbling away on a Wasp synthesizer in Vince Quince & His Rialto Ballroom Detectives. The cats behind Wasp synthesizers must have done a roaring trade in the early 1980s.


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87. THE PRATS
‘Disco Pope’
(Rough Trade, 1980)

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There is no way this list could be complete without The Prats. A bunch of high-school kids from Edinburgh who got the punk bug early, way before they could play their instruments fluently, the kids from The Prats have always felt like the ur-DIY group, high on energy and possibility, brash with attitude, but also – and never forget this – possessed with a knack for tossed-off catchiness. Songs like ‘Disco Pope’ will get lodged firmly in your head, its childlike melodies patterned across each other with insouciance. ‘Disco Pope’ stuck out like a sore thumb even amongst the sore thumbs on that Post-Punk compilation the Rough Trade shops released a while ago. Genius. (There are family connections between The Prats and The Scars, btw.)


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88. THE PREFECTS
‘Going Through The Motions’
(Vindaloo / Rough Trade, 1979)

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A gang from Birmingham, The Prefects centered around the great Robert Lloyd, who would also run the Vindaloo label, and eventually form The Nightingales. ‘Going Through The Motions’ is meta-commentary – the song moves at a sluggish, sludgy pace, almost slothful, with Lloyd’s voice shaky yet strident. You can hear that they’d started as a punk group, but by the time they reached this single, all kinds of weird things were going on in their songs, from the jerky, breathless sax to the graduate from the Moe Tucker school of simplicity behind the drum kit. Post-punk/DIY archivist Dan Selzer released a great Prefects compilation, Amateur Wankers, on his Acute label. Make sure you get hold of it.


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89. RED BALUNE
‘Capitalist Kid’
(MCCB, 1978)

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Another of Geoff Leigh’s groups, Red Balune justified their existence with this one song alone, an incredibly feverish blast, where guitar and electronics slime out of the cracks between those wild, almost free-improv drums lik ectoplasm across a corpse’s face. At this point, Red Balune were splitting their time between the UK and the Netherlands, and from the looks of it, MCCB was based in the latter, but this is such an archetypal blast of RIO DIY, it belong in this list. It still sends chills up the spine on the hundredth listen, such is its air of blasted malevolence. It’s available as a free download from Geoff Leigh’s Bandcamp page, along with all of his releases from this era.


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90. PAUL REEKIE
‘Lovers’
(Thursdays, 1981)

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One of the most disarmingly personal records from the DIY era, Paul Reekie’s ‘Lovers’ is simple beyond belief – a one-finger piano refrain, a pattering drum machine, a tom and tambourine, all framing Reekie’s resigned narrative about the complexities and frailties of human love, the dejected mood only broken by Reekie’s double-tracked chant of “joy, joy, love’s rebellious joy”. Reekie also turns up in Thursdays, alongside Michael Barclay, and he was a member of ATV offshoot The Good Missionaries. But ‘Lovers’ is his masterpiece.