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

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61. LEVEN SIGNS
‘Drain Melsh’
(Cordelia / Unlikely, 1985)

Hopefully I’m not skirting nepotism here, given that FACT’s very own Brad Rose reissued this record recently on his Digitalis Industries label. But Hemp Is Here has always sounded, to me, like one of the last great blasts from the era documented by this piece, and in some ways an almost summary moment of what could be achieved by those who believed in DIY as ethos, aesthetic, practice and experiment. Leven Signs was predominantly the work of one Peter Karkut, with vocals from Maggi Turner, and Cordelia – the label of Deep Freeze Mice, which gives you some idea of the world they inhabit – initially released Hemp Is Here. It’s a mysterious thing, with ticking percussion loops scuttling across pots’n’pans clatter, voices lost in an echoplex maze, softly blown woodwinds – the general entire kit and kaboodle of any good DIY endeavour. A classic of its genre, whatever genre you think that might be.


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62. THE LO YO YO
‘Cog’
(Floppy Records, 1985)

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Here’s one for the Beefheart fans – of which there were quite a few in the land of post-punk and DIY. The Lo Yo Yo was a project led by Alig of Family Fodder, and Mick Hobbs of The Work and Officer! (and now a member of Half Japanese), and they released two cassettes, one a split with Look De Bouk, before their only LP, Extra Weapons, appeared in 1985. Much like the Leven Signs record just mentioned, Extra Weapons feels like a final and defining point in DIY, again rifling through the metaphoric kitchen cupboard to corral all kinds of trickling, shuffling rhythms and melodies, over which the group sing out anti-capitalist rhetoric. I’d like to think the Captain would have approved.


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63. A. C. MARIAS
‘Drop’
(Dome, 1980)

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Perhaps the highlight of the entire Dome ‘endeavour’, ‘Drop’/’So’ was the first single released by A. C. Marias, the nom de plume for Angela Conway. She’d go on to become a dancer and a music video maker, but back in the early 1980s Conway was involved with the extended Wire crew, and alongside appearing on the first Dome album, released this lovely debut single, which took the submerged, greyscale industrial aesthetic of Dome and sung an abstract round over it. It sounds as though each part of the song is looping in a world of its own, occasionally coming into alignment, occasionally falling off axis. This might be pushing things, but I’m convinced you can hear quite a bit of the sidereal aesthetic of Coil in records like this.


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64. THE MARINE GIRLS
‘Tonight’
(In Phaze, 1981)

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Yeah, so they’re now semi-legendary thanks to the patronage of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Tracey Thorn’s subsequent music, both solo and in Everything But The Girl, but it’s always worth remembering that the Marine Girls came of age, quite literally, in the DIY age. ‘Tonight’ sums up their charms as well as any other song from their consistently wowing Beach Party cassette / album, originally released by their friend Pat Bermingham, and then subsequently reissued by TV Personalities’ Dan Treacy on his Whaam! imprint. That’s pretty heavy patronage, and yet the Marine Girls didn’t really even need it – at this early stage, their voices are all there. Their songs have a humility that capture the giddiness of teenage romance and the depressions of late teen life, and the songs – spindly, sometimes threadbare, but possessing an effortless pop thrill – are to die for.


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65. THE MEKONS
‘Never Been In A Riot’
(Fast Product, 1978)

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You may know them, now, as one of the longest-serving of the alt-country brigade – though that term does great disservice to the multiplicity of voices in The Mekons – but ‘Never Been In A Riot’ tells a different story, of a group fumbling to find their way around songs, playing with clipped urgency, a drummer taking brave and almost foolhardy steps around his kit, and voices that are lifted from the everyday. If it is, as I seem to remember, a pointed critique of The Clash’s ‘White Riot’, it still does so in a fairly oblique way, but even here, and on follow-up single ‘Where Were You?’, you can find a nascent Marxist critique that finds full blossom in later songs like ‘Ghosts Of American Astronauts’.


66. METHODISHCA TUNE
‘Leisure Time’
(Eustone, 1980)

You really can tell, much more so than with The Janet & Johns, that Methodishca Tune were a chip off Scritti Politti’s block – it’s there in the dub-inflected rhythms, the clanging, complex guitar riffs and strums, the fluty male vocals, and in lyrics like “Questioning your every day, keeps it on the run”, which feel like a sixth-grade take on Scritti’s trenchant Gramscian commentary. Let’s face it, Methodischa Tune etched “gramsci is a geezer’ into the run-out groove of “Leisure Time” itself! But there’s real charm in the fragility of Methodishca Tune’s music, its subtle, sinuous movements catching you unawares once you’ve got past the initial, “I can’t believe it’s not Scritti” stage of (p)recognition.


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67. METROPAK
‘You’re A Rebel’
(PAK, 1979)

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“Give us an A!” Metropak were one of Edinburgh’s finest, though they’re regularly overlooked in histories of post-punk Scotland. They capture much of what was so thrilling about Scottish DIY music – a particular nervous energy that reminds a little of those early Feelies records, guitars that chime and bristle, simple, naked rhythms, and vocals that oscillate between sung and declaimed. All three of their singles are great, but ‘You’re A Rebel’ has, perhaps, the most immediate punch. A compilation of their singles was released on Close Up a few years ago, but the label appears to have shut up shop – any clues as to how to score copies of the set would be greatly appreciated. You can see some blurry live footage of Metropak here, too.


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68. METROPHASE
‘Cold Rebellion’
(Neo London, 1979)

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Ah, the great Steev Burgess, helped on this first Metrophase single by Nikki Sudden (aka Maps) and Epic Soundtracks. All of which makes this a bit of a Swell Maps-related oddity, but Metrophase doesn’t deserve to be relegated to such secondary status. ‘Cold Rebellion’ has a kind of lo-rent psychedelia to it that reminds one, just a little, of some of the things coming out of Liverpool at the time, but without the aspirations to grandeur. In fact, if anything, this one feels like it has kinship with Germany’s 39 Clocks – it’s the combination of a patiently clicking drum machine, droning ‘60s organ, and gnarly, post-Velvets guitar scrawl. The second single, ‘New Age’, is a good one, but the In Black EP, which ‘Cold Rebellion’ is taken from, remains the premiere statement.


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69. MILK FROM CHELTENHAM
‘Passport To Happiness’
(It’s War Boys!, 1983)

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Milk From Cheltenham was another project of Lepke Buchwalter aka Gus Coma, now part of Die Trip Computer Die. It’s also, maybe, the best record he’s ever been involved with, a wild conflagration of post-Faust tape fuckery, bedroom concrete, and strange chants like ‘Passport To Happiness’, which sounds like the drummer’s been locked into the same groove for so long he can barely think anymore, while Lepke sighs and rants over the edge. They’re playing out in an echo chamber – maybe it’s somewhere underneath the Cold Storage Studios? – and the whole thing’s as unpredictably other as you’d hope from the It’s War Boys! team. In some parallel universe, It’s War Boys! were bigger than The Residents. Not really, but I can dream.


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70. MOD CONS
‘Buildings Of The ‘70s’
(Groucho Marxist Record Co-Operative, 1979)

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Earlier in the list, we featured a few songs from the Ha! Ha! Funny Polis compilation 7” on Groucho Marxist. Here’s a track from another of their comps, Spectacular Commodity. The Mod Cons were originally known as Anka Svenson, but by the time the Groucho Marxist crew bumped Mod Cons – along with Sneex, Poems, XS Discharge and Mentol Errors – into Glasgow’s East End, they’d found their new name, grabbed hold of another in the seemingly endless supply of tinny amps that were as much the foundation of the DIY aesthetic as any ‘consumer as producer’ rhetoric, and written ‘Buildings Of The ‘70s’, whose charming, lop-legged skank is only undercut by a vocalist who’s trying that bit too hard to be clear. For more on The Sound Of Alternative Paisley, check out Mike Clarke’s fabulous article on the Shit-Fi website.