Herman Brood "I Love You Like I Love Myself" (Ariola Records, 1979)

"I've had enough; maybe I'll be seeing you around. Make it a great party"

(Herman Brood, July 11, 2001)

It's so easy to find music now, isn't it? Hold your mobile phone up in a club, dial Shazam, get a text with the name of the song that's playing. Check out google, or discogs, and find a band's history, or any of their releases. Surf around the itunes store, filling in the gaps in your collection. Spend a while on ebay or gemm, or on message boards, tracking down an elusive CD, or a double for that old 7" that's starting to sound a little scratchy. But it wasn't always this way- when I started collecting, it was much, much more tricky. Back then, it seemed as if I had a long list of tunes stored up in my head; and I'd have to spend a huge amount of time trying to tick them all off, every time I visited a new record shop. There really was no effective way of sourcing things that weren't naturally stocked in your local shop: you could try and make a special order, but the process was very hit and miss. Without computers to check availability, or stock levels, an order might sit in a shop for weeks (or months) on end. The catalogue for actually placing orders was a giant red book, that most record shops had, but seldom used - another problem being that looking through a book of such size for a record whose title you weren't perhaps 100% sure of, wasn't something that most shop assistants would really care to attempt.

So, as I said, it was the "internal list" that I relied upon. Secondhand stores, out of town shops, record fairs, and a lot of "digging in the crates". This song is one which was on the list for quite some time. First heard in 1979, I tracked a copy of the album down in 1985 (without a sleeve!) in an Our Price in Watford which was having a closing down sale. Then, about 15 years later, finally found another copy in the Record & Tape Exchange. I've never seen a CD, though I think one was released in Holland in the late 80's: I'm presuming it's now out of print. But why was I searching so hard for this one song? It's all about how I found it, I suppose....
I first heard it on The Old Grey Whistle Test, in 1979. For the previous Christmas, I'd been given a brand-new Radio-cassette player, which I'd been using to religiously tape John Peel, and I also used it to tape stuff off the telly. So, on that Sunday night, I sat in front of the TV, gingerly holding up the recorder in front of the tiny speaker of my parents Sony Trinitron, and recorded it. Here's the exact clip I saw ( well, the second half is - the song comes in after about 4 mins)

And I just played that cassette to death. So, the fragility of the way I found the song meant I was desperate to actually own a proper copy, lest anything happen to the tape. I always felt that If the tape snapped, or got mistakenly recorded over, that I'd lose the song forever. So began the search. I'm still looking for the CD, though the album will do for now. I've never actually played any of the other songs on the album; "I Love You...." is track one, side one - so once that's finished, that's the album finished for me too. Childish, I know, but that's the way it goes.

Some more info on the song? Well, it's taken from a film with a flimsy plot about a bank robber, tied into the Dutch punk scene. It features (amongst others) Nina Hagen , Lene Lovich , and of course, Herman Brood. Brood is a fascinating character, and rightly revered as a true Rock'n'Roll legend in Holland, though his reputation didn't really cross over into many other territories - he managed a one-off hit in the US ("Saturday Night") and that was about it. However, in Holland, his influence is still felt to this day, as a performer, as well as an artist and sculptor. A long-time drug-user (and one who made no secret of the fact), he tried for many years to rid himself of his demons, but in 2001 was eventually devastated to find out that he was suffering from a terminal illness, and that he had mere months to live. On the 11th of July 2001, Herman Brood leapt to his death from the seventh floor of the Amsterdam Hilton, before that illness could claim him. There's more on Herman Brood here and his available recordings can be bought here (confusingly, there actually is a "Cha Cha" CD in print, but it's not the OST to the film). The song itself? Well, it's all about Brood, and the way he throws himself into its performance. He sings as if his life depends on it. The song can be taken, simply, as a paean to the love he's lost, or more obliquely, as a plea for help to break the spell of the substances he's using as a crutch to escape the pain of that lost love. Whatever the meanings, it's just a wonderful song, and always brings that same frisson of excitement I felt as a 12 year-old kid, holding a cassette player in front of a telly, in a small house, in a tiny village in the west of England, one Sunday Night. RIP Herman.

Herman Brood "I Love You Like I Love Myself" (OST) (mp3)

Swell Maps "Steven Does" (Rough Trade, 1979)

OK then, two posts in one day! And this one has an absoulutely crucial USP: it contains the GREATEST GUITAR SOLO OF ALL TIME. This is something I am not prepared to argue about: if you've got a different opinion; I don't want to hear it. For me, the solo in this song encapsulates the majesty, the glory, the romance and the power of Rock'n'Roll, and it does it whilst being quite obviously drunk and out of tune.
This song is one of four that were on a free EP given away with the initial pressings of the Swell Maps debut LP "A Trip To Marineville". For reasons I don't quite understand, some of the other tracks on the EP have appeared on retrospective Maps compilations, but this truly wondrous vignette remains unreleased.
For all of you out there who may not have heard of The Swell Maps, do check out that Wikipedia page, and follow some of the links. Theirs is a story too long for me to rehash here: suffice to say that without their innate knack of mixing noise with melody, post punk would never have happened ( or at least, it would, but it would have been even more po-faced). I knew Jowe Head via the TVP's (we've done this, haven't we?), but was lucky enough to count Nikki Sudden as a friend for a large part of the 90's. He was going out with a friend of mine, and would occasionally turn up, in the dead of night, on my doorstep, armed only with a bottle of vodka, 200 cigarettes, and a desperate need to listen to sleazy rock music until dawn. Believe me, those are the nights that hurt, that wipe years off your life expectancy, yet that make it all worthwhile. I was terribly saddened when he passed away. RIP Nikki.
It's him, incidentally, that provides the guitar genius on this song, and it's Jowe (Steven being Jowe's real name) who provides the vocals. The song itself may, or may not, be an insight into Jowe's upbringing (the sleeve certainly alludes to it), with the oblique nature of the lyrics (trans: what the hell is he going on about?) we may never be sure -and that's just the way I like it.
If you don't own any Swell Maps CD's, now's the time to right that wrong. Do it now.

Swell Maps "Steven Does" (mp3)

Honey Bane "Girl On The Run" (from the "You Can Be You" EP, Crass Records, 1980)

Lord only knows why, but I've been listening to some slightly disturbing tunes over the last week or so. It's that little frisson of pleasure that you get, from hearing something which simultaneously excites and somewhat appalls you at the same time. It's the sort of feeling you get when listening to "Hamburger Lady" by TG ......

See what I mean?
Anyway, there's that, there's another song called "Highschool Massacre", which is about Columbine (and is actually quite heartbreaking) and there's this little gem from Honey Bane. It's got that perfect mix of anger and sweetness, a sense of longing and love, underpinned by the breathless chase from evil, the unseen menace that stalks the subject of the song: as she descends further into desperation, the evil gets closer; you can almost feel it's breath on her back. Of course, all of this would probably be nothing without Crass providing the backing
track (it's credited to "Donna & The Kebabs", with delicious irony, for perhaps the most high-profile group of Anarcho-Vegetarians of the punk years). Crass were masters of the sinister, adept in churning out uneasy waltzes of confusion and paranoia: driven by Penny Rimbauds strict drumming, and overlaid with waves of scratchy, twitching, fuzzed-out punk anger.
Yet this single also displays something of a tender side to Crass: at its heart it's a pure pop song: from the "Boredom" riff, with its two-note semaphore, to the clever little guitar chords, floating over the time signature; this is a consummate piece of pop brilliance. But, it was never seen as such, and probably never will be. It still places a chill in my heart though: it's Honey's detachment, her matter-of-fact vocal sneer, it's the vicious treble wash of the guitars, it's that horrific flushing noise at the end of the track, as the song seems to vanish into some sort of vortex of unfeeling savagery, it's still quite the most wonderful mix of sweet and savage.
Honey Bane had an upbringing which added extra gravitas to this single, and seemed to be on the run from pretty much everything when it was released. She had previously voiced the Fatal Microbes single "Violence Grows", and a homage to it, "Porno Grows", appears on the other side of this single. Her talents would be temporarily, and unsuccessfully channeled into trying to be a bona fide pop star after this, as Jimmy Pursey produced a couple of her singles for Regal/Zonophone, which tickled the lower reaches of the charts. However, you always got the feeling Honey was slightly uncomfortable with the whole thing, and she vanished from the sight of the mainstream, to enjoy a lower, but more creatively enriching profile, from that day to this. She's still very much with us, and her myspace can be found here.
And, as a final footnote: how great was it to have "pay no more than..." on the single sleeve? It simultaneoulsy makes a statement of intent, and also freezes that single to a moment in time: remember when singles cost 65p? That's what I payed for this when it came out, and it was worth every single one of those sixty-five pennies. Enjoy.

Honey Bane "Girl On The Run" (mp3)

Chuck Wagon "Rock'n'Roll Won't Go Away" (A&M Records 1979)

When I was a little Punk Rock kid, many years ago, The Dickies were one of my favourite bands ever. I was too young to see that the press thought they were a bit naff, didn't have much street credibilty, but I didn't care. The silly cover versions made me smile, the buzzsaw guitar riffs made me pogo around my bedroom, and the coloured vinyl 7"s were teenage objects of desire. So, for me, the Chuck Wagon single became something I just had to have.

here's a little background info on Chuck: he was born Bob Davis, and was one of the founding members of The Dickies, playing keyboards, saxophone and guitar. This single shows that the manic punk fun of The Dickies wasn't all there was to Chuck- it's a wonderfully mellow snippet of early synth-pop, with backwards-treated vocals hinting at someone perhaps more shy than a showman cavorting around the stage in a punk band. In the middle of the band's success, Chuck had some sort of major problems with his girlfriend and sadly committed suicide. This single is the merest hint of what sort of talent we lost.

The record itself is also notable for being one of the trickiest Dickies-related items to find. Copies of "Banana Splits" are ten-a-penny, and most of the rest of the bands catalogue is never much more than an ebay auction away: however, this single bombed spectacularly, and as a result is hardly ever seen. It was released as a purple vinyl 7", but i've got a stock copy on black vinyl, as well as a stamped promo copy (also on black vinyl).

Chuck's death affected me quite a lot as a kid, I felt like some of the fun had been taken from my musical world: certainly it seems as though The Dickies themselves were similarly affected- drugs and other problems saw them fall into a slump after Chuck's death that would take them the best part of a decade to ride out. Here's a little footage of Chuck/Bob, which has been posted up on youtube. R.I.P.

The ever-reliable Captain Oi! records have reissued most of the Dickies essential albums, full details are here. the band themselves are still going, and have a myspace.

Chuck Wagon "Rock And Roll Won't Go Away" (mp3)