Hey all, if it seems I’ve been a little derelict from my duties here, it’s because lately I have been. I’ve got my hands full and it feels like I’m working on a thousand different things at once. Lately I’ve been devoting time to an event night/project in Austin, TX, called “No Doves Fly Here,” obviously named after The Mob EP and song of the same name. It began in October, 2011 as a monthly DJ event night where me and and my co-DJ, Cutter (aka DJ Damage Done) and Jack Control and others would play overlooked old and new dark postpunk, peace punk, deathrock, and stuff generally from the darker side of the punk spectrum. Lately that’s taken off and the venue has expanded it to twice-per-month.
As part of the project we decided to try to get bands involved by putting out free sampler CDs with their consent, and are also featuring interviews at the project’s site, which is at NoDovesFlyHere.com. Well, yesterday, Tuesday, January 3, we ran an interview I scored with Part 1 singer Jake Baker. Longtime Cultpunk readers will know that this site originally began with quite a fascination with Rudimentary Peni, Part 1, and GISM, who all seemed (and still do seem) like sort of the ultimate “cult punk” bands.
It’s the sort of interview that I would have run here, on this site, in the past, but I felt the need to push it instead as part of the No Doves project. You can read my interview with Part 1′s Jake Baker here. I’m working on securing an interview with Part 1 founder, guitarist, and songwriter Mark Ferrelli.
I spoke about it on my personal Facebook page, but today, a few hours ago, classic UK Batcave/deathrock/postpunk band Specimen just announced their first LP in – how many years? To be produced by Youth of Killing Joke!
This just about tops it. You’ve heard of David Beckham wearing a sequined bootleg Crass shirt, right? (Or Forever 21 recently ripping off the Flipper logo?) This new bit of news might be reason enough to resuscitate the old “Cultural Atrocities” feature I used to do.
I’m talking about an “up and coming” haute couture overpriced fashion label using a gold embossed Crass logo as their fashion brand. (See above.) The fashion label is called HARDWARE. Sleeveless hoodies start at over $100 USD, and they have a line called “WHOREWARE.” All of it uses the Crass logo in some capacity. Southern and Crass are aware of this (in fact, I learned of this through Allison at Southern), so it remains to be seen what will be done about it.
Below are some pictures from Hardware’s multiple sites. Yeah, I stole the photos and am reprinting them here without permission.
Record labels are a funny thing. Like bands, they can be objects of cultish devotion. Factory, SST, Dischord, 4AD, Rough Trade, and Alternative Tentacles all have their fans who look to the label’s imprimatur as an assurance of a band’s style, ethics, worthwhileness (is that a word?), or all three. This goes all the way back to the days of Sun and Decca Records.
Record labels can also acquire a reputation that works against the bands on them, however. This happened to Epitaph in the 1990s, a formerly sterling hardcore punk label that became known as the label “where good bands go to die” by 2001. Epitaph’s dizzying commercial successes with The Offspring and Rancid seemed to lead the label down a path of mall-punk commercialization that has blighted its reputation to this day, unfairly affecting the reputation of a few legitimately good bands along the way.
Although Crass Records never sold out, it’s afflicted with a similar image problem: The perception at large (i.e. among those not in the know) seems to be that it was a 2-dimensional haven of snarling, spiky haired punk bands of the Exploited variety, when in reality the label’s catalog is much more complex and refined. Crass and its other imprint, Corpus Christi, featured a diverse array of industrial, electro-punk, deathrock, and postpunk bands. This is a guide to those bands.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the the riff used in Killing Joke‘s “The Wait” from 1979, and how that has been recycled (indeed, even the entire structure of that song has been plagiarized paid homage to by many bands.) I rounded up 8 examples in that case, and I suspect there’s more out there. (A more common riff to focus on, due to controversy from Killing Joke themselves, is their “Eighties” song that KJ singer Jaz Coleman claimed was stolen by Nirvana for “Come As You Are,” but which Jack Rabid and others have noted itself seems to have been lifted from The Damned‘s “Life Goes On.”)
This week, it’s time to trace backwards another riff I’ve heard recycled a few times. It is the surf/rockabilly riff heard near the beginning of the song “Hospital,” by contemporary (and popular) Spanish deathrock band Naughty Zombies. There aren’t as many examples as I could provide for “The Wait’s” genealogy, but the few I did find here are pretty notable, I think.
If the shimmering/swampy guitar riff in it sounds familiar, That’s because it is. Here are some other, earlier songs that use the exact same lick:
I recently wrote a piece for Souciant.com, a newer webzine edited by Joel Schalit and Charlie Bertsch, editors from Punk Planet and Bad Subjects, respectively. The piece is “The New Postpunk,” and is about bands like the Red Dons (pictured here), Frustration, Belgrado, Iceage, and others. I previously did an interview with British anarcho-punk band Burnt Cross for the webzine.
Also, I co-DJ a monthly event night in Austin as “DJ Death Church” (from the Rudimentary Peni LP of the same title); the title of this is “No Doves Fly Here.” The other DJ is Cutter, aka DJ Damage Done, and the event night’s name — after a Mob EP and song — was her idea. We play a pretty good mix of deathrock, dark post-punk, and goth-punk type of stuff. The event has its own website, and at that website we’ve tried to provide interesting features, such as interviews with Ciril and also Christ vs Warhol.
Speaking of genealogy (see the last post), this is a chart I sketched of all the band connections to Rudimentary Peni I could find. Rudimentary Peni has had the same three members for about 30 years now, and they’ve played sparingly outside the band, so it wasn’t that hard. And since Rudimentary Peni are one of my all-time favorite bands, and part of the reason this site was made, I thought I’d share it.
Enjoy!
***EDIT: Just to be clear, I’m aware some of the dates on this family tree are wrong. The Magits actually formed in 1977, not 1979, for example.
Killing Joke (well, especially Jaz Coleman) were often fond of complaining that Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” stole the riff from their 1984 song “Eighties.” Punk fans later pointed out that it could be said Killing Joke likewise stole that riff from The Damned’s “Life Goes On,” from the Strawberries LP. Jack Rabid was one of the first to publicly point this out, but Jaz claimed not to be aware of the song.
ANYWAY — there is another riff, put out there by Killing Joke, that virally infected the world of 80s punk and post-punk. Namely, the main riff of their song “The Wait,” off their debut self-titled LP. At least Metallica had the honesty to simply cover that song and to call it just that — a cover.
But here are examples of all the many bands that have recycled “The Wait” and either made its main riff (and sometimes even the entire song structure) their own, or plagiarized it. See below to see what I mean. Is it all just a coincidence? We’ll start first with the original song itself, and work forward from there.
UNDER PRESSURE interviewed by Oliver @ Cultpunk.com
Note: This is one of several band interview posts I’m re-posting, as WordPress (or something) decided to eat quite a few entries from the past. Criminally, this interview was one of the posts WordPress decided to 86. Luckily, I had let David Koenig use it for his Quickfix PDF zine, so I was able to retrieve it from a copy of that. The graphics are David’s but the interview is by myself, from 2006, shortly after Under Pressure had released Come Clean. Since then they’ve released Black Bile, played Chaos in Tejas, and toured the US a couple of times.
Under Pressure, to my mind, are one of the finest hardcore punk bands around today. Their recent Come Clean LP should be on any sane person’s “Top 10 Punk LPs” of 2006 list. Every song on the album sounds different, but it all gels as a whole: One song might put you in the mind of Formaldehyde Junkies, another Swiz, another Poison Idea, or Econochrist, etc. — but it’s all got its own unique spin on things. This year [2006] saw them embarking on a big tour of Europe.
The Canadian band has a MySpace page where you can download several of the band’s songs. They are from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Members interviewed below include Cam (vocals), Jason (bass), and Dan (drums). Interviewed by Oliver, October 2006. NOTE: This is the first interview I have ever done where the Spin Doctors have been mentioned in any context. Be warned.
[Canada's Complications produced what I thought was one of the finest releases of 2005, a 10-song CD demo that to date has been their only official output besides an as-yet-unreleased track for a Slug & Lettuce benefit. [Please note the date of this writing; they have produced more material since. -- Oliver]
The band could be called a Born Dead Icons side project, but the sound here is different. Complications’ approach still retains some of the Motorhead-iness of Born Dead Icons, but the songs are more mid-tempo, a tad more experimental, and though the band cringes at this term in the interview below, I’d even say “post-punk.”
As of late 2011 Cultpunk is back. (Its initial run was from 2006-2009.) Cultpunk is a punk zine about DIY hardcore/punk music and related underground genres, historical and current. Underground culture, politics, literature, and art are also occasionally covered.
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[Canada's Complications produced what I thought was one of the finest releases of 2005, a 10-song CD demo that to date has been their only official output besides an as-yet-unreleased track for a Slug & Lettuce benefit. [Please note the date of this writing; they have produced more material since. -- Oliver]