Snubhole Voltaire

A return to Snub TV today, one from 1989 and one from 1990. In 1989 Texan experimental psychedelic punks Butthole Surfers arrived on Snub. The band pursued extremes to their outer limits- hardcore punk, noise, chaos, drugs, tape edits. They were not a mainstream band and were not looking for mainstream approval. Their appearance on early evening BBC 2 must rank as one of Snub's finest achievements. 

Snub caught the Buttholes at their home studio and asked them some questions which were answered in absurdist style. Note the size of some band members irises during the interview section- substances may have been consumed. The band then play live, filmed at a gig where they take sludgy 80s slowcore punk to new levels.

In 1987 Butthole Surfers released an album, Locust Abortion Technician, a record that captures them somewhere in the midst of art rock, noise and weird metal. Sweat Loaf samples/ covers Black Sabbath and opens with some lovely chords and then goes seriously leftfield with an exchange between a father and a son...

'Daddy?
Yes, son.
What does regret mean?
Well son, the funny thing about regret is that it's better to regret
Something you have done than
To Regret something that you haven't done
And by the way, If you see your mom this weekend, will you be sure and
Tell her...
SATAN SATAN SATAN!!!'

Sweat Loaf

I'm not sure they still make bands like Butthole Surfers.

A year later, March 1990, electronic/ industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire were on Snub. 

Cabaret Voltaire were punk before punk, making their own instruments, sampling, looping tapes, using video and film, hitching a ride with punk but not really playing in the same park. 1981's Yashar and their adoption of synths and sequencers saw them move into new territories- Sensoria, Don't Argue, Hypnotised are all shown in this ten minute clip and all sound like they were leading while others followed. The interviews and footage in the Snub clip shows how ahead of their time they were, and in some ways, still were in 1990. Richard H Kirk played a key role in the development of techno with Sweet Exorcists' Testone. 

Sensoria

Snubbed Return

More from the Snub TV vaults. In 1989 Snub found On U Sound legend Bim Sherman in the studio, a rare TV appearance with Bim singing Power in 1989 (not the smash hit single The Power by Snap). Crunchy Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish and Keith LeBlanc backing, Bonjo from African Head Charge on percussion, Sherwood at the desk and the golden vocals of Bim Sherman. 

In 1983 Singers & Players released their third album on On U, an all star reggae collective with members of Roots Radics and Dub Syndicate, Prince Far I, Mikey Dread, Ashanti Roy and on A Matter Of Time, Bim Sherman's voice. 

A Matter Of Time

In 1989 Barry Adamson was ex- Magazine and ex- Bad Seed and striking out solo with his Moss Side Story. Snub filmed on location in Moss Side, Manchester, with parts of the Moss Side Story album and some interview sections with Barry over the top. 

In non- Snub related news this weekend is The Golden Lion's 11th birthday. Joe Goddard plays at the Todmorden pub tonight and tomorrow David Holmes returns with a live set from Belfast's Deeply Armed on the running order too. Warming up Saturday before and around those two are The Flightpath Estate DJ team, all five of us in the house, with bags full of tunes and our standard attempt at sequencing them into some kind of coherent order. 

Snubbed Again

Another dip back into the world of late 80s alternative culture as filtered through the lens of Snub TV, an early evening independent music show of the kind that seems inconceivable now. In December 1988 The House Of Love were filmed playing live at Top Rank in Brighton- the seven minute clip opens with a ferocious take on Destroy the Heart, Terry Bickers' guitar and Guy Chadwick's vocals in some kind of war to be the most ragged and fraught. Bickers was a really talented guitarist, capable of slow burning shimmer and understated pyrotechnics. The clip then has an interview with a fresh faced Chadwick. The rest of the band look like they'd rather be anywhere else. Snub then cut back to the gig with Man To Child. 

I loved The House Of Love, saw them live several times in the late 80s including one occasion at the Queen's Hall in Widnes just a few days before they kicked Terry out of the band, abandoning him at a service station as they were driving to Wales. Relations were fraught and Terry called Guy a breadhead and set fire to a £5 note and then drummer Pete Evans punched Terry in the face- I might be misremembering the details but it was along those lines. The first album, released on Creation in 1988, was possibly the last gasp of this kind of indie guitar music before acid house and indie dance came along the following year. 

Road

Throwing Muses were on Snub in 1988, filmed live at The Town And Country Club in Camden in May. There's a brief interview section at the start of this clip, step- sisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, facing the questions and Kristin talking about feminism. The clip then goes to the gig, an intense performance of Downtown (a song from their 1988 album House Tornado). They were a powerful live band- they'd been going since 1981 so by '88 they were pretty seasoned performers. 

Manic Depression is a cover of The Jimi Hendrix Experience song. This is a live instrumental version, no vocals- I've no idea where or when it's from but a version of the song was on 1992's Firepile EP. 

Manic Depression

Loop Ride

More from the Snub TV archives, indie and alternative culture from the late 80s and early 90s as filtered and recorded by the BBC 2 youth culture team. First up, Loop, walls of guitar noise from Croydon, South London, formed by Robert Hampson along with his girlfriend Becky Stewart and James Endeacott. John Wills replaced Becky and Endeacott left to work at Rough Trade where he played a key role in launching both The Strokes and The Libertines. He's also a crate digger with some interesting compilations out (Unlock Your Mind With Morning Glory from last year is a good starting point). Some of the photos of early Loop touring the UK are in Sam Knee's photo book The Scene In Between are definitive shots of the era. Loop are on the cover and a certain subset of indie '88 encapsulated- narrow black jeans and winkle pickers, brown suede, long bowl cuts, leather biker jackets, amps, guitars and Transit vans. 

In 1989 they appeared on Snub, a seven minute clip with interviews, visuals and their music. The interview with Robert is very of its time, maybe the origin story for the 'we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes its a bonus' line but the music is a blast, overloaded guitars, single minded riffs and glorious repetition. 

Other band members came and went. Loop released three albums of loud, very noisy, psychedelic space rock, all volume, fuzz and three chord riffs- 1987's Heaven's End, Fade Out in 1989 and Gilded Eternity in 1990. The Stooges, Krautrock, late 60s counter- culture re- imagined in late 80s south London. Can you imagine this being on early evening, mid- week BBC 2 now? 

Got To Get Over It was the final song on Fade Out, a blaze of guitars playing the same riff over and over while sludgy drums and distant vocals compete in the background. It breaks down into a swirl of FX and noise, thunder and feedback, a guitar wailing as a weather system closes in around it. Simplistic and purist, an idea taken to its end point.

Got To Get Over It

Also on Snub in 1989 and also very much into distorted guitars and noise but a little younger, were Ride- their first TV appearance was on Snub, the Oxford teenagers playing live at The Town And Country Club. The clip shows them playing Drive Blind, released on their first EP on Creation in January 1990. 

Drive Blind is a Mark Gardener song, one the reformed band still play live now, a little more able to hear themselves and each other now than they were back then. God, how young they were. And we were. 

Drive Blind

Freak Swerve

More from the archives of Snub TV, the BBC 2 early evening magazine programme that delved into the world of alternative and independent music between 1988 and 1991. In 1988 Dinosaur Jr pitched up in the UK touring their third album, Bug. Their 1987 album, You're Living All Over Me, is the purist's choice- punk, metal, folk rock, indie, alternative, guitar rock, full on distorted guitar solos courtesy of J Mascis coupled with his drawled vocals- a winning sound. Bug may not be as good an album but it does contain Freak Scene. 

When Snub TV caught up with J, Lou and Murph it was miming to Freak Scene in the back garden of John Robb's house in West Didsbury, south Manchester, complete with a life size fibreglass fisherman and various plastic toys. Freak Scene was a song that seemed to cross the borders in 1988, a mini- anthem for those into all the different kinds of alternative music. 

Like John Robb, Dub Sex were part of late 80s Manchester, if not widely known elsewhere. The members lived in the infamous Hulme Crescents, a 1960s housing scheme on the outskirts of town that by the 80s had been abandoned by the people it was intended for and had become another world inhabited by those who wanted to live outside the conventional world. Flats, walkways in the sky, flat roof pubs, open spaces, abandoned cars, a vaguely post- apocalyptic feel. I visited a friend who lived there a couple of times and walked past it often as a teenager heading up Wilmslow Road into town. It was not suburbia. 

Dub Sex sounded a bit like Hulme looked- raw, concrete, intense. Vocalist Mark Hoyle was a northern version of Mark Stewart or Billy Bragg, 100% commitment. Industrial basslines, wire guitars, pummeling drums. In 1989 they appeared on Snub playing live at The Boardwalk, doing Swerve. 

Probably the best song you've not heard before that you're going to hear today.

Swerve

Estaba Pensando Sobreviviendo Con Mi Sister En New Jersey

Snub TV ran for three series between 1987 and 1989, shown on early evening BBC2 at a time when the channel had a dedicated youth slot which also included Rough Guide (essential viewing, hosted by Magenta De Vine and Sankha Guha) and in the early 90s Dance Energy. Snub covered the UK indie and underground scenes, catching bands live and in the studio, interviewing them and giving a glimpse into the alternative culture of late 80s. It was lo fi and informal and had some absolutely vital moments- The Stone Roses at the Hacienda as they were about to go supernova in 1989 lives long in the memory as does World Of Twist, rather less dramatically, being interviewed at Withington swimming baths, a place I knew very well from school swimming lessons and being our local baths). 

Snub filmed Pixies at a gig in 1988 on tour with Throwing Muses, an incendiary version of Vamos. However many times you've watched this clip, once more never hurts... 

Black Francis scrubs his guitar and switches between Spanish and English, David Lovering's backbeat is a lesson in breakneck drumming and Joey Santiago's guitar solo with beer can and feedback is so exhilarating it almost can't be contained by the small screen. After Joet stops, all Francis can do is scream 'aah!' several times before slotting straight back into whatever it is the song is about- moving to California, your daddy being rich and your momma a pretty thing. 

The recorded versions of Vamos are slower but no less intense. It appeared first on Come On Pilgrim, 1987's Pixies debut on 4AD, an eight song mini- album presented in a distinctive Vaughan Oliver sleeve, a photo of a bald man with a hairy back. The Pilgrim version is from the band's demo tape, recorded in Boston in March 1987 and finding its way to Ivo Watts- Russell in London, owner of 4AD. There was no- one else like Pixies in 1988/ 1989. 

Vamos

Vamos turned up a year later, re- recorded for Surfer Rosa with Steve Albini producing the band, another slower than the live version take but with a very loud kick drum and some deranged guitar playing created out of patchwork of improvised shorter sections, bits of tape chopped up, turned around, played backwards and messed about with. 

Vamos

I Learned It All From You Girl

Busy wasting time/ conducting research on the internet recently I found some pages from Sonic Death, the fanzine published by the members of Sonic Youth between 1990 and 1994 which ran to seven editions. It was written and assembled by the band with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo especially involved and was riddled with Sonic Youth's DIY, scissors, glue and photocopier, punk energy. There are photos and drawings, interviews with other bands, reviews of obscure, underground 7" singles and albums, letters from fans accusing SY of selling out (they were on Geffen at the time), tour dates and updates, gig reviews, all the things that fanzine culture covered. Here are two front covers, from issue 5 and issue 4, Royal Trux and Sebadoh and much more...

Actual copies of Sonic Death rare as hen's teeth and accordingly expensive; second hand- copies at second hand sites are listed at hundreds of dollars/ pounds. Luckily, at Sonic Youth's own website you can download every edition, #1 through to #7 as pdfs. If you're really dedicated, find some low grade paper and a stapler, print them and read as physical artefacts. Even better, sneak them into work and run them off there. You can find them here. Time capsules from a vanished age. 

Fanzines and music television were both high points of the early 90s pop culture world. Snub TV was a very fondly remembered  BBC2 early evening programme covering late 80s and early 90s indie with videos, live performances and interviews. It was essential viewing. I had stacks of clips and episodes recorded onto VHS to watch repeatedly at leisure. 

Sonic Youth appeared on Snub on 16th January 1989, thirty seven years ago today (not planned, a totally fortuitous coincidence I noted earlier this week when writing this post). There's a sense no one really wants to be interviewed and Thurston Moore stuns everyone at the end with a quote about punk rock and Sharon Tate that goes way beyond what the interviewer was expecting in a discussion about punk rock...

In 1992 Sonic Youth released Dirty, a double album that followed 1990's major label debut Goo. Dirty is loud and grungy, not sloppy grunge but punky grunge, noisy, experimental and chaotic but also with some very focussed and well arranged songs, produced by Butch Vig. Youth Against Fascism, 100%, Sugar Kane, Drunken Butterfly and Swimsuit Issue are all first rate and Dirty is an hour of Sonic Youth at their 90s best. 

The UK release of Youth Against Fascism came with a version of Dirty album song Purr, one of the earliest songs written for the album, recorded at a session for BBC's Mark Goodier, half acoustic and very fine indeed. 

Purr (Mark Goodier Session Version)

Automatic

Reading William and Jim Reid's account of their lives and time in The Jesus And Mary Chain, Never Understood, over the Christmas holiday sent me hurtling into their back catalogue and the one I got really stuck with/ into was 1989's Automatic. It's the album from the post- Psychocandy albums that sounds now like a high point, a non- stop adrenaline rush of great JAMC songs, really well recorded and produced. 

Automatic got mixed reviews in autumn '89, coming out just as the indie guitar world was going indie- dance and dayglo, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays crossing over from the world that the Reids came from (The Roses took quite a bit from early Mary Chain, not lest the paint splattered guitars and drumkit and John Squire freely admitted that seeing The Mary Chain made him completely rethink playing the guitar). By 1989 and the recording of Automatic the band had gone through bassists and drummers and were pared back to just William and Jim in the studio, writing and recording alone together. Almost all the drum parts for the songs were via a drum machine and all the basslines were sequenced from a keyboard (drummer Richard Thomas plays on Gimme Hell). The NME and Melody Maker both opined that the mechanical drum machine rhythms were a weakness and that the Reids had dropped the ball and were left looking like yesterday's men. 

In Alan Moulder the Reids found a sympathetic producer who gave the songs on Automatic a full, vibrant sound and sheen. He also made those drums and basslines sound really powerful- the songs on Automatic now sound very contemporary, jackhammer rhythms with William's best guitar playing, gnarly lead lines and grungy riffs. The two singles are peak Mary Chain- Head On is a blast, possibly their best song, and Blues From A Gun (sung by William) is stunning radio friendly, self- loathing indie- punk, with William's raison d'etre line, 'I guess that's why I've always had the blues...' sounding as profound as anything either brother ever wrote. 

The songs that really stood out on revisiting Automatic recently could easily have been singles. Here Comes Alice is the album's opener, a reverb laden slow motion groove, Jim growling about the heat, summer's heavy sweat, Pepsi Coke and ice cream and, in true Velvets style, about how 'here she comes'.

Here Comes Alice

On Coast To Coast they sound like the best of American indie- rock distilled into three minutes of adrenaline/ amphetamine rock 'n' roll. When the guitars drop out and Jim sneers, 'On the road/ Under the sky/ Coast to coast', it's genuinely thrilling. 

I don't think Jim and William ever had a lyrical theme to their albums- the Jesus and Mary Chain was the theme- but Automatic is full of references to travel, motion, velocity and distance. On Between Planets they turn the tempo up, the guitar a beautiful wall of sound, the drum machine thudding away, and singing of Jackie T who 'done it 50 ways/ Been off that medicine now/ For almost 15 days'. It's more or less the same song as Head On, the essence of Reid '89 at its peak. 'Don't shake those hips/ Don't bite those lips/ Just keep it hid'. 

Between Planets

Side one finishes with UV Ray, crunching hip hop drums and William's burst of guitar- experimental, but not acid house inspired, indie- dance. Side two has five more five star transmissions from Reid world- Her Way Of Praying, Head On, Take It, Halfway To Crazy and the full on psychodrama of Gimme Hell. 

They were filmed live for Snub TV in 1990, playing Take It and Gimme Hell, the films projected onto the screen behind them a perfect summation of Jim and William's vision- blurred shots from passing cars, coke logos, the word Jesus writ large, stars and stripes, all submerged behind red lights, dry ice, hair and black leather jackets. 

The Passenger And The Bus

More sad news with the loss of two more musicians in the last week. Ricky Gardiner died last week aged 78. Gardiner played guitar for Iggy Pop and David Bowie. That in itself marks him out as remarkable. But even among those two artists  and their rollcall of musicians, collaborators and players, Gardiner was special. He played the lead guitar line on Sound And Vision. He played the riff on Speed Of Life and on Always Crashing In The Same Car. He was Iggy's guitarist on the Lust For Life album, co- writing Success. He played drums on Fall In Love With Me. And, most of all, he wrote the riff on The Passenger, arguably the greatest rock 'n' roll guitar riff of them all. 

The Passenger

R.I.P. Ricky Gardiner.

A few days later the death of Cathal Coughlin was announced. Cathal, from Cork, died aged 61 after what was described as a long illness. He was previously the frontman of Microdisney and then Fatima Mansions. I first encountered Cathal and The Fatima Mansions on BBC2's Snub TV in 1990 and this specially shot clip for their song Only Losers Take The Bus. Intense and unforgettable, it made a big impression on me, Cathal tied to a chair firing off surreal lines like 'Churchill was shopping bag' and 'Paris is in India' while claiming he was 'born in hail and flames'. 

I've always assumed the song's title was taken from Thatcher's (possibly apochyphal) remark that 'any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure'. 

R.I.P. Cathal Coughlin. 

Set A Course That I Don't Know

This clip came  up on the ever- excellent @Birmingham_ 81 Twitter account yesterday, a birthday post for Norman Blake. Teenage Fanclub, on the way up, performing Everything Flows live caught by Snub TV's cameras in December 1990. Just watch this...

I mean, wow! Mayhem. Noise. Songs. Guitars. Drums. Kids losing it. Out of key vocals. Gloriously sloppy. Absolutely life affirming stuff isn't it?

Everything Flows is one of their best songs, a 1991 single and on the Fannies debut album A Catholic Education. It's got everything that made them sound so good- a group in love with the sound they're making, a yearning and slightly melancholic edge, loose harmonies, feedback. The recorded version is more controlled than the live one above but still seems to be at the edge of their capabilities (in the best way). 

Everything Flows

In 1995 they put out a four track EP of acoustic versions of songs from their back catalogue, one from each album they'd put out at that point. Gorgeously done stuff. 

Everything Flows (acoustic)

There's Something Wrong With Human Nature

A record purchase made on a whim and a coincidental sequence of posts on social media have sent me down a rabbit warren of On U Sound recently. The record purchase was On U Sound's Pay It All back Volume 7, a budget price double album of recent releases from Adrian Sherwood's dub stable. Not long after someone posted Human Nature, the 1991 single by Gary Clail, produced by Sherwood, a massive club and chart hit in 91 and inescapable for a while.  Weirdly I do not own Human Nature in any format- vinyl, cassette, CD or mp3. I have plenty of On U Sound, several mp3s of Gary Clail tracks and Beef on 7" but no Human Nature. Here's the video...



Clail's impassioned vocal over the dub/ indie- dance rhythm track and that keyboard riff, the piano part and Lana Pellay's 'let the carnival begin...' chorus are all obvious highlights, much of the music being David Harrow's musical handiwork (the keyboard riff, as I'm sure you all know, was used on the titles Snub TV, the much loved BBC 2 music programme). This being 1991 there were remixes and the Steve Osbourne Perfecto mix is a banger.



Originally the song included a Reverend Billy Graham vocal sample which couldn't be cleared for release and Clail recorded the part it himself. Some promo copies of the single made it into record shops though. You can hear it here courtesy of blogging legend stx.

In 1989 Gary Clail released an album called End Of The Century Party produced by Sherwood and  featuring an all star cast- members of Tackhead, David Harrow, Bim Sherman, Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. This one is a dubby affair with Bim on vox alongside Clail and is infectious like flu.

Two Thieves And A Liar

Mark E Smith

I've just seen a post by Dave Haslam on social media saying that Mark E Smith has died at the age of 60. He doesn't seem to have been in the best of health recently but it is still sad and shocking news. He was a true one-off, a maverick, a wordsmith and a visionary. He will be missed.

Moss Side Story

Barry Adamson, formerly bass player for Magazine and currently a Bad Seed, has a back catalogue I've never really explored enough. This song from his Oedipus Schmoedipus album has Jarvis Cocker in full on 'sexy' mode and is rather good. The album takes in everything from film John Barry style soundtracks to jazz, dub, soul and electronic stuff. Worth looking out for.

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis

Moss Side Story was a film noir soundtrack and homage to the streets he grew up in, released back in 1988 and found Barry a slot on Snub TV...

Snubbed Four

An ace New Order interview just after the release of Technique with a very fresh faced Bernard, a less fresh faced Hooky and Stephen. Vaguely stroppy throughout regarding Top Of The Pops, videos, the re-release of Atmosphere, marketing Ian Curtis and a certain Irish frontman...'It's all pretty hypocritical and it's a false ideology, I mean U2 are supposed to be Christians right and a big Christian belief is that thou shall not become a false messiah, right, and that Bongo guy, right, he's having a good stab at it isn't he?'

Snubbed Three

Loop, recently reformed feedback fans, and some very late 80s interview clips along the lines of 'we make music for ourselves and if anyone else likes it it's a bonus'. For the record, I do like the music, so that's the bonus. To be honest, Wooden Shjips don't sound a million miles from these chaps do they? There's something very mid-to-late 80s about the mixture of guitar noise, 60s visuals and Home Counties accents.

Snubbed Again

The KLF- I don't remember this interview so I must have missed this episode. I used to have a lot of them taped on VHS but they went the way of all tape and are probably landfill now. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, neither the easiest man to live with I reckon, made some fantastic records, provided a gateway to dance music for NME readers, had a good play around with notions of what it was to be a pop star and a musician, machine gunned the Brit awards, drove around the M25 for 25 hours and burnt a substantial sum of money. Bill Drummond continues to write thought provoking and interesting books. Jimmy Cauty has a vitriolic and slightly unsettling blog. All good fun.

Snubbed

I broke my Boxnet bandwidth for the month. Or rather, you lot did. Mediafire causes some people problems with the d/ls and they're quite trigger happy with my files too. So for this week I will be making use of Youtube and Soundcloud in order to keep this thing going as we approach December. Having put two clips up from the long lost BBC 2 show Snub TV recently I thought we could dig into their archives a bit.

First up The Jesus And Mary Chain, who were in danger of looking a little obsolete in 1989. Here they are 'promoting' Automatic, along with the video for Kill Surf City, some snippets of interviews and a couple of live clips.



'We're up against the music business. We're nothing'.

If you've got a spare £130 you could buy all their albums in one vinyl box at the moment.

Vamos

Snub TV, 1988. Mind duly blown.

Francis goes something like 'We'll have our sons, they will be all well hung, your daddy's rich, your Mama's a pretty thing, we'll go to California, something about lesbians.... etc etc (with a load of Spanish too)' and there's a throat-wrenching bit of  'Aaaghhhh!'

Kim goes duh-duh-duh-dum. Enthusiastically.
Dave goes rattatatatatatatatat, on and on, faster.
Joey gets more beautiful noise out of a guitar and a beer can than seems possible.

Still haven't bothered to see what their new stuff is like.

Life And Death

World Of Twist, Manchester's long lost turn of the 90s band, made at least three outstanding singles- The Storm, Sons Of the Stage (one of my favourite records ever) and She's A Rainbow- and an album which was badly mixed (at a cost of a quarter of a million pounds). Quality Street had some good songs on it but no matter how loud you played it, it lacked oomph. A shame since they had real potential, magnetic stage presence and a sound combining 60s pop, Northern Soul and psych with an early 90s sensibility- a definite sidestep from the Madchester sound, more like a sharper, rawer Pulp. I saw them at Manchester Academy and they were a blast, MC Shells keyboards housed in a giant shell, and spinning round newsagents signs and stage props. Front man Tony Ogden died a few years ago, one of the era's lost souls. He was devastated after the band were dropped and spent several years doing little but taking smack and watching World War II documentaries. Drummer Nick Sanderson followed the band by forming Earl Brutus but died of lung cancer in 2008. The lp has recently been remixed/remastered and is due for release next Monday, hopefully giving the record and the band the sound it needed twenty odd years ago. A second disc has radio sessions for John Peel and Mark Goodier and b-sides. This is the extended 12" version of their cover of a Sly Stone song.

Life And Death (12" Mix)

In this interview clip for Snub TV they are interviewed in Withington baths, just up the road from where I grew up and where I once nearly drowned as a kid (I stuck my finger in a grid at the bottom of the deep end. To see what would happen). Proper swimming baths they were- cubicles around the edge, freezing cold, fag ends and plasters floating in the chlorine.

Weathertube

There's been nothing from Lord Sabre here at Bagging Area for well over a week so here's a couple of clips from Youtube to remedy the situation.

First up, Weatherall, Terry Farley and Pete Heller interviewed for the long lost and lamented Snub TV (from BBC2, late 80s). The clip is memorable partly for Weatherall's long, curly hair and biker boots. The trio discuss London's acid house scene and how they helped  invent it. Also features a Bocca Juniors video.



Second up, Weatherall djing in a club in Belgium last year. Somewhat better than your average club clip due to being filmed and put together by someone who seems to know what they're doing rather than a drunkard with a mobile phone, it features a heavily bearded Weatherall playing cds (gasp, shock, horror, not vinyl!) to  a crowd significantly younger than him. Judging from the clip the Belgians haven't banned smoking in clubs yet and there's always a girl dancing on her own right in front of the record cd players. Records played in the clip- his own remix of Fuck Buttons Sweet Love For Planet Earth and Briosky's Radio Anatomy (I think).



Enjoy your Saturday.