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FIFTY TONS OF BLACK TERROR

 

Jonathan Marshall Free - Guitar etc

After cutting his (rather bizarre) teeth with flowery losers THE DAFFODILS (1987-8), Jon jumped ship to join moody losers THE PUSHKINS (1988-91), whilst also moonlighting on drums and guitar for angry losers MOIST (1990-94), (One self-released cassette-only album 'Face Pack', 1992. 100 copies).

MOIST had played a few shows with Tim's band LOVEBLOBS, and also with Graeme's band BUGSHIFTER, who had themselves seen Tim playing on the ACTION SWINGERS tour. Upon the simultaneous, but unrelated break-up of each of our respective bands, a chance meeting between Jon and Graeme at LIGAMENT'S first gig the night that news broke that Kurt Cobain had died was the start of our resignation to the inevitable formation of Penthouse...

Humanoid

 

Interview, January 2015:

Hi Jerome... thanks for the questions, I'm sorry it has taken a while to get get back to you - there are some interesting questions, with difficult answers(!), please feel free to edit out any irrelevancies or repetitions!!!


1/ The last album you have released is The Amusiacs' "Volume 1" in 2012,

Could you tell me more about it (who are you playing with, how did you meet...) ?

It seems like you've changed Continent, is a "Volume 2" to be expected ?


The Amusiacs started as a collaboration with our friends Scarlett & Tim from The Jooks of Kent in 2008. I first heard of them through their myspace page, back in 2007; I loved the track they had posted 'Her Book Of Retribution'. I saw they were playing The Spitz’ Festival of Blues with Scott Biram and Seasick Steve and so we went along; that turned out to be their first gig! Anyways, it also turned out that we liked each others' bands and we became great friends.They are an incredibly interesting and talented couple, very creative individuals! Gin Palace played at their wedding reception! Tim and Scarlett live by the sea in Folkestone, so we would occasionally go down for the weekend for a little holiday, and dabble in recording the odd bit of nonsense in their home studio. I also was making Tin-Tones by this point, and Tim and I would muck about on them, recording experimental bits and bobs. Eventually, when both Gin Palace and Jooks Of Kent had split up, we thought maybe we could do some stuff together, as a two-married-couples band, a bit like ABBA. They write and record in a pretty strange way; Scarlett might get up and record a 4 minute drum track with no preconception of any music, then she'd go off to work, and leave Tim to add a guitar part over the fixed drum-track... sometime later they would bring their 4-track (Cassette!) up to London and get me to add whatever I felt like to flesh it out... Maybe bass, maybe guitar, maybe Tin-Tone... maybe just noise - like me touching the unplugged end of a guitar lead to create a pulse tone. But once my bit was down, Tim might chuck out his original part, keep my overdub, and record his own part again but completely differently! Very odd, a bit like the game of consequences, when a group of people write a collective story without having seen the previous paragraphs. Sometimes, there'd be a solo drum track he hadn't come up with anything for, and I'd get to come up with a riff - then he'd do the over-dub parts. All the recordings were 1st or 2nd takes, so it's full of mistakes, but very fresh!!! Hopefully this method of working will lend itself to us carrying on working together despite us being in Australia, and them in England. We had gotten about 3/4 of the way through a Volume II before we left, and I'm desperate to finish it off, since I thought it contained some of the best stuff I've ever been involved with, but with our sudden emigration and various health complications/homelessness/babies etc, it's has just not been possible yet. Now Meaghan and I are settled again, and with our stuff out of storage, we have been talking about getting it finished up soon!!! Just this week, we have started exchanging files over the internet etc., so we are back on it!


2/ About Australia, do you plan to play there with any of your bands ?

Are there places/countries you never played but you'd like to ?

If you had to pick upon the best moment you had on tour, what would it be ? What about the worst memory ?


No plans to play out here, but if we can swing a few shows, it'd be great to get Tim and Scarlett out here for a holiday, do some recording and play around a bit... but I don't really have the connections here yet to book decent shows, and The Amusiacs is almost entirely unknown, so it'd just be for fun... Penthouse's bassist Esme lives out here too now, so a Penthouse re-union or some other project could be possible too…

I travelled pretty well around Europe with the bands over the years, it was just about the best benefit of the job! Penthouse's trip to Istanbul in Turkey was a huge eye-opener for me; Charly and I lived in a part of London dominated by the Turkish community, full of their ocak basi restaurants, all-night snooker halls and heroin dealers: There were a lot of Brits being taken hostage in Istanbul at the time we were there, and I was expecting a rather surly and conservative bunch, but in reality Istanbul was very cool! To our surprise, our first impression was that of seeing transvestites walking the streets in the afternoon sun! I spotted a billboard offering Efes (beer) at about 50 pence a bottle outside a club that looked somewhat terrifying; an empty hallway leading to an unmanned stairwell, peeling black paint and rubble, like an abandoned building, and I think I only lead the way in out of bravado, but… that staircase opened onto a sun-terrace with a panoramic view of the bay of the Bosphorus, absolutely beautiful, and waited table service too! Later, at a different bar we took a table to Gainbourg playing, followed by Suicide, and then Barry Adamson, which was amazingly credible DJ-ing for a bar in the Bazaar, which otherwise looked to be unchanged in 1000 years! Mind you, we also went to the capital Ankara which was excruciating, the DJs playing Paul Simon and worse after our show, and the patrons offering us money to stop and indeed to never play music again! I remember the coach to take us back to Istanbul didn't arrive until 6am, and that there were a surprisingly large number of lone men standing in the dawning sunshine on the beach, selling helium balloons, alongside the wreck of a boat... At 5am...?

That was as close to Asia as we ever played... We could see it across the water! I never got to Japan, which I would expect would be equally very strange and exciting! I hope I'll get there one day, Australia's not too far!



3/ It feels like you are a very busy guitar builder and repairer,

Could you explain exactly what your job is?

Did you ever succeed in making a living from (your) music or guitars ?

In the last year that I was in London, I did about 400 guitar repairs, so yes, it was very busy! The work ranged from setting them up, to major reconstruction work!. Through having played in bands for so long, I had a great network of people I knew in music, so I was getting a great many referrals, and worked for some famous bands, and many bands that I admired. I also handmade around 150 experimental guitars from recycled materials (www.tin-tone.com) from 2008-2013, and between the two income streams it was the closest I have ever been to making a living, but I still never made enough to clear the credit card debts of being a musician!


4/ Could you briefly tell me about your musical path:

How did you start to play music?

How come you played guitar ?

And how did this lead you to Penthouse ?

What about Moist ? (it's hard to find info on it)


Briefly, huh? I grew up in America, in New Jersey, just outside New York City - about 8 miles away (we could see the skyline from the balcony!), My mother was always listening to the radio, singing along, taping songs onto cassette etc. I remember around age 4 or 5 dressing up in a cowboy hat and jumping up and down strumming a spatula that doubled as a vocal microphone for her (and my!) amusement. In retrospect, this was probably not solely my idea; I must have been encouraged by my mum! Her Favourite album was Marty Robbins' "Gunfighter Ballads", doomy, melodramatic romantic stuff along the lines of Johnny Cash... She also used to love Nilssen's abject Without You, and Terry Jacks’ tragic “Seasons in the Sun”.


One time when I was sick, my dad came home from work with a present to keep me amused whilst tucked up under a blanket; a transistor radio!!! This would be around 1976, with me aged 5. It became a constant companion. When I got better, my favourite thing was to go out on my bicycle, with the radio hanging, spinning, from the handlebars playing whatever was on WABC (Radio New York). My father also around this time pulled an old Stella flat-top parlour guitar out of the dumpster outside our apartment block, and I started picking bits of tunes... but without any guidance, and only three strings, it festered for a while. We had an electronic chord organ with single finger chord buttons, which was MUCH easier to master, so I played that A LOT, making my first attempts at songs on that! around 1978 My sister, two neighbouring kids and I started a garage ‘band’, The Red Hots, but it was mostly jumping up and down and shouting, which was to become a theme in all my bands! Perhaps the Stella guitar was the only instrument? I think we only ever did a couple of songs at a friends’ house, then my family suddenly relocated to London to care for my sick grandparents.


By 1981, my sister and I had gained a casio VL-1 VL-tone, the first super-cheap entry-level programmable 'toy' synthesiser with a sequencer and calculator(!) built in! You know Trio's "Da Da Da"? The Fall's "Man Who's Head Expanded"? It was great!!! You could actually define the Attack Decay Sustain Release of the tones, so it really was a synth!


Around 1984-, my uncle started educating me about music, and encouraging me away from synths and into guitar... giving me his old butchered electric guitar, which was almost unplayable, with only 3 strings, and for which I had to make up a cable to plug it into the line-in on the family hi-fi, in the age-old tradition!!! He showed me how to play a few simple rock classics: Sabbath, Hendrix, Zep and Cream… obviously! Black Sabbath, I liked… but I was more into gloomy indie bands, Joy Division, The Chameleons, ComSat Angels, the Smiths, TV21, that kinda thing. After spending months trying to fix up this no-hoper guitar, when it was clear I really was interested in it, my uncle and my mum went into a pact to buy me for Christmas 1985 a new - playable - Ibanez Roadstar RS135 electric guitar and a little 10W Marshall practice amp. I started jamming at school with the only other two people who seemed interested in music; a drummer, who was into U2, and a fretless Bassist, into Jazz fusion!!!


In 1986, I traded the boring Ibanez strat-copy for a beautiful New Old Stock 1982 Shergold Custom Masquerader, like Joy Division used! I saw an ad in Making Music for a singer who was into Echo & Bunnyman, Joy Division, the Smiths, and figured it was better than U2 and Fusion!!! That first proper band was called The Daffodils (not my fault!), and we did a couple of recording sessions, nothing released but we did get studio and live tracks played on BBC radio London. Around this time my dad was made redundant and - in an incredible act of blind love and support - he said if I really was serious about this music lark, he would like to buy me an amp, "one which would see me through to a professional level", as he had been given a cash settlement, and didn't expect to have the cash again later. My sister had just seen The Smiths and brought home a concert programme (I was still only 15, too young to be admitted to gigs!), which showed Johnny Marr with a Twin Reverb, and I figured if it was good enough for him.... I found a 1978 135W Fender Twin Reverb at a local store (only second hand then, not vintage yet!), which has been my only amp used on every gig, every session from that day to this! (thanks dad!) (update 2024: I haven’t been able to lift it since c. 2015)


Even then, in the Daffodils, I remember wanting to be in a band 'like the Birthday Party', and intentionally setting out to do so, writing weird riffs in that style only to have them turned into naff flowery whimsical things... The overwhelming vogue at that time was for indie/goth bands, and I ended up after the Smiths-ey band broke up, joining a The Cure-ey band called The Pushkins in 1988. Unfortunately, they were actually really rather good, with a fragile beauty and sensitivity about them - until I JOINED AND RUINED IT. I was listening to a lot of Foetus and SWANS and other rather nasty stuff, and the middle ground we ended up agreeing upon was in the My Bloody Valentine territory... and ultimately, I think I spoiled what was originally good about them!


Moist started in 1989 as a side project from Pushkins, to make real the fantasies of Ned Langman, a PIL- and Godflesh-loving bassist friend of the band. Originally it was called Not From Manchester, and was a hate-filled reaction to the nauseating influx of weak sub Starsky and Hutch pseudo-funk Stone Roses baggy dance crap around at the time, which, of course, every-man loved, and this period of Acid House and Ecstasy rave later became known as the Second Summer Of Love. Not for us it wasn’t! I was drumming, and Pushkins' singer was supposed to be playing guitar... but he didn't bother to show up on the date of our first demo! So I recorded the drums, then Ned added Bass, then we waited, and waited, and waited... until I snapped and wrote and recorded first take guitar parts for the four songs! 'Lard' from this demo made it onto Face Pack, the remainder are due to come out next year on Detonic Recordings, along with out-takes and some post-Face-Pack demos! Our singer was Nick Brown, my best friend and confidante from school, who had gone to University in Leeds to study Goths. Drummer was Percy, who later (12 years later!) went on to play bass in Dethscalator


Moist did probably around 25 gigs, none with anyone famous, or at 'real' venues... The Falcon in Camden, and the White Horse in Hampstead, I remember… The Bull & gate in Kentish town, too…  Pretty much no-one saw us, or liked us (notable exceptions being Babes In Toyland, Headbutt, and Cranes!), but we somehow managed to sell 100 hand-made cassettes at those gigs, and there was a small feature published on us in Ablaze! fanzine before we split up 1992! Sadly our singer Nick Brown unexpectedly died last year after a sudden collapse at work, believed to be a brain haemorrhage.



5/ As we speak you are, each week, putting some old b-sides, demos or radio sessions from the Penthouse era on Bandcamp

What gave you the impulse to do it?

Is there more to come? (I know it's already a lot but it’s the fan's speaking!)


The last 18 months have been quite harrowing, making me acutely aware of how fragile that everything that we might take for granted is... Shortly after Nick's sudden demise, our landlord dropped dead at work, meaning his estate was sold, including our (rented) home of ten years, leaving us suddenly homeless, and without a place-of-work, and forcing us to make the decision to emigrate to Australia with a newborn baby and a 3 year old in tow! But then, almost immediately upon our arrival in Oz, my father was unexpectedly diagnosed as terminally ill and I flew back to England to care for him for his last two months.

As if that wasn’t enough, after i finally rejoined my wife and family in Australia, It soon transpired that my wife, still breastfeeding our newborn, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and as a result of the treatments became ill and was bedridden for 6 months, and… every time I checked facebook I’d find another friend had unexpectedly died, had a stroke, or been diagnosed with cancer etc etc, and so... 


But back to your question! Circumstances forced me to go back to London to nurse my father, which entailed living at my old family home for a couple of months and closing up my father's house, during which I re-discovered a lot of forgotten cassettes and masters of unreleased recording that I'd stored there in earlier periods of itinerancy(!), and it seemed like a good idea to spend my nights transferring them to the computer to archive them. Then I, too, had a fairly serious accident (head injury) last year which but for luck could have been final, but which also brought up some other underlying ongoing health problems, and it just occurred to me that unless I get this stuff preserved and available somehow, it would never be heard, especially with the rapid obsolescence of last-decade’s technologies. Without meaning to be over-dramatic, I realised that unless I acted, these recordings would die with me, and that given how rapidly my peers seemed to be falling, doing it sooner was better than an assumed later! 


There are a few more recordings that might be worthy of perpetuating - Penthouse's first gig was recorded on 4-track, which I remember being great, but of which I do not have a copy... but most of the live recordings are audience-based, and not particularly good quality. Our old soundman Dave Lamb has just found a minidisc which may have something on it from Switzerland, Zurich Rote Fabrik, he says it is 'in the post' to me now. I have another CDR from Nottingham Old Angel which I remember being great, but which will not play on the 3 computers I have tried it on(!). There's one other sound-desk recording from a show in Bielefeld, Germany, but due to our insanely high on-stage volume, it’s really only the vocals through the PA, and on the recording!!! I tried to arrange a proper record Penthouse's last show, which was easily our best... I had two roving cameramen, a sounddesk and also an audience recording all arranged - and can you believe every one of them failed me? The sound-desk guy got play and pause mixed up and recorded the between-band's DJ set, not us... all we got was from one of the engaged cameramen, who managed to record it as an audio verite piece on a dictaphone with awful sound quality, enlivened with interviews with drunken audience members while we were playing... which was terribly disappointing at the time, but in retrospect might be an interesting document? Again, it's on micro-cassette, and i don’t have a dictaphone, so transferring it will be fun!



6/ Could you briefly tell me about Penthouse...

How did you meet each other?

It seems like "Charlie disappeared" in 1994 and you looked for another singer, what's the story ?

Why did you change your name for "Fifty tons..."?

Gutter Erotica was released 4 years after the band was created, what happened in between ?

Why did you stop after Unt, just 5 years after the first album ?


I knew Tim first. Both The Pushkins and later Moist had played gigs with The Loveblobs, who Tim drummed for. They were also from the South London/Croydon area, and I had become friendly with the band. Graeme I first met when Moist shared a bill with the very great Bugshifter, but they were from Aylesbury, so I didn’t meet them again socially for a while. Tim had around this time been playing in Ned Hayden’s Action Swingers on their UK tour, after Ned’s American band quit on him(!). On this tour, he too shared gig bills with Bugshifter and met Graeme. After Loveblobs split up, Tim started playing guitar and singing with Ligament and I went along to their first gig. I remember it was the night that the news that Kurt Cobain had died came through. My own band Moist had split up, and I remember telling Tim to carry on drumming, and that we should do something together. He told me that Graeme was going to be coming down to the gig, and that Bugshifter were splitting up too… so it quickly became obvious that we had the makings of a band!

That gig was at the Dublin Castle, and the promoter actually suggested Charlie as singer, although it was a while yet before we were to meet. Charlie did turn up and collect a demo tape, but he was in a bit of a state… at that time, prior to there being mobile phones, and with us too poor to have a home phone(!), everything was arranged at public telephone call-boxes on the street. I was at a Telephone box one day, and this guy in full leathers screeched up on a motorbike, came up to me as I was talking on the phone, helmet still on: “Are you Jon Free?”. I thought he was a hit-man!! Anyways, that was the first time I met Charlie. The next time I met Charlie would have been when we arranged a pseudo-audition down at the local karaoke bar (‘Love Letters’, and ‘Old Shep’), and he basically got the job, but almost immediately got himself banged up, and had to do a stretch in Pentonville, He was caught with rather a large amount of something very stupid, and very naughty, and later told me he went cold turkey inside with only Metallica’s Black Album to listen to for the whole three months. Torture!

Well, the band was ready to go, and we didn’t know what had happened to Charlie; he had simply disappeared! So Graeme called in his old bandmate Stuart Ness to sing, and we played our first few shows. At this stage we didn’t have a name, but were just pulling strings to get added to bills appearing unannounced, or under whatever name the promoter wanted to call us. At the second gig,  at the Dublin Castle the promoter Jim (who had suggested Charlie as vocalist, them previously being bandmates in The Hinnies), and who went on to be our manager - when we told him to bill us as ‘whatever fantasy band-name you feel like, you must be looking at band names all day, what SHOULD our band be called?’, he billed us as Penthouse… I believe he would have known where his best friend Charlie was at that time (although we didn’t) and wonder if Pentonville Prison inspired the name? Anyway, this gig got reviewed, and so we were stuck with the name! Well, it was either that or throw away the publicity... But the name did come back to bite us… At first the infamous Penthouse magazine was cool about it; it seemed obvious to us that there could be no possible confusion between the two entities… Certainly there was a strong  precedent for bands and indeed magazines bearing the same names without problem - Depeche Mode, The Times, The Sun, even Boyzone (Boy’s Own), and erm… Magazine! - and for a while as they were launching a British-edition of Penthouse under the title PHUK (PentHouseUK, long before French Connection did their FCUK rebranding) we were in talks about our band playing at their launch night! The bottom line is, UK law and USA law are different, so we were allowed to be called Penthouse in the UK. but to release or play in America we were going to have to do it under a different name. We did consider changing our name to PHUK, which in retrospect would have been a much easier to market than the eventual name we chose! Our dear departed friend Paul Hofner from Gretschen Hofner had given Charle a book of 50s B-Movie posters with the words ‘maybe you can find a new name in here; it’s full of great stuff like “Fifty Tons Of Black Terror”’! There were indeed loads of great movie bylines in there, but none were better than what Paul had said, and despite close examination, none actually used the phrase “Fifty Tons Of Black Terror”. Anyway, Charlie was sold on it, and so it was to be.


It wasn’t really such a long time between forming and the first album, maybe you are looking at the date of the Beggars banquet reissue? 1994 we got together, 1995 Charlie joined, we did demos and recorded the first two singles, 1996 second single released, recorded more tracks for compilations, split singles, and Gutter Erotica, released 1997…


Why did we stop? In the short term, Esme’s wife quite suddenly left him, and moved herself and their children to Australia, so in an attempt at reconciliation and to nurture a relationship with his children, Esme was forced to move to Australia. He was on a flight within 24 hours of us playing our last show. At this point Tim announced that he wanted to leave the band also; he wanted to stop playing drums to focus on singing and playing guitar. This was November 2002. Initially, Charlie and I were going to continue, and were considering two names, The Blackouts, and ScumShots - I had a tape of a halfdozen ideas for very aggressive songs which I played to Charlie, who said ‘but where are the violins going to go?”, and then didn’t contact me for 3 weeks. Knowing that he is a huge Scott Walker fan, and that he wanted to do something more orchestral and melodramatic, I assumed he hated what I was doing and felt too awkward to confront me about it, so I reluctantly started looking for a new singer. Through December, I was trying out the songs with drummer Stuart Bell, and we met Meaghan and asked her to sing, playing our first gig at Gin Palace January 6th 2003, only 6 weeks after Penthouse split up! Of course, Charlie turned up after Christmas with sheafs of lyrics, saying he had written words to all the songs, and I had to admit that I’d booked a gig with the new singer next week. I remember explaining that Meaghan was only here on a six month visa, and that I didn’t think it would last(!), little did I think we’d have been married for ten years by now!!! (2024 update: you do the maths!)


7/ Then there was Gin Palace,

What's the story of that band ?

Are you still playing together ?

Are you still in touch with the members of your previous bands ?

Gin palace did a lot in quite a short time; there was a lot of excitement when we started, and it all happened very fast.

Meaghan hadn’t sung in a band before, and she was too shy(?) to sing at the one rehearsal booked on the snowy day of Monday Jan 6th. But then the first gig was booked for that Friday, Jan 10th, so onstage at that gig was really her audition!!! The band-name was only chosen about fifteen minutes before we played! I literally wrote it on the doorperson’s ticksheet just as the doors opened!


Careless Talk Costs Lives had only discovered Penthouse just as we were splitting up, so I gave Steve Gullick a CDR of a recording of the first gig by ‘my new band’, and he played it in his DJ set the following night, Saturday 11th Jan, at the Artrocker club, at the Buffalo Bar. This lead to us getting gigs at Artrocker, and ultimately to them signing us, and 6 weeks after formation, in March 2003 we were recording our first EP!!! It was really liberating to play with just a drummer in terms of musical freedom and ease of decision making, plus with just the two ‘instruments’ to record, we recorded full backing tracks to both Kill-Grief EP and the Kicking On LP in about two hours each! Kill-Grief was finished in a day, Kicking On done and mixed in two days…!


At the time there was a fashion for bands with no bassist, but I didn’t really plan it that way. I did speak to a few, but they would always come up with statements like ‘I really like Nick Drake’, and ‘I think backing vocals make a band sound really professional’, which immediately disqualified them!!! Then David Lamb, Penthouse’s soundman intimated to me that with Penthouse ‘quite often, if the bass was out of tune or something, I would just take it out of the mix and turn up the low end on your guitar’, and slowly the penny dropped. I hadn’t heard the Kills, and had only heard the White Stripes on a cassette a FRIEND In A&R had brought back from NYC, and didn’t know about their strange line-up - in fact I dismissed them as an awful Led Zepplin tribute act!!! Shows what I know!


Gin Palace never officially split up, but haven’t played together since September 2009, as Meaghan fell pregnant and we had a baby in March 2010, followed by another May 2013, and then circumstances conspired for us to emigrate to Australia, with Stuart remaining in London, so obviously logistics are going to be a problem! That aside, if there were interest, I’d be delighted to play a few shows with Stuart again! Where Meaghan and I live now is very beautiful, but quite remote… so we don’t really see any of our old ex-bandmates other than on Facebook, but we do all remain in touch that way...




8/ You have a very particular way to play guitar, and a very personal sound,

Who would you quote as influences ?

What are your favourite artists / albums of all times ?

What do you actually listen to ?

As a kid at school, aged 12 I remember listening to The Cure’s ‘The Hanging Garden’ double 7” on my walkman in the school playground while all the other kids were freaking out dancing to Michael Jackson’s newly released Thriller!. This was around the time I first started playing guitar ‘properly’. I started listening to John Peel’s radio show every night, and discovered most of the bands I would go on to like through his Peel Sessions:  The Smiths, The Fall, Joy Division, The Birthday Party, Jesus & Mary Chain. I started off picking out Black Sabbath riffs, Cure guitar parts, but really taught myself to play guitar by playing along with the live 2nd disc of Joy Division’s STILL album, recorded at their last gig - which I’d still recommend to any beginner on the guitar, because it was easy to very quickly match or exceed Bernard’s technical prowess, which is much better for your confidence than trying to match, say, Johnny Marr’s chops!!! 

Probably the biggest other influences on my playing was that of Rowland S. Howard and Mick Harvey in the Birthday Party. Their last stuff was, i thought, their best. I loved that Pleasure Heads Must Burn video!!! After them I didn’t hear much that really got me going until Duane Denison’s work in The Jesus Lizard.

All-time favourites is difficult, isn’t it! Maybe Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and still Joy Division and all of the above mentioned influences! i used to have very definite thoughts on what was good and what was awful, but since getting the ipod, and getting into shuffle-culture, scrambling the genres, i find that it might hear Throbbing Gristle followed by Astrud Gilberto, Pussy Galore and Townes Van Zandt, and I will love them each as deeply as is possible for the duration that they play, think that I want to start a band that sounds like whatever it is. and then Robert Pete Williams will come on, blow all of that away until next it’s the Velvet Underground, Dead Brothers, Lydia Lunch, Howlin Wolf, Country Teasers… I tried to explain that what I liked was ‘blues-punk’ to someone recently, and they said ‘oh, like Dr Feelgood’, which is certainly not what I meant!


9/ Do you remember the first records you've bought ?

Of course! First I got Adam & The Ants’ Dog Eat Dog and Kings Of The Wild Frontier 7”s. Singles, of course, I couldn’t afford an album! Then I got John Foxx’s No-One Driving, and then Madness’ Work rest & Play EP. I credit my quick descent into liking weird non-mainstream music to my love of Soft Cell’s big hit Tainted Love; due to my interest in Tainted Love,  my Grannie bought me my first album for Christmas 1981, a strange compilation called ‘Some Bizarre Album’ which featured an early, perverse tune by Soft Cell, ‘The Girl With The Patent Leather Face’ from their pre-fame Mutant Moments EP. This compilation album also had the first releases/recordings from loads of weird stuff, and included Depeche Mode, Blancmange, Soft Cell, The The, b-Movie. Being my first and only  album, I played it endlessly, and bought everything I could find by all the artists on it, and every release on Some Bizarre label, quickly leading me to very perverse waters with Psychic TV, Foetus etc!!!

Do you remember the first show you've attended ?

Yes, I do! It was The Chameleons at The Marquee in London, 10th May 1985!!! I was 4 years under-age! Actually, before that I saw an open-air festival at Crystal Palace concert Bowl with Comsat Angels, March Violets, Balaam & The Angel, culminating with Hawkwind with Lemmy and Dame Vera Lynn as special guests!!! There used to be a great venue in Croydon called the Underground where over the summer of 1985 they had The Fall, The Scientists, Crime & The City Solution, Mark Stewart & The Mafia, The Moodists and a hundred other bands I wanted to see, but being only 14, I was almost always asked for ID and turned away, which was really infuriating!!!


10/ Except music and guitars, what do you like, read or watch ? (books, movies, family, poetry...)


I'd be happier without a TV, and indeed lived without one for a long time - I haven’t been reading much other than music biographies for decades(!). Also, I worked for ten years in ‘the film shop’, which was a real film buff’s personal video collection opened up for hire, and built up into a business - so I’ve been blessed with great access to watching all the older & classic movies I could ever want to see… and am consequently a bit ‘over it’ now,  so I only catch the odd new release and it’s rare any of the new ones really capture me… that said, recent Sci-Fi films Divergent and Predestination are standouts… Recently we’ve been catching up with some of the better TV dramas: The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, the usual stuff that everyone watches! Black Mirror, or indeed anything Charlie Brooker does is worth watching. Same for Chris Morris. Here in Australia there’s some great political satire going on in The Roast (recently cancelled), and Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell. For comedy and satire I cannot get enough of brit comedian Stewart Lee, please seek his work out!


11/ If you could travel through time and change one moment of your career, what would it be ?


It would be hard to choose just one thing to change... at just about every juncture of my ‘career’ it feels like things fell short of ideal. Changing everything might yield better results? I do wish I had been kinder to and more understanding of my bandmates, and had been better socially equipped to smooze with music business people. Add to that, I wish I had been interested in melody, and in entertaining people rather than using music and performance as a cathartic attack! Of course, if I’d have been sensitive and well-balanced instead of a self-absorbed borderline psychotic, I wouldn’t have been capable of making the music i did… so then, maybe that’s the thing I would change. 


12/ If we meet in the 2024, what do you think you'll have to tell about the past decade ?

What would you like to have done ?


I’d love to be able to tell you that - moments after writing this - we met a whole range of creative, like-minded people, fellow musicians etc.,  and that together we found, and even comprised an affluent, self-supporting and responsive audience, eager to facilitate each other’s every artistic whim(!), allowing us to collectively enter gracefully into a ‘Golden Era’ of creativity.


Beyond that, I’d like to be able to tell you that I finally managed to collate and complete the preceeding decade’s (2005-2015) worth of unfinished multitracks from their various now-obsolete recording formats, and issued the second and third Gin Palace albums, the second Amusiacs album, and edited down the many many hours of Tin Tone Army improvisations into a focused cohesive hour-long career-topping album featuring guest vocals from Lydia Lunch, Damo Suzuki, Marc Almond, Jim Reid, Adam Ant, Scott Walker and more.


 

 

 

click for more skeletons from our closets:

Charlie Finke - Vocals | Tim Cedar - Drums | Esme MacDonald - Bass | Graeme Flynn - Bass