Daily Archive

I’ve walked along Brixton’s Acre Lane a number of times – on the way to the supermarket, or the pub – and never really gave much thought to Number 32.  And neither would you, given that is just part of one of any number of new housing developments munching their way through once unfashionable areas of South London.  Yet Number 32 was once Cold Storage, the pie factory turned recording studio, referred to in the title of the 6 CD career retrospective This Heat box set.  Rarely can there have been greater symbiosis between band and location, between band and time; the collision between old industry and new technology, between the old racism and new multiculturalism, between the old left wing and new right.  Between the iron curtain and cold cold steel.

Their self-titled debut album is a heady mongrel, flecking spitttles of post-punk in the face of some cerebral sonic experimentation.  “Horizontal Hold” crashes into the hum of “Test Card”, and lurches around in search of a groove it can stay in for the night, or at least until it is awoken by the industrial gamelan of “Water”.  “24 Track Loop” is still a thrilling pitch-shifting, shape-shifting beast – like one of the tape manipulation tracks from Neu! 2, but with Jaki Liebezeit on drums; the Can axis is even more pronounced on “Twilight Furniture”, which could slip almost unnoticed onto Tago Mago if it had the confidence to stare the doorman down.  The album then heads east, through the “Rainforest” and towards “The Fall of Saigon”, where guitars are prepared and played with chopsticks.  Sonic Foo Yung, if you will.Follow up Deceit is a more cohesive howl into the abyss.  Attempting to outdo the sense of abandon and adventure of its predecessor, the album manages to incorporate melodica, sampling, pan pipes and Albini-esque splintered steel guitar shrapnel; in fact everything up to and including the town hall clock.  Lyrical content is dogmatically consistent; raging about advertising, capitalism, fascism, and nuclear war over the disparate looped and found sounds.  Deceit is a-buzz with so much fraught and twitchy energy.

The contemporaneously recorded “Health and Efficiency” single makes up the next disc, and sets itself up in opposition to Deceit, charging in on a ridiculously catchy riff and lyrics about the sunshine.  There are even “whooo”s in the background, for heaven’s sake.  About two minutes in, seemingly embarrassed by its own effortless pop, it chucks itself into a hole and spends the next five minutes running from side to side until it makes itself dizzy and it throws up its school dinner, full of mad colourful visions .  Two plus five equals seven, making this seven of the most thrilling minutes in recorded music.  The B-side was the 45rpm version of “Graphic”, which I thought sounded like Deathprod on mogadon until I heard the 33rpm version which takes up 20 minutes of the Repeat disc.

I’m not sure how much the nascent John Peel tracks or the 80/81 live performance add value, but the inclusion of Repeat – essentially “24 Track Loop” hyper-inflated beyond all constraints of time and common sense – is a marvellous thing, twitching and phasing for twenty minutes, after which the Cold-Storage-as-instrument “Steel”, and the aforementioned “Graphic” are welcome respite

I’m bound to be back in Acre Lane some time soon.  I think I’ll pause a while longer to howl at consumerism, as represented by a stray shopping trolley or something.  Then I’ll fidget a bit, before wandering off in some other direction.