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Life After Death

by Blood and Roses

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1.
Scenario 02:46
2.
Louie Louie 04:20
3.
Paradise 02:15
4.
5.
Jesus 02:14
6.
Roles 03:48
7.
8.
Sympathy 02:29
9.
Mummy 02:16
10.
Strychnine 01:38
11.
12.
Curse on You 02:04
13.
Necromantra 02:52
14.
15.
Possession 02:32
16.
Tomorrow 02:58
17.
18.

about

Life After Death
Blood and Roses

Released as FU666

01 Scenario (Short) (Rehearsal 1981)
02 Louie Louie (R. Berry) (Rehearsal 1981)
03 Paradise (Short) (Rehearsal 1981)
04 I’m Waiting for my Man (Reed) (Rehearsal 1981)
05 Jesus (Short) (Clarendon Hotel 1981)
06 Roles (Kirby/Short) (Rehearsal 1981)
07 Product Of Love (Short) (Clarendon Hotel 1981)
08 Sympathy (Short) (Rehearsal 1981)
09 Mummy (Short) (Clarendon Hotel 1981)
10 Strychnine (G Roslie) (Rehearsal 1981)
11 Your Sin Is Your Salvation (Short) (8 Track Demo)
12 Curse On You (Short) (8 Track Demo)
13 Necromantra (Short) (8 Track Demo)
14 Spit upon Your Grave (Kirby, James, Morgan, Short)
(16 Track Demo)
15 Possession (Short) (16 Track Demo)
16 Tomorrow (Kirby, Short) (8 Track Demo)
17 Your Sin Is Your Salvation (Dub) (Short)
(Casenove Road Porta studio Demo)
18 Love Under Will (Short) (8 Track Demo)

Looking back over thirty years, I am confronted by a world that even I find difficult to recognise; a world of cassette tape recorders with condenser microphones and telephone boxes on the corner, listening to John Peel on a battery powered transistor by candlelight. Sure kid, we had electricity in those days – unless you hadn’t quite managed to get it together to steal an old meter and jerry rig it into the squat wall. Or the police had torn it off said wall for kicks. Or the Council had dug up the lines in front of the house in an attempt to save on eviction costs. Or one of your friends had decided the meter was a Dalek during some kind of drug fuelled psychotic episode. Could have been some kind of power cut. They seemed to always be happening because of strikes or cut backs or something. Maybe God just decided to take a dump on it. It’s been known to happen. Ask Job.

Was it surprising that there was always some kind of shit happening? There was always some sort of bomb going off here and a riot or two there. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and, like some kind of hell spawned Midas, everything she touched turned to shit. There was still good old British know how and crap made out of Bakelite barely holding the circuits of London together. When the fuse blew up in your plug, you wrapped foil from your cigarette packet around it. Every appliance in the capital seemed to be attached to a frayed cloth lead with odd patches of exposed metal shining through from where one of the local sewer rat went and fried itself. Why there wasn’t some all consuming second great fire is one of life’s great mysteries. Possibly, it was always raining.

Fortunately, if the power was off and the cold wind blew, you could always shuffle your way down to some club in search of light and heat. Of course you had to avoid a long list of youth sub cultures in your travels. Every night in London town was a reinvention of The Odyssey as told by some third rate Cockney Walter Hill. Can you dig it? Why did you go to gigs when skinheads were always turning up to beat you up? Well. If you stayed home they’d come around and beat you up anyway. You might as well go out, hang out with the herd and better your chances. And there was music (or at least some rhythmic pulsing noise pretending it was music.)

There’s the nostalgic cut and thrust part of proceeding dealt with. War Stories for the barely impressionable. Funny to think now that those second World War fogeys we mocked were closer to 1945 than we are to 1977. I just needed to get the idea of time and place settled before I talk about “Life and Death”, a cassette only release by Blood and Roses that was released by 96 Tapes in 1983/4. The reason it came out in the first place was every morning I woke up to a pile of blank cassettes and self addressed stamped envelopes courtesy of the mail man. Various darkly covered envelopes with felt pen decoration would make their introductions. Do you have any demo recordings? Live recordings? And dutifully I’d sit there pressing play and pause and waste precious time I could be indulging in debauchery. In hindsight, I know I was participating in a huge underground network communicating ideas and culture. If you think about it, it is a rather amazing phenomenon that probably deserves a University thesis. The trouble was, I was never a great revolutionary. I may well have had my revolutionary ideas and ideals but I essentially wanted to consume copious amounts of substances both illicit and otherwise whilst having sex with women. There were certain people who considered this to be reprehensible but they generally were not having sex with anyone so I envied them nothing.

“Rob,” I said to the Lord High God of 96 Tapes. “Just let me shove everything on a cassette and they can buy it off of your fledgling musical empire. Then I can get on with my pitiful attempts at wenching and less than successful attempts at filling the gutters of Hackney with my vomit.”
“Sure,” says the Bossman. “How much do you want to charge?”
“Just costs. I don’t want to make any money off this shit”
“What do you want to put on the cover? We could put bats and spiders’ webs and shit on it. We could do a real Banshee’s thing on it”
“Fuck that. Put something repulsively cute on the cover. A baby seal. Some pretty flowers.”
“I got this picture of the kitten”
“Perfect.” says I. And that was the extent of our business and marketing dealings.

And perhaps that sounds dumb and cynical and somehow lacking in cultural, revolutionary or artistic zeal or merit. But if you want the truth about how this project got off of the ground, there you have it. But before you get too disappointed, just remember art has a funny way of shining through. These were a collection of recordings made in complete seriousness under absolutely absurd constraints. And when I actually went to put the master tape together, I began to realise I was actually creating a very weird piece of work. Instead of looking for the perfect takes – or even the acceptable takes – I was collecting a series of snap shots about how a band essentially comes in to being. And it is strangely compelling in a way that more commercially acceptable anthologies are not. That still didn’t prepare me for the fact that Robin Gibson gave it a five star album review in Sounds. What was he thinking?

Then I’d start reading someone say that this was ”the real Blood and Roses album” and... in many ways they were right. Blood and Roses played most of their gigs in squats and squatted venues through PA’s that were far from effective. (Okay; occasionally they were guitar amps or record player amplifiers and not PA’s at all and that may have explained their abject failures.). In an attempt to hear herself, Lisa plugged her microphone into a guitar pedal. Any improvement in levels was at best a placebo.

I had a semi acoustic guitar I had bought for ten pounds (I got to knock the price down from fifteen because it didn’t have any pick-ups). I taped some pickups from a smashed guitar into it and then stuffed it full of toilet paper to stop it feeding back. We owned no amps. Whatever we could beg to play through we played too loud because it seemed like that was how you were supposed to do it. It wasn’t like we were playing venues with sound guys. We just did our best to tack all this crappy equipment together and then put a cassette player somewhere. Then we’d get on the train or the bus home and listen to the cassette happily as our fellow public transport users recoiled in horror. Any venues that heard these tapes would black list us, nail their doors shut and call the police. So, yes. I guess this really is the authentic Blood and Roses album; not born of dreams but nightmares.

But it is not as if I am claiming some unique way of working. This determined seizure and misuse of any or all available tools of production was rampant. This was, however, a separation of working method from the first wave of punk bands who talked the talk about doing it yourself but pretty much recorded the same way all those rock and roll vampires had recorded; talked their way into record company demos. By the early Eighties, the major record companies had enough punk bands to keep them going. Gary Bushell’s myopic lenses kept the various sonic experiments committed in the nation’s squats in a state of premeditated commercial suicide. Even Crass seemed to have access to some sort of legitimate form of production. Given how far outside of society we had all tumbled, we clung to the lyrics of those we thought had blazed our trail. Someone locked the door? I’ll kick my way back in. Or that was the plan.

The music industry did not care if Andi Martin lurked in his attic with a couple of tape recorders and a five watt amp churning out Apostle album after Apostle album having nothing but time on his hands. Out on the edge of the smoke, Faction pressed play and record, thrashed for a minute and a half and then pressed stop. Repeat until you have a dozen songs. Fill in the name of two hundred offenders I fail to mention. A house could fill up with band tapes if you didn’t watch out and remember to tape over them with your own band. Nothing like a roll of sticky tape to foil those copy protect tabs.

That is the world “Life After Death” begins in. The Clapham demo was created via a revolutionary idea. On a less than bright Sunday afternoon, we jumped the tube across the river and set up all of what little gear we could scrounge into the basement of a squat. I had got hold of this 35 watt amp that, if you pushed every dial up to full you could almost hear over the drums. When we played back the half dozen songs we recorded, we couldn’t hear the vocals at all. No problem. We put the cassette into another machine and then had Lisa sing it again with her right next to the recorder. The instrumental “Scenario” got added words because I picked up the first available book and read where I opened it at. (Typically the library book in question must have fallen open at the... ahem... most read section.) Professional microphone? Nah. The crappy built in thing records sound doesn’t it? High quality cassettes? I picked up these from that stall outside Boots for fifty pence. Each? Nah, all three.

If you somehow think I am mocking this process, you are wrong. Necessity is the mother of invention. The day you wait for someone to give you permission is the day you should give up. The day criticism is enough to slow you down means you are pushing a losing hand. Throughout my life, I have seen thousands of people waiting for their break, holding back for the perfect opportunity to strut their stuff. Waiting for that one perfect thing that is going to vindicate them. Guess what? I haven’t seen it happen once. The only way you can prove yourself artistically is to actually stand up and try to do something with whatever tools are at your disposal. If no one likes what you do, FUCK ‘EM. If all you care about is people liking what you do, FUCK YOU.

The Live at the Clarendon gig was recorded by Andi Martin for SCUM tapes. It was our first gig with Jez on bass and he’d been on bass for all of two minutes. The recording was made on a portable cassette player. It sounds like a toilet being flushed. It sounds just like every small punk gig you ever went to. It sounds totally and utterly real and wonderful but you’ll never need to listen to it twice.

From there on, the recordings get better. Unfortunately, the tapes are copies of copies of copies with each new generation layering its own peculiar rumble or EQ spike. I’ve put them though some software to try and improve some of the quality and trim off jagged tape recorder clicks. Sony has just invented some software that claims you can separate individual instruments so you can fix virtually anything up. Well. I thought that might defeat the purpose somehow. If these recordings were to suddenly morph into something listenable, where would this leave the feeling of adventure and authenticity? Why isn’t your favourite track here you might ask. Well, “Life after Death” was a ninety minute tape and CDs aren’t that big. For this re-issue, I’ve decided to make two separate discs. Look out for “More Life After Death” coming soon.

And finally. Why now? Why bother? Well, I had been recording some backing tracks of some of the unreleased Blood and Roses songs and I needed to try to work out some of the lyrics. That’s why you have the misfortune to be able to download this. But why was I recording backing tapes? Well, there was talk of a new Blood and Roses album but, with Lisa’s untimely demise, that isn’t going to happen.

But this will be our little way of keeping memory alive. Blood and Roses was a small club with a high mortality rate. Jez is gone. And Steve and Soooo. I’ll put all this stuff out up here and we’ll see who remembers...

Oh. And I lost the cat picture! So you get a different cover too.

credits

released December 31, 2013

Vocals: Lisa Kirby
Guitar and Vocals: Bob Short
Drums: Richard Morgan
Bass: Jez James
(except tracks 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 10)
Bass: Clapham

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Full On Noise Sydney, Australia

Dedicated to making your neighbour's life a misery since 1977, Full on Noise brings you the music you've never heard of!

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