Written by Bob Short (Copyright Control)

It was suggested to me that maybe I should write a few words about my soon to be (or maybe it is already) released single. Does that sound confusing? No more than it does to me. Late one night, I looked at my bank balance and a quote for pressing a single and... in one of those mad impetuous moments spurred by a couple too many drinks and an underlying tendency to stupidity, I pressed a few buttons and started a process into motion. Okay. I knew I’d have to stop going out or drinking for a while but life offers you so few enough opportunities. At the end of the day, your resume can only be so long, there can only be so many mountains you climb. And time is not your friend.

Neither continents nor empires rose or fell. But time did pass, day after penny pinching day. Eventually, some boxes arrived. The shocking truth lay before me. I was in the music business. Or something like the music business. I have all these slabs of plastic and they can’t stay in the front room forever. I realised I have to do some other things like launch the record. Sell some. Give some away. Give their round black lives meaning. Make a proper film clip rather than some old photos slapped across a chunk of Youtube. I have to get distributors. I have to sort out downloading and streaming and – hell, I’m not sure what those new fangled things are. Do I really want to be spotified?

Let’s put it another way. Basically, I have to find homes for these kittens. They are very nice kittens. Do you want one?

Have I released a record? The correct answer is, I’m not sure but I’m muddling through. There’s a record and I’m releasing it and you can have one now. Because I have a couple of boxes.

Well. That’s one version of the truth but it’s not the whole truth. Here’s an equally true and valid stab at the tale. Some of you might remember a band I was in called Blood and Roses. Wilfully different, we had our moments – not all of them glorious. We weren’t to everyone’s taste which was a bit of a relief. I mean, I’ve heard what passes for everyone’s taste and I don’t like it. Everyone’s taste has left me banging my head against walls seeking short respite from the twin evils of popular banality and stupidity. I’ve been banging my head against walls for years.

Blood and Roses played around the Wapping Autonomy Centre and the Centro Iberico. We tried playing pubs but they didn’t like us or the people who came to see us. Oddly, the music business came sniffing at our door. We did the “Love Under Will” EP. Rather than pay royalties, the record company broke up and handed the record rights to their best mate.

We sat in the offices of other record companies. We’d find ways to sour the deal. They’d invite us in and have security see us out. We broke up. (Well, truth is drummer Richard Morgan stole someone’s guitar amp to feed his wretched habits and I didn’t want to be in a band with someone like that so that was that. If you ever wondered why Richard wasn’t in the band when we reformed to do the album... there you go.)

After the album, life started getting in the way as it starts to in your late twenties. Babies. Relationships. Drugs. Violence. At the time of writing, everyone involved with the making of “Love Under Will” has gone with the exception of me and Min who was one of the backing vocalists.

Lisa Kirby, the singer, left us last year. In the years before that, I’d been trying to put an album together with her and come over to Europe and play some kind of tour. It was slow work but it seemed plausible. I recorded backing tracks. She sent back notes. During a phone call, she told me she had a few things she needed to sort out and we’d get to work in six months or so. She wasn’t specific about the reason and I didn’t push. I had called her at eleven AM and she was already drinking. As our conversation mostly resolved drinking, I thought she meant she was heading back to rehab. Less than a month later, I was dressed in a Santa suit waiting to jump up on stage and sing in a children’s pantomime. I got an email to tell me she had collapsed and was not expected to live. And, just like that, she was gone.

As you can imagine, that was quite an enormous shock. Much more than I realised myself. You think you are shocked and upset when something happens but your brain has so many layers and you just almost involuntarily start doing things to resolve events like programs running background on your computer. The little voice we think of as ourselves is a speck riding on a dark continent.

It was only many months later, looking back over what I had done, I realised the magnitude. I had started working on the recorded songs. I dug up old Blood and Roses material that hadn’t been recorded or that I wanted to rework from another angle. I started writing new songs. A year later, I was looking at 54 finished recordings that filled three CDs. I had just buried myself in this music to try to make sense of the terrible inevitability that frames our lives and remember.

The work became a story about Campbell Buildings. In the late nineteen seventies, Campbell Buildings - a Victorian Housing Estate located behind Lambeth North Tube Station - was cleared of tenants to make way for a proposed bus depot to service Waterloo Station. The empty buildings attracted large numbers of punk squatters. At its peak during the summer of 1980, as many as two hundred punks lived there at any one time. Drugs and violence were rife, particularly given a number of rival youth gangs frequented pubs less than a mile away. There was plenty of opportunity for trouble to raise its head.

Don’t get me wrong. For those living there, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Whilst it is easy to dwell on the squalor, it represented something else – our own brave new world, free of the restrictions of our childhood days. Despite the threat from outside forces, this was a refuge for runaways, the strange square pegs escaping round holes. A world where you could live and love and dream. Despite what you have read to the contrary, the risks were always worth it. If you’re expecting a cautionary tale, you may well be disappointed or blind to the flip of a coin.

I lived there for a year and, ganging together with some of the other residents, formed the band that would become "Blood and Roses". Named after the English title of a French vampire movie "Et Mourir de Plaisir" (literally: To Die with Pleasure). The single is about those times. (And more specifically the slide into drug usage in the shadow of the threat of violence).

Like Blood and Roses, the single creeps through knowing winks at the sounds of cinema. Some may use the word Gothic but that is one of the most ridiculous genre descriptions ever laid before the public. It opens with cold piano chords hinting at "Bron/Broen" and the Coen brother's "Blood Simple" with a one note drone echoing "I wanna be your Dog". When the drums arrive they channel Phil Spector as told by Martin Scorsese in the opening shot of "Mean Streets". Then the guitar relives the prelude to an Ennio Morricone scored showdown and we haven't yet reached the chorus.

Some would question whether this could be called punk at all whilst some might argue that this is the most punk of all.

The B side is a cover of The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset". You might call its inclusion "ironic" but the original has irony to spare. Certainly, on many a summer evening, the sound of the Kinks rattled through broken glass as the sun went down. As I said before, a coin has two sides.

The decision to make a record was largely based on making something permanent. You can release music on CDrs or cassettes but they have a limited lifespan. Even as the media itself breaks with age, CD drives are vanishing from computers and DVD drives look like heading for similar retirement. Formats and applications change on computers on a corporate whim and government sanction. Profits are maintained by big companies selling you the same songs in different formats.

Vinyl records have survived at least in the background of popular culture. Some Luddites lay claim to some inherent ghost in the machine that captures magic like flies in amber. I’ll leave that to philosophers to argue. The technology required to draw sound from a disc remains fairly simple. A spinning wheel. A sharpened quill and a paper cup will evoke ghosts and demons. Essentially vinyl is the last preserve of our aural history.

This is a limited pressing release and will not be repressed. It will be available for download through Bandcamp as a cheap alternative. You can watch it ad finitum and not pay a red cent on Youtube. In terms of a piece of work, it means a lot to me. I hope at least some of you like it and form some kind of emotional attachment to it.

An album called “Et Mourir de Plaisir” is set to follow. Consisting of ten songs (None of which are on the single), it will be limited to a pressing of 150 copies. I just have to sell enough singles to pay for it.