DEAD ELVIS ARCHIVE

THE WORMHOLES - RIOTMAN

‘You walked in / I passed out / C’mon we’ll get our coats / C’mon we’ll go downtown / C’mon we’ll tell the kids what’s goin’ on.’

The Wormholes - Riotman

One of the many unforgettable things about being around the Wormholes when they were recording and playing live was seeing Dave go off almost totally freestyle on lyrics. He seldom had any kind of completed lyrics for the songs he featured on while recording. Every time he sang some of the key post ‘Chicks Dig Scars’ Wormholes songs - the lyric would be noticeably different but always strong and always pretty dark.

‘Riotman’ is to me like a kind of ‘School’s Out’ or ‘C’mon Everybody’ turning into a nightmare song and is a great example of the way he improvised lyrics in the studio. The Wormholes had recorded this song in a session with Marc a good year before they re-recorded it with Stan Erraught producing. It was quite shocking for me to hear the way in which the lyric was kind of the same but very different across both versions. Both versions are dark and end with a kind of sustained improvised repetition. This version (Stan producing) is incredible and hearing the insistent piano brings back clear memories of the improvised ‘Dirt Records’ studio in which it was recorded and of how really friendly, helpful and warm Monty (Revelino) and Shane (ex Blue in Heaven) were to us at the time. The other version of the song (which is much much longer) which Marc produced is also incredible and I can’t wait to dig it out and hear it again as it was probably the single Dead Elvis recording that I have strongest memories of. It’s darker than this - wayyy darker. Unlike this one you could also clearly hear all the lyrics - something Dave was increasingly allergic to after the band recorded ‘Chicks Dig Scars’. You can definitely hear enough of the lyric here to get the idea though. ‘Your face, the wall again’. Graham’s harmonica is also full on. More about the other version of ‘Riotman’ and the ‘lost’ version of the Parijuana album from which it comes will come later. The image below is Dave in 1994, sometime after they recorded ‘Chicks’.

LEE REMEMBERS RECORDING A SINGLE / JUBILEE - A. DON’T GIVE UP ON ME + B. 22 YEARS

Jubilee - Don’t Give Up On Me

Jubilee - 22 Years

Lee, who for quite a long period was Jubilee’s drummer, sent me the account below of recording their ‘Don’t Give Up on Me’ single in 147. He mentions a phonecall where myself and Og asked Jubilee to record the single for us. I can still vividly remember phoning Fergus on that Sunday night. Nice to be able to date it. It was approximately eight months into the existence of the label. Myself and Og were sitting together in the very narrow back bar of The Hut at the time. Joe in the hut was always game for giving us a few jars on tick and it was a kind of sanctuary back then for us from ‘town’ and all associated with it. I had drank regularly there for a few years already at that stage, and, despite the fact that I lived in town at that time(?), would meet Og and others regularly there. The phonecall was actually a series of phonecalls from the coinbox in the pub. We  had seen Jubilee perform the song just before that somewhere and we convinced each other it was a stone cold classic worth fighting for.

The ‘fighting’ involved much whinging, bullying and pleading over a series of at least three calls. A ‘what would Husker Du do?’ kind of level of stuff with me making sure that Fergus was clear that it was a ‘now this minute or never’ kind of deal. I remember the calls being full of humour at our end at least. Myself and Og getting drunker and laughing about what taunt or wind-up we could try in the next phonecall so as to up the ante. We were easy and already friendly somehow by that time with Fergus. We had no reservations about slagging him anyway. It worked. We were absolutely thrilled. I can’t remember if he and the others succumbed to our assault on that evening or in the few days afterwards - but succumb they did.

Lee also talks about what was in fact their launch gig for the single in Barnstormers in his account. We used Barnstormers for quite a few gigs at the time. We had become friendly with Dougie who had run the ‘Fusion’ club in McGraths in O’Connell St and when he started running Barnstormers - we started asking him to give us space for gigs. The bikers were indeed frightening to look at but we never had a single tiny bit of hassle from them over the course of a good lot of gigs we did there.

People got a copy of the 7’ on entry at the launch. I remember that there was a decent crew there - but nothing resembling a full house. I don’t think many people were paying much attention to Jubilee at the time. The single changed that very quickly - and I’m still proud to this day of that fact. The image at the bottom of the post is the club ‘colours’ of the Bikers who haunted Barnstormers in numbers at the time. I’m also including a vinyl rip of ‘22 Years’ - the B side of the single which Jack added sax to as described by Lee. The video which Daragh McCarthy subsequently made for ‘Don’t give up on me is linked to on here somewhere too. Over to Lee …

I remember Eamonn rang Fergus in the Avondale Road house on a Sunday night in May 1995 and asked if Jubilee wanted to do a single with Dead Elvis. After practicing on the Tuesday evening as usual, we went into the studio in 147 on Wednesday for an all-nighter.

We’d been there before when we recorded our first single in October 1994 so we knew Marc and we knew the layout. Fuse was a basement space with a small control room and a small live room.  Marc was a great engineer who had the knack of making people feel relaxed. That really helped us. As Eamonn has already pointed out, we weren’t really technical musicians but we did have good ideas and there were times when we had a beat, albeit primitive. Marc helped us ease into the process of getting recordings down on tape.

We were still a three-piece at the time, so we recorded the two tracks live and did the vocals and extra instruments as overdubs. Barry did a one-take solo on ‘22 Years’. We were all taken aback by how good it sounded and decided on the spot that it was now imperative he join the group. Jack did the sax. I remember we weren’t too bothered that the instrument was in a different key from the song. We told Jack to just make some noise. We didnt really care if it sounded wrong. At the time we relished what we imagined to be the confrontational aspects of making a racket. Our aesthetic was that being in tune was bourgeois conventionalism of the worst kind. But, a professional even then, Marc slowed the tape down so Jack and the song were in some kind of sync. In retrospect it was probably the right decision.

When I listen back to ‘Dont Give Up On Me’ I hear how much it speeds up. I remember the banter  that night was to quote a phrase by Guy Stevens to the effect that all great rock and roll speeds up. What I hadn’t fully grasped then was that the converse did not necessarily hold true. Not all rock and roll that speeds up is great. These two tracks are pretty cool though.

This recording was definitely a high point for us. We were unselfconscious in our approach and bowled over that Eamonn and Og would want to do a single for us.We got the whole thing recorded and mixed in one night. I think the session went from something like 8pm to 6am but I could be a bit off in those times. I remember having to leave at some point  before the mixing began. I was finishing a year in college and I had exams the next morning. I felt very rock and roll sitting in the exam hall that day. Who else there had made a record the night before, I wondered.

The single came back really quickly and a couple of weeks later we played a few gigs to publicise it. I remember one in Barnstormers on Townsend St. They had a cigarette machine on the stage, which was tiny and right beside the bar. People would buy smokes while you played, interrupting the band to get 20 Superking and challenging you to make something of it. But the place was a biker pub so no-one ever quibbled. It was that kind of venue. And Dead Elvis was that kind of label: eccentric, a little scary at times, but very memorable and always rock and roll.

STEVE REMEMBERS THE J.C.A.S. / BUCKLE - FLOORED

I asked Steve to write what he could remember about attending the Johnny Cash Appreciation Society nights in The Hut in Phibsboro. He kept a diary at the period and the sense of the context in which Dead Elvis was doing stuff really comes through in his listing in his piece of the events he attended in and around the period of the Johnny Cash nights.

That listing set me off on a train of thought about Leagues (Foggy Notions) and Timo (Ultramack) and their substantial involvement in the ‘Crush’ gigs which took place a few years before the JCAS nights in Phibsboro. I ran the ‘Crush’ gigs with Leagues - for a while at least - and was reminded by Timo lately that he realised initially that he liked being involved in running gigs from doing the door quite a bit at the Crush gigs. I think it was through Leagues’ involvement in those gigs that the Dead Elvis gang got to know about In Motion. I still can’t even picture Timo being there at the time and it was quite a bit later on that we got to know him properly.

Remembering some of this stuff has led me into thinking about and reading online about Hope Promotions - and their influence on a lot of people who we did stuff with from 1994 onwards.  There is a really vivid piece by Leagues about the Hope scene on the state.ie website which brought home to me that, unlike many many of the bands and people we had dealings with in Dublin from 1993 onwards, we had not been part of that scene at all. That is not to say that Hope and their existence and activities didn’t have an influence on what we did as Dead Elvis. We might not have been conscious of that influence at all at the time - but I think it was there.  Just not in a straightforward way. That’s something I’ll talk about much more in another post.

I’ve linked to a video of a tune called ‘Floored’ by Steve’s band Buckle at the end of the post. They started up in 1994 and were quite defiantly experimental and (I’m pretty certain) focused a lot on recording their own live improvisations. I can remember Wormhole playing some of their tapes for me in Dave and Anto’s house in Ringsend in 1994. They were impressed and I have a feeling that Buckle were part of a whole lot of stuff that they were listening to at the time that was building up their interest in pushing the boat out in terms of recording improvised material.

Anyway over to Steve’s account. I’ll be throwing in a few clarifying comments along the way where I think it’s useful. They’ll be in brackets and italics.

When Eamonn asked me to write an account of my memories of the Johnny Cash Appreciation Society gigs I very quickly realised that even though I know from my records that I went to four of them I now have very few personal memories of what happened, but here goes. I lived on Black Horse Ave. which was right beside the Phoenix Park on the North side of the city and about a 10 minute cycle from The Hut in Phibsboro. I remember there was already a bit of stupid romanticism in my mind about the whole Dead Elvis social scene and its various characters like Joe Carolan, Eamonn and Og. They lived in the north inner city and drank in various old man type pubs like the Welcome Inn and The Hut. So using this venue certainly placed them very much in their natural habitat.

Straight off I wondered about the name. I didn’t know much about Jonny Cash and wouldn’t have called myself a fan. Joe and everyone else involved seemed interested in material strictly pre-comeback Cash even though this was two years after the rehabilitation of his career after his performance at Glastonbury in 1994. The Crudden Brothers and Joe were a good bit older than me and had some different, possibly more matured tastes. (The first tape I ever owned, sometime around the time I was seven years old - was a Johnny Cash album. It was one of his cheezy ones - well post the Sun period. But it was my first favourite record ever. I was always a very big fan and even more so after I got to know his early stuff and his prison albums. I didn’t hear his first record on American Recordings until sometime during the run of the JCAS. Joe also liked country stuff a lot - particularly Hank Williams.)

I probably wondered that first night if it wasn’t all a bit too ironic but then I quickly realised it was all just a bit of (drunken) fun. It was upstairs and there may have been a vocal PA or not. (There was pretty much always a vocal PA.) I seem to remember the first few were the best attended by punters and performers alike and then it degenerated quickly to die hards of both varieties. (The club hit the rocks because - a little contrary to what Steve says here - the number of people wanting to perform got bigger and bigger and Joe from the Hut became uncomfortable with the fact that our basic agreement that he would give a couple of drinks to any performer was starting to lose him money. The attendance actually got larger as the thing went along in my memory.) As it was held on a Sunday evening I know I never went to any after hour’s parties with them as I would have been almost always working the next morning. I had a regular job most of the 13 years I lived in Dublin and therefore wasn’t ever really able to experience the same 24 hour party lifestyle that the Dead Elvis crowd appeared to me to be living. This was probably a good thing personally but I felt I balanced my time out as best I could. Of course as I got to know them I learned that in reality their lives were not just one big party, or if it was it wasn’t always a very good party.

With Joe Carolan as compere you never knew if he was acting or being himself, he was of course just being himself but you never really knew for certain and what strangers must have thought I don’t know. I do remember getting to know Stan Erraught and his girlfriend Bernie at these nights. I know I missed the first one with The Sewing Room as I was in the States, so the first one I went to was on 12th May 1996 and it featured Rumble, Sunbear, Stan & Bernie, Gary and Oona. I can’t be sure but was this when this latter pair started singing together and gradually became Great Western Squares? If so this might be the one legacy of JCAS. (Gary and Oona became the Great Western Squares in front of our eyes during these gigs. They started with pisstaling country versions of stuff like Adam and the Ants but they were seriously bitten by the country bug and were playing quite amazing sets mixing comedic and tragic songs in equal doses by the end of the run. They never called themselves The Great Western Squares during the run of the club. The name came in the period immediately afterwards when various participants in the club collaborated with them to make their first album - Judas Steer.)

Next time I went was the following Sunday where Gary & Oona, Andrew (?), Shane McGrath and Stan & Bernie were on. Then I wasn’t back till 16th June when Dennis McNulty of Decal did something (can’t remember what) and Gary & Oona were again guests. Again for my final visit I made it two in a row and this time the guests were Gary & Oona, Shane McGrath, D.D.D.(not sure who this indicates) and Bernie. At one of these nights Oona was rechristened the ‘Queen of the New Cabra Road’ by Joe.

As this is an archive, from my records I can give you a flavor of what type of shows were happened at this time in Dublin within the local scene involving as it happens, Dead Elvis, Ultramack etc. while I was attending JCAS during May and June. First there was a Luggage headline supported by Jubilee (before they lengthened their name?) in Whelan’s; some good old US hardcore with Game Face and Clean Slate at the Da Club the same month; The High Llamas (remember them) supported by Jubilee All-Stars (interesting, maybe they changed their name from this show onwards) at the Olympia; Gout supported by Rumble at the Ormond Multi Media Centre at the start of June; again at same venue just a few days later for a Decal headline of a one-off club night Ultramack put on; my own band of the time, Buckle, supporting Wormhole at the Da Club with The Floors also on the bill and finally before the month was out back to the Ormond for more US hardcore from Neurosis and Unsane.

Looking at Eamonn’s posts about the JCAS so far I don’t remember any vacuum cleaner. I remember Joe always being quite political and the commie stuff rings true. I do remember seeing the reunion thing on TV with members of Rumble and Joe on a beach in Blackrock with freaked out bikers which was totally mad and very funny. All the songs - yeah they seem to ring bells - but I don’t remember anything else about their performances. Basically now JCAS for me boils down to going up stairs into a spacious lounge room, did it even have a bar?, sitting down with people I knew and didn’t know very well and talking, drinking and listening. (It was anything but spacious - thirty of forty people was enough to absolutely pack the place - and yes, there was a tiny bar in the back corner.)

AN OG ROAD TRIP / RUMBLE - BURN THE DISCO DOWN

Rumble - Burn The Disco Down

This below post is from Og. The Rumble track above is a studio version of one of the tunes they banged out for their Peel session which he mentions in the post. The song was brand spanking new at the time of the Peel recording if I remember correctly. It’s a very very funny rewrite of ‘Hang The DJ’ by the Smiths and it rocks. Certainly takes the piss out of The Smiths effectively. Well that’s what I always thought it was doing. I love the line about the ‘beerstained bumble’ particularly - It’s sooo Dundalk. The photo included at the end of the post is Keiran from Rumble at round the time described in the post. Shocked (again) to see Og somewhere he wasn’t expected to be (again) no doubt. Rumble recorded their Peel session on the 19th May 1996 and so the events in this account can be dated quite accurately for a change. Og went on quite a few  of these kind of seat of his pants trips at the time and hopefully he’ll write about a few more of them along the way. It was always amazing at the time to hear his tales when he returned from his trips abroad. This was all pre mobile phones etc and any of us having the net - so we would literally hear nothing from him till he made it back to his flat in Phibsboro. Over to Og …

My main memories of the Dead Elvis period are all based around several of the international trips I took when trying to sell our records to unsuspecting foreign people. One highlight was a round trip to Cologne in Germany in May of 1996 to go to a big music trade fair called Popcomm. I wanted to meet two particular people there and also wanted to pass around CDs to any distribution companies that I thought might be interested in dealing with a small label from Dublin.

The people I had specific arrangements to meet were Gary Walker from Wiiija and a guy called Roland from Semaphore Records in Germany who I had already met the previous year. As you know from Eamonn’s various posts - we had very little money as this stage. I wrangled an Aer Lingus flight from from the Irish Trade Board. A guy there called Michael Kenna sorted it for me. He was later to help out with funding for the ‘Zip Up Your Boots’ compilation we did with the guys from Blunt. This flight was a return flight to Düsseldorf. I set out with ten punts, a small brown shoulder bag of clothes which I used this on all my road trips at the time, a tent, a packet of tobacco and a bunch of Dead Elvis CDs. At that point I had already done quite a few similar trips and felt that anything in this line could be done with the price of a phone call and a packet of tobacco.
 
My intention was to try and find a camp site near the trade fair and stay beside it or in it - but things didn’t work out so simply or so uncomfortably. On reaching the airport in Düsseldorf I went looking for my tent and luggage. The tent didn’t made it to Germany and was MIA. So I went after the man in charge of luggage at the airport and harangued him for several hours pointing out that I was there for four days and that he had just gotten rid of my accommodation for me. I was offered some paltry amount of cash to start with but I finally settled on the equivalent of 150 punts in return for the inconvenience. At this stage it was late in the evening and I wanted to get out of Düsseldorf. I never liked big cities much. I got a train to Cologne and went straight to the cathedral as I knew that a lot of punks hung out outside it. (I think Gary Fitz. from Pincher Martin had told me this)  From there I asked how to get to a camp site for the Bizarre festival which was on at the same time as Popcomm.

On the train going to the camp site I meet some young punk lads drinking on the train. I told them a bit of my story and asked them where  the best place to try and get a lie down for the night was. They told me they where staying in a friend’s kitchen and offered me some floor space. I went along and they where quite generous. They provided me with a couple of cans of beer along with the floor space.

 In the morning I had to get a train to the site where Popcomm was taking place but ended up getting on the train on the wrong side of the tracks. There where a couple of girls in my booth on the train so I asked them, expecting them to be German, if I was on the right train. I was going in the wrong direction but, just as my luck always seemed to have it at that time,  they where Irish and asked me what I was doing on this local train. I explained my story and they offered to put me up for the rest of my stay. I changed train after arranging to meet them later that evening in a bar in Cologne.

I went off to Popcomm for the day and met Gary Walker from Wiiija and Roland from Semaphore. Roland ordered 100 CDs from us and, as he had done the previous year, provided me with several bottles of Grolsh. This was a big deal as it ultimately meant 500 punts which would a significant way towards funding another Dead Elvis release.That evening I went to the bar to meet the girls. Late on in the evening I sat back on my own at a table to take a breather. It had been a long couple of days. A man sat on the chair opposite me and started to chat in English. He was from MTV and, like me, had been there for Popcomm. He had to go home the following morning. He said he had six complementary tickets for The Bizarre festival. He asked me if I could use them. All I could see were £££ signs. I said yes of course. He gave me all six.

The next morning I headed out to the Bizarre festival and tried one of the tickets just to confirm that it was ok. I got in and got an armband. So I went back out and sold each of the five remaining tickets for forty punts each. I had now amassed £300 on my travels plus an order for 100 CDs. I hung around for the day at the Bizarre festival. Iggy Pop was playing. I remember the heat and feeling intimidated by the whole thing.Happy with all this and with the newly acquired money - I rearranged my return flight to take me to London to go and see Rumble recording a Peel Session which they’d been offered. They were travelling in a van from Dundalk -  driven by a friend of Pete’s father who had been involved with Pete’s father’s old show band.

 I can still remember the sight of the lads when I arrived in Maida Vale - a real highlight for me from the days working on Dead Elvis.  The van man took a heap of pictures which I think Pete may still have. I’ll try to dig them up. They set up the full band in a huge wooden room and just went for it. I was there with the punks from Blackrock. Almost home, but not quite.  The bit left to go to home was an adventure in itself. But that’s another story …

SUNBEAR - CENTRE PAGE / A SHORT ACCOUNT AND SOME PHOTOS FROM COLIN

Sunbear - Centre Page

Colin who played with Sunbear sent me the short account of their association with Dead Elvis which you’ll find below. There’s an open invitation to others with any kind of association with the label - however tangential to do the same. I had forgotten about their long field recording of the late night sounds of Parnell Street (described in his account) which is included on their self-titled album on their own BearBones imprint. It reminded me of the way in which the late night events on the street outside of Fibbers and The Blue Lion were a popular entertainment in 147.

There was a great panoramic view of the street from the other Eamonn’s room and altercations were an extremely regular occurrence after the bars closed. The street didn’t have an immigrant population back in 1993 and 1994 so it was very much the fighting Irish in their ragged glory. Again the street itself and particularly the Welcome Inn, which was really the Dead Elvis office for two or so years, deserve a post. I’ll leave that till later. Colin also sent me on two snaps of Sunbear at the time which you’ll find at the bottom of the post. In one you can see the ramshackle centrail stairway as it was in 147 at the time. The track included above is not really representative of what Sunbear sounded like on the album they recorded with Marc in 1994 - but it is interesting for the free flowing experimentation nonetheless and it’s included because Colin mentions it in his account.

You can stream or buy the rest of the Sunbear debut album over at the Indecater website. The Indecater page also includes an interesting account of the making of the album from Martin. These guys really became part of the general Dead Elvis associated rabble after recording with Marc. He and Og can still be found ranting about the quality of the stuff they recorded in 147 back in the day.

1994: 147 Parnell Street and the Sunbear Connection

To say the first Sunbear gig (08/04/93) was a shambles would be generous. We were out of tune, bum notes everywhere and Martin forgot most of the lyrics. However, we persevered and got (a bit) better over the following year  playing venues like Fibbers, The Attic, The Rock Garden and Behans Bar (Fox & Pheasant). There was a very distinct group of bands that played the same type of gigs around that time; Monomer, Unease, In Motion, The Idiots, Luggage  and Wormhole. So when we found out that Wormhole were to release an album, we were pretty amazed. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because no band of that size in Dublin was doing anything like that. Plus, their album was to be on CD! CD pressing before then had been way out of most people’s budgets. Most small releases were glorified demos on audio cassette.

This got our attention and we talked lightly about putting one out ourselves. Except we didn’t know where to start. A drunken encounter with Óg Crudden at a North Strand party provided us with some of the answers. For one thing, he was involved in the label (Dead Elvis) that was putting Wormhole’s album out. And for another, he volunteered to help us put out our record. He was familiar with the process involved and they had already got a studio set-up in the basement of 147 Parnell St, where Marc Carolan manned the cockpit.

So before we knew it, we were recording in Fuse for £50 per day. A Soundcraft desk and a Tascam 8 track reel-to-reel machine were used and God knows what kind of mics. Marc was great to work with even back then and was exceptionally inventive too. The “Stephen Hawking” voice on the middle track, Centre Page, was done a year before Radiohead did something similar on OK Computer with Fitter/Happier. Way ahead of his time!

As far as I remember, we were there for 12 days. 12 days which involved hardly any sleep, way too much alcohol (fuelled by John Fitz in the Welcome Inn) and really bad delicious takeaway food from the Black & White chipper across the road.

At the final stages of the recording, someone asked how much music you can fit on a CD. “77 minutes” was Marc’s answer. Well, it’d be a shame not to fill that space, wouldn’t it? So one Saturday evening, upstairs in 147, we miked Parnell St. In stereo. It’s still interesting to listen to the traffic noise at the end of the final track. You can hear conversations, traffic, sirens, screams and shouts.

Following the release of the album on our own Bearbones label and several decent reviews we asked Eamonn Crudden to do a video for us. For some reason, we ended up setting up a living room on a road down on Dublin’s docklands and throwing chairs into the sea at Killiney beach, but somehow Eamonn captured a moment in Sunbear’s life and managed to put together something we were very proud of. The version on youtube (very bad quality) has the song ‘Notebook’ on it, but ‘Your New Laugh’ was also put on the same video. Both versions were aired a few times on No Disco by Donal Dineen.

So although Sunbear weren’t on Dead Elvis, we certainly would’ve been lost without their help.

Colin (an ex-Sunbear)

RUMBLE - EDGE OF NOWHERE / DOING TWO 7’ SINGLES

Rumble - Edge of Nowhere

We were on a total roll in and around 1995. Wormhole had signed to Roadrunner Records who were releasing some EPs by them before re-releasing their Chick Dig Scars album. We had released three good albums pretty much one after the other from The Sewing Room, Wormhole and In Motion. I don’t know where the idea of doing 7’ singles came from but I suspect we took some inspiration from the beautiful generic cover designed by Naill from Jubilee for their self-released first single.

It was crazy at the time in how things seemed to be just flowing. Marc recorded a session with some old friends of his from teenage years in and around Dundalk and the music scene which barely existed there. Myself and Og heard the Rumble tape and spent days listening to the songs on it. ‘Edge of Nowhere’, available above, stood out. It’s as sweet and innocent in its own way as ‘Please Don’t Give Up On Me’ by Jubilee which was recorded pretty much the same month by Marc.

It reminded me, and still does, of teen years wanting to and then actually hanging out with the punks in Blackrock outside Dundalk - Stano and Big Stano being the most of them! Pete had had virtually the same experiences in ‘The Rock’ and the song, at least to me, is about the cartoon romanticised version of Blackrock and all who sailed within her which existed in my head.

The songs became the A sides of two 7’ singles which we put out simultaneously. The Jubilee single got an incredible amount of press attention. Rumble’s didn’t - which I still think is a shame.

When we released the singles they each came with a postcard advertising our extant wares. I’m kind of shocked when I look at the list on them and realise that all this happened in about 10 months of frenetic activity? (Note to self - I have to get a proper timeline together).

I’d completely forgotten that we sold out our run of the Wormhole albums so quickly. But that’s another story for later.

The images below include the press shot I did for Jubilee at the time of the single releases and an example of the postcards - front and back.

MORE TUNES FAVOURED BY THE ‘HEXUAL CLAN’ / AN OLD ‘JOHNNY CA$H’ PRESS RELEASE / WORMHOLE - UNHEALTHY

Unhealthy - The Wormholes (with Joe Ca$h)

I’ve managed to get some additions to the list of Johnny Cash Appreciation Society performances which I started in a previous post. Thanks to those who passed these on. Any more that anyone has would be much appreciated.

Gary Fitz and Oona White: The Lord

Tim Rogers: Up Against the Wall Redneck Mothers

Joe Carolan: April Skies

Stan Erraught: Wheels 

Shane McGrath: Dig A Pony 

Shane McGrath: A Different Drum

Martin and Colin (Sunbear): She don’t use Jelly

Martin and Colin (Sunbear): Two of Us

Gary Keogh: Only Fools and Horses Theme Tune

Myself, Joe and Nially also all vaguely remember a performance that involved a vacuum cleaner but haven’t been able to piece it back together at all. Joe reminded me also of all the ‘commie’ shtick that he was into when acting as compere at the nights. He referred to the Johnny Ca$h as ‘Ireland’s first communist country and western club.

The way it worked in terms of an economy was very simple. There was no rent on the room thanks to Joe from The Hut who gave us free use of it and provided a barman for the tiny bar in the corner of the room. Everyone who sang got two pints free from the bar. There was no entry charge. A hat was always passed around towards the end of the night. We’d count the money and ask Joe to give us the equivalent in the old pint bottles of Guinness. These were for the inevitable afters back at the house where I was living with a group of ladies who I knew from college. The live music and tomfoolery continued back at the house, often till the next morning. Quite a few people, and maybe the majority of people who attended the club, lived literally up the street from the house where I was staying and from the Hut so they didn’t have to do any worrying about getting home afterwards.

I’d also forgotten the fact that Joe attempted to put ‘clan’ names on any of those performing or attending who didn’t do so themselves before he got there. ‘Mexican Pat’ is one of the classics along with the unforgettable ‘Jethro Hexual’ and ‘Juan Too Many’ from Spain. But there were many more as I remembered when I dug out the press release which I’ve transcribed below. About a year after the run of the club in the Hut, I was involved in doing some freelance TV directing for a program of the time on Network Two called @last TV. I proposed holding - and filming - a ‘Johnny Ca$h’ reunion for the program and they (surprisingly) agreed.

A gang of us who had been involved in or around the club in The Hut spent a day in Blackrock - on the outskirts of Dundalk at the coast - messing around with Pete from Rumble and Joe taking the lead in a whole load of tunes  - making up shit as they went along. It was filmed and quite a few tunes were eventually broadcast. I’ve found a VHS tape of the raw footage which I haven’t tried to play yet. I’m going to try to do so in next few days and will, if it’s in any way intact, make some of it available soon.

Anyway - the press release (minus the boring transmission times / contact info stuff).

“The first anniversary reunion of the Johnny Ca$h Appreciation Society took place in Blackrock, Dundalk on Sunday 12th October. Present were international representatives of both the Spanish chapter and the New Zealand chapter, as well as well as assorted members of the hardcore inner circle including Joe Cash, The El Paso Kid, Cousin Slim, members of the Hexual clan, Mr. Hyde and of course the original members of the Irish Surrealist Movement - Danny and Conor Hughes.

The proceedings caught the imagination of the general public in a big way. At one stage an attempted armed robbery of the local credit union was narrowly avoided. The crowd became somewhat inflamed while hearing the Society’s uniquely moving rendition of ‘Money, Money, Money’ by Abba.

The El Paso Kid’s rendition of ‘Staying Alive’ - performed naked on the beach - also drove the ladies crazy in a big way. Sweet Ass - the female representative of the New Zealand chapter of the Johnny Ca$h became particularly excited and was spotted dancing frantically with several local mutants as the boys countrified ‘Rio’ by Duran Duran and ‘Club Tropicana’ by Wham.”

The track which you’ll find at the top of the post has something of a country flavour and is the one song that The Wormholes released with Joe from the Johnny Ca$h singing on it. Joe was a Wormhole fanatic and loved having an opportunity to get up on stage with them - to rant or sing or whatever - during the long drawn out improvised climaxes which were always a feature of their gigs. They loved Joe. I’m still not too sure how the audiences felt about his frequenty declamatory ‘commie’ polemicising. I do love this track though which Wormhole chose to include on their ‘Parijuana’ album.

It was recorded at around the same time as the thing in Blackrock described above in Andy’s flat in 137 (rather than 147) Parnell Street. I did the single take live recording of ‘Unhealty’ with extremely rudimentary equipment - a 4 channel mixer of some description running into a cassette deck as I recall. We had 2 mics. Anto is playing the synth, Graham the guitar, Dave the live bongo type drums and I’m the one poking unsteadily at a simple drum machine which had pads to manually trigger the sounds.

A lot of material was recorded that night but this is the only part of it which was ever released. I’ve managed to turn up the original tape and will be doing a trawl through it soon. I remember there being some very strong material on it featuring Wormhole improvising with an incredible foot pumped organ which Andy had gotten somewhere and which was a feature of the main room of the flat.

The image below is of ‘Joe Ca$h’. You’d just know fer sure lookin’ at him that he’s one of them there Hexuals.

AN (EDUCATED) RAW WAIL FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE GUTS / FEMALE HERCULES - PAINKILLER

Female Hercules - Painkiller

At a certain point maybe a year before the ‘Crush’ gigs (described in an earlier post) started in late 93, I harboured ambitions of being a music journalist covering the Dublin punk beat. Again this was in connection with the Dropout publication which Donal Scannell was editing, and which was largely being produced at the table of the house where we both lived in Phibsboro. I had read my Mr. Bangs about raw wails from the bottom of the guts etc and set out to track some local versions of these raw wails down. I had already come across some by accident in Fibbers at the Anarchy Night Cafe by that time - notably those being made by Tension and the Mexican Pets. However I must admit that these bands seemed so kind of big and downright scary that I never even thought of trying to get to interview them. Ger from Tension was absolutely incredible on stage - but (and you have to remember I’d seen precious few club gigs  in my life at this point) the vibe from them came across as hard and unapproachable. I barely knew who Fugazi were at the time so I didn’t really understand the ‘hardcore’ aesthetic that the Pets and Tension were drawing from.

Somehow at the time I heard about Jam Jar Jail and their noteriety for wild unpredictable gigs and barrings from venues and I somehow got in touch with them by phone. The call was really my first direct contact with the Dublin scene I would spend the next few years in and around. It was a good first call as these guys were very very central to the live scene at that time. I visited Shane and Frances at the house where they lived at the time to interview them. It was great and Shane was his usual mile (or three) a minute with Frances also getting her spake in. They gave me an excellent demo tape at the time and I also took their photo. This all resulted in a feature article in Dropout which helped me get access to other bands at the time.

The next band I wrote about were Female Hercules. I worked in TCD at the time (on a FAS scheme) and I’m pretty sure I saw Female Hercules first in the JCR where I often went for cheap grub at lunchtime. I had no friends in TCD at all so any time there was a band on in there at lunchtime - I was able to give them my undivided attention. Female Hercules made quite an impression on me at the time. Heavy music. Screaming. Wild guitar player (Aengus). White power afro guy up front!

I reckon I got Conzo’s number from Shane or Frances from Jam Jar Jail and I got in touch with him. He arranged to meet me in (I think) the philosophy department in Trinity. I was impressed with that. This ‘raw wail’ was an educated response to the ills around at the time I started to think. He’d have a lot to say! The interview was an absolute disaster though as the tape recorder when it appeared put him in the mood to unleash a series of non sequiters and confusing long and unfocused non-commital ramblings. Still - I was able to save the day because of the demo he handed me at some point during proceedings. I could rant about how amazing the first track on it was for the magazine. The track was called ‘Painkiller’. It’s  available at the top of this post This recording was later released by Blunt Recordings as part of a five track EP. It’s archived in full here.

I have another Female Hercules story that this was all leading up to involving flypostering, an overenthusiastic cop, ‘political’ arrests, the Store Street cop shop, my mate Joe, a mysterious character called ‘Gonzo’ from TCD and the policing of perceived expressions of opinions on abortion, but this is enough for now. I’m laughing too much thinking about the story to write it coherently right now anyway. I’ll do it tomorrow - all going well.

Thanks BTW to those helping me out as I’m going along with this. It is very very appreciated. I’ll be making use of some of this help by also posting more of the list of ‘Johnny Cash’ performances which I started out on (in the post below) tomorrow. That’s Conzo from Female Hercules below with the hair in full flower.

JOHNNY CASH APPRECIATION SOCIETY PERFORMANCES: A DRAFT LIST / THE SEWING ROOM - BROKEN LIFE WALTZ

Broken Life Waltz - The Sewing Room

I’m starting into trying to compile a list of all the performances which took place during the short but quite insane run, in 1996, of what we referred to as the ‘Johnny Cash’ upstairs in the Hut in Phibsboro. I think the club lasted about 7-8 weeks in total. There was an extremely messy ‘reunion’ shortly after it finished up in the Hut but that - and the story of the club itself are for another day. For now this list is enough to be getting on with. Those who remember the ever so slightly deranged atmosphere that developed as the club ran its course will realise that this is a very very difficult task. I’m hoping the performers and those who attended will kick in and help me out with this list.

Joe was the compere. He’s Marc’s older brother and an old friend of mine. He had a number of CW tunes which we did kind of half intend to release on Dead Elvis at one stage. Bits of one of the tunes were recorded with Wormhole around this period - but never released. His tunes, along with one or two which were performed by Oona White and Gary Fitzpatrick, were the unofficial anthems of the club.

Here goes with the list.

1. Joe Carolan (helped along by various at various times): The Lord Loves a Hanging, Buried Under a Blanket of Booze, Love is a Cigarette, El Paso Bound.

2. Joe C. & Stan Erraught and many many others in an end of night crowd performance: You Doo Right

3. Bernie Furlong (accompanied by Stan on guitar): Here Comes a Regular

4. Cousin Jethro and Deliverance Denzel: Death or Glory

5. Pete Johnson (Rumble): 6am Jullander Shere

6. Gary Fitzpatrick and Oona White: Dog eat Dog, Ace of Spades, A Song for You, One’s On the Way.

7. Rumble (with Bernie): A collection of Ramones tunes including Blitzkrieg Bop in full band mode. Rulebreakers!

8. The Sewing Room: Tunes from their ‘And Nico’ album. Pretty sure they did some covers but have no memory of them. They were the first act on the first night and played to mainly kids drinking lemonade after some football match or wedding or something.

9. Jubilee: Ramblin’ Man

10: Gary Keogh: Country Boy

I could have some stuff wrong about these. Please help with corrections if you are in a position to. Others I remember performing (and again some of these could be imagined) were Shane McGrath, Pat Clafferty from Mexican Pets, Denis from Decal, Dez from the Sewing Room. There were LOTS of strays performing as people generally got a free Jar or two if they sang anything at all. Any help in filling out this list appreciated. It would make my fxxing decade if any photos or recordings turned up. As the fella said - If you haven’t got a memory, half a memory will do …

I’ve posted one of the songs Stan Erraught wrote and sang for the ‘And Nico’ album which was released on Dead Elvis in 1995. He and his other half of the time Bernie were staunch supporters of the club - turning up repeatedly to take part when other serious adults would have run away screaming. Stan, as is well known, had a history with the country & western. I think he really enjoyed literally watching the Phibsboro ‘scenesters’ fall head over heels for a new (to a lot of them) genre of music right in front of him.

‘HE’S A MOTOROLA MAN BABY’: ‘CHIPS’ BY RUMBLE

Rumble - Chips

Paul (Blunt Recordings Archivist) posted the ‘Zip Up Your Boots’ compilation today at this link. It’s one of the many many things that Dead Elvis were involved in that I don’t have a copy of. I’ll talk about the process of getting it together later on. For now I want to just pick out one track  and write a little about it - Rumble’s ‘Chips’ which is pasted above. Rumble were from the same general area as myself and Og - Dundalk and environs. They released quite a bunch of stuff on Dead Elvis between 1995 and 1997 and built up quite an incredible fanbase outside of the capital during the life of the label. I don’t have those releases to hand but thanks to Paul I have this song -‘Chips’. The title refers to computer chips.

Og had studied and worked in the computing field before Dead Elvis and to an extent was always on about computers in conversation. Pete from Rumble picked up on this and I can remember - sometime in the period immediately before the ‘Zip Up Your Boots’ compilation being done - myself and Og throwing computing terms at Pete in Og’s flat in Phibsboro. Pete turned them into a song literally live in front of us. The lyric is great and very playful indeed. The coda ‘386 486 chips’ is my favourite bit - but there’s a lot more. I must have thrown in ‘Avid’ as a useful word as it refers to a type of video editing software.

It’s basically a ‘get your motor runnin’ kind of song about the internet - but from waaay before it was a normal thing to be using or even generally understood. Og knew about the net for years. He’d used it in the 80’s in college in Scotland - but never thought to get the Dead Elvis label online - something I think about with some regret from this remove. Dead Elvis was strictly a phonecalls from coinboxes and post-office operation. We almost always had our house phones set to only receive calls during the period as we were chronically poor and just couldn’t risk big bills.

Sometime immediately after ‘Chips’ was written Rumble did a very short sharp session with a beautiful soul who myself and Og loved having a natter and a jar with - Paul Thomas. They banged the song out mostly live and he made an amazing job of the recording. It rocks hard and loose and is probably the song that best captures the feel of the band as they sounded live. I can remember being present at the end of the session which was I think in Sun Studios - to make full sure that my suggestion of including a computer speaking some of the lyrics was included. And a great line the computer gets too. ‘He’s a Motorola man baby’. Another lost classic imo. It never got any attention whatsoever. It was never mentioned in print or played on the radio. It was buried in the midst of riches on the ‘Boots’ compilation - and somehow didn’t fit the ‘scene’ that the compilation came from. Rumble had very mainstream instincts and the more indie Dubs around us never really took to them. Well a few did - but that’s a different story and one I’ll talk about in the fullness of time.

We talked seriously at the time about selling this song to Apple Macintosh for use as an advert soundtrack. That, I think, is one hare-brained scheme we really really should have followed up on. We were enjoying life so much at the time that to be just able to tell whoever you were having a jar with that you were thinking such thoughts was enough!

I’m listening to it now and I just have to giggle about the ‘Pet Lamb’ reference in the lyric. Runble knew right well that the crew who went to Wormhole, Jubilee etc. gigs were not exactly falling over themselves to see them play. We went to great lengths to make sure they got to see them anyway - including an infamous April 1st gig in the Ormond Multi-media centre where I booked a headline for Wormhole and Rumble appeared (with Wormhole’s approval) instead in front of an unsuspecting audience. We loved them. I had serious fallings out with some of them at a certian point in the whole thing but I absolutely relished any chance I got to see them play live - and any chance to get up on stage with them or help cause a scene - both before and after that.

The Photo below is Pete from Rumble around the period described.