RIP

Seth Putnam died on June the 11th. That means there will be no more Anal Cunt releases. Seth was the last Rock and Roll Rebel since GG Allin. Our world is less without him:

In tribute, here are a few of my favourite Anal Cunt ditties:

First Impressions count

At precisely 0815 on August the 6th, 1945, America ushered the world into the Atomic Age by dropping the 'Little Boy' device on the heavily populated Japanese city of Hiroshima. The resulting explosion levelled 70% of the city and killed 30% of the population immediately. Living through this horrific scene of catastrophe and misery that followed the bombing would still be better than staying a week in Bridlington. For my sins, I have been forced into this unenviable position. Bridlington sits on the east coast of Yorkshire. The town actually perches on the highest area for coastal erosion rate in Europe. This is the best thing about Bridlington as it means the fucking town will soon no longer exist. I arrived at my B&B last night and immediately set out to find somewhere to eat. I searched high and low, in every nook and every cranny, up hill and down dale, but could I find anywhere open to eat? Could I fuck. It would seem that Bridlington is closed on a Monday. It is probably closed every day, to be honest.(this was written three days ago. It's taken that long for me to finish this post as Bridlington has sapped my will to live...)

When I was a callow youth, I was taken to Bridlington, again, against my better wishes. The only memory I have of that trip was a visit to a waxworks museum. This place was so bad and dilapidated that the exhibits
looked like melted candles. I distinctly remember the Elephant Man model was much more disfigured and fear inducing than John Merrick himself. In fact, John Merrick looked like a fucking supermodel by comparison. This is the only thing I knew about Bridlington and nothing has changed since then. Bridlington had its heyday in 1956 and never looked back. Mind you, it never looked forward either. It's been stuck in the 1950's ever since. I will post up some photos of Bridlington over the weekend, then you will know the true horror of this place.

You would be better off reading the latest Pledge Manner's review (for this book) rather than thinking too hard about Bridlington:

Remove all the wheelblocks, there's no time to waste!

Those of you with memory spans that weren't wiped out in your late teens and early twenties by vast amounts of military grade amphetamines and industrially synthesised LSD will recall that in the last post I was wittering on about my early manoeuvres through the heady world of Heavy Metal. I got thinking about some of the other ridiculous things I did when I was finding my feet musically. I mentioned that my introduction to the world of Metal was through Kiss, I only ever owned one record by them and that was Dressed To Kill. It had been bequeathed to me by my uncle, he'd long since realised that they were just a bunch of 60 year old Jewish Grandmothers and off loaded the album onto me when I mentioned seeing them on Top of the Pops. This was the first LP I truly owned myself and I played it until the grooves ran out. I apparently loaned it to Al Sithee for a time, telling him that Anything for my Baby was the best track on the album. But besides this small interruption it was rarely off my turntable.

What the fuck was I thinking?

As previously mentioned, I was a rather fickle child and seemed to be only able to like one band at a time. When Ninjasaurus Rex learned of my interest in long hair and guitars, he loaned me Iron Maiden's debut album on cassette. Now, Ninjasaurus was already way ahead of me in the music stakes. He'd been listening to Hawkwind since he was in nappies, for fuck's sake. I had a lot of catching up to do. I'm sure he felt like he was doing me a great deal of good by opening my mind to new bands. Little did he know how fickle I was. The moment I heard Maiden, I rejected Kiss out of hand for the disco sounding stuttin' cocks that they are. Maiden was a band that was so metal they were creating new types as of yet undiscovered metal and adding them to the periodic table. They probably had a laboratory somewhere on the Rhine where they were synthesising alloys day and night. I made a copy of Ninjasaurus' album and with the lack of a proper album cover, I conceived my own, based on the original but drawn up in Biro and felt tip pens. Unfortunately this didn't survive the later Slayer cull and I don't have a copy of it anymore for you to laugh at. You just have to imagine the front cover of Iron Maiden's debut album as drawn by a retard armed with a spatula and a plastic bag full of tramp's sick and you might get the idea. Mind you, this is how Derek Riggs seems to paint all the Maiden covers anyway....

Needs more sick...

Anyway, The reason I'm telling you this is to emphasise just what was going on in my mind when I was a child. I have always been interested in making models, when I was a wee lad it was model aeroplanes. My bedroom was full of Spitfires, Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs and Black Widows. I was a child obsessed. I loved aeroplanes and when I first heard Aces High by Maiden, it blew my tiny fucking mind. Here was a band that were more metal than anything I could ever imagine and they were performing songs about aeroplanes! They even referred to Messerschmitts as 'Me-109s'. They knew what they were talking about! They weren't just making this shit up! I fucking loved that track and I got so obsessed with the song that I looped it over and over again on one side of a C90 cassette so I wouldn't have to keep rewinding the tape at the end of the song. Forty five fucking minutes of Aces High. This was back in the days before CD players and programmable repeat patterns. This was old school. The analogue way of doing things. I would sit for hours at my modelling table, listening to an endless (for forty five minutes) loop of Aces High, whilst inhaling a heady mixture of Humbrol enamel paint, polystyrene cement and white spirits. There's no wonder I turned out like I did.

I FUCKING LOVE THIS, ME!!

As I said, I was a fickle child, even stripping down my musical obsessions to the bare bones by repeating one song over and over. This theme actually continued when I discovered Slayer. I borrowed the album Reign in Blood from the Rovrum Library and this shit literally melted my fucking face. As soon as I heard those opening bars of Angel of Death nothing was the same again. It was like I had been held down on the living room floor by intruders intent on causing me serious aural damage. This was no longer playtime. The big boys had arrived and they had knives. (Now I can just sense I will get a load of abusive comments about South of Heaven being a better album than Reign in Blood. This is simply not true. South of Heaven, although fantastic, is the lesser album. The band were hardly speaking to one an other during the recording of South of Heaven and this disjointed approach comes through on the album. Reign in Blood is perfection. The fact that the themes of the final track (Raining Blood) can be heard building in crescendo through the two previous tracks is just one example of the brilliance of the album. The whole album holds together far better than South of Heaven, which has great tracks amongst its numbers, but feels like there is a lot more filler on South of Heaven than on Reign In Blood. I play it now and it is still as fresh as it was in 1988 when I first heard it. There, that's why it's a better album, if you disagree you are in error.)

It just is. Deal with it.

So I recorded the album, but my dislike of rewinding tapes reared it's ugly head once more and I recorded the first two tracks of the album at the end of the tape and to this day (I still have my original cassette recording of Reign in Blood) Angel of Death still bursts forth when Raining Blood has finished. This is not the only relic of my past that is encased on this particular tape. The tape I used to record Slayer on was the Aces High loop cassette. It was probably my way of wiping out the past. A stepping stone, if you will. A closing of a chapter, some might say. The problem is that Reign in Blood is only about thirty minutes long, even with two extra songs tacked on at the end, this only adds up to about thirty five minutes of recorded material. To this day, as I play the tape in my car, the end bars of Piece by Piece are replaced by about four looped recordings of Aces fucking High.

The End is Nigh...

As I was feeling down in the dumps on Saturday, I decided the best way to cheer myself up was to buy some records. So off I trotted, down through the madding crowds of Saturday afternoon York, first off to the guy who sells records on the market. The man I have to reintroduce myself to every time I visit his stall. There can't be that many returning customers in the York Market. I remember him, why can't he remember who I am and know my eclectic tastes in records ('Me and Bobby McGee' and 'Speed Kills, But Who's Dying?')? I've a good mind to boycott him, but he does let me look at the special stuff behind the stall. All the stuff that is yet to be sorted and priced. He also gives me discounts on bulk purchases. So I probably won't be boycotting him anytime soon. On this visit I also called in at Attic Records. Surprisingly it was open. There have been numerous occasions when I have called in here to see what stock he had in only to find a sign saying 'back @ 2.30' hanging on the closed door. 2.30 duly rolled round and he still wasn't back. 'Fuck him' I thought, you only get two chances with me. Well, I say that, but I have been back and he has been open, so I must have given him a few more chances. Anyhoo, none of this is of any import. He was open, I made a purchase. Happiness was reinstated for about three nanoseconds.

True dat

The reason I mention all this background fluff, is because I bought two records I never thought I'd own in my entire life. The first was Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. I bought it as I feel that every household should have at least one copy of the Boss' work. I was very pleasantly surprised that it is actually pretty damn good. But the other purchase has such an profoundly astronomical effect on my life that I think things have changed irreconcilably. This is it, there is no looking back now. I bought Appetite for Destruction by Guns and Roses. Now this might not seem like such a big deal to you people, but let me tell you, this is massive for me. I'm a music snob, always have been, always will be. I have always hated Guns and Roses and have held them in continual contempt throughout my music listening history.

Hate you guys...

Allow me to explain how we arrive at that point: As a child I never really listened to music as such. The house was filled with Jazz and Radio Four, courtesy of my parents. The only pop song I remember from these times is Joe Dolce's 'Shaddap Your Face'. As a seven year old I thought this was swearing and was shocked that this would be played on the radio. What a fucking stupid little cunt I was. Around this time the only records myself and my brother owned were Dr Who and the Pescatons, Rolf Harris' The Court of King Caractacus and Rupert and the Firebird. My musical outlook was limited to say the least. What did happen, however, was when I got to Comprehensive school, I grew out of playing war and building dens in the quarry and realised that all the cool kids were listening to something called Pop Music. I wanted in. This was the real shizzle. This would make me accepted by my peers. So I decided that I would dip a toe in the ocean of this so-called 'popular music'. So one Saturday I bought myself some cassette tapes for a bit of illegal home recording. As I mentioned, the radio was controlled by my parents, so when it came to looking for a radio station offering pop music on the pre-tuned radio set, the best I could find happened to be BBC Radio 2. The light program. There was no Radio One in our gaff, oh no. And this is back in the day when Radio 2 wasn't the 'hip' beast that it is now, with all sorts of young upstarts playing contemporary music for a young at heart audience. This is back when they would smother the airwaves in its bed with a pillow of funerary dirges and religious tracts. Obituaries were read out in place of the news.

And later in the programme we take a candid look at medieval torture

This is what I had to contend with in my first tentative steps in the direction of music appreciation. Avowed to make a 'mix tape' that I could play at parties and impress Emma Lillyman and Tina Hinchcliffe with, I steadfastly spent the afternoon recording track after track of what I considered to be Pop Music. I still remember to this day what was on that tape. It was what one would best describe as an 'eclectic mash-up'. An even better description would be a 'fucking train wreck'. Amongst the tracks was Meat Loaf's 'I'm Gonna Love Her for the Both of Us' and Ashford & Simpson's 'Solid'. Believe me, these were the 'cool' tracks. I was determined to make a full 90 minute recording that afternoon. I filled the rest of the tape with such great hits as Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree and, I shit you not, The Black Beauty Theme. They said such great musical acts never should be brought together in one place. That afternoon, gentle reader, I proved them right.

Alan, I would have made you proud...

These first steps were soon calmed with the introduction into my life of Top of the Pops, and it was through this medium that I first discovered Metal. I was watching a show one particular evening in 1987, when something happened that changed my life forever. Kiss were performing 'Crazy, Crazy Nights'. I literally shat myself. This is what I had been looking for! Long haired men, fireworks, leather, spandex... erm. This all sounds a bit gay when you write it down. Anyway, Kiss blew me away (figuratively, not literally) that night. My life as I had known it changed. I was determined to track down more loud guitar music. I needed noise in my life. I quickly rejected Kiss when I discovered Iron Maiden and in turn I quickly rejected them when I discovered Slayer. I was a fickle child. In my mind I wouldn't allow myself to like more than one band at a time. This did soon change and the search was on for faster and harder music, Metallica, Nuclear Assault, Sepultura, Anthrax, Megadeth, Voivod, Kreator, Sodom, Acid Reign, Xentrix, Sacred Reich, Testament, and a million more were added to my growing lexicon of musical interest. This was in the glory days of Thrash Metal. I was in the maelstrom and there was no turning back.

Thrash 'til death!

So why am I telling you this? Well, this is where Guns and Roses come in. It would have been around this time that I was made aware of their growing stature in the metal world. I watched a series of programs called Heavy Metal Heaven one Christmas. Amongst the features was a gig at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go by GNR. I watched it in disbelief. here was a band that looked like women, played music that women were actually dancing to and not one person in the audience were headbanging to. There was no moshing, no stage diving, no blood and guts from a violent pit. Literally I thought; what is this shit? and waited impatiently for Metallica's feature to come up afterwards. From that day on, I have always hated Guns and Roses. This hate has become so ingrained in me over the last twenty years that in the past I have felt physically sick whenever I heard the opening bars of Sweet Child o' Mine. This Saturday all that changed. This Saturday was the beginning of new chapter in my life. A turning of the page, if you will. I spotted Appetite for Destruction on the market stall. Having discussed GNR only the other day with Logan Josh, I thought I really should see if they were as bad as I thought. With shaking hand, I handed over my money and placed the record in a bag so no one should see my shame as I walked back. Once back home, I drew the blinds, turned off the lights and locked the door should anyone be around to see what I was about to do. I placed the album on the turntable and dropped the needle on the vinyl. OH MY FUCKING GOD!! I HAVE WASTED THE LAST TWENTY YEARS HATING THIS BAND!! It blew me away, it blew me out of the goddamn room! It blew me to Mars and back! I was shocked with myself, what the fuck was going on? A few years ago I began to appreciate AC/DC for what they really were (another band that I had a long standing feud with, when I was eighteen I once even refused a date with a girl on the basis that she told me she liked AC/DC...), and now here I was loving Guns and Roses! Is this the downward spiral? Am I finally hitting middle age? Have I grown up? Am I able to appreciate what I once hated with venom? Here I am now, listening to Sweet Child of Mine and actually enjoying it. WHAT HAVE I BECOME?

Love you guys...