The lost patrol

After being ejected from punk group The Wall in 1979, singer Ian Lowery and guitarist Nick Clift (ex-Debutants) formed Ski Patrol, along with Pete Balmer (ex-Stranded, later to record with Fad Gadget) on bass and Bruce Archibald on drums.  Inspired by the darkwave and punk-funk sounds and emotions of British post-punk bands Joy Division, Gang Of Four, the band set about writing angular, moody songs that fused Lowery's dark lyrical pre-occupations with Clift's ringing, textured guitar chord phrasing. They released their first 7” Everything is Temporary / Silent Scream on their own Clever Metal label. Archibald was subsequently replaced by Alan Cole for the line –up which recorded the first of two singles for the Malicious Damage label: Agent Orange / Driving and Cut / Faith In Transition. Rumour has it that the anonymous synth player on Agent Orange is none other than Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman. Anyway this last is without any doubt one of the best post punk tracks ever. Pete Balmer was then replaced by Francis Cook by the time of the 3rd single, Cut / Faith in Transition, and this was the line up that recorded a John Peel Session for Radio One and that was one of the real high points of the band. Just a week after they played their final gig at Charing Cross Hospital. The guitarist (Nick Clift) decided to leave and Francis (Cook), the bass player, and Ian lowery decided to change their name to Folk Devils and never came back on their split decision. Malicious Damage never remastered their recordings and no one seemed to care. Ian Lowery played for years with new projects but never had a minimum of success. Then he died too soon in 2001 but we'll never forget him for his music.

The liquid legends

March 1979

"Island had dropped us, and I was planning to leave because I thought synthesizers were going to change music in the same way that the electric guitar did. Then we were offered a tour of America by Miles Copeland and his brother [Ian] - there was a big audience for British new wave acts at that time. We flew over on the cheap with Laker Airlines and, as there were no luggage restrictions, took all of our instruments and our backline amps. When we got off the plane Miles's brother was waiting for us with a van and we did six weeks with one day off. People like the artist Jean Michel Basquiat and John Frusciante from the Chili Peppers came to see us. The tour ended in Hollywood at the Whisky A Go-Go. After the last show I just told them all that I had had enough and was leaving, that they could have the name and the band identity. Things were already tense - at the end of long tours everyone is full of adrenalin but very tired - and a minor argument broke out although I can't remember what it was about. Billy and Chris walked out of the dressing room and Warren stayed hut was really angry, although he didn't shout, as we weren't that sort of people. We left the venue in separate cars and I flew back to England on my own the next day. It was a great wrench to leave, but the grey suits were waiting. I wanted to work alone with a tape recorder, drum machine, a synthesizer and get rid of anything that was rock'n'roll. As for their later success with Midge Ure, I have nothing to say about them, as that band has nothing to do with me". (JF)

From 1976 to 1979 Ultravox were legends as Mr. Foxx was their singer and musical guide. Their immense influence in the rise of uk post punk sound is undeniable.  Then came Midge and the New Romantics Years but please remember them playing with Mr.Dennis their last mythical 1979 us tour...

Amazing stories

According to discogs:

On cold autumn evenings of Milan in 1981 met for the first time Nino La Loggia and Giacomo Spazio. Both were regulars of the Bar Concordia, one of the few meeting places for the post punk generation. Nino with Mark Philopat (now established writer) had given birth to the HCN, one of the pioneering punk bands of the peninsula. Giacomo instead was a performance artist, interested in graphics and was looking for a new form of painting that was innovative and provocative. When the two met sparked. The two had the same passion for music: Kraftwerk, Joy Division, DAF and the whole new scene of proto-electronic wave and together they decided to start the musical project called 2 + 2 = 5, a tribute to Orwellian dystopia. The two split the roles immediately, Nino continued to pursuit the sound to the limit of experimentation and Giacomo wrote texts. The band made their début at the "Cinema-Music Non-Stop" at the Cinema Porpora of Milan in May 1982. Shortly after entered the band Cha Cha Hagiwara, already a keyboard player in 'Jeunesse d'Ivoire', enriching the band's raw sound with sonority which we can now define analog. After several dates among Milan, Turin and Switzerland, the trio entered the studio to record their first LP titled  '... Into The Future' which was to be published towards the end of the year 1983.........and that was the beginning...

Please listen again to their amazing stories... old songs/new versions, recorded in their unexpected 2010 live comeback in Milan!

Another wild ride with the leather kings!

There are some bands who never give up. Who after almost thirty years and thousands of bar gigs still do not know anything better than to cut another record or make another gig in front of 60/70 desperate/fortunate people. The legendary Fleshtones formed in Queens one million years ago (was it 1976 or...) and since then they started touring and never end. Maybe this is the reason why they became  the greatest garage rockers of all time. In all these years, they drew from the best parts of The Yardbirds, The Kingsmen, The Sonics, The Seeds, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Rolling Stones, The Cramps etc. They borrowed from the old and created a monster of American rock music that lived up to the haughty "Super Rock" title they gave to their sound. They intensified everything but the sound: cool, anxiety, joy, and energy. Over the years they've become a tradition unto themselves, incorporating also '50s R&B, '60s frat-rock, and '70s disco into a heady mix that can only be recognized as "their unique sound". I've seen them live no less than half a dozen times and it has always been F.U.N.! And that song too, the one I consider the "SONG" of american garage revival... yes, i'm talking about  “The Dreg”, with the incredible cool fuzz bassline (Jan-Marek Pakulski), a guitar that builds to a fever pitch, soaked in reverb  by Keith Streng, with tones of percussions rattling off in all directions and a cool understated vocals by Peter, singing of a person searching for the meaning behind their intuition, moving forward in life with whatever they have. What a song, what a band! As someone else recently wrote, "The Fleshtones were all garage rock without any qualms of being original; they were just better than what they started with". Not a lot more to say, in my opinion they really symbolize what still matters in rock & roll... dance again to their american beat and sing "Sha la la la" forever!!!

30 years of twee sounds

Ah the C86 years, full of little diy bands playing like The Smiths with no Johnny Marr on guitar, shouting like Orange Juice with no Edwyn singing... and what about those wonderful Sarah small packets on my po box coming from another planet or it was just a dream? I usually listen to C86 bands, often labelled as 'twee' just because they remind me of my teen years and those type of bands usually speaked out my mind, whether lyrically, whether instrumentally I don't know for sure. But tere must be a good reason if I spent those years exchanging mixtapes and twee badges with my penfriends from abroad (where are they now?) and drinking a lot of milkshakes instead of beers...The Pastels speaked out my longing for lost freedom as a teenager, like in 'Automatically yours' (from 'Up For A Bit With The Pastels') for example. And also they played some of the loveliest love songs around at the time. They were not dramatic as post punk heroes I usually love or talk about riots and revolutions, but about a love I kind of wish I had: genuine, spontaneous, simple, young and... boh, the typical teenage love we all dream about even when we grow... 'A Million Tears' is quite the perfect example to it: 'If I can't have you then I don't want nobody else, I'll tear myself apart and cry a million tears...'. So simple but so true. Thanks Stephen if I dreamt of trucks, train & tractors as it was me driving in the green fields. "Please don't think of us as an 'indie band' as it was never meant to be a genre, and anyway we are far too outward looking for that sad tag" said once Stephen Pastel. Sad tag or not, I viewed The Pastels and the C-86 phenomenon at the time as an intelligent reaction to the opulence of the Big League indie bands. And while U2, The Cure and Simple Minds filled their stadiums and sold billions of records, The Pastels reminded us that there were bands still recording in small rooms with their mummies in the kitchen and their papas watching tv...More sounds from Leamington please and buy SLOW SUMMITS immediately!!!
Hear them playing live some times ago and enjoy them once again...

Do you gesang?

Here we probably got one of the best band from the subterranean italian new wave music scene. This was i'm gonna write about is one of the few notable dark-synth act coming from Italy, more precisely from Milano, more or less 30 years ago. There weren't much infos about the story of band or if they played live alot... but there's been a lot of talking in the recent years about this band and their "coldwave" sound. I remember them playing my hometown Torino in a dark rainy night at The Big Club, but sincerely I was not so impressed by them at the time, they played like millions of others and they sang with very terrible english pronounce... So the question was and still is, do they deserve all this posthumous fame the world of blogging bloggers tribute them? What about other hundreds of bands that never surfaced here in Italy from the beginning to the end of post punk era? Boh, sometimes history changes the facts and what we believe to remember is not what exactly happened... listening once again to their records and their live tapes they do no seem so bad and I must admit I really like them now... anyway, also here in Italy we now have our little "joydivisionesque phenomenon", Weimar Gesang (who?) of course! As I told before, more than three decades have passed since they hardly tried to emerge from the minor cultural rubble of italian's wave to a kind of darkly propulsive post punk anthems. The band consisted of four members: Donato Santarcangeli, Fabio Magistrali, Giuseppe Tonolini, and Paolo Mauri, a few of which went on to play in various other Italian bands over the years. Their base was the historical label and record shop Supporti Fonografici. With their atmospheric soundscapes "a la cure" Weimar Gesang tried to demonstrate a personal kind of glacial grandeur, maybe never seen before here in the land of the sun & spaghetti. It was not easy for them, mainly because their derivative post-punk  sound, in the new born wave italian movement, was not immediately known. But now they had their revenge. In the last years it seems that anyone around the blog involved in coldwave things have a word for them, and many have cited Weimars and their works as "seminal" and influential...they certainly weren't, but now they are, stars...

In the Bridgehouse again

Wasted Youth were arguably one of the greatest lost London band of the post-punk years. Rarely mentioned, if at all, in the era's music history books, they were heavily influenced by the dark narcotic glamour of the Velvets and Transformer-era Lou Reed. The Only Ones were their myths and also Peter Perrett produced them, as did Martin Hannett some years later. It seems very far nowadays but I remember they were hugely popular as the Eighties dawned with punks, looking for something more sexy and sophisticated. As many others, Wasted Youth looked set to become much more than the cult band they became. They pre-dated Positive Punk and Goth and are still remembered as quietly-influential and a superb live band by fans.  They only had a three-year life but even more than others they were acknowledged as one of the bands which really influenced the darkwave & gothic band scene. Their records were released through Bridgehouse Records, a label set up by the bass player's father in the pub he owned in Canning Town (The Bridgehouse, the first pub in the world with its own record label!!!). There is also a one and only wonderful album, even pressed on CD, titled "Wild & Wandering", one of my favourite record of that times. Guitarist Rocco had some fame after they split forming Flesh For Lulu but this story is not so much interesting. In the late eighties the Bridgehouse pub became a sort of club, later also an hotel with a restaurant... Wasted Youth original singer Micks Atkins leaved us in 2008 and recently came the sad new that also the bass-man, Darren Murphy, died after a battle with cancer... anyway, if anyone wishing to find the missing link between The Only ones, The Psychedelic Furs & Manic Street Preachers should search no further than this overlooked great band!