Brain capers
This month’s square-peg in a round-hole, a heretic punk’s trip into free jazz psychedelia.
Alternative TV Vibing Up The Senile Man (Part One) DEPTFORD FUN CITY, 1979
MARK P, AKA former Deptford bank clerk Mark Perry, thrived on punk’s early promise. As well as devising prime-moving fanzine Sniffin’ Glue in 1976, he founded Alternative TV, who faced contradictions head on with essential 45s including How Much Longer/You Bastard, Love Lies Limp and Action Time Vision. But it would be a summer 1978 tour with free-concert hippy stalwarts Here & Now – which included playing the Stonehenge Free Festival – that led to ATV’s extraordinary, opiniondividing second album. “By early 1978 I was so fed up with the punk thing,” says Perry today from his home in Cornwall. “The early bands had all signed to record companies, the new bands were all a bit street punk… you’d think, How did it become so bloody normal? I wanted punk to go into a bit more abstract area. Touring with the Here & Now guys freed me up. It was experimentation on stage, experimentation with their lifestyles. Spending time with those people helped me lose those shackles.” By late 1978, Perry was in Pathway Studios in north London with multi-instrumentalist Dennis Burns and producer/engineer Wally Brill. Completed in two weeks, the record was a drastic departure even from ATV’s outré, live/studio debut The Image Has Cracked. “I found out I didn’t want the drums any more,” says Perry, who was finding inspiration in the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Frank Zappa and John Cage, among others. “We had a big row and the drummer got chucked out of the band. On Vibing… there’s not much rhythm going on – it just sort of sits there. A lot of it was improvised, coming up with all these mad sounds, putting a mike down an upright piano or just bloody taping stuff off the radio and mixing it in, which is what the point of it was. Punk said, ‘Here’s three chords.’ Well, why do you need to play chords?” The febrile atmospheres, derelict gamelans, sound art improvisations, dub distortions and random piano playing that resulted were not unadjacent to late ’70s works by This Heat, Throbbing Gristle or PiL. Yet Vibing Up The Senile Man (Part One) had an intensity and chill of its own. Beginning with a laugh, opener Release The Natives is moored by Burns’s bass throbs and the frying-bacon hiss of a degraded tape delay unit, as Perry digs into his psyche and speak-sings of refugees, ancient stones in Africa and class tension. The purgative mini-dramas continue with low-end audio play The Radio Story, which relives the girl-leaves-boy scenario with radio dial noise and increasing anguish, and the sinister Anglo-Krautrock of The Good Missionar y, which tells of Perry’s unease at being cast as Sniffin’ Glue’s punk spokesman. A climax of sorts is reached with closer Smile In The Day’s suite of folk woodwind, rusty hinge dub, lumpy jazz and Zappa-esque mock-opera, and its account of a dream Perry had about the composer Frederick Delius, the “senile man” of the album title. More impressed with The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Jam, the music press’s verdict was unforgiving. In particular, Perry recalls a joint review by journalists Garry Bushell and Dave McCulloch in Sounds, which declared it, “the worst album to ever come out!”. Things didn’t get any easier when ATV accompanied The Pop Group on their Animal Instinct tour that year, playing to crowds expecting to hear Action Time Vision. “We were scratching away on violins and beating dustbins and that to these pissed up punks and skinheads,” says Perry. “They hated us, booed us off. I quite liked the friction of that. I only got physically hurt once, when we played in Derby, when I got knocked out by a bottle. A lot of Vibing… is about the friction of me and my relationship with punk. There’s a lot of troubled stuff going on in the lyrics, you know.” It’s also not without humour, he argues. “It’s not serious, heavy work,” he says. “We were full of gags. Well, I laughed – ‘Oh fucking hell, there’s a second part?!’ I used to get a little bit intense when I did some of my vocals, but recording it was good humoured, yeah. There was a bit that was meant to be on the end of the album that I left off actually. Wally Brill says ‘Take it boys!’ and we all play out-of-tune sax and trumpets. I left it off because I thought it made it too jokey [it appeared as the third track on ’79 single The Force Is Blind], but it makes it more fun actually.” In the years that followed, Perry changed the group’s name to The Good Missionaries, recorded solo and reunited with original ATV foil Alex Fergusson. The odd hiatus notwithstanding, he has continued to lead ATV, who released their most recent album Opposing Forces in 2015. “At the time of Vibing… it seemed like I was in a rush, but I wanted to get all my ideas out,” he says. “It’s not my favourite ATV record, but there is something about it. It’s true to what we were doing at the time. It is what happened.”
“Punk said, ‘Here’s three chords.’ Well, why do you need to play chords?” MARK PERRY