Various
Just A Bad Dream: Sixty British Garage & Trash Nuggets 1981-89
Writhing, sweaty, tattooed male bodies thrashing furiously down the front of the Clarendon and The Living Room to the likes of Billy Childish’s Thee Mighty Caesars; Creation Records signings The X-Men and mighty Scots mods Jasmine Minks; the straight-ahead garage thrash of the Sid Presley Experience; awesome StingRays-in-disguise Cramps tribute band The Bananamen; Essex’s turbulent misfits The Wolfhounds (their killer, wailing La Juice a highlight here)… and myriad others, long lost to the mists (and sweat) of time.
The Cramps were the main touch-point, them and the UK’s grossly malformed The Meteors. Some called it psychobilly, reflecting the psychotic tendencies of those involved with the live scene – a mix of lurid B-movie sci-fi film, rockabilly and punk.
The title given to this threeCD, 60-track exhumation is more accurate: trash, with its roots firmly in the post-Beatles garage rock explosion of the 1960s. Also, several of the bands included – Scotland’s Biff Bang Pow! and righteous revival-heads the Green Telescope, the nearpastoral Dentists, Jesus And Mary Chain, with their Syd Barrett cover Vegetable Man, the all-girl 1960s experiences The Delmonas, the almighty Sexton Ming, Clapham South Escalators’ outrageous rip of Funeral Pyre – had little or nothing to do with the psycho/billy kids.
The studio versions rarely stood up to the live renditions even back then – when energy was king, after all – but this collection is still a great romp through a mostly forgotten patch of UK music history.
everett True