Death To Trad Rock!

I'm just finishing off my book 'Death To Trad Rock- adventures in the British post post punk scene'.
It's been a fascinating journey into the mid eighties underground that with The Membranes I was very much part of. There was a discernable scene of bands who were attached by a noisy attitude and circuit of venues and fanzines.
There was lots of discordant DIY noise and wild times. Invariably championed by John Peel and the music press the bands took the energy of punk rock and, instead of infusing it with the spirit of the Velvet Underground they mainly went for the twisted genius of Captain Beefheart, King Tubby, krautrock, underground noise, agit funk, the Pop Group, no wave old blues, garagerock and punk rock.
The scene was political but with a neat surrealist satirical edge. Many of the bands played benefits for the miners during the miners strike but very few of them wrote a direct political anthem. They assumed the audience were smart enough to know which side they were on as they satirised British culture in the post punk fallout.
This was a period of real despair. If punk had been rising up against the shit Britain of the seventies then this was a last glorious hurrah to a failed revolution. By the mid eighties Thatcher was in total control crushing the country but in a weird and wonderful way her selfish government was a real inspiration to the ragged trousered vagabonds plying this noisy groove.
The bands floated round in that space between punk, post punk, the new pop of The Smiths and the nascent Goth scene but on their own terms in their own frenetic world. Like American post hardcore this was a breaking away from the rules and conventions of music into a brave new world. Gigs were noisy and wild affair. The audience was made up from refuges from all these scenes- a collection of rough hewn hair, doc martins, black drainpipes and sawn of paisley shirts.
One band whose catalogue I’ve really loved since working on the book is Glasgow’s Stretcheads .Truly the children of the revolution they grew up with the bands that are in this book and then took their template and ran away with it. They emerged from the fertile Scottish scene in the late eighties with eccentrically titled songs that were driven by an uber heavy bass and frenetic guitar spiel.
Adding touch of American hardcore energy and post hardcore weirdness from the like of the Butthole Surfers and Big Black the band were fiercer than most of their mentors and ended up on the Blast First label the imprint that imported most of the American band into the UK in the first place. There is plenty of great clips of them on youtube. Check them now.