[H.H] DIES IN A FEW DAYS – LAST CHANCE
A couple of days to go and SH’s exit is looking as chaotic as its birth. Behind the curtain all kinds of things are breaking and people falling on their arses. Do I care? Strangely not as much as I did a week ago, which is a good thing.
Let’s have a wake. I’ve got a beer!
BEST SEVERED HEADS SONGS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER or
YOU’RE SO VAIN YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS LOOP WAS ABOUT YOU or
SQUEEZING PIMPLES IN THE MIRROR.
1. This Track Doesn’t Exist on Ear Bitten.
Listen, you can hear the crickets outside my bedroom window. It is winter, evening, 1979, I am 16. Richard and I are making tape loops – this one was Richard’s. We decided later that it should loop forever and it did on the original record, as did the crickets.
2. Inch Urch on Mysterious Kitchens.
Tapping away on my Kawai Synthi 100F and a Mini-Pops Junior. Onto a cassette and then play that onto another cassette back and forward. I was learning how to make multiple lines of music on a monophonic synthesiser and it somehow worked. It sounded just like Martin Rev who was a real musician.
3.Tiny Fingers on Clean.
I have a terrible ability to recall words magically only to figure out where they came from too late. Wet Taxis had a song called 1000 Tiny Fingers. This starts with toy piano through my Melos Tape Echo, then cuts to some Arabic radio on a tape loop, a single bass melody on the 100F and a treated voice. And it’s creepy and pretty and how I wish everything I did was that.
4. Deano’s Couch on BlubberKnife.
An old friend from high school dropped in to see me just as we were recording Bradbury’s huge disgusting belch through echo. The guy never visited again.
5. Anthem 82 on Eighties Cheesecake.
A drum machine, a bass, a bunch of vocal tapeloops and so damn optimistic about the coming decade and the culture that seemed to be blooming.
6. A Million Angels on Since The Accident.
I’ve heard this too many times to enjoy it, but you have to respect how some shitty old religious records, some Korgs and a lead guitar came together so perfectly, with the scratching of the Beatles Hold Me Tight as the icing.
7. 4WD from City Slab Horror.
There’s all kinds of moments all over this record which are simultaneously great and stunted. If I picked Explosive New Movie I’d have to mention the shitty lyrics. I think 4WD is my pick, because it was a love song written for somebody who knew it, and that’s Escape From Nerdland.
8. Petrol on Stretcher.
Petrol had been on Blubberknife, but when I did it again in 1985 somehow it just flowed into a pop song that I can always proud about. Pop music should seem effortless. Here it was.
9. Harold And Cindy Hospital on Come Visit the Big Bigot.
Another remake. I remake everything 1000 times, but this was the time you heard it. It is creepy and pretty and the lyrics are deranged and dammit why can’t every song be like that. Romper stomper disco.
10. Nature 10 from Bad Mood Guy.
This wasn’t on the original album because I’d already donated it to a Nettwerk compilation where it got squished up against the inner groove. It was recorded after the shitty world tour, losing my relationship and not feeling the happiest. The confection of captured radio and piano was better than anything that ended up on the LP and I was glad to bring it back much later. A Nature 10 is a customs declaration.
11. Midget Sings on Rotund For Success.
It was useless until I played it at the wrong speed, then it became the song of escaped circus midget. Even though I sang before I sped it up, it fits this resultant accident. This has my favourite chorus of all the songs I wrote.
12. King of The Sea from Cuisine.
The last moments of a drowning man who is for some reason broadcasting his transformation from sailor to bloated royal corpse. I can see this one in my mind, but I can’t make the image right. If you have ever found a dead thing in water, this is it. Cuisine was generally not understood – it’s filled with death at every turn, as is the best Country music.
13. Somewhere over the Gigapus from Gigapus.
A tape of somebody demonstrating a home organ by playing Somewhere Over The Rainbow becomes by cutting and sampling the basis of a sad little song about people coming and going on airplanes. Boats and aircraft by this stage being overwhelmingly symbolic in all the songs and god knows why. The dreamer is for some reason the same person as the King of the Sea, again I don’t know why.
14. Bookburner from Haul Ass.
Oscar Wilde meets the Predator. Oscar wins by mixing heroin into the Predator’s gin and tonic. One of a long series of songs about drug addiction (Oscar’s Grind, The Soundtrack of Fold, Junkhead Spins, Host of Quadrille) that is to say the addictions of everyone around me. I don’t have the body type, but for some reason addicts are moths to my candle.
15. Russia from Op1 and Op2.
I wrote this in the USA. The sides of the highways in the USA can seem very rural to highly urbanised Australians and a little like Russian patriotic posters. At this time the ex soviets were enjoying their decade long adoption of mass marketing. I wanted the voice to sound like a call from a minaret. McMinaret. Come to shop, we are all beautiful.
16. Lo Real from Under Gail Succubus.
A small girl at the kitchen table, strange lights in the sky. The parents, smiling, inert, keeping up a routine but a red glow is thrown across the table like a river of blood and pulling open the door she sees the cloud rising that sweeps in, drowning the whole scene in fire. Also a line of cosmetics.
