Slow Songs For Fast Hearts

Bush Tetras, Oct 17 @ Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle

This review is mega late (it’s for a show in October), as seems to be the way on Fast Hearts, but then this band is one that spans nearly 30 years, so I guess it doesn’t really matter!
The show was the legendary Bush Tetras, playing one London date only, at the Corsica Studios in Elephant & Castle.

Forming in the early 80s around the time of the burgeoning no wave & post punk scene in New York, members included ex- Contortions guitarist Pat Place, Cynthia Sley on vocals, Dee Pop on drums and Laura Kennedy on bass. An early incarnation of the band also featured Adele Bertei, who went on to form all-female band The Bloods, as well as appearing in the Lizzie Borden feminist film Born in Flames. Most recently Julia Murphy replaced Laura Kennedy who now has some pretty serious health problems: in September the Bush Tetras, James Chance and more put on a benefit gig to raise money for a liver transplant that she requires.

In interviews, Cynthia Sley has variously described the Bush Tetras’ influences as including bands such as the Clash and Pere Ubu, as well as reggae, hip hop and African music. In a 1980 NME article, Laura Kennedy described the Bush Tetras as a “rhythm and paranoia band”. When I first heard their song “Too Many Creeps”, I was a bit confused for a while, cos I thought it was the Slits, this was before I knew about the Bush Tetras. They don’t really sound much like the Slits at all actually, I guess it was just the early 80s sound, the female vocals and the funky beat, that had me initially confused (I guess I fell into the trap of using the Slits as a mile marker, as lots of people do, as if there could only have been one mostly all-female band playing music incorporating reggae and funk at that time!!). Bush Tetras never seemed to quite hit the level of fame or notoriety that a band, say, like the Slits did, but they were an intrinsic part of the New York art/music scene that included such dance funk bands as ESG, and their influence, particularly Pat Place’s guitar playing both in the Bush Tetras and the Contortions is widely acknowledged and respected:

“The Bush Tetras were funky. It was Pat Place, she was the show. She had the credibility because she’d put the funk into the Contortions. “Too Many Creeps” was a club hit. You heard it all the time”. (Richard McGuire from Liquid Liquid in Rip it Up and Start Again).

It’s always a bit of a worry going to see bands a number of years after their heyday that what you’ll end up seeing is a half-hearted attempt to recreate an earlier era, with the band churning out their “hits” but without any of the spark that originally made them so, ending up with a show that is faintly embarrassing…Bush Tetras were not like that at all! I’m not able to compare them with what they were like in earlier years, cos I wasn’t there, but I was impressed by their intensity and charisma. They still made you feel like you were seeing something new, their music not just comfortably slotting into the post punk revival (this was a group of stylish older women and men, not yr typical trendy haircut band), and yet their influence on those kinds of bands was quite clear. They looked cool. They sounded great. They made me want to hunt down all their old releases. The intimacy of the gig added to the feeling that you were really seeing “something”, I think it was this atmosphere that for example the recent X-Ray Spex show lacked. (This despite the fact Pat Place in Rip it Up and Start Again says that they used to play to crowds of up to 2000 in New York).

The support acts for the Bush Tetras and the Djs did well to set the scene, particularly the first band I saw, whose name I didn’t get, and I don’t think they were on the poster advertising the show. They were 3 gothed-out women on guitar, bass and drums, who swapped instruments throughout (and the drums were played standing up), reminiscent of Malaria! in the sense that they were quite serious and dark, and that 80s twistedness was evoked further by the bondage porn projected on a big screen behind them. If anyone else who went to this show knows who this band was, please get in contact and let me know!

Check out this 1982 video for the Bush Tetra’s “Too Many Creeps”:

Posted 6 days ago | By Melissa | Comment
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Race Revolt zine launch London

The 3rd issue of the amzing Race Revolt zine is about to be launched, with events to celebrate it in both Manchester and London. Race Revolt is a zine discussing race, ethnicity and identity in queer, feminist and DIY-Punk communities, features a bunch of articles by different people and is edited by Humey from Manchester.

The London launch is Sunday 16th November @ The Pullens Centre, Crampton Street, SE 17 12-5pm.

Check out www.racerevolt.org.uk for the program of workshops.

I’ll be involved in an informal discussion on race & music subcultures with Debi from Drunk Granny later in the afternoon…If you have thoughts/suggestions/ideas about this subject please come along and join in!

There’ll also be stalls from 56a infoshop & Ricochet! Ricochet!, plus a vegan cafe.

If you are in New Zealand, you can buy issue 1 & 2 of Race Revolt from the Cherry Bomb Comics table at the Wellington Zine fair on Saturday 15th November (same day as the Race Revolt launch in London), and if they don’t sell out there, off the Cherry Bomb Comics online shop at www.cherrybombcomics.co.nz.

Posted 22 days ago | By Melissa | Comment
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Punk tour blog

Check out punktourblog.blogspot.com, a new blog which includes tour diaries by Tobi Vail and Molly Neuman about the Go Team tour, 1989 and Bratmobile/Heavens to Betsy tour, 1992. Strictly for riot grrrl dorks.

Posted 58 days ago | By Melissa | Comment [1]
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A further thought on the previous post...

Can I just say though, that there are some amazing art initiatives happening in South Auckland, particularly at the Fresh Gallery in Otara…Curated and run by Ema Tavola, this gallery supports local and Pacific artists, bringing visual art into the context of the Otara shopping centre. This project is Council funded, and despite my rant below about the sting being taken out of street art by its connection with Council & corporate funding, I do realise what a boost it can give to artists, particularly artists who don’t have parental money to fund their projects etc etc. Fresh Gallery, in my view, is about bringing art in line with the community, and not imposing ideas of “what art is” onto the community. Particularly inspiring for me was the initial “Art Takeaway” self-published magazine produced by Ema and others which featured art by local Pacific artists, and was handed out at the Otara markets. Some people who would never bother going into the city to visit the Auckland Art Gallery now had some art to take home and think about, and the artists featured in the magazine would have the opportunity to have their work viewed by their own communities and families.

I mean, perhaps similarly, as Art Takeaway and Fresh Gallery challenge traditional curation and exhibition, “street art” appearing in galleries act as a challenge to traditional notion of what good art is. But I remember reading something by Elliot Askew a while ago, perhaps in a NZ hip hop magazine, where he was saying how frustrated he was when people tried to seperate the taggers from the street “artists”, how he felt that you couldn’t just dismiss tagging and love aerosol art. And it’s really annoying when people think they’re edgy cos they’ve got a piece by Misery in their front room. A public art becomes private.

Check out Ema’s blog which features info about Fresh Gallery and other community based art projects.

Posted 72 days ago | By Melissa | Comment [2]
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How is it street art if it's not on the street?

This is not strictly about anything to do with music at all, but it happens to be the thing that is most on my mind at the moment, and this link that Linden forwarded to me this week just really made me wanna talk about it.

So you checked out the link and read what it was about right?: a group of “pixadores” in Brazil who were protesting against “the marketing, institutionalization and domestication of Street Art” by the galleries and media… And they didn’t even bother covering their faces…swoon…

This issue has bugged me for ages, probably mostly intensely around 5 years ago when in Auckland a company by the name of Phantom decided to “own” all the spaces in Auckland usually used by posterers to advertise their DIY gigs and events etc. Where you’d normally see layers of black & white A4 flyers pasted up with a mixture of lumpy flour and water or perhaps wallpaper paste for the more discerning, suddenly there appeared huge A1 sized coloured posters advertising products and large corporate bands and signs advising you that you would be prosecuted or your poster would be torn down if it was put up in any of the spaces “owned” by Phantom, which happened to be the side of every abandoned building, electric box, busted fence etc in the city.

Similarly, there has recently been a huge crack down on graffiti in targeted areas of the city, (i.e the poor parts) and while there has never been a better time for graffiti artists who want to make money in the corporate world (just look at ads for Vodafone etc), suddenly your average kid on the street, for whom graffiti has always been something outside of the system, can get more screwed over by the police than ever before, especially if they live in South Auckland and if they are brown. I lived in the privileged central city, and worked with youth in under-privileged Otara (a suburb on the edge of Auckland) for a number of years, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that they seemed to be getting more and more ghettoised for behaviour that was perfectly legitimate in my eyes, me who doesn’t want to have to watch planes pulling large advertisements for Qantas across the sky while I’m sitting in the park, who doesn’t ask to be bombarded by sexist and heterosexist and racist advertising everytime I step outside the door in central Auckland….What the hell do I care if these kids want to tag everything up? I’m glad they do, the graffiti that many of those kids do in Auckland is vital and exhilirating in my opinion, cultural terrorism that resists being co-opted by being “ugly” in the eyes of society. And I’m not talking about Otis Frizzel either.

Anyways…So now I’m living in London, and where’s all the graffiti? The only concentrated amount I’ve seen so far is in this tunnel that was set aside for a “street art” exhibition, featuring the work by some public school guy called Banksy…I mean, what the hell is the point of street art sanctioned by the council? What is the point of street art that some public school guy called Banksy sells for thousands of dollars and allows to be sold off on little canvases in the Camden markets to tourists etc, or has his pieces out on the streets put behind perspex so no nobody can tag over them? And has CCTV got such a hold on this city that there are no kids or activists or anyone wanting to spray all over the walls? That’s a shame if it’s so… And I can’t say I’d risk it either.

So what the hell is up with commodifying street art? And posters and flyers and zines that are brought out on shiny coloured paper featuring advertising for Coke or whatever, disguising themselves as being “street” and therefore appealing to some youth market. Same as commodifying riot grrrl or punk or hip hop, middle class art school kids wearing “bling” and adopting some lingo outside of their experience as an expression of irony towards a group of people they don’t think would ever understand the joke.

I’ve read a few message boards about what happened in Sao Paulo. The overriding opinion seems to be, good intentions, but bad choice of target. Why target an independent gallery featuring work by artists who do actually do stuff on the street, who maybe even came from the “street”, and now are legitimately trying to make money off their skill. Dumb taggers, people are saying, who are still wearing Nike and trying to be revolutionary. Spray an adidas billboard, people reckon, if you want to make a statement.

Well you know what? What’s gonna get a bigger reaction and get people talking about this issue more? Spraying up a gallery or tagging some billboard where the company can afford to put a new ad up to cover it at 6am so nobody ever sees or knows or cares? And plus, what do the artists exhibiting at the gallery in question care? No doubt their works were insured, so they’ll still get money anyway, and what does it matter to them whether their work was used in this way or bought by some rich person to put up in their rich person’s “edgy” lounge room? So they want to make legitimate money from their skill….well that’s fine and understandable, but is it still “street art”? Is it still a zine if it’s a monthly gig guide put out by Barfly? Do we need to waste paper making posters advertising Katy Perry when everyone who likes her has a TV anyway and watches it avidly?

The kids that I knew back home when I worked in South Auckland are going to end up either with huge fines, jail time or maybe even death (e.g the situation that happened last year), OR they are going to be commissioned by the mayor who will sanction them to do a piece on some politician on the side of one of their buildings in their neighbourhood who has never done a damn thing for them. And you can be damn sure the mayor will make sure that he gets into the photo with those kids in the papers.

This is an unapologetic rant. What do you think?