Pricebuster Blues

Growing up on the Fylde coast, life managed to feel ordinary, exciting and horrifyingly dull all in one go. Blackpool, the Fylde’s Financial District, is tucked in on the coast by the surrounding sleepy retirement towns. At the end of the holiday season, shutters drop, jobs dwindle and the town falls into a deep slump. Like most children, an interest in music provided enjoyment, something to sing along to and eventually acted as a means to fill the cultural void. At an early age I listened in default mode to cassettes of Elton John, U2 and Buddy Holly. In later years it was to be replaced by House and Rave, Dreamscape DnB cassette packs, Gangsta Rap and the arse end of Brit Pop. None of it ever felt particularly ‘ours’.

We were simply too young for clubs and raves, way too white and northern to be packing techs, wearing Karl Kani jackets and leaning on mad bitches. Eventually, I was just too fucking embarrassed to maintain listening to anything like Shed 7 and the sort. When asked what music I was into, I would answer ‘Indie and Rap’ – misheard by my Gran as ‘Indian Rap’. She must have been thinking about the ragga-infused Apache Indian but no one round here was listening to that.

After leaving St Annes and Blackpool and forgetting at least half of the aforementioned genres, I realized that the main bond with a lot of my friends was simply music; I shared little of their wobbly opinions towards most things or people beyond the start of the motorway but music quashed any real differences. Only a decade ago most of this music, although somewhat cartoonish, felt pretty anarchic at 15. Now, the majority of it has been absorbed into our infrastructure. Children in supermarkets singing ‘Smack That’ by Akon, pensioners in Sue Ryder humming to Basshunter, Uncle Nigel walking around in Nike Air trainers and a Kenwood Stereos jacket - It’s all just a bit too much. For a town whose super stars include Joey Blower, some pretty weird tastes and interests have crawled out from under the boardwalk.

One of the most surreal artifacts to emerge out of the Fylde coast in recent years lies in the anonymous data of a single CDR, lovingly christened ‘Crap Soul Guy’. I was handed a copy in 2005 and am still surprised that more people haven’t heard it. Legend has it a member of local psych-punk band Cermanic Hobs had found the unidentified, used CDR in a recording studio in Blackpool. Amazingly, Crap Soul Guy’s style lies somewhere in the ballpark of The Residents covering Craig David.

BEHOLD HERE

My friend Phil, being a social carer, claimed he knew “exactly what this is” and that it was most likely to be a CD produced by someone with, at the very least, severe learning difficulties and was probably made during a creative ‘group session’. If this is the case, then you should probably stop laughing right now. But if you wish to look past this mild speculation, you may find it to be an astonishing spin on popular music from a man living in a culturally puzzled, White peninsula town where the biggest landmarks (The Pricebusters and Woolworths buildings) lie mercifully in the dust of Britain’s financial skids. Yates’ Wine Lodge (historically the impressive Tivoli cinema) along with a pet shop and shopping arcade, a rollercoaster, The Grand Hotel and numerous other buildings have all been burnt to a curly fry via a slew of suspect arson/insurance jobs. Even the new prototype trams are burning for no reason.

In a whirlwind of smoldering infernos, the BNP and 10 a penny, meaningless, romantic pop songs being piped in to every space and conceivable orifice, Crap Soul Guy makes perfect sense.

Before any heightened musical epiphany as such, like a lot of teenagers I too went through a phase where the spectral teen traits of hyperactivity, aggression, utter boredom and high school crushes were perfectly personified (albeit briefly) in the skull-shattering, polyphonic labyrinth of Happy Hardcore. Whether or not the genre was simply waiting for us in the cycle of ever-existent youth-culture fads, was a product of social and economic decline or actually the shared responsibly of a bunch of grown men with maturity complexes is hardly a hot topic on the nations lips either then or now.

 For a while, it’s nauseating, Benny Hill BPM seemed the type of thing most people are only massively concerned about as a teenager - like OXY10 spot cream or knowing how to put a condom on - but on the whole, modern chart music appears to have openly embraced the sound with even the most celebrated, contemporary RnB singers milking themselves silly over the paper thin, textual ambience of Rave music’s synthetic strings. Example: Beyonce’s Broken Hearted Girl - a song so readily waiting to be transformed into a rave banger, it sounds constructed with the assistance of natural resources scientists.

 Whilst all of this went on, still goes on and shall eternally go on, as a teen I had not yet turned my attention to the fact Blackpool has maintained a small but established scene of punk, noise, psychedelia and weird pub rock that has been consistently active (although declined somewhat) since the late 70’s. As far as inspiration goes, it’s a fitting location for transforming wooden-clapper commodity into music.

 

Ceramic Hobs have been at the centre of the town’s outsider community since the early 80’s, dealing with mental health (a number of band mates having been sectioned over the years), national hysteria and generally fucking about with every concept, person and musical style they can. Including the track ‘Make Mine A Large One’ which lyrics' accuse local Free Masons for the murder of a young boy and the use of his head for Masonic rituals. Generally all of this writing could be about Ceramic Hobs and probably should, but more can be said about them here in an extensive interview with founding member Simon Morris for Blastitude http://www.blastitude.com/17/CERAMICHOBS.htm

In the late 70’s to mid 80’s bands such as Section 25 and Tunnelvision (featuring two of my family members), were lucky enough to escape the decay briefly and landed (in varying lengths) deals with Factory Records. Section 25 cut their most famous single ‘Looking From A Hill Top’ in 1984. A minor hit in the UK but a precursor for House and Detroit Techno in America. The chances of anything as culturally crucial emerging from Blackpool in this day and age seems as likely as giving birth to a time machine.

Whilst searching for Section 25’s ‘Dirty Disco’ to post, I found a video by a band called Slugfuckers from Sydney, Australia playing a track called ‘Deaf Disco’ released 2 years before Sect 25’s brand of disco and the same year as PIL’s Swan Lake (Death Disco) and is arguably more entertaining than the both of them.

 The Membranes were also formed in Blackpool in the late 70’s by John Robb, who has become a sort of punk Terry Christian, popping up as a talking head in every nostalgia show. Here he can be seen playing in two videos, an amazing one below in a car park in Nottingham and also here performing ‘Myths and Legends’ which includes an interview with an inexorably smug Jools Holland about the town itself.

Whilst looking around for Ceramic Hobs videos, I came across a band called Johnny Wu and The Layton Playboys but further research reveals it to be little more than a band with a funny name covering tracks by the Fugs, which is about as good as it gets for now.