Here are the details of Digital Plamf’s last two choices for Unsung Heroes. You can hear his own music at his myspace page and you can hear the intros he recorded for these on the first podcast.(He also introduced me to the amazing Edinburgh band The Male Nurse, who were my choice for unsung heroes on show no.1)

Lowlife "Gush" ANOISE ANNOYS 1995 (LOLOF10CD

Digital_Plamf’s Unsung Heroes volume 3

More info on Slurpy Gloop courtesy of Kinema:gigz , a comprehensively detailed site for "The Whole Story of The Kinema Ballroom Dunfermline (and Cinemas of Dunfermline & Rosyth)" – all material © Ghoulz @ KinemaGigz

Slurpy Gloop

Pano (Michael Douglas) – keyboards, various electronic gadgetry
Fritz (William Ian Fitzsimmons) – keyboards, voice
James Barney Ward – synth, strings, backing vocals
Maria Berry – backing vocals

Other collaborator included:
Derek "Deek" Coll: – keyboards, drums, percussion
Kenny Macdougall – drums, percussion
Craig Hood – drums, guitar
Talcy Malcy – trumpet
Alison Reid – vocals
Wee Lynsey n Tracie

Way back in the late seventies, Pano briefly managed Dunfermline bands ’ The Skids ’ and later, ’ Trax ’. He then formed ’The (Dick Emery) Family On Holiday’ (Members included: Pano – guitar / Fritz – keyboards / Nipper Morton (Murray Ferguson) – vocals, drums / Peter Hamilton – drums / Scott Roberts – bass / Collapso – drums). Described as a psychedelic / electro / punk group, ’The Family On Holiday’ played and recorded around the fife coast of Scotland and released a 7" single ’Who’s a Pretty Boy Then?’ / ’You’re as Cute as a Dead Gerbil’, recorded at Palladium Studios on their own ’Fabidoo Records’ label in July of 1981. (It was the chosen single of the week in ’Melody Maker’ of guest reviewer Mark E Smith (singer with Mancunian legends ’The Fall’!)

’The Family On Holiday’ later spiralled out of control and transformed briefly into ’Choir Invisible’ (Pano, Fritz & Warpo on drums).

Take electronic legends and luminaries such as Karl Heinz Stockhaesen, Philip Glass, innovative brain-waving stereo pioneers ’Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’ and on to the weird and wonderful krautrock ’Faust’, then add ’Kraftwerk’, ’Syd Barrett’, ’Pink Floyd’ and ’The Pixies’ into the equation and you’ll begin to understand the mix that inspired Pano to form his next project, ’Slurpy Gloop’.

Pano dreamed-up the moniker to turn his musical ideas, inspirations and technological skills into reality. Starting off with not much more than a guitar, Minimoog and drum machine (Warpo), material was written, analysed and moulded into the shape that was to become the basis of that certain ’Slurpy Gloop’ sound.

He then enlisted friend and Choir Invisible music collaborator William Ian Fitzsimmons (Fritz) whose armoury included an Octave Cat synth, and a Roland String Synth. Fritz appeared to be quite shy in the early stages of the band but soon proved to be anything but when performing. He had amazing off-beat rhythm and an ear for a good original keyboard sound. He later moved on to vocals and at his best an excellent singer and performer but his pièce de résistance had to be his song writing.

Having written the preliminary sketches for what would become the backbone of an album, the duo called-out for someone to have a freelance roll and experiment with some kind of vocals to layer on top of some unfinished work.

Maria Berry had never sung with a band before, but what she lacked in experience was made up by her enthusiasm and lack of fear to try something new & different and usually performed on her adrenaline / nerves. The end result (live and recorded) was rather intriguing to say the least. She soon adapted herself to tune in to the sound with her own inimitable style.

With Fritz and Maria concentrating on vocals, the door was open for a new keyboard player to add a new dimension to the sound. All they expected from James Barney Ward was some different keyboard work but once he settled in with a Minimoog, Oscar Synth and Crumar Strings he created some mind blowing tunes. James also had an interest in backing vocals and his unique style is evident all the way through the album.

On Saturday 23rd May 1987 they had a bash at a Beatles-style roof-top gig one warm sunny afternoon at Sunset Studios in central Dunfermline atop a building known as ’Shafi’s’ on the corner of Carnegie Drive, Chapel Street & Bruce Street where they rehearsed & recorded the album.

Pano himself takes up the story:
"This is where we had our rehearsal/recording studio and I remember it was a Saturday afternoon and a lovely summers day, so within a whimsical second or two the decision was made to open the skylight, chuck up the backline and p.a. and just go and have a wee practice in the sunshine. The only thing was that once we started jammin’, mayhem ensued as down below the traffic had stopped, the Police and papers turned up and the band consequently were arrested but released 4 hours later without charge. A nice time was had by all" ..

’I Heard it in a Bathtub in Ohio’ was recorded at Sunset Studios Dunfermline (atop the old Shafi’s building) mixed and mastered at REL studios in Edinburgh.

For a period of time while Slurpy Gloop were totally together and at the height of their creativity and totally psyched up for it, they were ignored by the influential music heirarchy/industry bigwigs who couldn’t really think where these guys fitted in or quite politely had never heard of them and did not want to, because they were not hip and in consequence the buzz, adrenalin and creativity that was there in abundance during rehearsals and the recording of ’Bathtub’ soon petered-out and the band went their separate ways through time. While other experimental incarnations of the band came & went, none were anywhere near as good or had the definitive vibe within the original line up of Pano, Fritz, James and Maria ..

Album:
’I Heard it in a Bathtub in Ohio’ (1988) – Digitally re-mastered mixes from ’Bathtub’ now available on Garageband

Tracklisting: ’Victory Beat’ / ’In Little Ones’ / ’Power of Lies’ / ’Ribbons of the Heart’ / ’An End to a Start’ / ’Don’t Let Your Touch Die’ / ’Feelings (The Outsider)’ / ’Let Go’ / ’Come Wake Me’.

Pano continues to record as ’wakiaudio’.

Cheers Pano!

Digital_Plamf’s Unsung Heroes Vol. 3

Fife is, always has been, a strong regional contender in the music stakes. Paul Hewson and Dave Evans were so mightily impressed by The Skids that their early sound was based on a Skids template. Just more earnest and over the top. And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge I can sell you. Two bridges. But it’s true – U2 were devotees of the Dunfermline sound. The Edge is on record on this. Anyway that’s not got much
to do with the rest of this post, which is about Dunfermline band Slurpy Gloop.

I heard Slurpy Gloop on the radio a long time ago, and was smacked across the jowls by how off the wall they sounded. They had the usual guitar/ drums/ bass -led sound, but rather than trying to re-write the The Jam, The Pistols (or even the Skids), and augmented by cheap synth, they were doing some kind of retro-futurism that was devoid of sequencers or drum machines. As a reference point here, think about the roughly contemporary "No UFOs" by Model 500. Model 500′s sound at that point was cheaply recorded, sketchy, demo-ish, and bound by the four-to-the-floor, nailed-down sound of Detroit Techno. Slurpy Gloop’s sound, by contrast, was no precursor to Acieeeeed: more like a post-Joy Division take on Telstar, Giraffe, or Thaddeus Cahill, or some such synthoid nonsense, but – and here’s the key – it sounded unique.

Anyway, on an internet fact-finding mission, all I can gather about the band is this:

1. Slurpy Gloop were managed by ex-Skids manager Pano Douglas

2. Their one and only LP, "I Heard It In A Bathtub In Ohio", on Sparkling New Dimensional records, is available from Amazon Marketplace for £24.99, but the accompanying picture is a scan of a VHS tape about Windsor Castle – which makes it a bit of a gamble for anyone prepared to fork out £25 and possibly end up with some hoary old heritage dreck.

Slurpy Gloop’s "Instru-Mental" was volume 3 of Digital Plamf’s Unsung Heroes. Tune in to Milo McLaughlin’s show "I Hear A New World" on freshair.co.uk for more in this occasional series by me, and loads more sonic quality, not by me.

Tracks that didn’t make the cut this time round:

The Wake "Joke Shop" – emptied for dissing Tony Wilson

Cheapglue "Stupid Book" – emptied for sounding too Radio 2 mark II

The For Carnation "Moonbeams" – emptied for being ten minutes long , at 34 bpm for fucks sake…

The Arab Strap [sic] (aka The Angry Buddhists) "7^th Glass" – emptied for expeletives

The Goats "Do The Digs Dug" – emptied for expeletives ("Fuck George Bush")

Digital Plamf’s Unsung Heroes V.2

Lowlife’s ‘Gush’ was recorded at Mighty Reel studios in Edinburgh in 1995 – this studio was on East London Street next to the dry cleaners’. Neither of these businesses exist anymore – the dry cleaners’ is now the Bella M’briana italian restaurant, and the unit next door was for a few years the Lost Sock Diner, the owner (who’d also co-owned Mighty Reel) carefully picking a name whose initials spelt LSD. I had my dinner there once, but it wasny very psychedelic, although the name was quite funny.

So, who’da thunk that this anonymous tenement on the edge of Edinburgh’s New Town was the place that a brace of classic Scottish albums would be recorded. One of these classics was Lowlife’s underpromoted and practically invisible LP. Indeed, I wasn’t even aware of its existence until a few years ago, and it took about six months of trawling Amazon Marketplace before I could finally buy a copy.

Standout tracks are ‘Truth In Needles’, ‘Swell’ and ‘Tocopherol’. By this stage in the career the band’s stadium size sound was largely gone, replaced by an amazing, almost Martin Hannett style, ‘slower-but-faster’ production, with songs that told -sometimes painfully – stories that you could only hope for their writer’s sake weren’t autobiographical.

A note on the production – the producer, BeBop, was (I believe) a member of Edinburgh "legends" Gods of Glam who do have a MySpace page, but I won’t link to it here, for pro-Beatles White Album reasons.

Right. So that’s that then. Ah wait though, I did say a brace of classics was recorded at Mighty Reel – so what was the other one? Well, it was Brutal, whose CD "Bullshit Attitude and Experience", can only be described as psycho-biohazard. It sounds more like an experiment than an attempt at recording an album – an experiment in the fusion of loud noise with even louder noise. (If Jake and Dinos Chapman had recorded this album it’d be worth millions – and rightly so). Eponymous track "Brutal: the Harbour of Fools (Bladerunner Mix)" is a heavy-going 8 minutes of larynx-bleed shouting, layered guitars, and lumbering Front 242 with a broken drum machine beats. As for the track "Tart", think of a Scottish Notorious B.I.G. with no sense of the existence of R&B.

And that rounds up volume 2 of Digital Plamf’s Unsung Heroes. Tune into Fresh Air (Not FM any more) on Milo McLaughlin’s essential new show I Hear A New World for more lost classics, in an occasional series by me, and a whole load of other stuff, not by me. Mondays 10-11pm

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