If you had told me that I would name drop Chumbawamba twice in less than 6 months I would have laughed in your face. Actually, if you had told me I would name drop them ONCE, I would have laughed..."I get knocked down, but I get up again"? That band?
But apparently, Chumbawamba were a well-known and respected anarchist punk outfit in the 1980s (I need to listen to "Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records") and the few reviews I've read of Karma Sutra's "The Daydreams of a Production Line Worker" always mention Chumbawamba. One reviewer also mentioned Killing Joke crossed with Chumbawamba.
I would also say Karma Sutra (Luton, England) reminds me of what a more ferocious Chameleons UK might have sounded like. The Bandcamp write up also mentions Thatcher on Acid (listen to TOA's "cover" of The Wedding Present on "My Favourite Mess"). And not all of this Karma Sutra release is punk - listen to "When the Music Stops".
This was originally released on Paradoxical Records in 1987. Sealed Records reissued the LP in 2025.
The mid-1980s were crushingly unhappy times in far too many places: El Salvador, Afghanistan, Soweto, Southwest Philly. And so on. But we shouldn’t neglect Belfast. The dominant narrative of the Troubles features a number of signal events from the period: the Bobby Sands-led hunger strike; the bombings at Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and the Grand Brighton Hotel; the Maze Prison escape. For the population of Belfast, everyday life was an ongoing experience of being under the cosh — of the S.A.S., of the U.D.A., of the I.R.A. (and the Provisional I.R.A., and the numerous smaller paramilitary groups espousing loyalty to Ulster, to the Republican cause or to generalized mayhem). Walled-off neighborhoods, guard posts commanded by men with heavy guns, regular patrols of armored vehicles—the city was a de facto warzone. Hence the name of the Warzone Collective, an organization run by a bunch of Belfast anarcho-punks during the mid-1980s and intermittently through to the present. Toxic Waste was a punk band active in the Warzone Collective, and Sealed Records has done us all a very serious solid by reissuing Belfast, an anthology originally released in 1987 that collects a number of Toxic Waste’s songs. It’s a terrific record, documenting some oft-overlooked music from a vital punk scene and its vigorously politicized response to the lifeworld’s chaos and violence.
The songs on Belfast are taken from two moments in Toxic Waste’s development: Side A has been selected from records produced in 1985 and 1986: From Belfast with Blood — The Truth Will Be Heard, a split EP with Stalag 17 released by Mortarhate (run by Londoner punks Conflict); and We Will Be Free, an LP compiling songs by Toxic Waste, Stalag 17 and Asylum, first released by the Warzone Collective. Side B includes tracks from a later session, featuring Toxic Waste’s Roy Wallace alongside members of DIRT, a London-based anarcho-punk band. There are sonic consistencies that render the sounds on both sides comparable, most notably the dual male and female vocals, though on Side A, founding member Patsy sings, and on Side B, you hear Deno from DIRT. For both line-ups, the influence of Crass is palpable, in the interplay of the voices and the relative simplicity of the songs’ constructions — and legend has it that Toxic Waste was created in the aftermath of a 1982 Crass gig in Belfast.
You can draw a fairly direct line from Stations of the Crass (1979) to We Will Be Free to Nausea’s Extinction, from “You’ve Got Big Hands” to “As More Die” to “Godless.” That sort of genealogy building is informative and interesting, but the importance of the immediate social context of Toxic Waste’s music should not be reduced. The situation of anarcho-punks in a politically fraught conjuncture like mid-1980s Belfast lends the music a particular power. Songs like “Tug of War,” “Burn Your Flags” and “Religious Leaders” demonstrate the band’s continual symbolic and ideological displacements, to a marginal in-betweenness, then to a radically placeless outside. As anarchists, the punks in Toxic Waste weren’t Catholics or Protestants, Fenians or Loyalists, natives of Sydenham or of New Lodge. Their relations to Northern Irish identity were infernally complex. There’s this, from “Song for Britain”: “You take a look at Northern Ireland / And think it’s too far away to worry about / But it’s not that far / And you may have to experience what we’ve put up with for years.” That seems like a collective “we,” cutting across the country’s sectarian lines. But in a city so divided, where could that “we” live with any sort of stability? And from whence does the treat in that final clause originate? Then on “We Will Be Free,” you hear, “I am not Irish / I am not British / I am me / I am an individual / Fuck your politics! / Fuck your religion! / I will be free! / We will be free!” Shorn of national, religious and political markers, who is that “We”? Is it the same “we” that speaks in “Song for Britain”?
It’s impossible to say for certain, and all of those contingencies and fluidities make the music on Belfast volatile, always on the move, always riven with restless desire. Perhaps the most coherent statement of the intent driving Toxic Waste can be encountered in “Traditionally Yours” (present on the record in two versions, from the two iterations of the band — a double voicing that further complicates all the other double voicings): “The struggle became a movement / Human rights was its concern / ‘How dare they!’ cried the rich / We’ll see those fuckers burn!” The anarchist language embedded in the passage is as powerful as it is ambiguous. What do we make of the past tense? Does that indicate that the movement is moribund, undone by Northern Ireland’s violence? And what about that “we”? Is it spoken by the song’s lyric speakers, representing the anarcho-punks that sing? Or is that “we” the “rich,” expressing their outrage at and malign plans for the anarchist cause? The syntax remains unresolved, and while Northern Ireland’s worst armed struggles have receded, these songs remain explosive, messages from displaced people that systems of oppression would like to exploit, exhaust and cast aside. But even the most institutionally entrenched powers find that Toxic Waste isn’t so easy to dispose of.
REALLY nice reissue with the original foldout style artwork and music from the master tapes. They clearly took a lot of time and effort to get the printing of the artwork and music right on this one. Well done. I bought this thinking that my pocket sleeve pressing was a bootleg since I couldn’t remember where I got it, but it turns out they pressed some pocket sleeve versions in 1987. I guess I’ll keep both versions of this masterpiece. #themoreyouknow
Rachel Love's work is deserving of a post in it's own right. It's amazing how this captures some of the 1960s pop feel that embodied early singles from her 1980s band Dolly Mixture.
Really, this post is mostly intended to bring to light the reissue of Dolly Mixture "Remember This" on Sealed Records (both based in London). I can't post the release because, while it IS on Bandcamp, and there IS a physical release, there are no audio tracks available. Thus the post of Rachel Love's CD. But here is a link to the full "Remember This" album on YouTube.
Dolly Mixture is just amazing. It's very cool to listen to the growth of the band from 1960s pop to minimalist pop to C86 to post-punk. At the time they were associated with The Damned, and influenced by The Undertones. post break-up members went on to form several bands including Birdie. I think there are strains of Delta 5 and The Pastels throughout.
Rudimentary Peni has always had a pronounced interest in modernist literature. The band’s high-water mark was the batshit brilliant Cacophony (1988), an album-long engagement with H. P. Lovecraft’s equally batshit mythos (maybe — when it comes to batshit brilliance, Nick Blinko is tough competition). On the underappreciated EP No More Pain (2008), Blinko commences the madness by repeatedly snarling a line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust!” The band’s most recent record was a bare affair, setting Wilfred Owen’s World War One poem “The Chances” to a grim musical accompaniment. That interest in Owen and the Great War seems to have stuck. This new record, ambiguously titled Great War, offers another Owen poem set to music, this time the poet’s brilliant “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” None of us who listened to the band’s utterly singular records in the 1980s are “youth” anymore, and the doom-struck character of our current conjuncture can obscure the urgencies of the early 20th century, perhaps entirely. This new Rudimentary Peni LP is a useful reminder that history happens the way it has to, and we can learn a lot from understanding those necessities.
Stylistically Great War strips the band’s sound back to raw intensities, much in the vein of the Archaic 10”. Great War’s harsh textures are even more mechanical. Most of the record’s songs sound like the band has used a drum machine for percussive rhythms (see “Mental Cases” for an especially dry, brittle and inhumanly precise snap). That seems apt, if a bit reductive in its sonic enactment of the truism about World War One as a first truly mechanized conflict. Significantly mechanized firearms technologies had already been used in the American Civil War, the Boshin War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (and the Prussians’ rationalizations of command, troop deployment and supply were perhaps even more important innovations for the conduct of modern warfare). But the scale of the slaughter — on the Somme, during the Brusilov Offensive, at Verdun — was indeed unprecedented, and the introduction of chemical warfare intensified the awfulness, the utter contempt for life. Blinko’s voice is instructive here. His own experiences of immiseration register in its cragginess, its depth and weirding power. It carries Owen’s sweeping bitterness into very dark places.
Of course, the trenches that Owen knew from France were already dark, dismal, dreadful places. Media’s contemporary representations of war are considerably different: drone strikes and drone footage; dusty desert villages, hot sun, endless masses of buckled concrete that were once cities; asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency. Some songs on Great War can help you think and feel back across the more than a century that has past, back to mud, shit, tides of rats, flooded ditches, rotting feet, festering bodies, the horrific fixity of the trenches. “Asleep” comes at you in quickly phased waves, claustrophobic rushes repetitive riffing, unrelenting yelling. It’s an anxious experience. “Strange Meeting” slackens the pace a bit, its signature riff a slowly intensifying, gnashing, grating machine. It’s not especially violent as an array of noises and textures, but it still feels completely pulverizing.
And that’s a fair generalization for all of Great War. The record doesn’t have the gonzo, maniacal unpredictability of Rudimentary Peni in the full floridity of the late 1980s, but this new record’s simplicity conjures a different sort of force. Everything feels necessary — and that in turn conjures the inevitability of the war itself, as monopoly capital surged to global crisis. The songs vibrate with requisite anxiety and anger. Blinko’s creative sensibility continues to find idiosyncratic sites at which contests among form, function and philosophy flare into music, and then scorch and scar everything in their path. Better take cover.
Fantastic singles collection for this underrated UK punk group. The sound is great and the packaging is amazing as well, it comes with a huge booklet. Lo-fi, infectiously catchy punk rock that you can’t get out of your head for weeks. Unfortunately a lot of these songs are still very relevant today. Well done.
Sealed Records (London) has been reissuing rare/weird/punk music since 2019. We posted about (and I bought) the excellent Dolly Mixture collection released a few months ago.
Now, releasing in July, we have a 7" from Andy Stratton (UK). Andy was a 16 year old when he recorded these songs in 1980. The drummer was from The Mob, and Andy had never played a gig on his own. Yet here he is sounding mature and appropriately punk - he sounds influenced by the Buzzcock's and The Mob. He has a bit of Wreckless Eric in him, and the tone of his guitar sounds a bit like Andy Summers.
Really, check out the Sealed Records catalogue. There's a lot to dig into - most of it comes with authentic British snarl.
The guitar is so gross sounding on this most recent RP 12”, I know a lot of people don’t seem to like this record, it’s artsy and the songs are all kind of the same, but I think it works well as a stand alone piece and I especially like the artwork on this one. It’s pretty cool in my book.
