Noise Nutters

version

Well-known member
This might be a thread for @martin and @john eden to shine in. Anyone got any good stories about ridiculous noise shows? I was thinking about Hanatarash last night for the first time in ages and the stories about them are just ridiculous...
Hanatarash was notorious for their dangerous live shows. Some of the band's most infamous shows included Eye cutting a dead cat in half with a machete, strapping a circular saw to his back and almost cutting his leg off, and destroying part of a venue with a backhoe bulldozer by driving it through the back wall and onto the stage.

At a 1985 show in Tokyo's Superloft, the audience were required to fill out forms due to the possibility of harm caused by the show. The show was stopped due to Eye preparing to throw a lit molotov cocktail onto the stage.
The performance cost ¥600,000 (approximately $9,000 US) in repairs.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Martin has done loads of these but I can't remember which thread/threads.

It's weird how corona has made him break character. I'd never seen him do an earnest post before this and now he never does a comedy one. A few people have had personality shifts. Woops used to be determinedly apolitical. Now he's always banging on about 'the tories'. He's worse than idle rich now.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I wasn't there, because I was three, but the description of the early Neubauten gig in which they made a spirited attempt to destroy the ICA sounds like it would fit the bill for this thread.

When we played at the ICA, we had this Utopian idea of leaving the stage from underneath. The plan was to dig through the stage into the tunnel system underneath the venue, which is supposed to go all the way to Buckingham Palace. Obviously, the venue had no idea of our intentions. We'd already been banned from a lot of venues for using fire and drilling the walls, but the Concerto for Voice and Machinery was billed as a highbrow art thing. There was no connection made to rock music.

I think the ICA probably started to realise something was afoot when a cement mixer was set up on stage, alongside electric drills and jackhammers. There was a piano, too, but that would be smashed to pieces. In those days, we'd often take the stage under the influence of substances or alcohol but this time I think we were particularly aware of the potential for danger so we were pretty much straight. When we took the stage, the euphoria was so intense. It felt ritualistic, meditative, like we were samurai.

There's a lot of controversy over who was actually on stage. Contrary to rumour, Blixa [Bargeld, the singer] did appear, but pretty late. He came on in the last quarter and sang one word, Sehnsucht, which means "addicted to desire". Frank Tovey, who performed as Fad Gadget, was singing freestyle stuff, these sort of om-like mantras. Genesis P Orridge was also on stage but I can't remember if he was handling a chainsaw or a pneumatic drill. Because we were using petrol-driven chainsaws, very soon the whole room was filled with smoke, the stench of petrol everywhere. It sounded like a cross between a building site and war. Because I was very young, the others wouldn't let me near the heavy machinery so I stood, wearing protective gloves and a visor, throwing milk bottles into the cement mixer, which smashed and flew into the crowd.

There was an attempted "reconstruction" of the event in 2007 but it must have taken months to plan and probably had health-and-safety documentation the size of a complete set of Encylopaedia Britannica, which must surely have been entirely at odds with the spirit of the genuinely dangerous original performance?
 
Martin has done loads of these but I can't remember which thread/threads.

It's weird how corona has made him break character. I'd never seen him do an earnest post before this and now he never does a comedy one. A few people have had personality shifts. Woops used to be determinedly apolitical. Now he's always banging on about 'the tories'. He's worse than idle rich now.

it turned me into an anxious bore with no sense of humour for two months, i think im emerging from that quite slowly
 

john eden

male pale and stale
The Whitehouse textfiles are gold for this sort of thing:

live action 3
09mar82
gossips disco - london, uk

notes: audience 20 / whitehouse originally booked here to support peter and the test-tube babies who subsequently did not make it / whitehouse left as headlining band for all the punks who had turned up / predictably chaotic results as whitehouse are forced to abandon the live action after about 15 minutes / no audio recording of this performance is available / filmed on super 8 by paul hurst

special biographical note:
During this period until LA33 most performances in London were booked by Whitehouse manager Jordi (George) Valls who presented Whitehouse to clubs as ‘electropop’-oriented. Sound checks would therefore also have to be disguised to prevent cancellation from venue managements.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
live action 2201jul83
roebuck - london, uk

notes: audience 80 / support groups are ramleh and bushido (featuring glenn michael wallis and gary levermore) at low volume / steve stapleton gets arm cut after flying glass during whitehouse performance / police raid in large numbers midway through anal american / many arrested in chaos / whitehouse manager jordi valls spends night at police station for barring access to police

review:
Wasn’t the half-hour wait for Whitehouse worth it? Yes, it was. Philip Best, the king of the nasties, walked on programming his tool of ultimate power: sound. Next walked on Kevin Tomkins who fiddled with the oscillators so harshly, he was torturing his own machinery! Then the brainiac of the Come Organisation, William Bennett, flitted along the floor, dictating and screaming "Kill" like Hitler never could! gesticulating "louder", a helper, I think, persuaded the public address bloke that more power was needed, with the sound ultimate violent playing, the anger was brewing. A fag butt directed at the audience, a glass of beer, beer glasses, the boys took over, objects were flying like a testing range, one bloke who decided that a beer glass cutting his arm was not very social got on stage and kicked the equipment over. William seemed to direct his anger to Phil by "come on" gestures, the doors were barricaded and officers of the law kicked the door down and literally dragged an angry man down the stairs in not the most polite fashion. Was that a Whitehouse performance, total anger, rage and violence? I mean, all their lyrics are "Fuck", "Kill", "Shitfun", "Buggerfuck", now what are you meant to think? Is it pretending of a warning, a sign of sheer dominance and then sheer fascism and sexism? Well, I don’t know, but if it is, fight it, if not, we should support the noble cause.

 

john eden

male pale and stale
This performance by The Haters was an unforgettable night:

1995_london_uk.jpg


19/12/1995 London
Not all flying saucers are from outer space. The sky will occasionally sang on itself, leaving a temporary saucer-shaped rip. During this 25 minute performance, a still image of such a rip in the sky was projected over the three performers. One performer stood centre stage with a motorcycle tire over his shoulder. A second performer behind him used an electric sander to wear away at the tire. A third in front rubbed a calculator on some sandpaper which had been taped to the tire. Contact-mics were on both the sander and the calculator. Entitled both "The Thinking Ross Does" and "Changing The Tire". (#225)
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I remember the smell of rubber. It was in a weird place upstairs in some building on the east side of Charring Cross Road. Con-Dom also on the bill which was standard power electronics audience baiting.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
It is hard to beat Martin's story of going to see Sutcliffe Jugend at the Red Rose with K-Punk and another former Dissensus poster who will remain nameless for now though. I believe fragments of this will appear in his forthcoming hardcopy zine.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Is this who you were talking about before in that other zines thread I started a while ago? I'm hopeful we'll get the zine soon, keep up the promo John!
 

version

Well-known member
I'm convinced I read a review of a noise show where someone put a microphone down their throat, dunked their head in a bin full of ice water and a bin full of hot water then alternated between the two.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I'm convinced I read a review of a noise show where someone put a microphone down their throat, dunked their head in a bin full of ice water and a bin full of hot water then alternated between the two.

That sounds a bit like one of the acts at the Broken Flag reunion fest. Club Moral?

I think there was a review of it in Turbulent Times.
 

martin

----
I saw a pretty messy Whitehouse gig in 2001. Some goth girl made the mistake of sitting on the stage with her back to the group when they came on, so Peter Sotos (Whitehouse's 'Bez', if Bez had been a fat Bluto lookalike in a dirty old man raincoat) walked over and booted her in the back - she came off the stage horizontally and landed on her arse on the floor. Later, Philip Best nearly got dragged clean off the stage after he made the mistake of licking the palm of his hand and trying to grope people in the front row. Maybe he thought they'd be repulsed and move back: instead, they just clamped onto his arm and yanked him off balance. He actually looked quite worried.

It's weird how the Whitehouse audience radically changed after Sotos left. Went from a bunch of drunken lunatics, snarling and screaming abuse at the band and hurling objects around, to a more genteel crowd, nodding with their arms folded. I saw Whitehouse when they did that ATP gig in London Bridge in 2005, when the Aphex Twin fans bottled them offstage, and thought: that was typical for these guys five years ago.

There's a funny 'Live Actions' entry on that site about William Bennett getting bitten by a dog.
 

martin

----
Special commendation should go to Smell & Quim for getting an entire weekend noise festival in Leeds shut down in the first half hour, after coming onstage in rubber pig masks, wielding machetes and a sledgehammer, and hacking up/attempting to set light to a (real) pig's head.

The fact the event promoter sent out a po-faced email afterwards, condemning S&Q's flagrant breach of HSE regs ("...the wielding of any blade in a public environment (especially when done by a man wearing a pigs mask thus lacking peripheral vision) is also massively illegal...") just made it all the more legendary. Health and safety gone mad.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
maybe it's unfair in retrospect, but all this stuff seems just impossibly edgy

or like, only for people who (no offense to anyone) don't/have never experienced violence in their daily lives
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
you guys would know better than me, but like, come on. all the fascist provocation, so edgy.

neofolk too. like bad imitations of Comus plus some garbled Julius Evola.
 
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