‘Shame And Pain’, the final track on Axels And Sockets: The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project Volume III is based on an unfinished song originally found on the Lucky Jim (the final Gun Club album) recording demos. According to Pierce collaborator Cypress Grove the lyrics, recorded in London, are an expression of Pierce’s then-disintegrating home life. Mark Stewart, who specifically requested he would like to do a duet with a Pierce vocal and guitar track, recorded this version at Urchin Studios in Hackney with Thurston Moore and Jim Sclavunos, who co-produces and plays fuzz bass, organ and percussion. This is the first time a Pierce vocal has appeared on any of the three Sessions CDs.
Stewart told us: "It was a total honour to do a posthumous duet with Jeffrey and, together with Jim Sclavunos and Thurston Moore, to finish one of his last songs. Back in the day Jeffrey’s Gun Club together with Nick Cave’s Birthday Party were one of the very few renegade comrades. Massive respect to Cypress Grove for protecting scraps of tape and fragments of a dream (Jeffrey’s legacy). La luta continua."
This accompanying and specially-commissioned video is by Rupert Goldsworthy, the British ‘New Banalist’ artist and author of the radical classic Consuming Terror. Says Stewart “It’s an ‘objet trouvé’ provocation riffing on the trope of ‘entangled objects’, the moving contradictions of geographical development and the production of space / the third place / the worldwide revolt of human nature against universal alienation."
Goldsworthy’s visuals are a worthy backdrop to the chaos of Pierce’s end times, as he already knew at this point that he was dying. According to Cypress Grove, "The chaos that his life had become is perfectly reflected in the whirling dervish dancing in time to the music, and the crescendo building up to the inevitable explosion at the end says it all."
Get hold of Axels And Sockets from Glitterhouse Records and have a read of our in-depth retrospective feature in-depth retrospective feature on Pierce.
