12. Guided by VoicesCrying Your Knife Away
We were watching Gaunt support the New Bomb Turks at The Garage in north London, probably around 1994/5. They played a ripper of a tune, and said: "…that was by the best fucking band in the world, Guided By Voices…", and that’s when we first heard of Guided By Voices.
Crying Your Knife Away is either terrible or brilliant, over four sides (sides one and four are on one record, three + two on the other. A mis-press bollock drop that normally wouldn’t matter but on this record you HAVE to listen to it all in order) you hear the band celebrate the birthday of a character called Bela Koe-Krompecher at a venue called Stache’s in Columbus, Ohio. It all starts OK but as the album progresses, making sure you listen to the album in order, the band’s drink of choice, Rolling Rock (a pissy lager of little merit) renders them more and more incapable. The gaps between the songs get longer, the chat more indecipherable, the tunes more ragged.
And GBV have got some tunes, and this record has versions of all the ‘hits’ from the classic era – albums like Propeller, Bee Thousand, Clown Prince Of The Menthol Trailer are joyous examples of scrappy, tune-riddled rock, 20 songs an album, 40 minutes each, recorded lo-fi but played live hi-fi with Robert Pollard high kicking and hollering his way through them like he’s fronting The Who in 1964.
Recorded in 1994, I think this is a bootleg LP. I was desperate for some GBV after the aforementioned Gaunt inspired ‘see the light moment’ so headed into London and saw this for £19.99 in Selectadisc. The whopping price tag gave me the fear so I did the classic: pick it up, wander around the shop for 30 mins, put it back in the ‘G’ section, and leave. I regretted it, of course, standard. But in HMV an hour later I found it, mis-priced, for £7.99. I snaffled it away, remembering and then re-living the halcyon days of yore when we used to change the price labels in Woolworths to get Dio or Def Leppard albums for 99p instead of £4.99*.
For the next few years, between a few of us, we picked up all the GBV records and saw them numerous times. They were a boozy band and we were enthusiastically boozy people. I even went through a phase of drinking Rolling Rock. Yowsa.
*Along with kicking the pick ‘n’ mix out of the shop. Only the wrapped ones naturally. We weren’t animals.
Joe Thompson
