3. KeponeSkin
When I was maybe 15 or 16 there were a few music shows which were on at, like, 3am on ITV, things like The Beat, which used to have loads of footage of bands that otherwise weren’t on the telly. I remember it had loads of stuff from Phoenix Festival, really mad bands. The absolute key programme though was Noisy Mothers, which I would religiously set the video to record and get up at half six the next day so I could watch it before school. It was absolute agony when you programmed the video wrong, or you forgot to change the clocks when they went forward. This was the only place there was heavy music on telly, and there was some insane stuff for a little kid who’d only scratched the surface at that point… I think maybe Noisy Mothers changed the lives of a lot of dweebs like me.
So many firsts here – Slayer, Obituary, Carcass, Pantera, and loads of obscure stuff… Acid Bath, they’re one I fondly remember! One of the last episodes I ever saw had a band called Kepone on doing an interview, and the video for their song ‘Knifethrower’, which I think I intrinsically understood even then was a stone-cold classic. I tried to order a copy of their album Skin for like, a year but no-one could seem to get hold of it. Then it popped up in Virgin. I fell in love with this album, and still love it. I guess you’d call it post-hardcore, or something like that?
I’m not so familiar with this whole area, never investigated it too much but this album really caught a hold. It’s so unusual and smart and weird. ‘Super Fucker’ is really thrilling. ‘Blue-Devil’ and ‘Thin Solution’ are both so tense and haunted. I reckon it’s a lost classic. The songs are fabulous, the guitars sound amazing and spiky, the vocals are beautiful and wild, and Ed Trask is an amazing drummer. Maybe the production overall is not quite there, but I think the slightly thinner, scratchy quality adds to the whole effect. It’s almost like a rural gospel-punk thing… Not quite gothic… more like a rotten old hut. I listened to this on the train back from Sheffield the other day and it struck me that I respond strongly to these sharp kind of guitar tones, abrasive styles, raspy strings. Maybe this record has been a bigger influence on me than I realised. I play it a lot for people and most of the time they’re just like, ‘huh? aye, it’s ok’, but what do they know?!
