Totally Shuffled-Electro Hippies

extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"

April 18^th

Electro-Hippies- Chickens-Peel Session E.P.     

I listened to this in the car on the way into work this morning. 

There’s eight tracks on the e.p. and it lasts just over seven minutes. The longest track is “Sheep”, which is an epic 1 minute 42 seconds in length; the shortest track is “Mega Armageddon Death Part 4(Part 3)” which clicks in at a snappy 1 second. That’s not a typo; it does actually only last one second. Probably one of the only tracks I’ve got where is takes longer to pronounce the title (or even read it) than it lasts. 

It might have been thought that crust punk/hardcore bands had no sense of humour-I find this really funny. I hope that they meant it as a joke because if they didn’t, they would have been too overly serious. 

Having said that, they did originate from Upholland, Lancashire. Being therefore from the no-man’s land between Wigan and St Helens (a kind of uber-Bermuda triangle), I would have thought that a sense of desperate, grim and black humour would have developed within them from a very early age in any event.

At the time this came out-or at least when I heard it-in the late 1980’s, I lumped it together with Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death i.e. fast songs, crusty hair, veganism, tatty clothes, big boots and shouting etc etc.

It struck me as a bit of a dead end where (clearly) the songs would end up being so short and fast that they would only last one second long (guess what?). 

For all their protestations of individuality and anarchy, the whole grindcore or whatever scene seemed so ossified and dogmatic, even when it was at its peak, that it was as irrelevant as a Teddy Boy Rock and Roll revival. Crass did it with a lot more intelligence and proper political engagement. Crass at least made you think about things behind the music. 

All the ENT/Napalm Death/Electro Hippies stuff was too obvious, too much of a blunt instrument.

I did have an idea though-more of a thought, a memory really-that the music in itself, just the music, apart from the image, had something about it. Maybe it had some intangible quality in being so extreme. Possibly things have moved on a bit since then. 

Maybe I’ve been spoilt by listening to actual extreme music (Japanese band, Die! You Bastard, are a good example of how it should be done), but hearing Electro-Hippies again, after a long time, well, it just seems a bit lame, a bit quaint. 

Driving along the M62 in the rain got me thinking, “Is that it? What am I missing here? Doesn’t all this sound quiet and old-fashioned?” I felt a little bit sad, a little bit let down by the whole thing. 

Before today, I at least had a (false) memory that a bunch of blokes (these grindcore bands were always blokes by the way-women are too smart for all that nonsense), from Upholland made some of the most extreme music possible. 

Now I know they just sounded like Bucks Fizz.

This is just one extract out of 366 from "Totally Shuffled".

You can read about it/get it here as a Kindle ebook  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA   

or here as a paperback    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X