Garbage Days Revisited #45: Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction - "Tattooed Beat Messiah" (1987)

 

"I'm the reverb saint, I'm the King of Flies/I think you might've guessed that I ain't like other guys..." - Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction - Tattooed Beat Messiah

Look, it's quite simple really. There are times when you want to put on music that'll make you ponder the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything and genuinely give you something thought-provoking. And then there are times when you just want to cue up something supremely dumb, unrepentantly meatheaded and loud to bellow along to. Zodiac Mindwarp's Tattooed Beat Messiah album, as you might've guessed, is very much the latter situation to the nth degree. Behold, if you will, arguably the greatest music video ever. And no arguing you at the back.

As with a few bands I got into in the early noughties as my music tastes started to drift away from what the NME and Kerrang! were desperately trying to foist on "the kids", I'm pretty sure it was the Sleazegrinder website who are to blame for me getting into Zodiac Mindwarp - they were frequently spoken of in hushed terms in those (web)pages. Having risen up with the very early grebo bands in the mid-'80s courtesy of the High Priest Of Love mini-album, one of the first releases on Food records, the group were essentially a one hit wonder with Prime Mover which used to crop up on a lot of '80s goth compilations in my collection for some reason. But sod it, if you're gonna be a one-hit wonder then you might as well do it with one of the greatest solitary hits of all time. Similar to a lot of bands I've covered in GDR from Slaughter & The Dogs to W.A.S.P., there's just something brilliantly primal about that song that makes you want to neck the nearest beer, devour the nearest steak and howl at the moon until sunrise. It's just undeniable.

If you've heard Prime Mover then you've essentially heard the whole of its parent album Tattooed Beat Messiah - even their guitarist Kid Chaos (aka Stephen "Haggis" Harris who would later go on to the Cult and the Four Horsemen) admitted when I interviewed him for Bubblegum Slut many years later that "We basically had one song which we'd written in about 85 different keys and I was like "Can we write a new one now?"...I saw the end coming, let's just put it that way." But the fact is that it pulls off that one template - headbanging riff, growled lyrics and pounding drums be it fast (Spasm Gang, Untamed Stare) or slow (Let's Break The Law, Bad Girl City) - brilliantly every single time. Call it the AC/DC effect if you will but it's sheer brilliance.

It doesn't hurt either that Zod was (and still is) a man with a way when it comes to lyrics. Maybe not a surprise when you consider that, like Cliff Jones from Gay Dad he'd been a music journalist before going from poacher  to gamekeeper but Tattooed Beat Messiah must be one of the most quotable albums out there. I mean, just a few examples - "Had a party back in '44/I was Mickey Mouse with a chainsaw!" (Skull Spark Joker), "Well some call it murder, I just call it fun, gonna saw up your little sister with my sex machine gun!" (Let's Break The Law), "I'll be your gunsmoke lover, a dangerous stranger, I shoot silver bullets but I ain't the Lone Ranger" (Bad Girl City) and, lest we forget, "I'm a sex fuhrer baby, I'm a love dictator, you're a disco reptile, a funky alligator!" off Prime Mover itself. I mean yeah, big and clever it very much ain't (well, maybe it is a bit clever) but like a barbarian Marc Bolan, there's just something brilliantly call-of-the-wild about the whole thing that's guaranteed to make you feel a bit better when life's gone to shit.

Perhaps inevitably, it couldn't last. The failure to produce a follow-up hit to Prime Mover saw Zod, Cobalt Stargazer, Slam Thunderhide and the rest of the crew gone from their major label deal very quickly and by the time they'd started work on a follow-up in 1989 only Zod and his faithful axeman Cobalt remained. The comeback single Feed My Frankenstein flopped but one person who did notice it was none other than Alice Cooper who ended up covering it on the Hey Stoopid album and getting a hit on both sides of the Atlantic which must have given Zod a much needed boost to his coffers. Unfortunately when the second Love Reaction album Hoodlum Thunder did finally surface in 1992 it was a disappointment, lacking the instant headbanger gratification of the debut, and Zod would wander off to minor label obscurity.

He's still out there though of course and happily he had a new album out in the form of I Am Rock at the time I got into the Love Reaction which I picked up when they toured it at Bradford Rio's. It's probably the best thing he's done outside Tattooed Beat Messiah and High Priest Of Love, keeping it simple, grisly and gruesome the way he does best from the pummelling Shake through sheer scumminess of Fucked By Rock to the out and out chaos of Christmas Eve On The Reeperbahn and is well worth seeking out. As is Zod’s unapologetically OTT autobiography, also called Fucked By Rock (the reissue being backed up with I Have The Greatest Respect For You George, his grim tales of growing up in ‘70s Bradford) which is pretty much essential rock ‘n’ roll reading.

Zod's been a bit quiet apart from the odd reappearance on the live circuit in recent years with his last album being We Are Volsung (a bit of an inconsistent effort if I'm honest) a decade ago. I remember seeing him playing the short-lived Pipeline venue near Liverpool Street station on the tour when he was unexpectedly joined for the inevitable encore of Prime Mover by a wild eyed guy in a leather jacket who leapt onstage and started joining in on the vocals - we later discovered that this was Adam Ant and, soon afterwards, he'd be back touring again after a decade away so there's another historic occasion your correspondent was present for! Similar to Antiproduct though, I have a feeling Zod'll resurface at the last moment anybody's expecting it. I certainly hope so anyway, in these desperate times, a bit of riffed up Love Reaction goodness is always a welcome development. And in the meantime, we've always got Tattooed Beat Messiah to cheer us up.