Sounds From The Junkshop #87 - The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster

 

"I wanna f**k your mother/It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it..." - The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster - Celebrate Your Mother

I've said a couple of times in the past when writing a Sounds From The Junkshop column that sometimes one of the most enjoyable things is revisiting a band whose records you've not heard for ages and remembering just how much fun they were. And listening back to Brighton nutcases the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster's debut album Horse Of The Dog was definitely one of those moments.

Here's the thing about the Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, right - their singer Guy McKnight basically looked like Richard Ashcroft's long lost evil and ultra-unhinged twin. Onstage, the man was frankly an utter lunatic, leaping around, screaming gibberish into the mic, climbing the rig, curling up on the floor and on one occasion I saw them, shoving the microphone down the front of his boxer shorts, picking it out again, sniffing it and visibly retching (ewww). Behind him, the rest of the band looked like some sort of psychobilly Addams Family, clad in ill fitting clothes and ghoul make-up. And they sounded just as unhinged as they looked - think a collision between the Stooges, the Birthday Party and the Cramps that somehow ended up getting birthed into the early noughties garage rock explosion and you're pretty much there.

And the amazing thing? They actually managed to take this formula into the charts! Yup, they had actual Top 40 hits - a good four or five of 'em if I remember rightly. I seem to remember getting wise to this band quite early on after Kerrang! wrote about them in gushing terms and the NME did likewise around the time of their ultra-unhinged debut single Morning Has Broken which started with McKnight crooning out the lyrics like Nick Cave at his most psychotic before the whole thing crashed into a chorus with him screaming "I WANNA LIVE MY LIFE MAKING LOVE!". The second single Celebrate Your Mother was even better with lyrics which seemed to be about incest and drug abuse but really it was so utterly gibberish that it could've been about anything. I mean in terms of sheer insanity, there was only really fellow SFTJ alumni McLusky who even ran these guys close.

While those two songs were minor hits, the group's third single Psychosis Safari, with a nausea inducing 3D video directed by Edgar Wright, took the group all the way into the Top 30 (probably helped slightly by the fact that they released it in mid-January when nobody releases anything) and all of a sudden the group found themselves unlikely chart stars with a good mix of rockers and indie kids on board. Like I say, this sort of music should by all rights have been WAY too insane to get anywhere near the charts but there was something genuinely exciting that it somehow did...

It left me eagerly anticipating the band's debut album and Horse Of The Dog didn't disappoint - ten tracks and 26 minutes of utter goth-sleaze-psychobilly insanity with the likes of Chicken (which would follow Psychosis Safari into the Top 30 and had a similarly unsettling video), Whack Of Shit and Giant Bones being the sort of addictively lunatic blasts of chaos that made nearly everything else in late 2002/early 2003 seem decidedly anaemic by comparison. One of the best albums of that year, make no mistake about it.

Similar to fellow bright hopes of this era and SFTJ alumni The Cooper Temple Clause, TEMBLD followed Horse Of The Dog up extremely quickly with the lead off single from their second album Mister Mental, another fine slice of lunacy as per its title and another Top 30 hit, seeing the light of day a mere eight months after Chicken, the final release from Horse Of The Dog came out and I'm wondering if maybe this pushing themselves was what ultimately sowed the seeds of their destruction. The album, The Royal Society, gave the group a couple of further Top 40 hits in I Could Be An Angle and Rise Of The Eagles but it seemed a bit more reined in than its predecessor as if it was trying to build away from the chaos. Supposedly during the making of the album, three of the band including McKnight and guitarist Andy Huxley who was the band's main songwriter, had given up drugs and turned to Buddhism which might explain why this one sounds a bit more structured and less out there.

It was a brave move but for me it just didn't quite work - by taking out the chaos that had been such a key part of those early songs, TEMBLD just seemed to become a bit less interesting. Which I know is a terrible thing to say given the reasons for it but although it's still a competent effort with some standout moments, somehow The Royal Society felt more like a good album than a great one and while it did better chart-wise than Horse Of The Dog, it still stalled some way short of being a hit. Soon afterwards, Huxley would leave the group and they would go on hiatus.

TEMBLD would attempt a belated comeback in 2007 with the In The Garden EP which led to an even more belated third album in the form of 2010's Blood And Fire which was self-released and I missed altogether. They would disband again soon afterwards, this time for good (at time of writing anyway). Latter day guitarist Rich Fownes would resurface a couple of years later with the equally nuts Bad For Lazarus who I remember seeing detonate the tiny Lock Tavern in Camden when I lived down south and who put out a decent album Life's A Carnival Bang Bang Bang before disappearing again. For me though, Horse Of The Dog remains a classic of its time - one of those albums which kind of snuck through the barriers of good taste while everyone was distracted by the Strokes and the Libertines to put some genuine confusion, chaos and excitement in amongst the British music scene for a briefly glorious moment and it still sounds good today (to be fair, The Royal Society ain't bad either but the first one's the real kicker to these ears). Pure insanity rarely sounds this addictive, put it that way.