Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

 

"You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?" - Silverfish - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal

I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split. I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy?'s Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth and Femtex) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger.

Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would actively avoid rather than visit (see Withnail & I - the London part of the film was set there). Put together by Rankine and guitarist Fuzz Duprey, their early releases at the tail end of the '80s like Fat Axl and Cockeye were brutally vicious slices of hardcore punk which knocked the air clean out of your lungs. They were initially signed to Wiija, the same as Therapy? were in the early days and that's how the two bands became good mates (Therapy? even supported Silverfish a few times on their way up in the Babyteeth/Pleasuredeath era).

If you're the same age as me then you may well remember the riotgrrl movement of the early '90s and groups like the Voodoo Queens, Huggy Bear and Mambo Taxi - well, basically Silverfish were the same thing but they were a bit ahead of the curve and arrived on the scene two or three years before the aforementioned. Lesley's ferocious vocals and striking image (shaven head and floral dresses) definitely gave them an edge - she sounded like she could eat Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna for breakfast. Live, they were a truly ferocious proposition - researching this article I came across a story from a fan who'd gone crowdsurfing at one of their gigs and landed on Lesley's FX pedals - she promptly gave him a right hook to the jaw and nearly knocked him out. In his words - "it was the hardest I've ever been hit by anyone!" Unlike a lot of the competition though, they weren't afraid of letting a sense of melody filter into the chaos. Take their arguably best known song Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal which absolutely slaughters with its pounding riff, snarled vocals and big gang chant chorus of "HIPS! TITS! LIPS! POWER!". Oh and arguably one of the greatest music videos ever, see below.

Silverfish would graduate from Wiija up to Creation in the pre-Oasis days and Organ Fan, their sole effort for the label, was arguably their crowning glory (though some would argue that the more chaotic early stuff represents their best stuff - I see the point but disagree). The ferocity is still there but it has a bit more of a structure to it and the likes of This Bug, Suckin' Gas, Scrub Me Mama With That Boogie Beat and the excellent Fuckin' Strange Way To Get Attention are some of the best stuff the band did and really seemed to mark them as a group who were heading upwards. Even the surprisingly straight cover of David Essex's Rock On works better than you'd think. It actually made the Top 75, pretty amazing given how brutal and uncompromising it was. So obviously, a matter of months later the band split up.

I'm not exactly sure what happened but I know that Lesley emigrated to the States and formed a new group, the more electronica-influenced Ruby. I remember hearing one of their songs Paraffin in the Britpop era and being really disappointed by it - it was pretty much a total break from Silverfish but not in a good way - it just seemed to lack the urgency and anger that had made that band so great. A shame. Of the other Silverfishes, Fuzz is now a DJ at the excellent Dublin Castle pub in Camden (a regular gig haunt of mine back when I lived in the capital), no idea what happened to bassist Chris Mowforth and drummer Stuart Watson. Lesley is now back in her native Scotland and still occasionally releases music under the Ruby moniker.

Silverfish were a classic case of a band who produced one brilliantly bright magnesium flash of an album before suddenly vanishing shortly afterwards rather than fading away. Maybe they just felt they'd taken the formula as far as they could (and arguably with Britpop just around the corner they'd have seemed like a bit of a fish out of water had they stuck around in Camden much longer than they did) but it kind of seems like a shame we never got at least one more album out of them. Still, Organ Fan (and in fact all of their other stuff too) comes highly recommended - vitriolic unrestrained feminist chaos has rarely sounded better than this.