Garbage Days Revisited #99: Thee Hypnotics - "Come Down Heavy" (1990)

 

"Fifty five million and that's just the start of it..." - Thee Hypnotics - Justice In Freedom

You could probably tell everything you need to know about Thee Hypnotics just by looking at the sleeve of this album. Four mean-looking longhairs who look like they just teleported in from the scummiest Detroit garage you could imagine circa 1969 or so ready to kick loose and fry your brain with some synapse-exploding primal rock 'n' roll. Even more impressive when you consider they were actually from that perennial punchline for jokes about boring home counties towns, High Wycombe...

Thee Hypnotics were a classic "right place, wrong time" band - plenty of critical acclaim but they burst on to the scene with their brand of Stooges indebted garage-punk/psychedelic freakouts right in the middle of Madchester and were well and truly swimming against the tide from day one. I s'pose you could make an argument that Primal Scream took a not entirely dissimilar formula to chart success but they wouldn't really get there for at least half a decade after Thee Hypnotics did - at this point they were still on the woozy indie-dance of Screamadelica etc.

It all left Thee Hypnotics as arguably one of the cult bands of the early '90s, sharing venues on the toilet circuit with the likes of the not entirely dissimilar Gunfire Dance or supporting the likes of the Damned, the Lords of the New Church* or the reformed Dead Boys**. A real shame because their early recordings, the Live'r Than God EP and their full length debut Come Down Heavy are proper classics, real fry-your-brain levels of raw feral garage punk attitude fired along by Jim Jones' preacher man howl, Ray Hanson's unhinged Hendrix style guitar freakery, Will Pepper's rock solid bass playing and Phil Smith's brutal energy behind the drum kit. Needless to say, I heartily recommend 'em both. Hell, the opening riff on Let It Come Down Heavy and the truly sinister seven minute epic Resurrection Joe which sounds like Iggy fronting the Doors circa L.A. Woman (yes, seriously, that good - I liked it so much I even named one of my old bands after it!) are almost worth the price of admission on their own.

* - Brian James was actually so impressed with Thee Hypnotics that he offered Jim the chance to replace Stiv in the Lords when there were issues between the two over Bators' commitment. Jim refused, Stiv found out about the incident and hence we got the T-shirt incident where he sacked his entire band onstage and thus ended the Lords - read more on the Lords GDR entry for that story.

** - Ray and Jim actually ended up as touring members of the Dead Boys on one late '80s tour when Cheetah Chrome couldn't get a Visa to join the others in the UK.

Unfortunately, like I say, Thee Hypnotics were just one of those bands who well and truly fell through the cracks despite getting a fair bit of good press from the critics and endorsements from veteran psychedelic freakout merchants like the Pretty Things (Phil May and Dick Taylor from said band both guest on Come Down Heavy). But even in the early '90s where the British music scene was arguably at its most diverse, they still never quite fitted in anywhere - too heavy for Madchester, too energetic for shoegazing, not quite punky enough for grebo/fraggle. They did end up picking up a bit of interest Stateside though and quite a few of the grunge bands took them in as kindred spirits when they made it across the Atlantic leading to Live'r Than God actually getting a release on Sub Pop over there and giving them a healthy cult following both in the US and over here in the UK.

It seems as though that initial failure to break through properly kind of sent Thee Hypnotics into a tailspin though - their second full album Soul, Glitter And Sin was a vast sprawling beast which took a few listens to get into with seven of the ten tracks being five and a half minutes plus. Again though, it got them plenty of acclaim but not a huge amount in the way of sales. Line-up instability started to set in with drummer Phil Smith being sidelined for a year with a broken back sustained in a car accident while touring in the States (none other than Rat Scabies would sit in for him during this time) while bassist Will Pepper left the band after being frazzled from constant touring only for his replacement Craig Pike to overdose a matter of months after joining the band and Pepper being talked into rejoining for what turned out to be their swansong, 1994's The Very Speed Crystal Machine.

Unfortunately, TVSCM was the sound of a band losing fire a bit - they'd sparked up a friendship with the Black Crowes (then going through the quality plummet that was the deathly dull Amorica album) who set them up with their producer George Drakoulias. The result is that while Crystal Machine still has a bit of the fire of old, it tends to drift into self-indulgence a bit. Sales were no better than its predecessors, the rise of Britpop had left the band as even bigger fishes out of water than they were half a decade previously and the group gently drifted to a close as the '90s came to an end.

It's a real shame it never quite happened for Thee Hypnotics - horribly out of time with the trends of the '90s they may have been but they were that most rare of beasts, a group of talented musicians with attitude who knew how to pool their resources to create a pretty unique and amazing sound that always kept you guessing (in that respect, you could say they were very similar to the Lords of the New Church a decade or so earlier). Will Pepper would go on to join up with Andy Bell from Ride to form Hurricane #1, a pretty dramatic departure from his old band's sound to say the least, while Jones would eventually resurface in Black Moses, have a brief stint on drums with the Urban Voodoo Machine and then hit a second spell of infamy with the awesome Jim Jones Revue. All of which I'm sure we'll cover in future episodes of Sounds From The Junkshop. But in the meantime, I heartily recommend that you at least listen to Come Down Heavy and Live'r Than God for some truly awesome mind-melting psychedelic fuzzed-up garage rock with snotty punk attitude. Soul, Glitter And Sin and The Very Speed Crystal Machine are both a bit less immediate but are definitely well worth persevering with too. Jim and Ray have done a few Hypnotics reunions down the years, most recently just before the lockdown, and Jim also has his All-Stars group these days who are hopefully gonna hit us with some more music following a promising debut single last year. Suffice to say it's something we're waiting for with bated breath...