Within the second instalment of a two-part prolonged function on the band Prolapse, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of their superlative debut album, Martin Grey takes an in depth look again at their beginnings and examines most of their recorded output as much as their dissolution in 1999, and what transpired afterwards when the band reformed to play a number of reside reveals once more in 2015.
Leicester: A lot to reply for.
Sure, discover that I truly wrote Leicester – and never Manchester. And sure, additionally discover that I sneakily paraphrased a sure album title from a sure legendary band related to that exact same northern metropolis within the parentheses of the primary article title (extra of that will probably be made clear later).
Typically thought to be the third largest metropolis within the Midlands (when it comes to complete metropolitan space inhabitants) after Birmingham and Nottingham, Leicester surprisingly has given us fairly a veritable choose’n’mixture of names, in a bewildering array of genres, over time. Not that it ever bangs its drum and blows its trumpet about it lots, in contrast to some cities I may point out….
For starters, it gave us the venerable Engelbert Humperdinck (truly born in Madras, India as Arnold George Dorsey however relocated to UK as a toddler together with his household – bizarrely adopting his acquainted stage title from a nineteenth century German classical composer), no-nonsense bassist John Deacon of Queen, veteran 60s folkster Davey Graham, late-60s to early 70s rockers Household, 70s’ rock’n’roll revivalists Showaddywaddy, early 80s publish punkers Yeah Yeah Noh and 2-Tone act The Apollinaires, legendary cult weird-psych eccentrics The Deep Freeze Mice and The Thurston Lava Tube, obscure and elusive sampladelic experimental dance poppers Discordia, genre-straddling indie-poppers Cornershop, late 80s storage punks/greboes Crazyhead and Gaye Bykers On Acid, and latterly Younger Knives and King Energy stadium rockers Kasabian…
However one act which hardly ever if ever was afforded a lot of the identical consideration – besides with the extra accommodating weekly music publications on the time – was Prolapse, a bunch of defiant non-conformists who first bought collectively while all had been college students on the metropolis’s former Polytechnic (now De Montford College) in 1991. Among the many undergraduate topics studied being English Literature, Archaeology and Physics….something arty most probably didn’t even get a glance in. It was pure academia.
Shit Indie Disco Music: Nein Danke!
The story – apocryphal or real, it doesn’t actually matter, it’s nonetheless intriguing – goes that three or 4 of the members merely frolicked collectively within the scholar union bar from sheer boredom and disdain for the crap music that was being performed on the common disco (we’ve all been there I suppose!). Chat turned to consuming and fairly quickly, they went from assembly recurrently on the desk to discovering themselves UNDER the desk, in a fashion of talking. This, evidently, was the place the thought for the band quickly transpired: the seeds had been sown. They bought collectively after a number of drinks and started to concoct an unholy racket with no matter devices they may pay money for. A pair had guitars in order that was a begin.
In a matter of months a lot of the personnel had been sought and recruited with a view to forming, within the phrases of one of many members, ‘essentially the most miserable band on the earth with essentially the most miserable title ever making essentially the most miserable music’. And what title did they choose? The organic time period thus:
PROLAPSE : noun
a displacement of an element or organ of the physique from its regular place, normally downwards or outwards, usually leading to it protruding from an orifice.
Positively a family title within the making that may quickly grace the weekly chart rundown on TOTP we predict….. or is it? However hey – earlier than you begin elevating your eyebrows and sighing, take into account the context. The truth that the band have a bleakly black sense of self-deprecating humour! Prolapse is a perfect band title – one which certainly encapsulates the unsightliness and ugliness of a lot of life generally. A phrase that conjures up a sure diploma of revulsion within the faint-hearted. However then, many would select to affiliate it with arses or rectums (significantly the bovine selection). That’s fairly shamelessly punk rock I suppose.
Granted, it’s not as downright crude and puerile as Bum Gravy (Melody Maker band title of the 12 months again in 1989, in case you forgot), however, take into account this, it’s not that far faraway from Butthole Surfers both, is it? And look how notorious THEY turned!*
(*Having mentioned that – are you able to think about how completely heavenly it will be to have had Prolapse AND Butthole Surfers taking part in collectively – or co-headlining – on the identical trans-Atlantic invoice? In my wildest and most fanciful goals, I suppose)
Right here Come The Misfits!
Okay so who had been/are Prolapse…and why are these misfits so goddamned necessary to a few of us?
A broiling cauldron of conflicting and disparate personalities: two guitarists David Jeffreys and Pat Marsden, usually taking part in in full asynchronous kinds however nonetheless tight sufficient to helm in discernible buildings and melodies; a bass participant Mick Harrison, whose taut, insinuating 4 string assaults prowl and intimidate just like the bastard demon offspring of The Stranglers’ karate god J.J. Burnel; the fiercely polyrhythmic octopus of a drummer Tim Pattison, whose gleeful battery and assault seems like BOTH tub-thumpers from any traditional Fall line up throwing one another down the steps; then lastly two wildly contrasting vocalists: Linda Steelyard could also be diminutive, however demure she definitely isn’t – her alternately emotionless, cool, angelic or spiteful retaliatory tones are the proper foil to the unfastened cannon that’s Mick Derrick – a gregarious lanky Glaswegian who merely mouths off at each alternative and blares out regardless of the fuck he likes with out in a lot as any sense of cause or decorum, apart from the truth that he needs to say one thing and say it loud and profoundly and to hell with anyone who stands in his approach!
To keep away from additional confusion, we’ll hereby check with the 2 Micks within the band by their geographical origin: thus Mick Derrick is ‘Scottish Mick’ and Mick Harrison is ‘Geordie Mick’ – in a fairly amusing trendy reprisal of an outdated Dandy cartoon (The Jocks and The Geordies) which I bear in mind fondly from my ’70s childhood!
Linda Steelyard recollects with amusement being recruited into the reside stage line-up by the others when the unique plan for her and a buddy of hers (to each stand stage again, peeling oranges or making out just like the evil twins in The Shining and stare out the viewers while the band cranked out their regular cacophony) was scuppered as her mate didn’t present up. It was by this serendipity – plus the truth that she was at one level an merchandise with Scottish Mick which explains the affiliation – that she finally turned a extra common presence and contribute phrases and spoken/sung vocals that quickly turned the band’s defining signature sound as she and Derrick would commerce insults and even battle on stage, to the bafflement (and generally alarm) of onlookers witnessing this.
Prolapse usually sound like an accident occurring – by no means thoughts ready to occur! The sheer tumult and turmoil that usually ensues when all six of them are on stage locked into their very own infernal battle zone is de facto fairly one thing to behold. It’s a fantastically dysfunctional blitzkrieg like no different: and but, paradoxically, due to the formidable rhythm part of Geordie Mick and Octopus Tim, we now have what’s a very outstanding dichotomy of simultaneous self-discipline and dysfunction. Only a few bands can carry this off with such verve and aplomb with out being derided as desperately novice or consideration searching for for attention-seeking’s sake.
No matter occurs to prevail with Derrick and Steelyard battling it out within the vocal stakes, the ever reliable engine room of the band retains its heads down and continues to knock out a stable fusillade of motorik beats and deft counter rhythms – all of the whereas with the guitars normally sticking to at least one chord (or two in the event that they’re being beneficiant). Relentless, hypnotic, repetition is essential. Even when issues seem like lurching uncontrolled like a crazed merry-go-round spinning free from its moorings (which is usually) the 2 of them someway handle to rein issues in with consummate ability.
Their influences are manifold…they’ll sound like a dozen bands at anyone time, from a dozen eras….however most followers and admirers of the sextet would concede that their closest religious cousins, when it comes to the stress and turbulence that all the time varieties the undercarriage to their music, is The Fall. However add to this combine Krautfock / Neu! grooves (which then lend weight to them being usually regarded as a ‘extra violent Stereolab’, with whom they briefly shared a report label, Lissy’s, in 1995), traditional post-punk bands like Gang of 4 and PiL (the Wobble-esque bass particularly on their later materials), shambling 80’s indie (assume a Sarah information tweepop get together gatecrashed by a drunk), riot grrrl of the 90s (once more, they as soon as performed as a part of a reside showcase invoice that featured figureheads on the time Huggy Bear, however in all equity the band have by no means related themselves with this explicit scene), defiantly weird and angular art-rock, and even the FX-laden ‘shoegaze’ bands of the early 90s….
They’re additionally – for me – a welcome and far wanted antidote to the turgid, retrogressive and depressingly conservative mediocrity of the entire lad-rock / Britpop wave that was making such a large splash on the radio and the charts round 1994-1995. Killing The Bland certainly… They stood defiantly aside from the rabble, a refreshing panacea to the hackneyed neo-patriotism and jingoistic flag-waving wannabes who immediately thought that to be present and up to date you needed to regress by about 40 years as an alternative (and to hell with being unique and modern)….Oh, and in addition to hold about basking within the glow of the shit-eating grin emanating from the sanctimonious Cliff Richard of politics that was Tony Blair in the course of the really cringeworthy ‘Cool Britannia’ fad of 1997.
For Prolapse, conventions and guidelines are there particularly to be damaged. Conform to what others anticipate of them and play the sport? Fall (arf!) over themselves to seem on the hole superficial charade that’s TOTP with their new single? They’d fairly die! However as an alternative of taking part in good, they correctly decide to plough their very own furrow of semi-improvised stream of consciousness psycho-babble relating virtually something that takes one’s fancy (Mick), or nasty, retributory phrases of existential despair, betrayal, struggling, disintegrating relationships and dying (Linda). What’s to not like about that?
Prolapse pictured in 1994.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY:
Crate : Songs For Ella EP (1993)
Pull Via’ Barker EP (1994)
Their first releases had been on Cherry Purple Data and each produced in an deliberately lo-fi method by legendary punk singer and author/broadcaster/raconteur John Robb. Each showcased the band’s attribute knack for creating pummelling slabs of kraut-punk however nonetheless pulling in reverse instructions all on the similar time to the purpose the place the stress simply explodes….. Many tracks intentionally begin at a slower tempo after which rapidly enhance in tempo, making a backdrop for the neurotic squabbling of the 2 vocalists: Steelyard’s musings and recriminations are countered by Scottish Mick’s belligerent rantings – coming throughout fairly like a post-punk Rab C Nesbitt. (Psychotic Now from Crate is as aptly titled because it comes). The very fact the band already sounded possessed of actual fireplace and objective right here boded nicely for his or her subsequent recordings.
Certainly, such was the volatility of the songs right here, with virtually every part tearing alongside at full tilt, I used to be reminded of a (fairly amusing) anecdote John Robb associated to me once I pressed him about what it was like when he produced the band within the studio (Peter Hook’s Suite 16 in Rochdale). He informed me that a few of the members of the band – he didn’t reveal which although – had been usually arguing with each other about every part and something, and sooner or later this even spilled over into real drunken argybargy the place punches had been being thrown! Residing the depth of the music for certain!
Pay attention right here:
Doorstop Rhythmic Bloc EP (1994)
Pointless Walks To Dismal Locations LP (1994)
A taster for his or her first full size LP correct Pointless Walks To Dismal Locations, which adopted on the tail finish of 1994 (see full thirtieth anniversary reappraisal evaluate of the album right here:), the title monitor of the Doorstop Rhythmic Bloc EP is available in two variants: a radio customary edit (not that it ever bought any airplay on the radio besides John Peel who after all had good grace to offer Prolapse the airwave publicity they merited) and the whole model which featured on the mother or father album.
It’s their most instant quantity to date, extra restrained compared to every part on the earlier two EPs, constructed principally round a sustained insistent one chord jam, and it’s virtually a pop tune by their requirements. However simply once you assume it sounds kinda candy with Linda’s repeated ‘get your personal / now to get your personal…’ chorus, Mick barges in together with his regular non sequiturs… ‘ALL ABOARD THE ARK ROYAL!’ – he bellows just like the human foghorn that he’s so proud to be.
Issues revert to kind on the frantically clattering Pile Tent – the drums and bass strike up a hyperactive St Vitus Dance of kinds while Mick and Linda commerce their insults throughout the clangorous wall of noise.
This kind of vocal interaction between the 2 is curiously paying homage to a extra demonic Sugarcubes – the place Björk’s breathless, rapturous exhortations are duly shot down by the unbearable co-‘singer’ Einar Orn belching about not liking fucking lobsters (not copulating lobsters, you perceive, oh, by no means thoughts…). However issues do get very surreal however – that is Prolapse bear in mind, not soddin’ Sleeper – when the phrases proceed as stream of consciousness interjections from each Mick and Linda – the place one makes an attempt to outsmart the opposite with essentially the most indirect and profound couplets they’ll give you completely apropos of nothing.
And therein lies the attraction of this juxtaposition of the 2 contrasting voices: most of what they’re singing about might be improvised anyway. Certainly Mick freely admits to creating up the phrases on the spot, usually when performing reside (their ability at making these impromptu asides may be traced again to the truth that each have additionally had turns performing in theatre previously).
Pay attention right here:
TCR 7″ single (1995)
Backsaturday LP (1995)
When House Invaders Had been Huge 7″ (1995)
Flexed (1996)
It’s price noting that every of Prolapse’s 4 full size albums throughout their preliminary temporary tenure had been launched on a distinct label. Backsaturday got here out on Lissy’s Data, while the only which preceded it, the comparatively sprightly twisted anti-pop of TCR, was on yet one more: Love Practice. A second single launched the identical 12 months comprised an additional new monitor When House Invaders Had been Huge – a Peel Session recording – coupled with a double AA facet of a Gang Of 4 cowl Love Like Anthrax. This was issued on former label Cherry Purple Data.
Second album Backsaturday, nonetheless, is Prolapse at their most experimental and opaquely impenetrable. It defied simple pigeonholing (regardless of clear nods to Nurse With Wound and Faust on a number of of the numbers) and its operating size too fell halfway between that of a full album and a mini-album: simply shy of 38 minutes. Nevertheless, quarter-hour of that complete operating time is taken up with the stupendous opening monitor Flex which is solely astonishing in its sheer execution and sense of dynamism: starting very quietly and slowly with a tentative guitar determine earlier than steadily accelerating in tempo and rising in quantity and depth because the bass and drums and noise kick in : then it’s a dizzying and cruel NEU-rotic rampage stuffed with Steelyard coos and Derrick in full throttle rant mode, which leaves you gasping for breath.
Some tracks are extra cryptic and ambient, while others are unrelentingly visceral and confrontational, dominated by the fiercely belligerent drums and growling bass interaction with Mick and Linda as soon as once more exchanging righteous verbal crossfire – like on the gnarled and disquieting Each Night time I Am Mentally Crucified (7000 Instances). Many of the extra avant-garde tracks clock in at simply two minutes or much less, while two others – Framen Fr. Cesar and the very Steel Field-sounding Zen Nun Deb – are stranger, weightier and extra ponderous, stretching past 6 to eight minutes apiece (hear out for the bizarre disembodied recorder which pipes up on the previous). It’s by far essentially the most uncompromising that Prolapse have ever sounded. Their subsequent few choices although would see some gentle and color – and dare I say even accessibility – emerge from the suffocating and overly claustrophobic noisescapes on present right here, however not earlier than the album’s lead monitor Flex was remixed and issued as a extra (ahem) ‘club-friendly’ 12″ single the next 12 months, titled Flexed.
Pay attention right here:
Killing The Bland EP (1997)
Autocade EP (1997)
The Italian Flag LP (1997)
By this level Prolapse had honed their order-out-of-chaos-and-back-again to such some extent of refinement that, having signed to Radar Data, there was now severe discuss of getting them onto the radio…..unthinkable as it will appear. In any case, solely Peel had the knowledge and good judgement to play their information on his night present, who else would?
The primary of the 2 new singles that may path the following album, Killing The Bland, might not have set heads and hearts fluttering with playlist programmers, however it was however much more instant than something on Backsaturday. It’s a breakneck rampage by regular territory – with flailing drums, terse guitars and even classic burbling synths, with Mick and Linda’s parallel full-throttle monologues current and proper, however there’s even a refrain right here that Mick belts out with one thing akin to ardour that was remarkable in any earlier providing.
The B-sides on this EP are fascinating of their breadth of sonic experimentation, most notable of them being Worry Of Enamel: a queasy, unsettling blizzard of distant bleached out violin drones and disquieting clipped guitar atmosphere which is each menacing and foreboding….while the decidedly odd Snappy Horse sounds virtually like a Mediaeval folks tune performed on what seems like ukulele and mandolin.
Autocade, the second single, was – and stays – the band’s most divisive second. It’s a shameless simple guitar-driven indie pop tune of which there isn’t a equal in the remainder of the Prolapse canon. An entire anomaly (and in Scottish Mick’s eyes, an entire aberration – he loathed it and had nothing to do with it, strolling off stage each time they carried out it reside: to at the present time he regards it as a lame nadir within the band’s whole recorded profession.), it options simply Linda singing and it’s certainly a really – whisper it – business sounding tune which is consciously geared in direction of radio play. Maybe this was the band’s sole concession to that dreaded beast referred to as ‘compromise’. And it paid off – it was their largest ‘indie hit’ and in addition made a fleeting look within the (very) decrease reaches of the right UK singles high 100.
However even right here, as soon as once more the B-sides salvaged [artistic] victory from the jaws of defeat in a fashion of talking. Autocade additionally featured as a radically completely different and defiantly fucked up experimental noise remix (hear under) subtitled Didactic Feral Management, the place, over some muffled and disembodied digital loops, Linda’s candy vocal is unceremoniously gatecrashed by a deafening roar of pure speaker-shredding static virtually as if some digitally processed Godzilla had burst in by the partitions and made mincemeat out of everybody. It recollects the confrontational avant garde manglings of Faust and Stephen Stapleton (Nurse With Wound). Not like Mick although, I believe Autocade is a superb monitor regardless, and it’s good that the band can pull one thing like this off regardless of themselves.
Pay attention right here:
The 13 tracks that comprise their third – most excessive profile – album The Italian Flag, issued in September 1997, are among the many greatest that the band have ever launched. It’s a persistently sturdy set which touches on all the bases they’ve made so distinctively their very own since their debut. It’s their most fully-formed and consummate providing, an eclectic tour de drive, and to at the present time, lots of their most ardent followers cite it as their undisputed masterpiece. Produced by Donald Ross Skinner – greatest identified for his affiliation with Julian Cope – this may increasingly arguably be Prolapse’s most interesting hour.
One other satisfyingly wonderful thing about The Italian Flag is that, in addition to essentially the most stable set of songs on supply right here, there are actually lyrics supplied so you’ll be able to truly MAKE OUT WHAT MICK IS RANTING ABOUT. Much more cleverly, the CD booklet has each respective units of lyrics by Linda and Mick break up throughout separate halves (or on separate internal sleeves within the case of the two x vinyl album) so that they successfully make out like yin and yang….
The opening triumvirate of Slash/Indirect, Deanshanger and Cacophony No. A are flawless and seamless, within the method by which all of them cross-fade into each other, thus reinforcing that fantastic sense of continuity. In actual fact all through the album a variety of the tracks do an analogous factor, which is testimony to how completely the entire thing is sequenced.
Each Mick and Linda are on kind right here: the previous rambling on in his inimitable caustic and unrelenting method smashing the ornaments, kicking over all of the statues and stomping over all of the freshly laid cement with glee as Linda tries to get a phrase in edgeways (‘you’ll by no means perceive me’ she retains singing earlier than Mick shoots her down with extra of his hyperfast unintelligible babble).
In contrast, the next Deanshanger (it’s the title of a village in Northamptonhire for individuals who are curious) has some hilarious Mick diatribes specializing in his utter hatred of the Eighties (‘the music was crap/ the claise was crap/the hair was crap/besides one…’ ‘…Gdansk was crap/Warsaw was crap/Solidarity was crap/ Aw ae it was crap!’). And, as if to ram the purpose dwelling, he promptly pulls off one thing completely sudden and does a neat activate the bagpipes too. Brilliantly off the wall bonkers.
Cacophony No. A – extra accessible by comparability – has an alternating cease/begin/ quiet/loud association with Mick intoning his unusual disjointed story of battle fatigue, however when Linda’s vocals weigh in concurrently the intermittent cathartic launch of guitars – sweetly trilling traces like ‘you make me really feel abused’ and ‘by no means perceive your lies’ – issues even recall to mind Blondie circa Parallel Traces (not a nasty factor on this case).
Elsewhere, I Hate The Clicking Man adopts a masterful deployment of rigidity and launch: alternately increase a way of anticipation by way of a slower tempo earlier than the floodgates open and the monitor accelerates once more. Subsequent up is the second of the album’s killer triptychs: Return Of Sneakers, which is essentially the most paying homage to Stereolab on right here (however then it’s simply this one quantity whose guitar recollects the distinctive two notice riff of the latter’s Jenny Ondioline), adopted by the existential nightmare A Day At Demise Seaside which opens with distorted wind-lashed fairground sounds. Unusually that is the one different monitor on right here (aside from Autocade) which options simply Linda on vocals – Mick is totally absent – however it’s fairly the antithesis of that different pop tune.
This monitor then cross-fades into the mesmerising, trance-like calm of Bruxelles: it’s a prolonged phrase affiliation poem of kinds the place Mick and Linda commerce single random phrases spoken alternately virtually as if in a hypnagogic state…..they repeat the sequence of phrases time and again, however the phrases are inconsistently distributed between them – Linda uttering 21 while Mick solely 14…. so every time Mick hits his 14th phrase, Linda remains to be reeling her fifteenth by which level Mick is again to his first phrase once more – they usually grow to be mismatched each time their respective cycles meet once more. It’s a curious and really very unusual piece, however there’s a real serenity to proceedings right here by means of complete distinction to the tumultuous, usually frenzied, din that has preceded it to date.
Simply because the listener thinks that the album goes to finish on this comparatively low-key notice, the band cost defiantly again into life once more, all weapons blazing, with the extraordinary valedictory barrage of Visa For Violet And Van, after which as that lastly recedes into the space, you get this awkward pregnant silence……just for it to be adopted by the downright weird, repetitious and virtually nightmarish neo-folk chant of Three Picket Heads (which sounds utterly improvised), that serves as a suitably surreal footnote to shut out and spherical off this impressively constant album.
That mentioned, The Italian Flag seems like no one else both. It’s absolutely the pinnacle of greatness and a report which, 27 years on, has nonetheless not misplaced any of its efficiency and wayward brilliance.
Pay attention right here:
Fob.Com 7″ & CD single (1999)
Ghosts Of Lifeless Aeroplanes LP (1999)
Leaping labels once more (this time for Cooking Vinyl), Prolapse situation what seems to to be their final recordings simply because the outdated decade is beginning to fade into the sundown. Preceded by the only Fob.Com, the fourth album continues the extra completed and stronger preparations discovered on predecessor The Italian Flag. A lot of that is all the way down to the producer of the final album, Donald Ross Skinner, now successfully the seventh member of the band, and together with his professional studio prowess, the brand new songs that comprise this album sound far more centered, ditching utterly the unbridled chaos and cacophony of the previous.
Even the lyrics are extra intelligible this time round as a result of you’ll be able to truly make out what each Mick and Linda are singing/saying with no need to resort to the phrases printed (to be truthful solely The Italian Flag ever gave us the luxurious of a written perception into precisely what was sung/ranted/shouted/yelled on the album). However in the event you assume this implies Prolapse have grow to be extra accessible on this report, then assume once more. Ghosts Of Lifeless Aeroplanes is an altogether way more indirect and cryptic beast.
It’s not instant on first hear – there aren’t any accessible songs (or something remotely approaching a pop monitor) on right here: as an alternative there’s a uniformity of temper and execution on a lot of the songs right here, accentuated by the comparatively clear and dry manufacturing that pervades all through. The extra typical sounding and uptempo Fob.Com clearly comes closest, provided that it was the only single in any case. However even right here the manufacturing tips renders Linda’s vocal fragmented prefer it’s being sung by a Leslie speaker and the occasional jagged bursts of sheet metallic guitars do their utmost greatest to overpower every part else.
The fairly creepy opener Essence Of Cessna is insidious in its masterful deployment of understated however eerie atmospherics (backwards guitars and alien swooping noises) and Linda’s hushed, childlike narrative – backed by her personal disembodied cooing – offsetting Mick’s equally restrained brogue recounting his personal. As ever, one voice sits on the left channel and the opposite on the suitable…..however they seem to have swapped locations this time. In the meantime, the bass and drums are insistent – the previous as soon as once more greater than somewhat Wobble-esque circa Steel Field.
Linda’s reflective musings present some kind of respite, sonically talking, on the calmer and extra downtempo Adiabatic (solely augmented with Mick’s rancorous outbursts each time the becalmed sections happen), however Mick then takes full centre stage for Cylinders V12 Beats Cylinders 8, proffering his regular misanthropic put-downs at an unseen and unidentified adversary whom he repeatedly refers to as ‘a septic tank of a person’. Linda is solely content material to ahhh wordless backing harmonies as he continues his venomous diatribe for a lot of the following 5 minutes or so.
The deep PiL bass sounds resurface on the juddering, throbbing subterranean pulse of After After – which buzzes and drills its approach into your cranial synapses with Linda’s massively amplified whispers accompanied by all method of disparate and otherworldy space-craft noises creating a way of unease, earlier than a return to the hyper-frenetic super-fast punk rampage of outdated Prolapse (for one tune solely) in Authorities of Spain – which is solely one other showcase for Mick to spew his more and more hysterical invective apropos of nothing, saving his most demented and deranged screaming to declare ‘The Authorities of Spain is all evil!’ – his rising pitch veering utterly off the dimensions, leaving hardly any house for Linda to get even her phrases in edgeways.
However then perhaps that’s the complete level of their compulsively fascinating double act in a nutshell. And that’s additionally the entire idiosyncratic attraction of the fairly singularly distinctive entity that was Prolapse.
Pay attention right here:
After the deluge got here the drought.
Prolapse merely fizzled out (with no nice dramas, no acrimony) and quietly referred to as it a day quickly after this album and went their separate methods taking on number of completely different tasks. Scottish Mick went again to being an archaeology researcher however shifting to Oslo, Norway, while one of many guitarists (Pat) relocated to Denmark and pursued just about the identical. One other (David) headed Stateside to proceed educating in an artwork college, Linda took up a full time journalism profession with the Leicester Mercury newspaper, while the others Octopus Tim and Geordie Mick continued with taking part in music in different incarnations and guises.
However, regardless of being all separated and having day jobs, lots of the former Prolapse members nonetheless harboured that ever-irrepressible itch to proceed making sporadic recordings and collaborate with different musicians. Some even reunited beneath new names: Mick Harrison and Linda Steelyard briefly connected beneath a mission referred to as Ears Go Fff! Mick Derrick and Pat Marsden, regardless of each being in their very own Scandinavian enclaves, someway created new noises beneath the title Cha Cha 2000**. Busiest of all was drummer Tim Pattison: he’d be holding the fort on the stool and elsewhere with varied esoteric names: MJ Hibbert & The Validators, The Fabians (visitor solely), Ludd Gang, The Council, and extra. The one one lacking musically in motion was Dave Jeffreys.
**Taking their title after a reside album by a late-80s mission that includes Klaus Dinger from Neu! (now curiously referred to as La! Neu?), Cha Cha 2000 didn’t truly report a lot, however their kooky and half-reverential / half-ironic ACOUSTIC one-off cowl model of Autobahn by Kraftwerk was fairly impressed: it was launched to nice acclaim and enthusiastically reviewed by the music weeklies, even making the indie chart high 20 …. and but it was all augmented and assisted by MJ Hibbert of all individuals.
Recent stirrings…
For greater than 15 years, it appeared that the probability of this unstable union of six fairly distinct personalities reassembling once more for any additional musical endeavours touched on negligible. Then out of the blue in 2015 they bought a name… from Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai….to play with them because the latter had been doing a number of reveals to mark their very own twentieth anniversary. Braithwaite was an enormous fan of Prolapse’s loopy, compulsively cacophonous racket and was all too desperate to see the band regroup even when only for a few reveals.
Unusually sufficient, the re-grouped Prolapse had little bother easing themselves again into a number of reside performances and shortly it was sufficient to think about perhaps recording some new noises at a later juncture. However not earlier than they determined to embark on a brief ‘reunion’ tour of some UK venues….one in all which was the legendary Manchester Roadhouse (the place I final noticed them in 1997/1998 – and the venue which, together with the equally sadly missed Boardwalk throughout city, I ended up catching by far essentially the most reside gigs between them – one thing like 67 in complete – in the course of the interval from 1988 to 2015).
Nevertheless, by this level I used to be hardly on social media as such (I nonetheless detest it to at the present time actually) and I used to be completely disconsolate to find that that they had already performed their low-key Manchester date there on the identical night time I used to be truly within the metropolis, having simply returned from internet hosting an acoustic music occasion happening ON A TRAIN from Glossop Labour Membership again to Manchester Piccadilly (these had been month-to-month folks trains which I helped run and compere for 15 years between 2005 and 2020). If I had identified Prolapse had been taking part in I’d have made a straight beeline to the venue – coronary heart in mouth and drooling deliriously in anticipation – with out hesitation. And the worst factor was: regardless of being again in Manchester round 10.15pm that very same night time, and discover myself standing lower than 200 metres from the hallowed venue’s door, I as an alternative caught the bus again dwelling southwards down the A6 to Stockport.
Aaaaghhh, I suppose that’s the kind of canny shit and unhealthy timing you need to put up with once you’re a rabid Prolapse fan, sigh…..
Revisit Prolapse reside at their 2015 Manchester Roadhouse gig in full right here (thank fuck for YouTube, once more!):
Additional future exercise
Prolapse continued to sporadically get again collectively for additional occasional reside escapades for the following few years and even after the dual debacle that was the Covid Pandemic and the Brexit Breakdown (woeful, soul destroying shit fests each of them), curiosity within the band amongst their devoted following was nonetheless buoyant. Two welcome releases each containing beforehand unavailable Peel Classes had been issued in stunning double 7-inch vinyl units by Valuable Recordings (so fascinating that even yours really hasn’t managed to get copies of both because of their supreme shortage, harrumph!), and some extra reside gigs had been loved in 2022.
There may be nonetheless discuss of recent Prolapse materials as soon as the band are in a position to reassemble in a studio to see how issues transpire….certainly two new songs had been already premiered at a number of additional reside gigs which happened in late September this 12 months, to all those that had been fortunate sufficient to witness them (that may evidently not be me then) – together with the humungous, gushing evaluate of their Con Membership, Lewes date, the report of which may be discovered right here.
All of us are actually a fuck of lots older, wiser and greyer… and perhaps a bit extra cynical, world-weary, punch-drunk and saggier across the edges too, however the gloriously magnificent discordant racket that Prolapse have been blessing us with ever since 1994 will all the time be one thing that defies and transcends not simply altering fads and developments, however, heck, gravity too. One of the crucial unimaginable and fascinating bands ever for my part, reside and on report – they are surely distinctive, and that’s why my adoration for them won’t ever die!
Prolapse can be discovered on bandcamp. What the fuck are you ready for? Search, click on and DEVOUR!
all phrases by Martin Grey
different articles and opinions may be discovered right here:
Acknowledgements:
Group footage taken from Wikipedia’s entry on the band.
A particular shout to the Brighton and HoveNews for the unbelievable and pleasant write up of Prolapse’s current present in Lewes – god I want I may have been there!
And naturally invaluable gratitude to You Tubers missbarbell and Norm Waz who so graciously shared their footage of the 2015 Manchester Roadhouse gig I so desperately wished that I used to be at that fateful Thursday night time!
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