Strawberry Switchblade
It’s one of our vaunted Pick Five episodes this week, with Alex and Bruce each asking “How’d this get here?” That is to say, they’re both selecting some artists whose inclusion within the worlds of darker alternatives might be puzzling to outsiders, or even themselves, at least initially All that plus a little bit of the “what are your first memories of Band X?” game so often featured on Bombers. As always, you can rate and subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or download directly or listen through the widget down below.
It was funny hearing the mention of Riki because I saw her touring with SRSQ and would say SRSQ is an even better example. If I’d brought a friend to see her live who was unfamiliar with g/i nuances, pretty sure they’d have thought she was in admittedly v good kind of 90s alt post-grunge place rather than anyway g/i related. Which is fine, who cares about gatekeeping? Well except for that time when I saw Juno Reactor headlining one night of a g/i fest some years ago, and spent most of the set thinking “really? REALLY?”.
Interesting to think about this in a few years time, and whether some of the artists currently moving in a more pop or hyperpop-influenced direction after previously being much more scene-y would kind of fit into this category then. Like if you heard those artists’ most recent work and weren’t previously familiar, would you be wondering why it was getting play if you were a gatekeeping type? They (look, it’s Zanias and Kanga I’m thinking about, clearly) are making awesome music but it doesn’t sound like a lot of the other stuff clubs play, so maybe people will have that experience with them in a few years
Well, on TSOL, I cant’ find it but I swear that Dianah Cancer went on to talk about how they were a goth/death rock band in the book Phantoms and went on to describe how they went through the hardcore-death rock-hair band – just bad progression. Many bands from this time period seemed to do that. Had a few really good albums and then produced really horrible stuff later which is all we could find in the used records stores in the 80’s & 90’s.
As for the Damned, they also talked about how Dave Vanian was the first guy doing classic white face goth make up. (pg 397) That and when Phantasmagoria came out, I was all about whatever it was way before I had heard of any goth bands besides Bauhaus and Siouxsie. It would still be five or six years before I would run across Christian Death.
Another one for the show would probably be Foetus. Like Current 93 or Pink Dots, it was just a matter of ‘they were already here when we got here’ in the collection of bands as they turned from “alt rock” genre to “Industrial”. I did sea Meat Beat open for Einstruzenden Neubauten in Dallas however (with the misforturne of having to sit through Consolidated again).