Prick Decay and Neil Campbell – rate of CHB is in (UP55)

From that lowercase title, to the smushed sounds on this brief tape we are in uncharted and choppy waters.

Two underground heavyweights; the multi-limbed Neil Campbell machine and Prick Decay’s Dora/Dylan dichotomy are our plucky pilots, our wise navigators.  But make no mistake; you’ve got to pack a lunch before you head out on your canoe with this tape screwed into your lugs.  It’s a wet and wild one.

Side one is the thirteen minute wonk-piece, ‘Am Closing in on Skint’, an odd-leg tape montage of clicks and cunts.  Spluttering radio broadcasts shimmer through the grainy underground fuxx, massed choirs and North African call-and-response shudders out of nowhere to disappear into a greasy hole. 

It’s like Dylan, Lisa and Neil have hijacked Regan MacNeil’s’s tape recorder and are goofing over the contents, splicing and dicing as they notice the room starting to get chilly. 

At the mid-point the remnants of a violin-squeal jam are thrust through the milky ringer until all drips with filthy cream.   An uncontrollable judder morphs into a squeaky wheel (the birth of a signature Blood Stereo sound perhaps?) and nonsense speech, slippery without the framing intent flops like a teenager.   The last few minutes ramp up the gurning vox and ffw scree like R2D2 watching old Mr Bojangles tapping and tipping his glass-soled shoes over a hot tin roof.

What might seem casual at first, sounds thrown willy-nilly.  Soon becomes a sonic diary, each inky entry a new obsession for the voracious listener.  It’s about as far from ‘academic’ tape music as you can get, and yet, it kicks down the doors for pure sound in a way that would make Luc Ferrari stand up and shout ‘Oui!’

Side two presents itself as ‘Shirts and Jerks’.  We’ve all been there eh?  I would argue that this is a study in small detailed sounds; overarchingly brittle and delicate but with a sharp serrated edge. 

You want examples?  A tiny plastic horn drones over a dripping caldron, skeleton finger clicks, musical box mechanisms unravel into shiny scarab beetles, spoken-word blowhards slowed via magic gravy, clonked metallic bones, throat tickles and nose sniffs amplified though a rubber tube, swotty pocket calculators rattled for the secret tones they hold inside, distant ritual drums startle the heather then get folded round the black capstans, that dream I had where noggin turned into harry pussy, antique threshing machine (idles),fag  smoke turning into golden glitter, girls rule at the back of the bus, radio exorcism, blutton jags, loose cables on a bridge, the nervous chatter as a party comes to an awkward and unplanned stop.

Yeah.  That’s about it.  It’s deeply fucked man.

This week I’ve badgered Neil and Dylan Nyoukis (one half of Prick Decay) into spilling the beans on this mysterious mucky spooling.

Hi Dylan.  First things first, what does the tape title mean?  It’s pretty cryptic…’rate of CHB is in’.

Well, this I actually remember. I guess Neil would be writing letters to us using scrap paper from his job at the time, which was something to do with coding or something, connected to the Social?  You would have to ask him, my head was in a perpetual cloud. But anyhow ‘rate of CHB is in’ was one of the phrases that stood out from all the print-out crap on the back of Neil’s scrawl.  And when I say scrawl I mean SCRAWL. I mean the guys sharp as a tack and dresses like one suave swinger but his writing is a joke. I reckon CHB = Child Benefit but again Neil could set you straight on that.

Neil and Dylan cementing relations (photo courtesy of Dylan Nyoukis)

Neil thinks he sent you loads of material for this tape and you did all the splicing and dicing?  Is that right or were you adding your own material too?

Yeah I reckon I mixed all the mess together but we would also be including our own sounds in there also.  I can hear Gar Funk nattering away in some parts. I don’t think I ever just did a release that was me mixing other people source; I always have to add to the mud sound. As much as I can enjoy playing in a room together with people my preferred method of collaboration has always been collaborating from a far and working with source materials that someone has sent me. Not quite sure why. Maybe I enjoy how doing things in solitude allows you to disappear down different avenues.

It’s not a control thing though as I am more than happy to send out source material and have someone else add to it and have final mix.  That is always exciting to hear. It is still my preferred method of working, even when I work with Karen and she lives in the same house!

Myself and Neil have just finished a CD for Krim Kram that was done the same way. There is a track from the early 2000s that I mixed using his source and there is a track from last year where Neil added to my gumpf and mixed it down.

There’s loads of different ‘sound zones’ in here.  What sounds like improv jams, street recordings, shortwave radio.  Did you have a walkman on you all the time and get into the habit of recording stuff that sounded interesting? 

Oh yeah, man.  You know the score. I was always with a Walkman in the 90s. Always. I mean on this tape listening back I can hear myself and Gar Funk. He would have been 7.  I remember that afternoon; it was me and him running around our wee village with my walkman and just bashing stuff with sticks, squelching about in mud, talking crap… SUPER KICKS!!!

These days I always have my Tascam DR05 with me and some binaural headphone/mics. Brighton has a lot of ‘wildlife’ shall we say. I just wish all the cars would git tae fuck.

I hear some recordings on this tape that I am guessing are North African.  Around this time hearing non-western music seemed to get a bit easier and I know acted as inspiration for loads of folk.  Even if it didn’t come out directly in the music it seemed to free people up to break out of western sound structures in a way punk could never do.  Was that a thing for you?  Or am I just being a Smart Alec? 

No I can see that, man. Like you say just experiencing anything that was out of the staid European tradition was fresh yum. I mean punk was just pub rock to my ears. I mean how many so called noise-heads probably had a phase of having their heads turned by some mighty Indian Raga not to mention the ferocity & joy of Free Jazz?  Our white asses got taught.

In my review I pick up on a spinning bicycle wheel sound.  This is something I have heard you return to again and again over the years, even up to Blood Stereo.  Or am I just imagining it – seeing shadows when there is really nothing there?  And if I am imagining it do you have a fave sound (or sound family) you return to over and over?

Nah, I think you are right, there has been a lot of spinning wheels in the recordings over the years. Don’t ask me why. These days I have this hand crank in the living room that I like to use. Not necessarily for recordings, it’s just nice and soothing to crank the fucker. I have always been adverse to beats in my work, maybe the spinning wheel/crank is to compensate for that. It’s kinda like a loop I suppose, and loops just make my mind burble.

Kurt Schwitters, Das Sekretariat 1919 (photo Creating in Collage 1967)

Neil mentions your ‘non-musician’ status and I know you have spoken about that too; no interest in technique – just the sound that comes out at the end.  If that was the case how did the humble Walkman open up your ‘sound-mind’?

I dunno man. The Walkman was just a cheap and fast way to collect source material. Then you get into that whole Basil Kirchin thing of finding the joy of opening out sounds within sounds just by, say for example, slowing the tape down.

Do you still feel the same way now?  What’s your take on technique?  Even if it’s a totally gonzo technique?  And if this seems a bit loaded or cryptic it’s because I’m thinking about this issue a lot right now.  Here’s an example – many folk would say an artist we both know and love, Luke Poot, (but it could be any number of NAU folk) doesn’t play ‘music’ in any traditional way but I know he thinks things through deeply and goes through a series of decisions in his musical routines so it comes out exactly the way he wants it to.  To me…that’s a technique, a brilliant and unique technique of his own. 

Poot is a showman of the highest calibre. Give that man a stipend for life! I mean none of us are doing this to make a proper living.  If you are lucky you can scrape by with a side-hustle here or there but ultimately you are doing it because you are driven to do it.  But you know what? Even the most obscure type of music and art is bringing joy to other people, even if it’s just thirty people who buy a tape or CDr, or even five people at a show.

You will get cunts that just laugh that off because you are not shifting thousands of ‘units’ or whatever crap but those people can spin. Give thanks and spread the love, baby.

Natalie d’Arbeloff, reverse printing and collage example (photo Creating in Collage 1967)

And on that rallying cry I go back through my notes to find out what Neil has to think about this tape.  As regular readers will know I bent Neil’s ears back in 2023 over a few pints to talk about his Union Pole days.  I’ll let Neil pick up the story here…

What can you tell me about this tape you did with Prick Decay?

I think I enjoyed this tape the most when I listened back.  I can’t really unpick who was doing what but I know I sent a set of un-formed, odd bits of tape and they stitched it all together so the sounds could be me and they did the editing but I really don’t know.

I think lots of my other stuff on Union Pole is quite immediate but this one is really mysterious.

Talking of mystery, were you involved in Guidelines for the Basement Non-Fidel album?

No. I knew them at that time but wasn’t on that album.  But I did a re-mix on the double CD reissue that was released when there was a resurgence of tape stuff. 

When I first started in the 80’s tape labels were either from a punk, industrial or power electronics perspective and none of them sat happily with me.  But when all this stuff came out in the mid-90s I felt much more affinity with these weird kids who didn’t want to be transgressive for the sake of it, labels like Chocolate Monk and OSKA and Fisheye Distribution held them all together.  At the time it was really liberating and good. 

We talk a little bit about the importance of Fisheye Distribution and the fact Neil bumped into Fisheye boss, Paul Wild, for the first time in 25 years at the recent Dead C residency in Café OTO.  Thanks to this encounter I was able to track down Paul and interview him in a bonus post back in January.

You can’t overstate how important Paul was. He was stocking amazing records from America that you couldn’t get from anywhere else. He always paid on time for my distro stuff or you could trade records which I often did. 

For me Paul’s write ups of the records were really important.  You couldn’t hear this stuff on John Peel and getting my hands on Bananafish was difficult so having someone describe the music really helped me choose how to spend the little money I had.

Yeah, he was a great passionate writer.  When I saw him it reminded me of the time me and Stewart recorded an album on New Year’s day 1996 in North London with Paul.  We were all really hung over.  I think Andrew from ‘I’m Being Good’ and the people from Scaredycat were there too.  They recorded it really nicely to 4-track, all acoustic instruments. I think Paul was going to put it out but not sure if it happened. Maybe it was rubbish! (laughs)

More drinks arrive and we pick back up our conversation on the genius of The Dead C.

So seeing Dead C recently was the first time I’d been to OTO as a punter, I’ve played a bunch of times.  I have so much love for the Dead C’s music.  They are beyond self-parody and really moving in their weird dynamic.  There was a lot of love in the room on the night I was there.  Dylan and Karen were there that night too.

We talk a little about DIY scenes in Leeds and Newcastle (my home city) and mutual friends.

We played in Newcastle a lot in the early Vibracathedral Orchestra days.  I remember playing upstairs in the Chillingham Arms, Ben and Has (Editors note: Ben, Has and Sarah were the mighty Jazzfinger) put us on and there was maybe 10 people there.

I’m sure I saw you in Newcastle playing with Sunburned Hand of the Man.   VCO were so intense and the place was so hot I didn’t even stop to see Sunburned play, after the final notes of your set drifted out the window, I was done, totally sated.  I couldn’t take any more sound so I left.

(Laughs) We played with ‘Sunburned’ in Newcastle?  I can’t even remember it. 

When I was first living in Leeds I really lucked-in to the pre-emo scene.  I never dug the music but the people were great and ‘Bilge Pump’ always gave us gigs.  No one was interested in ‘making it’ they just wanted to play.  I moved to Headingly and the first gig I went to was in the Royal Park and a band called ‘Mask’, featuring Joe from ‘Bilge Pump’, who were playing this huge wall of noise.  And there was a big poster outside my house advertising a gig for ‘Dead Punk’ and ‘Headless Piss’ for one pound. I knew this was the place for me! 

Grace Hartigan, Pure Fury 1965 (photo Creating in Collage 1967)

You had the Termite Club too

We’d played there as A Band so I used to pop in and I ended up seeing my old friend Mike Dando who I’d known in the 80s as Con-Dom.  We started going to gigs together and volunteering our services.

I wanted to ask you about your solo tape on Chocolate Monk, ‘Executive Silk Lips’ from 1994.  That was the first thing of yours that I heard.

(huge laugh) I had nothing to do with the artwork!  Dylan had this concept of ‘broken music’. I can’t remember what it sounded like but I knew I used things that weren’t working. I don’t think I have a copy of that one.

I sent off for that and the Cunt Eats Cock tape at the same time and was terrified my mum would intercept the package when it arrived!

Was Cunt Eats Cock Lisa? 

Yeah.  It’s a pure noise tape but you can hear it’s informed by hardcore bands.  Lisa’s yelping vocals are so raw, like Adris from Harry Pussy.

I can imagine.  What I loved about Prick Decay was how fucking un-musical they were. They just didn’t give a shit.  I’ve described myself as a non-musician, but I’m kinda not, I’m just a very rudimentary musician.  Whereas they just didn’t give a fuck. It was so liberating (laughs).

There’s a joy to the noise!

You can run away with Prick Decay and Neil Campbell here on the $1 ticket

https://unionpoletapes.bandcamp.com/album/rate-of-chb-is-in-up55

OR…you can download the whole damn Union Pole discography of 76 tapes for $5 here.   Don’t be cheap!

It won’t surprise you to learn that I often make mistakes!  Please leave a comment below if you spot a mistake in the blog or have a tale to tell to drive this Union Pole story forward.  Everyone is invited on this ride.