TRAUMA/DRAMA EAST/SOUTH LONDON 1985 – 2013.

FRAGILE AND PRECARIOUS AND DON’T KNOW HOW TO ARTICULATE THE DISGUST AND WONDER…

Chance manifests in the shape of a black swan choked on dirty cash…

Summer 2012, London: the hyperreal cityscape seems permanently lodged in a fresco forged from David Peace’s worst nightmares. Anxiously compelled by their own relentlessly restless daemon Band of Holy Joy ditch the streets and hit the studio to sculpt a trash electronic sequel to their lost never-released 1985 cassette City of Tales. Brechtian cabaret is displaced by cheap Casio shamanism, beat machine, string screech, found sound, an extended scream – abject fury and world-weary vulnerability spun from endless late-night orbitals, riding the 149, their own strung-out history never once quelling a sense of murky misadventure. Johny Brown, Chris Brierly, James Stephen Finn, Jon Clayton, Inga Tillere. Ladies and Gentlemen we present: Band of Holy Joy - City of Tales (Volume 2).

Things get weird. Long departed original Holy Joy member, film-maker Brett Turnbull clatters fevered email: a discovery… a cassette. From way back. It’s a near won thing – a crack salvage job (tape baked in the oven rendering the sound into deformed bad-acid Hawkwind, tampons applied to the playback heads hand- held in place to reverse the process over one long night. Rider: REVOX, bottle of whiskey and some isopropyl alcohol – a deep labour of love to keep the speed from wavering). Songs saved, so what have we here?

Summer 1985, London: Brett, Big John, Martine, Max Davis and Johny Brown. Original JUNK shop mode and the darkest dark, Holy Joy holed-up in a New Cross squat puking soundscape, lost voices, cheap organs, slithering basslines, stuttering drum machines: pure drama and trauma a go-go. The similarities startling, the differences intoxicating. The 1985 model enacts a younger chemically fuelled pre drug-damaged séance – disturbing elements of psychotic glee lashing out within the fury, the kind that comes when you open the portal for the first time – when there’s unspoken hope behind the exorcism. The youngest member of the band, James Stephen Finn steps in to curate and a path is trodden to Brixton to master. What the fuck?! How can this be? Ladies and Gentlemen we present… Band of Holy Joy - City of Tales (Volume 1).

We get excited. We think cassette double pack. 100 only. Inga Tillere visualises stark fetish - hand prints booklets out of recycled 20 quid notes, ties up booklet-postcard bundles with the original tape. Business cards are made. Tales nailed.

2 volumes of disgust of bile of tenderness of lives lived, fucked over, redeemed, eternally lost . 3 decades of unflinching vision - Accumulated Accounts of the financial jackboot making miseries of mavericks. The song remains the same whilst Capital Gains.

Time to balance the books redress history really LOOK at the food at the end of that fork see the Naked Lunch.