My friend Andy described Smell & Quim as the industrial Chas & Dave. I very much like the idea of Smell & Quim as the industrial Chas & Dave but I suspect Andy was confusing thematic tangents with the presence of an ampersand in the name of the band. We've all done it.
Maybe they're more like Second Annual Report dubbed onto VHS footage of the Kenny Everett Video Show; or maybe I'm just wasting everyone's time with such comparisons.
For the sake of argument let's agree that Smell & Quim were what happened when power electronics developed a long overdue sense of humour, given that The English Method predated William Bennett's transformation into a sort of sadist Bruce Forsyth by two years; or at least let's agree that I've just written that. Ignoring the notion that there was ever anything genuinely tittersome about Porridge wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Charles Manson's todger - the joke being that no-one knows it's Charles Manson's todger tee hee playful yet subversive blah blah blah - I suppose it was inevitable given the inherent absurdity of a man stomping around a stage screaming about how he's going to do you up the wrong 'un.
The thing is that with a lot of these noisy types, especially those from the pornier end of the spectrum, whilst grimacing like you actually mean it may well render the work all the more terrifying, it all begins to look a bit art gallery after a while, particularly since the mainstream Turner Prize winning art world went all Moors murderers and elephant poo. With this in mind, Smell & Quim came across as altogether more visceral when I first heard them and was still in the throes of my initial what the fuck? reaction - a thoroughly disgusting journey into the actual tastes and smells, the cheesy and the yeasty of their routinely appalling subject matter in contrast to the sanitised airbrushed pubes of their contemporaries; and never mind all this posing around as some faceless authoritarian organisation with a scary name, Smell & Quim always knew they were a pop band. They even dressed as Elvis a couple of times. That's ennatainment!
I always thought Your Enemy's Balls was supposed to be some kind of greatest hits given that the excellent Bukowski-sampling Shaft of a Goad / Lurve was on The English Method, but I could be wrong. In any case, it's a thoroughly convincing place to start with this lot, should you feel so inclined and seeing as they're still cheap over on Discogs; and Turned Over to Sod in particular demonstrates why they are the one noise band you simply must have in your collection, as Tony Blackburn might put it - twenty-two minutes of looped noise with the horrifying vocal performed by a speak and spell machine. You may well think what the hell is this shit?, but the effect is peculiar once it draws to an end, as though you're left beached on a slightly different and certainly weirder universe than when you first hit play. So even if you really must regard Smell & Quim as a comedy turn - the sort of thing which makes the Residents sound like a lounge act covering the Steve Miller Band - there is nevertheless a solemn and unsettling power to what they do; and in terms of what you get for your noise dollar, they really do make most of the competition sound like po-faced wankers. Your Enemy's Balls also includes a track called Incontinence Pants Are Go, if that helps.
No comments:
Post a Comment