Come - Rampton (1979)

I suspect the increasing ubiquity and multiplication of noise artists may have somewhat reduced the impact of the form in certain respects. My first encounter with Whitehouse, for example, was in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine contemporary with the release of Psychopathia Sexualis - so about 1982, I guess. The first thing which struck me as weird was that I'd never heard of this band and yet they seemed to have quite a following. They sounded absolutely terrifying, the music papers refused to write about them, and Rough Trade wouldn't stock their records, and so it was inevitable that I should at least wonder. Forty years later and I'm still not sure what I think about Whitehouse - or even that what I think about Whitehouse really matters - but Come seemed initially promising.

Come was William Bennett's first attempt to scare the living shit out of the public following his exit from Essential Logic, and might therefore be regarded as a formative version of Whitehouse. I thought Come Sunday 2 on the Für Ilse Koch compilation album was terrific, a vertiginously flanged swirl of understated menace reminding me very much of Gristle's live material, so I bought the 7" - effectively the first version of Come Sunday - and discovered the compilation track to be the single fed through a powerful effects pedal. Without the benefit of the aforementioned powerful effects pedal, it was kind of clean, very minimal, and just sounded a bit odd. I still probably would have given Rampton a shot, but Come Organisation vinyl was selling out within weeks of release by that point; and I didn't have much faith in the cassette versions, having originally purchased the tape of Für Ilse Koch and listened to William Bennett pissing about in one channel for the duration, presumably running off the copies on his home stereo little realising he still had one microphone plugged in - watching a bit of telly, making a cup of tea, playing guitar and so on. It was amusing but I traded it in for the vinyl.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's Rampton once again, nicely remastered and pressed, the cover printed rather than photocopied, and me not having to pay four hundred dollars for a copy. I wasn't massively impressed with the Come Sunday 7" but was assured of it being the weakest track on what is an otherwise decent record, and so curiosity caught up with me; and the whole is actually stranger than I expected, possibly not so much for what it does, as for what I expected it to do, which it doesn't. Lest we should have forgotten, William Bennett is a pretty decent guitarist, and Rampton is mostly angular guitar riffage with Daniel Miller playing a bass synth and someone pounding out a pseudo-tribal rhythm on a couple of floor toms. Vocals are way down in the mix and tend to be vocalisations rather than singing. The whole is surprisingly minimal and lacking in effects, excepting a light slapback echo on the vocal, and somehow - and I'm assuming here that it's on purpose - this is its power. This unsettling quality is the fledgling form of all that feedback and implied violence because, no matter how many thousands of industrial music rarities you may have accumulated over the past few centuries, the initial most logical reaction to this record is holy shit, what the fuck am I listening to?

Bennett has cited Yoko Ono's Don't Worry, Kyoko as a significant influence on Rampton, which I can definitely see although this is, frankly, a much better record. The vocals, perhaps not on purpose, are vaguely ridiculous upon close inspection, mostly the sort of lines we used to come out with in the playground when impersonating the mentally ill, and yet somehow this makes the record additionally disturbing when combined with those jagged shards of guitar - regarding which, it's easy to hear why he was asked to join Siouxsie & the Banshees as replacement for John McKay.

Rampton doesn't quite stick its fingers down your throat as did Whitehouse, but there's a powerful sense of something wrong on this record, so much so as to overcome what initially seem like limitations, and even Come Sunday sounds better in the context of the whole. The only wobble, at least for me, comes with the use of tracks from side two of the BBC's Sound Effects volume thirteen - Death & Horror, an assortment of screams seguing into heavy breathing, then more screams as Rampton comes to a close. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone I knew in the DIY tape scene of the time had at least one track featuring those same screams, and naturally I'd done it myself, so hearing that the Master of the Overviolence also went there, admittedly a year or so before the rest of us arseholes, is akin to discovering that Lemmy briefly presented Blue Peter back in the sixties.

Never mind. I'm very glad to have heard this regardless, and should Susan Lawly see fit to stick out either In Country or I'm Jack, I'm certainly curious.