John Peel, Observer, Sunday 19 July, 1987
‘AND a half a lager for me, please,’ I whispered. ‘Are you sure?’ asked the barman, plainly worried. This was the Metropole, Sunbridge Road, Bradford, serious pints territory where members of the long-established 1 in 12 Club were gathered in an upper room to hear, amongst other bands, Nottingham’s Heresy.
Fifteen years ago I won myself a sort of immortality through the inclusion in Pseud’s Corner of my suggestion that the music of Pink Floyd was the sound of dying galaxies. Thoughts on Siouxsie and the Banshees were similarly honoured a decade later and last year I made the Corner for a third time by telling that a three-second-long track by the American band JFA was amongst my most treasured possessions. Since then the members of JFA have been exposed as time wasters by the Descendents whose song ‘All’ is one second long, and by Britain’s very own Napalm Death with a track on their debut LP, on Earache Records, which, it is claimed, is yet shorter.
Earache Records is run, from his Nottingham bedroom, by Digby Pearson, known as Dig. Dig was at the Metropole on Thursday to see Heresy, also on Earache, go about their business. Heresy have triggered such praise as ‘mind numbing thrash barrage,’ ‘rapid chaos gone beserk’ and ‘a wanton obliterative trip’ from American admirers, and their current LP, which they share with Concrete Sox, has sold, according to Dig, some 3,000 copies.
1 in 12 Club members showed all the signs of a culture in transition. T-shirts endorsed not only such ferocious bands as Big Black, Suicidal Tendencies and Stark Raving Mad but also rap ensembles Run-DMC. Baseball caps and baggy shorts were in evidence and haircuts ranged from decaying, spikey confections of the type admired by postcard manufacturers to state-of-the-art styles apparently wrought by chainsaw.
Heresy followed the Swedish band Filthy Christians on to the small stage. The Christians had played a set of staccato, rampaging songs with lyrics rendered in a language substantially beyond identification, but their work seemed seriously dream-like when set alongside the uproar created by Heresy.
Although some of Heresy’s more extended works allow the four musicians to stray into what could be misread as demonstrations of squalid musicianship, they are at their best playing dislocated stuff at extreme speed. Mitch, Heresy’s guitarist, studied his instrument with the air of a man bent upon craftsmanship, in marked contrast with bassist Kalv and John the singer, both of whom performed with abandon, the latter inspired in his presentation by some of the less inhibited film roles of Boris Karloff. In front of the band, celebrants hurled themselves about with a disconcerting lack of concern for personal safety, clambering on to the stage the better to launch themselves through the air and on to their peers.
Billy Joel enthusiasts who wrote to object to my remarks last Sunday would, I suspect, have imagined the Metropole to be some ante-chamber to hell. I preferred it considerably.