Leatherface mush rapidshare

But yeah, Leatherface never get the recognition. Such a shame, they're a killer band! Album Rating: 5. How can you not love this record! The analogy of Stubbs's singing being like Lemmy chewing glass and gargling acid is pure genius and accurate! Dead Industrial Atmosphere on volume 11 is dynamite. Good review by the way. Leatherface Mush 4. Review Summary: Oft-ignored British punk greats' magnum opus. Rank: 12 for Often a band is so much more than the sum of its constituent parts.

Some intangible element elevates the music they produce from mediocrity to something special. Leatherface is characterised by this strange phenomenon. They are one of those bands that have that certain something that separates them from the herd, that makes them a band you cherish. And with Mush , we witness the most striking articulation of this curious secret ingredient.

That isn't to say that there's nothing noteworthy about the individual building blocks of Leatherface's music. In the early nineties, no English punk band sounded remotely like them; their guitar work on Mush had far more in common with Bad Religion than with any of their compatriots still flying the flag of punk's first wave. On the album, melody is put above attitude and aggression; lyrics tend to look inwards, or at least at parochial issues, rather than trying to make any broad-sweeping political or social statements.

Then there is lead singer, Frankie Stubbs. Many attempts have been made to accurately describe the tonal quality of Stubbs' voice most of them involve conjecture about Lemmy Kilmister, emphysema, glass chewing and sulphuric acid gargling , but suffice it to say that it is somewhat of an acquired taste. Listening to Mush , thus, hammers the point home rather quickly that Leatherface is an atypical band.

What makes them special, and what makes Mush a remarkable album, becomes apparent around the time the first chorus hits on the first track, "I Want The Moon". There is an underlying sense of urgency and desperation simmering just below the surface here.

The two guitars play off of each other, flying off in separate directions throughout the song and syncing up occasionally to hit you directly. This band plays like it's the night before Armageddon and time is fleeting.

The sense of desperation is almost tangible. Frankie Stubbs' voice is coarse and gruff. It takes some people a while to get used to it, but I loved it immediately. It sounds as if he smokes a carton a day and someone switched his Listerine with a can of paint thinner. Very rough, very impassioned, and incredibly unique. It will move you. The lyrics are equally powerful. Stubbs comes off as weary barroom poet who has seen too much of the world.

Melancholy and yearning for some sort of meaning to it all. I cannot say enough about an album like Mush. Their three record Roughneck deal had ended. But I think it was like, "Let's just do some recordings when we come down to London and we can release an EP," really. I think that's what "The Last" was going to be. So it wasn't like I signed them to a deal or anything. We just made an EP. But then they went in the studio and they made more tracks than we expected.

They came out of the studio with eight tracks, so we said let's call it a mini-album. And that's what we did. That week they were in town, they were playing a show at The Garage, which was the show I mentioned earlier in the conversation, and it was a sold out show, an incredible night.

It was Saturday night, I think I remember, and it was amazing. I think it was probably the biggest London show they'd done.

You couldn't move in there. There was at least people. It was really a brilliant show. But there'd been some trouble. There was some tension with the group, and they broke up that night, I think on stage. Maybe Frankie said something on stage and that was it. Then the next week it was in—I think the Christmas edition of the Melody Maker—and there was a big story on it.

It was like "Leatherface split, it's all over. I guess there'd been some trouble. They'd been touring and they'd been fighting, arguing or whatever. And that was it. But it's all a bit hazy really. So it was a very euphoric Saturday night show, and then it ended with this weirdness. But they'd done these recordings during the week, and the recordings were brilliant.

They had, after "Minx," I'd said "Let's go into a really good studio in London while you're down. And they sounded amazing. So at least we had this great document of the last little batch of brilliant songs.

NI: And it does have some brilliant songs on it. Laurence: Yeah, I agree. I was crazy about "Little White God. NI: Is that why you chose to release that on the single? Laurence: Yes, definitely.

I thought it was an amazing single. I thought it was a really, really special song. The lyrics were kind of amazing. And it just sounded so good.

It just had that Leatherface twin guitar thing. He's so in love he's forgotten about being a mod. Frankie took the kid, he was a mod, so he took the drugs, the speed, because he was a mod, and speed was originally the mod drug. Then he kept taking the speed and then he stopped being a mod. He just took the speed, you know? And then he started taking worse drugs, and it was white lines to brown lines and all this. It's a very, very moving paean to the classic decline and what damage the drugs can do.

But it was also a completely uplifting banger. Really powerful, very moving. Showing that side of Frankie's writing, that sort of almost like a Tom Waits song or something. So you've got that amazing thing, like Tom Waits doing "Shipbuilding" or something really melancholy.

Beautiful, beautiful. Laurence: No, I didn't, no. In fact I'd forgotten that they were even on there. They were on the B side, I think? Laurence: That's alright. So I was really excited when they talked about doing it, and I might have encouraged that if Frankie had suggested it.

But they always had amazing covers, such great covers. NI: That was going to be my next question, about their covers, because they always had such great ones. Well, Frankie was a proper songwriter and he appreciated proper songwriting. They did an incredible version of "Message In A Bottle.

It was just amazing. You could hear the musicality, the sophisticated chords, and that they could play that stuff. And how those songs were incredibly well written. Then they elevated them, blitzed them, and just made them their own.

Laurence: Oh, it's so good, yeah. They did "Ideal World" by the Christians. I would have liked to have heard that. Then of course on "The Last" there's the Snuff cover as well, which is pretty straight up really. But they were just all very close, that lot, so that was a nice circle right at the end having heard them via Snuff. They recorded "Win Some, Lose Some" for their last record.

NI: And with having Andy in the band, yeah. Laurence: Yes Andy was playing bass in the band too, bless him. Another great player. And then they had "Ba Ba Ba Ba Boo," which is almost like a Louis Armstrong sort of thing, a kind of goof off or something at the end, but I think it's Frankie's own thing. NI: From a label standpoint, what's your perspective in terms of what it means to you to have been a part of those records? Laurence: Incredibly proud.

They still give me absolute shivers up my spine whenever I listen to them, and I don't listen to them very often. But of course I went back and listened before I talked to you, as I have done before when sometimes they come up and when people bring them up to me.

But yeah, I'm very proud to have been involved. They were probably the first band from when I moved to London that I signed once I got into the 'proper' music business, shall we call it. I'd done DIY records, and I'd done things back in my hometown and put out a few records friends groups, which were great fun and I'm proud of them too. But Leatherface was the first thing once I came to London.

And great, I think they stand out. I still think they're the best of that kind of thing from that time. I think Frankie is one of the most amazing songwriters and lyricists, an absolute visionary as an artist.

They were a colourful bunch of characters. Dickie Hammond, bless his soul, extraordinary guitarist. Andy Laing on the drums, just an absolute powerhouse. They were really fun to be around. They're still quite underrated outside of the punk world maybe—but I'm so glad that people get it and it means a lot to people 30 years on. I always thought that they would become a huge cult, and I was really pleased when the Americans started to pick up on them.

I was always hoping Metallica or someone would cover one of their songs and it would just take off laughter. But that hasn't happened, not yet anyway. NI: No, but they certainly did achieve the cult following in America. Well, they ended up reforming and going out and playing, which I was really pleased about.

I still hear a lot from America about that, the excitement around that, that cult status that they had attained. You know, rightly so. NI: I think there's a certain mystique around them that's different from other bands.

Laurence: Yeah, I think there sort of always was. I think they had a reputation. Even the name. It was such a powerful name at that time. It was like, "Wow, Leatherface. And they were. They had a bad ass sound, but then there's this extraordinary sensitivity and emotion within the lyrics and all that poetry within it. So it was tempered with that, and that gave it that depth and complexity. And that kind of stream of consciousness element. But yeah, incredible stuff. I'm very pleased to have a little bit of Leatherface in our catalogue laughter.

Were you involved at all with those reissues that came out on Fire Records or was that completely separate? To be honest, I didn't realize how deleted it is. I guess it's just on DSPs [digital sound platforms] at the moment. And I asked in the warehouse for a copy, and I didn't know it was completely out.

So yeah, I imagine we would actually at some point. Obviously it's up on DSPs, as most things are. But there's no physical stock right now. You think that'd be a good idea to do that? NI: Well, yes, I do. But I still buy my music on vinyl, so I'm hesitant to speak for others. But no plans right now, but I'm sure it'll come out again on vinyl for sure. Maybe you can still get cheap CDs out there, but yeah, I'm sure it'll happen.

NI: I know there's very much a bunch of people that would like a copy. Laurence: Well, I'll talk to the powers that be at Domino laughter. NI: I remember when I heard Leatherface for the first time how hard it was to get a physical copy of the music.

Laurence: Yeah, sure, I've been there. And it was a big deal because it was a very difficult album to get here in the States. It was hard to find. And it came in this like cardboard cover over the jewel case. Laurence: OK, that's interesting.

Obviously, I left Fire, the label that owned Roughneck in '92, ' But it was licensed to Seed Records, which I think was part of Warner's Atlantic originally when it first came out in like in like So there was an American edition at the time.

But they never went out there at that time, they only went out afterwards. NI: Did you find that the American distributors did not push the album here as much as you would have liked? Laurence: You know, I wasn't really out there, so I didn't know. At that time it was quite hard to know what was going on. We thought it was getting a decent push just 'cause it was actually getting released and it was being released via Warner.

But it obviously didn't get a proper push. I think it was maybe just kind of a bit of a nudge. So yeah, I didn't really know to be honest. I was talking to someone at WEA [Warner Elektra Atlantic], there was a product manager and people were talking about it, but I didn't know exactly what was going on, if it was being marketed well or whatever. But as they didn't even go out there, there wasn't really an infrastructure, I don't think, for the band to go out and tour.

There wasn't that kind of management, or an agency, and things like that. So the whole thing wasn't really happening. Not at that time anyway. I think they were there a few times when they reformed. NI: That's pretty much all I had.