hey kids

Hey, it's great to see people are still geting into Stick Men with Ray Guns, Je M'en Fous and Uz Jsme Doma - you know it makes sense.

I've started up this blog again at a slightly different address with loads of weird and wonderful music, reviews and fanziney rants to-boot. Find me here:

http://ticket-to-cubesville.blogspot.com/

Keep in touch and keep on rockin'

Love,

Cubesville

Woohay!

Cubesville is back up and running. Excuse us if there have been problems with links - the file upload thingy was shite and deleted all my files. Duh. Giza shout if you experience any more problems. With the site that is - do I need to know the darkest corners of your personal lives? Onwards and upwards. Stick Men with Rayguns anyone?

Stick Men with Ray Guns

This is what I call punk rock. The band couldn’t play and their objective was to get up your nose.


From Christian Rat Atttack to rare gems like Pee Pee in the Disco Mommy and Have I got a God for You, singer Bobby Soxx did his damndest to ruin your day.


SMwRG formed in Dallas, Texas, in 1981 and ran until 1988. Unfortunately, Soxx was cruelly taken from us due to liver failure in 2000. This anthology, Some People Deserve to Suffer, was released after Soxx’s death.


Bob Beerman (bass): “Onstage we were unpredictable and violent. There was always blood or some other body fluid on the floor at the end of the night. Some people loved it, some hated it, but nobody walked away and said: ‘That was OK.’ It was never OK.”



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Rock n Roll Rimbaud

Daniel Treacy, the man behind the Television Personalities, gets my vote for the 21st Century’s answer to Arthur Rimbaud.
OK, it’s not a straight forward comparison – Treacy’s lived a bit longer and his creative work has lasted longer than Rimbaud’s. Treacy wrote Part Time Punks and Where’s Bill Grundy Now? whereas Rimbaud was a bit heavier like.
But both looked over the edge and both have found their own distinctive ways of describing what they saw. Treacy revitalised the Television Personalities after he contacted the world from a prison boat in Dorset. My Dark Places is a classic. Listen to it, buy it and then buy the follow up Are We Nearly There Yet?

Get it here

I don’t fucking care!

Whatever comes first – revolution or apocalypse – one day it will be mandatory for all rock n roll bands to sound like Je m’en fous.

If ever a band grabs its audience, gives it a shake and says, “Hello, I’m a zany French person and I’m here to melt your mind,” Je m’en fous does.

Now based in Geneva, Je m’en fous emerged blinking from the ashes of self-destructive quirkcore masters Headache.

Rock n roll outlander Titi plays guitar and cajoles the band towards its absurd extremes. Raised on a diet of Saxon and Abba, he flagrantly makes no homage to either.

Titi's twisty turny guitaring is complimented by singer Max’s nihilistic yells and profound scepticism of anything animal, vegetable or indeed mineral. Max cut his teeth yelling for Canadian hxcx outfit Shitfit. Disappointingly, I got crap odds from bookies William Hill on Max making 65 without having put a comperhensive company pension scheme in place. Dammitt

Although their first recording, J’ t’emmerde, is a bit like Headache lite, it does give some indication of the twisted genius possessed by all four members of this riotously unique band. Check out the excellent Headache discography from Life is Abuse records for a rollicking good listen.

Je m’en fous tours extensively. If Je m’en fous play anywhere near to you, cook food, take it to them and tell them from me they fukkin rock like.

Get it here (ooer)

Sing to God

Bad Brains stand head and shoulders above any other Christian rock outfit. When they sing about Jesus and God and love and stuff, they do so with a ferocity and commitment that would make our local church, St Luke’s Church of England in Formby, positively shudder. I reckon there would be complaints all the way up Bushby’s Lane even as far as Kippax the newsagents.

I can’t begin to imagine what the vicar would make of it but I bet songs like Universal Peace and In the Beginning would have the congregation slam diving from the pulpit and crowd surfing the outstretched hands of the Formby and District Ladies Guild.

Get in.

Bad Brains’ first slab of Christian rock, Rock for Light, was a belter and they never really matched it. Build a Nation tries to recover some of Rock for Light’s energy but avoids some of the crimes against taste committed on their later Christian rock albums like Quackness and I Against High.

St Lukes church, Formby, is currently recruiting a new vicar. To apply, go to http://stlukes.merseyside.org/

Find Build a Nation here

Full on Czecho gibbon frenzy

Uz Jsme Doma are total dissident quirk. Frantic Minutemen strumming meets the deep tolling of funereal bells accompanied by the curried-up parping of the saxophone. They even have big old snatches of opera (and I’m not just talking about the contents of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s underpants).

Uz Jsme Doma set out on their quirktastic pilgrimage in the 1980s when the evil communist regime thought it was funny to arrest the kids and shave off their spiky hair. Boo hiss.

When the Iron Curtain fell, and in a bizarre twist of fate, Uz Jsme Doma became popular in native Czech and the underground kids said they’d sold out and gone pop. Pop??!!?!?

Getting hold of actual Uz Jsme Doma cds was a cathartic experience. I’d stayed on in Prague after a two-day business trip to a bathroom manufacturer in the region and needed to do something to get back to normal.

Didn’t fancy investing in a Dupla Prague away kit or catching the matinee showing of the latest Jan Svankmajer comedy, so spent an afternoon tracking down real life Uz Jsme Doma recordings. It took half an hour. Vegan meal took longer.

Scruffy tapes of their first two albums made their way round the European underground scene during the 1990s, inspiring waves of frenzied quirksters desperately seeking a way out of hardcore blind alleys.

Fifteen Drops of Water scoops some of the best moments up till 1997. Last one to leap in a frenzied gibbon-like manner from their mum’s Festival of Britain sideboard smells like David Cameron.

Find Fifteen Drops of Water