The rarest record I ever owned....
Evil Gazebo/Pankhurst-split 7” single
One of the
rarest records I’ve ever had and one that survived the immense clear-out of my vinyl collection.
(There will, I think, be a piece about the tragic year-zero clear-out later on.
A tale of eternal regrets in return for small amounts of cash). This record, along with “Highway 61
Revisited”, “Swoon” by Prefab Sprout, “Dragnet” by The Fall and The Baby
Astronauts, “All The Pancakes You Can Eat”, is one of the few remaining
artefacts of the days when vinyl was king. Why, out of all the few hundred
records I had, did this one survive the cull of 1998? A good question, and
looking back, there were quite a few others I wish I hadn’t got rid of.
However, this
was yet another record I got from Probe in Liverpool. (I really must do more
about Probe-it does warrant 500 words for itself). But without heading too much
into that, they used to keep on the counter a file, a normal lever arch file,
with forthcoming releases scribbled upon separate sheets of paper, week by
week. This was before the days of the internet obviously. It was always worth
glancing through this folder to see what was on the horizon. Probe, being
fairly elitist, wouldn’t list any of the major label releases, but only the
ones they thought were interesting. I’m sure that sometimes they just made
things up to lead customers astray. This single wasn’t on the list though it
was in the shop on a quiet Monday morning. Most of the singles, were as usual,
stored behind the counter, but they did have a box you could browse through.
This was usually comprised of U.S. imports and anything that would seem as
obscure as possible. They’d all be on small indie labels you’d never heard of,
based in Nowheresville, with archetypal indie sleeves and would always be bands
you never heard of either. A smattering of coloured vinyl completed the
equation. It was to my surprise that Monday morning that I came across a single
in a plain white sleeve. In fact it wasn’t a minimalistic arty white sleeve but
just a normal single sleeve with a hole in the middle for the label. The label
was plain as well, just a plain paper label with nothing printed on it. The
only inscription was in biro. On one side it read “Evil Gazebo”, and on the
other it read “Pankhurst”. It was a kind of curiosity piqued in reverse for me
as there was so little to go on.
I asked the
bloke behind the counter about it and if he knew what it was. Suffice it to say
that the staff in Probe made Jack Black in “High Fidelity” look like a paragon
of customer service, but he genuinely had no clue what it was. Because it was
so unlike anything else in the box, I bought it simply on impulse. After all,
it could have been potentially something very rare-something recorded by an
artist under another name, a rare white label by New Order, Sonic Youth or even
The Fall. It could have been the vinyl equivalent of Wonka’s Golden
Ticket.
On returning
home, I hurriedly took it from the sleeve (treating it just like a Golden
Ticket), and slapped it on the record player. I thought that it may have been
an e.p. but there was only one track on each side. Nothing was scratched into
the run-out grooves, not even a serial number. Until I listened to it, the
whole thing was a mystery. I played the Evil Gazebo song first-largely because
that’s what I presumed the a-side was. It was either a massive piss-take by The
Fall or an inept sub-goth/arthouse band. The production was awful; muddied
vocals, drums so far down in the mix it was as if they had been playing in a
studio on the other side of the road, and a bass that seemed to be played by a
one-handed primate on loan from Chester Zoo. The guitar wasn’t too bad
though-it added a bit of a shimmer. I had no idea what they were singing about
though-the vocalist was either hopelessly overcome with nerves or was
pretentiously singing so quietly for effect. I turned the single over expecting
more of the same. Guess what? It was completely and utterly different-poles
apart. The production qualities were just the same and the musical abilities
seemed to be even more rudimentary than the a-side. However, stylistically, it
was a whole other thing. In place of the mumbling, slow and whispered male
vocals on the a- side, here were screechy, agitated, very very angry women
bellowing into the mic and so high in the mix it was as if they were perched on
your eardrums. Again, I couldn’t really make out much of what they were going
on about however as the sound was so overloaded and distorted. I did catch the
odd shouts of “men”, “bastards” and “kill them all”. It was a little bit scary.
The only comparison musically would be a mix of Crass, The Raincoats and
somewhat ironically, AC/DC. It gradually dawned on me that “Evil Gazebo” and
“Pankhurst” weren’t titles of songs but were two different bands. So what did I
have? A split single rarity in the same vein as the Sonic Youth/Mudhoney
classic maybe? I could have been sitting on a fortune. It was because of this
that the record survived the mass extinction; like some anachronistic marsupial
marooned after the ice age it remained unscathed.
For the next decade or so I kept my eyes
peeled in the music press to see if I had inadvertently bought an underground classic by bands who
went on to do bigger and better things. (I don’t think that Evil Gazebo could
do otherwise-they couldn’t get any worse and certainly couldn’t get any
smaller). They was nothing, not even a reference in Record Collector, so the
whole thing remained an enigma to me.
Until about 18
months or so ago. Trawling through the net for something else, I came across a
reference to a track called “Swirling Clouds of Despair and Loss” by a band
called Gasebo. Could it be? The title made sense-it seemed to fit. This
reference was simply within an archived playlist from a radio station in Des
Moines, Radio WAFJ. A bit more searching on their archives led me to a sort of
Holy Grail, in that back in April 2001 they had played a track called “All the
Young Men Walk in Line” by Evil Gazebo. The titles of both songs though bore no
resemblance to my single, and regrettably it appeared that Radio WAFJ had
closed for good in 2005 after intense lobbying by Christian fundamentalists.
The station had unwisely played a 12 hour Crass marathon and the airing of
“Christ the Album” tipped it over the edge.
To this day I
have carried on, every so often searching the internet. References to both Evil
Gazebo and Pankhurst have cropped up every now and then, but only tangentially.
This is what I do know. They weren’t from somewhere deep and obscure in the
heart of America and therefore exotic. Evil Gazebo were from Runcorn, Cheshire
and Pankhurst originated in Goosnargh, near Preston in Lancashire. They gigged
infrequently across the North West of England during the early 1990’s. Evil
Gazebo were referred to at various times as a goth band, New Romantics,
post-punk and even as “progressive rock in the same tradition as Yes”. They
issued two cassette singles (which I’d love to hear) and nothing else.
Pankhurst never released any music-whether by accident or design, I don’t know.
According to a footnote in a blog about alternative music in Lancashire, they
were an extremely militant feminist band and would only ever play women-only
gigs. There seemed to be no connection between the bands at all-nothing in
common, either musically, politically, personally or geographically. How come
they were (apparently) sharing the same piece of vinyl? This was an endless
mystery until three weeks ago, when idly reading a lifestyle piece in the
Observer Magazine I came across what could be the missing piece of the jigsaw.
In a puff piece
with the “cutting-edge” interior designer from “the North of England” (aren’t
we all in the eyes of the Observer Magazine),Neville Broadhurst, he gave a
passing reference to his life before stressed concrete and rehabilitation of
woodchip wallpaper as a bassist in a small band called Evil Gazebo.
Furthermore, when pushed, he put his change in career direction to the band
breaking up after he embarked upon a relationship with the violinist with their
musical nemeses, an unnamed, strident, lesbian, feminist band from
Preston,(Pankhurst?). To this day, Neville looks upon this episode with regret
and sadness-the only good that came out of it was his marriage to the said
violinist, one Julie Plumpton, who now works as a full-time mother and a
part-time chiropractor.
It still makes
me wonder how the single came into existence. Quite frankly, the songs are a
load of rubbish, but I’ll always keep hold of it-just for the mystery.
"Totally Shuffled" here:
Kindle book http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00CJYZ3CA
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