An Organ piece in three parts. Part Three, to accompany the two LSD album reviews, one each from Organ founders Sean and Marina, a look back over and a picking out of ten moments from all the time spent working with Cardiacs in one way or another during the lifetime of Organ. A piece writen by Sean Worrall…
Ten Cardiacs/Organ moments. Ten Cardiacs/Organ moments? What’s that all about then? Well now that the dust is starting to settle on that finally released Cardiacs album LSD, an album that started something like seventeen or eighteen years ago with the release of that Ditzy Scene single here at Organ, one of several Cardiacs releases on our then in-house label ORG Records. Now that it is all done and dusted and as we do really start to think about that book to mark forty years of Organ – If we say it often enough then that book might just happen, Organ will be thirty nine years old on December 4th of this year (2025), that means we’ve got a year and a little bit to get our act together and get that book done (actually we’ve probably got enough tales and more for ten books). Here seeing as we’re probably closing a big chapter, a massive adventure and a glorious ride with Mr Timothy Smith and his affectionate friends (not that we could ever completely close it, there are all those albums, all that beautiful Tim Smith back catalogue with Cardiacs, Sea Nymphs, Spratleys and more, that chapter never closes). We have a lot of history with Cardiacs.
I read a comment made on social media the other day about how we didn’t really do that much for Cardiacs. Here’s are just ten of the many moments spent working with Cardiacs over the last forty years…
1: The start of it all – Turns out I first saw Cardiacs in Liverpool in the early 80s opening for Here and Now, truth is I didn’t take too much notice of the support band that night and it wasn’t until much later that I realised that was actually the first time I saw this band that were going to take up so many of my days (actually I just looked it up, they were still called Cardiac Arrest, it was 1980). The first time I really properly saw Cardiacs was at Stonehenge in ’84. I, like most people, was waiting for Hawkwind, we’d just seen The Enid, we couldn’t be bothered to move so we stuck around and anyway Hawkwind could have been next on, Stonehenge running orders were always vague. What is this? Who are these people! No really, who are these people?! No one seemed to know who this rather excellent band were? I kind of put it aside once Hawkwind came on. Hawkwind were really out there that night, Nik Turner was really at his height and by the time Hawkwind had done their thing and the sun had come up that other strange band from early were almost forgotten (except they were rather good and some of their songs did stick around and who the hell were they?!?). Back then the day’s line up at Stonehenge was never that clear, a blackboard with a last minute list chalked on it, and well I kind of wrote them off as one of those many strange bands you’d see at a free festival that you’d never ever see or hear of again. And then a few months later I went to see Marillion in Manchester, I went to see Marillion rather a lot in their early days, indeed they were one of the first bands I was ever involved in putting a gig on for back in my days as a teenage art student, they played for a food and a place to stay for the night – So Marillion in Manchester in late in 1984 and hey, there’s that band again, Cardiacs were supporting Marillion! They were intriguing from the off, they didn’t go down that well, I rather liked them to say the least! They were brilliant! The music, the way they looked and at last I finally got to put a name to that band I had seen earlier that year at Stonehenge! I needed more, not sure why I didn’t buy a tape that night? Did they even have them on sale? I kept an eye out for more dates but they never seem to come up North, they seemed to be a Southern thing…
And then I moved down South, got a place down here at an art school, here on Cardiacs home turf although I had vowed to not let music or anything else distract me. I’d stood on the Stretford End for the last time a couple of weeks before starting at art school and said goodbye to my other love (5-0 win over Newcastle, memory said it was four, ! just double checked, it was five), I was going to give art everything and not get distracted by football, by music or by anything else! And on the second day of that three years of doing an art degree and not getting distracted a girl jumped out as I was passing, I was wearing a Twelfth Night t-shirt (the prog rock band, not the damn play – hey, I went to school in North Wales, Shakespeare never meant jack to our teachers) and an excited conversation started about music, she leant me a copy of the Seaside and a bootleg tape of that band I last saw opening for Marillion, a tape she had made at the Croydon Underground and that first weekend of art college was mostly spent listening to Cardiacs and not painting. That girl turned out to be a first year Animation student called Marina and that weekend, forty years ago this very week actually, we went off to the Marquee to see Geoff Mann and La Host (I think it was La Host?) and not long after that it was off to see Cardiacs at Fetcham Riverside and wow! And well the forth time I saw Cardiacs, at Fetcham Riverside, really on their home turf, in front of their own following, that was really the first proper time I really properly saw Cardiacs and by that time music was already taking up far too much of my painting time.
Meanwhile Marina was well into making her first year film, an eye-boiling three and a bit minute piece of animation that came with an It’s A Lovely Day soundtrack that drove the animation department mad (in those days every frame of animation needed a run in while it was shot so for every single frame the music would run back and play again, there was 24 frames of animation per second, so all day all the other people in the room were hearing the music going backwards and forwards!). That’s a rather low quality verion up there, I do know all the orignal drawings are still here, maybe one day Marina will get around to re-shooting it all – “Still not quite as gloriously in sych as the original Hi Band U-Matic master. I guess I’d better do something about that. Btw this was runner-up at the 1987 Snapper Awards… one of the judges was legendary experimental animator Robert Breer who told me it should have won!” said Marina in a comment under the bootleg version of the video she made that someone psoted up.
Somewhere along the way, Marina said she had a tape of an interview she had done at a gig with Cardiacs main man Tim Smith. Half of that interview had appeared in a fanzine called Urban Guerilla, a zine put together by a loveable madman called Grob (more of him in a moment), and the other half was still on a cassette and why not start our own zine?
At that point every small gig you ever went to there were people selling zines they had made and well why not? And there was all this great music that was being ignored and…? Well, just a one off thing, nothing that’s going to take up too much time, just a one off thing for the hell of it, maybe make it into a bit of an art thing? That first strictly one-off edition of Organ finally came out as a very handmade thing in December 1986 and by that point Marina’s animated film had started to be screened at Animation festivals and indeed started to win awards and had even been shown on BBC TV, Cardiacs first ever time on TV I do believe.
And after quite a few more Cardiacs gigs during that first year of art school and failing to not get distracted by music and going to the Marquee (and other places) to see them when I should have been painting and with Tim Smith and The Consultant taking more and more interest in what Marina was doing with animation and film, well a relationship with Cardiacs was building.
By the way, talking of filming and such, it was actually Marina who filmed that recently released film (via YouTube) of a whole concert of the classic Cardiacs line up at the Town and Country Club in 1988, it was listed as filmed by “unknown”, it was actually Marina. Marina had a Super Eight camera at that gig, someone else had a video camera. Cameras were swapped as it was agreed Marina by that time knew the music as well as anyone and she should video it. The tapes were handed to Tim at the end of the show and forgotten about until they were recently found. That is some fine footage of the the classic line up even if I do say so myself, what a time it was… Actually, there’s a lot more footage kicking around here on old video tapes and such that really needs t obe sorted out one day, Cardiacs footage no one has ever seen…
2: Reading Festival 1986 – So we spent our first year at art school getting distracted by music, Marina making films, including the one that got Cardiacs on the telly, me painting, us writing, plotting a strictly one of fanzine called Organ, interviewing more bands and at some point The Consultant said, hey we’re playing the Reading Festival, do you want to come along with us? And so off we went to the 1986 Reading festival with Cardiacs, in their van (it was a big orange van I think). Us, the band, The Consultant. I remember spending most of the journey folding covers for the Seaside Tape, a new cover, this one the one with the colourful stripes and Jim on the cover, it was the first time most of the band had seen it properly. Can’t remember if all the band were in the van, Tim and Sarah certainly were, others were there, not everyone, Jim arrived later. I remember everyone being in high spirits as we headed out of London on the Friday afternoon discussing the merits of Saturday night headliners Saxon and Tim mischievously suggesting we should switch the road signs for Reading around so Biff and company would get lost on the way. We went on the Friday, just in time to catch The Mission and a brilliant Killing Joke set in the thunder, lightening and torrential rain (“the gods are with us” yelled Jaz Coleman in the middle of that epic storm). Cardiacs were to be first on stage on the Sunday so we all set up tents and camped for the weekend. Yes, setting up very basic tents in the pouring rain in the dark at Reading in the public camping area when most bands were arriving on the actual day they were playing in their big tour buses or from the hotels that they were staying in although, where did Tim and Sarah disappear to after that first night and their collapsing tent?
It was the last great Marquee/NJF version of the then institution of a festival, it was never the same once the Marquee people stopped doing it. Friday was brilliant just for Killing Joke and the spectacle of tent erection in that heavy heavy rain, Tim was not that good at putting up his tent. The tents were marked with a big Cardiacs flag Marina had made and then used to rally people to the arena and the triumph of that Cardiacs set that started off Sunday’s bill, that bigger than usual for a first band on crowd that built and built as the sound filtered back to the campsite and people came running to catch it – by the end of that half hour set the already healthy crowd had tripled, it was a triumph, it has all been well documented, the set itself was released as the Rude Bootleg live album. The sight backstage before they went on, the sight of Cardiacs gleefully dancing and diving in that big muddy puddle behind the stage in those already rather messy bandsman’s uniforms, legendary! Well Well Well, the band tasked with going on after Cardiacs would later describe the puddle moment as the moment they knew, before Cardiacs had even taken to the stage, as the moment they knew that they had already been blown off. It was brilliant to see and hear the crowd and the reaction dramatically build and to listen to all the reaction afterwards as we rushed around collecting names and details for the mailing list. What a fine adventure that was…
3: The Peel Session/that Sea Nymphs single, we’ve told the story of the session before, here it is again via this link; ORGAN: “Don’t be silly” said Tim in a tone of disbelief, the tale of a glorious day spent behind “enemy” lines…
– that Sea Nymphs single became a daytime Radio One single of the week – people forget that fact now, that single and the way it was done really did crack the dam in terms of radio. Yes there has been Is This The Life but that was a bit of a strange one off and the door was firmly bolted after that for such a long long time. That Sea Nymphs release finally got some daytime radio and finally got that John Peel session in the bag (even if we did spend the whole day at Maida Vale trying not to mention the C word within earshot of anyone from the BBC during the actual recording). John Peel was to later tell us he never had a problem with Cardiacs but others at the station did – we had John’s ear for a time back there what with ORG releases with Cay, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, those Cuban Boys and such which is why we were so keen to put out the Nymphs single at that point even if it was a good few year after the album had come out, we knew we could get it on the radio at that point with all the interest ORG was getting at the time which is why we did it at that point.
Then there was, before the Sea Nymphs single, our insisting of Bellyeye coming out on ORG when we did finally get some backing and decent distribution for the label even though no one wanted us to release it and people were going as far as to tell us they wouldn’t work with us if we did release it – yeah, it really was that bad back there! That Bellyeye single and an almost fight in a record company office to get them on that Blur bill at that big Mile End festival in East London that was part of the whole Bellyeye period – that probably killed off any hope of really taking ORG anywhere serious but we were pleased to do it, to not do so would have been a betrayal of everything Organ had been about (I do very occasionally wonder what might have been if we had done the sensible thing back there and turned our backs on Cardiacs at that point? Putting that single out really did throw a big spanner in our works that year, a lot was sacrificed for Cardiacs).
Why didn’t any of us take things like cameras to things like John Peel sessions back then?
4: The Eight Day Itch (and Die Laughing) and Tim finally meeting Kavus at an Organ gig and that soundcheck and shut up we’re winning the league! – It was a stupid idea (not our first), three of London’s then most active underground promoters coming together to put on a solid week of shows together. This was in the days when you really did have to work things, this was way before the internet and just sitting at home putting up Facebook event pages and lazy “stories” on Instagram, this was way before communication was an instant thing and you really had to work hard, this is when you had to stand outside every gig happening for weeks before hand in the wind and rain with flyers and working the word of mouth and the hope that the bastards in mainstream music press (yes, bastards, choosing my wording carefully here, at times they really were bastards if you weren’t working with one of their very limited handful of chosen bands!) would deign to let it slip though and appear on their gig listings page even if you were paying through the nose to advertise things in their papers. It was damned hard work flyering night after night back there and really the Eight Day Itch, although we look back fondly on it all now, it was a nightmare of a week at times!
So us Organs, Sonic Relief and T.L.F came together (don’t ask me why they called themselves Tortoise Liberation Front? Maybe we’ll ask Rick Lennox or Laura before we finally get around to that Organ book that is surely on the way). We came together over a silly idea to put on an overly ambitious whole week’s worth of gigs, it eventually tuned out to be nine gigs over eight days including a late night collaboration with Jonathan and Eko over at Feet First and Camden Palace that featured a then rather happening Utah Saints. This feature today isn’t about the whole Itch week though. It had been a stupid adventure filled week what with that Anti-Seen gig and that Blaggers all-dayer and well, all those Eight Day Itch tales are for another time, this is about our adventures with Cardiacs.
The final day of the Eight Day Itch was a gig that started somewhere around 5pm and went on until three in the morning (the next day was a bank holiday Monday so running late wasn’t really a major problem and Cardiacs as headliners were scheduled at ‘normal’ gig times so people could catch trains home and such. Eskimos & Egypt played afterwards, from what I remember a banging techno set although I was pretty burnt out by then! Credit to The Nation was a last minute addition to an already packed bill. Both the line up and the gig itself was completely rammed, way (way) over capacity (we’d never have got away with it now, although a lot of it was one person out one person in). I was on the door or dealing with the guest list and the hundreds of people who couldn’t get in for most of the night (it got a bit tasty at times!), I hardly saw any of it, certainly not the Cardiacs set. My finger turned blue in the cold as I clutched the guest list outside, it was one of the biggest Pond gatherings at that time (what did I read online the other day about Cardiacs never selling out big gigs back in the day?). Even the then all powerful NME had to grudgingly admit the week had been brilliant, although true to form they managed to run a big full page review of the last night without ever once acknowledging headliners Cardiacs were even on the bill! If the NME were to be believed, Poisoned Electric Head headlined the day and then Eskimos & Egypt played after them, Cardiacs weren’t even there. The night was madness, it was brilliant, what a day, (and as a personal side issue, United won the league during the soundcheck while I yelled at the band to shut up for final five minutes while I had my ear glued to the radio as Oldham beat Villa to hand United their first league title in years – “what the hell are you on about feller” yelled Tim? From that day on Tim was always grilling me about football and how he couldn’t get it and would I please please explain? He’d tell me how he’d be in pubs utterly confused as mass bodies of people got so worked up yelled at televisions, he said he wanted to get it and t oget involved but never ever could).
That night was massive, a really show of something or other, a coming together of people, bands, DIY spirit, some kind of underground statement, it was by far Cardiacs biggest gig at that point and just one brilliant gathering at the end of a very long week. A real sense of Cardiacs building something in terms overdue recognition and a following big enough to build on without having to try and seek approval from a hostile and still all too powerful music press and music industry. Something changed that night, it was the start of something, there were still tough times ahead and moments in future years when it felt like it might all be coming to an end, but that night was a triumph in so many ways for so many reasons, that night it felt like we all won the league, mostly forgotten now but that night at the New Cross Venue over in Deptford, South London was a very important Cardiacs night.
Oh and by the way, a rather unknown band from Plymouth called Die Laughing who we had been covering a little bit since they sent us a rather messy demo tape were due to open the whole final day of the Eight Day itch and that Cardiacs bill only they didn’t. They called up to cancel what would have been their first really big gig in London on the actual day before the show! Apparently they had instead split up that week during rehearsals for the gig. Before then we’d given Die Laughing’s demo tape a really positive review, we’d seen them a couple of times in pubs, did we put them on, can’t recall now? There was that time at the Boston Arms when the young guitarist in the rather thrashy rather metal flavoured slightly hardcore punk orientated band, a guitarist who had a leather jacket with Voivod painted on the back, declared mid set that he had just worked out what Tim Smith’s secret was and then proceeded to play a Cardiacs-like riff on stage as if he had just discovered the meaning of life (I think we’ve still got the bootleg tape of the gig here somewhere).
If Die Laughing had turned up for the Eight Day Itch rather than splitting up the night before, then that guitarist with Voivod painted on his jacket night have met Tim and Cardiacs for the first time that night, but it wasn’t until sometime later at an Organ gig that a young Kavus Torabi first met Tim Smith and by that time we’d already given Tim a tape of the band that evolved out of Die Laughing and Tim had come specially to one of our regular Camden Monarch Monday night gigs to check out that then new band that featured most of Die Laughing, a new band called The Monsoon Bassoon. If I remember it right they were opening for a band called Old Fruit. We put The Monsoon Bassoon on rather a lot in their early days, we released their tape on ORG, we stood outside venues selling them, sold quite a few outside a King Crimson gig I recall, did rather a lot to help build an early following for them until one day they decided a lot was not enough for them. A familiar story with bands, you’d do loads for them, loads was never enough…
5: The Organ Tenth Birthday Party gig – we’d put Cardiacs on at the Astoria or downstairs at the smaller LA2 a number of times either as outright promoters ourselves or in collaboration with the Astoria and Chris Alexander who managed the place brilliantly as well as put his own gigs on through the best of those final years of the much loved venue (Chris was great, he really cared about the music). There was a number of Astoria gigs we were involved in, including the “Brillant Organ Christmas Party” – for once that typo on those posters wasn’t down to us! It was indeed the Brilliant Organ Christmas Party and Brilliant was the name of Cardiacs then rather under appreciated manager Mark Warmsley’s merchandise company (that’s right, Mr Warmsley printed t-shirts for loads of bands, so if you were buying shirts at gigs in the early 90s you were, without knowing it, helping to keep Cardiacs going!). Mark had the posters and flyers made and we didn’t get to see them until it was too late, that typo was not on us! We were horrified when we saw it (a poster and a bill that also featured DJ Lavender Filter which is another long Organ story involving the ambient side of a fictional hardcore Gabber DJ called Peacekiller but that’s for another day as well). That was the Brilliant show, before that one there another one of those Cardiacs Astoria gigs, the Organ Tenth birthday party gig, two nights of gigs at the LA2 in 1996. The LA2 was the still rather large smaller venue downstairs underneath the main Astoria and the first night of the Birthday Party was Cardiacs headlining with Pulkas, Charlie’s Angels and Dream City Film Club also on the bill. The second night was headlined by a then still largely unknown and rather more musically interesting than they are now Porcupine Tree with Terry Bicker’s then new band Nervous also on the bill. Yes, by 1996 Organ was already ten years old and Cardiacs has featured on our pages many many times so it was rather obvious that we should invite them to headline the party (they seemed rather happy to be invited, “are you sure you want us!?” said Tim).
So by the time Organ was ten in 1996 we’d featured Cardiacs on a number of compilation tapes that we’d sold hundreds via mailorder and mostly by hand at gigs, “come on, you’ve got to hear this band, the tape is only a pound, all these great bands, Cardiacs alone will change your life!”). By ’96 we’d featured Cardiacs in most editions of Organ, we’d probably featured them way too much but we really didn’t care. One rather major magazine publisher back then offered us a rather good deal and then at the last minute said it was only on the proviso that we “stopped covering bands like those bloody Cardiacs you keep going on about” – a no thanks we said to that as well! Oh the deals we’ve turned down over the years over our refusal to stop covering or wanting to release music by certain bands.
Gawd knows how many editions of Organ we’d put out by 1996? It’ll be in the records over there, far more than the one off edition Organ was only ever meant to be! So much for that not being distracted by music thing when I should have been painting! By the time of our tenth birthday came along we’d probably put out that Cardiacs special, an entire edition of Organ that collected together several Cardiacs interviews we’d done by then as well as a collection of reviews and features on Cardiacs and related bands such as Ring and Levitation from earlier Organs. People were asking us to reprint old Organs just for the Cardiacs bits, the compromise and the more creative thing to do was to put together a Cardiacs special.
There were quite a few Cardiacs-related Organ gigs besides the actual Cardiacs gigs; there were those Panixphere gigs, the numerous Sea Nymphs gigs, the occasional Tim Smith solo show including that never to be forgotten time upstairs at the Garage where he took great delight in sound-checking to a roof full of watching rats – just me, him and soundman Dave Murder and I swear the rats in the ceiling were watching him (yeah, I know, I’ve mentioned that more than a couple of times before but it really really was a special five minutes and I know some scoff at these things but that was the magic of Tim Smith, you either got it or you mocked those who did. I never saw the dozens of rats at any other soundcheck in that place and I watched a lot of soundchecks up there, those rats only came to that one gig).
6: Those Camden Falcon secret gigs – there were many Cardiacs and Cardiacs related gigs, three of the most memorable were the then Falcon-based Barfly Mr. Smith and The Big Ship gigs. The Falcon was a brilliant venue, it had rather dramatically figured in our Eight Day Itch with that Anti-Seen gig, we’d seen loads of excellent bands make early moves in that very small very dark Camden backroom, it was the place to play for then unknown US bands. We put on quite a few gigs in that backroom ourselves, the first ever Dandy Warhols gig in this country fell a long way short of being anywhere near a sell out (I thin kthey pulled about 40 people). We put a semi secret low key Napalm Death gig in there on my birthday (I didn’t tell anyone it was my birthday, it was secret present from me to myself), at one point we were doing gigs every Sunday night in there (co-promotions with Keith’s Back Yard, lots of hardcore punk and metalcore crossover gigs, people like Raging Speedhorn, Knuckledust, Cynical Smile, Medulla Nocte and such). At some point somewhere along the line the venue got into some kind of financial trouble and if I remember it right Tim was at one of our gigs where this crisis was being discussed and Tim being Tim he said can’t we play a night here and help out? We had put Sea Nymphs on at the Falcon a few times, did we put Panixphere on there? Of course Cardiacs playing at the Barfly was going to be ridiculous, somewhere along the line someone said you’ll never get all the gear in, then someone else said well if we do then we may as well stay and play for more than one night. So one night turned into three semi secret low key nights. The Falcon people were sceptical, they didn’t really know that much about Cardiacs, (“I’ve never seen them in the music press, are sure about this?” said the landlady) it sold out mostly via word of mouth and mailorder tickets and we ended up with loads (and loads) of people who didn’t get tickets standing outside or just listening from the bar. It was manic. Sea Nymphs supported on one of the three nights and Bill and Sarah came along and played with Cardiacs for one more time. I ended up running the door (again) and missed most of it (again!), a gang of overdressed Irish women turned up in a taxi at one point, they had no idea who was playing but turned up on the strength of it being a secret gig and something to be at, they’d bought tickets from somewhere, never did find out what they thought. Joe Cole turned up, the then young Chelsea footballer who lived in the area, I jokingly wouldn’t let him in, he seemed genuinely interested and a little bit hurt, he bought a copy of Affectionate Friends, bought me a pint and went in (did he ever pay?). Those ‘secret’ gigs were in January 1999, they were crazy nights, that place was way too small for the band let alone a crowd as well!
We’d put Cardiacs on (with the Monsoon Bassoon supporting) at the Garage in the December before and we were back at the Garage six weeks or so after those January Falcon gigs for two more packed Garage gigs (one with King Prawn the other with Bic’s post-Levitation band called Dark Star as well as openers Camp Blackfoot). Cardiacs had been far too quiet in ’97 and early ’98 and we were damned if we were going to stand by and watch them just fade away! No chance!! So yes, there was an element of truth in that statement Jon Poole made in an interview in Earzone fanzine around that time, that bit about “if it wasn’t for Organ there wouldn’t be a cardiacs any more” (something a few people seem to have forgotten).
So yes, Cardiacs played three low key packed out everyone drenched legendary nights at the tiny Camden Falcon, the disbelieving landlady said all bar records were broken on the first night, she got in extra staff to cope with it all for the next two nights and the second and third nights saw the bar records broken again and again, a bottle of champagne was opened at the end of the third night (no confetti though) and the Falcon carried on as a venue for a year or two more as a result of the bar takings and once again we just about broke even and might even have made enough for the tube ride home and blah blah blah…
I once read online that I wasn’t really a Cardiacs fan and that I was only in for the money. Yeah right! We made a fortune out of putting on Cardiacs gigs and releasing their records! If the truth be told people who were later selling copies of the Ditzy Scene single or that Cardiacs edition of Organ on ebay made far more money out of Cardiacs then we ever did! I suspect no one ever got so much pleasure and bloody-minded satisfaction out of it all though, even if I did spend quite a few of those nights stuck running the door or dealing with things back stage and missing the actual performance. I don’t think I saw more than a couple of minutes of those legendary three nights at the Barfly but hey, what nights they were!
7: Panixphere at the Astoria – Now this one was an unexpected turn up for the books, somewhere along the line we’d been roped into working with The Enid by their then new manager who promptly decided the Enid were way too much of a nightmare to work with and completely dumped them on us (turns out he was right, they were way too much of a nightmare but that’s another set of stories that might make the much threatened book one day!) Tim was a fan of the Enid, I think it was mutual although Robert John Godfrey never really talked much about anything besides his own music and his (understandable) need to get it out there. Tim came to most of those Enid gigs we put on and Mr Godfrey seemed to like him being there, a mutual admiration thing. Somewhere a plan for The Enid to headline the Astoria was hatched, we all knew at that point The Enid couldn’t fill the Astoria, that they had alienated a lot of their core following a couple of years before by dropping the The, calling thenselves Enid and going all acid house in a rather uncompromisingly extreme way! It was proving rather difficult to entice those (sometimes openly hostile) fans to return and to convince them the real Enid were back. Sea Nymphs were asked to support at the Astoria and I guess we all hoped that a good chunk of Cardiacs following would come along to see the Nymphs in a relatively big venue and through a big PA and help fill up said venue a little bit. It was an Enid/Sea Nymphs double headline really. And then on the day of the gig, crash bang, a phone call, Tim on the line, “hello feller, watchya, us Nymphs can’t play tonight but hang on, don’t panic we’ve got something special, we’ve got another band, we’ve been practising all night, can we still play, watd’ya say feller?”
Panixphere were by then a long lost semi legendary did-they-really-ever-exist sort of band and no one was quite sure if they had actually ever seen them or not. A band put (back) together by Bic and Tim, more Bic’s thing if we have it right? Was Little Hickey, a Cardiacs roadie for a bit as well as a Ring member, was he the original Panixphere bass player? If I remember it right it was very fast versions of Cardiacs and Ring songs they played that night as well as original Panixphere songs about dogs and cats and things and was there maybe Foetus cover in there? It was almost sonic violence fired at both the Enid fans there for some classically pastoral prog rock and those who had arrived for the delicate sounds of Sea Nymphs that evening. Tim on (Jim’s) bass, Bic on guitar, was Jon Poole in the band that night? I do remember Levitation Drummer Dave Francolini took Flat Hat’s place on the drum stool and they played a stupidly loud fast set that might have included Ring’s Some Fish Have Teeth, a version of XTC’s Cross Wires, an outrageous To Go off And Things – I did tape it, the tape is still here somewhere. Brilliant gig (I got to see the whole of that one)
Panixphere went on to play a number of times for us, including that legendary gig with Huge Baby and Map at the Monarch (was that the greatest gig ever in the entire history of all gigs ever?). I think they played a couple of times at the Monarch actually, and a gig at the Powerhaus over in Islington, as well as a chaotic gig at the Charing Cross Marquee that was an Organ New years party on something like December 30th of whatever year it was. A gig where the PA broke during the soundcheck and, unable to fix it, in the end two thirds of the bill got moved to the tiny Pizza parlour behind the Marquee! Dub War were support, Angel Interceptor (later to become Angel Cage, Captain Scarlet’s lawyer didn’t like the original name) were supposed to open but time and space didn’t allow them to play in the tiny pizza place that was at the time something to do with the Marquee. Dub War were Benji’s pre Skindred band (did we put Dub War on with Cardiacs as well? At the Powerhaus? I can’t recall now? Maybe it was it a Dub War and Angel Interceptor show with Tim doing the sound for it? Whatever it was, those Panixphere gigs were seriously manic punk rock affairs, they were Tim and Bic just letting loose, they were fun! It all got a bit too wild in the end, the last time we ever put them on was at the Venue in New Cross with InAura (who might have still been called Poloroid at that point, it might have been before Mr Polaroid’s lawyers called up, it happened a number of times with lawyers and band names!), that gig really did end in proper broken chaos that time and that was the last time that version of Panixphere ever played (did we see Bic has just got them together again, this time with Jon Poole and Bob Leith?)
So anyway, Sea Nymphs for some reason couldn’t play that gig with the Enid at the Astoria that night, Bill was ill or something like that and so Panixphere stepped in and no one knew who they were and we spent all afternoon trying to intercept as many Sea Nymphs fans outside as we could to let them know who Panixphere were and to please not take a refund but to please please come in instead (some did, some didn’t) and well, the Enid following just never knew what hit them that night, none of us did really!
8: That Goosebumps compilation tape – there were quite a few Cardiacs tracks on various Organ/ORG compilations as well as those Cardiacs singles and that Affectionate Friends album, but this is the one that, more than most, seemed to do lots in terms of reaching people who had not heard (or indeed heard of) Cardiacs before. It came out in 1993, it featured Goodbye Grace as well as Shaping The River (Sea Nymphs) and a rather raw semi-metallic kind of hardcore punk track from Die Laughing, the band that featured a then pretty much unknown Kavus Torabi. The compilation also featured a then rather happening Mint 400 as well as a classic bit of Homage Freaks (another of Tim’s favourite bands of the time), a Poisoned Electric Head track and a whole load rather good earfood from back there in 1993. It was the first time we’d had a tape professionally compiled and mass-produced (previous tape releases had been real DIY punk rock affairs, put together and duplicated on tape decks at home), we sold hundreds of those Goosebumps tapes, mostly by hand at gigs at places like the Marquee and such as well as via mail order.
Was there an earlier Organ tape featuring both Cardiacs and Ablemesh amongst others? I know we sold lots of copies of the Ablemesh single that Scott and Noiseburger Records put out via our mailorder operation. Ablemesh featured a pre-Cardiacs bob Leith and Jon Poole. No, hang on, we just put on Ablemesh a few times, the very infectious Cancel Life single that came out on Noiseburger in ’95. I do recall Jon coming around to our house to tell us he had just joined Cardiacs and he wasn’t sure if it was Tim just winding him up or if he really meant it and would Tim joke like that? Hang on, no, it was Ad Nauseam who were on an early very handmade Organ compilation tape alongside Cardiacs (wasn’t it?). Ad Nauseam, were Bob and Jon’s first band, or the first band we knew of, they sent us a demo in the very early 90s that we reviewed. Ablemesh came a little later (there was also Mr Poole’s album of Zappa covers on ORG of course).
Actually, besides thatGoosebumps tape, we put out quite a few singles and compilations and such for and with Cardiacs. Besides all the various-artists compilations like Goosebumps, there was the Camp Blackfoot split single, theBellyeye single, the Sea Nymphs single (with that hidden Cardiacs track from a Stonehenge bootleg), and of course the Ditzy Scene single. I haven’t read the sleeve notes about the making of the LSD album yet. I somehow doubt there’s an acknowledgement of the original Ditzy Scene single and the other two tracks from that release that are now on the LSD album ever being on ORG. I doubt there’s any mention of the plans that were hatched back there with Mr Smith that were shelved that awful night when Tim was taken ill, I guess there’s quite a few points of view in terms of what was happening back there during the Ditzy Scene period and the start of LSD, it was difficult time for all, especially for Tim’s family and close friends.
All our dealings back then were with Tim directly, mostly via e.mail, quite regularly in pubs after mastering sessions where we’d sit for hours chewing the fat over music and this band he loved or that band who he quite liked or in pubs before other people’s gigs (Tim was always calling up asking about other bands and such, he would often just turn up at Angel Cage soundchecks and just do the sound for the love of it and because he thought they sounded like the Pixies, he loved Pixies). The reality is, besides a couple of phone calls we’ve really not been in the loop since Ditzy Scene came out and Tim got ill and the second single from the album was put on hold and then shelved. We’ve never got any of the press releases or any details of the re-issues over the last dozen or so years, no one has sent us any review or radio play material, and certainly not for this new album. I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel like reading the sleeve notes or the booklet, I’m not sure how much of this revising of Cardiacs history I’m now seeing in the music press or on line I’m that comfortable with. I’m not sure how much of this revision might need to be taken with maybe just a tiny bit of a pinch of salt.
9: Affectionate Friends / Greatest Hits – This was back at the start of this century, back when the Internet still wasn’t a (serious) thing, Organ and ORG Records had been building a healthy underground reputation overseas, we were at a point where you could buy copies of Organ in major record stores in the USA, where we had the ear of lot of US college radio station DJs and such and at some point we hatched a plan with Tim to put together a sampler compilation that would get the band out beyond these home shores. We put the Greatest Hits album together with Tim, although he stubbornly refused to let anything that predated 1988 on to it, we pestered him for something unreleased, he insisted he had absolutely nothing and then sometime later he maybe semi-reluctantly he produced Faster The Snakes from somewhere – he actually produced it from his carrier bag at the compiling/mastering session, he waved a DAT tape at me and said I do have this.
We did all the press on that Greatest Hits album here at Organ, it was mostly sent overseas, we paid for all the postage and the sending copies of the CD out from here at Organ, we sent copies to radio stations and alternative press people all over the globe, mostly to contacts and such in the U.S that we had built up. The payback was to be in the form of the Affectionate Friend compilation, an album Tim put together for us to release on ORG, a release that would hopefully allow us recoup some of the money we’d spent sending out the Greatest Hits album which kind of explains the wording and Tim’s humour on the inside of the Affectionate Friends cover (posting CDs around the world wasn’t cheap even in those days so us “Zealots” at Organ desperately needed to claw some of those costs back! Not sure if we did ever cover the costs of it all? probably not).
Tim was seriously thinking about starting his own label back there, so the Affectionate Friends album was also meant to introduce that idea and some of the bands/artists/projects he was thinking about releasing on his very own All My Eye label (as mentioned on the Affectionate Friends cover). The Greatest Hits title came from another of those post mastering sessions in the pub and yes, you are right, we had already released a Charlie’s Angels album called Greatest Hits on ORG a few years before but we were in the pub and we may have had more than a couple of pints by the time Cardiacs Greatest Hits was set in stone (and yes, I admit, I ripped off those Cockney Rejects for the Charlie’s Angels album in the first place). Did Greatest Hits work? Well who knows? Cardiacs certainly got some U.S press and radio play out of it, I guess it added to the then slowly building word of mouth over there, copies of Greatest Hits as well as copies of Affectionate Friends were handed to all kinds of then influential musicians and such back there, every interesting touring US band we encountered around that point went home with a CD – Deerhoof were very appreciative – it was hard work spreading the word back there in the days before the internet really kicked in. I do know Greatest Hits got a number of good reviews back there, the first serious bit of American underground coverage and college radio play for the band.
10: Ten? Oh, there’s loads more we could tell, the photocopier in the Marquee dressing room incident, that time with Faith no More well before Mike Patton’s days when Chuck was still the band’s frontman. So many stories and adventures, that very last minute Saturday afternoon Marquee gig with the very theatrical End of The Century from Japan that was (I think) Jon Poole’s first ever Cardiacs gig. We will put out that Organ book one day, we need to save some of it until then (and there’s probably some things we’ll never tell), it is organ’s 40th birthday next year. We’ll make the tenth thing in this little feature those beautiful Sing to Tim gigs that Jo Spratley and Bic so brilliantly put together. The shows were nothing to do with us when the other nine things here were, but those gigs last year were extra special, they really were needed, they really were done the right way, and we just got to go along and quietly enjoy the all spectacular beauty, it was a beautiful way to put as good a fullstop as there could possibly be on it all. Here’s the reviews from those shows, thank you for those special nights Bic and Jo…
And there was that Tim Smith tribute radio show Marina put together that was broadcast not long after his passing, a very carefully put together hour long broadcast on London’s Resonance 104.4fm and even if I do once again say so myself, it was a rather beautiful rather moving tribute. A tribute put together using lots of our personal live tapes and bits gathered from here and there along the way. A tribute and a piece of radio art made with all of Marina’s loving care and attention.
We hear there’s more Tim Smith musical sketches and unfinished pieces hanging about his studio for those who are in this new band now to pull together and take forward in some kind of way. I hope they do it with respect, it really would be good to see and hear Tim’s music played by many others. I thought the Smith and Drake Ensemble in Brighton were both extremely respectful and particularly wonderful. Cardiacs has (mostly) been a wonderful forty year distraction. There’s other things to get on with now, it was one hell of a forty year ride. Now to get that book out… (sw)
Also
ORGAN: A Cardiacs piece in three parts. Part One, exploring the album…
ORGAN: A Cardiacs piece in three parts. Part Two, exploring the album…
Post Script…
And one more thing. Through all that, all those forty years, I can’t really think of a single band who survived and lasted as long and who built such a massive network, such a big following who didn’t at one point or other have the machine behind them. Others might have got chewed up by machine, spat out and almost destroyed by the machine but for a while they all had that machine behind them buying them mainstream coverage, getting their videos out there, buying them onto tours, advertising budgets that insured press coverage, television and all those things that for a while resulted in a greater awareness of who they are. Every cult band ever had that music industry machine behind them at some point – Hawkwind, New Model Army, Killing Joke, The Fall, The Mission, Wolfsbane and hundreds more, all those fine fine much loved bands who now have loyal armies of followers, they all had the machine at one point and that’s how they got a large lump of that following (who then told others). Cardiacs, as well as being unique in terms of music are pretty much unique in terms of major bands who never ever enjoyed fifteen minutes of being pushed by the machine, it really really was all about the word of mouth and building it all one person at a time, about the people who wrote zines like The Stairway, Urban Guerilla, Earzone and many more, as well as the slightly bigger left field publications like the excellent House of Dolls or the short lived Lime Lizzard, about the promoters who weren’t just about making money, about people like Grob and Jenny at Sonic Pollution or the good people of Club Dog or the team at the Marquee, the people who ran places like the Fetcham Riverside or the Croydon Underground, about people like Mark Warmsley or James Stevens. There isn’t another band who built it all purely on word of mouth or the underground networks, on the devotion of their following and without that music industry machine. Unique.
THE ORGAN 
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