Plunder the Tombs: Southern Death Cult – Moya 12” (Situation Two

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Southern Death Cult – Moya 12” (Situation Two – 1982)

If the only aspect of The Cult you’re familiar with is as the famous hard rock stadium act churning out MTV crowd pleasers like “Love Removal Machine” (Beggars Banquet, 1987), this might be a good time to sit down, because you’re in for something of a shock. The Cult as we know them today is nothing at all like their original incarnation as Southern Death Cult.

The history of Southern Death Cult proper begins in 1981 with Ian Astbury joining an existant but dying punk band in Bradford known as Violation. He persuaded them to change their name to Southern Death Cult, the name both a Native American reference (an obsession of Astbury’s which would recur many times throughout his career) and also a nod to the disparity of power and influence between Southern and Northern halves of the UK.

The band toured with both Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate throughout 1982, providing them with massive exposure and coverage in the alternative media, rapidly becoming very big on the post punk scene despite lack of any significant amount of released material.

The Fatman 7" - Southern Death Cult cover art here demonstrating just

how thin the wall really was between punk and what would

become understood as early "Goth".

Indeed, during their brief existence, the band released just two teensy pieces of vinyl, The Fatman 7” and the Moya 12” (both on Beggars Banquet, 1982), and each containing both of the title tracks, although Moya includes a third song “The Girl”. Both are interesting, not only musically, in the sense that the listener can easily sense just how far the influence of this band would be felt, but also in their political commentary, an element that would become increasingly rare as Goth continued to develop as a genre.

Looking at the footage below, it becomes very obvious just how far removed Southern Death Cult were, both visually and musically from The Cult that we know today.

Southern Death Cult would disband after just 16 months in February 1983. The explanation for breaking up that “expectations were just way too high” has frankly never satisfied me, it seems a singularly silly reason to disband. The explanation that Ian felt the various elements of Southern Death Cult were “working against each other” seems rather more reasonable (Mercer, Gothic Rock, Pegasus Publishing, 1991).

Never fear though gentle reader! Astbury with his new partner in crime, Billy Duffy (formerly of The Nosebleeds, Lonesome No More, Slaughter and the Dogs and most importantly, Theatre of Hate) would soon form Death Cult. The rest of them go on to form Getting the Fear, and later the hugely underrated Into A Circle.

But Death Cult is a tale for another time…

Track Listing:

1. Moya

2. Fatman

3. The Girl

After the band’s break up, Beggars Banquet released a compilation of various material, clearly sparing no expense on the cover art.

There are several different versions of this out there, with quite different track listings. Only the later CD releases include “The Girl” though, so you know what to look for…

Line Up:

Ian Astbury (vocals, guitar), David Burrows AKA: Buzz (guitars) Aki Nawaz (drums), Barry Jepson (Bass).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Death_Cult

http://www.deathrock.com/southerndeathcult/main.html

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/southern-death-cult-p5487

2 comments:

tooyoungFebruary 27, 2011 at 10:22 AM
Worth mentioning that Billy Duffy was in Theatre of Hate as well. For me, SDC is kind of hit or miss. I adore Moya, Fatman, All Glory, and Apache. The Crypt is ok. The rest I don't listen to at all.
ReplyDelete
Replies
James Von SutekhFebruary 28, 2011 at 2:36 AM
Damn it! I knew there was one I'd forgotten!
Fixed!
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….