Plunder the Tombs: Anorexic Dread – Tracy’s Burning 12” (Criminal Damage, 1984)

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Anorexic Dread – Tracy’s Burning 12” (Criminal Damage, 1984)

Falling somewhere in the gap between Alien Sex Fiend and a slo-mo version of The Cramps, the short-lived Anorexic Dread appeared out of DanielleDax’s hometown of Southend, Essex in 1983, lasting until just 1985. Perhaps best described as a kind of Horror-Punk / Psychobilly outfit, other obvious influences included The Birthday Party and Killing Joke. If they’d been American, it’s a fair bet that Anorexic Dread almost certainly would have come under the Deathrock tag. Frontman Phil Black was quick to belie the band’s morbid image however, stating

“..we go onstage and have just as much of a lunatic time leaping around. We don’t take what we do seriously. We go onstage to enjoy ourselves and we invariably do.”

The Tracy’s Burning 12” recorded at Diploma Studios represents Anorexic Dread’s sole contribution to vinyl. Interestingly, while discogs.com lists only one version of the 12”, variations of the cover art appear to exist, with the band’s logo sometimes appearing top left, and sometimes in the top right. The variant album cover can be seen on the deathrock.com link below.

Side A of the 12” begins with the epic nine minutes plus title track “Tracy’s Burning” and its conclusion “Epitaph” while side B graces us with the much more Psycobillyesque “Tick Tock”. I must confess, that this didn’t do much for me on initial hearing, but it does grow on repeated listenings, actually becoming kind of endearing. And here for your listening pleasure:

Tracy’s Burning / Epitaph

Tick Tock

The band played quite a few venues around Essex including The Pink Toothbrush /Crocs (Don’t bother Googling “Crocs” – you’ll just end up with links to a lot of sites selling some spectacularly unattractive excuses for what passes as “shoes”). They also played The Batcave in London on at least one occasion, and managed to wrangle a support gig with Alien Sex Fiend, a coupling I imagine would have worked perfectly for them.

This live picture purports to have been taken at Crocs, but

the source who was nice enough to point me in its direction disputes this.

Things didn’t last too long after the 12” however, with Anorexic Dread’s guitarist going walkabout as a roadie for The Cure. A new line-up did record a demo “Dark Night in London”, apparently in a more straight forward rock direction, but the band seems to have dissolved soon after. Other songs are documented to exist including “She’s Beautiful and She’s Mine”, “Dragnet” and “Limelight”, but as far as I can tell, none were ever formally released.

There’s a common misconception, especially amongst newer musical collectors of subgenres that “obscurity” somehow equates with “credibility”. In reality, some bands remained obscure because they weren’t in existence long enough to make a real impact, some because they never got the breaks, some because they were so left of field as to never catch on, and quite a lot who remained obscure because they simply weren’t that good. In the case of Anorexic Dread, I suspect that this is very much a matter of personal taste, but I do think it worth more than just one listen before making your mind up.

Track Listing:

Tracy’s Burning / Epitaph
Tick Tock

Line Up:

Phil Black (vocals), Leonard Finch (AKA: Leonardo de Finchie) (guitar), Magoo (keyboards), Donald Frame (drums)

http://www.deathrock.com/anorexicdread/

http://www.southendpunk.com/html/anorexic.html

http://www.discogs.com/Anorexic-Dread-Traceys-Burning/release/970200

2 comments:

AnonymousJanuary 11, 2012 at 6:45 AM
Definitely not Croc's.
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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….