I miss swapping emails with the late Simon Morris. He was a fantastic source of noise scene gossip ((though he never spilled the beans on what William Bennett had told him about Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions – anyone got a Ouija board?)) and conspiracy theories so mental they had to be partly true. We also shared a mutual interest in parallel universes, alternate timelines, internet rabbit holes and the cinematic masterpiece Joker. A real shame he topped himself: he would have loved 2020-2021. Everything in that 24-month trash vortex – from COVID and ‘Cassie Compton’ to the 5G tower blade-runners and Raytheon BLM ads – would have been right up his street.
In one of our exchanges, he told me he was thinking of dating a Christian girl but was worried she might brainwash him. My opinion was he might as well go for it and see what happened: “Just don’t do a Steve Hall,” I cautioned. He got it straight away…but of course Simon knew who Steve Hall was.
79: STEVE HALL INVENTED JUNGLE OK
Steve Hall was a teenage delinquent from SE London. His first band was The Afflicted, who gained notoriety around London in 1979: not so much for their discordant music and ‘skinheads just woken up in a dustbin’ look but for the fact that two of their members – Glen Bennett and Nicky Crane – were prominent members of the British Movement. Given this, you’d probably expect The Afflicted to have pounded out thuggish, racist Oi! – but you’d be wrong. It was more of a chaotic psychedelia, oversaturated with wah-wah, fuzz and dubby FX. They were more like The Homosexuals or The Apostles, with lyrics like a cross between Combat 84 and Gong.
What’s that effect where you make a sort of ascending/descending swooping sound on a guitar or synth? You know…where it feels like the instrument is sliding up and down on a corrugated-iron see-saw? Is it a ring mod? (see why The Sound Projector deleted my CV?) No, that doesn’t have the ‘up and down’ bit. You can hear it on Screams Of Passion by The Family (the thing I'm talking about comes in at around 0.43):
Anyway, The Afflicted used this effect too on the B-side to their second 7”, Who Can Tell, only they went completely OTT with it, ‘til it sends the entire song into a vertiginous tailspin. Like the menacing Be Aware on the first 7” (nowhere on YT) it sounds like two different songs are playing at the same time in places. Oh, forgot to mention, another thing Steve Hall was notorious for – being completely off his fucking face:
Apparently, the empty space to the right of Steve was meant to be Nicky Crane’s mugshot but they dropped it after Crane was banged up for a racist attack in Woolwich. On some copies, Crane’s name’s been felt-tipped out of a xeroxed news clipping about the band’s forthcoming gigs
Hall found himself in a bit of a pickle: he hadn’t wanted a fanbase that was ‘flyin’ the phoenix’ but saw a small audience of far-right nutters as preferable to playing another gig to a vacuum. Or maybe he viewed his BM support as a temporary blip on the road to packing out Wembley. It didn’t work out and the band disintegrated, being way too ‘weird’/not-racist for yer average nazi but too tainted by their association with Bennett ‘n’ Crane to win a sympathetic ear at Sounds. Releasing a new 7" called Senseless Whale Slaughter didn’t seem to appease either side. Some might say Hall brought his ‘outsider’ status on himself. Either way, he rebranded as The Afflicted Man and knocked out two trashy (but now collectable) LPs, The Afflicted Man’s Musical Bag and I’m Off Me ‘Ead. I find this cosmic squat slop fascinating: feral head music for the few crumbling GLC tower blocks holding out against the wrecking ball.
Here’s Survival In The 80s, Hall’s morbid guide to staying alive in a world of shadowy squats, populated by skinhead mugger gangs who’d throw you head-first into a council bin for your last Tuinal, relayed over a repetitive sludge bassline that sounds like a depressed Steve Hanley pacing up and down in a secure unit. The lyrics sum up Hall’s mental state at the time. Sleeping with one eye open in rat-infested abandoned hospitals with no running water, facially tattooed schizo runaways for ‘housemates’ and the ever-present threat of a firebomb through what was left of the window can do that to a lad…especially if he’s lived on Kwiksave orange juice and speed for seven days:
The final Afflicted Man release was the colossal psych-fuzz squid Get Stoned Ezy. Dunno if I’ve told Dissensus this already, but I’ve never been one for weed. I once smoked a White Widow in Amsterdam– what a fiasco that was. I ended up hugging a Miss Pacman machine, watching the ghosts go round on a loop, entranced. WHY had NAMCO named three of the ghosts Blinky, Inky and Pinky – but the fourth one Sue?? What did it mean? “Martin, your eyes are totally red,” a disgusting voice cackled from the Moon. I tried to turn my head but couldn’t – Sue had me trapped in her electric maze of death. I’d forgotten how to speak. At 1.30am, I decided to cut my losses and spent the next three hours walking in circles around the city, looking for my hotel. I finally found it but then suddenly started worrying about plaque, so spent 90 minutes meticulously brushing my teeth until my gums bled. Then I checked my Nokia: it was 1.45 am. I didn’t want to lie down in case I got the bends, so I walked to a pub and stared into a bald bouncer’s dead eyes for an hour (a real hour this time)…
ANYWAY, my point is, even a non-stoner like me loses his shit when the solo on Get Stoned Ezy kicks in:
And then in 1983, Steve Hall formed a new band called The Accursed and completely knocked British youth culture off its axis. Yep– this was the year Steve Hall INVENTED JUNGLE.
Yeah, you read that right. I’m the only person on Dissensus who’ll give you the truth. Don’t tell me a pre-pubescent Shy FX wasn’t caning this to death after school. Don’t pretend DJ Rap wasn’t taking notes. Fuck the revisionists. Jungle Committee? I shit ‘em. Drum and bass was playing and the beer was open…back in ’83.
It’s a good album – but, when you’ve opened it with the world’s first ever jungle tune, how can the usual drugged-up punk shit satisfy? There’s some fun footage out there of The Accursed miming to this entire LP in someone’s flat: I especially like the bit where Hall leaves the room to put on a hazmat suit and gasmask while a faux-posh voice reads out a fake BBC report about a nuke strike on London, and then runs back in through the door for the song Nuclear War. If you thought Kevin Tomkins being upstaged by a milk float while expounding on the ‘right to kill’ was ‘80s VHS tape gold, this'll blow your mind. Nuclear waste/Is going up my arse indeed.
You know what's weird? Numerous times during that video performance, Hall really reminds me of Simon Morris.
A few years later, Hall was sent to prison. I don’t know what for, but something smack-related might be a good guess. Somewhere along the line, he found God and formed a new act, The Called, who I’ve never heard. There used to be some bullshit on dodgy punk forums about him dying in the early 2000s but he’s still around, playing charity gigs and doing prison ministries, and reminding people that there’s always Christ after drugs. Well, he was into Amen breaks before everyone else, so why not? Print this post off and staple it inside your copy of Energy Flash.
In one of our exchanges, he told me he was thinking of dating a Christian girl but was worried she might brainwash him. My opinion was he might as well go for it and see what happened: “Just don’t do a Steve Hall,” I cautioned. He got it straight away…but of course Simon knew who Steve Hall was.
79: STEVE HALL INVENTED JUNGLE OK
Steve Hall was a teenage delinquent from SE London. His first band was The Afflicted, who gained notoriety around London in 1979: not so much for their discordant music and ‘skinheads just woken up in a dustbin’ look but for the fact that two of their members – Glen Bennett and Nicky Crane – were prominent members of the British Movement. Given this, you’d probably expect The Afflicted to have pounded out thuggish, racist Oi! – but you’d be wrong. It was more of a chaotic psychedelia, oversaturated with wah-wah, fuzz and dubby FX. They were more like The Homosexuals or The Apostles, with lyrics like a cross between Combat 84 and Gong.
What’s that effect where you make a sort of ascending/descending swooping sound on a guitar or synth? You know…where it feels like the instrument is sliding up and down on a corrugated-iron see-saw? Is it a ring mod? (see why The Sound Projector deleted my CV?) No, that doesn’t have the ‘up and down’ bit. You can hear it on Screams Of Passion by The Family (the thing I'm talking about comes in at around 0.43):
Anyway, The Afflicted used this effect too on the B-side to their second 7”, Who Can Tell, only they went completely OTT with it, ‘til it sends the entire song into a vertiginous tailspin. Like the menacing Be Aware on the first 7” (nowhere on YT) it sounds like two different songs are playing at the same time in places. Oh, forgot to mention, another thing Steve Hall was notorious for – being completely off his fucking face:
Apparently, the empty space to the right of Steve was meant to be Nicky Crane’s mugshot but they dropped it after Crane was banged up for a racist attack in Woolwich. On some copies, Crane’s name’s been felt-tipped out of a xeroxed news clipping about the band’s forthcoming gigs
Hall found himself in a bit of a pickle: he hadn’t wanted a fanbase that was ‘flyin’ the phoenix’ but saw a small audience of far-right nutters as preferable to playing another gig to a vacuum. Or maybe he viewed his BM support as a temporary blip on the road to packing out Wembley. It didn’t work out and the band disintegrated, being way too ‘weird’/not-racist for yer average nazi but too tainted by their association with Bennett ‘n’ Crane to win a sympathetic ear at Sounds. Releasing a new 7" called Senseless Whale Slaughter didn’t seem to appease either side. Some might say Hall brought his ‘outsider’ status on himself. Either way, he rebranded as The Afflicted Man and knocked out two trashy (but now collectable) LPs, The Afflicted Man’s Musical Bag and I’m Off Me ‘Ead. I find this cosmic squat slop fascinating: feral head music for the few crumbling GLC tower blocks holding out against the wrecking ball.
Here’s Survival In The 80s, Hall’s morbid guide to staying alive in a world of shadowy squats, populated by skinhead mugger gangs who’d throw you head-first into a council bin for your last Tuinal, relayed over a repetitive sludge bassline that sounds like a depressed Steve Hanley pacing up and down in a secure unit. The lyrics sum up Hall’s mental state at the time. Sleeping with one eye open in rat-infested abandoned hospitals with no running water, facially tattooed schizo runaways for ‘housemates’ and the ever-present threat of a firebomb through what was left of the window can do that to a lad…especially if he’s lived on Kwiksave orange juice and speed for seven days:
The final Afflicted Man release was the colossal psych-fuzz squid Get Stoned Ezy. Dunno if I’ve told Dissensus this already, but I’ve never been one for weed. I once smoked a White Widow in Amsterdam– what a fiasco that was. I ended up hugging a Miss Pacman machine, watching the ghosts go round on a loop, entranced. WHY had NAMCO named three of the ghosts Blinky, Inky and Pinky – but the fourth one Sue?? What did it mean? “Martin, your eyes are totally red,” a disgusting voice cackled from the Moon. I tried to turn my head but couldn’t – Sue had me trapped in her electric maze of death. I’d forgotten how to speak. At 1.30am, I decided to cut my losses and spent the next three hours walking in circles around the city, looking for my hotel. I finally found it but then suddenly started worrying about plaque, so spent 90 minutes meticulously brushing my teeth until my gums bled. Then I checked my Nokia: it was 1.45 am. I didn’t want to lie down in case I got the bends, so I walked to a pub and stared into a bald bouncer’s dead eyes for an hour (a real hour this time)…
ANYWAY, my point is, even a non-stoner like me loses his shit when the solo on Get Stoned Ezy kicks in:
And then in 1983, Steve Hall formed a new band called The Accursed and completely knocked British youth culture off its axis. Yep– this was the year Steve Hall INVENTED JUNGLE.
Yeah, you read that right. I’m the only person on Dissensus who’ll give you the truth. Don’t tell me a pre-pubescent Shy FX wasn’t caning this to death after school. Don’t pretend DJ Rap wasn’t taking notes. Fuck the revisionists. Jungle Committee? I shit ‘em. Drum and bass was playing and the beer was open…back in ’83.
It’s a good album – but, when you’ve opened it with the world’s first ever jungle tune, how can the usual drugged-up punk shit satisfy? There’s some fun footage out there of The Accursed miming to this entire LP in someone’s flat: I especially like the bit where Hall leaves the room to put on a hazmat suit and gasmask while a faux-posh voice reads out a fake BBC report about a nuke strike on London, and then runs back in through the door for the song Nuclear War. If you thought Kevin Tomkins being upstaged by a milk float while expounding on the ‘right to kill’ was ‘80s VHS tape gold, this'll blow your mind. Nuclear waste/Is going up my arse indeed.
You know what's weird? Numerous times during that video performance, Hall really reminds me of Simon Morris.
A few years later, Hall was sent to prison. I don’t know what for, but something smack-related might be a good guess. Somewhere along the line, he found God and formed a new act, The Called, who I’ve never heard. There used to be some bullshit on dodgy punk forums about him dying in the early 2000s but he’s still around, playing charity gigs and doing prison ministries, and reminding people that there’s always Christ after drugs. Well, he was into Amen breaks before everyone else, so why not? Print this post off and staple it inside your copy of Energy Flash.
