Inner Sleeve: Baron Mordant

23 Skidoo – Tearing Up The Plans EP (Fetish/Pineapple 1982)
Design by D Landin

The early 1980s had seen me make a sudden and unexpected move away from buying Slade ex-jukebox 7"s towards electronic music after randomly seeing Kraftwerk on the Computer World tour courtesy of my neighbours. From there I’d been fortunate that Godalming had seen a vinyl revolution at the Record Corner shop in Pound Lane due to Spot The Ball winner Ray Taylor. He’d lavished some of his winnings on a couple of Ducatis and a stake in the shop, which he had proceeded to fill with records by Whitehouse, The Pop Group and the like. Along with Portion Control, I had immediately taken to the blanched Industrial funk of 23 Skidoo, and Tearing Up The Plans embodied my somewhat naive teenage grasp of that ‘Industrial’ climate perfectly. The sleeve just begged to be stared at, so I did, and still do – I’m staring at it now.

I still feel that, despite the brilliance of the music, 23 Skidoo are almost incidental to the sleeve photo itself, and that they could probably be found ritually thrashing around in the nearby reverbdrenched medicine cupboard at the end of the photo’s corridor. It is also one of the last great ‘laminates’.

During the same period my mother was working in a mental institution in Chartham, Kent, called St Augustine’s, and wandering those dismal corridors for the first time became forever intertwined with the sleeve photo of my recent Industrial acquisition. Even over and above the general aesthetic of the photo and layout, the sleeve has a rare sense of atmosphere that I can only still relate to via St Augustine’s. Add to that the blinding incongruity of the tape cut-ups of the lead track “Just Like Everybody” and you have an instant Bayeux tapestry for mental health in the early 80s.

I’d witnessed a fair spectrum of behaviours at St Augustine’s during my sporadic visits – from persistent fag cadging to hammer attacks – so later down the line I began to give the mystery ‘fugueur’ sitting on the bench in the photo the various personas of the patients I’d meet. Occasionally he’d get discharged. The fact that he is permanently suspended in the glare of that phosphorescent flare means that he could still be alive, and I’ve never bothered to ruin my teenage vision of this sleeve by finding out exactly who he is/was and where the corridor might have been. Roehampton? Budapest? Was it a sinister war relic? A film still? Am I missing something? I’ve preferred to leave the scene suspended for my own augmentation and not have it ruined by a pedantic historian. Daniel Landin, formerly of the group Last Few Days, is credited with ‘design’, but the photograph remains a mystery to me. Its composition and lighting are simply stunning, and today I can only liken its atmosphere to a still from a film by Andrei Tarkovsky or Béla Tarr. The image has accompanied me for over 25 years and, along with the sounds contained within the grooves, still manages to occasionally appear in nightmares. Most of the time the figure simply gets up, shuffles off and exits the scene in silence. Other times he’ll look into the camera like some Lynchian cipher and proceed to piss himself laughing in pitched-up tones.

Circumstance and timing prevailed ominously in my introduction to this record. The music is haunting throughout: from the majestic tape collage of “Just Like Everybody” to what I assume is Fritz Catlin’s low slung alley cat drumming on “Gregouka” and “Tearing Up The Plans (Pt 1)”. Horns flail and recede in melancholic swathes and the production and overall sound seem aeons away from today’s overly compressed false floor. The record is a room-size remnant of my days semi-squatting in Bridge Street, Godalming. It has adorned most walls I’ve been hemmed in by at one time or another and refuses to leave the box despite numerous economic distillations. I’ve wandered down its corridor a few times under the influence, wondering if there was a sheer drop to a mise-en-Bosch through that doorway down on the right. According to my mother, Hawkwind’s Robert Calvert was admitted to St Augustine’s a few times, and I’ve even seen him perched on the bench swapping gags with the lone figure...

Baron Mordant is a member of Mordant Music.