Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 62

Record label: Polydor

Produced: Jimmy Bowien

Recorded: Polydor Studios, Koln, Germany; November 1965

Released: March 1966

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Gary Burger (g, v); Larry Clark (o); Dave Day (banjo); Roger Johnston (d); Eddie Shaw (b)

Track listing: Monk Time; Shut Up; Boys Are Boys And Girls Are Choice; Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy; I Hate You; Oh, How To Do Now; Complication; We Do Wie Du; Drunken Maria; Love Came Tumblin’ Down; Blast Off!; That’s My Girl

Running time: 29.46

Current CD: Repertoire US import

Further listening: Five Upstart Americans (1999) – sessions recorded before the album

Further reading: Black Monk Time (Thomas Edward Shaw and Anita Klemke, 1994); www.the-monks.com

Download: Not currently legally available

Intentional squalling feedback rattles the control room windows as Polydor’s genial producer struggles to protect Deutsche Gramophon’s delicate equipment from the uber-beat onslaught of The Monks. The Velvet Underground will be bending VU needles in a couple of years’ time, egos bolstered by their art-world credentials. But now, in 1965, The Monks and their nihilist German mentors are forcing the issue in the rarefied atmosphere of the recording studio.

A year or so before, The Monks were a group of ex-GIs called The 5 Torquays, playing to Hamburg teens and US airbase personnel, until an alchemical reaction of boredom, experiment and a pair of loopy existential visionaries called Walther and Karl brought about their miraculous transformation. Lovin’ Spoonful bowlcuts and Cuban heels gave way to shaved tonsures, black shirts and a bleakly realistic outlook. This was some of the hardest, most minimal and monochromatic rock’n’roll ever heard. Nobody in 1965 sang ferocious songs called things like I Hate You or Shut Up, stripped down to their fuzzed-up, screaming, percussive bones. Nowadays a lot of people do.

As bassist Eddie Shaw observes; ‘The Beastie Boys and Jello Biafra have said that our music had an effect on them. I really believe that music was evolving in this direction and we just stumbled across it early.’

The album was never released by Polydor in the US – ‘They insisted we tone our music down … or lose our contract’ – and The Monks disintegrated in a bitter flurry of impotent anger and disappointment. In retrospect, the album’s unique appeal lies in the collision of naiveté, rawness and the utter pre-punk impossibility of its existence. Even its completely black cover-design, looking more Joy Division than Yellow Submarine, sounded a jarring note at the very dawn of flower-pop. They performed live shows with The Kinks, The Troggs and The Creation, but even these hardened outfits rarely got close to their live sound in the studio. Monk music – primal proto-punk, demented nursery rhymes – is all pounding drums, fuzztone bass, clattering electric banjo, gothic organ and histrionic vocals. As Shaw maintains, ‘Walther and Karl believed in having our music recorded as we played it. Studios, at that time, were not equipped to record our kind of music.’ They wouldn’t be for some years to come.