Damp Jungle sees the light after 35 years!

mycareer

My beautiful non-career in music 1980-2015

Ironically just after drawing the ‘my music career’ daily doodle above came news of the release of my first ever recording..35 years to the day after we went into Street Level Studio in Ladbroke Grove!

Record Store Day had a box set of first ten Creation singles and an ORK N.Y, set too. Which got me reminiscing about the early 1980s then prompted by some Postcard Records nostalgia with Steve Roberts I remembered recording with Peter Astor as ‘Damp Jungle’ back in 1980. My first recording was as a pretty lousy drummer! Anyway seems this artefact is finally seeing the light of day:-)

Damp Jungle were

Peter Astor – Guitar Vocal
Adam Sutherland – Bass/ Vocal
Shaun Belcher – Drums and paint tins
Liz Ayres – african drums, tambourine and triangle and cowbell

We recorded four songs at Street Level Studios London because that was where Alternative T.V. recorded and Mark E. Smith took The Fall :-)

Kif Kif was engineer and I distinctly remember junkies on the stairs. Here a fabulous flyer from the time …

street

I had a child’s drum kit from a second hand shop padded out with paint tins!
Shame it wasn’t released as a single at the time..it all sounds good compared to early postcard releases:-) My favourite track is ‘Picture of a Girl’.

Inspired by Subway Sect, James Brown, A Certain Ratio, Richard Hell and Orange Juice….the sound of young London from 34 years ago!…and never before heard.

It seems that this lost artefact of the Sound of Young London is finally (34 years later) to get a release .

Will keep you posted if and when that happens :-)

Here meanwhile is an old cassette with what sounds to me like the original master complete with pre-song chat from Adam and Pete and three not two versions of Experience complete with dub echo:-)

This is what I looked like at the time and this the discovered cassette 🙂

 

hornsey damp

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