Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Catholic Discipline!

The X footage from Decline of Western Civilization I posted a while back got me thinking about this band. The soundtrack to this film was one of my first punk rock music purchases. I had heard of almost every other band on it ,but not these guys. I fucking loved this song and all the great sound bites of French ex-patriate frontman Claude (Kickboy Face) Bessy tearing everyone from new wavers to his own fans a new one! Claude co-founded Slash magazine/records which was probably the first west coast punk rag/label and was responsible for recording and releasing the debuts of bands like X, Fear, The Germs and many other greats from that era.Unfortunately he never got around to getting his own band in the studio so we are only left with this track from the movie and a few live bootlegs.A shame because they were a  spectacular document of the early California punk scene when originality and experimentation was encouraged and before "hardcore" came in and regimented everything to the same look and sound. Claude moved to England in the early eighties (apparently despondent over the election of Reagan) where he worked for the infamous Factory records in Manchester before relocating to Barcelona where he died of lung cancer in1999.

2 comments:

  1. Every time you post stuff like this I end up flooding facebook with a ton of youtube videos of all the cool old stuff I used to listen too ;-) Oh well, gotta try to relive our youth somehow

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