The Gods Hate Kansas

The Batfish Boys’ debut album, The Gods Hate Kansas, was less Denbigh’s dark night of the soul than it was a cider and speed-fuelled descent into comic-book madness. Occupying the rarely visited place where Creedence-meets-the-Sisters, …Kansas was populated with bizarre characters that could have come from the fevered snake-bitten imagination of Carson McCullers. Imagine Captain Beefheart at the wheel of Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, careering through the Louisiana swampland loaded on cheap whiz and moonshine, and you’re halfway there.

“The first Batfish Boys album I can’t even remember making it,” says Denbigh. “I wrote it and recorded it in a week and then the, um, stimulants ran out and we spent two days mic-ing up a snare drum in a toilet going DOOSH DOOSH! ‘What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Is there any more…’ ‘No.’ DOOSH DOOSH!

“And now I listen back and I think: ‘This is fucking brilliant. If I was going to make an album, it’d be just like this. Oh, hang on – I did.’ But it was like a stream of consciousness thing.”

“I got the name from a book in a bargain-bin on the way to the studio. The USS Batfish was an American submarine that just lurked around for most of the war, getting bombed and strafed most of the time by its own forces, and then sank two or three Japanese submarines in a day. And that was all it did, the entire war.”

By Scott Rowley March 27, 2014

Ripped by someone, a long time ago, from the vinyl album (as there’s no sign of this ever being properly digitised) to MP3 @ 320kbps

The Batfish Boys; The Gods Hate Kansas

A1.  Real Rough Dude

A2.  The Tumbleweed Thing

A3.  Killer Sub

A4.  Mrs Triffid

A5.  Swamp Liquor

B1.  Chronopolis

B2.  Lootenant Lush

B3.  The Birth Of Rock And Roll

B4.  Garth Rides Out

B5.  Hot Guns