The Batfish Boys

Out of Leeds comes a throng of rock bands whose music is as dark and twisted as the times they’re living in: The Sisters Of Mercy, The Three Johns, Mekons, Gang Of Four, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry and Si Denbigh’s similarly drum machine-driven March Violets. They’re largely forgotten now, but in their time the Violets get music-press front covers, record sessions for John Peel and Janice Long, and release a succession of 12-inch singles, the best of which (Snake Dance and Walk Into The Sun) deserve to stand shoulder to shoulder with She Sells Sanctuary, Bela Lugosi’s Dead and Alice as classics of the time.

For Denbigh it ended as quickly as it began with him being fired from the Violets and falling into The Batfish Boys. They’re a Goth swamp-rock band with inspired and unhinged lyrics that mutated into a deranged hard rock outfit, pre-dating Zodiac Mindwarp and the ‘grebo’ movement that briefly brought hairy-arsed rock into the indie charts. But while acts like Pop Will Eat Itself went for laddish comedy, Denbigh favoured genuinely clever word-play and comedy of the dark and demented kind. Never hip, never embracing the Goth or the grebo tags the press tried to put on them (“I had lived in Norfolk for a bit and there a grebo was a greasy knobhead who pretended to have a motorbike but didn’t. They had a helmet. And were a helmet…”), The Batfish Boys ploughed their own furrow, signing with Motorhead’s label GWR, touring with UFO, before falling into the deep ‘where-are-they-now?’ wormhole of 80s alternative rock. The Batfish Boys are a perfect example of the great unwashed and un-hip acts that other magazines refuse to remember because they’re too busy trying to rewrite the past. Weirdly, it has fallen to the likes of Classic Rock magazine to remember these acts: the Goths, psychobillies and sleaze rockers that populated the 80s.

What we have here are the first two Batfish Boys 12” singles released on their own Batfish Incorporated label. Both are ripped to MP3 @ 320kbps

The Batfish Boys; Swamp Liquor 12”

 

A.     Swamp Liquor

B1.  Hound Of Death

B2.  Hot Guns (Long Barrelled Version)

Crocodile Tears 12”

A1.  Not Enough Blue

A2.  Are You Gonna Be There (At The Love In)

B1.  Detroit Chrome Mountain

B2.  Peacock Machinery

You can find The Gods Hate Kansas in all its glory here