Southwark Mental Health News 127
w/ Continuity Mad Pride v/a CD. 1000 copies
Made with the help of a £750 grant from the South London & Maudsley Trustees ‘Smile’ fund this Continuity Mad Pride various artists CD defied all my expectations and turned out to be actually rather good. In a ‘all the way through good’. Well most of it anyway. I’ve had these Mad Pride CD’s through my hands before and I don’t remember the others being as … um ... cohesive. Perhaps time has erased some of my grey blobs of remembrance but nope I don’t think I was as royally entertained by Continuity Mad Pride as I was with the others.
I played it through twice while making comments to myself along the lines of of well whodathunkit, theres me liking a UNIT track [mainly because it had a William Burroughs sample on it], and there’s Hiroshima Yeah! zines head cheese Mark Ritchie hovering between greatness and busker like someone doing a bad Leonard Cohen cover but it actually sounding better than Laughing Len himself. His voice has that really sad ache to it that gets you right there. There. And there’s Jim MacDougall who was last seen being arrested somewhere no doubt, probably for popping bank windows or somesuch and Fes Parker [R.I.P.] with a rollicking The History. Of course I don’t know who half of these people are but what struck me was the way they’d created sounds that went down my earhole and reached my brain without me having to make pained expressions of the kind that has one side of my mouth going higher than the other making one eye shut in a grimace.
And then the CD refused to play. No doubt some Mad Pride hidden agenda designed to turn you in to frothy mouthed UKIP voter. I played it on my PC and the third time I inserted it into its slot the little pointy thing just went down all the tracks in split second and stopped. So I took it out and rubbed it on my sleeve and put it back in but no, it was no more. But I do remember being held in thrall by The Ceramic Hobs ‘33 Trapped Chilean Miners’. A single from last year that I'm most familiar with and is without doubt the track that has the biggest ‘what the fuck’ factor. That the Hobs continue to record such remarkable rock churn with little in the way of recognition remains one of life’s mysteries. We live in hope.
Of the rest I’m relying on memory. It seemed to get spacier as it went along of that there is no doubt, was the last track by Esther Leslie a poetry reading as given to a Dada inspired parp band? I think it may have been. The Astronauts rocked it. Thank you Mr Astronaut. Alternative TV. You know about them. And DJ Unfit For Work. Come on down your time is nigh.
Southwark Mental Health News itself is an A4 paper zine of sorts containing lots of information as regarding drop in centers, gigs, marches, help groups and the dodgy Braham Kumaris pseudo religious cult who believe that the world is going to end soon [now theres a surprise] and that only India will be left standing [yawn], theres a cartoon strip about Raffy the psychiatric Labrador, a lengthy piece entitled Capitalism Is Bad For Your Health by Robert Dellar, a small review section and an appreciation of Nikki Sudden, some poems, thats about it. The only thing I cant tell you is how to get hold of a copy seeing as how these are given away to the artists and those members of the Southwark Association for Mental Health. You could try their website.
Southwark Mental health
Or their FB page
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