Smell & Quim; An interview with Simon Morris, Stewart Walden and Kate Fear.

About three or four years ago Steve Underwood asked me to interview every past and present member of Smell & Quim with an eye to a future article for As Loud As Possible. I readily agreed, with hindsight not realising the enormity of the task ahead of me. After I'd attempted to interview Neil Campbell and Paul Walsh in a busy Friday night pub in Mirfield I realised my task was even more futile. What I did manage to get down was a few questions thrown at the following people who happened to be in the Duck & Drake on the afternoon of a gig at the WC by Ramleh. 


SM = Simon Morris

SW = Stewart Walden

KF = Kate Fear

IF = Idwal Fisher




SM: Stewart do you remember the list of twenty things you were given to do?

SW: I was given a list of twenty things to do and a twenty sided dice.

SM: ‘Kiss the girls and make them cry’ was one of them. You picked me up and forcibly removed my clothes at the front of the crowd next to Cath O’Connor and I was really insisting on keeping my pants on and I suddenly realised hang on I’m being stripped I suppose this means I’m in the band now?

SW: A few of those twenty things I didn't do ... waltz with Diz I didn't do, masturbate into blancmange I didn't do and call the police I didn't do. I did go to the upstairs bar, and remember I was dressed in a leotard with a banana down the front, and there were all these people there who didn't give a shit about the music and the gig I shouted ‘Call the police’.

IF: Simon, where did you meet Dave?

SM: I’d met Neil Campbell already, at a gig, we were both on Pumf Records and I’d had some contact with Stewart when he was doing Swank. I remember getting the first A Band single, we were swapping tapes,  I was sending Stewart, Neil and Mike Con-Dom tapes. I remember having Dave pointed out to me ‘thats the guy from Smell & Quim’. There was a Skullflower gig, an amazing gig with only about 30 people there, the Termite Club about 1994/95, it was a wonderful night and lots of people seemed to meet each other.

SW: That's where I remember meeting you for the first time ... at that gig.

SM: We were talking on the way over ... the era of 90’s Smell & Quim very much had an overlap with the end of the A Band ... so there was a number of people involved in the A Band who ended up in Smell & Quim, Sticky Foster was involved in a number of 90’s Smell & Quim performances. There's the one with the rectal thermometer.

SW: It was a turkey thermometer. I tried to stick it up his arse but I think I missed and he yelped.

SM: I remember you handing it to Shack and Shack licked it. Shack wasn’t in Smell & Quim at the time, Stewart pulled out this rectal thermometer ... Shack was dressed as a dentist ... he was just in the audience, not a member of the band and he licked it. it was kind of gross.

IF: It was a big social thing as well around that time wasn’t it? Especially around Sowerby Bridge. Were you there at Sowerby Bridge? I suppose there was lots of drinking going on?

SM: Yeah, Diz and Sandy were there.

SW: Lots of ideas that came to nothing.

SM: Paul [Harrison] remembered you [SW] knocking on the door at Sowerby Bridge after a row with your ex and saying you’d been sleeping in bushes. Paul was like ‘oh bloody hell’. The Sowerby Bridge scene … Ivy Cottage where Shack and Holly lived. They were very interesting flats those where Diz, Sandy, Paul and Nandi lived. It was like a William Burroughs Interzone thing with these tunnels, weird architecture and staircases.

SW: The flats were at the top of the street and you walked between these tunnels between the houses and suddenly it falls off and you have to walk down these stairs.

SM: Strange houses and the amount of drink and substances around, insane art.

SW: Sandy and Diz between them ... amazing people. Didn’t Shack have a recording studio in Sandy’s basement?

SM: Yeah, yeah.

SW: I only went down there once but to find these people who were doing this kind of thing was amazing. Supremely generous people too.

SM: Your last gig was the Citizen Fish gig wasn't it?

SW: Yes, Neil gave me a ten pound budget for props so I went to the fish market and bought three fish with it. For that gig we were all meant to dress up as rock stars.

SM: I was Jim Morrison but I didn't have any leather trouser so I used black bin liners.

SW: This was the one where Neil was Jimi Hendrix with the black curly wig and sun glasses and he injured his back and couldn't move at the time so he’s just sat in a chair in front of a table with a tape deck. I took a fish and put it down the front of his shirt knowing that he couldn't get away or get out of it ... so Neil’s sat there with a black curly wig, dark glasses, tape deck turntable with this fish tail sticking out the top of his shirt.

SM: My memory of that gig is the reaction of the anarchist vegan guy who was shouting ‘fish is murder’ and he actually came up to me outside the gig and said to me ‘I know you’re going to call me a fucking hypocrite cause I’m wearing leather shoes but I’ve had these shoes a long time. Sorry mate but a fish is just the same as a cow’.

SW: I threw one of the fish into the audience and all these hardcore vegans were jumping out of the way and this one guy picked it up and he said ‘Its OK I used to be a fishmonger, I can handle it’. After the gig I hid the largest fish inside Citizen Fish’s bass drum and I hope they didn't find it until they were in the van on the way home.

IF: Those 1 in 12 [Bradford] gigs were truly inspiring.

SM: Do you remember the one where we had a break dancer? Sandy had met him in the mental hospital. He was called Paddy. He had no idea what he was doing he was just break dancing in the middle of the floor to noise music. That was also the night of the mystery electrician. He was in the upstairs bar and we became paranoid because we thought there's no way he can be here just to mend the fuse boxes all night and we became convinced that he was involved in surveillance. Which years later might have been true because they had a lot of trouble with fascists there. There's something on Stephen Hawkins Butt Plug where you can hear ‘Hello mystery electrician’. People still talk about the mystery electrician.      

IF: Tell me about the Belgian gig

SM: The Belgian gig was wonderful. The promoter thought Smell & Quim were a duo and he had fifteen people turning up on his doorstep. We were all over his house, in the kitchen, in the attic, everywhere.  He was very nice but he made the mistake of giving us free drinks, too many it seemed, unlimited, and it was all this ridiculous 8% dark beer and we were playing at three in the morning. Paul Harrison had made all these preparations, oh I’m going to do a bit of synth or tape noise or whatever, it was about an hour before we were due to come on and the red mist came down and by the time we got on stage he could barely stand up and he just threw bottles at the crowd. Because it was a day trip to Belgium there was lots of other people doing one off performances. Andy Bolus from Evil Moisture, he got Lisa from Prick Decay to fist him with a rubber glove on, she got a couple of fingers in. Eva Revox and Julian Bercourt from this French label were there and his girlfriend was Japanese and she spoke very little English ... she was just talking about Smell & Quim over the top of it. And there was the Shite Girls which was sort of a Smell & Quim spin off. There was Holly, Kirsty, and Sandy and Nandi, they were in potato sacks. Diz had this sprinkler attached to his trousers as if piss was spurting out. I had some potatoes down my underpants, I’d had these potatoes in the dark for about six weeks and they had long tubers growing out of them and I’d pull these tubers off one by one and then throw the potato at some poor Belgian ... some noise guy got on stage and started trashing everything. Dave got a telling off from the venue people and they were saying ‘we’ve had skinhead bands here, we’ve had punk bands here but never this’.  It was a bit pathetic because there wasn’t really any damage. It was just a bit wild.

SW: And then four years ago when we went back to Holland with the new Smell & Quim line up this guy turned up and he said ‘I was at the Belgium gig!’

SM: What are your memories of Paris?

SW: The Paris gig was October ‘95 and a friend of ours called Sue wanted to go to the gig and she didn’t want to go on her own so she paid for me to fly over and we didn’t tell anyone. The Paris gig was great. Nobody was expecting us of course. Neil was there, Sticky was there the whole entourage as Smell & Quim was in those days and we turned up unannounced and it was terrific fun. I wore a stripy skirt with a strobe light inside the skirt.

IF: Its important to know what you’re wearing in Smell & Quim.

SW: Well you had to have a costume. A costume was everything. The Elvis suits, the Leiderhosen.

IF: Didn’t you turn up for the aborted Smell & Quim gig at No Trend wearing a silver lamé suit?

SW: It was a gold lamé suit actually. Dave couldn’t make it. Steve [Underwood] who organised the gig said I could do a solo set if I wanted so I set up to prepare to do it and all I had was the props I’d brought with me which was an ironing board and twenty wooden spoons.

IF: You must have cut rather a dash walking through London looking like that.

SW: I was relying on other stuff being there but I did put the wooden spoons in the ironing board frame in the toilet as a sound check and Carl, one of the A Band people who’d arrived during this time ... his first experience of me at all is of a bloke in a gold suit making a load of banging noise and saying ‘OK I’ve done the sound check’. As it happened the venue was flooded and there was a lot of delays and I didn't get to play so I said let the people who’ve come from afar play instead of me. That was in 2006 so the Smell & Quim comeback proper didn't happen until a year later which was the time when we got the entire festival thrown out because they’d chosen to put us on first.

IF: The Deaf Forever festival in Leeds.

SW: Thats the one. Phil and Mel put a lot of work into that, they got people coming from all over, one person was coming from Belgium and hadn’t even arrived by the time it was all over. This was pretty much all the fault of Mr Gillham who’d brought along a pigs head and a machete. A bad combination.

IF: And lets not forget this was at a venue not 200 yards away from a mosque.

SW: Yeah, yeah. But it was fun. It was a brilliant set.

IF: I was there and I saw the two people who complained about the performance. They were sat next to me and they shot back upstairs, two minutes later the landlord came down and that was that.

SW: All I did was go round with the mouthwash. I’d got given five bottles of mouthwash so I got some labels made with Smell & Quim pigs on them, stuck em on and people wouldn’t believe it really wasn’t mouthwash. And there was some raw sausages. It was very much a pork theme that night. And people didn’t want to touch them so I put one on somebodies knee ... ‘have a raw sausage’. In the meantime, behind my back Gillham was doing somersaults with a machete and attacking this pigs head.    
   
SM: I had a pigs mask on and couldn’t see a damned thing and narrowly avoided the machete on a couple of occasions. It was quite scary.

IF: He was pushing the pigs eyeballs back into its head which was quite gruesome.

SW: The landlord complained about people trying to set fire to the pigs head and it was just two matches in its nostrils. I was pouring mouthwash on it just for weirdness sake. But that was a great gig too especially afterwards when we sat around a table in the bar upstairs being glared at by everyone else in the room.

SM: Kate, tell us how you first met Dave.

KF: I first met Dave at a gig and he was crashed out. Volcano The Bear were playing and I’d fallen asleep pissed ...

IF: That was the Termite gig in that mill complex on the outskirts of Leeds that nobody could find. There was a solo French artist on that night ‘Nocturne’ ...

SM: Who Dave didn’t take too kindly to.

IF: About halfway through this hour long synth barrage which was like Jean Michelle Jarre only ten times more boring, Dave went up to him and shouted in his face ‘You’re dying a fucking death mate’.

SM: The thing with Smell & Quim is that Dave’s a catalyst that makes things happen for a lot of people. I remember one gig where I didn’t even see Dave ... this is the last time Sticky played. The one with the breakdancer. Dave would have been around there somewhere but I didn’t see him for the whole gig. The whole craziness of Smell & Quim, it whips your brain in to a frenzy. Shack and Holly they got hold of this rave DJ ... we got this gig in Middlesborough and it just turned in to dance music basically, Dave and Shack and Holly were all on cocaine and this rave DJ’s just going bump, bump, bump. It was basically a rave gig. Dave had been drinking all weekend and he said ‘for our next gig we all have to learn martial arts and karate and what we’re going to do is go out and mug all the crowd and leave the venue with the music playing and all the punters on the floor’ … I think he was worried we weren’t going to get paid.

SW: I think the main strength of Dave is that he assembles all these nutters around him for them to do the crazy stuff. Whether it be dealing with haircuts or me screaming into someones groin, as I did in Holland.

SM: That was great. Groin shouting in Holland.

SW: If you can imagine this ... there was about thirty people there and I approached each one of them, who were ninety percent blokes, grabbed them by the hips, I was on my knees, face into the groin and shout. So you’ve got this vibration, this feeling of it, the vibration and the heat, with the noise. You’d probably not hear the shouting.

SM: Its almost like aural pleasure in a way isn’t it? You gave aural pleasure to a number of men.

SW: The important thing to remember is that it was a penis festival. I might have been the only person at the festival who did something penis related.

SM: They all got naked.

SW: Getting naked is normal for the likes of us.

SM: That was the last gig at Hondenkoekjes. His missus had had enough ... Marc from the FCKN BSTRDS ... we drank the place dry and I think it was the last straw for his missus.

KF: I had a mallet and people were throwing things and I was knocking them back and one of them was a bottle and I just whacked it and they were saying that could have gone in my eye...

SM: And they were saying oh its not too bad we had Whitehouse here and they were throwing glasses too. 

IF: Do you think its just as well Smell & Quim have never toured America.

SW: Still might happen.

SM: We’ve still not seen this new album [Lavatory]. Have you seen the pictures? Me and Dave are naked and Kate’s naked, Gillham and Stewart didn’t get their photos in.  

SM: I’ve no idea how Dave puts Smell & Quim records together. I’m just a bit part player really.

SW: I haven’t contributed recently. I haven’t physically, actively done stuff since four years ago here in Leeds where we did ‘In The Brown Girls Ring’. In Holland we had about thirty people all doing the ring-a-ring-a-rosie thing and here in Leeds they weren’t up for it.

SM: Gillham was off his fucking bonce on speed and ecstasy.

IF: He cut his hand didn’t he?

SM: He cut his hand and wrote ‘Smell & Quim’ in the blood on the drum. The guy who owned the drums wasn’t happy.

SW: Me and Kate were going round the audience body searching people ... simultaneously .. each person had four hands on them at the same time. 

SM: I suppose I must have done a maximum of ten Smell & Quim gigs since the one where you started off by stripping me. For a while in the mid nineties it was whoever turned up and now Dave says that this line up is the classic line up.

SW: The reason this lineup is so great is Michael Gillham

SM: Michael is wonderful.

SW: Michael is ‘it’.

IF: You haven’t told us how you mate Dave

SW: I met Dave because in 1992 … in 1992 me and Neil had been making music with various bands and Neil had the Jesus Christ LP and he played it to me and I looked at him and said whats this weird shit? So one day Neil says to me you know that band with the Jesus Christ album well they’re playing a gig. So we went along to the gig. It was at the Duchess of York [now defunct Leeds pub/venue]. We went along and we were in the audience with a couple of mates and we taped the gig. Who are these weird guys? Both of them fell on their backs drunk several times during the set. I mean literally on their back with their legs in the air, off their faces, a lot of vodka drunk, even then they had the bucket shaker thing, fabulous stuff with the vibrating going on. They were great. On the ‘Christmas Album’ they released the recording of that, their first gig and its the recording that me and Neil made and you can hear me and Dave and Jimmy and Sue talking all over it. Neil had been writing to Dave and he went up afterwards and he said ‘Hi I’m Neil from Sheffield I wrote to you’ and Dave was so drunk he just went ‘uuuuuur’ and Neil’s trying to make conversation and Dave’s so drunk all he can do is go ‘uuuuuur’. After the gig they were just sat on the edge of the stage looking like a morose Laurel and Hardy.

IF: I’m trying to find out some further information on this gig. I believe Mike Dando was on the bill. There was Smell & Quim, Con-Dom, Haters and Techno Animal.

SW: Thats right yeah.  The next Smell & Quim involvement for me was in 94 with ‘Whats Your Health Problem’.

SM: Oh, the phone box.

SW: That's right the phone box. Paul had left by then so it was just Dave and he was trying to get people to contribute and we had some lyrics that Stream Angel had written ...

SM: … Manchester Woman.       

SW: Manchester Woman, yeah, that's right. So we’re in this phone box in Sheffield shouting our heads off down the phone and Dave recorded the whole thing and I think its track five on the album.

SM: It sounds like some loonies shouting.

SW: But we were some loonies shouting. In fact that's all we’ve ever been. Some Loonies shouting. A good way to get a recording is to go in to a launderette, preferably a 24 hour one so you can go when nobody else is using it, put a load of money in all the machines but also stack on top of the machines a load of bottles, glasses and stuff so that when the machines go in to the spin cycle you don’t just get the sound of the bottles but of the machines too. 

IF: Didn’t Diz collect sardine tins?

SW: Jeff Nuttall wrote a book about performance art and there's a picture of Diz in it wearing the sardine tin necklace.

SM: Its on the cover isn’t it?

SW: There's a whole history of Diz that none of us knows about.

SM: He once got Lol Coxhill to play at a Smell & Quim gig in London.


SW: Holly got Smell & Quim to play her 21st Birthday party. She booked this room at this really posh hotel in Halifax.

IF: Didn’t she book them in as a jazz band?

SW: Smell & Quim were still Dave and Paul Harrison at this time and they were wearing the Elvis suits with the robot heads. I made myself a costume out of a fishnet curtain and wore nothing else. I used to go into the audience at that time and I’d made some blue popcorn that was brown sauce and garlic flavored which I was offering out. I don’t know what they did but Dave and Paul managed to set off the smoke alarms. I think there was smoke coming out of the robot heads. And the fire alarm went off and the place had to be evacuated but Paul and Dave hadn’t realised because they couldn’t hear the alarm. The manager called the fire brigade and the building was evacuated. So we’re all out in the street including me in my fishnet thingy and the fire brigade arrive and Holly knew one of them so she’s having a chat ... meanwhile back in the room Dave and Paul are still playing, they’ve got these robot heads on and cant see a fucking thing, they had light bulbs where the eyes are. All the noise and the smoke machine’s going and the first they knew was when the manager pulled the power and everything stopped. They wonder what the fuck was happening so they take off the robot heads and the rooms empty except for the manager and the chief of the fire brigade.

IF: Who where the two who played in Smell & Quim at the first Vibracathedral Orchestra gig at the Yazen-I-Kylo [Leeds].

SM: That was Steve Massey from the Hobs [Ceramic Hobs], who’s spent 11 years in nuthouses now, on guitar, Paul Harrison on bass and I think I had a tape player going ‘one, two, three, four’, and it was a really bad gig in that we were all dispirited thinking this is terrible.  Apart from when Dave was doing stuff with Steve Fricker ... there were a couple of gigs that were billed as Smell & Quim and Onomatopoeia [Fricker’s project].

IF: One of those was the Scruffy Murphy gig in Birmingham wasn’t it? That involved a fish too.

SM: Yeah, the landlord refused to sell any more beer. Fricker wrapped the audience up in string. Those were the quite years of Smell & Quim.

SW: Simon, were you at the gig where I had a roll of industrial strength cling film?

IF: Was that the one where you wrapped the audience up with it?

SW: Yes, all of the audience.

IF: Except for me. I was stood at the back. I could see you coming.

SM:  Cath O’Connor and Pauline were sirens at the 120 Rats gig.

SW: I was the compere. The whole event was organised by Phil Smith. It was Blackpool bands versus Leeds band.

IF: The Rats was a squat venue wasn’t it?

SM: Yes, on Meanwood Road in Leeds. It was a just a few houses knocked into one.

SW: The Hobs played, Bilge Pump played, Smell & Quim played, Sticky was there, James Barnes ... Pauline and Cath wore silver foil and bubble wrap.

SM: Diz had a starting pistol at that gig and he shot it into the air which was a shock for some people. Crank Sturgeon guested with Smell & Quim in London one night. Andy Bolus was there ... that was another one where we ended up with fifteen people on stage .. Jim Plaistow from the A Band ...

SW: There's a big cross over from A Band to Smell & Quim. In Fact of the current line up Dave is the only one who isn’t connected with the A Band ...