Cardiacs are almost more of a cult than a band. I was turned on to them many years ago and immediately was fascinated by their sound and intrigued by their strange and quixotic story. I recently read a “history” put out by The Alphabet Business Concern (they control the Cardiacs) and it was quite an engrossing read, full of odd twists and turns in their story.
An excerpt from Cardiacs.net/history:
One day the front door flies open… Some boy with a guitar strapped around him is held by his shirt collar by a very tall and greasy man shouting “THIS BOY WILL DO FOR YOU! … THIS BOY WILL DO FOR YOU!” and shaking him like a rag doll. The boy was Graham Simmonds. The tall man was THE CONSULTANT who’d been spying on Cardiacs for some time. Graham never wanted to be in Cardiacs but he was made to join. THE CONSULTANT made him. He had no choice. Cardiacs had no choice. It was Cardiacs’ first meeting with THE CONSULTANT and was so not to be the last. It was around this time that a girl called Marguerite Johnston was asked to join the band to make up the other half of a saxophone section with Sarah and to fill the space that Mark Cawthra had mysteriously left. (It turned out that THE CONSULTANT had ‘misplaced’ Mark in order to ‘introduce’ his boy Graham into the band and was furious when Marguerite joined and made it virtually impossible for her to stay very long. She went missing in early 1984.)
This album was originally a cassette and the surviving audio makes that fact quite obvious. (Their history remarks that they used to just dub copies off of copies for Obvious Identity.) It has the ‘whirr’ of an old and heavily played Memorex and the interplay between the guitar and the keyboards has an extra layer of aural complexity from a seemingly slowing and speeding of the tape. I find it mesmerizing. The music is at times manic and twisting. It starts and stops and chugs and speeds. It is both organic and machine like, but only if that machine is an old and failing. The vocals are reminiscent of early 70s British bands such as Wire, Buzzcocks and The Fall; with maybe a touch of the weird – I’m thinking of The Crucifucks or Danielson Famile.
It’s all a strange and compelling sound. I find it thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing, but it may be an acquired taste. You tell me (in the comments, twitter, whatever.)