Comicide were a duo of Eric Jurenovskis (guitar) and Stephen Àh Burroughs (synths and vocals), who would later go on to form celebrated Blast First unit Head Of David. They formed Comicide in 1984 specifically for two gigs, each consisting of the same set list of four tracks, opening for CON-DOM at two venues in their native Midlands – the Star Club in Birmingham and the possibly unlikely setting of the Eve Hill Afro-Caribbean Community Club in Dudley.

A new archive limited edition cassette by Cruel Nature puts these eight live tracks into the cassette players of Head Of David completists for the first time, as well as providing another insight into the early Eighties noise movement. These tracks are, as might have been expected, noisy and uncompromising affairs. Each track is built up from ground-out guitar riffs and disturbing synth shapes that have been subjected to the same extensive distortion as Jurenovskis’s guitar. Tracks like ‘Hatehouse’ swell with layers of dubby reverb, each time adding an element of compelling dissonance, finally becoming nothing more than bleak echoes of the racket Burroughs and Jurenovskis were curating.

The second set introduces Burroughs’s angry, shouty vocals to the tracks ‘Bloodmeat’, ‘Muscular Jesus’ and the aforementioned ‘Hatehouse’. Those vocals aren’t obviously missing from the Star Club set, but when added in they have the effect of making the duo’s loud, repetitive riffing less uncomfortable somehow – even though Burroughs’s voice could never really be considered comforting. Though still a challenging, impure experience, the Eve Hill set sounds more polished, perhaps more studied, probably because the pair had longer to develop the songs. The instrumental ‘Bruised Organon’ takes on an atmospheric, installation-like tone, as if the two were actively countering the maximalism of their other pieces and seeking to channel the cultural echoes of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

(c) 2019 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence