Dirt - Never Mind Dirt Here's The Bollocks

DIRT -

NEVER MIND DIRT -

HERE'S THE BOLLOCKS

January 1983 saw also the release of the début album from Dirt, entitled Never Mind Dirt - Here's The Bollocks. With its nod to the Sex Pistols in the title, Dirt were reaffirming their allegiance to the tattered and torn flag of Punk. Not for them any denial of history or any musical/cultural progress for the sake of it. Punk was a state of mind rather than a form of music, for sure, but that wasn't to deny how utterly brilliant three-chord Punk Rock rammalama could be. Dirt being fine exponents of the art.

After numerous interviews with various fanzines a bit more was now known about Dirt as in who they were and where they were from. Not surprisingly they were London-based but interestingly two of the members - Fox on drums, Vomit on bass - were brothers and the older, tattooed guy who was always helping with the lighting at their gigs was their father, Leo.

Although Crass fans from days of old, unlike so many other bands who had been sending demo tapes to Crass (for later inclusion on the Bullshit Detector LPs) it was actually Crass who had approached Dirt rather than the other way round, offering them a support slot on an upcoming tour in place of Poison Girls.

Why Crass had chosen Dirt over so many others seemed to be down entirely to just liking them as people, so much so that they were one of the very few bands that Crass broke their label policy of only releasing one record by any one band. Thus, Dirt's début album appeared on Crass Records.

Their début single, the Object, Refuse, Reject, Abuse EP would forever be a superb slab of Anarcho Punk beauty but it was playing live where they had first impacted and it was live where they would always be at their strongest. It made sense then that Dirt might release a live album but to do so as their début just smacked of compromise. Recorded at The New Half Moon in Stepney, London, almost a year earlier, Never Mind Dirt disappointed because it wasn't what it could and should have been.

Dirt excelled at playing basic, tuneful Punk Rock shot through with a shivering, self-possessed fervour. In the studio with Penny Rimbaud their songs had been turned into finely-chisled Punk jewels; suggesting that a whole album crafted in a similar fashion would be sublime. What was actually delivered - though a bargain at 'Pay no more than' £2.00 - was instead a curiously flat affair that failed to do justice to what Dirt were capable of.

With uninteresting samples of inter-group dialogue replacing any audience applause or any acknowledgement of an audience at all, along with studio-recorded overdubs it wasn't really a 'live' recording of a gig at all. At the same time, it wasn't a full studio recording either. It was neither one or the other. It was a compromise.

Even the cover seemed to convey a mixed message with wording around the outside edge stating 'Anarchy as enacted and as demonstrated by Dirt' but the main picture design being of The New Half Moon venue beneath a looming depiction of the Grim Reaper wielding a scythe. On the back of the cover additional wording around the outside edge simply said 'The end. Or is it the beginning?'

So what did it all mean? And why were the titles of the tracks not listed anywhere on the record? And why even the extreme change of name of their drummer from 'Fox' to 'Shit'? It all made a lot more sense when it became known that just prior to the release of the album, Dirt had actually split up, instigated by the departure of drummer Fox under less than happy circumstances at the Zig Zag squat gig. This would also explain the finality of such statements on the cover as 'Thanks to all who shared the experience', implying not just the experience of the gig at The New Half Moon but the experience of the entire 'career' of Dirt.

Apart from this, the maddening thing about Never Mind Dirt was the fact that all the songs on it were really very good. Hi-jacking the John Lennon line "All we're saying is 'Give peace a chance'" and shouting it out Dirt style shouldn't have worked - but it did. So too playing The Animals' House Of The Rising Sun in their own specific manner and changing the words so that it became an anti-war song. It should have been rubbish - but it wasn't. Instead, it was a sing-along though not quite a family one: "Corpses lay scattered like flowers in a field, in the town of Nagasaki. Animals and land destroyed beyond belief, in the town of Nagasaki..."

Dirt were brilliant but it was just a shame the same couldn't be said of their début album...