Sorry for the late post, I was on set all day with my buddy Tom working on a music video. I’ll post more about that on Saturday.
Now that England has been bounced from the World Cup (via Costa Rica beating Italy today), I won’t have a more timely opportunity to highlight that country during this An Album A Day “World Cup” project of mine. So today I’m gonna share an English obscurity from my record collection with you.
I don’t remember how I learned about High Speed & The Afflicated Man. I want to say it was back in 2006 or 2007 when it was recommended either by Aquarius’ email list or one of those MP3/download blogs I was devouring at the time (Mutant-Sounds?). Nevertheless, after hearing the MP3s I set about trying to track down a copy, but it proved incredibly difficult. I never really expressed much interest to friends or fellow collectors about hunting for one, so you can imagine my surprise when on December 23rd, 2010 one of my co-workers presented me with his duplicate copy as a Christmas gift. I’m not sure what was more shocking, that he had two copies of this record, or that he thought I might want one without us ever having spoken about it.
Siltblog says:
Afflicted Man (or Afflicted) was the charming moniker of a Londoner by the name’ve Steve Hall. Up to this outing, Afflicted Man’s style could best described at stock-in-trade Brit DIY w/an almost Street Level sort’ve quality to it. Then at some point Hall lost the Afflicted tag & went on to the Accursed, which was a decidedly Nation Front styled punk trio who knocked out (at least) 2 lp’s. And somewhere between that transformation came this amazing anomaly. Too freaked out for punks, too punked out for freaks, ‘Get Stoned Ezy’ is a bloodbath of pedal stomping carnage. Recorded & (originally) released in 1982, it must’ve felt like a rusty safety pin stuck straight through the heart of whatever DIY fanbase Hall had acquired. And for all the Pink Fairies or Hawkwind type’s that mighta come across it, it was too primitive & animalistic for their quid. And forget about the psych & prog clowns. To them this must’ve seemed like a soundtrack to the Manson Family. In a country where the pigeonhole is everything, this record wouldn’t play by the rules, was deemed “esoteric” & banished into the fog. See ya!”
High Speed & Afflicted Man
Get Stoned Ezy
(Bonk Records – AFF6, 1982)
A1. Get Stoned Ezy
A2. Zip Ead
B1. Sun Sun [MP3]
