David Griffin, Managing Director of Elvis Shakespeare music and book shop, speaks about his favourite album; Suicide by American rock band Suicide released in 1977. Although it failed to chart, it is listed in Rolling Stone magazine’s top 500 albums of all time.
The most extraordinary punk electronica album you will ever hear in your life. Not exactly a prolific band. Made up of two men; Alan Vega who’s like a camp Elvis Presley in a little leather hat who’s now 75 so he looks even funnier like that, and a chap called Martin Rev who’s a classically trained electronics whizz kid who basically plays keyboards like this [pumps both hands up and down very fast]. They’ve done four albums in thirty-five years, so not very prolific. Everybody hates them in America because they do lots of nasty anti-American things, according to the Americans. But the first album you really have to hear, it’s a self-titled album that’s been rereleased loads of times. It’s got loads of beautiful songs on and it’s got the most terrifying song in the world on called Frankie Teardrop about a man who takes his wife and children out to the garage maybe, hacks them all to bits and then kills himself. It climaxes with Alan Vega screaming for about five minutes. I know that sounds a bit enfants terrible, but trust me it’s hair on your neck time when your hear it. It’s my favourite album of all time.
I got it from my childhood. Childhood stuff sticks with you in the arts much more than anything else. They supported The Clash when I was kid and I’d never heard of them, and they came and supported The Clash and I was like [opens his eyes wide] and The Clash fans bottled them off and he (Rev) just loved the bottling. He loved it, he jumped in and fought them. Martin Rev is a computer geek, well the seventies version of a computer geek, and I’ve seen him solo over the years and considering he’s in his seventies this man still has the ability to antagonise and get up people’s noses. He makes absolutely beautiful music is the odd thing, it is really beautiful but his vocal extremes sometimes make it not. For example he’s got a song called Dream Baby Dream that is sadly not on that album, but it’s just a beautiful lullaby almost. He’s marvellous, go find the album.
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