Mark Of The Covenant

Mark of the Covenant

‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’ c/w ‘Mummy, Not The Shears’.
Released 16th July 1968. Regal Zonophone RZA 93356.

Mark Steele had spent most of his life in mental institutions of one sort or another and was signed to Regal Zonophone the day after he was released from The Feltham High Security Bedlam Zoo House For The Very Deranged.

Zonophone’s A&R man, Sussan (sic) Taylore had seen the trend for weird, psychedelic lyrics become ‘trendie’ (sic) after The Trembling Hands hit number forty-one in the pop charts with ‘Hide In The Attic’. He decided to get his own casualty to cash in and get promoted.

"I was on the lookout for people who had been recently released from the Loony Bin. I know it isn’t very fashionable to call them Loony Bins now but that’s what they were called then", he says today. "And they still are today, as far as I’m concerned. Loony Bins, Loony Bins, Loony Bins. Where the mad and demented are housed. I reckoned that all that psychedelic nonsense came from there 'cause it sounded like it had been written by a madman, so I wanted to get one of my own".

Rushed into the studio on a stretcher, Steele was given half an hour to write both sides of his debut platter. He came up with ‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’ in two minutes seven seconds, using a cheap Biro.

This was a place where:

Gooseberries squeak and quack and tingle
With pingle wringle fingle wingle

Accompanied by Morgan Rapsfield and Roddy Ginseng from The Acrobats, the resulting recording was a delightful mesh of Japanese traditional folk and squealing feedback. Says Ginseng: "Mark had no melody, so I pinched this melody from a traditional Japanese folk song and it seemed to fit. The original words were something about hedgehogs, so we jettisoned them and replaced them with Mark’s unhinged, toxic, but ‘trendie’ (sic) view of the world. I thought it would be number one in the hit parade for sure, but nobody bought it. Not one copy".

There were rumours (and still are) that an album had been made by this wayward genius, but this was not true, according to Taylore. "There were rumours that an album had been made, but this was not true. There still are rumours that an album had been made, in fact. Who are we talking about?"

There was no album but there was a single. It was called ‘My Dream of Gooseberry Heaven’. The b-side, ‘Mummy, Not The Shears’, was covered by Niblet O’Connor (formerly of The Shyt) on his fifth solo album ‘Gonk Crazy!’.

SCHLANKETTE

SCHLANKETTE
‘Trauma Elektriche’ c/w ‘Futurik Der Zeitgeschlunger’
EINGANG RECORDS EINS 2783.1
Gerhardt Gerhardt (Synthesisers), Manfredd Schnelke (Drums), Heni Brown (Electronics), Rolf-Harische Wubblebodt (Percussion)

At the forefront of the new wave of Kosmiche Musik, Gerhardt Gerhardt and Manfredd Schnelke met at the Schwarzkopff Institute of Hair & Music in Munich.

“We study under the great German avante garde composer Julius Eissel”, Gerhardt tells me on the phone from his farm near Dusseldorf. “Eissel was a genius. He tore up the book of rules, starting with conventional compositional structure, then traditional time signatures and eventually destroying the concept of the orchestra, the orchestra arena, the audience and instruments”.

In 1969, in his work ‘Deconstructing Destruction’, Eissel staged a performance during which an entire venue was torn down and burnt as the audience and musicians fled into the night. “Eissel arrived on a steamroller”, remembers Gerhardt. “He had laid out the music sheets in front of him. He conducted the piece as his steamroller crushed the stage”.

The recording of the event was held up as a sacred landmark pointing a new direction for German popular music . Up to that time, it was generally considered to be 'trapped in a whirlpool of bland' as musicians copied the tired grooves of American rock and roll.

“Manfredd and I were in a beat group called The Crazy Boy Guys and released ‘Hey, Look At Me Over Here Please, I’m German and I Am Enjoying The Dancing’.

But their experiences with Julius Eissel changed everything. “We threw away our instruments. In fact, we recorded the sound of us throwing away our instruments. It was a big seller. That helped us forge our new direction. And we also saw the advantages of taking many drugs”.

In 1970 Gerhardt and Schnelke started a commune in Hamburg. “We built a giant vagina out of willow and lived inside the wicker womb with our animals. We tended our livestock and made love to our women. Sometimes vice versa”. They were also introduced to an early version of a synthesiser by electronics genius Heni Brown. Remembers Gerhardt: “It was a machine that made very strange oscillating noises if you looked at it the wrong way. It would not respond to touch. You had to look at it”.

“It would go ‘whoooooowhooooo’ if you looked at it in a sarcastic way. Or ‘brittttttah brittttah’ if you looked at it very quickly and then looked away as if you didn’t mean to look at it”.

With their first synthesiser on board, and having invited the eccentric percussionist Rolf-Harische Wubblebodt to flesh out their sound, SCHLANKETTE became a reality. In 1971 they released the definitive Krautrock epic ‘Drohn’, featuring the insistent driving sound of Schnelke’s drums and the ethereal dream landscapes of Rolf-Harische’s whistling.

A single, ‘Trauma Elektriche’ followed:

‘I need to drill a hole
In the wall I drill a hole
In the wall is a wire
Elektriche trauma’

The band folded in 1972 following a spate of sexually transmitted disease and foot and mouth.