Throwing Soiled Underwear Against a Wall To See What Sticks

[Lexi Darling]

Fair on all points! I admit I completely forgot Rattle and Hum existed and I do agree that it's a mark against that album run.

[Suburban Placeholder?]

So I was thinking what could I possibly write about for my next journal post. And then it came to me, Why don't I write about.....

The Most Offensive Album Ever Released



During 1970 actor Peter Wyngarde was on a high. After spending the last 2 years playing the crime fighting author Jason King in ITC Television's 'Department S', Wyngarde was by far the most popular of the series three leading actors and plans were underway to give him his own show that would debut the following year in 1971. Simply entitled 'Jason King'
It was around this time, the folks at RCA Victor decided to cash in on Wyngarde's popularity by offering him the chance to record his own album....... That was their first mistake.

Thier second was to allow Wyngarde to have total creative control over it.

What Wyngarde came out with needs to be heard to be believed. To give you some example of how bad this is, when you talk about political correctness in todays climate. Try to think about how things were in the early 70s when concepts like sexism, homophobia and racism were practically non-existent in the mainstream media and on television where shows such as The Benny Hill Show, The Black and White Minstrel Show and the Carry On... movies were rampant with that kind of thing and watched by millions of viewers.

Well, this album is so bad and so offensive it was even too strong for the 1970s. And we're not talking about one of Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's
Derek & Clive albums from the same era being controversial because of the amount of bad language on it. I don't think Wyngarde swears once on this album. This is bad because of its subject matter, hence the sexism, racism and homophobia.



Firstly there is virtually no singing on this album, the only song which Wyngarde actually sings fully is 'La ronde de l'amour' which thankfully is entirely in French.
The majority of the album can be described under the simple heading 'Songs that sound like Peter Wyngarde whispering in your ears as he spikes your drink with a dose of Rohypnol'.

Then we have the less offensive songs, there's one called Unknown Citizen about a guy who serves his local community....and that's about it for that song.I think it's supposed to be social commentary but falls flat on  it's arse because it's not making any point. It just tells you the guys life story .... then the song ends.

Widdecombe Fair is probably the best song on the album for three reasons. One, that Wyngarde has practically nothing to do on it, two it's all sung by the backing singers and three, it's 38 seconds long.

The final passable song is entitled 'Neville Thumbcatch' which is something about some old guy who can't get it up any more and prefers gardening while his wife makes do with a garden gnome......or something.

So that's most of the album out of the way now to get to the two songs that really give this album it's reputation.

The first song is entitled 'The Hippie And The Skinhead', which starts off with Wyngarde reading out a letter to the Sunday Times written by two 15 year old skinhead girls. He then goes onto narrate a scenario where a gay hippy (called Billy The Queer) seduces a skinhead called Kenny only to discover that when he rips his/her shirt open it is in fact a girl. Ignoring the tastelessness of the song Wyngarde's slimy delivery somehow seems to make the song even worse. And this isn't the worst song on the album.

That accolade belongs to a song entitled 'Rape'.
In this song Wyngarde extoles the virtues of raping women from all around the world. And when you think the song can't possibly get any worse (two lines into it), he then begins to pick countries at random suggesting how French, German, Japanese, American and other women like to be raped throwing out all the 1970s incredibly bad cultural stereotypes you can think of in the process.
It's so bad that he even suggests to rape a German woman you should use gas!!!!!!!!!
And yes, he does the accents too.
AND THEY RELEASED THIS AS A SINGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And they even changed the title of the single, not to a better or tamer one to help it sell by the way.
They changed it to 'Peter Wyngarde Commits Rape'
Unbelievable


The Tasteful *cough* back cover.

And somehow, beyond belief this album was released... for a few weeks. RCA actually thought this would appeal to somebody and it would sell. In the end they pulled it off the shelves after about a month after it's release and the record became an interesting curio for collectors who were willing to pay hundreds of pounds for an original copy.

That was until 2001 when Cherry Red records decided to re-release the album on CD under the title 'When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head'.
They interviewed Wyngarde for the sleeve notes. Wyngarde himself maintained that RCA hadn't pulled the album at all and that all the original copies of it had sold and that none were taken off the shelves, It's just RCA didn't want to press more copies. (Which was utter crap). He also says they reneged on a three album deal with him. (Can't think why).

As for Wyngarde himself, the following year Jason King became a massive hit show both sides of the Atlantic but it only ran for one series. Unfortunately for him, in 1975 Wyngarde was busted for doing a George Michael in a public toilet (Under his real name of Cyril Goldbert. he was given a pardon for it posthumously in 2023) and his career suffered. He still appeared in many television shows, films and plays (Including Doctor Who in 1984) but never as a leading man. He was declared bankrupt in 1982 and 1988. In the mid 90s he retired from acting and he died in 2018 at the age of 90.

I won't post any of the lyrics or songs from the album (for obvious reasons) but if you want to check it out the whole album it is amazingly available on Youtube in it's entirety. So fill yer boots if you want to.

[Guybrush]

Man, what a crazy story. I generally enjoy a glimpse into the depraved corners of humanity, but I hadn't heard of this before.

Thank you for sharing 🙂

I did take a listen to Rape. For a celebrity at the top of his game to create something like that.. It boggles the mind.

[Lexi Darling]

That's just so bizarre. Like, what was his artistic intention by making a song like that? The r*pe one that is. Surely he was trying to make some kind of satirical statement and not just straight up say "hey I love to r*pe people". Or it's some kind of poorly done attempt to shock and offend for the hell of it? So fascinating.

[Suburban Placeholder?]

For a celebrity at the top of his game to create something like that.. It boggles the mind.

Now you have my mind working overtime wondering which current celebrity would do it and what the subject matter would be about 

Or it's some kind of poorly done attempt to shock and offend for the hell of it?

DING DING DING

I think we have a winner 

[Lexi Darling]

Perhaps that song was an unsung influence on bands like Anal Cunt. 

If you think about it like that, he's actually kind of ahead of his time.

[Suburban Placeholder?]

Now you've given me images of Ralph Fiennes releasing a cover of 'I Got an Office Job for the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women' as a limited edition 7 inch single on Record Store Day.

[Suburban Placeholder?]

"I Got a Fat Wife and Nine Kids, and I Gotta Feed 'Em"

The Greatest Wrestling Promo Of All Time (And a History Lesson)

I love Stan Hansen.

Stan Hansen is the kind of wrestler you don't really see a great deal anymore. Wrestling in 2023 is all chiseled physiques, athleticism and everybody talking the same way..... With a few exceptions.
Stan Hansen is the tough as nails guy in the bar you never mess with who is just looking for a fight. I mean seriously who would you want on your side in a fight, Stan Hansen or The Miz.

Watching Hansen coming to the ring was an event. He would be shouting and hollering while swinging around his bull rope and cowbell, spitting chewing tobacco at people, and with him being blind as a bat without his glasses there was a very real chance he would hit you. Audiences would scatter in fear in the opposite direction when he came out. He even once said his hard hitting style in the ring was because of his poor eyesight. He would hit people as hard as he could so he knew it would look good, because the alternative was that if he pulled his punches and kicks he would miss by a mile. In fact he punched so hard that in a match with Big Van Vader in 1990 he punched Vader on the side of the head and knocked his eyeball out of it's socket. Vader popped his eye back in and carried on wrestling. And yes, it's on YouTube.

Hansen first rose to notoriety in the late 70s when he legitimately broke Bruno Sammartino's neck. It happened accidentally when Hansen botched a body slam. Hansen was actually devastated by this, it was his first run in a main event spot, and he had just broken the neck of the most popular champion of the last 20 years. Sammartino told Hansen not to worry about it and the story was given out that Hansen had deliberately injured Sammartino with his devastating Lariat clothesline. Their rematch happened at Shea Stadium on the undercard of the famous Boxer vs Wrestler match between Antonio Inoki and Mohammed Ali. Sammartino reportedly came back from injury too early due to pressure from Vince McMahon SR because the Inoki vs Ali match wasn't selling as well as they'd hoped. Speaking of Inoki, Hansen is the only American wrestler to cleanly pin Antonio Inoki and Giant Baba, the two biggest names in Japan.
Hansen spent most of his career in Japan where he became a legend and also the highest paid gaijin (Foreign Wrestler) although he would come back over to the states for short runs to keep his name out there.

Some Context About Wrestling During This Time
This clip is from 1985 for the AWA, The American Wrestling Association based in Minneapolis. The AWA were falling on hard times.

From the 1940s to the late 70s wrestling was run as a territory system. Each promotor kept out of other promotors territory, Each territory had it's own champions. They would also swap talent, but most important they would also vote on who should be the single World Champion who would  travel around to all the different territories facing all the local champions. Usually wrestling to a time limit 60 minute draw, to make that territory top star look good. This system was better known to wrestling fans as the National Wrestling Alliance.

So this was all fine and well, but at the end of the 70s something happened... Cable TV.

The younger promotors saw the potential of having their regional shows broadcast nationally, and the gloves were off. Some of the older ones were slower and by 1985 had already sold out to bigger promotions or closed doors.
By 1985 there were 4 main players....

WWF - Vince McMahon Jr had bought out his father in 1982 he had spent the previous 2 years buying up talent. This is the year he would launch Wrestlemania. Vince McMahon's father's last words to the N.W.A. was a warning that his son wanted to put him them all out of business.

Jim Crockett Promotions - Jim Crockett Jr had taken over his father's business in the early 70s and ran the NWA's Mid Atlantic territory. He had ran the first ever wrestling card on closed circuit TV, Starrcade in 1983 beating the WWF's Wrestlemania by 2 whole years. They also had Ric Flair as champion and Dusty Rhodes as Head Booker. By 1988 they had expanded too quickly and were millions in debt. They were bought by Ted Turner who renamed them World Championship Wrestling.

Mid South Wrestling - Owned by Cowboy Bill Watts, later to be renamed the Universal Wrestling Federation. Although they had the best television show a financial recession during 1986 in the oil producing States, which was their main customer base, meant that their revenue slumped and early in 1987 they were bought out by Jim Crockett.

AWA - Owned by Verne Gagne. Gagne was an old school promotor from the 1950s. He had an eye for talent, the wrestlers he trained read like a who's who of 70s and 80s Wrestling. However, he was behind the times and had just recently lost a huge chunk of his talent roster to the WWF such as Bobby Heenan, Jesse Ventura, Adrian Adonis, Gene Okerlund, Ken Patera and most famously Hulk Hogan. He also had a reputation for having the dullest TV shows. Despite all this somehow they had managed to acquire a lucrative deal to broadcast matches on ESPN this year which kept them alive far longer after they had any right to be still around. They finally closed the doors in 1990 holding their final TV taping in a small warehouse that was painted pink.

About The Clip
So this clip was from early on during the ESPN shows. Having lost a lot of talent it was thought having a young popular champion like Rick Martel would bring the fans in. This didn't work so Gagne turned his attention to Japan and Stan Hansen.
Gagne bringing in Hansen was seen as a huge mistake by many people in the industry simply because he was earning far more money in Japan than Gagne could pay him. But nonetheless, in December of 1985 Hansen beat Martel for the belt and everything was fine..... for 6 months.
In June of 1986 Hansen was told he would be losing the belt to Nick Bockwinkle. Hansen had lined up some title defences in All Japan Pro Wrestling and no showed the event. He was stripped of the title and ordered to return the belt, which he did..... After reversing his pickup truck over it several times. he never wrestled in the AWA ever again. Ironically, later that year Jerry 'The King' Lawler would win the AWA World Title at Superclash, an event hosted by several different promotions in an attempt to gain ground on the WWF. Lawler was never paid for the event by Gagne so he no showed his title defences and was stripped of the belt too. In fact he still owns it.

Hansen had one last run in the U.S. in 1990 for World Championship Wrestling where he won the U.S. Title and feuded with Lex Luger, but spent most of his time in Japan. He even married a Japanese woman (who isn't fat or had 9 kids). He retired in 2001 and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame by Big Van Vader in 2016.

[Guybrush]

Thanks for teaching us about wrestling, @Suburban Placeholder? It was an entertaining read.

I also liked the promo video, though not quite as much as Andy Kaufman's trolling of Lawler and wrasslin' fans in general.

[larsvsnapster]

So I was thinking what could I possibly write about for my next journal post. And then it came to me, Why don't I write about.....

The Most Offensive Album Ever Released

Oh my dog.  This appeals to me in the same way that old abstract industrial cassettes that examine all sorts of transgression do.  This is not the most offensive album I've ever come across though -- that honour belongs to White Power from Iphar run by Philip Best from Whitehouse.  He was examining the subject rather than advocating it -- this isn't Skrewdriver.  I find Whitehouse's stuff "comically disturbing." I don't know how to describe the feeling other than that -- it's not funny but in a certain frame of mind my own almost automatic indignation is.  My reaction when I first came across the Wyngarde album was much the same, not so much a "what were they thinking?" but more of a "is he actually serious with this or is he trying to rile me?"  I put it down to Wyngarde's own homophobic self-loathing. 

The Iphar tape is power electronics with found speeches so the indignation and transgressive subject matter is almost de rigeur -- but it's presented in such a way that you can't tell whether they're advocating racism or not.  I asked Philip Best himself about the motives for doing such a project and he said "to get it on the table."  He further elaborated that he was inspired by Sex Pistols "Bodies" which takes a similar stance on abortion -- here it is, yes it's horrible.  Still think this is the way to go?  I find this very interesting from an artistic audience's viewpoint, but it's not for the Teeming Masses, and I generally keep my admiration of music with transgressive subject matter under wraps, until I'm certain you're intelligent enough to bypass whatever indignation you have and discuss it rationally and calmly.  My take is "how could people even think this way?" and the more I try to understand it, the more I fail, and the more interesting it is. 

I don't recall where I heard this, but I heard that RCA sent out the "Peter Wyngarde Commits Rape" single (which was promo only I believe) and got so many of them back snapped in half that four days later (not a few weeks as is commonly reported) they'd recalled the album, but it would have had to be posted back by the individual shops.  This was released at the very end of 1970, I think end of November or somewhere around there, and a gnar kill postal strike was looming in the UK that lasted from 20th of January 1971 to 8th of March I believe -- I remember the dates because it coincided with the decimal money conversion and I remember that like the back of my hand.  The strike had been building up for some time so although RCA might have recalled it from sale in 4 days, many shops just simply chose not to send it back immediately, and that's why the discrepancy in dates. 

Side note about that postal strike, and I don't think this is common knowledge either -- The Yes Album got successful because the Official Charts Company couldn't get sales figures from Melody Maker due to the postal strike, so they took what sold from London stores, especially the Virgin records physical shop that Richard Branson had just opened in mid 1970.  Brian Lane, their new manager, went and bought every copy Virgin had, sending it high in that store's charts, so that when the strike was over, everyone had heard of the album but hadn't heard it yet -- and so history was made. 

The second most offensive album I've ever run across is VS Politcs [sic] The New Fascism but it's offensive from an historical viewpoint and could be taken as educational material.  The first side is a collage of Nazi speeches and Nazi sanctioned music.  Yes it does include the full version of "Deutschland Uber Alles" but it's not specified in the tracklisting.  The second side is called "Fuhrer Spricht 1942" and it's exactly what you would think it is ... Hitler's 1942 speeches including the one that sounds like the screechy bit that starts off Magma's "Stoah." 

[Suburban Placeholder?]

I asked A.I. to create a duet between Dolly Parton and The Fall, including cover art

Enjoy...



Track Title: Ghost Train to Dollywood

Genre: A unique blend of Dolly Parton's signature country twang and The Fall's driving post-punk energy.

Lyrics:

(Verse 1 - Mark E. Smith)
Factory lights flicker, shadows crawl the wall
Another shift ends, another day enthralled
By the machine rhythm, the soulless grind
Ghost of industry, a future left behind

(Chorus - Dolly Parton)
But honey, don't you fret, there's a train that runs all night
Leavin' this tired town, takin' you to the light
A ghost train to Dollywood, where the mountains sing their song
Where dreams and laughter echo, where hearts forever belong

(Verse 2 - Mark E. Smith)
Concrete jungle rises, a towering maze
Promises of plenty, lost in a daze
Empty shelves in the supermarket aisles
Consumerism's hunger, with forced plastic smiles

(Chorus - Dolly Parton)
But honey, don't you fret, there's a train that runs all night
Leavin' this tired town, takin' you to the light
A ghost train to Dollywood, where the mountains sing their song
Where dreams and laughter echo, where hearts forever belong

(Bridge - Spoken word - Mark E. Smith)
So pack your bags and leave it all behind
This world's a broken record, stuck on a rewind
Step onto the platform, feel the whistle blow
A chance to escape, a story yet to grow

(Chorus - Dolly Parton & Mark E. Smith)
Don't you fret, there's a train that runs all night
Leavin' this tired town, takin' you to the light
A ghost train to Dollywood, where the mountains sing their song
Where dreams and laughter echo, where hearts forever belong

(Outro - Instrumental)
A blend of The Fall's signature guitar riffs and Dolly Parton's iconic banjo, fading out with a sense of hope and possibility.

This duet would showcase the contrasting styles of both artists, creating a unique and thought-provoking listening experience. The lyrics explore themes of disillusionment with modern life, while offering a glimmer of hope and escape through the metaphor of the "ghost train" to Dollywood, representing a place of dreams and possibility.

[Guybrush]

^Haha, that's brilliant 😄

Which AI did you use?

[Suburban Placeholder?]

Gemini for the song
Img2go for the cover

[Suburban Placeholder?]

I asked A.I. to create a duet between Dolly Parton and Rob Halford............


.......Fuck it, forget I said anything   

[Trollheart]

Now you've given me images of Ralph Fiennes releasing a cover of 'I Got an Office Job for the Sole Purpose of Sexually Harassing Women' as a limited edition 7 inch single on Record Store Day.

It would have to be a twelve-inch, wouldn't it? Cos, you know, for guys like that, size does count...