expletive undeleted

GAD WHIP are a quartet of non-hairy and also hairy freaks from various northern shitholes who present an ungrateful world with a very pleasing hodgepodge of high-energy, low-fidelity punky psychedelia and post-industrial musique concrète, via the medium of cassette tapes, mostly.

Let’s not get hung up on the medium at the expense of the message.

Named after a murkily arcane North Lincolnshire ‘old religion’ ritual involving a long cattle whip being shaken above a priest’s head on Palm Sunday or something, Gad Whip are old enough to know better but they don’t. Me and singer / drummer Pete started swapping zines through the post in the mid-Eighties and I later met Geoff when he moved in across the road from my girlfriend, and their band Aki began to gig around Scunthorpe.

And here we are, 30-odd years later.

On first hearing, these analogue fundamentalists’ albums sound like the craziest and greatest mixtapes you’ve ever heard, but within a few listens each track begins to sound like it could only have been produced by Gad Whip. And you have to wonder what kind of weirdo would have these kinds of mixtapes recorded for them. Me, apparently.

Musically, Gad Whip are all over the place. There appears to be neither rhyme nor reason to their outré oeuvre. They point and laugh at genre politics. The constants appear to be a willingness to experiment and a weary exasperation with the essential rubbishness of modern life.

While middle-aged blokes are always moaning about something (exhibit one: the Twitter stream on the right of this page), seldom has this kind of male-menopausal grumpiness been expressed with such invention, energy and style. They have yet to repeat themselves. And busying themselves with this shit definitely beats waking up one morning and leaving your missus and kids for a florist named Lance or even buying an elaborate surrogate phallus in the shape of an expensive car / motorbike.

I like what Gad Whip do very much.

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