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Princess Tinymeat: Meet the obscure genderbending trashglam post-punk goth offshoot of Virgin Prunes
02.08.2018
01:14 pm
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Princess Tinymeat promo poster

The extremely extreme Irish post-punk band the Virgin Prunes was formed in 1977 by vocalists Gavin Friday and Guggi (Derek Rowen), along with third singer Dave-iD Busaras, guitarist Dik Evans (brother of U2’s The Edge), bassist Strongman (Guggi’s brother Trevor Rowen) and drummer Anthony Murphy (known as Pod) who would leave almost immediately, but later rejoin the group. Pod was replaced on drums by Haa-Lacka Binttii (né Daniel Figgis, a former child actor who was in a 1969 stage production of Waiting for Godot with Peter O’Toole among other things) who also contributed tape loops and keyboards. Binttii performed only on their first two singles “Twenty Tens (I’ve Been Smoking All Night)” and “Moments and Mine (Despite Straight Lines)” and two compilation tracks, “Red Nettle,” which was a part of the famous NME cassette release C81, and “Third Secret” which appeared on a Cherry Red comp called Perspectives and Distortion. (Both tracks are included on the Prunes’ essential rarities album Over the Rainbow.)

After this Binttii was kicked out of the group. What in Satan’s name would you have to do to be kicked out of the Virgin Prunes I wonder?
 

 
When Binttii resurfaced a few years later with his new project Princess Tinymeat (a reference to Montgomery Clift’s penis size as revealed by Kenneth Anger in his bitchy gossip classic Hollywood Babylon) it was with a single called “Sloblands” that featured a rather provocative cover (both sides have Figgis with his own meat and two veg out!) and a confrontational abrasive/hypnotic sound that called to mind Swans and also somewhat presages the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Some of it was abstract, some slightly poppier, if not exactly commercial either. The project’s trash/trans esthetic could be described as being somewhere on the continuum between Frank Tovey/Fad Gadget and Coil on one side and Alien Sex Fiend and Pete Burns’ Dead or Alive on the other, although this is not quite giving Figgis his due as the music heard on Princess Tinymeat’s three singles and sole album, the Herstory compilation of 1987, is much smarter, evil sounding and far more considered than either of these later named acts. Still, I’d put Princess Tinymeat in the category of “Batcave bands,” like the Specimen.

The core of the group besides Figgis were Tom Rice on guitar, Ian Sissy Box on bass and C. Zappa on drums and frankly, aside from this, there is virtually no other information to be found—anywhere—about Princess Tinymeat and this would appear to be the way Daniel Figgis would prefer it, as his own website’s bio page doesn’t even mention the group (or his tenure in the Virgin Prunes for that matter) saying only…

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.08.2018
01:14 pm
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Suck me, baby: The Virgin Prunes’ new form of beauty
01.18.2016
11:51 am
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Meet the Pig Children…

“Like a crazy singer in a band that’s lost the words.”

I’ll go out on a limb here and declare that I think the Virgin Prunes are THE #1 most underrated group of the post-punk era. Go ahead and do your worst. What about _____? Or ______?  Or _____?

Well, what about ‘em? Sorry, but I’m right. No other band with their theatrical power and musical genius has been so wrongly overlooked as the Virgin Prunes.

The main reason for this gross miscarriage of cultural justice is simply because their albums were extremely difficult to find until the mid aughts. Unless you bought the expensive limited edition import vinyl pressed in France and Italy when they actually came out in the early to mid-80s, you were pretty much shut out of enjoying the din glorious of the Virgin Prunes. You probably weren’t going to encounter much, if anything, of the Virgin Prunes’ output in a used record store, either. People who owned those albums, even those who slimmed their record collections down considerably over the years (like me) held onto them. They were not common on Limewire or Napster. Not only were they rare and coveted albums, they were glossy, darkly glamorous and obscenely weird objects d’art in their own right.

I think another reason for their obscurity has to do with the (mostly) misinformed notion that the Virgin Prunes were a goth band due to their “Pagan Lovesong” being such a big dancefloor mainstay at places like London’s Batcave discotheque (which is admittedly where I first heard them myself). Being lumped in with bands like The Specimen, Danse Society, Gene Loves Jezebel and Clan of Xymox hurt their credibility with rock snobs, but their scary, intimidating noise/art rock had far more in common with Faust, The Pop Group, The Birthday Party, Public Image Ltd. or Throbbing Gristle, certainly, than it did with Sex Gang Children. The goth label was, and is, an unfortunate one for the legacy of the Virgin Prunes to bear and is still a barrier to proper critical re-appraisal of the group’s work. The goth label didn’t exist when they started. They were Irish hooligans who came of age with Bowie and punk. They threw pigs heads around onstage and spoke “in tongues” in cheek out of disrespect to their Catholic elders. To lump them in with goth is just… lazy. The Virgin Prunes wanted to do things like this:
 

 
(Imagine the collective reaction the people of Ireland had to seeing THAT on their tee-vee sets. Then shed a tear for the current generation of boring, well-behaved young people.)
 

 
“We entertain people from another level…”

Another excuse that they’re still so unknown and underground after so many years have passed is that their work is simply not for everyone. Motherfuckers are evil sounding. If you don’t like an evil-sounding racket, get back to your Carpenter’s albums—quick—and just keep moving. These guys might damage you for life.

If Satan himself had a band, they would try to sound like the Virgin Prunes.
 

 
“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, I’ve seen it all…”

It’s been remarked often that the Virgin Prunes are the reverse image of U2. Dik Evans, original Virgin Prunes guitarist, is the brother of The Edge and the members of both groups grew up as friends in Dublin. Quoting from the Wikipedia entry:

The band consisted of childhood friends of U2’s Bono. Lypton Village was a “youthful gang” created by Bono, Guggi (Derek Rowan) and Gavin Friday (Fionan Hanvey) in the early 70s, where every member got a new identity and where they could escape from dreary and predictable Dublin life and be anything they wanted to be. It was both lead singers Friday and Guggi who first gave a teenaged Paul Hewson his alter-ego and world-famous moniker “Bono Vox of O’Connell Street,” later simply “Bono.”

 

 
U2 were the good boys, the Christians. The Virgins Prunes were feral and downright demonic.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.18.2016
11:51 am
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RIP Kazuo Ohno

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Following up on Brad’s post on butoh, my gifted illustrator friend Michael Wertz notes that Antony Hegarty (of the Johnsons) has written the obituary for Kazuo Ohno—one of the stark dance/performance form’s originators—who died on June 1 at the age of 103.

Ohno and fellow choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata created butoh in the ‘50s as Japan roiled in young, tortured energy, and the proliferation of butoh groups throughout America and Europe since the late ‘70s speaks to their legacy. Check out Edin Velez‘s excellent film Butoh: Dance of Darkness here.

You can see butoh’s influence on Western avant-garde pop on both the Virgin Prunes live clip and the excerpt from ½ Mensch, Ishii Sogo’s 1986 film of Einsturzende Neubauten, below.

 

 

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.08.2010
10:48 am
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