Australian radio aired an unorthodox 45-minute special about the music of Chrome in 1981. Built around a wide-ranging interview with the band’s late singer and founder Damon Edge—who, I learn, spoke with the unmistakable accent of a native Angeleno stoner—the program makes inventive use of the radio documentary format. As you’re listening, the interview tape will suddenly start running backward, and an Australian radio presenter will break in reading from the text included with the Alien Soundtracks album, her voice run through a Chromesque chain of phasers and flangers. It’s a psychedelic sci-fi broadcast mixed and edited in the style of Chrome, and it is totally nuts.
Details about the special are scarce. The Helios Creed tribute site that posted it, helioschrome.com, reports that the show is the work of Australian radio DJ and producer Tony Barrell, who died in 2011. A book about experimental music in Australia names Barrell as one of a few DJs on 2JJ (“Double J”), Australia’s youth-oriented radio station, who championed experimental music and introduced cut-up techniques into the editing of their shows.
Edge talks about Chrome’s then-recent show in Bologna, Italy, in July 1981: the “classic” lineup’s first live performance, and, wouldn’t you know it, the second-to-last. He also discusses why Chrome is a romantic band, how he and partner Helios Creed approach recording, why punk bores him, and how he learned that Chrome’s music had been used for “brain therapy” with a car crash survivor. Here he is on the origin of the band’s name:
One of the periods I liked, besides the psychedelic movement and some classical movements, was the Surrealistic movement. And I was reading an article about the Shah of Iran in 1930, who had commissioned a Paris Deco artist to invent air conditioning for his car—and that’s how air conditioning was invented, cause the Shah wanted air conditioning! [laughs]—so after that, he was so impressed, he said, “Well, build me this really far-out mansion,” so [the artist] said, “OK,” and the guy stuck a lot of chrome in it. I was just in the doctor’s and I was looking in the magazine, and it just seemed to sort of give me a sense of design, chrome. The metal itself is very high-class, it’s very stated, it’s very minimal, and it has something deeper about it, too, you know. It reflects. . .
A final point. The special gives the misleading impression that none of the names on Chrome’s early albums, other than Edge’s and Creed’s, refer to actual people. Not so: Gary Spain and John Lambdin are real live flesh and blood sons of the earth who played physical instruments in Chrome. “John L. Cyborg” is the fictitious person (although engineer Oliver DiCicco says it was sometimes him).
Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s go back to the future.
Chrome’s new album is called Feel It Like A Scientist.