"Everywhere we live in a universe strangely similar to the original" (From a demo tape strangely different to the original)
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Sleeve - Front
Which side are you on? |
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Sleeve - Back:
Damian's demo cassette doodle from original version of the "Epics in Minutes" CD comp (Deranged) + 'Baiting the fish' image |
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| Vinyl - 'A' Side |
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| Vinyl - 'B' Side |
Stats:
Tracks:
A) 1. Red; 2. Black Iron Prison; 3. The Achilles List; 4. Sleep Tight
B) 1. Piece by Piece; 2. Sirens; 3. Following
Released: 2022
Label: Get Better Records
Matrix A: 10-92886 / GBR-136-A 232218O1/A
Matrix B: 10-92886 / GBR-136-B 232218O2/A
Pressing Info:
One time pressing of 500. Test Pressings: TBA
Inserts: No insert
Variants: No known variants
Notes:
Twenty-increasingly-odd years after its original release on hand-dubbed cassette, Fucked Up 'reissue' their Demo as a benefit release for
Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction.
The artwork uses outtakes from Caleb Cooper's 2003 photo session, which resulted in the iconic image used on the "Epics in Minutes" CD comp. This was a couple of years after the demo recording; the band's first few singles had made big waves in the places that any new Toronto band, wishing to be taken seriously would want them made; over the border and across the pond. When it came to compiling the songs, they needed a suitable image for posterity, something appropriately intimidating, minor-threatening and urban-guerillary, to go with their music. After a few rolls of film and a bit of xerox refinement, they pulled it off:
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| Epics-era FU: Serious |
The outtake pictures used on the Demo 7" leave a different impression...
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| Also Epics-era FU: 4/5 of band struggling to hold straight-faces for the group stare. |
The demo was famously recorded at ''Jesse's House''. Jesse and Jonah were schoolfriends who'd been in various bands, culminating in Career Suicide - click
HERE to find out more and also see a young Jonah with big sideburns and a quiff.
Mike: This was done a few days after Damian had replaced Josh as singer. All the lyrics were made up on the spot. Martin from Career Suicide used his limited knowledge of recording for committing this glorified jam session to tape. Taken from the actual demo tape as the original master was destroyed.
(From description of the demo on the 'Epics in Minutes' CD inlay 2003)
Fucked Up had only just settled on a working line-up, when the demo was recorded in August 2001. The vocalist hadn't learned the lyrics, some of which had yet to been written and the proto-rhythm section were still learning to play their instruments. The recording is rough around the edges (and the middle), but holds together, thanks to consistent inciteful guitar, on cue vocal embellishments and a sense of collective enthusiasm that is infectious. With hindsight (or hindsound?), it also reveals elements of the epic 7"s to follow.
The demo cassette artwork likewise, shows the swift development of an early aesthetic they would establish. Confusingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, there is more than one version; here we take a look at the three main variants:
1. 'Original'
The first batch of cassettes came with various covers...
Damian: I think we were making fun of “tour test-press, of a test-press, of a tour press” exclusivity. Every single demo has a different cover… For anyone who wants to trade mine, it has Dez Cadena on the cover…
(From ExD Interview 2001) Please check back tomorrow to see Dez Cadena cover.
Jonah: When we were making the demo’s, I was looking through this book I had on Samurai movies. I was thinking of what to put on the cover and there were some cool pictures; one was this guy getting shot with 14 arrows and another was three old men giving cheers. Then Mike sent me this picture of a guy from the Great Depression holding up a sign. So, those were the three covers.
(From ExD Interview 2001)
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Jonah's 'Guy getting fucked up with arrows' picture
(Image borrowed from Jonah's Instagram) |
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Jonah's '3 Old men getting fucked up & giving cheers' picture
(Image borrowed from Mark Pesci's Instagram) |
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Mike's 'Guy fucked by depressed economy' picture.
(Image stolen from Ebay)
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The economy would soon be grinning like a bipolar bull-bear, following the unprecedented military expenditure of WW2. As mushroom clouds dispersed over flattened Japanese cities, Lieutenant General Knudsen, (former President of General Motors) laughed "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible, LOL!" the concept of Britain, ever gracious in defeat, handed over the keys to the empire to the concept of the United States, who celebrated by coining the concept of 'military-industrial-congressional complex', whilst simultaneously putting it to action. New income taxes were conceptualized to fund the otherwise redundant concepts of corporations, and everyone lived happily paying them ever after, thankful for their democratic right to choose which of two opposing parties would be responsible for transferring the wealth to private companies, rather than squandering it on public services.
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| Track list for first batch / 'original' demo cassette - not quite the same as the vinyl version |
2. 'Official'
The first batch looked the part, but someone wasn't entirely happy. Maybe the messages implied by the artwork on the originals were a bit too obvious? Or maybe the xerox print quality was just too good? Fixing both these problems, the 'Official' version followed soon after, its artwork entirely redesigned, with a mysterious grainy picture of girl seen from behind, seemingly waving at a gravestone...
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Demo in ''Official'' guise; better packaging + less songs = $$$$
(Image courtesy of @hcpunkflyers) |
The inlay folds out to into a lyric sheet, with quotes from Jean Baudrillard and CS Lewis, and a weird squiggly sigil on the spine. Also of note, are both the appearance of the FU logo and the band-name in an uppercase font, not dissimilar to the Clarendon they would settle on going forward.
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| 'Official' version inlay folded out. |
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| Weird |
As well as the artwork being different, the official version uses different song titles:
Jonah: I was supposed to make the covers for the first batch at some show we were playing. All the images came from a book I had about Italian Cinema, and a book about Japanese Cinema, as well as an old collection of William Randolph Hearst's doomed LA newspapers. The names (of the tracks) came from Mike, but were changed after the initial run of tapes to what's on the "official" demo. I think to do with extra lyrics being written.
(From old email correspondence).
Jonah forgot to mention that the 'official' demo appears to be missing two tracks, and the ones it does have are listed in a different order.
3. ''Demo + 5"
This version bundles the 'Official' version, with the 5 tracks from the misspelled 'No Paseran' cassette. It comes with the same inlay as the official, plus a copy of the No Paseran inlay, with not one, but one and a half, extra-big logos. Nice and easy.
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| Demo in ''+5'' guise; more packaging + more songs) |
Not so easy is working out what's going on with the song names, so we made this cut out and keep translation table:
Fucked UP - Demo song-title AKA's
| 'Original' Demo |
'Official' Demo |
"Demo 7" |
| 1. The Lurking Fear |
1. Red |
1. Red |
2. Circling The Drain |
2. Nickles & Dimes |
2. Black Iron Prison |
| 3. The Achilles List |
3. Following / |
3. The Achilles List |
| 4. Sleep Tight |
4. Wanderlust |
4. Sleep Tight |
| 5. Sirens |
5. Piece by Piece |
5. Piece by Piece |
| 6. Piece by Piece |
6. The Land of Nod |
6. Sirens |
| 7. Following |
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7. Following |
8. Land of Nod |
+ 5: |
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7. No Pasaran |
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8. Circling The Drain |
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9. A Light That Never Comes On
10. Generation
11. Red |
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Notes:- The coloured text (hopefully) connects the three songs on the 'Original' that got their names changed for the 'Official' release.
- The two orchid highlighted tracks are different recordings of the same song. It appeared under its original title during the ''No Pasaran'' session (see 'No Pasaren' cassette), then under a 'fake' title ''Black Iron Prison'' during the ''Police'' session, (see FU / Haymaker split 7") both versions sound remarkably alike. Here we get the previously unreleased demo version, which is nice for completists, or anyone who's worn all the grooves off all seven of their different colour variants of the Haymaker split. The real problem is the fake title,didn't appear until 2005, so if you are a nerd, you might wonder about its use here...
- Titles in
strike through text evolved into 'proper' songs and do not appear on the 2022 version. The 'Original' version includes two tracks that would become the 'B' sides to the first 7" and first Zodiac record. ''Circling The Drain'' was omitted from the Demo track-list, when the 'Official' version appeared in December 2001; it was recorded in it's final form a weeks later, during the ''No Pasaran'' session. ''Land of Nod'' was later renamed ''Last Man Standing'' and became the 'B' side to ''Year of the Dog'', maybe explaining its absence from the 2022 'update'. - The 7" liner notes credit Martin Farkas for the recording (1st August 2001) and note the first 5 tracks were released on a tape in late December 2001, i.e. it's the 'Official' version, but track 6 'Sirens' is restored from the 'Original' so it's BOTH versions. Even better than that... Track 7 'Black Iron Prison' is from the '+5' (sort of), so you get the full 'Demo Trilogy' experience as of should be, carefully pruned of troublesome anthems that might distract from these elemental sparks...
- The 7'' liner notes do not credit Martin Farkas with the vocals on ''Achilles List'', meaning this song is the only recording of Damian's vocals that don't sound like Damian and it's pure coincidence that the person they sound exactly like, happened to be in very close proximity to the microphone when the vocal sound waves were produced. To suggest otherwise would open a can of worms; just do the math: Martin's vocals + Jonah hitting something + 2 or 3 other buds = Career Suicide.
Black Iron Prison:
Coined by Philip K Dick in his novel ''VALIS'', the Black Iron Prison is a concept of social control which goes beyond common ideology, to take root in the very substrate of whatever manifests the prisoner's beliefs about their reality:
Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it. THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED.
VALIS, along with Grant Morrison's Invisibles were complimentary influences on the young Fucked Up. Both authors explore perennial ideas, that over millennia have been persistently supressed wherever they have arisen. Both recycle these ideas and mix them into stories of ordinary contemporary reality and along the way, find something extraordinary, if not extra-terrestrial. For Dick, it was a Vast Active Living Intelligence System, for Morrison, Barbelith; his characters found themselves ever-capable of smashing through prison walls and sometimes through the graphic framework of their world, but always left wondering which side they are on, all to the tune of the world is not what it seems.
Readers found themselves confused, mildly annoyed or overjoyed, sometimes in combination...
According to one story, Fucked Up came to life out of a zine influenced by such things, and if this is true, the 'Original' demo marks the beginning of the metamorphosis with a brief punk orthodox-journalism phase; the 'Official' shows the early development of strange new organs of communication and the '+5' marks the completion of the transformation, with its first viable vinyl offspring ''No Pasaran!''
Twenty years on, it might be tempting to permanently link the demo tracks with the 'weird waving girl' imagery of the ''official'' cassette version; maybe just using a sharper picture, to go with freshly mastered vinyl artefact, making clear its obvious associations with the beginning of a story. Hell, it even includes time, reflection and threshold motifs, a feminine visitation, and an implied invitation to see a different version of the world; it's clearly a blueprint for Dose Your Dreams...
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Instead, we get the 'oddly-arranged forgotten snapshots of some kids looking like they'll never get used to being the subject of an iconic band picture' sleeve, which as well as meeting FU's post-Police and compilation-LP-accompanying-7" design-criteria, is probably a more truthful reflection of events, for there was no great narrative master-plan, just some unusual ideas that would bear offspring in their own time, evolving into things quite different to the original, but with an overall cohesion that each record might be a page, or chapter of an epic story. Accordingly, there are no blurry basement images, no archaic artwork - other than the songs themselves - and no attempt to ham-up the already meaty myth.
Nonetheless it is still a Fucked Up record and it's probably no coincidence that the apparently random selection of song titles tell a tale that goes beyond the brief few hours spent in a friend's basement, to capture something of FU's12-month gestation period. With no dreams,
beyond wanting to put a record out and be involved in the thing they loved, off they set, armed with a modest set of tunes, some with potential, but nothing approaching an anthem. This otherwise forgotten period is marked by 4 key recordings:
- Demo - Recorded at Jessie's House - 1st August 2001
- CIUT (College radio) session - Demo songs replayed with less finese and band interview- 7th October, 2001
- "No Pasaran" session - Blue Tilt Studio, Hamilton - 26th January 2002
- ''Police" session - Signal to Noise Studio, Toronto - 22nd July 2002
During this brief time, they stepped-up from the facsimile punk elements of the original demo and ''No Pasaran'' and began mixing in ideas from mind-altering literature to create something new and compelling of their own. As if by magic, on 22nd July 2002, the anthem ''Police'' would be born under the experienced midwifery of Jon Drew. Suited-up in its suitably-arresting aesthetic, it would set off the afore-mentioned wave.
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Merch menu from early show. (Lifted from Jonah's Instagram):
Note prison-busting aspirational title of zine, containing lyric based instructions.
Note also100% increase to demo price
(pls pick me up one of everything if you go).
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The demos disapeared in the wake. A few were lost and have not been heard since, the rest clung together and found themselves stuck like barnacles to the wrong end of an epic vessel, mostly unnoticed, or mistaken for rust. Twenty years later, with the compilation refreshed and stripped down, the demos now like hermit crabs, get their own little home.
