Ebola - Imprecation ep

God bless the emotional time machine...

The real problem with immigration is not the fact that your qualifications are worth shit in your new country or that you can barely even open a bank account to deposit the wages from your demeaning new world job into.

No the real problem is that most of your record collection is stuck back in the mother land and everytime you think "fuck, i could really do with listening to Death Church/ A Light in the Darkness/ Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" (it's a Macronympha record...) you realise they're 5,000 miles away.

Anyway, i found this yesterday and figured i'd share it. Kind of hard to believe i recorded this almost 13 years ago, i guess progression really is over rated.

I started Ebola with vocalist (first album only) Jonathan Shaw in the summer of 1995, we lived in Benwell, check this awesome photo of the street we lived on:

Need anything from the shop while i'm out?

Clearly we needed some escapism from our lives and Ebola was our ticket. I asked Micky and Karin from One By One to play guitar and second vocals (it was the 90s...) and Chris from my other band Sawn Off to play drums.

There's not much to be said really, the politics of Ebola were far more straight forward than anything i've been involved in in recent years and i was far less, uh, metaphysical in public then than i am now. Not that i'm one of those people that grows up and attempts to distance himself from his embarassing early forays into opinionated bullshit, i still stand by the necessity to say the things we said due to our time and space.

At the time there was a lot of backlash (and some of it with much merit if we're honest) against bands that were trying to say something about the state of the world. A common criticism i would hear was that punks would never change anything so what was the point. And it's true, on the whole punks will never change a fucking thing, hell, the only things they ever changed in Newcastle were my Crossed Out and Drop Dead records at parties when they wanted to listen to some useless awful dirgey bullshit like, hmm, how about Crass? But i digress.

Well, punk managed to change my life. As gay as that sounds it gave me the tools to travel regularly for free, open up my horizons significantly and ultimately led me to Canada, a move which after six years still isn't old for me.

Previous to this 7" we recorded an LP which i think has aged a little more poorly than Imprecation.

Nick Loaring replaced Jonathan Shaw on vocals between the first two records. After Imprecation came the horribly recorded split 7" with Servitude that took us far too long to write and marked the start of our inability to keep a drummer for very long. I left not long after the split 7" and the band managed another record before imploding under shakey line ups and too much physical distance to keep the impetus alive.

Micky and Karin recently moved to Belgium and have two children, Nick lives on a boat, Chris plays in the recently reformed Sawn Off and Jonathan tragically died of cancer three years ago. Jonathan was probably the most important person that's ever been in my life.

There was some kind of talk of a discography CD a number of years ago. Honestly, i can't say i was paying too much attention about it and i suspect none of us really feel that strongly about the need for an Ebola CD to exist. Having said that maybe five will turn up unannounced in my mailbox next week and i'll have to rapidly edit this blog entry...

RIP Lobster

A brick through a car dealership window as an act of love.