12 Minutes At The Hot Club Murphy

***Adventurous, subtly-hued pop art from a Rosetta Stone line-up of post-HOMSEXUALS / THIS HEAT / Rock in Opposition squat savants. The full story is more complicated—and exponentially richer (as is the music), but here’s a short version of how 12 MINUTES AT THE HOT CLUB MURPHY came to be, in the words of ROB STOREY, the one constant in 30-plus years of Murphy variations (Federation Murphy, Orchestre Murphy, The Murphy Love Experience, Murphy Patrol, Murphy Working Stiffs, Laboratoires Murphy, etc.). ““We had made a start as the GOOD FOR NOTHINGS in about 77/78 and played sort of punk rock music with a line-up of Catherine O'Sullivan, Bing Selfish, Rodrigo Lodwick, Seamus Luttman-Johnson, and Robert Storey. We soon got tired of the straitjacket of the 'punk' sound and started trying other things, 'fake jazz', more theatrical elements, improvisation and performance deconstruction—which resulted in some extremely antagonistic audience reactions... We sat around listening to reggae more than anything else, and dub became a part of the consciousness, the idea of using the multi-track studio as a composition tool and not even trying to sound 'realistic' or to approximate the live sound. After making the first single ‘Fed Up Skank’ / ‘Slipping Past On The Inside’, Bing was a semi-detached member of the Murphies anyway, and went on to make ‘Selfish Works’. Chris Gray, Jim Whelton, Ted Barrow (who had all been associated with the Homosexuals), Lepke Buchwalter, David Doyle and Joe Torres (who were Milk from Cheltenham), Janey Haggar (Nancy Sesay), and Mick Hobbs (The Work), amongst others, became part of the pool of people who would do gigs, tours or recording sessions. It was a loose arrangement of players by the time we made 12 minutes at the Hot Club Murphy.” Limited to 457 humbered copies in silkscreened sleeves.