Sounds. July 14th 1979.
MONSTER MASH
GIOVANNI DADOMO talks to
Destroy All Monsters.
Sounds editor falls for Niagra (geddit)
and says "I think we have a Debbie
Harry situation with regards to this one"
DESTROY ALL Monsters — great name for a band, even better name for a horror movie. Which is exactly what it was, a gargantuan
come-all-ye of 1968 vintage.
The item in question was the twentieth item on the catalogue of Toho Pictures, a Japanese sibling to Roger Corman's American- International or our own house of Hammer who'd been raking in the megayen since a 1954 item name of 'Godzilla', a city-demolishing, radio-active son of Kong whose success spawned a whole series of come backs — even the inevitable 'King Kong versus Godzilla' itself, no less — in which a succession of retired sumo wrestlers found faceless fame by dressing up as big scaly things and destroying miniature Tokyo's in Toho's roof-top studio.
Like Uiversal before them, Toho soon found that the way to keep
the punters coming was to pack their pics with as
many varieties of
gigantic terrorisers as possible.
By the time of 'Destroy All Monsters' they had a menagerie
including Rodan, a skyscraper-sized pterodactyl; Varan The
Unbelievable (the Concorde-prototype, fire-breathing bat); the vast
jellyfish known to his friends as Dogora The Space
Monster (his
enemies simply went "Aaaarrrgh!" and
dissolved); and Camera, that
well-known towering turtle.
Godzilla and co. never really enjoyed their local/American success
over here, chiefly, one suspects, thanks to our film censors, who kept these
frequently laughable epics out of the hands of the teenagers who'd probably
have appreciated them best.
Presumably they feared a new spate of teenage delinquency wherein kids would
leave the cinema and start stomping buses and eating national monuments.
Nowadays most of the original items have been sold to T.V. in the States and on Sunday afternoons you can catch triple bills wherein some nuclear accident or other puts the world at the mercy of massive squids, gherkins and all manner of mutated Crustacea, busily gobbling up fifteen-story blocks of flats for all they're worth until it's time to return to the depths.
POP-WISE, Destroy All Monsters are a quartet from
The recently issued Cherry? is the
new D.A.M. single, featuring 'Meet
The Creeper' alongside 'November
22nd 1963'. Sometime between the
two there also emerged an EP of
early Destroy All Monsters material on
Unfortunately my own copy of this
limited edition biscuit (about more of which later) was mangled in the mail and
arrived in two very unplayable pieces. Bassist Michael Davis' 'Meet The
Creeper' is a suitably malevolent sounding tribute to Rondo Hatton, the Forties
bit-player whose distorted features grace its green-coloured label; Asheton/ Niagara's 'November 22nd 1963' refers
to the day persons unknown turned President Kennedy's head into a salt cellar,
an event echoed by the snap of Jack placed on the label so that your spindle
can emerge from the doomed cranium at the appropriate point.
Niagara vocalises with a mite more passion than she
did about the ants on the floor and, like 'Creeper', the subject matter's, a
big leap forward from that of the first single (art' and SF fans will recall
several dead Kennedy items issuing from Messrs Warhol and Ballard in the late 'Sixties,
Alice Cooper collectors might point knowingly in the direction of 'Dwight Frye',
however).
Interesting combo anyway, and one we'll be able to check in the flesh come
September, at which time a Destroy All Monsters
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS first started sometime in 1973 as an experimental/art
ensemble built around co-founders Niagara, then a struggling artist, and her
then boy-friend, struggling film-maker Gary Loren.
The band proper didn't really get into gear until the spring of '77 though,
which time saw the arrival of Ron Asheton in their
number. Ron recalls how he was stranded in
The group lasted some three years and vinyl junkies will doubtless recall a New Order album issued some eighteen months back through a French outlet. It wasn't very good and got a near-total pan for its pains.
"I'm glad they put it out but they didn't tell me about it until it was
already released," says Ron. He admits the quality was a bit dodgy but
points out that the album was cut from a cassette. "I have the original
tape of that first side and it's really great." New Order were in the wrong place and time says Ron, and that was just
one of the problems.
"The appeal of joining this band was really like the musicians I'm playing
with. This band's in the right place at the right time and we all really get
along well."
The departure of the Miller twins for the jazzier areas they're more inclined
towards has recently slimmed D.A.M. down to the standard rock format,
which Asheton greatly approves.
"It works really well, everyone writes, and there's no
personality clashes. By the time New Order broke up everyone was
just getting too wired, it was the Stooges all over again......terrible.
The singer was just a little Iggy, doing too many quaaludes, smoking angel dust and all that crap."
D.A.M.'s other gentleman of pedigree is bassman Mike Davies, formerly of
"I'd decided I wasn't going to have anything more to do with rock 'n'
roll, but Ron talked me right back into it."
'Meet The Creeper', it transpires, is the first song Mike's ever written.
"I was just fooling around with the guitar part and this guy just popped into my head. I used to really like the old Sherlock Holmes movies and this guy was really impressive to me. Everyone looked down on him but I didn't think he was such a villain at all."
Old friends? "I met
Pardon? Tree trimmer' isn't, as one might suspect,
some kind of negative euphemism; the 'divine presence', it turns out, really
does trim trees for a living.
Saved the cherry for the end. "Success?" says the chanteuse. "I guess we want to be
successful. I don't know, I'm not really too good at talking
about business, hold on (asks other members if they want
the group to be a success) ...... Yes, we do want it
to be a
big success." And yes, says
Art was her first ambition (she still does the D.A.M. sleeves). "That's all I was doing, but you can't make any money at it."
She asks if it wouldn't be a good idea for someone to do
an article on all the people in rock bands who came from
art backgrounds, "And to show some of their work to see
how good they really were." She's delighted by the news
that there's actually been an exhibition of musician's
paintings in London, even more when I tell her that at
least one artist/musician I know (Knox of the de-batteried Vibrators) is now paying the rent with a paintbrush
instead of a plectrum.
"That's what I always wanted to do, too. The idea was to
use this to get half-known and then start using that to sell
pictures. It just seemed like rock 'n' roll was a much easier
way of becoming famous than the other things we were
doing." D.A.M. have a repertoire of about thirteen songs,
says
In the early, experimental, arty-farty days when Destroy
All Monsters first started,
I mention the EP issued by Cary Loren. "Garbage," says
"Do you have good pastry in
When Destroy All Monsters arrive, I promise, I'll show her where to get
the best jam roll in
THE END