Sink did a big 9 week, joint-headline tour of Europe (including dates in the UK) with our bestest buddies from Washington DC, Shudder To Think. They had just released Tenspot on Dischord and would record Funeral At The Movies at Southern in London directly after the tour. Shudder were my favourite band at the time and I think I got to see them 53 times that summer. Wonderful stuff. The line-up of Craig Wedren, Chris Matthews, Stuart Hill & Mike Russell will always be my favourite version of Shudder and it was cool watching them every night and seeing them write and develop some of the Funeral songs as the tour progressed.
As for Sink; we had just released Old Man Snake & The Fat, Black Pig on Decoy and were excited to be back in Europe and on tour. Outside of the UK you were expected to play longer sets and so we embraced this with our own fairly eclectic take on “life after hardcore”. A few chuggy, Fugazi-inspred numbers, some poppy, Replacements nods, as few fast ones as we could get away with and some covers we couldn’t really play. No two nights were the same and we had a lot of our own material and plenty of covers to choose from. This was probably the height of our embracing of The Blues and in that I hope you’ll be indulgent with us. Everyone should spend a couple of years looking into where the whole of popular music came from and discovering the Blues greats. We did and we thoroughly enjoyed it…it was just unfortunate for our audience that we tended to play a lot of what we were listening to at the time. So on this tour we ‘gifted’ the crowd with dodgy, post-punk versions of white-boy blues that we loved, but which looking back, probably aren’t even 10% as good as we thought at the time. Fuck it, we had a ball.
We always enjoyed playing at the AJZ, a squat in Bielefeld, and Bobo, the booker there, was a great guy who seemed to like the band and helped us out a fair bit. Also on hand was our very good friend, Alfred Bradford, who took these great photos. Incidentally, Alfred had brought along US band The Dambuilders who were also touring at the time. We said hi to each other on the night, but didn’t really hang out. Ironic then that 3 years later, Chocolate, would tour Europe supporting The Dambuildes on their Islington Porn Tapes tour and that their drummer, Kevin March, would end up playing for the final line-up of Shudder To Think. Small world.
Anyway, what follows is the whole gig. It’s very much warts and all. If you’re a Sink fan then you’ll probably enjoy it, if you’ve not heard Sink before then I wouldn’t recommend this as your introdution to the band; there are bum notes aplenty and the mix isn’t always great (the sound man seems to like his reverb and his delay effects). That said, the versions of Angel Turns Blue and Big Red Car are pretty damn good
- Ed Wenn - Vocal & guitar
- John Ruscoe - Guitar & backing vocals
- Paul Duncan - Bass & backing vocals
- James Kermack - Drums & backing vocals
Points of interest:
- * This was the only time we ever played The Letter (a huge 60’s hit for The Box Tops).
- * Boogie Man and Ticket Office Blues were written by us, but were never released.
- * Amanush was recorded on a Peel session and came out on Aston’s first Boss Tuneage compliation, Floor 81, but it really should have been on Vega-Tables. It was Paul’s song in the main, but was ‘a bit punk’ for where I wanted the band to be at the time (and I was a Nazi) so it got left off the album. These days I like it a lot.
- * Craig from Shudder jumped up onstage and sang Whole Lotta Love with us…we should have got him to do it every night because he had the voice for it. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he’d be interested and I hadn’t made the connection at that point between his voice and the classic rock singers like Robert Plant.