Instant Automatons - Blues Masters of the Humber Delta (Deleted Records DEC 010)

I learnt today that Protag, or Martin McNeish to give him the name he was born with, died recently, so brought this tape forward in the schedule. He played bass and/or guitar for a long time in a number of incarnations of Blyth Power and assorted other bands of a punky nature and had a reputation as one of the good guys of the scene, and will be missed by many.

I first came across him and his first band The Instant Automatons in the back pages of, well, probably the NME as that's what I used to read, when it had a brief flirtation with the burgeoning cassette scene of the early 80s. The principle was simple, you sent a blank tape and an SAE to an address and it came back filled with someone's music. In the case of the Automatons, it was to a farm in the hinterlands of Humberside, and the music that came back was determinedly lo-fi, powered by ancient beatboxes and hissy echo pedals and flavoured with the sort of psychedelia that came from smoking too many clove cigarettes. There were woozy Beatles and Motown covers and a couple of reasonably good original songs that nodded at post-punk as well as live recordings from places such as the legendary Meanwhile Gardens and the London Musicians Collective.

To my 15-year old ears it represented something different to chart music and even to the punk and post-punk that I was discovering through the music papers and John Peel and showed that it was possible to make a joyous noise unhindered by equipment or ability, and using the fanzine network and even the bigger boys, like ZigZag (who even published a guide to cassette music) and the NME (who had a column in the back of the paper for a while but which was probably seen as taking small ad revenue), it was possible to get it out to people who were receptive to it. This blog has recently equated Bandcamp with the tape scene and I'm inclined to agree, with the added immediacy of being able to hear and decide immediately.

Being a boy of slender means I didn't send off for many as even blank tapes were hard to come by on my paper round money (which was mostly committed to buying a synth on HP), but this tape and the Deleted 'compilation' Magnitizdat (of which more soon) were regular fixtures on my cassette player. distressing my parents and driving me to do something of the same.

Sometime in 1982 or 1983 Crass acolytes Zoundz (and I'm fairly certain Crass themselves) played at the slightly unlikely Bentley Pavilion in Doncaster. My friend (and other half of almost-imaginary punk band Plus Support), Dean and I walked along the abandoned railway line that linked my home to the venue to see if we could get in. Crass gigs were usually open to all ages and cheap and we had scraped the money together to get in, only to get cold feet when we got there despite seeing that both the Astronauts and Instant Automatons were playing as well.

When Blyth Power played at the Empire in Middlesbrough in 1987 or so, I told Protag that I had copy no 064 of 'Blues Masters of the Humber Delta' and he was pleased if not rather taken aback.

RIP Protag, this tape might not what you'll be remembered for, but it's the one that brought you to my attention.

I've just found that the tape was, perhaps strangely, reissued on CD in 2002 and is now available for download here, with most of the rest of their output, starting here.

North Bank:

1. All You Need is Love
2. Laburnum Walk
3. Mr MacPhee
4. Esoteric No.2 - Blazing Pedals
5. Catacomb (Live at Meanwhile Gardens)
6. Catacomb
7. Prisoner of the Grapevine
8. I Think Somebody Must Have Poisoned Me

South Bank:

1. Then He Hit Me
2. Esoteric No.5 - Brains Under Glass
3. Restless Night (live at LMC)
4. Ballad of the New Things
5. Disillusion (live at LMC)
6. August '78 (live at LMC)
7. When The Pubs Close (The Bonfires)
8. Outro (Meanwhile Gardens)

Download