Name: Singles 81-82
Brand: Drowning Craze

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

bella736v

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

[r12080495]

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Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

White Vinyl with Download.

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Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2018-06-08

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

PIAS

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

5414940010961

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1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

bella736cd

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5414940014228

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Drowning Craze

Genre GB

New Wave / Post Punk

Label GB

Bella Union

Limited Copies come with a free tape of the John Peel Session. 

The history of post-punk is full of curious footnotes and sudden dead-ends. Fascinating bands that flared up, intoxicated with the rush of ideas and sense of creative freedom in that fertile period where there were no rules and boundaries to creativity for groups, leaving a vapour trail of a handful of singles and inevitable John Peel sessions before disappearing back into the ether. The Drowning Craze are typical of those bands. Their legacy is three singles and a John Peel session, a glimmer of possibility and a hint of something quite wonderful, and then gone. Fortunately for them their constituent members re-emerged years later in other projects leaving them flagged up on the history train with the band’s bassist Simon Raymonde going on to play in the Cocteau Twins before setting up his own label, Bella Union, and original vocalist, Angela Jaeger, joining Pigbag whilst their next singer, Frankie 'Fun' Nardiello, joined the esoteric Chicago industrial disco band Thrill Kill Kult.

The Drowning Craze had formed in early eighties London with Simon Raymonde - the son of Ivor Raymonde who wrote hits for Dusty Springfield, such as I Only Want To Be With You and Stay Awhile, and then string arranging for all the Walker Brothers hits. Simon played piano and violin at school, but took his own tangent when punk rock arrived and his brother got a cheap bass off The Vibrators’ Pat Collier and gave it to Simon in 1977 aged 15 who promptly learnt the whole of Never Mind the Bollocks, the Sex Pistols first album, in one afternoon. Inspired by punk rock / post punk and John Peel he was very much a child of those times. Glued to Peel’s lugubrious tones on the radio that were signposting a way out of the crashed car of punk rock and into new musical soundscapes he would also help to carve as a foot soldier with the Drowning Craze. The band’s debut single Storage Case was released on Situation 2 in June of 1981 and was a glacial, perfect, blissful, post punk, dark wonk workout with a busy hypnotic chorus bass line and, what we would call at the time a ‘shattered glass’ guitar. It was their only release to feature the wonderful voice of New York singer Angela Jaeger who was in London studying music and theatre (and would eventually join Pigbag) and was made Single of the Week in the NME and Sounds. Inevitably the band fell victim to artistic difference, like any good band should, and the guitar player ran off and got a proper job as an accountant.

Singles 81-82

Music GB