Blue Lamp, Hull
Splash Club, London
Princess Charlotte, Leicester
Hope and Anchor, London
King Tuts, Glasgow
On another page:
Cas Rock cafe, Edinburgh
A momentary lapse of reason (The Blue Lamp, Hull)
Prolapse: when your internal organs fall out of yer backside. In
other words, a load of arse?
Hazy Memory number one: Arriving at venue to find band playing
football in street. Obviously demonstrating deconstructivist
tendencies/willingness to break down barriers between audience and
'stars'. Or clever attempt to show kinship with soccer culture
sweeping nation? Anarcho/terrorist tendencies in records neatly
mirrored by left-foot shot into nearby bedroom window.
HM number two: Entering venue. Beaten-up old working men's club vibes
proliferate. Buy own drinks. Prolapse owe nobody nuthin'. Singer's
Scottish, by the way.
HM number three: Prolapse firing into their amph-f***ed up metronomic
boogie like beagles round a terrified fox (subtle animal rights
reference - oh subversion!) Think psyched-out Can/La Dusseldorf
rhythms were never meant to be allied to knackered old Fall
rockabilly riffs and foul-mouthed speedball punk and played in front
of an audience of 18-year-old dead people.
HM number four: Taking that back. Remember hearing The Fall's seminal
f*** you "Totale's Turns" (rec: a Doncaster WMC) years ago: white
crap that talks back to old flat caps who talk crap. Motto for
would-be cantankerous Bands: scare the f***ers into silence and then
pray someone, somewhere is actually listening.
HM number five: Being overwhelmed by the twin strike force of Mick
(Duncan Ferguson lookalike) and Linda Steelyard (Rita Tushingham-type
w-class 'ard-done-by supababe). He rants. He chokes. He jokes. He is
made of girders. She purrs. She scowls and stomps around. She is made
of sugar and spice and battery acid. A kitchen sink drama in a
Godforsaken black hole.
HM number six: Walls of frazzled-out cold noise and crypto-derisive
Lothian narrative. The intensity of Joy Division, the social graces
of Bernard Manning.
HM number seven: Thinking that these are dangerous times. British pop
music parallels the rise of the Conservative government's power in
the early eighties. Pop groups are going to the wall like entire
industries were once hived off. Sometimes a good thing / inevitable.
But the death of pop pluralism is the death of ideas. Uncompromising
and unbowed, Prolapse are the Scargillite mind bomb under Menswear's
Thatcherite values. Scottish Mick is the anti-Christ: "Your lifestyle
is an eyesore/ Your bowl of fruit is made of mud."
HM number eight: Mick's dramatic remodelling of Northern Soul dance
steps in a Krautpunk context - a dual commentary on
cross-pollination/current retro tendencies and a profoundly original
action in itself. Wahey!
HM number nine: Some members of the audience are actually walking out
now. A victory!
Thought the next morning: sometimes the sideshow can be more
enthralling than the main event. Think on, empty-headed bandwagon
chasers.
Dave Simpson, Melody Maker
Mick and Linda Prolapse are a punk Nancy Sinatra and Lee
Hazlewood. A duet of crazed domesticity strung out on DIY and hair
care. Like a warring couple, they stalk and stomp across the floor,
shouting, making fists and opening umbrellas. They don't just stand
around onstage, they move in and make it home. The audience are the
fourth wall; we're standing where the bricks and paint should be.
It's scarily intimate, like watching the hugest argument between
lovers or the erupting psychosis of your friends. Everything is
closing down and closing in.
Linda makes a plait of her hair and recites: 'My mind is closed, my
eyes a closed, my mind is closed, my eyes are closed,' pressing her
hands to her head like she's keeping all her thoughts in place. Mick
tries to drown out her voice, determined to be heard too. Linda pulls
at blonde strands, piling them on top of her head and Mick takes a
screwdriver to the ceiling, undoing rivets as he sings. They have a
whole repertoire of gestures and attitude that brings them together
in the most antagonistic of ways, bouncing off each in a frenzy of
good spite and fizzing menace, wiping beer on faces, reading randomly
from books and maniacally pacing. The suppressed hysteria apparent in
a ranting atonal ballad is picked up in the guitar and bass, all
those spiky, claustrophobic emotions thrumming in and out in warped
chords and single distorted notes.
All this is intense and funny and exciting. As Linda and Mick spar
with each other, and us, chanting bits of Fall songs and offering
dedications to Ivor Cutler, the rest of the band start a momentous
buzzing until the next song happens - Slash / Oblique, Flex or
Headless in a Beat Motel. You can feel that compressed energy
squeezed into small pieces and the instrumentation is the controlled
sound of speed paranoia and relationships gone horribly, comically
wrong. Retreat, withdrawal and the potential for violence are
contained in their frantic songs; it's a musical collision of two
world views.
I keep wanting to get closer and closer to the stage, so I can see
exactly what they're doing; Linda desperately pacing, Mick drifting
along to the drum beat, but the room is crowded, so I'm foiled. And I
want to work out what they're saying, what the lists of words in Visa
for Violet and Van or Black Death really are. But it's all so
whirlwind that I just get caught up in the musical twister and I
never land, not even outside on Charing Cross Road, waiting for the
bus home. And, for days after, I'm still laughing. And wondering.
Eithne, Melody Maker
What to make of Prolapse? They'll probably tell you that they're
just normal run-of-the-mill miserable bastards. Their stage show,
however, is something totally different. Never before will you have
seen or heard a band like Prolapse, because they are truly a breed
apart. Pigeonhole them at your peril, The Princess Charlotte screams
out for a band like Prolapse, a place that needs a bit of excitement
and downright weirdness to flush away the sterile atmosphere. I also
need Prolapse because I've run out of beer money and the vast array
of ultra-violet lighting is showing an alarming amount of dandruff on
my shoulders.
Prolapse amble on stage and don't really give you any indication of
what is going to follow. This is a band of two halves. One half
fucking mental, one half studious and workmanlike (again the Fall
comparisons abound). By the time the absolutely wonderful Headless in
a Beat Motel blasts forth the crowd are in full swing. Mick is man
processed, wobbling around on the spot, while the small and perfectly
formed Linda fires icy glances at him. A puffer fish hangs
precariously above the drummer's head while Linda, resplendent in a
Celtic scarf, points at a frame picture and Mick sings with his head
stuck in a globe. Tina This is Matthew Stone ends with Linda and Mick
spitting vitriol at each other while highlighting he former's fairly
nifty rugby-tackling technique.
Prolapse are a near perfect band, combining the sublime with the
ridiculous to produce a mesmerising performance. Best gig of the year
without reservation.
Severn White, atomic vol 1:k
"Gorgeously orchestrated chaos that sometimes sounds like it was
recorded in a basement bunker during the London Blitzkrieg."
"Prolapse have so much energy that it's practically exhausting to
listen to them. They're chaotic and beautiful at the same time."
"It's tough deciding whether these guys have no idea of what they are
doing or if they're musical geniuses."
You can't stick six restless souls on a five-foot-wide stage and not
expect them to fall over each other, just as you can't confine songs
that sweep like trains blurring across the Midwest plains to a tiny
room with a low roof and expect them not to shrink. Singer/
upfrontman Mick punches the ceiling, jumps off the stage, pushes
other band members, even wanders off to buy himself a pint - anything
which might constitute action and movement, anything which might free
Prolapse tonight.
The show turns out to be a fascinating study into the kind of high
tension produced when distrustful and predatory animals are thrown
into unnaturally close confinement with each other. Witness the large
ape-like biped, marking his territory through excessive prowling.
Consider the small-boned female's responsive retreat. Note that the
noise these creatures make becomes increasingly confident and joyous
the more they investigate and overpower their environment. In the
end, this makes for a raucous onstage struggle for supremacy,
culminating of four of the six band members laying flushed and
bruised in a heap on the floor. But the battle is won with some
style.
Tonight, much of the onstage dynamic comes from Mick's personality
disorder and the careful way in which co-singer Linda - small and
sweetly pretty - handles him. In one respect, he's unbelievably
childish; a neurotic, hyperactive attention-seeker who'll quickly
lose interest in any moment in which he does not star. 'That one was
all right, but I got bored halfway through,' he says after a track
during which, when he wasn't singing, he passed around an old
photograph of himself. In another respect, he's stereotypically
masculine, communicating through primitive actions (he pulls Linda's
hair, pushes her away, throws his arm around her) and favouring a
direct, practical and unsentimental kind of language in his lyrics,
In return, Linda reproaches him, makes faces at him and makes him
blush. Really, they should get married tonight, in front of us.
It's when these oppositions struggle against each other over driving,
kraut-flavoured guitars, that Prolapse summon hearts out of gaping
mouths tonight. Cacophony No A pitches Mick's dry, atonal monologue
(he describes himself as 'a commando cartoon') against Linda's
sugary, warm melodic lilt to disarmingly potent effect. Killing the
Bland lets them duet together, with a kind of Dalek meets Sarah
Cracknell, Dalek falls in love result. Ultimately, it's friction,
rather than harmony, that drives Prolapse's magic. Anything or anyone
might go off at any time.
Feeling lucky punks? Go see Prolapse.
Jade Gordon, Melody Maker