The Forgotten Covers of Three Dead Crows
Playing other people's music maybe wasn't as taboo as I recall
When I think about my first band - the largely ignored Three Dead Crows - I remember us as being fiercely original; almost pretentiously arthouse. Sure there was humour and irony, and forays into pop, goth and post-punk stylings, but we did our best to avoid being pinned down. Right from the start, we were determined to write our own material, distancing ourselves from our influences as much as was possible for teenagers endowed with limited musical abilities and experience. We often succeeded too, albeit largely thanks to our shocking (and treasured) naivety.
The dearth and rarity of recordings has consigned what we did to fading memory, in a way that artists of today will never experience.1 Yet, in our prime, we could fill rooms in Birmingham, with folks who actually left their houses and paid money to watch us, on a fairly regular basis. There must have been some value to it, at least in the contemporary cultural context of that setting. It’s not like we were the popular kids who just had loads of mates - if anything, quite the opposite.
I know that by the end of our 2-3 year existence we had quite a lot of songs - and yet I struggle to remember very many. Some, like Good ‘n’ Hoppy or Heaven Awaits, still inhabit suitably monochrome cupboards in the shrivelled backwaters of my cerebral cortex, emerging only as snippets of melody, or short, baffling, decontextualized extracts. I.e.: ‘The old man from the cottage sang of secrets, and of Jenny. In my hand I held a star, in caution of the night.’
Other half-remembered phrases, like ‘He needed his mother’s help to kick his suicide trip’ hover in the background, entirely divorced from any recollection of the song to which they belonged. I don’t even have a copy of our second studio session. Somewhere, recordings of such oddities as All the Little Fishes [sic], The Day of the Dragon, Heaven Awaits and the strangely prescient Kelly, likely still lurk in somebody’s attic, hiding in forgotten cases of once loved cassette tapes.2
I suppose this shadowy recollection might lead me to unconsciously mythologise our time together. There is no doubt that our starting point was extremely experimental and unique. I remain unreasonably proud of our first ever composition, Icicle Treetops, which was kept precisely as improvised by the original, short-lived, three-piece line-up. But even by the time that track was recorded, the membership and process of the band had evolved drastically.
It seems that part of this myth was my memory of our commitment to original material. Today, I had my entire music library playing on shuffle as I went about my day, and one song unexpectedly snatched a memory from some forty years ago, straight to the forefront of my attention.
Because Three Dead Crows had covered The Staircase (Mystery), by Siouxsie and the Banshees. In fact, I had gone so far as to go into a music shop and buy the sheet music! Yes, in the 1980s, published songs - even punk songs - were available in high street shops as printed sheet music! Even I find that hard to believe now. I really wish I still had it.
I have to say I am proud of my 16 year old self for picking this song. The lurching, sinister swells and waves of the vocal line, and the surreal, disturbingly disorientating lyrics were a perfect match for what we were trying to do, and even today, it sounds wildly unusual as a choice for a single. But this sudden revelatory recollection shook the mountain of the myth, causing an avalanche of further memories. It was not an outlier. Sure most of our repertoire was original compositions, but across our short career we actually played a surprising number of cover versions. I doubt we ever included more than one in a set, but still!
Other songs I recalled us playing in this barrage of myth-busting, would include Overground (also the Banshees), Car Trouble by Adam & the Ants, (for which I also bought the sheet music), as well as Whip In My Valise and Physical (You’re So) (also the Ants).3 Then there was So What? by the UK Subs, Latex Love by Vice Squad, Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran, and, I have a horrible feeling we might have even attempted Spy In The Cab by Bauhaus. Hell, we were practically a covers band.
Still… there may have been a whole lot more cover versions than I had previously remembered, but, damn, we chose some good stuff to cover!
If you made it this far, please consider liking, commenting, following, restacking, subscribing (it’s free) and all that stuff. SubStack can feel a bit like shouting into a void without feedback.
Kelly was a raucous three-chord ‘Oi punk’ pastiche, in two parts, with which we finished most of the sets that we ever played. It was intended to be a fun, ironic, excuse to go crazy at the end of a gig.
The second part (subtitled, Puke on Me) was a clearly less than serious ode to Vix Fuzzbox, after she stood me up on an angsty after-school date. The first part, however, while instrumentally just as dumb, featured a reworking of lyrics from an earlier and thankfully (if somewhat scrappily) recorded song - Remembrance Sunday - with an increased focus on the fate of the eponymous character.
The words in question were a clumsy, ostensibly nonsensical, stream of consciousness, which I wrote in July 1984 about the unfortunate death of someone called ‘Kelly’, who had just popped into my head apropos of nothing. The lyric tells us very little about ‘Kelly’, apart from the fact that he is in some way militarily adjacent, takes a stand against ‘a million voices all the same’, that his death has a shocking effect on both me and the future of humanity, and ‘some bastard’ killed him in the middle of the night.
The seemly synchronistic death of weapons expert David Kelly, exactly 19 years later, after he allegedly told journalist Andrew Gilligan, ‘off the record’ that claims made in a government dossier, regarding the availability of Iraq’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, had been included (against his advice) on the insistence of Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, was clearly entirely co-incidental.
While this claim did dishonestly embroil the UK in an illegal war that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, destabilised an already shaky Middle East, set the groundwork for Islamic State, and stirred up Islamist militancy in a way that would tear a trail straight through the Syrian civil war, to the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Hamas attack which sparked the ongoing Palestinian genocide - all of this happened nearly two decades after I wrote Kelly, so is clearly unconnected.
Besides, Dr Kelly committed suicide.
This was confirmed by the Hutton Inquiry, which PM Tony Blair called to ‘urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly’ before his body had been identified. It was, of course, also entirely co-incidental that earlier the same year Kelly had stated that, should Iraq be invaded, he would ‘probably be found dead in the woods’.
He clearly killed himself with an overdose of dextropropoxyphene, before cutting his ulnar artery with a pruning knife. The fact that his fingerprints were on neither the knife nor the pills' blister-pack is irrelevant - after all, neither were anyone else’s.
Lord Hutton, who was personally appointed by Tony Blair, following his sterling work defending the British military after the Bloody Sunday massacre and overturning the extradition of General Pinochet on torture charges, was entirely satisfied that there was no evidence of foul play in Dr. Kelly’s death - and so should you be. To think otherwise would reveal you as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and open the door to even more bizarre ideas regarding such ridiculous possibilities as a wholly pointless precognition, revealed in the lyrics of a silly punk rocker from Birmingham.
I think it’s true to say that Car Trouble was the first song I ever learned to play on bass, and as anyone who knows my work with Dog Food will confirm, it overwhelmingly influenced my playing style - at least until the release of Julian Cope’s Jehovahkill.