All Hail the Edgar Broughton Band!

By far the best thing I’ve heard in the past couple of weeks is a mystifyingly overlooked album recorded by three moustachioed, unkept freaks in London in the spring of 1969. It is (hushed tone) ‘Wasa Wasa’, the debut LP by the Edgar Broughton Band. It has recently been reissued on CD by Harvest/EMI, and it is mindbogglingly fucking amazing.

I was tipped off about its greatness by Galactic Zoo Dossier, who in turn admit to picking up on it via a recommendation in another great underground zine, Black to Comm, so let’s regard this post as the next stage in what will hopefully be a long succession of word of mouth/print news spreading, cos all aficionados of truly warped rock n’ roll genius need to hear this shit right now.

Basically, Edgar Broughton Band (who dress like prison guards from a Hammer horror movie and look like they’d be at home arm-wrestling Sonny Barger) manage to cook up a witches cauldron of everything exciting and weird that was happening in rock music circa '68-'70 and blast it rough and ready and loud as fuck through a gigantic, echoey free festival sound system, instantly launching fields full of Hawkwind fans onto the biggest bummer of their acid-gobbling lives (or so one would imagine).

As advertised in GZD, opening track ‘Death of an Electric Citizen’ sounds like Captain Beefheart leading first album era Stooges through a brutally mangled blues nightmare. No, really, it does. Satirical Vietnam skit ‘American Boy Soldier’ could be the Bonzo Dog Band channelled via the Manson Family. ‘Why Can’t Somebody Love Me?’ is an absolute MONSTER proto-metal jam based around churning, monolithic post-Hendrix riffage with Edgar delivering blasts of terrifying, cathartic bellowing between shrieking, fumbling fuzz-tone solos.. he really fucking means it, man! ‘Neptune’ continues in a similar vein, but adds lashings of histrionic King Crimson styled prog carnage to proceedings.. jaw-dropping! ‘Evil’ and ‘Crying’ crank things up further before the stunning ‘Love in the Rain’ explodes into hair-raising, orgasmic ferocity, spunking formless, liquid life/death noise over the collapsing skeleton of rhythm & blues like Jimmy Page era Yardbirds tackling the Stooges ‘LA Blues’.... holy fucking jesus! And having torn through some of the wildest and most vital music of their era, the band are content to let it all hang out on the closing ‘Dawn Crept Away’, 14 minutes of utter LSD-fuelled dementia taking in frantic beat poetry, incoherent howling, evil hard rock jams and freaked out tape experiments.

HEAVY in every conceivable sense of the word, ‘Wasa Wasa’ is a stone-cold underground rock classic, and the current reissue should be a cinch to pick up an a bargain price, so in the name of Satan check it out... if you dare.