"BACK OFF MAN, I’M A SCIENTIST!"

Great cover or what? “You see child – that’s what a rock band looks like! They live in darkness! Stay away!”

I bought this record a few years back from Selectadisc in Nottingham. It’s an ‘exact replica’ style repressing of the original 1983 7”, put out for some reason by Munster Records of Germany.

I was on a new-student-loan record binge and it was on for 99p, so I mean… a conscious thought scarcely crossed my mind between seeing it on the racks and getting home to survey my purchases.

I was entirely ignorant of The Scientists, and Australian punk rock in general, at this point, and I think it only grabbed my attention thanks to a mis-heard line in The Minutemen’s “History Lesson Pt. 2”, the bit where D. Boon says something like “..our band The Scientists drucked, but I wasn’t bluuue..” (I still don’t know what he is actually saying). So for a second I thought that maybe, just maybe, it could be a record by this Scientists band that Boon and Watt were in… no doubt a brief look at the drop dead cool dudes on the cover put an end to such an assumption, but no matter, by that time it was in my hands along with all the other fine junk I was buying.

Needless to say, I still didn’t have a clue in hell who these Scientists were or what they wanted of me when I dropped the needle, but I knew from second # 1 that I was now the owner of a seriously MONSTROUS slab of rock n’ roll, and that made me happy and excited and tingley round the edges.

The Scientists – We Had Love

The b-side is a fine take on Captain Beefheart’s ‘Clear Spot’, which I don’t have a digital version of.

Now of course, I’m older and wiser and in possession of more astounding Rock Facts, so I know that Boon & Watt’s pre-Minutemen band was actually The Reactionaries, and I know all about the great and influential Scientists and their vision of savage, bad attitude swamp-rock.

In fact they’ve reformed of recent, and I caught about half of their set at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year. So I can report that although these days they have rather shorter hair and wear practical loafers alongside their flouncy shirts (and have probably bought some new bulbs for their practice space), they’re still hitting those Big Muff pedals for all they’re worth, Tony Thewlis is still an evil lead guitarist, and they’ve now got a female drummer who plays hunched over with hair across her face, looking like Sadako from Ring. So it’s all good. You can find out what they're up to or say "hi!" here.

Anyway, what got my thinking about scientists and music is that the great Grant Balfour has a new venture in the works – The Guild Of Scientific Troubadours – and if science and song-singing are your things, he invites you to join. The concept is simple: report on some interesting news from the world of science, then sing a song about it.

Being a general supporter of irrationalism, magic and mystery, science as such has never really been my ‘bag’, but nonetheless I hope to find some time to give it a go.

So ‘check it out’, as they say. It's Edutaining.

Labels: punk, science, The Scientists