RTSBBK#5: The 39 Clocks – Psycho Beat

Ok, this is the first, (relatively speaking), obscure band and record on this blog. The 39 Clocks were a hugely underrated duo of musicians from Hannover, Germany, whose first public appearance was back in 1976 at the Dada Nova in Hannover, a space occupied by the radical AAO Commune. They split in 1983. Gigs were characterised by Situationist violence and the wilful and chaotic unprofessionalism of the band, but their recorded output was superb. They built on the American garage punk and psychedelic noises of the 1960s, sanded it down with the sound of the Velvet Underground at their most dissonant, and varnished it with the hauntingly spare electronica of legendary pioneering synth-punks, Suicide, (who were clearly a massive influence on them, adopting the New York duo’s confrontational aesthetic).  They were often, unfairly, and much to the band’s annoyance, referred to simply as the “German Velvet Underground”, when it is pretty obvious that they took on a lot of influences and forged their own sound, as part of what was dubbed “new German psychedelia”. This song appeared on the band’s first album in 1981, Pain It Dark, and  undoubtedly provides the trancey, cascadingly repetitive, minimalist psychedelic template for a host of imitators, such as Spacemen 3, Loop and the Telescopes, to name but a few. Great track.