Of Rats and Imps

Some of you may have heard this story before. That’s too bad, because it’s one of my favourite stories. Hopefully the telling will have improved over time. This is the very long and rambling story of how Disjecta Membra ended up playing a song called ‘Rats’.

Hamilton, New Zealand, 1987. I was twelve, and my favourite band was The Cure. I owned a Casiotone keyboard and an old beat-up acoustic guitar, and couldn’t play either of them. But tinkering away persistently I eventually happened upon some basic chord-like shapes and wrote some words for a handful of songs, some of which eventually found their way into the Disjecta Membra canon.

‘Cathedral’ was the first song I wrote – two chords on the Casiotone and some words about a figure from a recurring dream. The main riff from what became ‘Dog’s Death’ (a song we played early on) was written on the guitar around this time as well. That came from a dream as well, in which a street sign that read ‘Dog’s Death’ pointed ominously towards a dead end. The next song that I wrote once again revolved around two fragmentary chords, coupled lyrically with some existentialist angst prompted by the sudden death of three family members in a car accident near the end of ‘87. Eventually, and after ample deliberation, it was imaginatively titled ‘Third Song’.

In highschool the following year my classmate Mat Nicholls and I decided to start a band called Nösferätu. The name arose from stumbling across Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre on TV late one night. We didn’t know then that there was already a UK Goth band called Nosferatu. The important distinction between Us and Them, of course, is that We had the heavy metal umlauts, flanking our band logo like a pair of canines. I drew it in trusty Old English font across the back of a communal denim jacket that became the envy of all our friends, complete with a cartoon skull sporting horns and batwings. On the schoolyard of Fairfield College in 1988, that was a veritable triumph in viral marketing.

I had taken up drum lessons, on account of being so rubbish at guitar, so Mat played guitar, I played drums, we both shared vocals (although I eventually became the lead singer by virtue of writing most of the words), and there was another guy, Simon Wood, who was loosely involved as second guitarist. Simon was a few years older than us; I was one of those precocious kids who gravitated towards a slightly older set, simply because they were the only people who liked the same bands as I did. Simon went to university and listened to ‘alternative’ music (a genuine point of difference, at the time), and had a show on the local student radio station, Contact FM. On the day we met, I took his moped for a joyride and crashed it into my mum’s garden fence.

But as much as Simon’s an important player in this story, Nösferätu was to all intents and purposes a song-writing collaboration between Mat and me. Our influences were a mixture of metal, punk, glam rock and gothic – Metallica, Misfits, Motörhead (hence the umlauts), Fields of The Nephilim, T-Rex, Slayer and Bauhaus (my new favourite band at age thirteen)… and watching a lot of vampire and zombie movies. We spent almost as much time watching videos like The Lost Boys, Near Dark and Night of the Demons, or Return of the Living Dead as we did on our music. The look, sound and feel of those films and their soundtracks moulded our tiny but fertile minds. TV walk-ons by Motörhead and The Damned on The Young Ones left similarly indelible impressions. We played covers of ‘The Last Caress’ (Misfits), ‘Jeepster’ (T-Rex) and a thrash-punk version of the TV theme from Batman. Mat was the proper Metallica fan, but I gratefully discovered the music of Misfits and Killing Joke via their ‘Garage Days Re-Revisited’ EP.

At the time, cultural points of reference for two adolescent schoolboys living at the far ends of the earth were few and far between; we knew nothing of the existence of ‘deathrock’ or ‘horror punk’ as musical genres, but in effect, that was probably what we were playing. Our originals included titles like ‘The Psycho Pirate’ (after a DC comic book character), ‘Ebullition’ (Motörhead-meets-Nephilim), ‘Gothic Epic’ and ‘Karnage of Kinski’. The latter was, shall we say, “inspired by” hearing ‘Legend of Lugosi’ by Wellington’s Flesh D-Vice on Contact FM. There was also an improvised blues dirge about sacrificial Smurfs (don’t ask), a demented little folk ditty called ‘Happy’, and a version of ‘Cathedral’ set to the music of ‘Dog’s Death’, because Mat refused to entertain the droning two-chord Casiotone version.

The Disjecta Membra track ‘Necrophilia’ was also culled from an earlier Nösferätu song by that name. The original was written by Mat, and was more in the noisy guitar-driven gothic/glam/punk style of some of Bauhaus’ more ‘rock’ moments, as opposed to the gloomier atmospherics of the Disjecta Membra version. The music was great but I wasn’t too keen on singing the words, which were a bit puerile (left to his own devices, Mat had also penned ‘Fuk U Bitch’ and ‘Honey U Got a Nice Ass’), so I eventually rewrote them after reading about Karen Greenlee in Apocalypse Culture. When Mat and I went our separate ways, I was obliged to come up with my own music for ‘Necrophilia’ as well; I did so while experimenting with my first bass guitar and listening to ‘Faith’/‘Carnage Visors’ by The Cure and ‘Closer’ by Joy Division a lot. By the time I recorded the first couple of Disjecta Membra versions, ‘Necrophilia’ was an entirely different song, but its genesis had been as one of Mat’s songs for Nösferätu.

But I digress; this is, after all, the story of ‘Rats’.

As a ‘band’, Nösferätu was one of those things that only ever existed in theory. We never actually played any gigs; we never even managed to get a fully functional band line-up together, but we recorded a handful of fairly raucous demos live-to-tapedeck in bedrooms and garden sheds. Sometimes we got really technical and used two tapedecks, to enable overdubs. I don’t know what happened to those tapes; I think Mat had the only copies at the time, and with any luck, he will have destroyed them years ago. We wrote a lot of songs together, but more often than not our ideas were incongruent and never quite gelled; Mat decided he’d rather focus on rock and metal, and I was more interested in gothic and alternative stuff, so it eventually folded. I think we existed, hypothetically at least, from about 1988-1991.

As a parting gesture, Mat very kindly taught me a few chords and a handful of riffs to help get me on my way with writing my own stuff. He also gave me his old guitar (Ibanez Roadstar II) and a homemade practice amp after we accidentally pulled an insurance scam, claiming that they’d been stolen. When I say accidentally – we actually thought that they had been stolen from my mum’s house while on loan to me, and by the time we found them locked away in a cupboard somewhere, mum’s insurance had already paid out for replacement gear. So Mat got the new rig and I got to keep the ‘stolen’ stuff. Pretty sweet deal, I thought.

But anyway, none of that’s important, because we never actually did anything; that’s just the back story. This is the part that I wanted to tell you about.

At some point during 1990, prior to calling it a day, we’d bumped into our sometimes-bandmate Simon in town, who informed us that he’d given up guitar and had taken up the violin in a band called Zangiacomo’s Eastern Tour. Then he invited us to come with him and check out a gothic band fronted by someone he described as his “sort-of-girlfriend”, practicing in the basement of the Music Box; the alternative record store where he worked. Mat wasn’t very interested but I was sold, so taking his advice, off we fucked without him.

Simon’s so-called sort-of-girlfriend (by which I think he meant he liked her, but hadn’t told her) was Luana, and the band was called The Haunting. Lu had a sort of impish look about her. She was not very tall, as is so often the case with imps, and she had spiked-up peroxide-blonde hair and these wide staring almond-shaped eyes. She stood transfixed before the microphone like an unblinking sentinel spitting icy monotone at the reverberating concrete basement walls. When they played live, she would stand staring at some fixed point in space for the entire duration of a song, and when it was finished, she would pick up the mic stand, set it down somewhere else, and then stand riveted to some other place unseen throughout the next song.

This wizened, scrawny little mad-scientist dude with Robert Smith hair and John Lennon spectacles played guitar through an epic chain of stomp-boxes. Sometimes you’d see him skulking through town and his bird’s nest ’do would be startling white, as though he’d been freshly reanimated by lightning. He was called Wheels, and his marathon rendition of the lead guitar passages from ‘A Forest’ sounded like The Cure being herded into a T.A.R.D.I.S. and sent hurtling through infinity. Still, better than being locked in a wardrobe and thrown off a cliff. I realised that everything Mat had been telling me about alternative guitarists being musically unsophisticated was completely untrue – this Wheels chap could sweep-pick his way through the Phrygian mode backwards with the best of them.

Wheels’ partner, Ree, played these lurching, grinding basslines that stalked the earth like raging giants. She cut the sort of figure through town that people got out of the way for; like a bigger, harder looking version of Simon Gallup stuffed into a Bad Seed suit-jacket, supported very tenuously atop a pair of black leggings and Doc Marten boots. Shortly after we’d turned up and Simon unlocked the shop, she’d barrelled through carrying a great big bass rig, swearing and bellowing at snivelling onlookers, who parted like the Red Sea before her. I wasn’t afraid of her though. She had a show on Contact FM too, which I used to tape every week, and got my first taste of songs from what was then Peter Murphy’s new album, ‘Deep’, from Ree’s show. I eventually started going up to the station and annoying her, eager as I was to befriend people who liked the same bands that I did. Perhaps she found it somehow disarming to have a young and impressionable fan following her about, because she was usually very nice to me.

A dreadlocked drummer called Paul T, with piercing pale green eyes and missing teeth, resembled the bastard offspring of Worzel Gummage and Nod Wright, and played thunderous post-punk neo-tribal tom-toms. He spoke the Waikato dialect of bogan fluently, and turned out to be a keen astrologer, and archivist/curator of the best Hamilton alternative music collection in existence. Everyone called him Paul T, rather than Paul; partly in order to distinguish him from his mate Paul Oakley, a local bass-player with whom Paul T appeared to be joined at the hip, and partly because the local papers were always spelling Tregilgas wrong. Paul T and Oakley, as they were (and are still) known, were also in Simon’s band, Zangiacomo’s Eastern Tour.

So we’re in the basement of the Music Box at a band practice for The Haunting. I remember that the first song they went through was a cover of ‘The Mirror People’ by Love & Rockets, and their next song was an original, called ‘Rats’. This moment in time, I mark it well: one afternoon near the end of 1990, fifteen years old in the basement to Hamilton’s only alternative record store, watching The Haunting play ‘Rats’ for the first time. That was the definitive moment in which I felt, rightly or wrongly, as though there was actually a point to pursuing my own music. And more than that, suddenly it was absolutely essential that I should do so.

Besides The Cure and Love & Rockets, The Haunting also ran through covers of ‘Christine’ by Siouxsie, ‘Spirit’ by Bauhaus and ‘Temple’ by another local band, Book of Martyrs. Originals called ‘Two to Fear’, ‘Switch it Off’, ‘Tripped’, ‘Grave Words’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’ bore out those influences, alongside strains of early Christian Death and X-Mal Deutschland. I bought a copy of the Book of Martyrs tape ‘Catharsis’ from the Music Box on the way out, and over the course of the next two days I sat down and taught myself to play all of the guitars on ‘Disintegration’ and ‘Pornography’ by ear. I had decided that when I grew up, I was going to be a Wheels. 

As well as The Haunting, Book of Martyrs and Zangiacomo’s Eastern Tour, I’d also been propelled along this trajectory by a couple of other late ‘80s Hamilton bands called Cygnet Committee and Requiem. These latter two probably had more in common with what Mat and I had been attempting; Cygnet Committee combining the dark theatricality of Bowie and Bauhaus with the schlock-horror glam rock of Alice Cooper or Rocky Horror, while Requiem were similar again, but leaning further still towards the ‘dark metal’ end of the spectrum. But unlike The Haunting and co, I’d been far too young to sneak into the pubs and see Cygnet Committee and Requiem live; I was simply inspired by hearing their music played on Contact, reading about them in local papers and student zines, hearing about their gigs from older friends, seeing flyers around town… the nearest I got was watching a video of Cygnet Committee playing at The Gluepot in Auckland.

These people were all very kind to me over the years. Ree and Wheels used to let me come over to their flat and hunt through Wheels’ enormous record collection, and then they would tape stuff for me. While it’s not so unusual anymore, at the time, Wheels was considered quite old for a gothic type. He was in his thirties, and had first seen The Cure play at the Founders Theatre in Hamilton during their massively influential New Zealand tour of 1980. I’ve met plenty of crotchety old bastards who saw (or claim to have seen) The Cure on that tour, but to still be playing in a gothic rock band ten years later gave Wheels some serious old-school die-hard credentials, by my reckoning.

Ree eventually decided she was bored with playing in a band; I think Oakley briefly replaced her in The Haunting until Luana quit as well. Oakley also did a stint as Book of Martyrs’ second bassist. By 1992 Wheels, Oakley and Paul T had morphed into a covers band called Hapukalypse Now, with Jonny Armstrong from Book of Martyrs on vocals. They had a residency down at the Ward Lane Tavern every other Thursday; I used to go along, mainly to watch Wheels, that being my primary form of music tuition at this point. He and Ree left the country bound for the UK near the end of ’92, and that was the last I saw of either one of them.

My former cohort Mat had meanwhile joined a rock covers band called Waters, fronted by one Dave Jones, a frustrated songwriter trying to make a living on the pub circuit, who happened to live just down the road from me, so that’s how I met Dave. In December of 1993, Dave and I recorded the first few proper demos (if you could call them ‘proper’) under the Disjecta Membra banner in his garage, but that’s another story again.

In late 1995 when Disjecta Membra started gigging around town more often, I became reacquainted with Paul T; the only ex Haunting member still active on the local music scene. I wanted to track down some old Haunting recordings and learn to play ‘Rats’, so Paul put me in touch with Luana, who came around and dropped off the tape one day, with demos of all their originals on one side, and a recording of the band practicing in the basement of the Music Box on the other. I often listened to it imagining that it might have even been recorded that very day.

Disjecta Membra played ‘Rats’ live for the first time in December 1995, and by mid-way through the following year it had become such an integral part of our set that it felt like it was one of our own. To most people seeing us live, they were usually hearing the song for the first time anyway, so it never felt like we were playing a cover. In fact it was more than that, because where Disjecta Membra could take credit for our own originals, this song could take partial credit for engendering the band. For me, it’s a part of the fabric of who I am in a way that no other song could ever be. When we were offered the opportunity to release an album, I had to include it. I wanted other people to hear that song, and it seemed like the only conceivable way to pay tribute to the people who had given me that definitive, inspirational moment. Everyone had lost touch with Wheels and Ree by then, but Paul and Lu gave us permission on behalf of The Haunting. To this day, I have no idea whether Ree or Wheels has ever heard it.

Years later, I managed to persuade Paul T, Oakley, and former Book of Martyrs guitarist Stan Jagger to play in a Hamilton-based live incarnation of Disjecta Membra, for a couple of one-off shows in about 2005. The line-up was specifically put together for an event organised by my friend Mark Tupuhi, known as The Inaugural Hamilton Circle Jerk – a bunch of Hamilton bands playing cover versions of other Hamilton bands. Naturally, we covered ‘Rats’ by The Haunting and ‘Temple’ by Book of Martyrs, which is pretty fucking meta, man… and a couple of noisy rock songs at Oakley’s insistence, of the sort that would inevitably go down a storm with ridiculously drunk Hamiltonians staggering toward the end of a piss-soaked marathon of pub rock anthems.

Paul T in turn persuaded me to loan him my Haunting and Cygnet Committee tapes, and of course, I’ve never seen them since.

Fast forward to January 2014. Disjecta Membra recently played two shows in Auckland and Wellington for the first time in nearly five years, and ‘Rats’ is still a part of the set. Lu lives in Sydney these days but we’ve kept in touch online, and lately The Haunting are on my mind a lot. Neither of us can find Paul T on Facebook, but I discovered that he has a soundcloud page where he’s uploaded five songs by The Haunting.

Curiouser and curiouser still, a couple of days later Lu got in touch and said she’d just been visiting her folks in New Zealand, where she found some old tapes of The Haunting’s demos and band practices. She wanted to know would it be okay if she sent them to me so that I could transfer them to CD. 

The tapes arrived a few days ago; one of them’s more than a little worse for wear, but I’ve managed to patch it up with a pair of scissors and some sellotape. Lu can’t find the one recorded in the basement of the Music Box with ‘A Forest’ and ‘Christine’ on it, but says she has a vivid memory of me being there that day. Oh, ephemera.

So anyway, if you’ve ever been curious, or never were before but are now, then here it is – ‘Rats’, by The Haunting.

The Haunting - Rats by Michel on Mixcloud