Also See:

• Pat reviews his own records (circa 1993)
• appearances on various-artist compilations
• MonkeeMan's "variations" page (mirror)

1983

Bath Of Bacon It's really just the sound of a few mates failing to take seriously the fact they they've got an l.p. to make. It seems VERY early eighties now, but you must remember that there was a LOT of crap for us to clear out of the way in those days.

Southern Mark Smith (single) Recorded in the summer of 1983 in a place called Wellingborough, a small town in the middle of England where even the children are scarey!

1984

A Scandal In Bohemia The Albatross. A record, I feel, of its time. We were young(ish) and cocky and I think it shows. I still haven't learned to sing on this one, which bugs me too. Still, it was cheap and cheerful, and it helped us to meet an awful lot of people.

Marnie (single) An attempt to force a meeting between the steaming tropical jungles of Bangladesh (where the tigers live) and the frozen stepps of Siberia (where the Siberian tigers live).

Roadrunner (single)

Zombie Love (single) Recorded in London one Sunday afternoon in January 1984, Zombie Love is just sick.

Affection (single)

1985

Sex And Travel Having exhausted the initial stick of JB songs, I was obliged for the first time to write about my life as it was at the time. I think that now we had started to learn about actually creating recordings rather than just recording the sound of a bunch of pals fooling around. This one I'd actually defend at length if I had to.

Hamburg (live) We were all disappointed at the way this came out. The concert was great, but logistics prevented us from making anything much more than a glorified bootleg. Still, live albums are best as souvenirs anyway, so I guess some people regard it fondly. Lots of entertaining photos to look at anyway...

The Gift Of Music (compilation) This record collects together the various singles that have been issued in England to date under the much-abused name of the Jazz Butcher, to wit: me. I rather like having them all in one place like this - it makes for a nice, noisey muck-it-up sort of disc that is ideal for leisure time at home, on the beach, in you local club.... hell, ANYWHERE!!!

Real Men (single) Real Men, the kind who never sit together on buses in case they get their medallions tangled.

The Human Jungle (single) The title comes from a rather noir little TV series from the early Sixties wherein the great Herbert Lom played the extremely sexy and not entirely unbrilliant Dr. Alexander Kordu, a psychiatrist with the handy ability to sort out even the most appalling cases within sixty minutes.

Christmas With The Pygmies (single)

Leaving It Up To You (various)

1986

Distressed Gentlefolk We were deeply confused young men when we made this record. Max, Jones and I had all been drinking dangerously for over a year now. Generally, we had it down in concert. In just about every other department, however, we were coming to bits, individually and collectively, and to me this record actually shows the morbid state of things at the time.

Bloody Nonsense (compilation) The Jazz Butcher and his group are not in the business of belonging; they are too old and too obstreperous to conform to some attention-seeking image or commercially viable formula. Rather, they bring their not inconsiderable talents to bear on whatever happens to be in the way at the time. The results can only be described as essential.

Hard (single) This record is all about love. Don't let the psychic molestation syndrome get to you. This is our loudest record to date, which is something to do with the elephants.

Conspiracy (EP) "Ever wondered what Max and I get up to away from the glamour of the modern stage? No, probably not, but let me tell you that there is nothing we like better that to get our teeth into those Big Questions."

Angels (single)

1987

Big Questions (Gift Of Music Volume II) (compilation)

May I (EP) Chock full of acoustically and lively delivered cover tunes. Essential.

1988

Fishcotheque Having ended up on Creation Records, which I took as a bit of a validation, I was keen to get as far away from all those "w" words that had followed my group around. The sessions were chaotic and funny. What disappoints me is that it came out sounding so SMOOTH and tidy. But I like Fishcotheque; I wish there more records as good as it.

Spooky (EP) Thanks for the money. We'll be spending it on weapons and drugs. The first thing that you have to understand about this disc is that it is not an L.P.: it is a single and a radio session nailed together for your amusement.

1989

Big Planet, Scarey Planet Early 1989 was, indeed a strange and desperate time after all that triumphalist Tory looting that had been going on. We listened to a lot of hip-hop and soul music at the time, and I think that we considered ourselves sufficiently HARD to take the whole fucker on in an l.p. Possibly with a more "clued-in" producer and a bit more self-discipline we could have come up with something like what we were looking for.

New Invention (single) We trust that you will get off on it.

1990

Cult Of The Basement If things seemed weird back in February 1989, when we made this baby, the Weird were going shopping on bikes. In a farmhouse in the dead of winter, in personal circumstances too bizarre and complex to relate, we set about making our "commercial suicide" album. For the first time, I felt, we had made an album that really sounded like us. This record does have personality. One of my favourites, this.

Girl-Go (single)

We Love You (single)

1991

Condition Blue For all the pain and crap from which this record was made, the actual sessions were a gigantic and wonderful party. This was warmly received by The Outside World, less popular among those who counted themselves JBC afficionados. This IS the sound of me having fun, and getting me to do that in those dark days of mid-1991 was no small job.

Edward's Closet (compilation) So you've got a CD player, have you? I've got a headache and an abiding dislike of expensive food crews in dumb baseball hats. I've been in Edward's Closet and he wasnt't in. "That JBC", they mutter at the bus-stop, "turned left at the light a Long Time Ago".

She's A Yo-Yo (single)

Shirley Maclaine (single)

The Black Eg (other) Karel's two brothers, Otto and Emil, arrived in Vienna, having taken advantage of the new freedoms introduced by the enlightened government of Vaclav Havel, and Karel obtained in a second hand store and ancient sequential circuits drum machine and a primitive sampler. The Black Eg was born.

1992

Unconditional (compilation) One of the better Creation-era compilations. Canadian release.

1993

Sweet Water (single)

Waiting For The Love Bus There's a clean, simple sound to a lot of this that Condition Blue detractors might appreciate. I'm ten years older now than when I made Bath, and right now, after all that morbid stuff, it only really feels like about three. There's rockin' shit and there's a big ballad or two and some weird little pop songs and a nice family sing-along about penguins. I hope you like it.

Western Family (live) Yes, I believe something horrible DID happen to the tapes somewhere. The first time that Richard Formby and I played this CD we sat there laughing. For loonie completists only, for sure, though, if you listen through the muck, you'll see that we did our bit.

1994

Vodka Girls (various)

1995

Sixteen Years (single)

Illuminate New JBC lp duly completed in secure Northampton location. 1994 live line-up stumbled through a series of tunes and such under Butcher's direction, aided and abetted by a number of the usual suspects; Alex Lee on guitar, Alex Green on saxes, that sort of thing.

1996

Draining The Glass (compilation) Glass Records era compilation.

1997

¡Excellent! The Violent Years (compilation) Millions of years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Today the Galileo Space Probe orbits mighty planet Jupiter. The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy first appeared in June 1982 in the back room of the Black Lion in Northampton. They finally drank the bar dry in a small town in Mallorca on the 20th August 1996.

2000

Glorious And Idiotic (live) The last thing anybody expected was a new Jazz Butcher album in the year 2000. But there is one, and it's just the sort of thing that you hardcore JBC listeners are going to enjoy. The record is called "Glorious and Idiotic" and it is released on 26th January 2000 on ROIR.

Rotten Soul Well, I'm back from America. We had a good old time of it, and by the end of the tour we had worked 5 songs off the new record into our live set. The title of the new waxing, incidentally, is Rotten Soul.

2001

Cake City (compilation) Glass-era compilation.

2003

The Jazz Butcher's Free Lunch (compilation) "You're not a band. You're a crack team of international restaurant critics" - Curtis E. Johnson

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