Bugger Me

Bugger Me in Coome’s own words is “Suicide meets The Beach Boys. Not the sophisticated ‘Pet Sounds’ Beach Boys, but more like ‘Surfer Girl’ stuff. More conscious reference points were Chris Montez or Timmy Thomas.” He wanted to make “entertainment music, but entertainment music meant for those not served by more mainstream entertainment music.  Maybe one might want to take a break from Sheer Hellish Miasma & enjoy some simple tunes that maybe speak to the same sense of the absurd, that likewise reject commercialism & market-based aesthetics, & even now & again pay a little homage to the raw synthesizer noise we have grown to love & even crave. Maybe timeworn themes such as love & war still resonate in the dusty backrooms of your mind (indeed maybe they are the only themes which do so).”

Accompanied only by his organ and ‘Conny’ – a mid-‘60s rhythm box (non-programmable, “not even really a drum machine”), Coomes made a conscious choice to pare things back. He explains: “In a time where anyone with a computer & enough time on their hands can micro-manage a given piece of music to the nth degree; can process, arrange, edit & otherwise wheedle a song into a state-of-the-art showcase of outclevering the next guy… maybe allowing a song to exist at its most basic level is a means to not only subvert market-based (or, almost equivalently, technology-based) standards of production, but also a means to keep the music & the performance of the music honest.  This is assuming of course that honesty is a good thing, or at least is considered a good thing by those unmoved by mainstream entertainment music, which often reeks of dishonesty.  Whether this is a safe assumption, who knows?  Actually, I’m suspicious of people proclaiming their own honesty – so forget it.  Certainly, its artifice.  But the intent is honest artifice – like the original King Kong, as opposed to the remakes.  If King Kong for you means Willis O’Brien rather than Dino De Laurentis or Peter Jackson, then you probably have an idea of what I’m driving at.”