Not long ago my wife posted an Instagram video of our nephew, a 4 year old growing up in South London, banging on a toy guitar/synthesizer and loudly singing shouting a song he had just written on the spot and was performing for us via FaceTime. A friend of mine commented on my wife’s video, “(your husband) has records that sound just like this.” I made a note to play my nephew some Prats next time I saw him.
“Lo-fi” has become an umbrella term for any music that contains some combination of poor recording quality (intentional or otherwise), incompetent musicianship and/or artistic ineptitude/lack of professional aesthetic. Like “punk” or “emo”, “lo-fi” can mean any number of things, but when it’s used to describe music, more often than not, listeners will read it as meaning “poorly recorded”. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of fans out there who appreciate “lo-fi” music based on their own definitions of what it means. I can pinpoint the Electric Eels “Agitated” as the first song that immediately struck me as being poorly composed, recorded and performed, and was 100% all the better for it. Nothing sounded like it to me. Somehow the lyric about “cousin Fred” was the absolute dumbest thing I had ever heard in a punk song and therefore the BEST thing I had ever heard in a punk song. However, if I applied the same qualities of that record to, say, Frankie Knuckle’s “The Whistle Song”, or the Cro-Mags “We Gotta Know”, I can’t say it would have worked quite as well for me.
By the time I was actively collecting the inept, lo-fi “DIY” records that were being tossed aside by serious Punk™ collectors I realized that my taste for the less-than-professional sounds of some of these artists put me at a slight advantage as not as many people were looking for this stuff. However, in a pre-Google world that also meant information was a lot harder to come by and many of those who had a clue were reluctant to share for fear of having their proverbial spots blown up (or just they didn’t want to waste time discussing records that weren’t worth much). Chuck Warner’s Hyped 2 Death comps, Johan Kugelberg’s top 100 DIY 7″s list and comps like “I Hate the Pop Group” were very polarizing among collectors I found and lucky for me that sometimes meant if a dealer was holding something that was on one of them, just knowing about it and letting them talk at you about it for a few minutes might soften them up enough to give you a deal. 85% of the records I own that appear on those comps I bought before Discogs and Popsike existed so that right there should tell you how valuable information is compared to the personal taste of someone trying to dig up the next “KBD MONSTER PUNK OOP LISTEN”.
A few years ago I ws diggin’ for deals on Discogs when I came upon a listing for a live Puddle LP on Flying Nun that I didn’t even know existed. I may not have given it a second look but there was one copy for sale for only $20 with the following description:
“Both sleeve and LP like new. MoFi rice paper inner. Erm, a collector’s item? Yes, if you like live albums that sound like they were recorded from the back of the room inside a gumboot. Maybe we can classify it as “ambient live alt. kiwi pop”. Please take this off my hands.“
I hit the “Add to Cart” button, confirmed, and within minutes I receieved a message from the seller:
“Lol, thanks for the order. You really want this huh? I’m losing money on this as I paid quite a bit more for it, but I can’t listen to it & just want to get rid of it. I warn you now, the sound is very lo-fi. The record is immaculate, but it’s a bootleg quality recording. If you change your mind before paying, I’ll let you off the hook 🙂“
What a thoughtful guy! My immediate reaction was to look at what else he was selling and sure enough my suspicions of his taste were confirmed by his meticulous descriptions of some Green Day and Pixies reissue LPs. How he ended up with this record is beyond me but I was happy to help him get rid of it.
“Live at the Teddy Bear Cub” ws released in 1991, 5 years after the Puddle’s “Pop Lib” 12″, their only other vinyl besides a track on the excellent “KVI” 7″ compilation on Onset/Offset from 1985. It really is a pretty lo-fi gumboot recording, even by 80’s NZ standards. Founder George Henderson had by that point already made his mark in the NZ underground with bands The Spies and The And Band, both of which have seen LPs released of their archival recordings, the survival of which is miraculous considering the stories behind them. Henderson resurrected the Puddle with some friends in the early 00’s to perform and record new material. His most recent project, the New Existentialists, released their debut 7″ in 2017 on Spacecase Records.
Here’s The Puddle performing “Mahogany” live in 2009:
