Electric Eels

The Electric Eels were the original anti music heroes. Formed around 1972 in Cleveland, they lasted three years and played only around half a dozen gigs.

“In 1974, they (The Electric Eels) were wearing safety pins and ripped-up shirts, T-shirts with insulting things on them, White Power logos and swastikas: it was offensive and they meant to be offensive. They meant to distract people, but I don’t think they were exceptionally racist: they were being obnoxious and outrageous.” 

Mike Weldon quoted in “England’s Dreaming” –  Jon Savage.

The centre of this maelstrom was the peroxide-haired John Morton and violence whether onstage or between members of the band and audience was always bubbling under the surface. Morton, originally drawn to art, wanted the excitement of performing. In the Electric Eels, he combined the two (creating all the band’s artwork). As Heylin in ‘From the Velvets to the Voidoids’ observes: “Their roots…led them to deconstruct rock’n’roll, retaining only the noise element, the polemical nature of the rock lyric and the confrontational aspect of the live performance.”

One gig had John Morton and Dave’E’Macmanus being arrested for being drunk and disorderly. The one wearing a coat strung together with safety pins and the other covered in rat traps. Morton’s hand was broken in the arrest. The next gig he had various tools strapped to his cast and proceeded to beat the shit out of a sheet of metal with a sledgehammer.

“The Eels never saw the inside of a recording studio. These tapes were made using an assortment of junk PA equipment and a low end home cassette deck. No compromises to the recording process would be made and the band played just as always deafeningly loud. Care was taken to maintain the loud edge of the fuzz guitars as well as the overall distortion of the bands live sound.”

‘God Says Fuck You’ sleeve notes.

Agitated is a pure slice of the finest punk – insanely mixed past the point of bleeding and fucking brilliantly proud in its audacity. It’s also worth noting the drummer on their recordings providing that solid back beat – one future Cramp –  Nick Knox.

Oh, I’m so agitated, so agitated Run through a washing machine, agitated, I’m so agitated, I’m so convoluted I don’t know what I know, but I’d just like to shoot it It’s five a.m. and I’m crawling the walls, waiting for imaginary telephone calls You know what I think, I think the whole world stinks, and I don’t need no shrink, I just hate it Sometimes I think I’d be better off dead, just like my cousin Fred

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Images John Morton

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