Back in the "early days" we took perverse pleasure in opening our sets with what, in hindsight, could only be regarded as an obtuse, bloody-minded, but totally artistic statement of intent. It went by the name of
Trommelmann. It was 4 minutes 36 seconds of martial drums and
Psycho strings, with a flash-gun popping in the audience's eyes, all underpinned by the dog-bothering whine of a detuned radio.
At least that's what the audience heard.
There was a foreboding deep-bass melody picked out by Sarah on the Jen SX1000, but unfortunately every sound engineer who ever had the (mis)fortune to encounter Herr Trommelmann failed to bring this vital melody to the forefront. The result: the unsuspecting punters had their ears bashed by a relentless 4 and a half-minutes of belligerent clattering drums and not much else. There would be a smattering of polite applause at the end, and a thinned-out crowd as the dry ice lifted.
It took us quite some time to realise that this wasn't the best way to win a crowd - we heroically debuted it at our second gig at the Lounge Bar, Worthing on 03 May 2002, and its last recorded airing was at The Freebutt, Brighton on 23 October 2003. And the Trommelmann only lived on when we took to naming our rhythm section, of drums&bass in a metal box, after it.
Until now... There has been talk of late in the Miss Pain camp of resurrecting Trommelmann and knocking it into shape. So I powered up the old 8-track and took Herr Trommelmann to task. It emerged re-arranged, still brutal, and a little rough around the edges.
We will hopefully be putting Trommelmann on tape in our next recording sessions, but for now, here's a relic from those "early days":
MARCH WIDE!
