The Cat & Bells Club
The Cat & Bells Club
Blank Forms Editions
/
2023
LP
29.99
BF-058LP
Incl. insert
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1Cat Thread
2Father's Dead
3Salt Would
4Coffee House
5Prallo By Window
6Oak Key
7Raven Chest
8Pipe Fly
9A Fairwell Rive
10Spanish Donkey
11C-town Breeding Ground
12The Co-operative
13Clip Blue Ceap
14Cave Of Ice Cats
15Theme'ers
16Kent Custer

In 1992, under the guise of the Cat & Bells Club, eighteen-year-old Cheriton residents Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris self-released three tapes—two yellow cassettes and one pink—documenting their earliest musical efforts at S.H.P. studios (Lambkin’s bedroom in his parents’ house). The lowest of all lo-fi recordings, these tracks were laid down live, directly into a boombox with no overdubs. Relieved of their academic expectations and plunged into the workforce, the duo aspired to enter the annals of rock history, making their own primitive teenage overtures to Marc Bolan, the Incredible String Band, Whitehouse, and the Godz. Lyrically and spiritually the Cat & Bells Club had much to do with Bolan’s early Tyrannosaurus Rex project, but with a hyperlocalized Folkestonian twist that nonetheless maintained his penchant for chevaline. While much of the Club’s repertoire comprised freeform instrumental try-outs—untuned charity shop guitars and coffee cup drum kits—a number of songs featured Lambkin’s original lyrics, read by both members of the band, dramatizing the comings and goings of anthropomorphic animals and musing abstractly on the minutiae of daily life in Cheriton (their native C-Town).

Taking their moniker from a mishearing of “the jester’s bauble, cap and bells,”' a line from Incredible String Band’s “The Iron Stone,” the duo operated for a brief year under the increasingly esoteric influence of the Fisheye mail-order and then fledgling Forced Exposure fanzine, and from the airwaves via Radio 1’s John Peel show. This collection was compiled by Lambkin in the early aughts for an unrealized release on his now defunct Kye label, but barring a few tracks on a retrospective 7″ issued by Siltbreeze in 2010, hardly any of these recordings have been heard beyond a handful of hangers-on, inner-circle drinking allies, and the most devoted of fans. The Cat & Bells Club set the stage for what was to soon follow, when the group changed its name to the Shadow Ring—the rest is history.