Thanks to our guests:
Joe Foster Bass guitar - 1, 8, 9, 14
Dave Morgan Drums - 5, 6
Greenwood Goulding Bass guitar - 5, 6
Tim Burrell Piano - 8
Sumishta Brahm Voice - 8, 9

1. She's A Yo Yo

The first take of the "Condition Blue" sessions: four desperate men in a haunted room. Alex Lee's fuel-air blasts and some two-wheeled cornering from Mister Paul Mulreany drive this heads-down squalid tale of bad people doing bad things.

Written at Basement Fish, the JBC's secret central London base, about the man next door. Neither Mister Odd nor Harry, the proprietor of the basement are with us now. God rest their souls.

Inspired by a photo in a sixties college yearbook and written in a Texas motel room, this owes a large musical debt to L.A. band Downey Mildew, which the Butcher somehow thought he could make up by shouting, "Hey, Charlie" over the guitar solo.

One will appreciate that a few years have passed since this was written. He is Bicycle Bloke now. One day he will hear this tune and the Butcher will be toast: "Bicycle Kid - the jumped up B-side that ruined my life."

In 1987, Alex Green and the Bucher toured France for a month in a small car with a crazed and almost totally blind Parisian punk rocker and a tour manager called Captain Dogboy. It is an indication of their state of mind that they actually considered using this title. Five minutes of squelching noises, basically.

Blind drunk and totally broke, the JBC bite the hand that feeds them. Careering unsteadily towards thirty, with the Thatcher thing beginning to bite, the Butcher goes into one, and a sinister man called Iain O'Higgins commit the resultant din to tape.

One week into the Nineties and the JBC hit a creative peak in a Norfolk farmhouse. Just back from a mad American tour, shocked at the seriousness of Kizzy O'Callaghan's illness, their personal lives in chaos, they go for commercial suicide and accidentally make their best album in years. Spooky.

A lunge at the Serge-coloured pervy corner, this may or may not be inspired by an anti-Vietnam War poster. Features one of the Bucther's more graceful lyrics and the first recorded contribution of dangerously moody guitarist and owner-of-all-the-beer, Peter Crouch.

Czech underground techno band The Black Eg caused something of a fuss when they accused the Butcher of stealing this tune from them, even going so far as to call the JBC and Creation Records "pig" on the radio. The tousands of AC/DC fans sampled here have also lodged expensive royalty claims, which means thet the Butcher will have to work until he is over a hundred years old just to pay them all off.

Two snapshots from the US tour of 1992, specifically a splendid night at the Sweetwater Springs Saloon, Los Osos, Ca. involving a giant refrigerator full of Jaegermeister, and a twenty-four hour binge in New Orleans. More romantic than it probably sounds.

The bleached-out sound of a post-hysteric Butcher with real submarine noises from Rosemary Davis' World Of Sound resonating in the Richard Formby Flotation Tank. Try to imagine the Sound Of Philadelphia filtered through a schizophrenically diassociative hangover on a freezing morning thousands of miles from home.

So you're mad. So you're gonna kill me. So how long do you think I'll care?

December 1989: high in the hills of Southern California a dazed JBC tucks into speciality ice-creams in a cowboy bar. It is Tuesday. Like elephants, the JBC do not forget. They agree that this would make a fine soundtrack for a film of their bus driving down a long, straight desert road somewhere in Spain.

We're right in the middle of the 1991 firestorm here. Alex Lee (Gibson 335) and Richard Formby (sixties science-fiction Vox affair) do battle in a darkened room full of toxic fumes. Lix is standing on a chair. The rest of the JBC are doing their nuts on the sofa. This is all that is keeping them going.

There is a place outside of space and time, visited by the illuminated and the terminally schizophrenic alike. Here, where all is spread out below, there is a sound at once soothing and disturbing. It is the sound of the inner circles of Richard Formby's mind, and is it captured for you on the closing minute of this, the JBC's own spooked misappropriation of the Petula Clarke classic, "Downtown".

- Pat Fish, November 1996