Alex Williams, James Cook, Ben Wright; Assisted by Agents-at-large/sleeper cell consisting of: Dr. Gavin Robinson (Minister for Information, some bass), David Croft (religious leader and spiritual advisor, more bass & guitar), Leo Cookman (more drums, keyboards, beard), Tobias Maximus Caesar (even more bass, one-man road crew). And a supporting cast of thousands...............
Influences
A small sample of our collective memory: Billy Childish (+ bands!), The Stooges, The Who, The Wedding Present, Dinosaur Jr, The Replacements, DJ Shadow, afternoon tea, Lightnin' Hopkins, Edgard Varese, Captain Beefheart, Public Enemy, Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention, failing the 11+, Link Wray, Joy Division/ New Order, MC5, Wes Montgomery, Shergold Woodcrafts Ltd (1969-1992), The Flaming Lips, Dick Dale, Jackson Pollock, Neu! (except when that bloke starts singing...),The Cardiacs (get well soon, Tim Smith), Pixies (+ Breeders & Frank Black), my dad's tall tales, The Magnetic Fields, Syd Barrett, The Pipettes, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Igor Stravinsky, Farmhouse Biscuits Ltd, Sonic Youth, Raleigh Industries bicycles, Bob Mould, Tina Arena, John Otway, Silver Apples, Hatchards outfitters (1902-2006), Sleater Kinney, Eels, Private Eye, My Bloody Valentine, Dr Feelgood, The Kinks, Mistys Big Adventure, Talk Talk, M.I.A., Skip James, Edvard Grieg, Massey Fergusson, The Kingsmen, Wout Steenhuis, Stanley Kubrick, Lightning Bolt, The Spice Girls pre-celebrity boyfriends, The Prisoners, Bonzo Dog Band, Admiral Lord Fisher, The Troggs (+ tape), Ornette Coleman, Jilted John/ John Shuttleworth, Slim Gaillard, Jurassic 5, Kid Koala, Jimi Hendrix, cheeses, real ales and fine wines, The Damned, Terrence Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, John Coltrane, the Thames Estuary and River Swale, Mose Allison, Dennis and the Din Makers, the red-headed girl who used to get my bus to school c.1993, P.J. O'Rourke, Wreckless Eric, Beach Boys, Jesus & Mary Chain, The Beatles, REM, women with French bobs, James Ormston Burns, Happy Mondays, Buzzcocks, Sir Alec Issigonis, getting fired in 2004, Jim Marshall, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Hexicon, the Teardrop Explodes, Charlie Watkins, Patti Smith, Luke Smith & The Feelings, Michael De Montaigne, The Shadey Gentlemen, Roger Bacon, Iron Maiden, Schoolly D, the smell of rotting seaweed, KRS-One, The Shadows, ruined industrial buildings, Kendal mintcake, PJ Harvey, the Art of Noise, ABC, being on the dole in 1996, Harris Tweed, Pebbles & Nuggets compilations, Ride, XTC, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Trashmen, Johnny Moped and our glorious ancestors, The Psychotic Mushrooms.
Sounds Like
Some of the more flattering comparisons drawn by Reviewers/punters have included: 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, The Coral, The Beta Band, Pulp, Mogwai, Johnny Thunders, Paul Weller/The Jam, The Wedding Present, The Mighty Boosh!, Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Wreckless Eric, My Bloody Valentine, Billy Bragg, The Who, The Prisoners, The Smiths, Lee Hazlewood, William Blake (no, really), Billy Jenkins, Eels, Babybird, Tindersticks, 'a deranged monkey fucking in your ears', Captain Beefheart, The Stooges, The Flaming Lips and even Belle and Sebastian. Some of these possibly say more about them than us...
Ok! Pay attention: The Psychøtic Reactiøn come from Whitstable in Kent, where we bring truth, beauty and noise terrorism to a tiny local music scene of erratic quality; playing gigs wherever we can and recording as often as possible. Despite being plagued by untold cock-ups and disasters (imagine living in a Peanuts cartoon written by Samuel Beckett. For 13 years!), we have occasionally touched the sublime (cough)and are Whitstable’s greatest-ever band, and no, not just by default either. On first sight we may well resemble two librarians and a road mender, but we are in fact torch bearers for the future of rock ‘n’ roll. Submit!!
Indie is dead: Long live the Gentleman Amateur!
If push comes-to-shove, I suppose we could be called "indie", but in the true sense of the word; NOT the pre-packaged, market-orientated stuff that passes for it these days, and NOT shockwave-sponsored, NME-endorsed pretty boys either — to be sure, these people are the enemy. We are hairy-arsed, goggle-eyed, gangling, interestingly ugly, MEN (with occasional assistance from one or two women) and all but one of us is a speccy bugger to boot. On no occasion have any of us ever used hair-straighteners or hair ‘product’ (though we wash occasionally. Cleanliness is next to godliness). We treat trends and fashion with the contempt they deserve, though occasionally fashion chimes with some of what we do ("if you wait around long enough…" etc). By and large we are stubborn and bloody minded. So there.
We aint been to no Brit School!!!
We like to try and mix the weird with the poppy and the impromptu with the measured, ideally within the same song. The key elements are avoid-the-cliché sounds and arrangements, distinctive melodies, "genre-splicing", our old friend ear-splitting feedback, unusual guitars and a frightening array of effects pedals (It’s all-or-nothing with FX!). All of this is maintained on a minuscule budget. Some have called us Outsider Music, but I think we’ve evolved beyond that. These days, we prefer the label "Gentleman Amateur" to "indie" as that has now become as debased a term as "punk", another worn-out label we’ve discarded!
Live gigs are noted for their unhinged abandon. We are capable of nosebleed-inducing rock ‘n’ roll chaos, introspective acoustic textures and all points in-between. As well guitars, drums, amps, fx and vocals, we have, with some assistance, employed banjo, harmonium, accordion, piano, mandola and organ. We know no bounds!! We usually materialise as a three piece, though duo ‘Acoustic Reaction’ and ‘Pianoforte Reaction’ versions are unleashed on special occasions.
Yes, we took our name from the Count 5 song. We never did sound much like them, although our forerunners, The Psychotic Mushrooms, used to cover the song live. It does confuse some folks who expect either retro-revival cobblers or death metal, and I wondered for a while (very early on, when we weren’t gigging and it was purely academic) if it was the ‘right’ name but Brother Dave, in his infinite wisdom, said it had to be. Why? “Because we’re reacting against shit music’”! So there you have it…
It’s A Small Town…
Whitstable is only 55 miles from London but in musical terms it might as well be on another planet, although we play in London as often as da Skoda ride allows. As well as various corners of Kent and the scary big smoke of London, we have repeatedly played as far a field as Southampton, Manchester, Edinburgh and Planet Thanet and even New York (twice!). We’ve shared stages with a vast array of groovy people and we won’t hesitate to drop their names!: Dr Dog, The Shortwave Set, Stealth Munchkin, Luke Smith & The Feelings, Billy Ruffian, Hexicon, Lol Coxhill, Black Market Karma, The Needles, Lost Sunday, Far Away Tree (now Cocos Lovers), Jeffrey Lewis, Lach, The John Doe Band, Regina Spektor, Spygenius, Robert Rotifer, the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players, The Coughlan Taches, Picturebox and Somer, as well as close relatives Das Zumas and The Reactor Core Is Splendid and any band seemingly signed to Filthy Little Angels. We sometimes put on our own band nights in the Whitstable locality with like-minded souls and wereunified with the now defunct Vic’s Vapo Club. We’ve played the odd festival including the (Whitstable) Old Neptune’s RNLI benefit, the New York Antifolk Festival 2007 and Canterbury's own Lounge on the Farm. We like contrast. We continue to be available for gigs, anytime, anyplace, anywhere! One of these days we will bust out of the ghetto and then the world will see our power. Resistance is futile.
What does not kill you, makes you stronger….
So, a little history: due to the aforementioned untold woe and pestilence, line-ups have waxed and waned and recording has proceeded in fits and starts, but while living out the Dark Ages (i.e. the late 90's), we made a few EPs on ye olde cassette for our friends and/or carers. In 2000 we released a CDR mini-album They Live. This was an assortment of off-the-cuff (wrist?) demos released as much out of desperation as anything, but it attracted some strong praise (most notably from Dan Chinn) as well as some of the outright hostility we quickly became used to! We followed this with two more mega-rare CD EPs of demos and live tracks (An Introduction to.. and It Takes An Audience Of Dozens To Hold Us Back, in 2002 and 2003 respectively), before we released our first full length album-proper, Rumble, which finally came out at the start of 2004. This was recorded mostly on analogue 4-track at our own expense (as ever) and released on our own Gentleman-Amateur label (Seasalter Sounds). After a slow start, it is now gaining recognition as an unmitigated copper-bottomed classic, although not everyone who hears it knows what to make of it! ‘Think Bizarro meets the Replacements via Trout Mask Replica…’ Some of our editorial decisions may have appeared odd to some people, but it was absolutely the album we wanted to make!
Since then, we have survived ever-fluctuating line-ups, enforced housemoves, redundancies and financial meltdown. We made a Christmas single “Goodwill To All Beings” in 2006. We made the well-received double-A side “A Moment of Clarity”/ “Overdraft Blues” (after Rumble, this is probably the recording we are most proud of- noisy, poppy and mildly experiemental in roughly equal measure) and at the end of 2007 we released- over a year late (circumstances beyond our control!)!- the offcuts from the same sessions as an EP, “Genre Music Is the Enemy” (one of our many MC5/Public Enemy/Manics-esque psuedo polemical slogans; most hacks don't get it!). This recording was an experiemental process as it was, believe it or not, the first time the whole band had recorded together in a 'real' studio (as opposed to someone's garage), so essentially this is a grab-bag of odds & sods and 'B-side' candidates and, somewhat ironically, possibly the most generic thing we’ve released, one or two nuggets not withstanding! Even more ironically, it was also one of the most expensive things we’ve made. Ho-hum. A salutary lesson there, I think you’ll agree, although Canterbury Student Radio once played it in it's entirety, so what do I know?
The Future is Now!!!
So what now in 2009? Following the cray-zee live frenzy of 2007, we had a semi-break from gigging, before slowly easing ourselves back into the saddle (steady!) during 2008. Following another cathartic round of heretic burning and bloody purges of counter-revolutionary elements, we are recording another album. So far we have 12 tracks semi-finished including live favourites such as “Barking Up the Wrong Tree” and “Battery In My Brain”, some ‘lost classics’ such as “In Your Head” and “Roman Stones” (the ones where people have said repeatedly ‘How come you’ve never recorded that properly and never play it live?!’: I’ve finally heeded them!!), some songs I’d forgotten about (“Duncan Down”, “Force of Nature”) and some new songs- including “Estuary Song”, "Invicta", "Big River" and “Semiotic Rock"; this still leaves plenty of songs in the kitty... It has so far been recorded on a mixture of 1/4" tape and DAT and mooted titles have included 'Invicta' and 'Fuck You, Listener' but the wokring title is now 'I See Lights When I Close My Eyes'. While this lo-fi ugly duckling morphs into a hi-fi swan, we have a few more things to attend to. In December '08, a new version of GWTAB was released (hear it here!) and was featured on a Filthy Little Angels comilation. Another compilation (Four Track Mind) and a live CD, featuring our 2007 NY trip and a CSR radio session, amongst other things, are also planned, probably for our own label. The only sticking points, as ever, are money and that slippery chimera known as time, but watch this space.
As well as gigs and cyberspace, we infiltrate both terrestrial and internet radio with surprising regularity. Radio Kent, Canterbury Student Radio, the National Pep and Jimmy Possession have all been amenable to our wares.
Don’t forget that our two albums to date, They Live and Rumble are still available; usually with free bonus CDs (whichever EP/single is first out of the bag!). Other stuff is available for FREE download: Our generosity knows no bounds.
OBEY
Anyway, here are some quotes, all guaranteed 100% genuine and from folks with no vested interest or prior grudges:
On ‘Rumble’ (an album):
“Rumble provided me with one of my most engaging listening experiences in quite a while.”- Liam McGrady, God Is In The TV
"This album (Rumble) should stand as a shining example of what can be done with skill, talent, song-writing ability and a limitless amount of time for recording. This band shits out smart ideas, and nothing seems forced" - Andrew Culture, Beat Motel
“It is the diversity between the warped ghostly instrumentals and dark sophisticated pop which keeps me captivated and engrossed in this deformed monster of an album. "It's A Small Town" even delivers the classic that gives Rumble the great debut accolade…” – Joey Sandinista, Damn Pest
“This is a band with talent, craftsmanship and something to say.”- Clare O’Brien, Subba Cultcha
"These are the sort of people I wish were playing in the pubs round here rather than the endless Coldplay and Radiohead disciples that clog up the place." — Jim, Paper Jam webzine
"I’m a shrivelled cock’s length away from having a psychotic reaction myself! Turn that shit off!" — Blank Stares & Cricket Claps
"Badly played, badly recorded and badly produced" — Rough Trade shop
On 'Genre Music Is The Enemy' (a supersize download EP):
'Hand-Me-Downs (Made Me The Man I Am) is a terrific Sultans of Ping type thing. Very funny and good to dance to, what else do you want? The playful power-pop of Sheep shows a high level of musicianship that the band are often accused of lacking. Make no mistake The Psychotic Reaction really can play. They just don't always choose to...The NME must surely hate this band, which is exactly why I love them.'- Lobster Quadrille, 2008
‘…all seven tracks are by and large well below the standard needed to impress in this musical climate, and indeed below the standard The Psychotic Reaction’s preceding reputation had me expecting. I’d like to see that line parade upon their next press release.’ – Tim Miller, God Is In The TV
‘The band seem to not want to give the impression that they care about what you think, they simply make music the way that they want. And, some of the time, this works a treat. “Hand Me Downs (Made Me The Man I Am)” is a playful piece of nonsense that makes up for its lack of subject integrity by placing its tongue firmly into its cheek and being about something rather charming. Likewise, “Knickers In The Photocopier” is delightful in the sleazy bassline and juvenile backing singing that makes you feel blissfully dirty when hearing it. During these moments, you agree with the diktat laid out by the album's title (sic)…However, this feeling is short lived because, simply, the rest of the album (sic) is a bland, torrid (sic) affair with very few moments of class or flare (sic) .’- Room Thirteen
'…I find it hard to pin point the band's exact influences - but there's a strong sniff of post-punk about the band - mix in a dose of noisy guitars and some 1960s psychedelic sounds and you've pretty much got what The Psychotic Reaction are about. The whole EP is available to download free from the band’s Last.fm page - I'd start with the psychedelic sounding 'Somethings Got To Give' which seems to be haunted by the ghost of Syd Barrett. All in all, a decent little EP - without ever really hitting the heights I think the band may be capable of.’- Trev Lostmusic, IndieMP3
On ‘A Moment of Clarity’/'Overdraft Blues' (download-only Double-A side):
“Their veritable rainbow of sounds jumps out the speakers and gives a good impression of a multitude of bands playing at the same time in perfect harmony, it’s magical and promising and this stand alone single ‘A Moment Of Clarity’ is the perfect way to fall in love with this band. It’s not often that a band truly is this hard to define, but these Whitstable boys are doing a fine job of it.”- Ross Drummond, God Is In The TV
“I was so damn sure from the name that this was going to be a metal fest that I almost got a new tattoo especially for it. And I probably should have got one because the three and a half minutes of sheer joyous pop that spouted forth would easily have soothed any pain away. It's a slow guitary start but then the simple organ sounds kick in and the whole kaboodle boils up like an over-heated pan of milk. It's playful and catchy and all the better for being DIY and a little bit rough around the edges production wise…Proving it's no fluke 'Overdraft Blues' is more leftfield but equally creative…it's bloody clever too. Who'd have thought such exciting things would come from Whitstable?” – tastyzine.org
On 'Goodwill To All Beings' (Download Christmas single):
"Goodwill To All Beings is a Christmas single which breaks away completely from the usual 'winter wonderland' story that most of these seasonal songs take on. The sound is very distorted and it's difficult to make out what the singer is blabbering about but none the less, the track is tightly packed with racing riffs, catchy drum beats and of course, no Christmas song would be complete without the sounds of bells!" - Cherry Pullinger, AMPEDREVIEWS.NET
On ‘An Introduction to The Psychotic Reaction’ (an EP):
“A lot like I’d imagine a deranged monkey fucking in your ears to sound. After all, didn’t a lot of the musical (or artistic, or literary) greats do things that were considered, at the time, to be totally and utterly WRONG?”- Peter Carter, Fast Cow
On ‘They Live’ (a Supersize EP):
“The Psychotic Reaction exhibit total sanity…unfazed and unimpressed by the dream of pop music they’re more likely to crack up laughing than buy into it in any way” – Dan Chinn, Misfit City
On gigs:
“Like seeing the Clash for the first time!”- Rob, a punter, Canterbury
"I think The Psychotic Reaction are definitely a band to see live, energetic and mad!" — Shoaib Mughal, Shepz
And finally:
"The Psychotic Reaction fail to match the inspired Magpie tendencies of their nomenclature with the insipid & truly dire “It’s A Small Town” - Trakmarx
"The band see themselves as an Indie band without the NME sponsored hair cuts and silly clothes, but the sound they produce leans more towards good quality pop/punk tunes. They are definitely not afraid to experiment with different instruments which places them in a different league from other bands trying to do the same. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of these guys in the future." - Cherry Pullinger, AMPEDREVIEWS.NET
“And how can you not like a band that posts up all their bad press on their myspace page…A Moment of Clarity has an innocent charm to it…Only the very snootiest type of person won't smile when they hear the delivery. The sort who sends their food back to the kitchen. When they're in the staff canteen…They won't win everyone over, but the world needs more bands like the Psychotic Reaction”. – Lobster Quadrille
Eat my Bum Notes!!
If you want Rumble, or any of our other CDs, you can buy them here using paypal. Rumble is also available from record shops in Whitstable and Canterbury, or you can buy it from us in person, if you ask nicely. Our earlier CDs are still available in limited quantities! Discount for bulk orders!!
Check out our website for far too much detail about everything, including our guitars and our home town, Whitstable. It is indeed a small town…
Go to our flickr page to see our extensive photo archives, and see where we've played on our flickr map
"It's A Small Town" is featured on God Is In The CD, a compilation of 18 underground acts (including Penny Broadhurst, The Sailplanes, The Swear, Gifthorse, Rhesus, Rose Kemp, The Gemma Ray Ritual) put together by God Is In The TV zine. You can buy it online for only £5.
None of the literally several people wot view this site complain, check yer magic spex grandad. As for audience baiting, audiences are SCUM and they need to be baited like the mindless yapping dogs they are until they receive enlightenment. In this hour I am responsible for the fate of the British people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the British people....
Hello, I'm just sending out a reminder that due to the nature of the festival site, this event does have limited capacity ... we will be selling only 2000 adult tickets - buy soon to avoid disapointment. Tickets purchased at the gate (if still available) will be more expensive.
So grab your tickets in advance from our website -
Just stopping by to say hello and give you some news. The new album 'Coolgilly and the Freakshow' from Centascope is now available worldwide from CD Baby and directly from the merchandise page of the official website. You can also get the album from Apple iTunes, MSN Music, Rhapsody, Napster, Amazon and many more.
Online Now!
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