History

Dave, “We’d settled into a routine by this time. We usually met to record on a Saturday, in those days we recorded in my bedroom, later renamed ‘Sneff’s Surgery’. We’d try to record a new piece each week, we’d meet up mid week and talk about ideas to try that Saturday. Often on the Saturday I’d have a new loop tape to play to Brian which would form the basis of the new piece. Or one of us would have come up with a new technique or, ‘what would happen if….’ It was quite exciting, we were discovering new ways of playing. We’d discovered the prepared guitar many years earlier and, I think, we discovered it quite independently of other guitarists, like Fred Frith. I can remember hearing about the prepared piano and thinking ‘you could do that with a guitar.’ Of course in the late 1970’s synth bands were becoming popular. We liked some of the sounds they made but we couldn’t afford our own synthesizer. So we set about making synth-like sounds by other means; tape effects, prepared guitars and so on. Hence ‘Sneff’s Surgery’ the surgery was where we doctored and treated sound!”

Brian, “I went on a holiday to the west coast of America in 1979 and part of it was in San Francisco. Naturally as a fan of the Residents I went to check out 444 Grove St. [the Ralph Records HQ] to buy some records. The place was very secure and I had to use an entryphone to get in. Turns out that I was very lucky as they had a policy of not letting people in, but because I had an English accent they saw me. I got to look over the place and saw things like Snakefinger’s ‘Dolls’ from the ‘Spot’ single cover, artwork etc. I asked if they would like a copy of Struve/Sneff and one guy said he’d like to listen to it. He took it into a small room (the studio) and played about 3 tracks, he came out and said he thought it was ‘excellent’. I spent the rest of the holiday feeling VERY HAPPY. Later I found out the guy was a Resident. So, after a few letters and tapes of new material we received a letter to say they wanted to sign us. Eventually Jay Clem came down to Portsmouth to see us in the Surgery and the deal was done.”

Versions

Originally self-released and sold by mail order and through a couple of local outlets. Each copy sold was made from the original stereo master tape – a maximum of 250 copies made. The cover colour changed after each 10 copies made; the first 10 made were on gold/yellow paper and are identifiable by the accent missing over the e of Struvé.

One copy of the cassette sent out by mail order included a ‘hidden’ track at the end of Side 2. We’d just finished a cover version of Ivor Cutler’s I Believe In Bugs and combined it with a thing we called Fennix, so somewhere out there it may still exist. The track has not been released in any other way.

In 1985, the album was remixed with extra tracks inserted into the song sequence for release on Ralph Records. This remixed/remastered version, to a degree, lost the fluidity of the original in attempting to reproduce its ‘accidents’.

The original mix was reissued in a limited-run CD-R in 1999, but ultimately compiled alongside the first live concert Renaldo and the Loaf ever played for Klanggalerie’s 2013 CD issue.

The remaining and remixed tracks from the Ralph Records release were compiled for inclusion on Breadcrumbs.

Covers

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Listen

Track Commentary

Meanings of W.E.I.R.D.
Ralph Records was running a competition for the best suggestion for what the acronym WEIRD meant. Rather than send a written entry we wrote a song. The lyrics were generated by randomly picking words out of a dictionary, with a bit of selection to keep the strangest or, to us, the funniest sounding ones. Walk energetically in rubber dungarees does conjure up an image, doesn’t it?

120 Before Zero
The lyrics were generated randomly from a music paper, NME or something. The title refers to rewinding the backing tape to a certain point, which was 120 before zero, i.e. –0880 on the tape counter.

The Kimbolton Gnome Song
The room that was now ‘Sneff’s Surgery’ over looked the gardens of Kimbolton Road in Portsmouth. One of these had a large number of garden gnomes and the song is just a fantasy about the owner’s obsessive care for his gnomes.

Letters from Lee: This was an improvisation in response to the collapse of our pre-Ralph contract. The basic track was recorded on a tape delay system with Brian saying some phrases from our correspondence with the record company backwards. We then reversed the tape so the phrases came out forwards and added some overdubs. When we decided to put it all together as a tape and to try to sell a few copies we connected the tracks on side one with fragments of another tape-delay improvisation we’d done.