History

Following the self-released cassette Struvé & Sneff, Renaldo and the Loaf were signed to The Residents‘ record label, Ralph Records. This was the first album released on Ralph.

The title is just a play on Songs for Swinging Lovers. The fascination with insects came about because Dave studied entomology as part of his degree. “The world of insects seems quite strange and different to our world – insects can see into the ultraviolet, some have ears on their front legs, they have bizarre life cycles. It’s endlessly fascinating.”

Brian, “Ralph also asked us to prepare a single to go with the Larvae album, it was to be released a couple of weeks beforehand. The A side was to be Medical Man / N2O (Going Under), the B side, Post Mortem. We even sent some artwork for it (now lost) but the project was shelved of course.”

Dave, “The album was moderately well-received, the reviews were pretty mixed. Some reviewers hated it whilst others were more well disposed towards it. I remember that one reviewer who gave it 3 stars out of 5 later told us that he’d only listened to it once before he wrote the review and that, after listening to it some more realized that it was a lot better than he’d originally thought. Still, that probably happens quite often given the number of albums a reviewer has to listen to in a week.”

Promotional Video

In 1981, Ralph Records produced a video for Renaldo and the Loaf’s Songs for Swinging Larvae featuring Spratt’s Medium, Lime Jelly Grass, and Melvyn’s Repose. It was directed by Graeme Whifler.

Brian writes, “As far as I know the Larvae ‘video’ was the first one to make a short film/promo out of multiple tracks . Sure enough, The Residents had done linked short videos (One Minute Movies, The Commercial Album) and a musical (Vileness Fats) but nothing like this. The project was discussed when we visited San Francisco in 1981. At the time, Dave and I suggested using Is Guava A Donut?, with a little boy annoying the grown-up. This must have sparked the later suggestion from the Ralph crowd to base it around a true abduction story from the newspapers at that time. Nowadays such things freak people, but then it was not such a disturbing thing, the story had a happy ending and no-one was hurt. The track list was discussed and we were consulted by post as filming went on. We suggested the backwards filming bits for example. I think the project took some time. When we saw it, we were impressed but knew it would be controversial, but such things get you noticed.

“Certain scenes, though creative, are now very touchy (the abduction, kiddy wrapped in ropes, handcuffs, bathing bit, the suggestion the kid is being abused in some way). The kiddy was about four when the filming was done. His mum was there all the time, and though on one occasion he seems to cry (hair dying scene) he thought the experience was fun. The second boy who crawls in and tells him how to escape was his brother.”

In 2001, this video was included on The Residents’ “Icky Flix” DVD, featuring The Residents cover versions of the three included Renaldo and the Loaf pieces.

Artwork

Future Pee Wee’s Playhouse set designer Gary Panter designed the cover art for the album.

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Listen

Track Commentary

Lime Jelly Grass
Brian, “I remember Dave explaining to me that he had a memory of being very young and of a birthday treat his Mum prepared for him…a chocolate blancmange rabbit surrounded by lime jelly grass.”

Frass
It’s the scientific term for the feces of insect larvae. Not a lot of people know that.

N2O
Dave, “N2O is nitrous oxide, laughing gas, the anaesthetic. I had quite vivid memories of going to the dentist as a child and having teeth extracted under gas. I used to love the strange dreamlike state of going under the gas and N2O was an attempt to recreate how that sounded. The words are taken from ‘Reveries of the Solitary Walker’ by Rousseau with a lot of the words substituted by randomly chosen words from the dictionary. This was then recorded with Brian speaking the text. The tape was then cut up, reversed, the order of parts of words changed so that the text got more and more confused and disorganised, a bit like the process of going under the gas.”

Spratts Medium
This track was named after a brand of British dog food. It was probably mentioned somewhere in Endgame by Samuel Beckett because that’s where the words came from.

Is Guava A Donut?
Dave, “Brian had this game with a number of dice, which had words, rather than numbers on each face. The idea was to throw them and make an amusing sentence. ‘Is Guava a Donut’ was a sentence produced in this way. As a sentence it’s obviously quite absurd and meaningless. I thought it would be interesting to work backwards to something that had meaning – sort of Chinese whispers in reverse. So that gave us the sentence ‘Is Dover a seaport?’ That then became the starting point for a series of increasingly bizarre questions, ending with ‘Is Guava a Donut?’”

Hats Off Gentlemen
Dave, “This is a series of loops taken from a Debussy piano piece called The Drowned Cathedral, this, like ‘Renaldo’s trip to Venice’ was just a tape experiment. The title is taken from The Plague by Albert Camus. There’s a character in the novel who is writing a book himself. He’s very painstaking and fastidious about his writing and wants it to be perfect. Consequently he’s only written a sentence so far, and it’s taken months. When it’s finished he wants everybody to say ‘Hats off gentlemen’”