ATHLETICO SPIZZ 80 – “DO A RUNNER” (1980)
A re-post from Post-Punk Junk…
It started years ago, when I first saw “Urgh! A Music War”. Amongst footage of The Cramps, Dead Kennedys and Gang of Four was Athletico Spizz 80, doing a song called “Where’s Captain Kirk?”, with the singer, Spizz, shooting Silly String into the audience, and all over himself. It’s one of the more crazed performances in the film, and naturally I was intrigued to know more about Spizz.
He started in ’77 with just him and a guitarist to accompany his warblings, and when his band grew, he changed the name every year (Spizz 77, Spizzoil, Spizzenergi, then Athletico Spizz 80 — in 1980, of course). Up until I’d heard this record, the only Spizz material I’d heard was unsatisfying and a bit annoying in its propensity for tunelessness. Imagine my surprise when I listened to this.
It’s a blast of an album that, for me, contains nary a dud. “Do A Runner”, after just a few short days since my first listening, became ONE OF MY FAVORITE ALBUMS EVER. I’m mesmerized by that fact that each song has a completely different texture; so few bands bother to shake things up a bit inside a single album itself, and “Do A Runner” has been a revelation in that respect, alongside its dense sci-fi lyrical imagery and unpredictable songwriting.
It’s a bit criminal that the album is massively out-of-print; the current available Spizz compilation only has one song from the album, while the previous and now unavailable best-of only had three.
I downloaded this from your last genius website and whenever it comes up in the pod I go running to see what band it is. Personal fave is “European Heroes,” but others are creeping in.
unrelated, but i thought you might like this considering you’re a joy division fan.
its a list of covers and live versions of love will tear us apart from various bands including joy division themselves.
http://punio.blogspot.com/2007/05/mp3-love-will-tear-us-apart.html#comments
i love what you’re doing. and that my comment confirmation word here is vliet, as in don van (vliet).
……haven’t heard this record in AGES although I found “Red & Black” not too long ago. Glad to see you’re back!
dude, i could fill an ipod with all the cool shit you’ve gleaned. thanks for your effort.
shitting crikey, you weren’t wrong! It sounds a bit like Magazine, but, y’know, better… I am listening to this whilst browsing the art of this man: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=Boles%C5%82aw+Biegas&oe=utf-8&rlz=1R1GGGL_en___GB336&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=v-RoStf-AYihjAeP3eG2Cw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
clever combo..?
actually make that Magazine meets Split Enz. Am i making sense?
SPIZZENERGI Last show of 2009 Covo Club, Bologna Italy. May 2010 London Athletico Spizz +30 for more info http://www.spizzenergi.com
One of my all time favourite albums as well, I bought it along with Delta 5 “See the Whirl” & Magazine’s “The Correct Use Of Soap” when it came out for the outrageous sum of 50 pence each! (Woolworths were having a sale!) Given the fact I was 12 at the time and my paper round was the limit of my earning power, cheap albums were my number one priority (I think thats why I got into Crass & the other anarcho-punk bands initially: cheap singles!).
Little did I know when I took them home that they would blow my yet to be a teen musical mind and I credit those three albums with the foundation of my eclectic taste. I am still astonished even now that this album is still little known as I consider it one of the defining albums of its time and should be up there with Give Em Enough Rope, Unknown Pleasures and the like…my two favourite tracks were Red & Black and of course “Airships”, everything about the Spizz album, including the cover spoke genius and originality…..and while I love Where’s Captain Kirk (even if it is a blatent Devo rip-off!) this album is eons apart in terms of experimentation…perhaps that was it, it was too far ahead of its time! I really wish I never got rid of my vinyl as I have never found a decent rip of this album…maybe one day!
Me again!
Found a better quality rip at Punk Vinyl:
http://punkvinyls.blogspot.com/2009/05/athletico-spizz-80-do-runner-lp.html
Don’t be fooled by the above link — it is encoded at a higher bitrate, but it’s not as good of a mix as the ZIP file I originally posted. I just listened to the one from the link above, and the guitar and keyboards are occasionally more buried in the mix than they should be. Whomever ripped the above link EQed the thing all wrong.
But thanks for the effort of tracking it down, all the same…
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