Sounds. July 14th 1979.
MONSTER MASH
GIOVANNI DADOMO talks to Destroy All Monsters. Sounds editor falls for Niagra (geddit) and says "I think we have a Debbie Harry situation with regards to this one"

DESTROY ALL Monsters — great name for a band, even better name for a horror movie. Which is exactly what it was, a gargantuan come-all-ye of 1968 vintage.

The item in question was the twentieth item on the catalogue of Toho Pictures, a Japanese sibling to Roger Corman's American- International or our own house of Hammer who'd been raking in the megayen since a 1954 item name of 'Godzilla', a city-demolishing, radio-active son of Kong whose success spawned a whole series of come backs — even the inevitable 'King Kong versus Godzilla' itself, no less — in which a succession of retired sumo wrestlers found faceless fame by dressing up as big scaly things and destroying miniature Tokyo's in Toho's roof-top studio.

Like Uiversal before them, Toho soon found that the way to keep the punters coming was to pack their pics with as many varieties of gigantic terrorisers as possible. By the time of 'Destroy All Monsters' they had a menagerie including Rodan, a skyscraper-sized pterodactyl; Varan The Unbelievable (the Concorde-prototype, fire-breathing bat); the vast jellyfish known to his friends as Dogora The Space Monster (his
enemies simply went "Aaaarrrgh!" and dissolved); and Camera, that well-known towering turtle.

Godzilla and co. never really enjoyed their local/American success over here, chiefly, one suspects, thanks to our film censors, who kept these frequently laughable epics out of the hands of the teenagers who'd probably have appreciated them best. Presumably they feared a new spate of teenage delinquency wherein kids would leave the cinema and start stomping buses and eating national monuments.

Nowadays most of the original items have been sold to T.V. in the States and on Sunday afternoons you can catch triple bills wherein some nuclear accident or other puts the world at the mercy of massive squids, gherkins and all manner of mutated Crustacea, busily gobbling up fifteen-story blocks of flats for all they're worth until it's time to return to the depths.

POP-WISE, Destroy All Monsters are a quartet from Detroit with; so far, two vinyl pancakes to their credit. As Pete Silverton pointed out in the relevant week's singles column, 'Bored'/'You're Gonna Die' (1978, released here earlier this Anno Domini through Cherry Red) was far better than one could reasonably have expected from a pair of such well over-done titles. Singer Niagara related the dullness of waking up to find ants crawling around the floor in a lacklustre monotone reminiscent of early Harry (Debbie, not Belafonte) over a busily propulsive backing track enlivened no end by the contributions of ex-Stooge Ron Asheton's guitar and Ben and Larry Miller (sax and 'space guitar' respectively).

The recently issued Cherry? is the new D.A.M. single, featuring 'Meet The Creeper' alongside 'November 22nd 1963'. Sometime between the
two there also emerged an EP of early Destroy All Monsters material on Detroit 's Black Hole Records, packed in the customary tasty manner with sleeve art from SF pulp genius Virgil Finlay.

Unfortunately my own copy of this limited edition biscuit (about more of which later) was mangled in the mail and arrived in two very unplayable pieces. Bassist Michael Davis' 'Meet The Creeper' is a suitably malevolent sounding tribute to Rondo Hatton, the Forties bit-player whose distorted features grace its green-coloured label; Asheton/ Niagara's 'November 22nd 1963' refers to the day persons unknown turned President Kennedy's head into a salt cellar, an event echoed by the snap of Jack placed on the label so that your spindle can emerge from the doomed cranium at the appropriate point.

Niagara vocalises with a mite more passion than she did about the ants on the floor and, like 'Creeper', the subject matter's, a big leap forward from that of the first single (art' and SF fans will recall several dead Kennedy items issuing from Messrs Warhol and Ballard in the late 'Sixties, Alice Cooper collectors might point knowingly in the direction of 'Dwight Frye', however). Interesting combo anyway, and one we'll be able to check in the flesh come September, at which time a Destroy All Monsters U.K. tour will occur. All of which had your fact-hungry hack hanging onto a Detroit phone connection come Friday last.

DESTROY ALL MONSTERS first started sometime in 1973 as an experimental/art ensemble built around co-founders Niagara, then a struggling artist, and her then boy-friend, struggling film-maker Gary Loren. The band proper didn't really get into gear until the spring of '77 though, which time saw the arrival of Ron Asheton in their number. Ron recalls how he was stranded in L.A. following the break-up of The Stooges, subsequently forming his own band, New Order along with Jimmy Recker, himself an original Stooge.

The group lasted some three years and vinyl junkies will doubtless recall a New Order album issued some eighteen months back through a French outlet. It wasn't very good and got a near-total pan for its pains.

"I'm glad they put it out but they didn't tell me about it until it was already released," says Ron. He admits the quality was a bit dodgy but points out that the album was cut from a cassette. "I have the original tape of that first side and it's really great." New Order were in the wrong place and time says Ron, and that was just one of the problems.

"The appeal of joining this band was really like the musicians I'm playing with. This band's in the right place at the right time and we all really get along well."

The departure of the Miller twins for the jazzier areas they're more inclined towards has recently slimmed D.A.M. down to the standard rock format, which Asheton greatly approves.

"It works really well, everyone writes, and there's no personality clashes. By the time New Order broke up everyone was just getting too wired, it was the Stooges all over again......terrible. The singer was just a little Iggy, doing too many quaaludes, smoking angel dust and all that crap."
D.A.M.'s other gentleman of pedigree is bassman Mike Davies, formerly of Detroit 's other legendary combo, the MC5. Like his fellow Fiver Wayne Kramer, Mike had gone from being behind guitars to being behind bars and when Ron Asheton approached him about joining a band again, he admits he was far from keen.

"I'd decided I wasn't going to have anything more to do with rock 'n' roll, but Ron talked me right back into it." 'Meet The Creeper', it transpires, is the first song Mike's ever written.

"I was just fooling around with the guitar part and this guy just popped into my head. I used to really like the old Sherlock Holmes movies and this guy was really impressive to me. Everyone looked down on him but I didn't think he was such a villain at all."

Old friends? "I met Wayne the other night. Yeah, he has a band now. He's coming back to England soon. Rob Tyner? Yeah, what about Rob Tyner?" Drummer Rob King arrived at the same time as Michael Davis: "I'd just played in a lot of local blues bands and I was getting a bit tired of playing blues. I used to play with this guy called Lance Long, too. You ever hear of him? Well, he's got this idea he's the divine presence of rock 'n' roll. He's a tree trimmer really."

Pardon? Tree trimmer' isn't, as one might suspect, some kind of negative euphemism; the 'divine presence', it turns out, really does trim trees for a living.

Saved the cherry for the end. "Success?" says the chanteuse. "I guess we want to be successful. I don't know, I'm not really too good at talking about business, hold on (asks other members if they want the group to be a success) ...... Yes, we do want it to be a big success." And yes, says Niagara , it would be extremely helpful to have the eventual backing of a big label, "Preferably the biggest there is."

Art was her first ambition (she still does the D.A.M. sleeves). "That's all I was doing, but you can't make any money at it." She asks if it wouldn't be a good idea for someone to do an article on all the people in rock bands who came from art backgrounds, "And to show some of their work to see how good they really were." She's delighted by the news that there's actually been an exhibition of musician's paintings in London, even more when I tell her that at least one artist/musician I know (Knox of the de-batteried Vibrators) is now paying the rent with a paintbrush
instead of a plectrum.

"That's what I always wanted to do, too. The idea was to use this to get half-known and then start using that to sell pictures. It just seemed like rock 'n' roll was a much easier way of becoming famous than the other things we were doing." D.A.M. have a repertoire of about thirteen songs, says Niagara . "We don't do all of them every time, but we play for about fourty-five minutes." Yes, there are more records planned. "We have another Cherry Red single to do that'll probably come out when we tour Britain ."

In the early, experimental, arty-farty days when Destroy All Monsters first started, Niagara used to play violin. She doesn't now, "I never was taught to play it or anything. I just used to get these different sounds out of it; I never had any big ambition to be a violin player."

I mention the EP issued by Cary Loren. "Garbage," says Niagara . "That was just an old basement tape of us jamming. I guess he's just trying to make some money. He's pretty rich but he's a bit psychotic too. He's always doing this sort of thing, it really drives me up the wall. That's why he left the band, he kept flipping out.

"Do you have good pastry in England ?" a surprising enquiry from someone whose photos suggest the most she'll ever engorge is the odd peanut. Niagara 's gaga for pastry, it transpires. England , she says in gleeful anticipation, "will be a whole new world of pastry!"
When Destroy All Monsters arrive, I promise, I'll show her where to get the best jam roll in London .
THE END

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