the moss garden

In late 2019 the late, great, dearly missed Professor John Hyatt and I were talking about making some music with the soulful feel of the late 60s, early 70s proto punk bands, with socially aware protest lyrics, particularly aimed at the looming disasters of Brexit and the climate crisis. The influences were the MC5, The Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, The Stooges, Mick Farren, International Times, Frendz, Barney Bubbles, Indica gallery, free festivals, and the spirit of that age untethered in this era. We chose the name Assassins of Youth, taken from a comic book picture I’d posted on facebook which John thought would be a good name for a band. This seemed very apt as Brexit was, amongst many other things, an attempted assassination of our youth, of their hopes and dreams.

By early 2020 I had made a few demo tracks which John wrote lyrics and recorded vocals for.

The idea was to be a bit like the Spice Girls, with characters in the band given the surname Assassin, such as Sporty Vicious Fury Assassin and Baby Rotten Eager Assassin, names John made up.

John had invited his friend Noki to make masks for the band and the poet James Young to write sleeve notes and missives, rants and polemics. I was intending to put a live band together once we’d nailed the songs.

Covid 19 happened and that took some of the energy out of the project as life became very strange, the virus affecting us all in different ways. In April 2020 I suffered a computer meltdown and lost many of the stems we’d laid down for the songs, I hadn’t backed them up anywhere which was a painfully foolish thing to not do. The project was put aside as the year became about dealing with this virus reality.

In 2023 John and I worked on the salvaged files from demos we’d made to produce the tracks. These recordings are some of the last John did before his voice became compromised by throat cancer.
We decided to change the project name as the Assassins idea had passed it’s moment and we felt that it all needed a more positive handle, so John chose the name Gods and Aliens after the first track we recorded.

Four of the songs are on bandcamp, free to download.

https://dm4sk.bandcamp.com/album/gods-and-aliens

Listen to Drowned by Gods and Aliens right here.

Featured image from Reefer Madness by Craig Voe, featuring Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Frank Frazetta, Jerry Robinson, Jack Kirby, and many more,