Side 1: Walking About
Side 2: 26 mg.
Venom P. Stinger is the next old Aussie band I want to blog a bit about today for my Tueday’s post after two days off blogging I’m back again, still not getting into a nice flow. Anyway it’s the both sides of the 7″ single from the year 1988 and with amazingly a video clip each for both the tracks just above. Not that they had anything like a budget for those videos, it does looks like they are just film them playing in someone’s backyard party and then gig in Melbourne and edit it into a couple of videos.
Venom P. Stinger is now most famous or well known for having two member who when on to play in another band in the 90’s called Dirty Three. You can see both drummer Jim White and guitarist Mick Turner playing or well, very young them in those videos. Some say Venom was nothing like Three but I can hear it, just take away the bass player and singer and add violin player, maybe slow it down and make it a lot longer. To me both White and Turner have a very special style of playing they instrumentals, I can really tell it them and no one else but then some just think Dirty Three is just all violin solos and don’t even seem to even hear the guitar and drums. Now I have written about them before but should write more about Dirty Three here on my blog but in this post because it’s Venom P. Stinger so that’s were you might know two of it’s member from, here’s a little more about them now. The singer name was Dugald McKenzie who sung in another classic old Aussie band called The Sick Things around this time too but died of cancer in 2004. He also spelled the end of the band in the early 90’s by just not showing up at rehearsals and the gigs, was for a brief time replaced but his howling vocals was a a very special style of singing too and not the same band really. Alan Secher-Jensen was the bass player, also played in the bands Beach Nuts, Come The Rubber Pig around the same time which is even less known and totally impossible to find anything on the internet by both bands but if I ever do find them, I’ll most likely blog about them too.
In 2013 the USA indie label Drag City reissue the whole back catalog of Venom P. Stinger with this line-up, they did one album with the new singer which always seems to be sold by itself. Under the simple title of 1986-1991 included two albums, one EP and this single all together. Now Drag City has a strict no streaming policy but you can listen small bits here at this link or just buy it there or look else where, if you like. They also had a pretty great live LP recorded at an American radio session, so yeah they did tour overseas before they broken up. A few years ago around the year 2010 they did have a very little reunion with a small hand full of shows, one playing the also then reunited USA indie band Pavement’s ATP festival in the UK.
So this is part four maybe five of a somewhat turning into a long wind project, to blog about all the songs on the comp CD album called Tales of the Australian Underground Vol. 1 & 2 and I do promise all the tracks will be covered in the very end, even if it’s going to take a long time to do them all. So far the only done three, I did: No Word From China, Fun Loving Me and Also Sprach The King Of Euro-Disco and those last two I wrote two years ago now so long wind project is an understatement but I kick started it again just last month or something. I will try and do few more, a bit more offend. Now the song Walking About was the only track by them on that comp album but I just had to include 26 mg. because I couldn’t help myself.
a1000mistakes 