Worried Wart by Perple Celotape

Worried Wart came out of a very specific situation.

Carl was subletting a room in Deptford, South London for a few months. The house had a basement and one of the housemates had a drumkit. Ideal. Andy came down and we took out the drumkit it was still covered in soot from a traumatic fire that the housemates had endured in their last place.

The basement had an old victorian coalchute and various other ancient bits and bobs. I was going down to the river occasionally to pick through all the bones, plastic bottles, beer bottle tops, claypipes and everything that washes up on beaches of the Thames. How London spits its history out at every possible opportunity. At one point during this time I walked along the beach to where my grandma had spent the first part of her childhood, a house in Rotherhithe. The place didn't really exist in the same way anymore. the house had been blitz-bombed (thankfully grandma had been evacuated down to sussex, hence my existence) and a block of flats now contained the number-range that contained the buildings that were in this bombed-out void. But the numbers didn't correlate with the number of flats in the block. This building was just x-x13 .... Road. Some arbitrary chunk of this building was the inheritor of the address my grandma had spent the first few years of her life.

Which is just to say that history is such a material constant in London, albeit always in material flux all smushed together and spilling out whenever you poke it. Deptford was being violently gentrified at the time with new flats being advertised first in investment magazines in China and the anti-gentrification graffiti I saw every night on my tipsy trudge home always being magically, violently erased the next morning on my groggy trudge to work.

So that's what was seeping into the recordings. Sometimes we turned the lights off and screamed. I was constantly struggling with my sitar which needed some severe TLC at this point. Emissions London and Buzz Lightyear mugs.

A couple of years later there ended up being two music videos for Pear rotting is food for bacteria. One was made by the irredeemingly brilliant Harry from East Anglia Records and the other came out of an art residency Carl went on in Turin.

We'll be releasing this on cassette soon with a couple of bonus tracks. Keep an eye out.

perple celotape x