In the ninth instalment of the series, Louder Than War contributor Martin Gray takes a look back at one of the strangest and most downright deranged albums ever released, 20 Golden Showers by Bubonique, and shares the open secret of its co-conspirators in crime. Read on to discover their identity.
Part One: Background: before the plague
1993. Hmmm… A year filled with the usual smattering of great records for sure. Indeed, I covered a small handful of them (my own personal choices mind) in a separate piece not that long ago. However, I consciously opted to leave out one particular record among that pile for a few specific reasons. That record was the debut album by Bubonique. The reasons being (a) that this record did not qualify – and indeed never will qualify – as one that warranted repeated listening on a day to day basis, (b) it didn’t fit in with what could even be termed as a ‘serious’ recording and, most importantly of all (c) unlike all of the others on that previous list, it was released only on CD and never on tape or vinyl. To me personally, the ideal album of the 1990s should come in three formats – vinyl LP, CD and cassette tape. This one does not fall into that category. However, it serves one useful purpose nevertheless. That of being used as a weapon of intent… or offence.
What, you may well ask, do I mean by that? Allow me to explain. There are some artists who are so resolutely nonconformist and anti-everything in their approach to their art that they either delight and enthral, or disgust and appal – often in equal measure. Their recordings are so out there and left of centre that they are considered unconventional, bordering on unlistenable, and in these cases, defy simple pigeonholing to evade classification altogether.
Here’s one example of the latter. In 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono issued the third of their avant garde concept albums: (The) Wedding Album. Half of the record – the second side – chronicled their time in Amsterdam during their well documented and infamous ‘bed-in for peace’ and featured interviews and some music sketches, and other spoken passages all welded together to form one 25 minute track. However, the first side was the real eye opener. Consisting of almost 23 minutes of John and Yoko calling out each other’s names in varying tempos, velocities and voices bordering on whispers to hysterical screams. It was as unorthodox, unsettling and as raw and primal as it was possible to get. Needless to say the public weren’t impressed as it completely tanked upon release in most countries.
If that’s an older example of artistic hari-kiri for the sake of being provocative and confrontational then spare a thought for one of Ireland’s finest ever songwriters and wordsmiths: the late, great, Cathal Coughlan. Former frontman and joint lynchpin of Microdisney and then later, the formidable five-headed beast The Fatima Mansions. In 1991 his band had come off a tour promoting the ferocious and brilliantly uncompromising and magnificently splenetic and genre-hopping album Viva Dead Ponies, itself one of the greatest Irish alternative rock albums ever released. He set about working on tracks for a new venture, using two older songs which never – as yet – saw official release, those being Behind the Moon and Bertie’s Brochures, two stripped down, slow paced piano driven ballads which showcased a far more lilting and beautifully understated side to the band than the usual broiling, raging misanthropic attack that they were so renowned, and feared, for.
Bertie’s Brochures became the title track to a new eight song mini-album of the same name, intended as a sort of stop-gap instalment between the first and second full length albums proper. Despite its more stripped down acoustic nature, it was still fascinating listening for a few reasons. It featured three cover versions: one by his beloved Scott ‘Walker’ Engel (Long About Now), another by Richard Thompson (The Great Valerio) and the third… well… the third was a conscious red herring that Cathal decided to drop into the set purely for maliciously puerile intents…
Some time before the album’s recording, The Fatima Mansions played a US show that was somehow attended by a certain Michael Stipe from REM. Stipey wasn’t too impressed after enduring a few of their more righteously angry numbers, and exited the show citing his disdain for ‘art bands’ or something similar. This was relayed back to Coughlan after the gig and, fully aware of the irony of such a pithy criticism, he took it in his stride, being a fan of REM as he was anyway. However, being the sort that he was, he duly exacted some form of gleeful revenge. Metaphorically speaking, he whacked on their just-recently-gone-multi-platinum Out Of Time album (in his head), cued up side two, track one, and set to work concocting a less than faithful ‘reinterpretation’ of said number. That song? Shiny Happy People. Oh yes.
I say ‘reinterpretation’ as opposed to ‘cover version’, because that was precisely what it was. Coughlan pulled no punches in his deft execution of taking said innocuous jaunty bleat of a song (even I found it twee beyond belief) by the scruff of its feeble neck and proceeded to rodger it senseless with a bargepole leaving entrails splattered all around like the end scene from the 1978 Brian De Palma gore fest The Fury. These entrails coalesced into this hideously deformed mutant abomination that slithered and writhed its way on Bertie’s Brochures, aided and abetted by diabolical electronics and much hissing, gnashing, and all manner of expletives tossed into the mix. It was like witnessing the scene in The Exorcist where possessed Regan’s head rotates 360 degrees and pea-soupers fly in all directions – in glorious Technicolour Widescreen.
As if that wasn’t enough, there’s excited yelps of “Masturbate! Masturbate! Masturbate! Aaargh!!” as the track fades out, and indeed everything bears very little resemblance at all to the original save for the distorted, buggered, quivering, refrain of the title voiced by what sounds like a chorus of pygmy Dalek chipmunks. The rest is Coughlan spewing out a vitriolic rap (whose words are so hysterical and venomous it’s pointless trying to reproduce them all here) upon which he rails against pretty much any target he cares to direct his venom at before he then steps up to the pulpit during the bridge to holler defiantly with two fingers raised aloft: “Fuck Your Showbusiness! Most of all, FUCK Your Showbusiness!”. Suffice to say, this delightful catchphrase soon became a Fatima Mansions T-shirt slogan.
Watch the (uncensored) video to Shiny Happy People here:
If this was ‘gratuitous obscenity’ (Coughlan’s own words), then it was in good company when the Mansions meted out the same treatment to Bryan Adams‘ inescapable power ballad Everything I Do (I Do It For You) whose endless tenure at number 1 during the summer and autumn almost drove many people suicidal in the latter half of 1991.
Come 1992, with the Mansions having bludgeoned the discerning world into submission with their spectacularly bilious, raging, Valhalla Avenue album, they were invited to contribute a track for a NME tribute album for the (then) Spastics Society (now SCOPE). This was the choice they opted for and, even more surreal, it was chosen as the AA side to a single whose A side was Manic Street Preachers tackling the Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless). On the back of its more illustrious and successful companions, the song went top 10 – earning the Fatima Mansions quite possibly the unique distinction of having the most irreverent and sacrilegious cover version ever to hit the UK singles charts (the highest the band themselves managed in their own right was number 58).
After the smoke died down from touring Valhalla Avenue (their U2 support slot in Italy being their single most infamous jaunt ever – revisit the article I wrote on this album and tour here), the Fatima Mansions split off into their own individual pursuits for a while, and it was during this period of downtime that Cathal Coughlan got back in touch with a couple of good friends of his…
Part Two: The birth of the appalling Bubonique
Paul Jarvis was a former member of 80s noise band Slab! (John Peel tellingly being the only DJ to regularly give any airtime to this lot) and later ended up becoming a TV researcher and occasional multimedia artist. Hooking up with Cathal Coughlan initially in 1991 they decided to produce a couple of one off singles intended as a spoof of current bands that they felt were deserving of taking the piss out of. They settled on a deliberately ‘festering’ name for the project, hence Bubonique. The first Bubonique release was two original tracks loosely based on George Michael (Screw / Monogamy, I’m Going To Kick Your Head In), whilst the second Bubonique offering – a less than faithful cover of that old 1960s Bobby Goldsboro chestnut Summer (The First Time) – was housed in a cover which was itself a completely batty piss take of the Pet Shop Boys (specifically their single Being Boring). Its flip was another repulsive ditty going under the provocative title Free Charles Manson. All of these were odd disjointed electronic ‘abominations’ conceived purely for self amusement.
A while later, around 1992, Coughlan then linked up with fellow Irish compatriot – the alternative comedian/actor/writer Sean Hughes (who tragically died young too in October 2017 aged just 51) – and enlisted him to be part of a resuscitated Bubonique Mk II which would also feature Jarvis as previously. Also riding on board with the Bubonique cause would be guest contributor Rob Allum (brother of Fatima Mansions drummer Nick Allum) who was already drumming with Coughlan’s former Microdisney colleague Sean O’ Hagan‘s new band the High Llamas. They set to work conceiving and assembling what would hopefully be one of the most intentionally revolting and unpalatable records ever released, as a defiant fuck-you to the conforming masses.
Going by the deliberately tasteless title 20 Golden Showers, and released in the spring of 1993, Bubonique’s targets range far and wide on this relentless – in places hysterically funny – vitriolathon of pure unrestrained lunacy and contrived chaos. Furthermore, being the contrary perverse bastards that they were at this juncture, the album wasn’t even divided into separate tracks by virtue of them being indexed as such on the released CD. Instead, the entire 56.25 minute long endurance test was programmed as one single track of that length, with all of its 25 ‘tracks’ (two of them unlisted on the back CD cover) – comprising sketches, movements, and many additional brief ‘surprise’ seconds-long untitled interludes, now only accessible if you keep abusing the random search forward and backward buttons on your CD player. Now That’s What I Call Bloody Bubonique-Minded!
Opening with the previous (as in 1991) single Summer (The First Time), it soon becomes apparent that you would have to have nerves of steel and particularly strong sense of resolve to have to sit through nearly an hour of relentless [un]musical head-fuckery for the sake of it. Furthermore, there are also warnings (ominously not printed on the album CD cover or inlay) that you must exercise extreme caution if you were to listen to this Bubonique CD on headphones with the volume turned up. The reasons will become clear shortly afterwards.
For the rest of us who have always revelled in Coughlan kicking against the pricks and crapping from a great height upon the festering carcass of mediocrity, it’s time to strap ourselves in for the shite knuckle ride [sic] that is Bubonique in excelsis. After the first ‘track’ ends – note how the CD timer just keeps on counting the minutes and seconds – we’re into the first power ballad parody, I Think You’re Cool, which is graced by a guest vocalist who sounds uncannily like Axl Rose. Lyrically puerile (well, all of the damned thing is, let’s face it!) it does provide an interesting insight into just how warped the minds behind this whole project are….as this track starts to climax by building up momentum – and tempo – the ‘singing’ starts to become increasingly agonised and excruciating, eventually resembling the sound of a scalded hen screaming for dear life as the entire edifice – complete with out of control and wilfully crappy guitar solo from another guest (fellow Fatima Mansions guitarist Andrías Ó Grúama aka Grimmo) – comes crashing down and the song appears to disintegrate completely save for the sequenced bleeps. You can’t help but laugh at the sheer lunacy of this Bubonique lark.
Wild Cherry’s old seventies staple Play That Funky Music is parodied next – and Sean Hughes takes centre stage to rechristen the song lyrically: “Lay down the ceilidh and play that Irish music ’til you die!”. This is followed by the gangsta rap spoof Cop-Lover (or more explicitly, Cup-Lover), whose anti-hero ‘Nice-T’ (I guess you gotta be in on the joke) raps about a fictional place called “Chigwell – the home of the tea bag / this ain’t the place for wimps and tags!” and waxes lyrical about making the ideal brew to influence your new friends, or something like that.
The strangulated whine of Codsucker Blues begins “Woke up this morning…wiped the record collection from my eyes…” and continues in this angst ridden vein until choruses of heckling voices childishly singing “wee wee…wee wee….’” start intruding. However, one of the most utterly deranged and hysterically ‘laugh so hard you’d be rolling on the floor’ moments immediately follows. Not content with taking the piss out of Axl Rose earlier, back he is dragged for a second dutiful splattering across the crapola canvas, so to speak. My Baby Gave Me Rabies just kills me! Every time.
The Axl vocal histrionics are so uncanny and spot on as he comes bowling in screeching that trademark yowl of his like an enraged feral cat on heat, set against a pummelling and totally unmusical percussive backdrop of orgasmic panting and sampled female screams. It’s positively apeshit bananas! His infernal ear-splitting gibbering (you struggle to make out what he’s wailing about) suddenly gets interrupted by a monstrously loud four-note blast of feedback**, before things continue like nothing happened. The deafening feedback blast recurs again right at the end when this hysterical (and to many, unlistenable) racket speeds up into something totally demented. **Seriously, be forewarned: DON’T listen to this on headphones, because I am not joking, you may incur probable hearing damage.
Everything and the kitchen sink is piled on – there is so much digitally scrambled noise going on in the background it’s complete anarchy at its most gratuitous and it sounds like it was all conducted and orchestrated by escaped lunatic asylum inmates. Indeed, another segment later on (DLT 666 No Idea [Insincere] – featuring a unbelievably lame monologue by the ‘Hairy Cornflake’ Dave Lee Travis talking in all seriousness about the lack of talented DJs and songwriters, and which of them should be protected first should nuclear war break out) features the sound of a simulated bomb blast^ that suddenly bursts out from nowhere, its deafening seismic explosion occurring at such extreme volume it makes you jump in alarm (^again heed the advice – don’t listen on headphones).
There are barbed take offs aplenty – as well as further gleeful desecrations – of more sacred cows, namely Elvis, David Bowie, Frank Sinatra, Michael Stipe and REM (hilariously for a second time), Nick Cave (his Birthday Party staple Release The Bats gets a pretty drunken and surreal trashing here with Sean Hughes on vocals) and even Julian Cope (whose Jellypop Perky Jean is rendered thoroughly crazed, evil and demonic by Cathal and Sean on shared vocals). Later still, J.G. Ballard’s Crash is the subject of the truly perverted cod-acid house workout 2 J.G. that joyfully canters along replete with filthy and excruciatingly juvenile lyrical wordplay (recalling VIZ comic colliding head on with a Spitting Image sketch, set to dance beats).
Two of the funniest segments still make me chortle: first is a merciless demolition of David Bowie titled Ang On Ronno. Now before people start protesting, let me just say that, for all of his legendary standing, he did come out with some right tosh during that lost decade of 1984-1993. The huge success of Let’s Dance might have precipitated his gradual artistic slide, as everything which followed was pretty gash (Labyrinth anyone?). The focus of the vicious lampoonery here centres around Bowie’s cock rocking Tin Machine project and what happened at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley where Bowie recited the Lord’s Prayer (why, in the name of….?). Coughlan and co. thus set about piling on in-joke after in-joke (a stentorian ‘Big Brother’ voice intones repeatedly “Destroy the tin machine!” getting more and more frantic) and it’s not certain who is doing the Thin White Duke’s impersonation this time, but, as with Axl, it’s deathly accurate and even more comically surreal when it starts mutating almost into that of Holly Johnson’s towards the climax. Our hero flails about desperately, clearly relishing the sound of his increasingly tone-deaf hollering, as the musical backing gets ever more unhinged and tuneless and by the time he deals his final kiss-off line “Do you love the way my trousers hang?”, this writer is helpless and incapacitated on the floor with stomach cramps from convulsing so hard.
The second one – an uproarious REM/Stipe spoof titled East Sheep Station – flips the finger to several of their songs simultaneously (sample lyric: “Jelly bean, fruit machine, standard lamp, postage stamp, water bed, am I dead? New Orleans, Heinz Baked Beans, monkey wrench, underpants”) and climaxes in a chaotic pitch-shifted chorus of “baaa baaa”s and agonised screams (it even sounds like ‘fake’ Axl is guesting here on backing vocals!). As if that wasn’t enough, yet more gratuitous heavy metal spoofs come elsewhere in the form of Iron Child, leaving us to work out exactly just who else is being sent up this time.
An infamous expletive-laden outburst from American DJ/broadcaster Casey Kasem – where he’s viciously lambasting his charges for being clueless – is also featured here amongst the scattershot insanity, whilst the spaces between the titled ‘segments’ often feature untitled sketches that are either sampled voices from old TV ads juxtaposed with distressed sound effects and other pure lunacy or sudden crashes, overloaded squalls and brutal bursts of discordant noise that function like jump scares. It’s all extremely disorientating and disquieting and it’s without question an acquired taste, but if your tolerance for such torturous aural detritus and ludicrous excess verges on the sado-masochistic, then it’s a fascinatingly abhorrent, and ultimately eviscerating, listen.
Whatever possessed the instigators to create such a defiantly listener-unfriendly racket** will never be clear. Suffice to say that the devious, anarchic, trouble-making enfant terrible side of Cathal Coughlan’s personality has always harboured an impulsive proclivity for indulging in such antics, relishing the temptation to commit artistic mischief as means of railing against both conformity and homogeneity. Perhaps it was a method and means of satiating that ever-restless quest for contrariness that always lurked deep within his psyche? In later years, a more sober and reflective Coughlan would openly admit to harbouring a few regrets about conceiving Bubonique as a recording project. Citing it as ‘flippant’ and ‘gratuitous’ and even ‘immature and unnecessary’. Immature it might well have been but some of those fans – like myself – who often delighted in his wilfully anarchic, provocative side, would disagree about it being ‘unnecessary’.
**In 1995, they unleashed a sequel called Trance Arse Vol 3, featuring even more of the same puerility and insanity. They clearly have no shame!!
With so much moribund identikit processed crap that was polluting the charts around that time (and this was long before the even more insufferable shallow showbiz corporate cancer that was Pop Idol and X Factor, remember!), maybe Bubonique : 20 Golden Showers served as an ultimate and defiant blood, spittle, piss and jizz-flecked ‘Fuck You’ to the self-righteous preening rock and pop cognoscenti.
Listen without prejudice, but exercise utmost caution!
If you dare subject yourself to the endurance test, a YouTube user has recently uploaded the entire Bubonique album for your listening ‘pleasure’!
There is no social media page for Bubonique – be thankful for small mercies – but you can of course follow the Facebook fan’s group dedicated to the work of Cathal Coughlan and that of his former band The Fatima Mansions.
Bubonique re-appraisal conceived and written by Martin Gray
Other articles in this series can be found on his profile
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