31st May 1986 Skittle
Political Asylum
Well Political
Kenny Brown, who was in the year below me at Kirkcaldy College of technology, who was a huge Political Asylum fan. I can picture him now with a green army bag with lots of badges on it. He was always trying to persuade people of the bands merits, trying to get people to go to their gigs, etc. I must admit I got into my head that they were a skinhead band and I always avoided them as I expected them to sound like Domestos. I think they were from Stirling, but they played around Kirkcaldy a lot, I see that that Sacristy supported them from some of the info on their page.
The first time I heard them was at the February 1986 Tech charities gig. There are loads of stories about that day on the Surgical Wars, Blue Vega, and Ghost Train pages, it was an eventful day.
I heard Political Asylum for the first time in the afternoon of that day and they completely blew me away. I think the Feb 1986 tech charities gig was over ambitious and most of the bands that were supposed to play that afternoon didn't turn up. Davie Brown, Mark Nicol and I improvised a makeshift band to try to make up the numbers and busked our way through two numbers - happily there was virtually no one there as I was half drunk and had no idea what I was supposed to be playing.
The first set of MP3's below are
Political Asylum's set from that afternoon. You can hear from the
audience noise that the hall wasn't even half empty, which is a
shame, as this is a great set. The recording was originally made
on my Marantz cassette recorder, it's in mono and suffers from a
bit of hiss. Shame they didn't play the evening part of the gig
also, but here they are from the afternoon of February 21 1986:
Download
whole gig as one Zip file (33Mb)
Download
whole gig as one file
The following tracks were provided to me on CD in the early 2000's, by the drummer of the band. Many apologies, but I lost all the mail from the first incarnation of Kirkcaldybands, so can't namecheck you. Please get in touch again if you'd like. I think this is a collection of demos, studio recordings and live material. The CD was called "Rock You Sucker!".
09 Down amongst the olive groves
Download whole CD as one Zip file (49 Mb)