West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

I Won't Hurt You - West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (1966)

cf.

Velocity Girl - Primal Scream
(1986)

The sense that there was an emerging, broad, independent music movement in the mid 1980s in the UK was in part defined by the influential NME c86 compilation tape.  This helped to create a lasting sense of identity: twenty-two bands, young and little known, playing rudimentary guitar-based music that had a DIY attitude.  A scene rapidly developed with a proliferation of clubs, bands, and fanzines. The first track on the tape, setting the agenda, was the wonderful one minute twenty-three second jangly rush of Primal Scream’s Velocity Girl.  

Primal Scream had both the look and the attitude that epitomised much of the c86 era - a mix of mid-60s cool and childlike awkwardness.  Not everyone in the band could play well, but that was the point.  Singer Bobby Gillespie was one of the main organisers of A Splash 1 Happening, the legendary Glasgow Club, where short live sets and self-designed posters appeared to be influenced by Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  The music played provided an alternative history of pop and rock - The Velvet Underground could be heard alongside girl groups such as The Shangri Las or West Coast bands like Love.  60s music complemented by the likes of Iggy Pop or new indie bands.  A soundtrack that often had a sense of innocence whilst also flirting with the dark underbelly of 60s culture.  The image of Edie Sedgwick was used on a poster for a club night,  and Velocity Girl, according to Gillespie, was written with her in mind.

"I  don't need anyone to hurt me

No, not anyone at all

'Cause my so-called friends have left me

And now I don't care at all"

Warhol’s influence was also apparent twenty years earlier in California.  Bob Markley, the adopted son of an oil tycoon, had organised a party in his Hollywood Hills mansion where the Yardbirds played.  His friend Kim Fowley had introduced him to a young band, The Laughing Wind.  Markley was impressed by the reaction of young women to them, and, sensing an opportunity, he proposed that he would fund and record the band under the proviso that he could join.  Although he had limited singing and tambourine playing ability, the Harris brothers and Michael Lloyd agreed to the deal.  Soon Markley, inspired by what was happening in New York, put his own stamp on the group, renaming it The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

The familiar version of I Won’t Hurt You by TWCPAEB was certainly played in indie clubs by the late 80s and shared via mixtapes.  A track from their first major album release, it had a distictive heartbeat rhythm and clear stereo seperated minimal guitars.  Over the years it has become an alternative classic, covered by  a wide range of artists.  In 2018 it prominently featured in  in Wes Anderson’s  Isle of Dogs animation.  However, the first recorded version of the song would have been unheard by those in the original indie scene, having been released as part of an album on Markley’s self-funded label in 1966 with less than 100 copies pressed. 

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s Volume One is a record that probably shouldn’t exist.  Many of the classic LA albums of the period by groups like the Byrds, Love or the Beach Boys, were highly accomplished works, utilising the top studios, talented arrangers, and the best producers. The Wrecking Crew could make up for any shortfalls in the musicianship of individual band members.  For those who wanted to join the party and catch the zeitgeist, cutting an album independent of that model wasn’t easy.  Even with the connections and money of Bob Markley, the music created by the early WCPAEB was still lo-fi, recorded partially in a makeshift home studio.  In reality, the record consisted of seven covers of folk-rock and garage songs by the core of the Laughing Wind and an EP worth of originals, lyrics by Markley and music by either Fowley or the other band members.  It is those four songs that stand out.  In turns the music produced was either a rawer proto-punk or a more fragile jangle than that of their better-known contemporaries.  These sounds arguably were a precursor to the mid-80s indie movement- shared influences and attitudes expressed via  guitars and shambling rhythms quickly laid down using basic recording equipment.

I Won’t Hurt You has been a real favourite song of mine for many years.   I never heard later WCPAEB records on Warner's

subsidiary,  Reprise.  Perhaps if I had, I would have been aware of Markley’s ever more overtly paedophilic lyrics.  Unchallenged, it appears those words were matched  by his deeds.  If the world wasn’t listening properly, then neither was I.   I Won’t Hurt You is clearly the phrase of a sexual predator, preying on a young girl.

“You're an untouched diamond

That's golden and brilliant 

Without illumination

Your mouth's a constellation

All the stars are in your mind ”

Whilst his former bandmates, in interviews decades later, derided his minimal music talent, it is the edge of Markley that has given the band their continued cult status and coolness.  It is important however to reflect that the music industry has never really had its #MeToo moment, and it seems something that, as fans, we appear often unwilling to confront the realities our own listening habitats, our cultural voyeurism and the behaviour of our musical heroes.  Instead, too often, we look away as per the title of the 2021 documentary on the sexual abuse of young women in the music industry from that era onwards.  Time to listen more carefully.