This Weekend I’ll Mostly be Listening to… The Golden Horde, the Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy

Inevitable, is it not that we’d eventually arrive at the Golden Horde. And not the first to do so, although note they were also namechecked here, but… nonetheless a band worth covering, and particularly the earlier stage in their career because they managed to do something quite unusual by bringing together punk and a certain strand of hippy from the years of zonk, albeit a curiously and perhaps uncharacteristically knowing strand of hippy.

The lineup which took The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy on the road was, to my mind, the classic one, though I only saw them once or twice. Simon Carmody’s voice was a punk monster, all Joey Ramone and grand gestures. Bernie Furlong’s vocals were equally strong – indeed some might suggest that the band were never better than when there was the interplay between Carmody and her. Des O’Byrne produced surprisingly subtle guitar sounds and all this underpinned by Peter Kennedy on drums and Donal Murray on bass. That changed after they left Hotwire Records, with Sammy Steiger coming in as a second guitarist, and John Connors replacing Donal Murray. The sound changed too, but that’s a different story.

It’s amazing to think that for a band that were a near permanent fixture on the Irish rock scene between 1982 and 1994 they only released three disks that could be – loosely – termed albums. More amazing still to listen afresh to their sound and hear how different it was to almost anything else going on in Irish rock at the time. Because The Golden Horde were a perfect marriage of punk and garage with a side order of psychedelia and psychobilly and when set against the faux modernist trappings of U2 and their host of imitators they sounded not merely raw but bloody.

But, if that was distinctive, then bringing Robert Anton Wilson – co-author with Robert Shea of the Illuminatus Trilogy – prime artifact of mid-70s zonkdom in terms of drugs, politics and sexuality – into the mix as a sort of vocalist was inspired. The visibility of the Illuminatus Trilogy was quite something during the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think I read it first in 1978 or 79, and quite an impression it made on a young 13 or 14 year old WBS – it left me an anarchist of sorts for quite some years subsequently. Of course, what worked well in the sunny climes of the United States – or at least some of them, didn’t necessarily translate unerringly well eastwards across the Atlantic, and by book number 2 of the trilogy I was fading fast. Wilson of course was an intriguing sort of libertarian, I read now he was in favor of basic income and he had critical words for Ayn Rand in the Illuminatus Trilogy itself. But then Wilson also translated eastwards across the Atlantic winding up on our fair shores.

Some enterprising person who goes by the name of charliespliff on YouTube has uploaded some tracks from the peerless Anton Wilson/Golden Horde collaboration “Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy”. Now sadly you won’t find ‘I was a Communist for the FBI’ here, or their epic ‘Black Flag’ or indeed … but ‘Little U.F.O.’, ‘The Chocolate Biscuit’ and ‘Young & Happy’ are here. Sometimes hard edged, sometimes surprisingly skeletal, all held together by Carmody, Furlong and Anton Wilson… And in some ways that’s all you really need. Except, of course, it isn’t, so I’ve thrown in a few more tracks as well from across their career.

Curious as to where you might have seen them? I direct you to this fan website which has almost every single gig they played. According to this I saw them at least four or five times. Probably a few more if truth be told, but the memory isn’t what it was. And wasn’t then, come to think of it [IELB makes the point that though not overtly political they also played quite a few benefits for pro-choice and other issues].

My own interaction with them beyond that of spectator, and God knows if you listened to any bands in the 1980s they were sure to be somewhere about, either in the crowd or playing support, was limited but not nonexistent. Carmody was what you’d expect, Des a gentleman.

In a period where groups tended towards a similarity of image they were widely/wildly divergent in look looking as if they should be in four or five separate bands. No bad thing – and perhaps the source of their strength. But musically they were tighter than might be expected and a lot more fun. And if there was sometimes the sense – [particularly in their later incarnation] that they’d have liked nothing more than to be Ireland’s Ramones [a band they once supported], well in truth they were as close as we were going to get, and that was pretty damn close. But perhaps a more accurate way of looking at it is that they were in no way simple Ramones copyists, and were instead so much more and better than that.

Exhibits A through H below…

Little U.F.O.

The Chocolate Biscuit

Young & Happy

Later still…from 1986

Crash Pad Chick

Vampire Bat

Later again from the early 1990s

100 Boys

Endless Weekend

I Never Came Down