Fever Carriers

Amrik Rai joins another group of hard-headed hopefuls, HULA, in the fever car i.e. the bar where all expenses are paid! Keven Cummins sets them up through the lens.
 

Arrival at the zone. Drummer Nort says: "What Hula plays disturbs me, so it must fucking hurt some people."
And yet five minutes after we arrive at Sheffield's Limit Club, a paedopheliac's dreamhouse, the DJ fades out U2's the Unforgettable fire' and suggests with the usual exclamational glee: " Try forgetting this one! The fabulous new single from Hula! Fever Car!" Abruptly, a blare of sound: crushed concrete, dense compression, metal, flesh, the noise of a massive radio swinging in and out of time and tune. Surprisingly the dance floor does not disperse in pain and panic. Ron Wright, cut-up voice, tear-down guitar, remarks coldly "To me Captain Beefheart's Clear Spot is a good dance record, but that wouldn't get played. It is funny, DJs get sacked if they don't fill floors and yet people are playing our record in dance clubs. Hula are obviously not compatible with the average play list. Perhaps things are looking up."
Later, we will decide to drink this.

HULA HU?
A trio of desperate intent with three desperate intentions to date: Black Pop Workout, Cut from Inside and Fever Car. The latter is a towering section of abstract soundscapes twisted into the geometry of the currently ascendant British paradisco - exemplified by the briquette splatterfunk of Chakk and the close to vital Cabaret Voltaire; attenuated by babes of the best like Portion Control, 400 Blows and Hard Corps.
The rest is part (Atrocity) and (Exhibition) brood. part (Naked) flesh and (Lunch) blood: all invariably cutting, wrought, fraught, fragmented. Through the Ernst/ Duchamp affiliated precepts of Chance, Accident and Irony, Hula's aggression charges without flanel. Not exactly inciting the listener to acts of explicit subversion, but not exactly paving her way into a healthy, ordered life. A new LP Murmur arrives this week, COM rather than DE pressed to further drag in, drain out and gatecrash the senses. Hula are from Sheffield. If that sounds obvious then, perhaps, so are you.
 

PARADISCO PARANOIACS IN THE CULTURAL LAS VEGAS
The next day, Hula are splayed across Nort's bedroom nursing NME financed headaches, crunching biscuits and talking in crunchy accents (In cultural Las Vegas every night out to a real fun, exciting place, like The Limit, is followed by a headache). Mark Albrow plays the grubby, articulate, self confessed Francophile referring occasionally to the likes of Genet, Bataille and Barthes. Onstage he hides behind a curious metallic Meccano structure, tuning out Hula's synth and special sounds. By day he paints DADartistic nightmares and designs portraits and posters. Ron Wright wears the ubiquitous black leather trousers. In the evening he allows charges of moderate altruism by dressing down as a humble psychiatric nurse, "a humbling experience". Nort is the tall, muscular, percussive, stormtrooper. In the darkroom he develops bizarre, faked newsreel photo-collages.
A disquieting feature of these meticulously collated pictures is their marked preoccupation with all-pervading violence and world cataclysm: Ronald Reagan savoring anal coitus with "Little Boy" and "Fat Boy", Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs; Sheffielder Seb Coe, arms raised for glory, a microsecond away from the wine tape, with the local riot squad behind armed with sten guns ready to stop him, dead on time.
What's it all about Hula?
Nort, his expression twice as manic and out to lunch as his drumming, explains: "There's an information war on. Everything you see or hear on television, in the papers, on billboards is faked. The people in Sheffield know a thing or two about that. This is just my own personal expression of contempt for how easy it all is."
Does this extend to pop music and Hula?
"We might use the same machine as Wham!" Mark insists, "but a gold disc in the toilet isn't the be-all-and-end-all of it. Our music has a strong emotional base to it, some of that comes from the expression and reflection of your immediate environment. The people who do that the best are invariably the ones who make the 'great' music. Like I remember whistling Marvin Gaye songs on the way to school, one in particular that I think was called 'Abraham, Martin and John'. The emotional response that records like that can bring out is incredible."
How do you reconcile listening to Marvin Gaye and playing distinctly less than life-enhancing paradisco noir of Hula? There are people who find that hard to handle. Are Hula a bunch of morbid sods?
"I felt pretty mobid the day that Marvin Gaye died" admits Ron. "We were in the studio when we heard about it, doing cut-ups of some of his stuff... which is not to say that we were in any way responsible. Getting to the point, I always found our music noisy, people are aggravated, irritated... but there's nothing dirge-like about what we do. There are a lot of chants and loops but I've always thought of us as much more buoyant and resilient."
Do you blame the music on your environment?
"The environment is the stimulus."

"WHAT EXACTLY ARE THEY TRYING TO SELL?"
If the Hula record was played in the local Virgin or HMV stories, half the shoppers would definitely edge towards the door. The Conga kids have seen the enormous face of pop. It has been mediated to them by a thousand television screens, it shrieks at them from hoardings of Heeley and Hillsborough. They know about pop's princess and paladins but Hula - spray-can out-patients of the multi-storey car park - do not compute. A careless whisper in the wrong place can apparently cause several deaths, but the sound of colliding motor cars is hardly heard at all. "You can't break, body-pop or dance to this one, John. We don't buy it." Instead of Hula are feted, principally, by the resurgent No-Go neophytes who see more in the ciphers of gore-blood violence and desire of TG/ PTV than in a perversely sophisticated entertainment. Is this where Hula's horizons get caged? Mark doesn't think so.
"The difference is that we're not using the group simply as a propaganda machine to harass and harangue people. We work off sexual energy to a high degree with principal motive in mind. This is a blatant example but Jean Genet wrote 'Our lady flowers' as a masturbatory fantasy while he was locked up in prison. The confusion of sex, gender and sexuality that book invokes throws your whole perception of things into turmoil. That's what it's all about."
"I think Foetus is brilliant," cuts in Ron, "but a lot of those others rely purely on shock horror impact to entertain; throwing in a couple of autopsies to sell a video is pathetic. I found the PTV videos entertaining from a scientific point of view but aside from that... Most of the films we use incorporate a random or loose element because they are to stimulate the group as well. That's why we use Pete Care (of 'Johnny YesNo' and the forthcoming 'Earthshaker' note), he gives us something to react against."
 

I know that is sounds dumb, but you ARE supposed to be entertainers. Aren't you?
"This sounds dumb too," replies Ron, "but I'd rather see myself as a cross between an agitator and a stimulator. To me bull-fighting is entertainment. What we do is intimidating - people are forced into an arena our choosing. You're not simply forced to watch the rock-and-roll singer going through his hour of histrionics either. We want to invite the imaginations if the particular individuals to rise to their highest point. Mind you, the tour manager in Holland came off drugs halfway through our tour. He didn't need them after three of our gigs."
"People watch TV all the timer," interjects Mark, "but they never get as excited as when things go wrong. A newscaster passing out on the air, that will be talked about for years. It becomes folklore. That's the break from humdrum that we're looking for."
As a parting shot I mention that the ghost of Cabaret Voltaire's mid-period epics 'Voice of America', 'Mix up' and 'Red Mecca', will invariably be dragged up in Hula discussions.
"There are parallels of thought, obviously," admits Ron. "But when we started everyone was taking names like Joy Division, we didn't exactly tow the party line. We'd have felt pretty tomato-ish calling ourselves The Oppressed Trucheons or The Anvil Of Death. As it was, people wouldn't come and see us because they thought we were Hawaiians."
Hula are not Hawaiians.

NME 1984-12-15