Ask any 30-something Brit-rocker with a wild, druggy stare, greasy, stringy hair, or a beat-up, puked-on leather jacket (or all three, seeing as they usually come that way) if they remember what “Grebo” was, and they will grin widely, stroke their scruffy chin, and say, like, “Fookin’ hell! The Bykers, mate!” or “Greee-bo Guru!” or “Toss off, bender!” or something equally British and enthusiastic. Although it’s reign in the pages of the UK pop weeklies of the day (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker ) was brief, “Grebo” was a far-reaching musical phenomenon from the late 1980’s that still resonates among scuzz-freaks and psyche-metal galactic cowboys to this very day. And the music still packs a powerful, debauched punch, too. So, just what was Grebo, and is there any chance at all that you, the young, intrepid flash metal blastronaut, might be a Grebo yourself? And what does any of this have to do with the Bomb Party?

The Poppies, being all slap-happy and shit, ultimately strangled all the menace and grue and 70’s drug-disco weirdness right out of Grebo, and just year later, the Brit press was throwing the term at the Wonderstuff, and Mega City 4, and all these skinny indie-rock motherfuckers, rendering it useless. Of course, us Yanks weren’t there, so the Wonderstuff couldn’t hurt us. We just STAYED dirty and greasy, and we kept listening to sleazy, leather-clad guitar-chug like “Drugs”, long after the NME announced that this party was over. The party is NEVER over, man. Rock n’ roll doesn’t know when to go home. And so, Grebo endures. Which brings us to Bomb Party's  finest hour, 1986’s masterpiece of gutbucket sourfuzz, “Drugs”.

Plus, they had a hot, peroxide-abusing chick, and in the credits, they claimed the album was recorded in “Alaska, Easter 1986”, which seemed so weird, even IN 1986, that you just had to hear what the fuck was going on. Plus, the first song was called “Kill Your Wife”! Nihilism and black leather has always been one of rock n’ roll’s greatest combinations.

Musically, the band’s closest cousins were the Gun Club, the Cramps, Beasts of Bourbon, and Tex and the Horseheads – the Bomb Party played grungy, stripped-down death rock with sub-rockabilly riffs and goth-gloom cool. And they were strange, too – “Don’t Die Keith” is such an off-kilter, primal gut-stomp of a funeral song, the mind boggles as to just who Keith was, and why they thought he was gonna die. Over a pummeling bass riff, Jesus snarls, “Dying is dangerous, you can’t trust your buriers/They’ll steal your gold teeth and piss on your soul, Keith”.  It’s the creepiest intervention you’ll ever hear.

A lot of the songs on Drugs seem to be about the Bomb Party’s friends, whether real or imagined – there’s the lonely, suicidal Susie of “Susie’s Party” (“Susie had a party and no one came/ Ever since, she’s never been the same”), mad strangler Johnny, of “Johnny Took Her Breath Away” (“Johnny took her breath away/With an electrical cable”), the less than zero “Johnny Nero” (“Johnny Nero is a twat”), and even the infamous “Kill Your Wife” (“Get a knife/Kill your wife/Get a crowbar/Kill your grandpa”) is dedicated to Denis. I’m sure Denis was thrilled by that.

The whole album is just one long murder ballad, really, with bad-cowboy guitar slinging, crazy, hopping-mad whiskey howls, and midnight moans of pain and ecstasy. It still sounds as lethally doped-to-the-tits now as it did in ’86, and the really sadistic death rockers, like “Zombie Head” and “Our Love is Pushing Up Daisies”, are just pure evil. “Drugs” is authentically NASTY rock n’ roll, the kind of stuff you could base an interstate killing spree or a murder-suicide pact on. It is one of the most depraved rock records of the 1980’s.

Suffice to say, it’s a must-have. ________________________________________________________________________________________