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Creaming Jesus and TSS vs The Filth

No – we’re not talking about a war between Cradle Of Filth… We’re talking the rozzers, you know, the police!

No – we’re not talking about a war between Cradle Of Filth… We’re talking the rozzers, you know, the police! In the early 90s, I was in another ‘riot grrrl’ band Toxic Shock Syndrome – we thought we were like the Ministry and Godflesh but with birds in the band. To many ‘Grrrl’s’ (and members of Huggy Bear’s) horror, we were not bubble gum pop, more flying blood, smashed-up, make-shift altars and offal from the butchers off-loaded gwar-style into the crowd accompanied by looks of bemusement/revulsion from the crowd. As Alice, the guitarist used to say, ‘Where’s the riot?’ Fuck the lolli-pops and sugar-sweet melodies of our ‘contemporaries’, in our minds the riot was happening right on the stage! Needless to say, we didn’t fit the Riot Grrrl mould. And John Peel himself was shocked, especially at a certain gig with Cornershop, when we used a sample of his voice. No Peel Session for us, then.

So we couldn’t play with girls and, as we thought we were so hard, we decided to play with the boys instead and who better than the likes of Creaming Jesus? Gigs with these sonic butchers were particularly eventful. And we loved Creaming Jesus because they were so different from the slew of other bands coming through at the time. I’m sure we met them because I thought I’d broken their singer Andy’s hair when I pulled his one – very long - dreadlock and it came off in my hand. I’ve recently been reminiscing with Roy – one of the crazy drummers – about the mayhem that always surrounded gigs with them. One leg of a Creaming Jesus tour saw us staying in some crazy house in Plymouth. The bloke who’d let us stay there fucked off to his girlfriend’s house so his housemates didn’t have had a clue who we all were. To make matters worse, two members of CJ decided to root through some bird’s draws and try on her scanties (and they were very scanty!) to the amusement of around 10 onlookers. Needless to say the police were called and we tried to make a hasty get-away. But I think the filth were more frightened of what they’d ‘stumbled upon’ (a van full of leather-clad freaks in their eyes!) than we were of them, and after Roy singing, ‘When ship goes down’ and various other booze-fuelled renditions of cypress Hill coupled with a taking down of particulars, they left us to go on our way. Us 1 - rozzers 0