Music Arcades: Rocket from the Tombs: The Day the Earth met the Rocket from the Tombs

David Thomas has a gift for all kinds of mythologising, including self-mythologising. While he didn't write the sleeve notes for The Day the Earth met the Rocket from the Tombs, I can't help thinking he probably had a kind of executive producer role in selecting the person to write them and giving him a kind of "guiding narrative". Thus the notes begin,

This album is more than just an artifact of a specific time and place. It offers a tantalizing glimpse at one of the greatest albums never recorded. Many of us — fans of this arcane sub-chapter in the history of rock music — are convinced that had Rocket From The Tombs survived long enough to record "30 Seconds Over Tokyo", "Sonic Reducer" and "Final Solution," as well as lost classics like "Muckraker," "So Cold" and "Amphetamine," the resulting record would, today, be ranked alongside the MC5's Kick Out The Jams, Patti Smith's Horses and the Stooges' Raw Power as seminal albums of the punk era. This collection of demo and live material is the closest we can get. Still, after 26 years worth of mythologizing, it provides ample proof that during their all too brief existence few bands rocked harder or closer to the edge."

Not that it matters, but listening now, I actually prefer this to Kick Out The Jams and Raw Power, but not to Horses. What's horrifying to realise is that I have no memory of forming an opinion about, or even of listening to, this album before. Records suggest I got it on my 41st birthday: I remember going to a fancy supper club (for the first and last time) and coming home to find that local lads had finally succeeded in catapulting a stone through our window; but whatever attention I gave The Day the Earth met the Rocket from the Tombs left little trace.

Oh, some background for you… Rocket from the Tombs (RFTT to their friends) were part of the Cleveland scene in the mid-seventies. They were exactly the kind of band who ought to have featured heavily in Please Kill Me, and perhaps the self-mythologising was a necessary corrective to the fact that they didn't.

RFTT never released anything before they split up, and, with hindsight, they appear as a forerunner of Pere Ubu — who inherited some of RFTT's finest material, including 30 Second Over Tokyo and Final Solution, which they released on Terminal Tower — though it probably felt different if you lived it forwards. After this album was cobbled together from demo and live recordings, the surviving members went on a US tour together and recorded their live set in a studio. The official line was "this is not a reunion" and "It will not be a 'real' band until we start writing new material", but then a few years later they did write (a little) new material.