No one is going to confuse these Swedish Sleazeballs with filthy habits with Abba, although they covered the latter’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” with spectacular success. The best way to introduce the Leather Nun is with their feces-friendly porn-funk classic “F.F.A.” which you might think is a salute to the Future Farmers of America until lead singer Jonas Almquist starts tossing off perve-friendly dance-craze slogans like “Let’s fist again” and “Fist and shout” before finally getting down to the brown with the lines, “Shit on my knuckles, pain up the ass for you.” Well I never.
And lest you think the song “I Can Smell Your Thoughts” is a kind of fecal-sequel (I certainly smell something!) it sounds to me like bad U2, which speaks to Leather Nun’s ultimate failure of nerve. Despite all of their dirty filthy posturing (strippers and hard-core gay porno films at their live shows, hooray!) they could never settle on a sound, and ultimately ended up sounding like wimps on the make.
Depending on where you stand in their discography, they sound like deranged noise punks, an industrial band, a Velvet Underground tribute band, the Psychedelic Furs (see “A Thousand Nights”) with funny accents or the kind of band that puts out a simply hideous synth-rap song called “Cool Shoes” in the hope you’ll think it’s a joke—which it probably was, but it still stinks worse than Almquist’s knuckles.
So, to sum things up, The Leather Nun don’t quite live up to their rep. In fact they didn’t even wear leather—image-wise they couldn’t quite decide whether they wanted to look like the Velvet Underground or the Dead Boys, when any Colonel Tom Parker wannabe worth his salt would have decked them out in full sado-masoch regalia. Why, on one live video I’ve seen guitarist Bengt Aronsson is wearing a tie-dye t-shirt and white pants. What kind of message is that sending to the youth of Sweden? How did these guys expect to be treated as the Elongated Country’s (the Swede’s own nickname for their country, swear to God) answer to the Velvet Underground? You can’t sell defilement, decadence, degradation, and the friendly act of fisting in white pants!
That said, the Gothenburg quintet made some interesting friends along the line including industrial music gadfly Genesis P. Orridge, BBC Radio DJ John Peel, and the Cult’s Ian Astbury. And their producers included Mick Ronson as well as everybody’s favorite Glam Frankenstein Kim Fowley. Which was inevitable, I suppose—the Sleaze King of Sunset Boulevard would have had no trouble catching a whiff of “F.F.A.” from 5,487 miles (I did the math) away. He was always looking for the Next Big Stench.
The Leather Nun’s 1987 compilation Force of Habit is recommended to listeners who want to hear the full range of their sound. It includes “F.F.A.” and “Pink House,” the band’s sarcastic retort to John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” which was sarcastic to begin so the joke’s on them, but maybe they missed the sarcasm, English not being their native language and all. Also contained within are their covers of both Abba’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” and Wire’s “506,” as well as the disappointingly tame “Have Sex with Me” (she’s wearing a black leather skirt–daring!).
Force of Habit has something for every orifice, it does, but that’s its biggest fault, and when I want to hear The Leather Nun I turn to their very first non-45, the 1979 “Slow Death” EP. Or I should say (and pay attention here kids, this isn’t very interesting) the 1986 full-length re-release of the EP, which includes a fourteen-minute-plus live version of the title cut recorded at the Scala Cinema in London in 1980.
“Slow Death” is The Leather Nun at their noisiest and most industrial—this is ugly, abrasive music that is most definitely not out to win the Miss Sweden Beauty Pageant, if only because it flunks (spectacularly) the charm portion of the competition and no way do you want to see it in a swimsuit. The LP is positively tainted, but not by the commercial concessions that would land the tepid pop confection “Jesus Came Driving Along” on the 1987 film Dudes. (Why not “F.F.A.”? Now that’s a dude’s song!) After just one listen you’ll understand why The Leather Nun was the first rock act to sell condoms as tour merchandise. My pet theory is that they’re weren’t being sold as aids to safe sex—they were to be worn over your ears, to protect them whatever loathsome diseases the band’s patented brand of smutsig musik was carrying.
Opener “No Rule” is a fuzzed-out, murky speedboat ride down a sewer gunked up with filth, fecal matter and everything else the Swedes flush down their toilets to keep their country looking so spic and span, and in general the song’s so ugly all of the rats and albino alligators in said sewer are fleeing not not out of terror, but out of disgust. For about three seconds “No Rule” sounds like the prototype of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” then Almquist comes in sounding like Sweden’s answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger, throwing gutturals galore into anarcho-chic lines like “No more rules, no more silly law and order.” That “silly” is simply wonderful, and listening to “No Rules” all you can think is “Yeah, as if. We’re talking about Sweden here, pal. No anarchy in the UK for you!” Which doesn’t detract a whit from the song’s off-the-scales grime factor. The Leather Nun sound the way the guys in Motörhead would have if they’d never bathed. Which they did, surprisingly enough—four times, to be exact!
“Death Threats” is a slow-motion noisescape that sounds like it was recorded in a foundry—the loping bass and muffled drums provide an undeviating pulse like the modern industrial workplace is a sentient being, while around them you get a ringing telephone, the sound of drilling, some kind of typewriter gone mad, a raging buzzsaw, and all manner of other post-Industrial Age racket-makers. Over which Almquist makes no real attempt to be understood—all you know is he’s receiving death threats, death threats, death threats, over that telephone I think. No thick accent on this one—fear has the salutary effect of making Almquist sound like a normal person! On this one PiL’s “Poptones” makes a field trip to the factory. So much for picnicking in the English countryside—Almquist is going to get his in the heavy manufacturing sector.
“Slow Death” is, believe it or not, a quieter affair. Over a skin-crawling beat Almquist, who almost croons, keeps repeating “Ninety-percent burns, fifty-five hours to live” and it’s scary because he sings it like there’s something sexy about it all—like he’s trying to seduce a woman (or man, hard to know with these guys) into bed. Meanwhile you hear noises and you can’t tell what’s making them. Is that a radio producing that on and off static? A synthesizer? Almquist sexually molesting his six-string? Whatever it is, it’s all you get for coloration, and it’s enough—this is minimalist fare and may or may not be about Chernobyl, but as slow and dark as it is there’s something perversely cheerful about it. This is seduction music for your real sexual perverts, a rewriting of J.G. Ballard’s Crash for burn victim fetishists.
“Ensam I natt” (rough translation: “Alone in the Night”) is more Speed Racer punk along the lines of “No Rules,” but despite Aronsson’s fuzzed-to-the-max Swedish battle ax it’s a cleaner, leaner song. Sounds to me like they spent maybe half an hour or so beforehand cleaning up the clotted filth that had accumulated on their gear after their tour through the sewer, then let rip. The drums and bass sound freshly bathed, at least until Aronsson comes along to spray new slime all over ‘em, and he plays with a barbarian glee that is unbecoming a civilized Nordic person. Meanwhile Almquist comes on like Lemmy singing in tongues. All I can tell you is he says “SOS” a lot, so maybe what we’re really listening to here is another Abba cover!
The live version of “Slow Death” (first released on the 1980 At Scala Cinema, London cassette) that takes up side two is a tour de forc—”Sister Ray” for people even more palely complected than the denizens of the Velvet Underground. The groove is relentless and remorseless—Aronsson comes out of the woods where he spent the studio version to whip it on us Jim with thunderous slabs of Stooges wah-wah guitar while Genesis P. Orridge saws away on violin and America’s own Monte Cazazza, an industrial music pioneer, throws in on synthesizer. Oddly enough, this live recording is the cleanest sounding track on “Slow Death”—the sound separation’s immaculate, and Aronsson’s titanic power chords and chaotic guitar caterwaul fail to drown everyone else out. And the proof of the song’s success lies in the fact that it keeps you hanging on for fourteen-plus minutes, which I attribute to either paralytic dread or musical mesmerism.
The Leather Nun ultimately laid waste to their powers the way most bands do—by following the trends and watering down their sound as appropriate. There’s nothing wrong with evolution, but somewhere along the line (which is inevitable, I suppose, when one considers “Slow Death” came out in 1980 and the band didn’t record its real debut album until 1986) they trashed their butt plugs and cleaned up their act and by so doing blew their chance to be Sweden’s retort to the Butthole Surfers. And they cleaned up real good, too—the only things truly filthy and morally abhorrent about them in the end were their live shows. Never again would they revel in the Smutsen och raseriet (that’s the filth and the fury to you) the way they do on “Slow Death.” In the end, Jonas Almquist washed his hands. Nothing brown can stay.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
