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Experimental

Nashville basement, one-man band

R. Stevie Moore

R. Stevie Moore was born in Nashville in 1952, the son of session bassist Bob Moore. At 16 he got a four-track reel-to-reel deck and started recording as a one-man band in his parents' basement in Madison, Tennessee. Phonography, put together by his uncle and pressed in 100 copies in 1976, was his first album on an outside label. In 1978 he moved to Montclair, New Jersey, worked in a record store, joined WFMU, and in 1982 launched a mail-order cassette club. He has self-released roughly 400 albums since 1968. Ariel Pink, who called him his mentor, curated a retrospective in 2006. Moore moved back to Nashville in 2010 and stepped away from music at the end of 2019.

Los Angeles, producer and promoter

Kim Fowley

Kim Fowley was born in Los Angeles in 1939, the son of actors Douglas Fowley and Shelby Payne. From 1959 he worked as a producer and promoter. He co-produced a US number one in 1960 and arranged a UK number one in 1962, then spent the mid-1960s in London working with P.J. Proby and an early Soft Machine. His own albums ran from Outrageous in 1968 through I'm Bad and International Heroes to Adventures in Dreamland in 2004. In 1975 he put together the Runaways and produced their debut. He died of bladder cancer in Hollywood in January 2015, aged 75. Later that year former Runaway Jackie Fuchs accused him of raping her in 1975.

Gravesend-born, Medway Poets, 1979

Sexton Ming

Sexton Ming was born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1961. In 1979 he was a founding member of the Medway Poets, along with Billy Childish, who later recalled it as "me & Sexton versus everyone else." In 1980 the two shared several small-press books. On Childish's Hangman Records they released Which Dead Donkey Daddy?, recorded in Rochester in July 1987, and Plump Prizes and Little Gems, with sleeve notes by Ivor Cutler. Both are stripped-down acoustic records, split between songs and poems. In 1997 he played Queen Victoria in the cult film Pervirella, and in 1999 he was a founder member of the Stuckists before leaving for a solo career. He is married to the artist Ella Guru.

Newcastle, wrapped in tar paper

Zoviet France

Zoviet France formed in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1980 and has stayed mostly anonymous since. The name has been restyled over the years, from :$OVIET:FRANCE: to the latter-day :zoviet*france:. The group came out of the early-1980s underground tape scene and packaged its releases in hessian, tar paper and aluminium foil, starting with Garista in 1982, then Norsch, Mohnomishe and Eostre on labels such as Red Rhino and Charrm. The music, made from dissonant, industrial textures and often filed under dark ambient, carried on through Shouting at the Ground in 1988 and Look Into Me in 1990. Former members went on to record as Rapoon and Dead Voices on Air. Co-founder Ben Ponton keeps the group going with Mark Warren.

Named short enough to spray-paint

The Ex

The Ex formed in 1979 in Wormer, just outside Amsterdam. They picked their instruments by drawing straws, and their name for how fast it could be sprayed on a wall. The band came straight out of the Dutch squatter movement, had its own squat within two years, and built a DIY ethic that shaped everything after. Blueprints for a Blackout, their fifth album, from 1984, is where they pushed past straightforward punk, bringing in violin, oboe, marimba and oil-drum percussion alongside the guitars. Singer G.W. Sok fronted the band for thirty years before leaving in 2008. By then The Ex had drifted even further from its punk origins, into free jazz, improvisation and a long-running collaboration with Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya.

Broken Flag, power electronics, 1982

Ramleh

Ramleh was formed by Gary Mundy in 1982, part of the early British power electronics scene alongside Whitehouse, and a string of cassettes and EPs came out on Mundy's label, Broken Flag. The band split in 1984. Mundy revived it in 1987, and in 1989 he reformed it with Philip Best for the LP Grudge for Life. Mundy's other band, Skullflower, then pulled Ramleh toward rock, from Blowhole in 1991 through Homeless and Be Careful What You Wish For to Boeing in 1997, with Skullflower's Anthony di Franco and Stuart Dennison on bass and drums. Mundy ended it again after Boeing. He came back in 2009 with Valediction, back in power electronics, and Hyper Vigilance followed in 2025. The early fascist shock imagery was later disavowed.

The Collection