Sink - Old Man Snake And The Fat, Black Pig (Decoy DYL 012) (UK 1990) (Vinyl 24-96 & 16-44.1)

Interview from 'Real OD' fanzine -1996 (This gives a really good history of the band)

…been waiting a while to do some kind of retro piece about SINK , the band who were probably the most diverse and interesting of the time/'scene' , from their inception in 1988, through the whole of the 'Pop Kid'/'fraggle' bullshit (even though SINK were never part of that) right up to when they changed their name and became BIG RAY. Ideas of getting the whole band together to rake up a few old stories and recount their considerable live and studio history proved, as always, to be impossible. So, we now present the story of SINK as told by frontman, chief writer and generally affable (though sometimes a little mickey-taking) king of PG porn - Mr Edward Wenn (nee Shred)….

Real O.D. - Okay, let’s start off with the first single….

Ed - Well, I’ll just chunter on for hours….

Real O.D. - All right …

Ed - There’s a couple of interesting things about this; it’s the first record on Poontang Records, which is a thing a lot of people got upset about, I must say, and it’s taken from this whole kind of Mama Sink thing, with poontang, hot coffee and good chilli. You know Link Wray? He’s got this really obscure country album and it’s got "Fire & Brimstone" on, which we did later on as well, with those lines about coffee and chilli on the sleeve notes, and Mama Wray and stuff …

Real O.D. - So you stole it?

Ed - Yeah, we stole it completely. SNUFF refused to join the label because of the name, and so did S.N.F.U., who were gonna do a single on Poontang as well until they found out the name. The guy (Chi Pig) just said, "no way, we’re not doing a fucking record on that label.". SNUFF did the same - apparently they thought it was sexist or something. We used it ‘cos we thought it was funny, not as a serious thing. I looked it up …it’s from the French word ‘putain’ which means prostitute. To me a prostitute can be of either sex, but people didn’t see it that way.

Real O.D. - So that’s the first one….when did it come out?

Ed - Well, it came out in 1988. The one thing we did try to do right from the start was to treat people with intelligence, you know, not shove stuff down their throats. That’s why we never put the title on the sleeve of any record, we’d put it somewhere else. So we tried to make people find out what it was, but everyone just called it "God Loves You", you know. The cover was….you know when you do your first record with your new band and your going, "Ooh, what’s the sleeve gonna be then?", it’s all exciting.

Well, I was staying at Alain’s house (one of the two infamous French guys that ran the Vinyl Solution label of which Poontang Records was a subsidiary), flicking through ‘The Face’, and this cool picture was in there, and I thought, "Right, I’ll use that as a sleeve.".

We couldn’t just rip it off though, ‘cos we thought we were gonna be this huge band and we’d get sued if anyone caught on. So I got in touch with the photographer, who’s called Colin Boyle - a serious top-notch photographer - and he’d taken this picture and a few others as a series, so we explained it was on an indie label, and we were doing it ourselves, and he said he’s send a bunch of similar pictures from the same shoot and we could choose the one we wanted. Since he was so cool about it all when I spoke to him, I thought we’d better send him something other than just a couple of copies of the record so I said "We can send you £20 - would that be an insult?" and he said he normally got a grand for every picture that was published, so £20 would indeed be a bit of an insult! We might as well just have it for free. So anyway we stuck it out, and a year later actually remembered to send him one. Nice bloke.

Real O.D. - So how much touring did you do for it? I remember you playing with PERFECT DAZE a few times….

Ed - We did an English tour, and recorded the next one before going to Europe, but when we went to Europe the first one was the only one we had out. Laurence, who’d joined on vocals just before we recorded the first single, left the band just before the tour….[phone rings and interview gets suspended for a while]… So basically the first single’s done and we went off on tour.

After this first one we kicked the drummer out - Redwood Pete – and Memphis (John Howie) joined for almost a year while he was over here from the US. Which is why there’s lots of different back cover pictures on the single. It got re-pressed 4 or 5 times and everytime we went to re-press it, the line-up had changed so we stuck a different picture on the back. I think the last pressing just has me and Paul on it…it seemed the safest thing to do!

On the Euro tour we did the whole thing supporting the INSTIGATORS in France, Germany, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and then we came back and toured England on our own for good measure…The whole thing probably lasted about 7 weeks and was a real eye-opener. I guess it set the tone in many ways for the next 4 years.

I remember writing a lot of good songs on that tour – "On The Tracks", "Backwater", "Big Red Car" – and polishing others – "At The Circus", "For What It’s Worth". It moulded us into a unit and took us to the next level. Until then we’d been pretty obsessed with the whole London thing, but there’s nothing like 6 weeks in a van playing all over Europe to knock the bullshit out of you.

So much was a struggle in those early days: not eating, sleeping in dodgy squats, being too tired to stand up, hating each other, arguing about money, but at the same time you knew it was the best thing on the planet and that there was nowhere else you’d rather be. The freedom was incredible. The fact that you’d become a part of a subculture – a layer of society that other people had no idea about. And just when it got really bad, you’d turn up at some club and meet the nicest people in the world and then everything was worth it again.

I’ll never forget that tour.

Real O.D. - ….and "On The Tracks, Feeling Blue" came out straight away?

Ed - More or less straight away….we’d recorded it the second Poontang release before we left for Europe. Memphis joined just in time to play on it. Tommy Stupid had filled in on drums for a couple of shows and some demos, but he was still doing the Stupids and was never going to be in Sink long-term.

When we came back from Europe, Ronnie Wood (of the Rolling Stones) had an exhibition of some of his paintings at a gallery in London and we went down there, took a load of pictures and used them on the sleeve. The first single would have come out in September 88, we went on tour in January 89, and this second record got released in February 89.

We instantly hit the road in England playing a few dates in Cardiff and Boston, places like that, and then later that summer a flexi from ‘Skateboard!’ magazine came out, with DOCTOR & THE CRIPPENS, NAPALM DEATH, INTENSE DEGREE, SORE THROAT CARCASS, JAILCELL RECIPES and SINK and what they did is cut the intro of our song off then faded the track before the end. I think they cut the CRIPPENS off as well. We were the only bands on the flexi whose songs ran to more than 40 seconds I seem to remember, maybe that’s why they cut us. Anyway, it was weird. So the two finest bands in England at the time (cough)….

Real O.D. - ….were cut short.

Ed - Yeah. We cut this at the same time as FILLER cut their second 7" - how about that! We all hung out at The Exchange in Camden digging each other’s tracks. It was a fun morning.

Real O.D. - So did you steal anything cool for "On The Tracks, Feeling Blue", the second single?

Ed - What’d we steal? We stole ‘Blue Noodles’ from FUGAZI’s ‘Bulldog Front’, stole ‘Bluesman’ from ‘Crash’ by GOVERNMENT ISSUE, so there we are ……

Real O.D. - What about the cover for that one?

Ed - The picture is by Neil Emery, who plays football with us now every Thursday. He used to live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he still goes back there every year to visit mates. He took the picture we used on one of his visits. The photo had the railway crossing with a sign saying, "four tracks" on it. It seemed appropriate. A proper picture by a proper chum. The second single also saw the airing of the, now famous, Boris logo.

Real O.D. - And what’s the story behind that?

Ed - The Boris logo….that’s design for the first tee-shirt we did. Boris is this mate who went to public school and because he liked punk music they thought he was a Communist, so they called him Boris. I thought that was pretty funny. I seem to remember that Paul was pretty much against having that design on the single. Don’t know why.

Real O.D. - So you toured England with this record?

Ed - Yeah. After that we didn’t go away again until the album came out. The next thing we had released was the ‘Pssst EP’ (note from the editor - a comp 7" with SINK, SENSELESS THINGS, SNUFF and PERFECT DAZE all doing each others’ songs). The photo on the sleeve is from ‘Psycho’ from a really good book of stills from each scene of the movie that I found once and bought. A sort of photo novel.

Laurence (singer with Perfect Daze, ex of Sink and the guy who released the EP) was looking for a sleeve and he chose a still from the book. Actually, I still haven’t got that book back…bastard!

The thing I like about the ‘Pssst’ artwork is the abysmal typeface on me back - it’s so awful! That must have come out at the end of ‘89, and we then basically played around England a lot. Memphis was still drumming for us.

We then went to this studio in Huddersfield, the INSTIGATORS’ studio….[Real O.D. support man, Karl, comes in offering Pringles around causing joy and surprise]……We went up there in June ‘90 to record a single and an album. The single was ‘Don’t Burn The Hook’, which came out before the album.

Claire (editor’s note - Ed’s then girlfriend, she’s now his wife) was doing her finals in London, so I was on the phone to her every couple of days and she had got really ill since we’d left for the studio and was having a bad time. So she was on the phone going, "Come back. I’m really ill and I feel like crap." and I was like, "Errrm, I can’t. I’ve got to do this record.". At the time, the LP was the most important thing in the world for me and I had no idea how ill she really was. She actually passed out in one of her exams! She still hasn’t forgiven me for that. But anyway….the studio was pretty basic, the house we were staying in was fucking freezing and Claire was passing out and hallucinating in London…so it wasn’t a very good deal at all. Like I said before, it all seemed like it was a struggle back then.

This was Sink's first release on Decoy proper as opposed to Poontang. Decoy was the label that all the tuneful punk stuff on Vinyl Solution went out through. V.S. had gone pretty much dance and thrash metal by this time and Poontang was very much a subsid of Decoy, so I guess this was us getting the corporate ‘thumbs-up’. The French bastards (editor’s note - affectionate name calling) at Vinyl Solution decided we were cool enough now to be on their shit label full-time (editor’s note – more humour).

Looking back on things, it all went downhill from there really. We were having a good time until then, I think.

By the way, if you got the insert with the ‘Don’t Burn The Hook’ 7" you were one of the rare 500 that did. The title of the single comes from something we heard Rollins had said around that time. Apparently he’d been writing for some fanzine and they’d run a disparaging piece about a John Lee Hooker LP, so he quit the zine, saying something along the lines of, "Nobody burns The Hook!". We thought that was pretty cool. In fact we were just chuffed that we weren’t the only ones in the punk arena who dug blues music. The picture on the back of ‘..Hook’ was taken at Tufnel Park by a guy called Andrew Testa. We never met him, but he used to send us really great photos from our gigs and say we could use them as long as he got credited. Nice of him really. We played with some American band that night, NO MEANS NO I think….anyway, it was Memphis’ last gig with us. Cue another new line-up!

Real O.D. - …and then?

Ed - Memphis then fucked off back to the States like he’d been planning all along. He said he’d try to come back, but we knew he wouldn’t. We went back to Huddersfield to mix the tracks we’d recorded in June, by which time Kermack had joined. This would have been in August I suppose.

After all that the single finally came out - three or four weeks before the album. Decoy stuck it out just to get a review or three, and it actually got reviewed pretty well. You have to remember that indie 7 inchers never sold shit back then. I still think it’s the best single we did. ‘At The Circus’ (editor’s note - the nominal ‘a’ side) is a cracking song. I still love it, I’m even getting to like Paul’s outtro part!

He wrote it on tour in Poland while he was having a shower apparently! We were staying in what they called a workers’ hostel and I remember him running out of the bathroom with my acoustic guitar and playing the part to us over and over until we agreed to use it.

Paul’s forever doing that you see. You’ll have a song completed. You’ve sweated over it for either days or weeks and when it’s finished you play it to the others and Paul will say, "I’ve got this great bass bit for the end, or for the start, or the middle", so you have to say it’s written by both of us, when essentially I wrote the whole fucking song and he stuck three fucking chords on at the end, and that’s all he did. E,C and D. But I’m not bitter!! Anyway, the next that happened was the LP release.

Real O.D. - So when was this?

Ed - ‘Another Love Triangle' (editor’s note - the debut SINK LP) came out in September 1990 - I think it was September - and it was really interesting ‘cos that was the first time we’d stuck a SINK album out and suddenly we got a shitload of press. ‘Sounds’ gave us a couple photos, and it got reviewed in all three weekly papers with photos etc. It was the first album I’d released since I left the STUPIDS – where we’d been total media darlings - and I was thinking, "God, this is really crap exposure", because I’d been used to more coverage, but looking back now I can’t believe how much we got ‘cos it’s all changed a little bit now.

Real O.D. - Talk us through the artwork.

Ed - In our band we always had this problem of Paul and I disagreeing over almost everything, and artwork was something we especially disagreed over. So to avoid stalemate, he did the front and I did the back. I front’s pretty appalling, really, but it’s not so much his fault. The idea he had didn’t really get translated by the time we got the finished thing.

Real O.D. - Well, I always wondered whether the front was supposed to be like that, or whether it was a printing error….

Ed - Well, this is the thing. If you’re in a band and you stick something out then just because you’re in the band everyone thinks that what they see it was you wanted, they don’t realise that the band may really hate it as well. The only thing I liked on the front cover was the logo in the corner, ‘cos it was a deep pink with a white surround and was really well defined. The thing that happened was that Kermack joined the band (editor’s note - Kermack was to be the permanent drummer for SINK from then on) during the mixing in Huddersfield and his girlfriend Wendy was a keen photographer…trying to turn pro. We were just going around London one day taking pictures, and the cover shoot was from Liverpool Street Station with us standing in front of these huge steel support structures. So Paul took the picture to some computer place in our college, scanned it in and adjusted the colour saturation. We had the shot displayed on a big colour monitor, and it looked fantastic so we took some photos of the actual monitor and they looked really cool…all these rich colours, blurry from the video image, but Vinyl Solution were going, "Ooh, erm, er….I don’t know", ‘cos the MEGA CITY FOUR single with JFK on the front (editor’s note - ‘Less Than Senseless’) came out around then and they didn’t want us to do a "video sleeve" as well. So their mate Barry, who’d done the last two STUPIDS album covers, painted a picture from our blurry shots. By this method we reached the point where, on our first little independent album, we’ve got a photo that’s gone through this seriously expensive computer process, had a photo taken of that and then had a guy paints a fucking picture of it - which was crap - and we ended up with this awful fucking sleeve that cost a shitload of money. So to make up for it, Vinyl Solution gave us a two-colour lyric-sheet insert which I don’t think they ever did for anyone else, and which looked great, but cost a fortune as well. So we basically didn’t make any money from the album for like, two years even though we’d recorded it for next to nothing and it sold over 6000 copies pretty quickly. The typesetting alone cost £295….

Real O.D. - Why?

Ed - I don’t know. This is the thing that gets me. We spent a mere £900 recording an album, an e.p. and some extra tracks. Then the record label, who always moan about keeping recording costs to a minimum, spend a third of that of that again for the typesetting! Since then we’ve had hand-written sleeves for our albums!! Anyway, it’s a pointless debate now since most people have access to a PC and can do their own. It’s alright if you’re gonna sell a thousand million copies, but y’know….

So anyway, we went off to Germany, touring with a band called UGLY FOOD - a German muso band, like RUSH playing hardcore - and TRYBUNA BRUDU, a Polish band who were mates of ours from the first tour we’d done with the INSTIGATORS. We played Denmark, Sweden as well as Germany and a few shows in Holland with the VERNON WALTERS. All three bands were really cool people and we had a good time. Also John joined on lead guitar for that tour.

We had 19 shows booked over 21 days, and our van broke on the second day! It wouldn't start without a push. February, northern Europe, snow and ice…and then, on the 2nd to last night of the tour it finally gave up altogether and in order to get it to the nearest rental place, we ended up pushing it over the largest non-suspension bridge in Europe! In Aalborg, Denmark. To actually leave Denmark we spent £900 hiring a van just to get the 200 miles south into Germany, then we hired a van at the northern-most tip of Germany and went all the way to the Hook of Holland for only another £250. Fucking Denmark…it costs money to breathe the air up there! Still, the tour was cool, really fun.

By now John had joined full-time (editor's note - John had been a member of PERFECT DAZE and formerly the SPACE MAGGOTS). I think he joined because he was bored at college, and PERFECT DAZE had split up by now. So he was without a band, without talent and certainly without a proper hairstyle – so he fit right in!

By the way, this was when he used to look in the mirror before going onstage and give his hair a bit of a tease, you know. We thought that was well funny. We were pretty punk rock, and he was - and still is - a rock'n'roll man. We would always nudge each other when he’d check his hair before going on stage!

For the first few shows on the tour he would come on for the second half of the set, to do the songs off the album and some other, newer stuff. Basically, as the tour went on we taught him more of the old songs and he ended up on stage for longer and longer.

Paul wanted the band to be kept as a three piece, but it was pretty obvious by the end of the tour that John had joined, and it hadn’t really become reality for Paul.

We knew John wanted to join and we were touring a lot in those days, so we told him he had to leave college if he was to come in full-time - this was when we were getting to be the biggest we ever were, especially in Europe and stuff. John was pretty hacked off with university and threw it in damn quickly. That was that. We were now four and Kermack finally had someone in the band he could drink and smoke with.

Anyway, we got back to England rehearsed a few new songs and went back to the studio with lain Burgess who'd produced the 2nd single. It's interesting looking back on working with him now ‘cos at the time he was the Steve Albini or Butch Vig of the indie world. He'd produced "Rise" by Naked Raygun and "Atomizer" by Big Black and was really respected.

Real O.D. - So where did you record?

Ed - We went to the House In The Woods, which is like a mansion where we had our own rooms, had food cooked for us and stuff. There was no soundproofing or anything, but no-one else lived near the place, so you could just stand there screaming. Recently the MANIC STREET PREACHERS did some demos there and at the time T'PAU were often in doing their shit. The daughter of the guy that owned the place was married to P. Paul Fenech of THE METEORS which pleased Paul 'cos they were one of his fave bands years before. It's a fairly crap studio but a really cool place, you know. They had MTV too, which back then was a big deal, before we all realised that MTV is crap. Suddenly it wasn’t so much of a struggle amking albums!

The cover for 'Old Man Snake And The Fat Black Pig' was another disaster. At the time we wanted to do a stupid, funny sleeve. We were at Kermack’s high-rise in Leytonstone and decided to get weird. Wendy, his girlfriend, painted our faces and we took pictures. We put one of John on the cover in the end.

We'd come back from Europe in February, recorded in March and wanted the record released pretty damn quickly, so the artwork was being done as we recorded the songs. So we didn’t see it until the proofs came back from the printer's. The original idea was for another colourful sleeve, something like a touched up photo. A homage to some classic New Wave sleeve, but Pierre at Vinyl Solution, who did the artwork on that one, missed the point entirely and just coloured different areas of the sleeve like on a screen print so all the definition of the picture was lost. It looks better on CD, but it’s not how it was supposed to be at all.

On the back there's loads of cards from small-businesses that we either used or knew the people that ran them and also Paul’s application to be Britain’s first astronaut….surprisingly enough he didn’t get accepted! That was our stand against the big corporates, y’know like, "Support your local small businesses" or whatever.

After that it was off to Europe again - in the summer - with SHUDDER TO THINK from D.C. It’s quite interesting, because ‘Old Man Snake…' sold more than the SENSELESS THINGS’ ‘Can’t Do Anything’ 12", which came out at the same time. Early on we'd sold 2000, and they'd only shifted 1200. They sold something like 1100 in the UK and 100 abroad, while we sold 1500 in Europe and sod all in the UK. They’d just signed to Decoy and they were pretty big, bigger than MEGA CITY FOUR then and really in the papers a lot. We wanted to be as big as them, but the UK was becoming harder for us so we thought, "Fuck it. They don't deserve us." and went off to Europe again.

This time with SHUDDER it was a another big tour, like 9 weeks or something. Seven weeks abroad and 2 weeks in England and Wales when we got back. That was the tour we told John off for drinking too much onstage. He doesn’t like anyone to know this, so I think this is me time it was heard.

He’d been in the band a while, and Kermack started to get into his bad old ways of having a couple of drinks and a fag or two, and we played a squat in Geneva where just before THEE HYPNOTICS had played and everyone walked out – we’d liked hearing stories like that! So during the gig Paul turned round and saw that John was just swaying from side to side. He can play OK like that, but just didn’t move.

So the next day we had a group meeting in Italy, Kermack told him not to drink so much, and John got furious. The point was we were touring for 9 weeks, and if you get blind drunk every night for 9 weeks it basically fucks you up, so we were saying, "Look, we want you to be in the band, we want you to be in the band for a long time, we don’t want you to be some kind of casualty." Now, of course when we go away for gigs everyone’s completely fucked, all total drunkards, except me who has to drive, so John probably drinks less than the others now, but that was then.

Real O.D. - So where did you play?

Ed - We did Germany again, Holland, France, Belgium, Scandinavia. We did two shows in Oslo, one in a squat and one in this big, new nightclub, and everyone was giving us shit and going "Why did you play this club? It’s a rip off, run by nazis, the guy fucks my sister!" and you say, "Well. how he hell are we supposed to know that from London?" but still everyone blames the bands for it.

So anyway, at this rock nightclub two people showed and thought we were SNUFF, ‘cos we did loads of covers including ‘Not Listening’ and these two drunk rock girls came up to us and started going, "We have been waiting three years to see you play this song!", they were totally convinced that we were SNUFF. Then we came back to the UK and played some shows with the LEMONHEADS. It was the 'Lovey' tour. Their first major label record bombed completely. I heard recently that it had only sold 12,000 or something. It was the tour they split up on. So we played three shows with them and they totally sucked, but I love that record.

Anne, this girl who worked for EFA (editor's note - SINK's distributors in Germany) and was doing our distribution, had Evan stay at her house for a week while he was in Berlin which was where they played before they made it over to the UK. So she told me at our show in Berlin, "Say hi to Evan, he stayed at my house a few days ago. We played loads of Gram Parsons songs and had a great time…" and stuff like that.

So we turned up at Birmingham, Edward’s No. 8, and you know he’s like completely mad and vague? Anyway, I went up to him and said I’d been with Anne in Berlin and she’d told me specifically to come up and say ‘hi’, and he completely didn’t know who the fuck she was, he had no fucking idea at all. Weirdo! Basically they were abysmal, they were so fucking bad, and we sold twice as many t-shirts as them, so their t-shirt guy was really pissed off and bored. But it was a trip playing with them anyway.

At the sound check Evan started singing a Gram Parsons song with us that we were doing, which at the time was no big deal, but now it’s like ‘Wow, I’ve sung on stage with Evan Dando’. This was all only a few months before they started getting really massive.

Anyway, things were about to start going downhill for SINK. Well, the last show we did on that tour was at the George Robey and I think we had 340 people there, a fucking massive crowd for that shithole. Then after that we didn’t play London for fucking ages, probably because we left Vinyl Solution and we were looking about for a new home. From that point, after the Robey show, things went bad for us.

The next record that came out was the compilation of the singles ("Mama Sink -The First 18 Years"). It was an end of contract sort of thing. So we stuck that out, which involved them cocking up with the CD in a major way.

Basically they got the covers round the wrong way so that there was no tracks listed on the back of the CD box, but when you open it up there’s the track-listing! Apparently it was too late to change it by the time we saw the artwork, but they said they'd fix it when the first pressing sold out. They sold 1500 in a month and then never re-pressed it. Typical.

The next show we played in London was a double headline with the CHEMICAL PEOPLE, which was the first real time we’ve busted up with a band. Y'know, not got on too well with them. In fact, first we supported the DOUGHBOYS at the Hampstead White Horse, but that was specifically so that a dickhead from Emergo could come and see us. God knows why…they never were that interested.

Then we did the CHEMICAL PEOPLE show. We were up for 80% of the door which seemed like a great deal, but we didn’t realise that that was after the CHEMICAL PEOPLE took the £250 that they'd been guaranteed. So even though it was a joint headline, we were left with a massive £l8 or something. So essentially we got shafted. I guess it wasn't the band's fault that we hadn't been told about the 'arrangements', but Paul spoke to them. He explained what had happened and we were hoping they'd feel reasonable and they just said ‘so?’ and just walked off We didn’t realise at the time that Dave Naz’s mom owned L'Oreal or something….

Real O.D.- Revlon….

Ed - Yeah, so they’re completely rich, and they just said ‘no’. So that was our next gig after the Robey, and we went straight downhill from there.

Real O.D. - So where are we now?

Ed - Er, I’m not sure. That was when CHEMICAL PEOPLE were on Vinyl Solution, so it would’ve been, like, November 1990. Our first show for a few months.

And then ‘One Final Kick In The Head’ came out, a bootleg single put out by, Florian, a friend of ours from Berlin, who was SNUFF's European tour van driver and chief dope procurer at the time. It’s a bootleg of the Peel session stuff that we did in May 1990.

So we were looking for a new label since we’d left Vinyl Solution and we had, like, 6 deals fall through, serious talks w/ Emergo and some others, but it wasn’t really happening. It felt weird having to hawk your shit around from door to door and I guess that’s why we thought,

"Fuck it, let’s record an album on our own and then see who’ll go for it", ‘cos we didn’t realise we were out of it really, down and out.

So Paul paid for half the album and my Granddad paid the other half ‘Vega-Tables’. We wanted a producer and before we left them Vinyl had promised a decent budget. We wanted to get the guy who produced ‘London Calling’ so we phoned around - we also called Jim Dickinson, but it was like $15,000 a week for him – and then we found found that the CLASH bloke, Guy Stevens, had died in 1981, so I was like ‘Oh, we can’t use him then.’ Finally we sorted out a great deal with Dale Griffin and Overend Watts from Mott The Hoople, but at the last minute we had to do it ourselves because we could get all the money together. It was a real bummer ‘cos it would have been cool. Dale’s a great producer. People hated him when they did Peel sessions, but outside the Beeb he was a different person.

So we went to Purple Rain on our own to record ‘Vega-Tables’ and it was like the old days, freezing cold, sleeping on the floor and stuff, really suffering and, to be honest, we had a really good time.

We really liked the album and spent three weeks getting it right. That was during the Gulf War. We’d spend all day recording and then stay up and night watching war. Weird. I also remember we’d hook a tape deck up to a gnarly old amplifier and pump out loads of Stax compilation tapes when people dropped by to visit. Like I said, it was fun.

Anyway, we finished the album, but it wasn’t until the summer of ‘91 that it finally got released on City Slang.

Right out of the blue one of the best alternative labels in Europe called us up and we screaming down the phone, "Hey Ed. This is Christof from City Slang and I want to release this wonderful album…thing you’ve recorded. Call me back."

So we were back in the running w/ this super-huge guy that runs City Slang, but in the end I guess it was another fucking disaster.

To support the album we played something like 26 shows in Germany on one tour, and Christof (who used to be an agent before he started the label) was like,

"What the fuck are you doing? You’re supposed to play like five shows in Germany, all big shows so you make loads of money. Not some youth club in Fuckville." – which is the kind of stuff we’d been doing up until then.

They were trying to get us away from this hardcore/squatting image and get our stuff to the student market, but it didn’t really work. It was interesting, and good fun, and we bought guitars and stuff with the money we made on the tour, but it gave us a false sense of things y’know….

On that tour we played some shows with FROGS OF WAR (from the UK) and THAT'S IT (from the States). We played our last show as SINK at the Fabrik in Hamburg with those two bands supporting us. It was a cool show and Tribal Video filmed it. Unfortunately I never got a copy. I guess that would have been late 1991.

When we got back we released ‘Drainpipe Jane’ on Full Circle Records, a label run by Andy Turner who’d been the INSTIGATORS’ frontman, which sold like 1200 and he's got about 800 left, so that was a bummer for him, but we told him 2000 was too many to press up.

And that’s about it.

We recorded what would have been our third full album, but changed our name to BIG RAY before it came out. I guess that’s probably for another day though.

….and indeed it is. Hope you took the time read through all this ‘cos it’s an interesting tale of almost getting there but not quite not making it. SINK were always a fun band to see live and there were always plenty of laughs shared along the way. So thanks to them for their records, the funny shirts and a worse collection of haircuts than LOVE JUNK and thanks to Ed for taking the time to go through his recent history on a cold November Sunday at Real OD HQ. edandjacqui.com

=Hardware=
LP>
Shure M97xE>
Thorens TP 16 MK III Tonearm>
Thorens TD 126 MK III Turntable>
Handcrafted low capacitance custom cables, polyethylene insulated twinaxial conductors>
Kenwood C1 Custom Revision I>
- Phono Stage input and RIAA equalisation capacitors replaced by Styroflex and Polypropylen types resp.
- Electrolytic capacitors not mounted by manufacturer onto the RIAA stage power Supply refitted (Philips NOS types)
- All electrolytic capacitors in signal chain replaced by foil capacitors
- All old JRC OpAmps replaced by Burr Brown (Phono Stage) and Analog Devices OpAmps resp.>
Handcrafted low capacitance custom cables, polyethylene insulated twinaxial conductors>
Audiotrak Prodigy 7.1 HiFi w/ AD712 OpAmps @ 24/96>
HDD
=Software=
Adobe Audition 3.0
ClickRepair
Trader´s Little Helper (FLAC)
+16Bit Version:
Weiss Saracon 01.61-27
Dither: POWr3

Date of rip: 2011-07-17
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