Peter Gutteridge - Pure Cass (1986-86)

Peter Jefferies and Peter Gutteridge were neighbours for awhile in 1988 and got to know one another quite well. From time to time we'd hear demos he was recording with Snapper and on his own, and after the first Snapper EP came out we persuaded him to let us put out some demos. Several tracks on this were basically the first version of that band when they were still really worth the hype. There were some other demos done around the same time which have never seen official release but were better than anything they ever put out. I'd have liked to have had them on this tape, but you can't always get what you want.

Although Peter Gutteridge was a founding member of The Clean with David and Hamish Kilgour in the late-70s, documentation of his collaborations with the Kilgours is limited to one Clean classic (the Gutteridge-penned "Point That Thing Somewhere Else") and one-half of The Great Unwashed's post-Clean Singles EP. Gutteridge was apparently not suited to The Clean's mission. Where the Kilgours seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, Gutteridge expressed darker and much less upbeat sentiments. Gutteridge seemed to leave The Clean and The Great Unwashed as quickly as he joined, and his early- to mid-80s outfits, The Cartilidge Family (with Shayne Carter and an ever changing line-up of local Dunedin luminaries) and The Phromes, went from start to finish with no released documentation. It was not until Snapper's first EP for Flying Nun in 1988 that Gutteridge returned to recorded mediums and began to fulfill his promise; shortly thereafter this collection of 1986-87 demos, collaborations, and oddities surfaced and explained some of those lost years. With their analog synthesizer, trance-like rhythms, and krautrock sensibilities, Peter Gutteridge and his bandSnapper prefigured Britain's Stereolab by about 3 years.

But while Snapper never cultivated that sound with the precision of Stereolab or produced consistent releases bust one EP, two LPs, and a handful of 7"s in 9 years Gutteridge and Snapper have created some beautifully hypnotic records. On Pure, Gutteridge's version of Snapper's sound. Archaic rhythm boxes and sustaining prog-rock guitar add a kind of low rent variation, with much of the equipment sounding dated (some sounds are reminiscent of late-70s video games like Frogger). Two tracks here would later be recreated for Snapper's first EP-"Cause of You" (appearing here as an instrumental) and "Hang On"-while "Thumbiline" prefigures the sound of "Snapper and the Ocean" and "Dead Pictures" from Snapper's first [Pre-Shotgun Blossom. All of the original Snapper line-up perform here in some capacity along with The Puddle's George Henderson and sometime-Dead C. compatriate Richard Steele. "Planet Phrom" particularly, with Christine Voice and former-Verlaines drummer Alan Haig, offers an early taste of Snapper.

-Bruce Russell