Vinyl Destination

Good old Slampt, possibly one the UK labels closest to the ideals and dynamics of those legendarily inclusive US independents like K, Kill Rock Stars, Dischord and so on. I was led into their world through my tangential involvement in Riot Grrl; moving quickly from receiving a mixtape from a friend containing a Huggy Bear track, to buying Huggy Bear’s first 7″, to having my mind blown by the sheer weight of positivity and creativity that existed at a grass roots level within a ‘movement’ that was very quickly derided and sneered at by fools and people that couldn’t grasp the concept of not being involved purely for fame and/or fortune. Phew.

I wrote a lot of letters to and from Slampt’s Rachel and Pete, and still have a lot of the records, tapes and fanzines that they released over the years. The fanzines always looked great, and the crowning glory of Slampt was Fast Connection, a short-lived but grandly-envisaged dossier of reviews, opinions and comment covering a scene that had grown up around their label and many others. The magazine laid the way for longer-standing publications like Plan B and Loose Lips Sink Ships, and so a lot of people owe it a lot, whether they realise it or not!

Avocado Baby was the Slampt in-house band, playing ramshackle-as-you-like indie-pop with an arched eyebrow and a subtly-hinted threat of violence. Great packaging on this record – photocopied hand-stamped sleeve with (on the back) a page torn from a recipe book pasted on. In small writing on the front it states ‘Avocado tape too!’, and indeed I still have that tape – A Million And Nine – and remember it fondly for its sheer lo-lo-lo-lo-fi quality. My copy was marred by a quarter being plagued with a strange tweeting noise over some tracks: such are the hazards of magnetic tape, I guess.