information:
St. Alban's Kids was a politically charged hardcore punk band from Adelaide, South Australia. They played a brand of chaotic punk that was quite unlike the majority of other outfits occupying that same niche.
Subsequently, they seemed to have been a major influence on later Australian acts like My Disco and Love Like… Electrocution among them. There seems to be very little information still out there about the band and their brief run.
This is also one of the only examples of a band on this archive actually existing on Spotify... who would've thought... I have also managed to stumble upon their entire, un-edited manifesto in pure text form, once again, from the deepest corners of the internet. Please enjoy...
St. Alban's Kids was Lachlan Vercoe, Nicholas Burchett, Sean Bailey and Thomas McFarlane.
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communique #1
Although eschewing any ‘essence’ in content, method or theory, st alban’s kids can be seen to be arranged around three basic ideas. First, there is a politics to all knowledge. Second, there are contested knowledges to all political practice. Third, the first two ideas can only be uncovered by challenging the taken for granted.
communique #2
St Alban’s Kids is situated outside the banal existence of playing for the sake of being heard or making noise for the sake of some synthetic dreams of stardom which are surely now way past their inevitable use-by date…
we exist because to not exist is to sit still and let someone else make the sounds, to sit still and let someone else do the talking for us…
we exist because – in the same way that writing on toilet walls is direct democracy – making this noise and screaming these words are living (as opposed to the inevitable process of simply being alive).
Taking our lives and our situation into our own hands we scream aloud in joint hymns of joy and pain, sadness and elation.
Songs in the key of a residual frustration.
So we scream, because to not to would be to accept defeat in the face an all too defeated populace, and we scream because we need to. We need to… to get past this coma of stasis which has washed over us - delivering existential boredom relieved only within the shackles of a late capitalist directed repertoire of organised experience – screaming in the face of adversity, and using punk rock as the route away from passivity, the last screaming stage coach out of the alienation of living in ghost towns.
And within a context that soon turns summer’s kids into winter’s adults, we wrestle with the writhing corpse of an outdated model of youth enragement, corrupted beyond the point of recognition by the man trying to ride the kids to the top (like trying to ride a mule to victory in the Melbourne Cup if you asked us, but on we go).
St Alban’s Kids kills the man – squishes the scorpion - and in the process spits in his poisoned face with the full fury of contempt he so deserves. For the kids by the kids, because anything less would simply be to play into the hands of an enemy all too ready to sing us to sleep with the deadening repetitive mantra of a thousand hearts broken, a thousand backs stabbed, and a thousand lives gone by the wayside.
But this is not to a failure to recognise the role played by these audio opiates. Because we acknowledge that these make up our wall, and we’re leaning against it with all earnest. Without them where would we be. There were no Christians without the pagans, no good without evil, no Debord without the emptiness, no St Alban’s Kids without the disappointment of a thousand nights of meaningless music… thus in a similar fashion there is no us without them.
Syntax error embraced.
And so we thank them, because without them our platform would not be in place and the stage would not be set for the journey of St Alban’s Kids to begin … they have helped us define our true selves. We wholeheartedly call forth a rejection of the spectacle by stepping forth and creating our own experience – transcending the rotting corpse – another small movement towards supersession. Another small movement away from false representations.
Stepping out of the boundaries of what we see before our eyes we move, and with that we have a movement. A movement which - far from being simple dialogue to set out yet more plans for further consumption – is based solely around the awkwardly revealing nakedness of primal experience….
And so St Alban’s Kids exists within the aesthetic of moving – no we’re not stuck with our feet concreted to the fucking ground – this is the mapping out of our own experiential geography as we go…crying with regret for all the past mistakes and suffering, yet simultaneously laughing with raptures of joy as we create our own situation, worthy of all of the pain and desire; via the sounds that we make; via the avenue of punk rock, bypassing at all costs the highways of mediocrity.
Bridging the gap, presented by the dichotomy of a life spent twisting and turning in agony at the recognition of an existence filled with eternally unanswered questions (ambiguous multiplicity) and the sheer passion and excitement of the miracle of life as we know it, this is St Alban’s Kids. Two-stepping to the sounds of the inevitable conflict between the raw experience of a reconstructed supersession and the sedated warmth of the spectacle we embark upon a passage of punk rock mayhem.
Romance and mayhem. Can’t stop this train.
live footage:
discography:
title: St. Alban's Kids - Demo
release date: 2001
format: CDr
tracklist:
1. Dialogue With A Consumer Product
2. Taking Pot-Shots At Dead Bodies
3. The Children Of Marx And Coca-Cola
4. Bridging Feldman And Foucalt
5. An Exercise In Self Affirmation
6. [Untitled]
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title: St. Alban's Kids - Tales Of Late Night Excursions Into Urban Wastelands [A Political Economy Of Noise]
release date: 2002
format: Mini CDr
tracklist:
1. Dance On Road, Dance On Street, Dance On Face [An Introduction]
2. I Am Hiphop
3. Last Drinkers At The Modernist Hotel
4. The Children Of Marx And Coca-Cola
5. Barthes For Breakfast
6. And With That.... Summer's Kids Turned Into Winter's Adults
7. Seducing An Outdated Model Of Youth Enragement [Necrophilia! Necrophilia!]
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title: Off Minor / St Alban's Kids - Split
release date: 2004
format: 7"
tracklist:
1. Disthentic Penetration
2. When We Were Just Days Away From Illiteracy
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resources:
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