Fudge Tunnel

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:: biography brought to you by www.loudisnotenough.co.uk ::



Fudge Tunnel were formed in Nottingham, UK, in 1988. The original line up consisted of by Alex Newport (guitar/vocals), Mark (bass) and Adrian Parkin (drums). They used to rehearse above a Working Men's Club, where their unique din must have earned them a few strange looks. Later on, Mark decided to move to guitar, and so they recruited David Ryley to take up the bass. Thus, for a while anyway, Fudge Tunnel were a twin guitar four piece. Mark left soon afterwards, leaving the trio that is now so very familiar to us.



The scene in Nottingham was largely dominated by the independent label Earache, who had built a reputation around bands like Napalm Death. The emergence of Fudge Tunnel with their dry humour and ambiguous musical approach was something new to the musical landscape of Nottingham and the UK as a whole.



Their first release, the acerbic Sex Mammoth EP, came out on Pigboy Records in 1990. Receiving praise from both the indie and metal press, summed up the problems the band were to face in the years to come: how did the music press catagorise them? The UK music press has never been able to handle ambiguity, so Fudge Tunnel had to be either metal or indie, they couldn't be both.



A tour with rising industrial band Godflesh, and a second EP The Sweet Sound of Excess, produced by Iain Burgess (him of Big Black fame), helped to land the band a deal with Earache Records, who had been starting to branch out with bands like Pitchshifter joining their roster.



The debut Earache release was the monstrous and ironic Hate Songs in E Minor. But the release was blighted by the now classic story of how Nottingham's Vice Squad confiscated the original cover artwork of a cartoon decapitation. This of course gave the record instant media coverage (no such thing as bad press, after all), but the truth of the story has little to do with Fudge Tunnel, as Alex Newport commented in an interview with Earpollution in 1999:



"The whole artwork problem was John Zorn's fault, in a way. What happened was that he had a particularly nasty photo he was using for his Painkiller CD, and instead of posting it like everyone else, he decided to fly to England with it. And you know what British customs people are like? They found the picture on him, confiscated it, and alerted the Nottingham Vice Squad, who then proceeded to 'raid' the Earache offices, looking for anything 'offensive.' Guess whose debut LP artwork was sitting on the desk? They took all our artwork, which was really quite silly and not very offensive. Our LP was due out in three weeks from then, so we hastily threw on some live photos instead. A few months later, all the charges were dropped, we got our artwork back, but it was too late to release it. We ended up using it for T-shirts instead."



Hate Songs marked a new era for Fudge Tunnel. The uncompromisingly brutal sound that burst from the 12" of vinyl took their early attitude and energy and magnified it with a stronger, more dynamic production. It also confirmed what most metalheads probably thought they already knew: that they were a metal band after all.



More tours followed, including one notably tour of Europe with Brazilian thrash band, Sepultura. Max Cavallera, then vocalist and guitarist with the Seps, went mad for Fudge Tunnel after hearing the Hate Songs album. They were invited on tour, and it became, what Alex Newport later called "their worst mistake" because it meant that Fudge Tunnel would now be forever viewed as a band from the metal scene.



They went back into the studio in 1993 and recorded the much more commercial sounding Creep Diets. Comparisons were instantly drawn with the rising Seattle scene, and Fudge Tunnel's ambiguous musical approach at last had a tag: grunge. The band found it quite amusing, but were pissed off when people actually started to think they were from Seattle themselves. Their disillusionment with the music press deepened.



There was no doubting that Creep Diets was a much cleaner, more polished recording than Hate Songs, or even Teeth, the four track EP released in 1992. With Alex Newport taking the production role himself, there was a very clear shift in emphasis for the band.



Creep Diets was a much more varied record: from the noise-blast solo of Grey, to the Cure sounding Don't Have Time for You, and the album closer, Always, which sounds like a homage to Discharge. This period was probably their peak, having gathered a reputation for reluctantly going on tour (they had only recently given up their day jobs!), brilliant live shows, and, if you were daft enough to heckle them.well, then you paid the price.



And so to Nailbomb.



Nailbomb started as two guys messing around, playing Discharge and Dead Kennedys songs, then someone suggested they do an album. And one thing led to another, really. As far as those involved were concerned, it was taken way too seriously.



They did one album, the intense Point Blank, produced by Alex and Max. It was a curious fusion of punk, industrial, thrash and the rhythmic muscle of Fudge Tunnel or Helmet on tracks like Cockroaches. It was also much more blatantly political than either of the two main musicians had been in their own bands up until that point. From then on, you can hear how both Sepultura and Fudge Tunnel changed their lyrical approach, making more direct social and political comments.



They played two gigs, one warm up, and their much hyped performance at the Dynamo Festival in Holland, 1995. After that, they called it a day and split up. It was inevitable then, that the Nailbomb experience, both musically and 'politically' (i.e. in terms of how the band was perceived by the media machine) would have a major impact on how Fudge Tunnel approached their next album. By this time, they and a few other Earache bands, had been licensed to Columbia Records for US release (I think the other bands were Carcass and Pitchshifter), and Columbia were expecting a lot from the new album.



The Complicated Futility of Ignorance, released in 1994, is the album where Fudge Tunnel lost their sense of humour.



I remember it being held back and held back for weeks, and as a 17 year old trekking into my local record store everyday to bug the guys there with the same question: "Is it out yet?"



I don't know the exact reasons for it delay, but I do know that in the US, Columbia were not impressed and refused to release it for quite some time.



.Ignorance was a big "fuck you" of an album. As brutal and hard edged as anything they had done before, there was very little of the ironic, wry humour they were known for, and instead, an all pervasive sense of anger and irritation. Even the UK tour that followed it's release sent out the message that they were not having fun any more: it was three days long.



I read an interview with David Ryley and Alex Newport in UK mag Kerrang! shortly before Creep Diets was released, and in it they said that they really only envisaged themselves doing about three albums, because bands shouldn't go on and on. In retrospect, you can see that for once, a band actually stuck to something it said, and they did split after only three studio albums.



But why? Because Fudge Tunnel wasn't about rock stardom and going on for ever. They ended when they were at their best. It would have been really sad to have seen them go down the path of so many other bands, who after a few fresh records, start repeating themselves and getting boring. Sure, fans keep buying it, because most people are thick and don't care about artistic integrity or keeping things original. They just want the same riff, over and over. Fudge Tunnel didn't want to become part of that. And all credit to them.