DESCRIPTION:
Diatribe; two brothers from Reading... I have not seen any live performance references so presumably they did not gig much, I have never seen anything in print about them apart from a rave review in Zig Zag magazine which prompted me to buy this record..

One incident did happen to add to the non-legend that is Diatribe.

One of the members brought a gun into the NME offices and fired a shot, luckily the gun only shot blanks, but no one saw the funny side. Criminal Damage Records were left fielding calls from an angry NME editor and the police for a couple of days. In the end the record label blamed enthusiastic fans but the E.P had already been given the media kiss of death

Two great tracks in ‘Seventeen And Dying’ and ‘Stop Dancing’, the more traditional sounding material, a little like a Southern New Model Army. The other two tracks are voiced over a drum beat and minimal instrumentation.

Criminal Damage history below courtesy of greeninconline.com

Hardcore or ‘real’ Punk was the big seller in 1983, the younger kids determined to create a harder, faster ‘77. I never liked any of it but when Illuminated (forever with an eye on the next money spinner) offered the chance to set up a hardcore label I didn’t think twice.

The Stills Yaron Levy joined me as fulltime partner and we named it Criminal Damage, a suitably hardcore name even though we had absolutely no intention of releasing anything like it.

From the start I was determined to leave the whole Reading thing behind and as luck would have it, the first couple of groups to interest us were the Stunt Kites from Sheffield and Twisted Nerve from Edinburgh. We still didn’t have a clue what we were doing and had no idea how tough it would be to establish the label as a viable entity but that was probably just as well.

The Membranes were our first long term signing and certainly helped our cause in the murky world of fanzines and DIY dogma if nowhere else. Their leader John Robb was, indeed still is, incredibly charismatic and would speed talk for hours in his Blackpool twang before sitting back and cackling like a loony, a kind of Northern Indie John Lydon.

During those early days I was still holding down a full time council job. When I wasn’t running the label from the work phone or making full use of the giant photocopier I was in the pub scheming and dreaming. So it didn’t come as a huge shock when I was finally asked to resign in the autumn of 1983. I was more than happy. For the first time I would be able to devote all my energies to what I loved doing. I didn’t need to worry about the lack of a regular wage either. Signing on proved remarkably lucrative and with the black market economy in full swing there was never a shortage of cash in hand jobs. And with the label also starting to earn a few quid it felt like I’d never had it so good. I could even afford a phone at home.

Together with a handful of smaller labels, Illuminated were based in 452 Fulham Road, a ramshackle collection of old warehouses. It was a rabbit warren of offices and storage rooms packed with records. Eventually we were given our own small office on the first floor and for the next year practically lived there; meeting groups, taking in gigs by potential signings and hovering up anything we could get our hands on.

I guess we were lucky because musically the early mid 80’s was the best of times to be running an Indie label. As we were hitting our stride, styles that had once been subsumed within the larger post punk rhetoric emerged from the genius of the early years to be named and identified as such, not least goth which had remained deep underground until the NME proclaimed the arrival of ‘positive punk’ in February 1983. Goth in all but name, while it was a manipulative attempt to connect the new rising groups resonating the most with the nations disenchanted youth, it did spark a massive surge of interest the likes of Southern Death Cult rode for all they were worth. In fact, goth became such a dominant force that almost every label had a likeminded group on its roster and we were no different.

By the summer of 1984 we had gained the reputation of being almost exclusively goth with records by Look Back In Anger, Ausgang, Anorexic Dread and Geschlecht Akt. We didn’t care, it was all rock’n’roll to us. Renowned genre historian Mick Mercer gave us the nod on some signings and eventually worked part time for the label scribbling nonsensical press releases to bemuse his fellow scribes. Through Mich Ebeling we befriended Billy Duffy who bizarrely offered his services as a producer in exchange for tins of baked beans!

Ironically, despite our supposed reputation, the most successful of our largely black hearted roster were The Membranes who were about as far from goth as it was possible to get. ‘Spike Milligan’s Tape Recorder’ and 'Death To Trad Rock', are still the best records they ever made and had a massive influence on the Independent network.