The New Cue #318 September 15: Mudhoney, ROY, NewDad, Sons Of Kemet, Gretel Hänlyn, Alabaster DePlume, Yussef Dayes

"We might have blown our wad on our first single!"

Hello and welcome to your regular Friday edition of The New Cue, except this is not your regular Friday edition of The New Cue. It is Friday. It is an edition of The New Cue, but it is not regular. That’s because we’re a man down - Ted Kessler aka Teddy K aka TK Max aka Ked Tessler aka Oh Teddy Teddy, Teddy Teddy Teddy Kessler is not with us for the next few weeks as he dives into another project. But don’t cry! In his stead, he’s arranged a stellar line-up of super subs doing a guest Recommender, beginning this week with the brilliant Liverpool writer and spoken word artist ROY. And Chris and Niall are still here too so it’s all going to be OK, promise.

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Enjoy the edition,

Ted even though he’s not here, Niall, Chris, and ROY.

The Story Behind The Song

How we birthed a classic

Touch Me I’m Sick by Mudhoney, 1988

Picture: Charles Peterson

On 6 October, grunge pioneers Mudhoney release vinyl reissues of their game-changing Superfuzz Bigmuff EP and a seven-inch edition of their rattling debut single Touch Me I’m Sick. Both are available to pre-order on Sub Pop’s new UK/EU Mega Mart, which is now open for business here.

Touch Me I’m Sick was written in the early days of the band, soon after Arm and guitarist Steve Turner’s previous group Green River had disbanded, but it came to define both Mudhoney and the scene that came to be known as grunge. A few years later, it was later re-purposed as a song in the Seattle-set 1992 Cameron Crowe film Singles, performed by the fictional Matt Dillon-fronted band Citizen Dick. Earlier this week, frontman Mark Arm told Niall about the creation of their classic.

“We were just starting out. We had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do from the beginning. Coming out of Green River, I wanted to do simpler, more punk rock kind of stuff. Steve and I, in particular, were very into some of the contemporary Australian bands that were happening at the time, as well as a lot of the underground US bands, scummy scuzzy shit as well as 60s garage rock, and some blues-influenced stuff and punk rock through the ages.

It was a creative time in Seattle, but there’s always been a lot of bands here, at least since I started going to shows. A lot of cool, weird people trying different things. In the early 80s, we had an oi! band, we had lots of post-punk-type bands, we had hardcore bands and ‘77/Alice Cooper-style bands, a variety. A lot of that had to do with how old the people in the bands were! The younger kids were playing hardcore and the older folks were playing more traditional punk with kind of proto-punk stuff mixed in.

With Touch Me I’m Sick, Steve had a riff that was inspired by a local band called The Nights And Days. They were a local garage punk band that had a fast choppy riffing sort of thing. That riff was out of The Yardbirds happening 10 years’ time ago and also The Stooges’ I’m Sick Of You, the fast part. I had a line, “touch me I’m sick”, which I thought was funny and I just filled in the verses around it. We might have blown our wad on our first single!

We recorded it in Reciprocal Recording and it was on an eight- track machine. Something about the way that everything went to tape made it extra gnarly. The next recording we did in Reciprocal, they’d upgraded to a 16-track machine, so that’s Superfuzz and it didn’t sound quite as gnarly. It’s one of the reasons why later on when we went to do Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, we went to Egg Studios because it was an eight-track, we thought maybe we could capture that saturated tape sound.

The reaction to Touch Me I’m Sick was in fanzine world at the time, or people locally getting it and going like, ‘Hey, this is cool.’ I remember, Gerard Cosloy and his fanzine Conflict said that the lyrics to [B-side] Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More were something like Bret Michaels from Poison could have written… I don’t think he could have!

The song being redone for Singles was a funny weird thing. I’m not even sure who recorded that. I guess I should ask [Pearl Jam bassist and Singles cast member] Jeff Ament sometime. I’m sure he was involved. I wonder if Matt Dillon actually sang on that.

Things had changed by that point. In terms of the number of people going to shows, underground shows and stuff, it had changed dramatically by’ 89 but that was well before any of the bands broke huge. All of a sudden it was like, ‘where’d these people come from?’ I know that several people who were involved through the 80s were like, ‘it doesn’t seem the same anymore’, it wasn’t this close knit group of people. But from a band’s perspective, it’s like, ‘well, there’s more people coming to shows, that’s great’.

I think the closest we ever came to being ‘let’s try to do a Touch Me I’m Sick again’ was when we did Flat Out Fucked in ’89 and it didn’t quite work. At that point, we were like, ‘ah, that’s what it is and we’ll just do whatever we want to’. The idea of there being a formula you could just plug into and satisfy yourself, I don’t think that would work for us.”

ND