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à;GRUMH... did lots of concerts and art performances from 1981 to 1991. Here are the highlights of the band's live activity.
Starting from 1981, many performances were recorded, such as the "By the Phone" session that later became the first tape of the Titicaca collection. à;GRUMH... (S3 and P3 at that time) also recorded many tracks of both industrial and rhythmic electronic music on tapes, some of which were simply never released. All we had was an old ARP synthesizer, a small casio, an old guitar, a couple of distorsion and flanger pedals, that's all... Extra instruments used were an old tuba, P3's horn (le clairon) and many gadgets and metal pieces for percussions.
Later in 1982 the concert at the Ravenstein Gallery, together with Hard-Capella (later to become J3) performed in the middle of the night in the empty Brussels'gallery to take advantage of its very special echoes. From 1981 to 1984 à ;GRUMH... performed quite often. One of the highlights was the Titicaca Connection Evening, a festival of industrial and alternative music where à;GRUMH... headlined in front of bands like Vortex, Arbeit Adelt!, etc. At that time, J3 entered à:GRUMH... as a full member of the band, creating the "mystical line up" (J3, P3 and S3).
The "Performance Inexplorable" was a very memorable event. It was given at Charleroi's Palais des Beaux-Arts under city funding. The venue had a floor all litten : the tiles made of fuzzy glass were litten from under with warm red color. On these tiles, we had drawn a large triangle with wide white tape. On every 3 edges of the triangle were 2 television sets delivering black and white pictures, one playing Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the other David Lynch's Eraserhead, so in total 6 tv sets. At several points of the triangle were Champagne buckets filled with dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) and various liquids. We used these for percussions and smoke-vocals. We stood in the middle of the triangle, playing horns, percussions and various instruments, wearing prison clothes and painted ourselves with paint sprays, but with a paint that was passing thru the fabric of the clothes so that we were painting our bodies without seeing the final result.
Also very famous, the concerts at the Plan K. The Plan K, an old sugar refinery transformed into a music and art performance venue, was the temple of modern music in the late 70's and the 80's in Brussels. It was the place to be. The place to see.
à;GRUMH... live at the Plan K
à;GRUMH... performed in the Plan K many times. At one concert in 1984, S3 had played the guitar for about 20 minutes when he came at the front of the stage and unzipped his pants and an entire bloody beef liver jumped out of his pants. People and press later reported the rumour that S3 had mutilated his genitals (but c'mon, a beef liver is much bigger that i'll ever have in my pants !... Still...).At another concert at the Plan K, J3 played with a real pig head, but it was so frozen that he almost broke his teeth trying to bite the groin of it. There was also the time where we nicknamed the boys from Nitzer Ebb "Petzouilles" and "Tchess à Claques". Ahhhhh these were the days...
Shortly before we had to enter the studio to record "Mix Yourself!", former member P3 Lacsap decided to leave the band for personal reasons. Longtime friend and T-Circle negadiacer P4 Lacsap joined as 3rd member. à;GRUMH... performed three times with P4 Lacsap on percussions, once in the "Etc" in Brussels, which was the only concert we gave using the "industrial" materiel from the second album, then once in the Plan K and finally once in the Synergon in Brussels. The concert at the Etc was very memorable since we used beef eyes and pork eyes, that we had got at the slaughter house, and used them in front of our own eyes on stage. Later these were thrown into the audience and many people collected the eyes. One fan told us that he kept the eye in a jar of formic acid, on his bed table, for years. At the Synergon, the audience could witness P4 Lacsap's last stage performance, all covered with coconut oil (a suggestion from long time Queen fan, the evil mothered Christrad Pierrine) and screaming like a marsupial mole while attempting to make noise with an electrical welding machine (it does not make any noise). After this only gig, the evil spy Minus broadcasted false information about our gig and the evil "Grand Guru" S3, which forced P4 to leave the band and retire into a Convent in Patagonia for several years (until S3's offering of Clairol's Herbal Essence body moisturizer to Hindhu Gods and Godesses managed to appease the bad vibes created by the evil Minus's calomnia, turning them into positive clouds which helped P4 to later become the greatest sound engineer of the european movie industry and promoter of parisian japanese restaurants). The rumour stating that the coconut oil was the reason of the split is therefore totally untrue.
From 1985, à;GRUMH... started to perform with the material from "Mix Yourself" as well as earlier tracks such as "Exaction" but from the release of "No Way Out" in 1986, only the songs from Mix Yourself! and No Way Out were performed on stage, as well as famous covers. Many other concerts led à;GRUMH... around in Belgium and in France (among many, the infamous concert at "La Fête de la Moisson" in La Neuville-les-Doreng, where à;GRUMH... stole a metal stand later called "Le Pied Français" because it sounded real good when we hit it with a metal hammer. Late 1985, we also gave the "Dans le métro" concert in a Charleroi underground station, for a tv crew from the RTBF. It became one of the most famous concerts we ever gave, thanks to the unvolontury self-destruction of founder-member P3 Lacsap, who had re-joined the band for this special performance, and who fell into a huge "t-circle" design set made of fluorescent lamps, that broke and whose glass pieces had entered P3's arm. But P3 courageously continued hammering wildly on the car roofs and car gas tanks that we had on stage, and at every hit on the metal pieces, sprays of blood were expelled from his glass-incrusted arm. It was lovely.
In 1986, à;GRUMH... left Belgium for its first European Tour, along with Skinny Puppy. The tour went to Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, Yougoslavia and Belgium. S3 was also the Tour Manager. We were absolutely amazed to see how well the people knew our songs, the lyrics and how big our following was in all these countries where we had actually never been.
(more to come)
Live in Basel on 18/12/97 (Kill tour '97)
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