This blog isn’t generally used for shameless self-promotion but I (Neil C) am now going to abuse management privileges by using the Wieden + Kennedy blog to announce that you can solve your last minute Christmas present problems by purchasing a copy of the excellent CD release by He’s Dead Jim: Colour Climax/Monochrome World (Aberdeen D.I.Y. Punk 1981-83). I can commend this to you in glowing terms because it’s a collection of recordings of the appalling racket made by my old band. The tapes are finally being released, 25 years after we made them in a freezing Aberdonian garage. Yes, I am another sad, middle-aged advertising bloke still harbouring ridiculous fantasies of rock and roll stardom.

We’ve been signed up retrospectively by the excellent and possibly misguided Messthetics label in the US and you can buy the album from their website here. 

Here’s what they say about it:

Messthetics proudly presents the should-have-been greatest hits
  of He’s Dead Jim
  – from the first half of their four-year Aberdonian "rammy" of trash
  culture and lo-fi melodic punk. HDJ were one of D.I.Y.’s most obscure (and least
  likely) prodigies. Despite the evidence of their (charmingly aberrant) songs
  on Messthetics #105, He’s Dead Jim were a complete pop band, and they were also
  prodigious songwriters, from their first lo-fi garage recordings to their very
  last …lo-fi garage recordings. They released
  eight full-length cassettes locally – each of them elaborately decorated and
  bursting with hummable tunes – but they never darkened the door of a proper
  studio. (If they had, they’d be all over Bored
  Teenagers or This
  is Mod, but they weren’t mods at all, so maybe that’s just as well.)
  The name derives from the immortal (and oft-repeated) words of Star Trek’s Dr.
  McCoy (although Scottie was the one who came from Aberdeen), and HDJ pay regular
  homage to all the usual school-band pop-culture icons from Fireball
  XL5 to The
  Prisoner. Pure [trash] punk, a lot of Mark E. Smith and maybe some
  Billy Childish, as well.

So, what next – a triumphant reformation world tour? Induction into the rock and roll hall of fame? If the Police and the Sex Pistols can do it, why not He’s dead Jim? Other than the facts that we were never popular or talented in the first place. The early 80s Aberdonian lo-fi post-punk bad noise revival starts here.

The mighty HDJ live in action in their long-forgotten ‘heyday’. L-R: Neil Smith, Allan Bell, Neil Christie.