Another press release

(published in International Times)

XEROX MUSIC

The Instant Automatons – Radio Silence, The Art Of Human Error

"The Instant Automatons are South Humberside’s best kept secret and no wonder – we here at Deleted Records think the Automatons stink but they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse…

Every month they come down to our studios for a Sunday afternoon session, lay down their noise, pay the fees and leave. I don’t know why they do it – it’s so obviously amateur and it’s not even vaguely commercial anyway. Protag told me it’s ‘sort of Nouveau Pop with a smattering of Psychedelic Skiffle…’ Well!

Most of the songs have only got three chords anyway and two or three have only two chords – Marimba Ride for example. It was only a dead rough demo anyway, from the bassist to the guitarist showing him a song he’d written (they only put it on coz it fitted the gap at the end of side one).

We told ‘em it’d sound awful, we said it was all a waste of time and explained how the tape-hiss would submerge the songs and how no one would take seriously a debut album which was not only a double album but also limited to cassette (and not even pressed in coloured tape). We even warned them how much they would lose, but they didn’t seem to care.

They (the band) asked me to mention a couple of things. Firstly, they want to thank everyone who encouraged and supplied constructive criticism to them. Also they said they were sorry, but not especially, if you don’t like the songs. This point has a special significance to me because I hate them all. Some of them really go on and on – I remember they once said they were going to do a song called Long Slow Dance and the engineer asked how long it was going to last. ‘As long as it takes’ said the guitarist. This kind of helpful attitude is symptomatic of the band – once they did an even longer song at the end of which they had to wake us up (it’s on the tape too, you’ll doubtless find it for yourselves)."

It is never expected or even desired to make money from this type of art. We advertised for people to send us cassettes which we’d copy the album onto and return; unfortunately, NME classified department found our ads unacceptable (didn’t say why) and so only about 20 copies have so far escaped (the 20 cassettes we supplied ourselves to friends and a few bands etc.)