Scars on Sunday

Mark Perry has overseen the reissue of 1979's Scars On Sunday, which was originally released as a limited run cassette and is now highly collectible. Comprising material from around the same period as the excellent Vibing Up the Senile Man album period (!979), the ideas behind the music were very much informed by Mark's experience of touring with Here & Now. Perhaps serving as a statement on punk, or the many hordes by this time now completely straitjacketed by it, it could be contended it was conceptually far more "punk" anyway. Beyond this, the music here illustrates precisely how Mark led Alternative TV into wide open terrain sometimes far removed from rock music in it's more generally accepted forms. As both proof of where music could be taken once unshackled from all notions of predictability and, indeed, just how far it could go into those realms usually reserved for the avant-garde, this was about as non-conformist as music could get at the time. Originally recorded live at the Greenwich Theatre and The Lyceum these sets aimed for the jugular as they confounded, enticed, and ultimately gave the audiences far more than they'd anticipated. Between the music of this period, the earlier more direct attacks and the subsequent sidesteps into clever songwriting or more electronically-driven pieces, Alternative TV have always embraced the idea of going to wherever they intuitively feel like in the given moment. Since this early period, the group has gone through lengthy periods of hibernation and surges of activity that together might not have served them so well in a careerist sense, but at least maintained their roles as artists possessed of integrity. A rare virtue in music.