Severed Heads was an
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
n
electronic musicElectronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
group based and founded in
SydneySydney is the largest city in Australia, and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney has a metropolitan area population of approximately 4.34 million and an area of approximately 12,000 square kilometres. Its inhabitants are called Sydneysiders, and Sydney is often called "the Harbour City"...
in 1979 (see
1979 in musicSee also:Musical groups established in 1979Record labels established in 1979* 1979 in music -Events:*Stevie Wonder uses digital audio recording technology in recording his album Journey through the Secret Life of Plants....
) as
Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign. The original members were Richard Fielding and
Andrew Wright- Life and Work :Andrew Wright is a Canadian multimedia artist from Ottawa, Ontario. He is best known for his work with video and large-scale photography. He holds a specialist degree in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Windsor...
, and were soon joined by
Tom EllardThomas Ellard , is an Australian electronic musician most well known as the founding member of the electronic and industrial music group Severed Heads...
. Fielding and Wright eventually left the group, leaving Ellard as a singular talent, the sole continuing member of the group.
A variety of people played in Severed Heads, including
Garry BradburyGarry Bradbury is an Australian musician. Bradbury has been active in Sydney's experimental music scene since 1979, specialising in manipulation of reel to reel and tape decks, as well as customising pianola rolls. From 1981 to 1985 he was a member of Severed Heads. In 1988 he released his first...
, Paul Deering, and
Stephen JonesStephen Jones is an Australian electronic musician and video artist. Born in Sydney, Australia, Jones, together with Tom Ellard, was a principal member of Severed Heads from 1983 to 1992...
, but over time the group devolved to
Tom EllardThomas Ellard , is an Australian electronic musician most well known as the founding member of the electronic and industrial music group Severed Heads...
.
Severed Heads was an
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
n
electronic musicElectronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
group based and founded in
SydneySydney is the largest city in Australia, and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney has a metropolitan area population of approximately 4.34 million and an area of approximately 12,000 square kilometres. Its inhabitants are called Sydneysiders, and Sydney is often called "the Harbour City"...
in 1979 (see
1979 in musicSee also:Musical groups established in 1979Record labels established in 1979* 1979 in music -Events:*Stevie Wonder uses digital audio recording technology in recording his album Journey through the Secret Life of Plants....
) as
Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign. The original members were Richard Fielding and
Andrew Wright- Life and Work :Andrew Wright is a Canadian multimedia artist from Ottawa, Ontario. He is best known for his work with video and large-scale photography. He holds a specialist degree in Art and Art History from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Windsor...
, and were soon joined by
Tom EllardThomas Ellard , is an Australian electronic musician most well known as the founding member of the electronic and industrial music group Severed Heads...
. Fielding and Wright eventually left the group, leaving Ellard as a singular talent, the sole continuing member of the group.
A variety of people played in Severed Heads, including
Garry BradburyGarry Bradbury is an Australian musician. Bradbury has been active in Sydney's experimental music scene since 1979, specialising in manipulation of reel to reel and tape decks, as well as customising pianola rolls. From 1981 to 1985 he was a member of Severed Heads. In 1988 he released his first...
, Paul Deering, and
Stephen JonesStephen Jones is an Australian electronic musician and video artist. Born in Sydney, Australia, Jones, together with Tom Ellard, was a principal member of Severed Heads from 1983 to 1992...
, but over time the group devolved to
Tom EllardThomas Ellard , is an Australian electronic musician most well known as the founding member of the electronic and industrial music group Severed Heads...
. In early 2008 he announced that Severed Heads was now defunct and that no further creative output would be released under this name.
History
The band's name change to Severed Heads, from the afore mentioned Mr. & Mrs. No Smoking Sign, was meant, in part, as a joke. Tom Ellard: “...We were called Mr. & Mrs. No Smoking Sign, because that was really ugly. Then, we wanted to fool people that we were Industrial and it worked. Severed Heads was a really dumb name, so that’s what stuck. Forever. I hate it by the way.”
Early Severed Heads music was characterised by the use of
tape loopTape loops are loops of prerecorded magnetic tape used to create repetitive, rhythmic musical patterns or dense layers of sound. Contemporary composers such as Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen used tape loops to create phase patterns and rhythms...
s, noisy arrangements of synthesizers and other dissonant sound sources, putting Severed Heads in the general category of
industrial musicIndustrial music is an experimental music style, often including electronic music, that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s to describe Industrial Records artists...
. After several releases in that vein, Severed Heads began incorporating various popular music tropes, such as a consistent 4/4 rhythm, strong melodic lines, resolving chord arrangements and Ellard's thin but gently eerie vocals and elliptical, poetic lyrics. This move was underscored by the incorporation of mimetic devices, such as
drum machineA drum machine is an electronic musical instrument designed to imitate the sound of drums and/or other percussion instruments. Drum machines are very useful instruments for a wide variety of musical genres, not just purely electronic music...
s and bass synthesizers. The result was a striking hybrid of the
avant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
industrial and pop.
Severed Heads were signed to
NettwerkThe Nettwerk Music Group is the umbrella company for Nettwerk Management, Nettwerk Records, as well as Nettwerk One Publishing, Nutone Records, and Artwerk. With over 150 employees, the Vancouver based company has offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Boston, Nashville and Hamburg...
records in North America, and
Volition RecordsVolition Records was an Sydney, Australia based record label specialising in electronic music styles such as house, techno, synthpop and trance. It was founded by Andrew Penhallow in the late 1980s, but folded in the late 1990s....
in Australia, and charted in 1984 with the song "Dead Eyes Opened". This deal led to a world tour, which was as much a multimedia event, thanks to the
video synthesizerA Video Synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal.A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators, as seen in the stillframes of motion sequences shown above. It can also accept...
s of Stephen Jones. They also charted in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in the late 1980s with a
12-inch singleThe 12-inch single gramophone record came into existence with the advent of disco music in the 1970s. The first 12" single was actually a 10" acetate used by a mix engineer in need of a Friday night test copy for famed disco mixer Tom Moulton. As no 7" acetates could be found, a 10" blank was...
of "Greater Reward" (from the album
Rotund For Success) assisted by several remixes by
SydneySydney is the largest city in Australia, and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney has a metropolitan area population of approximately 4.34 million and an area of approximately 12,000 square kilometres. Its inhabitants are called Sydneysiders, and Sydney is often called "the Harbour City"...
-based producer
Robert RacicRobert Racic was an Australian DJ and record producer. Born in Melbourne and highly influential within electronic and house music circles he was largely unknown outside Australia...
. Racic, who produced album tracks and various singles on and off through the late 1980s and early 1990s and became integral to the Severed Heads sound of that period.
Nettwerk severed its relations with Ellard in the early 1990s, leaving the band adrift in the marketplace. Ellard sought out another label for his next release,
Gigapus, in 1995, which was released on Volition in Australia and Decibel Records elsewhere. Around this time, the band had a major Australian hit with a remixed version of "Dead Eyes Opened". Both Volition and Decibel soon folded, and once again, Severed Heads were unaligned with the traditional music industry, and didn't fully own the rights to their music. This changed in 1998, when Sony Music sold Ellard the rights back for a nominal fee.
With his music back in his hands and fully independent, Ellard took this on as a challenge and began developing an independent music system, which is entirely Internet based, at sevcom.com (the link is below). During the early 2000s, Tom Ellard blazed an independent path for his art and developed several innovative products, such as the Sevcom Music Server, a subscription based
ambient musicAmbient music is a musical genre that focuses largely on the timbral characteristics of sounds, often organized or performed to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual" or "unobtrusive" quality.- History :...
distribution system.
Ellard has worked on a side project, Coklacoma, which released a few CDs in the late 1990s. By 2004, he was heavily involved with developing video but increasingly felt that the Severed Heads label was a thing of the past, and in 2008 opted to jettison the name. Ellard also worked extensively during the 1990s with other Sydney based electronic musicians and groups such as
Paul MacPaul Mac is a musician, producer and re-mixer from Sydney, Australia. Mac formed the bands Smash Mac Mac, Itch-e And Scratch-e, Boo Boo And Mace, The Lab and The Dissociatives as well as releasing records under his own name...
(of
Itch-E and Scratch-EItch-E and Scratch-E is an Australian electronic music group formed by Paul Mac and Andy Rantzen in Sydney in the early 1990s initially recording on the Volition label...
) and
BoxcarBoxcar is an Australian Sydney-based synth pop and techno band. Formed in the mid-1980s in Brisbane by main songwriter guitarist and vocalist David Smith, he was soon joined by keyboardists Brett Mitchell and Carol Rohde and somewhat later by drummer-percussionist Crispin Trist. They initially...
, former alumni of the now-defunct Volition label, as well as
The LabThe Lab were an Australian Sydney-based electronic music band consisting of keyboardist Paul Mac, vocalist Yolanda Podolski and vocalist and bassist Warwick Factor. They formed in the early 1990s and initially recorded on the rooArt label...
.
Selected discography
- Ear Bitten (1980)
- Clean (1981)
- Blubberknife
Blubberknife is a 1983 studio album by Australian experimental rock group Severed Heads. It was originally released on cassette.-Side B:#An American in Paris#Tarzan's Grip#Umbrella#Lower Than the Grave#J. Edgar Hoover / C.M.I.D.#Ad Infinitum...
(1983)
- Since the Accident
Since the Accident is a 1983 studio album by Australian experimental rock group Severed Heads.-Side A:#A Relic of the Empire#A Million Angels#Houses Still Standing#Gashing the Old Mae West#Dead Eyes Opened#Golden Boy-Side B:#Godsong#Epilepsy 82...
(1983)
- "Dead Eyes Opened" (1984)
- City Slab Horror (1985)
- Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live In The Past (1985)
- Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)
- Bad Mood Guy (1987)
- "Greater Reward" (1988)
- Bulkhead (1988)
- Rotund For Success (1989)
- Retread (1991)
- Cuisine (1991)
- Gigapus (1994)
- "Dead Eyes Opened 94" (1994) (remix)
- Severything V. 1 (1996) (CD-ROM)
- Haul Ass (1998)
- Op1.0 (2002)
- Op2.0 (2004)
- The Illustrated Family Doctor (2005) (Soundtrack)
- Op2.5 - Millennium Cheesecake (2005)
- Under Gail Succubus (2006)
- Viva! Heads! (2006)
External links