About Me
The Deadweighs are probably Britain's most forgotten band. Formed in 1976 by Texan renegade Earl Weighs and British drifter Beef Suite, they went on to record a number of highly influential but largely forgotten albums. In Earl's own words: 'I was twenty years old when I left the great big zero that was my daddy's farm in Texas. I wanted the bright lights of the city. I wanted sex and drugs and excitement. Don't ask me how or why, but I ended up on a boat, and after that I ended up in Liverpool, UK. I met Beef that first night in a bar. He was drunk as a skunk and trying to hump some broad who must've been twice his age, real ugly too. Saved that dude, for sure. Ended up on the floor of his folks' house. Dude was only 18 years old, the freak.' To cut a long story short, the pair of them headed south to London. Bright lights, big city. Beef was digging the tunes he'd heard on the Nuggets compilation and together with Earl's Texas 'twang', the Deadweighs were born. In 1977 they self-released their first album, The Deadweighs... Will Have Your Eyes. They sold around two hundred copies, all at their gigs. If you have one of these then it's probably still only worth the two quid you paid for it. Another two albums followed in quick succession. Unbelievably, and despite the musical revolution that was taking place in the form of punk, the band were considered deeply uncool, something to do with Earl's long Texan locks and Beef's thinning strands. Their music was brutal, though. Almost too tough for the hangers-on and liggers of the London punk scene. In 1979 the Deadweighs upped sticks and caught the boat to Bergen in Norway where they remained for a number of years. In 1987 they split up, Earl going on to form ZZ Top influenced Pump Action, an unwise foray into boogie that was thankfully ignored. It was at the Bergen festival in 2005 that they finally reunited. Strangely, both were drawn to the city by a strange sense of longing for former times. And yeah, imagine their surprise when they bumped into each other at the same smalltime garage gig, older and fatter and none the wiser. Which brings us to these recordings, The Bergen Demo Tapes. Quite possibly the last remaining evidence of the Deadweighs' former glories, these were recorded shortly after their arrival in Norway in 1979, onto a four-track console, straight to a C90 cassette. According to Beef they knocked out eight songs in two days. According also to Beef, this tape sat in a box in his attic for over twenty years. So thank God for that chance reunion, and thank God that a newly reunited Beef and Earl are, as we speak, in the process of cleaning up those ugly old tapes under the patronage of House of Bone Records. Who knows, maybe another album isn't out of the question. The last word goes to Beef: 'You know, Earl could never really play the guitar and I certainly couldn't sing, so in many ways, it's not surprising we failed quite so spectacularly. We were into fuzz when everyone else was into something else. And then the eighties happened, God help us. So we failed, but at least we failed in style.'
