Releases
TARGET OF DEMAND / STAND TO FALL Split LP (1988)
X-Port Plate
Songs: MEIN - GET IT AWAY - BANG MY HEAD - MEIN SPIEL - RITES OF SPRING -
TRAUM
TARGET OF DEMAND Gruss LP (1989) We Bite
Records
Songs: LETZT - SCHRITT - SICHER - STURZ - SPIEL BEI - C - GRUSS - SCHILD -
BRUDER - BLINDLAUF - KIND - ANOTHER LITTLE STEP
TARGET OF DEMAND Your Choice Live Series LP
(1990) Your Choice Records
Songs: SEEL - SCHRITT - SCHILD - BANG MY HEAD - WEISER - C - BRUDER - TRAUM -
GRUSS - JAMMERHEBEL - SPALTKERN - KIND
TARGET OF DEMAND See You In Hell 7"
(1991) Sacro Egoismo
Songs: SICHER I - STATE OF ALERT - HEAVEN - THEN PLEASE
V/A IT’S YOUR CHOICE 10" (1991)
Your Choice Records
Song: WEISER
Compilation including unreleased live tracks from TARGET OF DEMAND, SO MUCH HATE,
LIFE BUT HOW TO LIVE IT?, KINA, SCREAM, RIPCORD, VERBAL ASSAULT, MELVINS, RAPED
TEENAGERS, NONOYESNO and PULLERMANN
History
As far as I remember the story went something like this:
Early/mid-80’s, set in a town called Linz, 200.000+ people, a-not-so-prospering-steel-industry and plenty of what’s always the best motor to make things happen: boredom!
Harald ’Huckey’ Renner and me were good friends, heavily into music, arguing about it on a regular basis - alone the quality-time spent on THE SMITHS... - hanging out together, either at the LANDGRAF (basically a coffee-house that was THE live-venue for the early Linz punk/new wave-scene), E-SCHMID, STADTWERKTSTATT or sometimes at the KAPU, then a classical youth-centre with shitty music and cheap beer. I started to read more and more into ’punk’, so I did a fanzine and desperately wanted to form a band. Huckey already drummed for a power-pop/new wave-ish band called JUGO & DIE GASTARBEITER and somehow my sometimes drunken pleas probably got to him. he introduced me to a guy called ’Mops’, real name Andreas Breitwieser, drummer with local-not-so-favorites THE RATS and already his unpretentious, (mostly) easy-going self. the three of us got together in the Breitwieser’s family garage and well, the rest as they say is (little-known) ’history’.
Me too clumsy to even handle a super-simple punk-guitar became the singer, Mops played the guitar and Huckey hit the drums. Sometimes there was a guy called Peter Fuchs on bass, who did a fanzine called POPZORN together with Huckey. taking cues from the interior of the garage we called ourselves FEUERLOESCHER (fire-extinguisher) and had great fun doing our short blasts of innocent noisy songs with German lyrics about almost everything that ruled our lives back then - mind you, we even had a song about eating at Mc Donald’s, and no, that wasn’t in a MDC-ish fuck-corporate-fast-food-vein at all, as most of the words weren’t too serious anyway...
The songs came fast and a tape of one of our practices got into the hands of a fellow punk and so by fall 1985 we played our first gig at the KAPU, which by then slowly started to turn into the DIY-heart of a developing HC-scene, all of us being involved in that process to varying degrees. With us being more and more exposed to American punk and hardcore, an European HC-network starting to form and the KAPU being part of it, we became aware of so many inspiring ideas that our band started to change and reflect those ideas. Johnny Pichler, a close friend of mine, took over the bass and we changed the name to TARGET OF DEMAND, or T.O.D. (as it was HC’s three-letter period...). I started to write english lyrics (heavily influenced by the fact that I was getting into hardcore-folklore big time, one song was called S.O.A. after Rollins’ first band, I nicked ’Get it away’ from SSD...). still, to this day, I can not say whether I lifted the band-name from the Californian band of the same name consciously or if it was something I came up with without knowing about them - in any case, late apologies to the original T.O.D.!
With two tapes done on a four-track (’Kein Spiel’ und ’Mein’) we started getting around, review-wise in the blooming fanzine-scene and resulting gig-wise. it was just great to get into the van, get out of Linz, get to meet like minded people, get to play, see other bands. still from the early days on there was always some sort of tension in the band, some of it came from the fact that by mid-87 we had two guys in Vienna with Huckey and me in Linz. and we were so goddamn young! Plus our vision of whatever we were doing there was pretty blurred and pretty much different for each individual member. Anyway, by the time we attended a festival in Vienna with SO MUCH HATE and IGNITION we were about to kick out Johnny and replace him with peter, who by then had become our fifth member. but Gunnar, singer from Norway’s SO MUCH HATE talked us out of it and offered to release a split LP with STAND TO FALL, our friends from Linz and T.O.D. on his label X-PORT RECORDS. In February 1988 we drove to Hildesheim (Germany) and recorded our songs for that record (and saw an early RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS show on a night off, they did great GERMS- and BLACK FLAG-covers!). The release party at the KAPU on the 16th of July 1988 was just great. the records arrived just in time from Norway, to decide which band would play first we threw an empty record-cover in the air, the cover-side it showed when it landed named the opener. There were tons of friends from Germany, a packed KAPU, it was one of those ’top of the world’-nights and just now, as I write this, I realise how powerful that all felt all over again - our own fucking record! for real!
December 88 / January 89 saw us touring with Munich’s NO NO YES NO and STAND TO FALL on a tour called FRIEDEN AUF ERDEN/FICKEN AUF PFERDEN that was quite a trip. somewhere then we are supposed to have been in the studio again to record GRUSS, our album for Germany’s We Bite Records, but honestly I don’t have many memories of that. I remember we were again about to break up before we actually got in the bus to go to Hildesheim (we used the same studio as for the split-LP). up there north I spent most of the time with my girlfriend in the musicians-flat and only bothered to walk over to the studio from time to time; smart me even daring to get mad at my fellow T.O.D.’s ’cause I thought the basic-tracks I got in my headphones were too slow... oh well. and the cheap canned beer...
The resulting album GRUSS was celebrated with a show at the KAPU on the 29th of April, again together with STAND TO FALL. In the room of one week back then not only this show took place, but also JINGO DE LUNCH and the awesome NO MEANS NO graced the small stage in Linz - this is to indicate that whereas a few years back there was literally nothing now overkill was not only a (bad) bandname but a fact. from what I recall T.O.D. was in a pretty bad shape/mood then, Huckey and me played some with our other band SEVEN SIOUX, whereas T.O.D. played the grand total of two shows in about 7 months with a new record out. clever boys! but this clever boy had other stuff on his confused mind and started working as well as becoming a father. 4 days after the wonderful and amazing Tara was born I really had the nerves to go to Germany and record the TARGET OF DEMAND live-record for Your Choice on the 8th of December 1989. (somewhere in a parallel universe I do the right thing, stay home and the later recorded live-album becomes a classic live-set up there with ’It’s Alive’, ’Kick Out The Jams’...).
Two more adventures lay ahead of our band, a tour of Britain with gigs in England and Wales and three shows in Poland opening for the mighty NO MEANS NO in April and may 1990. both experiences were very intense for many reasons, one aspect being out of the rather cosy-Austrian/German-scene and playing in countries where the gigs reflected a harder/different reality and you couldn’t help but being thrown out of the ’hardcore-bubble’. the inspiring spirit of some of the people in Britain and Poland... at the same time our band was disintegrating, some members hardly talking. after two more gigs in Vienna in June and our last show in Goettingen (Germany) on the 1st September 1990 TARGET OF DEMAND broke up.
We played a one off reunion show at the KAPU’s 13th anniversary in 1996. the night Johnny, Mops and me (Huckey couldn’t make it from Linz) met to speak about the how was one of the most emotional challenging (and rewarding) nights of my life and the moment the four of us were together in a practice room for the first time after over six years and getting ready to hit one of those old songs (and yeah, it’s like swimming, they stay with you) - priceless, babies, priceless! I think we finished our unfinished business with that show and everybody’s happy about that, as for the whole thing: glad we were there!
Rainer Krispel, November 2005
Mit Liebe fuer Huckey, Johnny, Mops, Peter, die Kinder und Eltern von Target of Demand.