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Other highlights include Blood on the Boulders, which reimagines the Manson Family as content creators, and new single Cro-Magnon Man, with sung by Borgase with the help of uber-cool musicians Tony Njoku and Clarissa Connelly, which may be the most unhinged single of the year, a kind of trip into modern hell also written by Borgase, and based on a disturbing children’s book about death that his grandmother gave him.
“I was using these books about evil people as springboards to make my own narratives,” says Judge, ‘Like Crispy Skin is influenced by a book called Tender Is the Flesh [by Agustina Bazterrica], which has an alternative reality where cannibalism is completely normal, it's just like going to KFC.
“It’s quite an intense relationship,” says guitarist Louis Borlase, which also features Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson, with the way they write sounding like a therapy session mixed with a science experiment: “You're always chucking in ideas and each member is adding new things.
Black Midi and Black Country, New Road were the other cult acts that spring from it, and none of them were about holding back; this was music as art-rock buffet food fight: The Fall, Sonic Youth, prog-rock, krautrock, all the noisy lot.
On the allegorical Cowards, all distorted jazz, twisted brass and fairytale dread, Judge sings, ‘Polythene bags they’ll never go away/Us dogs and rats will never escape/If you said it could be better I probably won’t believe you/I’ll knock the teeth out of my head’.
