New Blood: Eternal Fags

Glasgow is a noisy place. We’re not talking the lascivious, wall-filtered sounds coming from your neighbour’s flat at ungodly hours, or the racket of a repair guy hammering on something random at eight in the morning, although those still count. This is about the musical noise rising up through the pavement, such as that proffered by local punk trio Eternal Fags – surely the city’s loudest export since lager-swilling padres in football shirts first fled to the Mediterranean in droves for their annual holidays.

Elusive and nameless (well, we know one of them is known as ‘Chris’), Eternal Fags rose from the ashes of two of the city’s revered garage rock outfits, Plaaydoh and Dirty Summer, who had both released music on local DIY label Winning Sperm Party. It wasn’t long after forming that the ‘Fags followed in their footsteps, releasing a self-titled mini-album of brutal and nervy punk rock which showed parallels with the discordant beauty at the heart of the city’s contemporary scene, going on to garner well-deserved acclaim last year. As the band quips: “We pretty much just did it ourselves and Winning Sperm Party took the credit for it.”

Like an amalgam of the more subversive branches of heavy music heard over the past few decades, Eternal Fags serve up a volatile cocktail of overdriven guitar, primal beat-keeping, and the deranged, wordless yowling that the band passes for vocals. All of which is bolstered by a solid backbone of infectious punk hooks. What drove them to produce such a feisty wall of noise? “When we were making the songs on that album we were primarily listening to Fun House, Sabbath, Captain Beefheart and a lot of krautrock.” Go figure.

Since knocking out their debut at Green Door studios in Glasgow last year (“we were able just to go in and jam out the tracks live… we didn’t spend a lot of time mixing”) the band have been busying themselves on the live circuit, playing Winning Sperm Party’s Christmas bash and recently taking in a jaunt to Murcia, Spain, to play for the Suena Imposible collective. On top of that, they’ve contributed various tracks to compilations by local gig promoters Cry Parrot and equally excellent Glasgow label Electropapknit.

What next for the ebullient three-piece? Well, album number two is in the pipeline and will be recorded “really soon,” while lately the band has broken things down to their core elements and are working as a duo. They remain a self-sustained outfit, practising the ‘do it yourself’ mantra, rather than hanging around waiting for someone else to put in the work. But they’re no insular loners, either. As they have it: “We’re quite happy doing our own recordings and putting on gigs. It’s often nice to work with like-minded others too.”

It seems that there’s no heady master plan, but wherever Eternal Fags go from here you can guarantee they’ll be leaving a trail of busted musical equipment and ringing ears in their wake. As Lester Freamon would put it, that’s just how they do.