Passion Killers They Kill Our Passion With Their Hate and Wars LP reissue
I was thrilled when this weird little piece of CHUMBAWAMBA history came out as an LP on Demo Tapes fifteen years ago, and it’s really nice to see it reissued on Sealed now. PASSION KILLERS were a group of teens from a small town near Leeds who had a song (their Big Hit “Start Again”) on Crass Records’ Bullshit Detector 2. CHUMBAWAMBA was also on the comp, and wrote to all the other bands saying “Hey, let’s keep the momentum going, let’s start a movement based on this serendipitous collection of bands!”—PASSION KILLERS were the one band that responded. Long story short, the two bands released a split demo and played together constantly, and two of the members, Harry Hamer and Mave Dillon, moved in with CHUMBAWAMBA (with parental permission, kinda), recorded the material found on this LP in 1983 with Boff of CHUMBAWAMBA joining in, and then got kind of absorbed into CHUMBAWAMBA, with PASSION KILLERS playing their last show in 1984. They reformed to release a 7” of covers protesting the first Gulf War in 1991, but otherwise have not done anything until a series of reunion shows this year (I’m assuming this reissue was done to coincide with those shows). The backstory is cute and all, but happily the music is also fantastic, almost shockingly good for something that has remained so obscure. Dare I say, it’s better than the early CHUMBAWAMBA demos. You can tell that very young teens wrote a lot of this, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There’s a really charming naivete throughout that is kind of refreshing in this day and age. The lyrics are political and largely idealistic, and the music is decidedly punk (more ’77 punk than anarcho-punk), very simple but very pop-informed and super catchy with sometimes off-key three-part harmonies. It brings to mind a lot of their contemporaries, bands like ANARKA AND POPPY, the MOB, and HAGAR THE WOMB that were straddling the line between punks and (gasp) hippies. It’s very easy to hear what the members brought to CHUMBAWAMBA, and it’s frankly magical. The record comes with a booklet with a detailed history of the band and all kinds of ephemera, and is all-around packaged beautifully with respect for the band’s ultra-DIY roots.