The The - Gun Sluts (1997)

The 1990's saw the return of Matt Johnson's band The The, following some years as a solo artist under his own name, helped in no small way with the recruitment of ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr to the group, alongside ex-Nick Lowe bassist James Eller and ex-ABC drummer David Palmer, as fully-fledged members. This line-up, plus guest singer Sinéad O'Connor, recorded the album 'Mind Bomb', which debuted at No. 4 in the UK Albums Chart and featured the band's highest charting single to date, with 'The Beat(en) Generation' peaking at No. 18 in the UK singles chart. Keyboardist D.C. Collard was added to the official line-up in 1989, after Steve Hogarth, who'd played on 'Infected', opted to become the new lead vocalist of Marillion, and this line-up embarked on a lengthy world tour in 1989/90 called the The Versus The World, which was filmed by Tim Pope during the three nights the band performed at London's Royal Albert Hall. The studio EP 'Shades Of Blue' was released in 1990, including cover versions of Fred Neil's 'Dolphins' and Duke Ellington's 'Solitude', as well as a new original song 'Jealous Of Youth' and a live version of 'Burning Blue Soul's 'Another Boy Drowning', and in 1993 the band released the 'Dusk' album, which debuted at No. 2 in the UK album chart, and which spawned three Top 40 singles in the UK. This was followed by another world tour, the Lonely Planet tour, after which Marr and Eller left, and were replaced by Atlanta-based guitarist Keith Joyner and New York bassist Jared Michael Nickerson, with the group having already lost Palmer partway through the tour, being replaced by ex-Stabbing Westward drummer Andy Kubiszewski. Now permanently relocated to New York, The The's next project was 1995's 'Hanky Panky', an album that consisted entirely of Hank Williams covers, and which was recorded by a new line-up consisting of Johnson, Collard, Fitting, ex Iggy Pop guitarist Eric Schermerhorn, ex David Bowie bass guitarist Gail Ann Dorsey, plus drummer Brian MacLeod. in 1997 the band recorded an experimental album called 'Gun Sluts', but it was so unlike their other records that their record label refused to release it, saying that it was too uncommercial, and so it was consigned to the vaults. Only the title track ever officially appeared, as an extremely rare promotional single sold on the NakedSelf tour, and the rest became a legendary addition to the bands discography, as well as causing the band to sever their eighteen-year relationship with Sony Records, and to sign to Interscope, on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records imprint. Johnson played one track from the sessions on his Radio Cineola internet podcast in 2010, and then in 2020 he released rough mixes of six recordings from the 'Gun Sluts' sessions as an official bootleg, in order to try to stem the sale of unauthorised pressings on the internet. By collecting together all the extant recordings from the 'Gun Sluts' sessions that have surfaced, we can approximate what the album might have sounded like, and although it might not be to the taste of some fans of the band, this all instrumental cacophony is just the sort of thing that I love, so I'm pleased to be able to post it here. 

Track listing

01 Gunsluts
02 Boiling Point
03 Love Lamp
04 Fuck Wit
05 Kid Killers
06 Echo Plasm
97 60 BPM
08 Psychic Sauna
09 Gunsluts (A Funkorelic Extension)