This article was to appear in January 1999's issue of The Wire. It was abandoned at the last minute in favour of an interview with the Evil Dick himself (available here).
In music, intelligence is a misfit component. In pop, rock, industrial and rave, doubly so. It's likely to cause blushes and irritation, interrupt a circulatory system based on flattering social identities and reassuring adolescent egos. Hence the aptly-named Evil Dick. He's found a crack in the cell wall of contemporary alienation, and he's using it to poke fun into the very grain of the music that feeds the masses. It's unlikely to win him many friends, but it is extremely amusing. The startled listener is assaulted with a salvo of perverted plastic dance-beats, hollowed-out industrial protest, parody avant-classicism and bizarre mouth-noises. Realtime non-repetitive going-somewhere music material for listening. The presence of Coprophagism on the FMR label provides no clue. Normally host to the worthy constituents of centrist British musicmaking (halfway between hardcore improv and heritage jazz), FMR CD-covers rarely sport garish bit-manipulated images with green-eyed idols sucking dummies. As unerringly as Crumpsalls's cult genius Dogbiz, Evil Dick has picked on scatology as the weakspot of a commodity culture erected on the repression of somatic actuality. Coprophagism, in other words, is music to die for.
Like Adrian Leverkuhn, the composer-hero of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Evil Dick asks "Why does everything seem to us like its own parody?". Technically advanced art is no haven from such clear vision either. "Expt. In 5:1", an exquisite Conlon Nancarrow spoof, is as poignant as the tiny spots of blood deposited by piles on the toilet tissue. "Council Wife" voices the bourgeois proprietor's fear of communism in tones both self-lacerating and chart-bound. "Get Down/Get Off" says everything that stammering Sheffield industrial protest was never able to articulate, while "Little Pink Gibson" - purportedly a parody of 80s Heavy Metal - is the raspberry The KLF never quite dared blow at dance music.
Humour and shit, the two unmentionables in the graded fraud served up by the culture industry. Here they're deformed, fromaged, chomatographed, split, recombined, mosaiced and alchemized. Evil Dick's measure of the social whiff of each sonic morsel suggests - to the suggestible listener - gold gold gold. "Klismaphilia Funk"; "Girl With The Mechanical Neck Movement"; "Dun Pressed On"; "Coprophagism" ...Oh no, Idon't believe it, a step beyond Mr Bungle! Shitloads of marvels.