I’ve been kind of bummed since finding out that Tom Ellard has broken up Severed Heads, one of the great electronic/industrial/noise/dance bands of the last thirty years. Well, ‘broken up’ is the wrong term, since it’s just Ellard. Perhaps I should say he’s ‘stopped doing it’, but that doesn’t sound quite right. That’s the story though.

Severed Heads is one of my formative bands. One day in 1986, I walked into a record store in Seattle’s U-District, and they were playing “Twenty Deadly Diseases”. It was a great piece of industrial dance electronica, aggressive but cerebral. I immediately realised that whereas I’d been listening to the Art of Noise, it was this that I’d really been looking for. I promptly bought all the Severed Heads I could find, and never listened to the Art of Noise to any real extent ever again.

Listening to a song like “Army” from Come Visit the Big Bigot, it’s hard to believe that it came from Australia. It’s very icy, and many’s the day I would slap on the headphones and walk in the snow with the sound of “Army” mixing with the cold and the howling wind and the gray sky and the long arctic horizon.

Not going to that year’s Severed Heads/Skinny Puppy show in Seattle is still one of the great regrets of my concert-non-going experience. (The other is Kraftwerk in Perth at the Big Day Out 2003, because it was on a Sunday. Shitty religious observance! At least I got the bootleg from the show.)

But now Tom’s hung it up because he’s teaching full-time at UNSW. Academia has sunk many a promising career. Why not both at once, like Dan Snaith of Manitoba, or Brain May from Queen?

However, our loss is our gain, since Mr Ellard has released much of the Severed backcatalogue. There are gems among the free downloads (especially ‘Twister’), but it’s Big Bigot and Bad Mood Guy that really shine. You might also want to check out his thesis, an exploration of how recording format can affect the music itself.