Port Sulphur

Not sure if it’s been mentioned before, but the most recent album by Port Sulphur, Meta Guru, includes a rather good track called “Bill Nelson” that is very much in the style of, well, you know.

For those needing background, Port Sulphur is a Scottish audio collective based around Douglas MacIntyre and his Creeping Bent organization. There’s no fixed lineup, although Douglas himself is a common factor, but there’s a lot of overlap with the Hungry Beat Band, which is a similarly nebulous lineup focused around people from the Scottish post-punk scene as documented in the rather good book, “Hungry Beat”. So on any given track by the band you might find a couple of members of Orange Juice, or Josef K, or Fire Engines, or Vic Godard, or Gareth Sager. Not sure of the lineup on “Bill Nelson” (although the electric violin is, I think, Paul Research from Scars) but “Hungry Beat” does establish that there was some influence, with Davy Henderson mentioning that before the 1977 Clash show in Edinburgh that was Year Zero for Scottish post-punk, he’d been more of a musical omnivore, specifically mentioning that he’d seen Be-Bop Deluxe in Edinburgh.

For those who want to check the track out, the album seems to be on all the usual streaming services. The A-side is mainly instrumental, the B-side has vocals, and it’s generally rather good. A lot of the material previously appeared on the Compendium compilation, but the versions here tend to be more polished - the only track where I prefer the original being “Fast Boys And Factory Girls”.