southern records

The Action Time are a London-based six piece hate-fuelled gospel/trash/punk soul revue. These three girls and three boys have been together about a year - they are: Ms C C Rider, Bex Bissell, Eddie Brackett, Miss Spent Youth, Miss Susie Sparkles and Black September.

By fortunate coincidence these six rock'n'roll revolutionaries ran into one another at a Northern Soul allnighter last Spring and things haven't been the same since...

The Action Time have already been described variously as "The Tamla Motown Sex Pistols", "Shangri-Las meet The Dead Boys" and `like The Stooges being beaten-up by a teenage girl gang'. Live appearances have often been so intense that blind members of the audience have found themselves suddenly able to see, small animals have exploded and electrical appliances have been vapourized. You have been warned...

Miss Spent Youth aborted a promising career as a go-go dancer after being linked to the murder of sleazy nightclub owner Harry Ringpiece, choosing instead to try her fortunes as a chanteuse in the Nancy Sinatra tradition.

Miss Susie Sparkles played the fictional catsuited crimefighter Honey Penny in the UK TV series The Revengers before falling on hard times and turning to karoake competitions to make ends meet.

Eddie had studied under Phil Spector duirng the sixties but had since fallen into alcoholism and gambling. After spending much of the last two decades in bed, dosed up with smack and cheap whiskey he finally dragged himself back into the music scene a year ago. Abandoning the lush, orchestral girl group symphonies he had previously recorded he took up the guitar upon realising that no-one in modern-day London had taken up the mantle left vacant by the passing of Johnny Thunders and Sterling Morrison.

Bex Bissell was hanging out in smoky pool halls and Soho drinking dens writing his self-published pulp crime novels before deciding that bass playing was a more fulfilling distraction from his addiction to vice. Whilst making his Super-8 hardcore porn epic I Was A Cowboy's Sweetheart Bex commissioned the baby-faced Eddie Brackett to score the film for him.

Ms C C Rider was one half of the notorious `Switchblade Sisters', a two girl crimewave across America's Deep South, before she flew into London on a false passport to escape the clutches of the FBI. She took up beating the traps as a musical outlet for her latent violent tendencies.

Black September, the final Action Timer, finished a ten year sentence in Wormwood Scrubs prison last year, serving time for distributing inflammatory nihilist political tracts in the street, including the self-penned Kill Kill Kill For Inner Peace. Emerging into the bright millenium-end sunlight only to discover the scene awash with "wibbling spacerock" and "fifth-rate britpop" he realised the only course of action was to form a dressed-up, messed-up total energy rock'n'roll band to fuck things up again and rudely awaken the nation's dissatisfied, slack-jawed youth.