Logo #64: GISM

Designed by GISM mainman Sakevi Yokoyama in 1985. Yokoyama, in a recent e-mail: "AK-47 T-SHIRTS FIRST USED IN 1985 MAY 30TH AT NAKANO PUBLIC HALL." Right! Just as SPK stood for SepPuKu, Surgical Penis Klinik, Socialistisches Patienten Kollektiv and System Planning Korporation, GISM had many bombs in its arsenal of acronyms: General Imperialism Social Murder, Gnostic Idiosyncrasy Sonic Militant, and God In the Schizoid Mind. This video footage from 1982 leaves a clue as to how wild and free their initial appearances were. Sakevi is in the beret and the studded leather jacket; he steals the microphone from the late Edo Akemi, lead singer of the band Jagatara. The fight rolls on as the mostly oblivious band just keeps playing. More fun: one press account, corroborated to this reporter by artist and composer John Duncan, maintains that Sakevi attacked a salaryman (white-collar worker) on a Tokyo commuter train for staring at him by using a can of hairspray and a lighter as a makeshift flamethrower.

It's curious how many people, even in this postmodernist day and/or age, make apologies for the quality of, say, their film footage. If any lesson was learned from the House of Sex, it would be Malcolm McLaren's truism, "Don't play, don't give the game away." You'd be surprised how many creative people argue away the power of their art by apologizing for anything from objectively imperceptible flaws to practically invisible mistakes. A corollary to the McLaren Edict is that of Pee-Wee Herman: "I meant to do that." GISM's smash hit "Nuclear Armed Hogs" can be heard here. After guitarist Randy Uchida died at the age of 45 on February 10, 2001 of cancer, the band effectively dissolved, with Yokoyama immersing himself in more art and design. At least Uchida wasn't around to see all the bad stuff happen that autumn - but he'd had a good full life, and there was nothing left about which to be sorry.

Logo #63: Hanatarash

Designed by Yamatsuka Eye in 1985, this logo appeared on the "ハナタラシ" LP, the debut album for this Japanese junk and electronics unit. A focused effort, its titles include the vaguely Yiddish-sounding "Ultra Cocker", the ballad "Domination In Spunked Cock," and the always inspirational "Cock E.S.P". Their latest, the longform "Hanatarash 5: We Are 0:00" CD, came out in May on Japanese label 3D System to criminally little fanfare. Hanatarash means "snot-nosed", a phrase that inspired busy British composer Michael Gillham, whose extortionately extensive MySpace page covering the band is from whence this vividly lime-green cover comes. Using a construction backhoe, Eye-san once demolished part of the venue in which Hanatarash played. This is what that looked like, and here is how they sound. More rock and punk than any endless loop of "Yeah yeah yeah" or the posturing of lyrics and fashion, Hanatarash are to music what John Wesley Hardin was to the Old West: so mean he once shot a man just for snorin'!

Logo #62: Broken Bones

Thrash crust punk band Broken Bones' logo was designed by founding members Darren “Baz” Burgess and Tony “Bones” Roberts in 1983. Much of the band's life is inextricably linked to that of Discharge, the logo of which was covered earlier this month here.

Logo #61: Gong

Gong's ubiquitous gnome, drawn by Gong showman and founder Daevid Allen in 1962, appears as the focal point of a trilogy of albums (expanded to a quinary by 2000): "Flying Teapot" and "Angel's Egg" (both 1973), and "You" (1974). The English progressive band - where "progressive" means all possible positive perceptions of the word - has effectively been alive since 1965, the year in which Allen had a vision in which his entire future was laid out as a plain before him (winning lottery numbers notwithstanding). This illustration was taken from a brilliant history of the EMS line of synthesizers, found here. As rock band logos go, it's a whimsical mix of folk art and the methodology of mythologies both personal and traditional.

I saw Gong perform in the late '90s in Los Angeles at the defunct Billboard Live venue - a club which broadcast the concerts live to a huge video screen on the front of the building. It turned into the Key Club, and sits in the spot on which Bill Gazzarri's (June 16, 1924 - March 13, 1991) club once stood. Same kind of band ethos in that particular block or three of Sunset Boulevard, though - not much has changed from the days of "The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II." This was during the version of the band in which Pierre Moerlen (October 23, 1952 - May 3, 2005) played drums - and just when you think eminently flipped-out, well-traveled musicians have seen it all, no stranger a look on their faces was had than when I asked the members of Gong to sign my, erm, gong. It just seems such an obvious thing to ask. The following day, I had an enlightening conversation with Gong founder Daevid Allen, who detailed at great length how deeply Virgin Records founder Richard Branson hated their guts. Oh, we talked about everything from here to the ends of the cosmos but that really stuck out for some reason - possibly because Richard Branson seems so serene amidst his billions.

Logo #60: Nitzer Ebb

From Simon Granger, designer of the until-now apocryphal crest and sheaves: "The logo was originally drawn manually by myself using Corel Draw in late 1994. The NE initials were initially created using straight forward rectangles then welded together in Corel and 'node edited' to create the circular effect. The lower case type underneath was a font supplied with Corel called Serpentine and is the closest I have got to using a font with serifs (apart from two Barry Adamson sleeves). The Olympic-style leaf element was traced in Corel from a photo of a badge I found on the web, and then flipped and duplicated to form the two crossing over. The initial idea came from Bon (Harris, Nitzer Ebb shouter and percussionist), as he had an idea of using a design that had a look and feel of an classic car type badge. The final overall effect still radiates the typical muscular / military / minimal NE aesthetic but in a more of an emblem rather than just typography. The design was only ever officially used on the inside sleeve of the "Big Hit" album in a small version and a knocked back watermark image behind the lyric sheet - however, I think it is in use on various t-shirts and around the web."

Nitzer Ebb were a British band of pioneers - in the early '80s, along with Front 242, D.A.F. and Stomach Basher - of EBM, the so-called "electronic body music" made up of a relentlessly syncopated series of shouts that affected everything from Parisian haute couture to homely girls in the American heartland looking vaguely interesting because of all the chintzy vinyl, tall stompy boots and pierced-lip sullenness. Apart from that, Nitzer Ebb had a few really compelling pop singles that are great to exercise to and still stand on legs of nostalgia and awkward embarrassment that only a pre-Internet world can still keep hidden.

Logo #59: Angel Witch

New Wave of British Metallers Angel Witch appropriated a logo that was designed by gnostic seer and magickal dealer of vexation Eliphas Lévi in 1855. Drummer Dave Hogg recalls: "Angel Witch was probably the first band to use this particular logo - it started back in 1972. Two good friends of mine - Rick Stanbury (who is still my best pal) and Gary Nash - did the research and design copy. We were still at school, studying for an Art examination, and had to come up with something different so far as layout. I offered them both of my bass drum skins for their project. One of them was reading Dennis Wheatley's "The Devil Rides Out," which is where the Baphomet logo initially appeared. I used this on my drumkit following their exams, when I had a band before meeting up with Angel Witch. Because it was already on my kit, the rest of Angel Witch wanted to use it as a logo for the band, and has stuck ever since." He also attached a history of Baphomet, which is rather exhaustive and deserves to be read in its entirety here.

"Baphomet" allegedly is a corruption or permutation of the name "Muhammad", which - as with the serene grace of the Anticlimactic - reveals the avatar for all things hedonistic to be merely a fabrication of bad press during the Culture Wars. And so it was with Y2K and the anticipated violence at the dawn of the 21st century, and so it was with Jesus' many predicted Second Comings, and so it is with the deliverance and redemption of True Love. True Love lives in the shadow of Hedonism, and is just as easily snuffed out by lack of sunlight as by an apparently benevolent Jesus who sees a dead tree as providing no benefit - not even shade. Nightmares hover over several days, during which an angry X lords it over a mansion with countless rooms, evicting her True Lover from room after room after room even as her parents outside endlessly trudge through knee-high snow, oblivious and silent, never entering, never witnessing the silent curses hurled from a mouth once so terribly beautiful but now twisted in a rictus of some language that might as well be Cornish, or Manx.

After three years, you'd think you'd know someone.

Logo #58: Stray Cats

The downright lowdown, straight from Stray Cats Central: "Slim Jim Phantom's first tattoo in 1980 was the Teddy Boy Stray Cat which he has on his left forearm. Jim and Brian Setzer went the same day to tattoo artist Bob Roberts, and between them they drew up the cat's head design. Brian had just the head tattooed on his arm but Jim wanted a whole body. The cat's head design became the official logo of the Stray Cats. Early copies of the band's debut self-titled album contained bonus stick-on tattoos of the Stray Cats logo. Regarding the "official" name of the logo, the three Stray Cats refer to it as the "Cat's Head"." When the Stray Cats showed up in the early '80s, they were a breath of fresh air after a cultural tank full of the nitrous oxide of New Romantics, New Wave and the New Wave of Brutish Heavy Metal. Strangely, they've been around longer than the '40s and '50s actually lasted; they show no signs of stopping so long as there's still the kind of "Miller Time" that doesn't make it into the commercials.