(Our reporter from the spiritual front, Matt, sends another chronicle, as brilliant as always, but in this case tinged with the sadness of another untimely departure)

The Monks:

A shamanic appreciation.

What possessed them? The first thought that comes into your head when you see a picture of The Monks. What possessed them? What possesses five all American boys, American servicemen, no less, to shave their heads into tonsures, wear all black, string nooses round their necks and play the most heightened rama-lama scorch that the early 60s had ever heard?

The story is legendary amongst garage connoisseurs. Following their leaving the army, the five men who would become The Monks, the eye-popping lords of uber-beat, Larry, Eddie, Roger, Dave & Gary, started a band called the Torquays playing the clubs around Germany and mutated into the strangest thing the Reeperbahn had ever seen (and believe me the Reeperbahn was no stranger to the strange), before imploding, just before a planned tour of Vietnam. In this time they cut one of the oddest, sheer wrongest, albums of all time. An album that can propel you out of yourself with the force of a black bomber under the eyelid. Stuffed full of lyrics that veer from the inane to the fiery shamanic and saturated with pounding toms, knife on bone electric banjo and some of the most hair raising napalm-the-village feedback this side of the VU, ‘Black monk Time’ is my favourite album. Of all time. Ever. It isn’t just that it stands completely alone, that no-one could recreate it’s sheer mania if they tried (or even if they wanted to), that it sounds like the kaleidoscope fever dreams of some alpen village Heidi home from school with serious karma deficit. It isn’t even that the singer barks the word ‘Constipation!’ twice during its terrible course. It’s ‘cos I don’t know what it is.

Maybe the Monks happened due the effect of the boys seeing their cosy American world going up in smoke from the (comparative) security of early-60s West Germany. Imagine it; race riots, Vietnam, JFK’s assassination all seen in photos on the front of papers surrounded by words you couldn’t even read. Outcasts in a country that still resented the presence of American servicemen, The Monks did what any good outcast does; cut themselves off completely. The fury in the album is simultaneously terrifying and hilarious, like when Ren would get mad at Stimpy and his eyes would fill with blood. It is not the contained, eloquent rage of a Dylan or even a Lennon, it’s the bawling, confused rage of a kid who’s dropped his lolly and is twice as dangerous for that. This is true shamanism, wrung up from the pits of fuck-knows-where and danced, thrown and spat out by people who hardly know what they’re doing. The Shaman is not a righteous man (fuck you jim Morrison. He doesn’t get capitals, he doesn’t deserve them), nor is he an evil man. He is a man who whirls with the spirits like he’s had a toaster thrown in his bathtub. Ineloquent, pitiful, hilarious and scary. ‘Black Monk Time’ plagiarises every form of music of the time in a frantic effort to ‘Mach Schau’ and ends up emptying the dance floor to all but the demonically possessed. It’s the anthem to everyone who feels cut off from home, everyone who knows that in mad times, the only thing to do is follow the mad man’s path and pray for rain, it’s the end of the fucking world and what was so good about the fucking world anyway? After all I’m a Monk, you’re a Monk, we’re all Monks.

‘It’s beat time, it’s hop time IT’S MONK TIME!’

The Monks- Monk Time

Dedicated to Roger Johnston, The Monks’ drummer, who died on the 8th of November.

PS- Read a nice review of Can’s re-releases here