International Flag of Chaos + The All Shitting Eye + Loops = 

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In the late eighties you could go to "Record Fairs". Mooching around town on the weekend a bored teen might spot dayglo posters advertising the date and location of one of these fairs. On the day, you would turn up to the venue with a couple of friends and pay something like a pound to enter a church hall-type space. Once inside the venue visitors would be presented with the "stalls", tables and tables with boxes of records on them and the stallholder sitting behind. At these fairs one could find old singles and rarities from favourite bands, plus bootleg recordings of gigs on cassette tapes and vinyl. The vinyl bootlegs tended to be a bit more expensive. If you were lucky you might even find a recording of a gig you had actually attended!

It was at one of these fairs, at the Secombe Centre in Sutton, that I first encountered a record by a band called "Loop". It was their first album, "Heaven's End". I remember being surprised at how "old fashioned" the cover photo looked, two guys with long straight hair and one guy with a kind of ginger(?) afro(?). It wasn't me who pulled it from the record box, it was one of the people I was with. They knew who "Loop" were but I didn't so I was most intrigued.

I must have taped the record from whoever bought it because I remember listening to this intense, fuzzy album on my walkman, particularly enjoying the pulsing rhythm of a track called "Head On". I liked the way this music created "spaces" in my head. There were no lyrics or messages to get your head around because you couldn't really make them out. The clearest vocals were the samples of Hal from 2001 - A Space Odyssey that appeared at the end of each side, "I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over", "My mind is going..." 

At some point I must have decided that I liked Loop's music enough to start spending money on buying their records. Owning actual products enabled me to pore over the few printed details about the band. The inner sleeve of Heaven's End featured black and white photos of the band members, along with a graphic artwork, a long-lashed leftward looking eye, the white of the eye filled with what looked like a Bridget Riley-inspired block pattern. I'm wondering if this might be because of Loop's connection to Croydon. In the music press Loop were described as a "Croydon" band, and Bridget Riley was a teacher at Croydon Art College when she became famous for her Op-Art work.  Anyway, I didn't really like this graphic, I thought it was a bit cheesy, a bit obvious. Thinking about it now, having an eye as a symbol was a bit odd for a group that seemed to be all about creating a hypnotic racket and called their fans "Soundheads". Maybe it's an occult reference to the children's song about rainbows that urges you to "Listen with your eyes"...? Oh...hang on, maybe it's an eye that contains an optical illusion or maybe even creates the illusion. Or is the illusion a reflection? Is the eye perceiving the illusion? Is it another All Seeing Eye? Does this blog now possess stereoscopic vision...? 👀

On the back of the singles and the inner sleeve of the albums would be printed a fan club address: Soundheads, c/o Gill, 35b Ardgowan Rd, Catford, London SE6. I'd never been to Catford, and only heard about this funny-sounding place in a parody "Smurf" song by the Barron Knights. Nowadays I live in Catford and according to Google Maps the former Loop HQ is sixteen minutes walk away from my house (mostly flat). If I walk for twenty-five minutes in the opposite direction I come to where James Endeacott, the former Loop member with the aforementioned big barnet currently lives. I see him in Catford from time to time, he's still got great hair.

Maybe for Lockdown 4 I'll devise a local circular walk that takes in these two addresses. On this walk one can put in the ol' earbuds and listen to Loop's masterpiece "A Gilded Eternity" on repeat whilst trudging along part of the giant tarmac loop that is the South Circular. Of course this walk will need to be called The Loop-Loop Loop. ◯◯ ◯  

The All Shitting Eye is a symbol that can be found on the website called "Arcane Bullshit". You can buy metal and fabric badges of it. It's basically a mash-up of the "Illuminati Symbol" and the poop emoji. I love it ♡

I love it because it seems to sum up our contemporary predicament: Absurdity, Waste, Conspiracy, Stupidity, Power.

It occurred to me that it could make a good symbol for the fascinating and, in my humble opinion, important field of inquiry known as "Discard Studies". Discard Studies looks at the world of "waste" and "discards" at all imaginable scales, from nano-scale plastic particles to man-made debris orbiting Mars. Discard Studies uncovers the forces that shape industrial-consumer society's attitudes to waste. It reveals how we are encouraged to think that anything, including ideas, lives and places, can be chucked away without consequence. It highlights how there is no "away" to chuck things to and how things that are discarded simply move from one place to another, either via deliberate transportation or "Accidental Logistics". Discard Studies seeks answers to questions like: "Who gets to decide what is wasted and how much waste is acceptable ?", "What are the impacts on lives and places when an uninvited discard arrives?" and "Is pollution colonialism?".     

I think The All Shitting Eye sums up the essence of Discard Studies, to bear witness to all that is wasted. And there is a lot that is wasted 💩👀

Flags are popular these days.

This blog has chosen to ”sail” under the International Flag of Chaos.

The International Flag of Chaos is a plastic bag in a tree. I first heard this name a long time ago from someone called Alun Rowlands. I’m not sure if Alun invented the name or not but I’ve always loved it. 

The designer Jay Cousins invented the term “Accidental Logistics” to describe the phenomenon of man-made things being transported by natural forces to unexpected and usually inappropriate places.

So we can say that the International Flag of Chaos results from Accidental Logistics.

In some places a plastic bag caught in a tree is known as  “Witches Knickers”.