Quietly forgetting the Drill Your Own Hole film fiasco GAYE BYKERS ON ACID have taken down the ‘gone fishing' sign and are about to spring their new LP Stewed To The Gills on an unsuspecting world. EDWIN POUNCEY sets the lines and fishes up tales of dolphin domination, radioactive mackerel, poetic biker codes and the new Grateful Dead. Fisheyes by PENNIE SMITH

Salvador Dali may be as stiff as his waxed, antennae moustache, but at least his surrealistic spirit lives on...even if his new creative shell on earth turns out to be the almost unearthly day-glo squat of Gaye Bykers On Acid!

For further proof that the master lives on, cast a bloodshot over the Byker's sculpture that's sprawled across the back cover of Hot Thing, their latest oozing 12" 45.

"You can't see all of it, because it comes around like a land mass," explains guitarist Tony, outlining with a finger the invisible contours of a garbage-strewn landscape.

"There's like the sea there...that's a Hockney sea that's flowing into a Lichenstein area", adds Mary helpfully. "That's a decaying land mass and there are weather maps and radiation," he continues.

"That's a radio-active fridge!" beams Tony proudly, pointing to a detail that shows a Hotpoint Iced Diamond with all manner of alien slime leaking out of its ice tray. "All the food that's coming out is radio-active, a bit dead."

Holy salmonella! But is this mass of melted plastic and decay, the contents of all four Bykers' bedrooms, a work of art, a statement...or what?

"It's a statement, it's a bunch of fun," admits Mary.

And do you guys see yourself as budding surrealists? I probe...

"Nawww!" snarls drummer Kev. "We're just a tax loss with a lobster on it!"

Perhaps at this point it would be well to look back over Gaye Bykers On Acid's rather rickety career since they were scooped from independent obscurity to overnight sensation, courtesy of the massive marketing claw of Virgin Records.

Their first venture was to make their own film entitled Drill Your Own Hole, for which the debut album of the same name would act as the musical soundtrack. This ambitious idea was duly put into operation and completed, only to fall foul at the final post due to some mammoth communication breakdown between the Bykers and Branson's marketing minions...What went wrong lads?

"The film was brought out months after the record, which was a total crock up," groans Kev. "They should have come out at the same time!"

"All the songs were written for the script of the film," explains bass man Robber Deofflicense.

"That film cost us as much as it would for Boy George to make one single video and we made an hour-long film!" booms Mary proudly. "We just wanted to show what you can do if you've got enough imagination."

Imagination id certainly one thing that Gaye Bykers On Acid have more than their fair share of. They are positively bursting with lunatic schemes, all of which they creatively crave to pull into action once they are given the all powerful thumbs up from the powers that be. They still seem to be smarting, however, from the rough ride their first cinematic fruit received at the hands of the less enlightened authorities.

"The British Board Of Film Censors censored Drill You Own Hole, complains Mary. "They insisted that we were called Gaye Bykers ** ****! We weren't allowed to be called On Acid!" he yelps.

It's a sick system Mary, I sympathize.

"Yeah," agrees Mary. "Still," he brightens, "we did a lot of ground work for the Acid House movement, didn't we?"

Gaye Bykers' next assignment is their upcoming vinyl assault, a second album that they have decided to call Stewed To The Gills...fishier and fishier.

It's called that because we've read that apparently in 50 years time we're all going to be under water. The album is a kind of Cronenberg perception of an evolution by mutation. We're all going to have to get a set of gills if we're going to be able to live on this land!"

To illustrate this theory (as only Gaye Bykers On Acid know how) they decided to reveal themselves skinny dipping in a heap of fresh fish for the inner bag of Stewed To The Gills.

"We went to Billingsgate Fish Market at five in the morning and loaded up Peter Anderson's Cadillac with fish," explains Mary with a grin.

"A box of mackerel, a box of sprats, two squids, a shark..." lists Tony.

"And..." reminds Kev, "a Saudi Arabian carp!"

So what are you trying to say with all this deep sea depravity boys?

"What we're trying to say," sighs Kev, "is that fish are eventually going to inherit the earth. When we've wiped ourselves out with radiation the dolphins will climb aboard to start their own multi-corporations."

Dolphins huh? I always thought that it was either ants or cockroaches who were next in line for the jobs of ruling the earth...Mary meanwhile has remembered another nugget of totally useless information.

"Did you know," he yammers in his very best Trival Pursuit voice, "that dolphins are masters of their own environment, but that they originally evolved from a hairy prehistoric dog?"

Will I never! I bluster. With Gaye Bykers On Acid you learn something new every day. Robber also insists on telling me all the gory details of swallowing one of the aforementioned finny friends, a raw mackerel that had apparently been hooked out of a radioactive polluted Irish Sea.

"I'm developing my gills already," he chortles. "I'm going for the implants!"

Stewed To The Gills is undoubtedly a far superior product than the flawed Drill Your Own Hole experiment. It's a full tilt rock'n'rollercoaster ride into Gaye Bykerland, the kind of psychedelic dimension where Hanna Barbera cartoon collides chaotically into such mass media mountains (and molehills) as sex ("Hot Thing"), skateboards ("Rad Dude"), religion ("Testicle Of God"), oral hygiene ("Teeth") and ever the popular press..."It Is Are You?" casts a gluey eye over the pages of The Indescribablyboring and their ilk to bark back the rejoinder..."YOU ARE, IS IT?"

The entire crazy concoction is further strung together with random snippets from Gaye Bykers's video collection of snuff'n'porn, pre-recorded giblets that have been chopped out and taped into the bulk of the beast.

"Some of them are relative and some are complete nonsense," reveals Kev. "Some of the snippets we have included come from our favorite films like Blade Runner, The Evil Dead and Night Of The Living Dead."

"There's also lots of stuff about serial killers such as Charlie Manson and people like that," adds Mary.

Stewed To The Gills might just find itself squeezing its way into The Guinness Book Of Records as it is the cheapest album that Virgin have recorded in four years. So how much is not much, Mary?

"It cost 33,000 pounds (huge cash as yours truly falls into a dead faint), which is quite a lot in some people's eyes but really it's not a lot at all. We'd sooner put out albums every week if we could," fantasizes Mary, his eyes beginning to gleam at the though.

"For too long we were away from making music," he continues, "away from getting on with what we were supposed to be doing because we were caught in a trap of thinking that we were pop stars. I think it would be good to release an album every three months, it would be much more representative of how we want to work in the future."

But, I think to myself, surely the public's ever sensitive palette would perhaps become a little jaded to the Byker's message with such a greasy burger of sounds as Stewed To The Gills rammed down their throats every quarter? At this stage of the game, does Mary think that the Gaye Bykers are progressing?

"Yeah, I do" he replies confidently. "When we started we wanted to do something that was just a kick in the face or something to outrage people in a way. We were and still are against censorship and a lot of what we were about in the first place just got lost when we signed to Virgin."

"Then we were making the film and we never really had time to sit back and see what was going on around us," reminds Tony. "Constant press, constant interviews, constant everything..."

It's too bad that Gaye Bykers On Acid feel a little like cast aside chaff at the moment. Mary sighs...

"Life is so complicated. I think what the three minute culture does is make you think about different things all of the time and the result is that you just get bombarded with information. I think too much information is a misleading thing sometimes, the media tends to mislead. It confuses me up to a point because as soon as I get one idea, I'll listen to or read something else and get a totally different idea. It's a William S. Burroughs kind of mentality..."

Are your songs a part of the three minute culture Mary?

"Probably, yeah! But if you listen to the first album the tracks suffer because there is so much going on in them. What we're doing as a band now is just focusing on one thing at a time."

It's nearly time to hoot off home... But before I go I get involved with the Bykers in a massive discussion about real bikers and their culture. Mary seems particulary keen on the subject and has his own theories...

"There's something about biker culture that's interesting. There are certain pagan things they do that are so poetic in a way. There is a certain poetry in bike law I feel, a certain floweriness, although I doubt whether the people involved would are to admit to it! The passion of a man on his motorcycle is the modern day equivalent of a man on his horse. It's a very pagan thing, there is something quite romantic about it."

Have you been accepted by the chapters en-masse like Motorhead have?

"We don't want to pigeon-hole ourselves with any audience," states Mary quite firmly. "We played with Motorhead at Hammersmith Odeon and the Hells Angels said we stood our ground pretty well."

"If you can play with Motorhead at Hammersmith Odeon you can play anywhere," growls Robber. "We're in a good position now where we can play with anyone or do anything. A lot of bands like, New Model Army, when they started off they gave you their political views and they'll find themselves stuck now. They can't really change their political views for feat that people will slag them off...We've never done that!"

"Everybody's welcome at our gigs," invites Tony cheerfully.

"We are the new Grateful Dead, not Sonic Youth!" cackles Mary.

Ah, but will Gaye Bykers ever become as versatile as The Grateful Dead?

Suddenly serious, Mary replies... "Yeah, we probably could be."

That's the kind of faith that has the power to move mountains and drain oceans... You've just got to admire them for it.

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