![]() They relented and recorded a couple of singles, including a cover of the French-pop classic Mini Mini Mini, following the release of a career-spanning box set by prestigious reissue label Numero Group in 2016. They rejected the prospect of recording, wary of the response of old fans and the danger of distorting the group’s legacy: “We’d always put the kybosh on it, mainly because old bands from back in the day doing new stuff is kind of fraught,” Salmon admits. The band supported Sonic Youth on an Australian tour in 2008, playing their mini-album Blood Red River as part of London promoters All Tomorrow’s Parties’ concert series, Don’t Look Back.īut the Scientists were constantly looking back. It took 20 years for the Scientists to begin playing again with any regularity, with Cowie rejoining Salmon, his fellow guitarist Tony Thewlis and bass player Boris Sujdovic. He proved difficult to replace eventually the band’s road manager Leanne Cowie (formerly Chock) began filling in. Rixon, whose sound was foundational to the group, left in 1985 and died in 1993. (The so-called “formula” is humorously drawn from the chorus of their early single Swampland: “Nine parts water, one part sand”.)īut reconstituting the formula several decades down the line has not been easy. Mudhoney are devoted fans a biography by Douglas Galbraith is titled Kim Salmon and The Formula for Grunge. Most notoriously, their soft-loud dynamics and dark racket was influential on Seattle’s grunge movement. And Jon Spencer, of Boss Hog and the Blues Explosion, once put it: “The Scientists turned my head around and made a man out of me! They put hair on my palms and made my socks stink!” Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore credited the Scientists with proving that “rock ‘n’ roll could be played by gentlemen in fine silk shirts, half unbuttoned, and still be dirty, cool and real”. Warren Ellis, of the Dirty Three and later the Bad Seeds, said the Scientists “wrote fantastic singles and looked like they just crawled out of the ooze. When U2 took their behemoth Zoo TV tour to Australia in 1993, they asked Salmon’s subsequent band, the Surrealists, to support. Slowly, the legend of the Scientists spread. Otherwise, he says, “we’d have sounded like any number of garage-rock bands from Sydney at the time.” Salmon wrote for the unique characters in the band, particularly drummer Brett Rixon, as if they were his muses: trying to capture their peculiar mix of sullen apathy and bursts of self-destructive energy.
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