With:

• Ramleh
• Dogs Blood Order
• Death & Beauty Foundation
• Jill Westwood
• AKE
• Pure
• Krank

From our time in London for the Equinox Event and the 19 Keys performance at ProduKtion-HAIR I don’t remember much. The first time we actually met Ross Cannon was at our wedding on 2 April 1983. He was with Toni Rogerson, John Murphy and Mary Dowd. They stayed at our place, Club Moral, for a couple of days. Then we went to London for the Equinox Event on 21 June 1983. We stayed at the basement apartment of Mary Dowd, which was painted totally black, including windows. Every morning she passed by to feed her enormous dog and take him for a walk. When we came outside it was as if we had been in a nightclub all the time. The day before the Equinox Event there was an opening ceremony of AMVK’s installation “The 39 Steps versus The 19 Keys” at ProduKtion-HAIR. The shop was somewhere deep in the back of a maze of corridors in a building complex. The space was tiny, to say the least. We brought all the artworks and our audio equipment in suitcases by train. Several collages on transparent film were hanging from a rubber wire in the space and along the walls were more collages and paintings on plexi. During the opening event we performed “19 Keys” whereby DDV was sitting in the barber chair, handcuffed and his head in the sink, reciting the “19 Enochian Keys” while AMVK was tape-manipulating Schönberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” as a live soundtrack to AMVK’s film “The 39 Steps Versus The 19 Keys”. People were standing or sitting on the floor to witness the performance. My Equinox Event memories are few as the whole event was rather chaotic. We already met the young Philip Best on the subway making noise on his battery operated WASP synthesizer. As a matter of fact the festival almost was a WASP festival since virtually every band was using one in some manner. The event started out fine in the late afternoon, but as time moved on, personal problems between organisers and bands or band members led to several arguments. Some bands showed up, some didn’t, some played in different constellations and some were only there to cause disarrangement. Steven Stapleton was notably moving between the Musician’s Co-op and a bar down the street goaded by William Bennett and particularly accumulating alcohol. Drunk and wasted around 7:00 or 8:00pm he ended throwing chairs during our performance thereby hitting Ross Cannon on the head. Around this time we went to Ross Cannon’s flat (in Brixton?) to have dinner one night. He had a complete reconstructed grave in his bedroom, including a massive headstone. In September 1983 ProduKtion came to visit us in Antwerp; Ross Cannon, Toni Rogerson, Paul Hurst and Christine Glover. On 17 September 1983 both Ross Cannon and Paul Hurst assisted in DDV’s performance “Now I Am Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds” in Gent. From the visit in 1984 I don’t remember a lot. You had the HAIR shop in Club Moral for like two weeks and we went to Breendonk and did some performances and recordings there. The films were shown at the opening event of the In Vitro exhibition. In 1985 we had an exhibition Crash! in Club Moral with posters and magazines by ProduKtion and an installation by Alex Adriaansens. Our visit in Australia in 1987 is covered in Force Mental 15.