23 Skidoo were formed in North London in 1979 as a punk-inspired schoolboy trio of Fritz Catlin (drums), Johnny Turnbull (guitar) and Sam Mills (guitar). The group's name is taken from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy; the underlying American slang phrase predates the band and appears variously in Burroughs and Aleister Crowley, translating roughly as move it or get out while the going is good. The Bureau files 23 Skidoo at Tier III on the position that the group is the case of the early 1980s London industrial-funk-tribal-percussion fusion: an extension of the Throbbing Gristle / Cabaret Voltaire production-and-aesthetic context into a percussion-heavy collective working partly inside the industrial-proper mode (the metal-and-electronics side) and partly in funk-and-world-rhythm territory (the gamelan, Burundi, Kodo and Fela Kuti references). The catalogue ran mainly from 1979 to 1987, with a reactivation from 2000 to 2003 and intermittent activity since.
The 1979 group expanded into a sextet by early 1981 with Patrick Griffiths on bass (who shortly left to live in Paris), Johnny Turnbull's brother Alex Turnbull on percussion, drums and bass, and Tom Heslop on vocals, electronics and saxophone. The first single, Ethics / Another Baby's Face, was recorded in October 1980 as a quartet and issued in 1981 on Pineapple Records (produced and financed by Mark Bedford of Madness, who 23 Skidoo had supported at the Dublin Castle in Camden). The early-catalogue record placement was Fetish Records, the London independent run by Rod Pearce; 23 Skidoo signed to Fetish in spring 1981 and recorded the catalogue's first major statement at Western Works in Sheffield, the Cabaret Voltaire studio, with Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson co-producing the resulting 12-inch single The Gospel Comes To New Guinea / Last Words (1981). The Western Works co-production placed 23 Skidoo inside the CV editorial-aesthetic for the early-1980s industrial-and-electronic London scene at the documentary moment of the catalogue's emergence.
The debut LP Seven Songs (Fetish, February 1982) is the catalogue's document and a record the Bureau considers one of the foundational examples of industrial-funk-tribal percussion. The record was recorded and mixed in three days; co-produced (under the pseudonym Tony, Terry and David) by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV, with engineer Ken Thomas. The TG / PTV production relationship places the Seven Songs period directly inside the IR-era industrial cluster: 23 Skidoo were rehearsing at the Death Factory in Beck Road (the TG rehearsal-and-recording space) through this period, and the production-and-aesthetic continuity from Industrial Records to the Skidoo catalogue is one of the cleanest single examples of inter-band working continuity from the TG breakup through the post-TG dispersal. Seven Songs went directly to number one in the Independent Charts.
The post-Seven Songs period brought a line-up reset. The hastily-recorded EP Tearing Up The Plans (Fetish, 1982) was made in the absence of the Turnbull brothers, who were travelling in Indonesia in search of musical material; the resulting record was, by the band's own later account, unrepresentative of the working group. The personality clashes that arose from this experiment led to the dismissal of Sam Mills (guitar) and Tom Heslop (vocals) in June 1982. The newly-reduced three-piece (Catlin and the Turnbull brothers) performed at the first WOMAD festival in 1982, joined onstage by David Tibet of Current 93; the WOMAD performance was a deliberately abstract noise-and-metal-percussion piece played on scrap-metal instruments, and it became side one of the next record The Culling Is Coming (Fetish, 1983). Side two of Culling documented the Turnbulls' Indonesian gamelan studies, providing the catalogue's clearest single document of the world-music-and-percussion direction the group would later develop.
The second record is Urban Gamelan (Fetish, August 1984), which continued the gamelan-and-metal-percussion direction of the Culling side-two. Sketch (Peter Martin, formerly of the Britfunk duo Linx) had loosely joined the group in 1983 after appearing with them on the BBC youth television show Riverside; with Sketch on bass, the group also recorded the 12-inch single Coup (1983), which marked an explicit funk direction. Coup featured Aswad's horn section and samples from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; the track was interpolated from Fuck You G.I. from Urban Gamelan. Coup is the catalogue's most sampled piece: The Chemical Brothers later lifted the bass-and-rhythm part for Block Rockin' Beats (1996, which won the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance the following year), and Ice-T sampled the catalogue on Peel Their Caps Back. The Coup sampling history is significant in the Bureau view: 23 Skidoo's industrial-funk hybrid became, decades later, the foundational rhythmic material for late-1990s big-beat dance music, making the catalogue one of the rare industrial-era records to enter the commercial-dance lineage by direct sampling.
The post-Urban Gamelan period is the catalogue's turn away from band-shaped working. Evicted from their rehearsal space at the Death Factory (the TG / Psychic TV rehearsal-and-studio house at Beck Road, Hackney), 23 Skidoo shifted their attention towards hip-hop production and built their own studio, Precinct 23. The 1986 single Assassin documents the hip-hop direction, and the 1987 compilation Just Like Everybody collected the studio work from this period. In 1987 the Turnbull brothers founded the Ronin label and issued Paradox's Jailbreak, widely regarded as one of the first breakbeat records and an early connector between the post-industrial London experimental scene and the emerging UK breakbeat-and-rave culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ronin also released tracks by photographer Normski and MC FORCE in the period. The 23 Skidoo catalogue effectively went on a thirteen-year recorded-output silence between Urban Gamelan (1984) and the 2000 self-titled return, though the Turnbulls' production and Ronin label work continued throughout the gap.
The group signed to Virgin Records in 1991 (using the advance to build a new studio) but did not issue a Virgin record. The eventual return record 23 Skidoo (2000, self-titled, on Ronin) was made fifteen years after the previous album. It included guest contributions from the jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (on the track Dawning, which received later radio play) and the UK rapper Roots Manuva; the record is the catalogue's clearest single statement of the group's later self-positioning as a connector node between post-punk industrial, world-percussion, free jazz, dub, hip-hop and ambient. A singles compilation The Gospel Comes To New Guinea appeared in 2002, and the LTM reissue programme through 2008 to 2012 brought the Fetish catalogue back into print on CD and (later) on expanded double-vinyl editions. 23 Skidoo performed at the final All Tomorrow's Parties holiday-camp edition at Camber Sands in November 2013, and in 2015 scored the Alex Turnbull-co-directed documentary Beyond Time, about the sculptor William Turnbull (the Turnbull brothers' father); the documentary was narrated by Jude Law and used both new and archival 23 Skidoo material.
The Bureau's reading of the 23 Skidoo position is that the catalogue overlaps with two distinct working clusters and connects them at a documentary moment. The first cluster is the IR-era industrial proper: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, the early Fetish Records imprint, the Beck Road / Western Works production-and-rehearsal network, and the Genesis P-Orridge / Peter Christopherson / Mallinder / Kirk / Watson co-production engagement during the catalogue's 1981–1982. The second cluster is the early UK breakbeat / proto-rave / world-percussion lineage: the Ronin label, the Coup sampling tradition, the Paradox-and-onwards breakbeat connection, the Asian-and-African percussion direction the Turnbulls had pursued through Indonesia and Burundi listening. 23 Skidoo are, in the Bureau view, one of the clearest single examples in the catalogue of a band working continuously across the industrial-to-dance transition: not a band that became a dance act, but a band whose method (sampling, metal percussion, rhythmic-cell collage, world-percussion sources, dub-engineering attention) was already proto-breakbeat at the moment of the catalogue's formation. The F·11 industrial-proper filing is a working compromise on a catalogue that genuinely sits between forms; the F·11 designation is filed on the IR-era production-and-aesthetic continuity rather than on the catalogue's actual sonic content, which the Bureau's later reading may reclassify.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Age of Discovery · last revised c. the Regency era