When Lydia Lunch, Marc Almond, Nick Cave and Fetus formed a band – SMALL LOST CLASSICS

The history of ‘supergroups’ has been around for as long as I know when, and every now and then a new band comes along made up of badass bands from other bands who, perhaps fed up with their partners or perhaps trying to raise some extra change, come together under some name, release an album, tour and then return to their monotonous marriage hahaha.

It turns out that (almost) 40 years ago, between October 30th and November 1st, 1983, four crazy people and some luxury escorts who definitely weren’t looking to ‘heat up the relationship’ with their respective bandmates simply got together for 3 chaotic happenings in Washington and New York. In short this is the story of The Immaculate Consumptive, formed by Lydia Lunch, Marc Almond, Nick Cave and JG Thirlwell – or Clint Ruin, perhaps better known as Fetus – with a helping hand or two from Blixa Bargeld, Barry Adamson, Mick Harvey (from Bad Seeds) and Annie Hogan (one of the Mabas then playing with Almond).

There are a few versions of how it all happened, but regardless of whether it was a meeting between Nick and Lydia during the Birthday Party’s first US tour, in London while she was filming “Like dawn to dust” and he was working with Fetus on a song from “From here to eternity” – Bad Seeds debut – and both collaborated with Almond on the Marc and The Mambas project or any other, apparently the idea came from the anarchic Mrs. Lunch, who was organizing a Halloween event in Uncle Sam’s land at the time. Maybe it was like ‘hey guys, let’s all get crazy and make some music together? We play a few songs by each of us and see how it goes’.

Then, with some bases pre-recorded on tape by the aforementioned ‘luxury escorts’, they left for a night in the Yankee capital and two in NY (at the mythical Danceteria), and between spoken word and screams, a piano broken by Foetus, Cave de sack full and chaos in concert form, The Immaculate Consumptive went down in history as the shortest-lived greatest supergroup of all time.

Obviously, there isn’t an album with any official record of this spree, and neither is it certain where the bootleg below was recorded, although everything indicates that it’s from one of the performances at Danceteria. But who cares about that or the awful sound quality, right?

I would give a kidney to have been there…

SAFE TO TRIP!