""War Sucks""

The Red Krayola ""War Sucks"" Call me lazy but to list all the works of Mayo Thompson would be huge so here's a bite of 'Wiki'. Psychedelic, avant-garde rock band from Houston, Texas, formed by art students at the University of St. Thomas (Texas) in 1966. The band was led by singer/guitarist and visual artist Mayo Thompson, along with drummer Frederick Barthelme and Steve Cunningham. Their work prefigured punk and the no wave scene in 1980s New York City. In 1966 the band signed to International Artists, home label to fellow psych-rockers The 13th Floor Elevators that was run by Lelan Rogers (brother of country musician Kenny Rogers). In 1967 the label released the psychedelic album, Parable of Arable Land, featuring six songs by the original three members interwoven with a cacophony generated by approximately 100 anonymous followers known as The Familiar Ugly who appear on a number of noise tracks called Free-Form Freak-Outs. The album's title track was a tape loop of electronic sounds with musical improvisations layered on top of it, a sound that foreshadowed the Red Krayola's second recording. Mayo Thompson continued to make music, both under his own name and as The Red Krayola. He teamed up with American drummer Jesse Chamberlain and recorded the single 'Wives in Orbit' and the album Soldier Talk both of which could be seen as musical responses to punk rock. His collaborations in the 1970s and 1980s read like a roll call of the avant-garde and experimental artists and musicians of the era. The Red Krayola teamed up with the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language for three LPs: 1976's Corrected Slogans, 1981's Kangaroo? (also featuring The Raincoats' Gina Birch, Lora Logic and Swell Maps' Epic Soundtracks) and 1983's Black Snakes. Thompson joined Pere Ubu for a period in the early 1980s, performing on several releases, and provided soundtrack music for Derek Jarman. Throughout this time he was prolific as a producer for many other seminal experimental and alternative rock acts, including The Fall (1980's Grotesque (After the Gramme)), The Raincoats, Scritti Politti, Blue Orchids, Cabaret Voltaire, Stiff Little Fingers, Kleenex, The Chills and Primal Scream. For me the top track of the Krayola would have to be "Transparent Radiation" covered by Spacemen 3.