Decadence Within This Lunacy

Decadence Within ‘This Lunacy’ (Peaceville, 1989)

‘This Lunacy’ is Decadence Within’s debut and features Ian Glasper on bass and Antony Mowbray on drums. Not the monkey heided ex Hibs manager but the future guitarist of UK Hardcore leading lights Stampin’ Ground who also featured Glasper reprising his role on bass and lyric writing duties.

Ian Glasper is probably better known as being a writer of some repute having published four books on the UK punk and hardcore scene as well as being a staff journalist for Terrorizer since its inception. It’s fair to say that he is, what we refer to in the scene as, a lifer; straight edge (sorry about the photo!), political, proactive and hardcore.

Ian was an ardent supporter of In Decades Decline and released two of our tracks on his label’s compilations. One was a tribute to Conflict (we were still called Unique Freak, I notice!) which I was elated about, despite the reaction our hardcore/death metal take on ‘Cord is Cut’ received from the less open minded members of our little punk family! The other was a UKHC compilation which found us side by side (ha!) with the great and good of the scene at that time. Which was a pretty exciting time, but one which was never truly embraced in Edinburgh.

Our friends in Glasgow lapped up the brothers in blood posturing of the London/Midlands scene and we briefly rode on their coattails, but IDD were more suited to playing with screamo and crust bands than shell suited wide boys and so we were never quite welcomed with open arms by UKHC. People like Jamie will of course debate the true meaning of hardcore, but essentially it’s semantics and I think IDD, Shank and Divide were all equally hardcore, just from different parts of the wide and varied palate available to us. UKHC still means something, but in the early 2000s it was really blossoming and it was great to be part of it with mates like Broken Oath, fronted by the ferocious Lee.

Ian was a great contact to have and it’s always a pleasure to catch up with him, the last time was in Bristol when Municipal Waste played their first UK show. Crazy Colin was on blazing drunken form that night, abusing our American cousins who were quite bemused by our mad friend’s antics. ‘How would you like it?!’ indeed. In between torrents of Coco’s snarling offers to repatriate the Waste, a thick West Country accent announced, ‘I knew it was Gav from In Decades Decline, what the f*** are you doing here?!’ and since then, even though he missed The Process set, I’m sure he’s one of the few people in the UK who at least remember who we are!

‘This Lunacy’ is heavily US styled Britcore; thrashing riffs are unleashed at breakneck speed, not to mention the bass, Glasper’s fingers must have been on fire after the intro to ‘Take it or Leave it’ whilst Kevin Brook, sounding not a million miles away from SNFU’s Chi Pig, sings about straight edge, animal liberation and anti-violence. This is serious skating music. Sometimes Decadence Within suffer from taking the metallic complexity a little too far, but they stay just on the right side of hardcore to ensure that this is pretty classic crossover rather than straight up thrash.

Peace