Whitehouse

A couple of years ago I was sitting backstage at a gig sipping red wine with Whitehouse’s William Bennet and it dawned on me that THIS was extreme. Extreme wasn’t the guys showing off how ‘crazy’ they are by jumping from high mountains or wearing a Cradle of Filth tee-shirt (don’t pretend you don’t know which ones I’m talking about), it was Whitehouse, who weren’t afraid to take their pure unfettered aggression out on stage (and trust me they did) and then relax with wine and chatter in the aftermath. Like the best serial killers, you’d never have suspected them until you found a sofa stuffed with rotting corpses. ‘Mummy and Daddy’ hit the shelves in 1998, 18 years after the band’s conception and showed them in their digital phase, using computer effects to take their sound into levels of total extremity. With tracks such as ‘A C**t Like You’ and ‘Philosophy of the Wife-Beater’ showing the trio’s dark sentiment lyrically and through their use of ear shattering bitcrushed white noise, the album ends on maybe their grimmest moment; ‘Private’ which is a 20 minute cut-and-paste piece, compiling tape recordings of rape victims and other such shocking samples guaranteed to leave you reeling. This is extreme music, all that’s left to do is enjoy it.