Digital Dinosaurs

Extinction 1979-1982 CD (Messthetics #207)

Huh? CD (Messthetics #209)

"Huh?" combines the original cassette with the 'Dinosaurs intended vinyl "ThreeE.P." and one never-released track. (About 100 copies of The Digital Dinosaurs' Huh? cassette were manufactured and circulated in 1980. Somewhat fewer of the ThreeE.P. came out in 1981.)

Peter, Gordon and Christopher each designed cassette artwork for "Huh?" and the insert was printed so that each of the three covers could be displayed by folding the insert in different ways... Christopher wrote the following in December 2003:

'Huh?' was like a lot of 'concept' albums in that it didn't really have a concept -at least not then...
We'd been listening to a lot of our favourite records --not just music. We'd decided that we were going to make an album with links between the songs and try and make a complete body of work rather than just a collection of different songs as we'd done previously. This completely took us over for a year --and it was meant to be our masterpiece, although we were still learning the recording process... So we set up all of our musical equipment (plus a television and record player) in John O'Boil's 'Boiling Point' Studio and worked for several weeks in the summer of 1980 on the recordings that were to become 'Huh?'
Pete was writing a lot of songs by now and one of his songs is pivotal to the album ('Superella'). He sang lead vocals on this for the first time and on another song as well. I was still writing a lot of songs and also collaborating with Pete and Gordon who was writing as well. So we had lots of songs and another drummer called Joe but still no concept. It was only when I was compiling the 'Extinction 1979-82' CD that I realised just what the concept was and that we'd not understood what we'd made with 'Huh?'
The project was only finally completed with 'Little Russia' which was a song that I wrote the year after we'd finished 'Huh?' but sums up the album's concept. The 'ThreeE.P.' tracks from the same period also dovetail nicely into the work. We'd all been living through the horrors of Mrs. Thatcher's 1980's Britain. These were oppressive, depressing, hopeless times when people's only escape was through the screen of a television, a disc on the record player or the intervention of a super hero maybe ...this was a job for 'Superella' though we, now know, that 'she' never came...

 

Christopher Sidwell's Crokodile Tears [various spellings, lovely music] has seen around since 1984: his bio since then, photos, and loads of music for sale and download are all at myspace.com/crokodiletears

Cassettes by the Digital Dinosaurs: Earpop, New Needles, The Bedroom Tapes, Final Touch, Three.E.P., The Hit Singles Collection, It's Another Fine Mess from the Digital Dinosaurs, When Again Men?...and Huh?:

The Digital Dinosaurs also appeared on"Angst in my Pants" double EP on the Instant Automatons' Deleted label and on countless cassette compilations from 1979-1983 or so...