armpit: leisure & the elderly

As reported by Stefan Neville: "Clayton 'CJA' Noone and Jon 'Sugar Jon' Arcus are some of my oldest and dearest friends. I've been listening to their band Armpit pouring out infinite sweat and toe jams for 20+ years and I still can't work out what Armpit even is. They are the wrongest band I've ever heard. We were all part of the same gang in early 1990s Hamilton, New Zealand. Armpit would always happen in rooms next door. They would keep me awake with the eternal strumming of bad guitars through bad equipment, bottles falling over, people falling over, things catching fire and always lots of giggling. I saw them play at a party once where they were too wasted to plug in their guitar pedals. They wrestled with them giggling for about ten minutes and then gave up. They didn't make a sound but it's one of the greatest concerts I've ever seen. Their recordings are always confusing. They display their deepest awful humanity and their sweet, sweet hearts, all in the same mouthful. Scorched hateful noise, incompetent absurdity, smoochy crooning folk songs with poignant words and brutal sausage fingered editing to highlight the horror and hilarity. Leisure & The Elderly was recorded in Dunedin in the mid-1990s. Jon was doing a nursing foundation course and learned to simulate giving a skinhead a sponge bath. A classmate gave him some of her tortured poetry so Armpit blended it with a nursing textbook and disappeared into the room next door to record the album in one go, ping-ponging recordings with two tape decks." It was originally released on cassette in an edition of just three copies. Edition of 300 copies in a silk-screened sleeve.