The McTells

The McTells formed in 1985 in Hertford UK. With a foot in the shambolic and aggressive sounds of The Fall and Swell Maps, they noisily stood out from a lot of their more soft C-86/noisepop contemporaries at the time. Initially a four-piece comprising Paul Rixon on guitar and vocal, Bill on guitar, Stuart on bass, Mark Flunder from the Television Personalities on stand up drums. Bill later left to form The Big Paintings but the rest of the band continued as a three piece releasing records on Paul's own Bi-Joopiter label. If you don't consider the 80's cassette culture a true DiY form of post-punk folk art, you really need to investigate the Bi-Joopiter discography. Comprising of painstakingly hand colored, bagged, stamped and xeroxed artwork, it truly does lift the medium of cassette-as-art that has carried on into today's aesthetic nether-regions of the resurged cassette culture movement. It is with that in mind that we at Captured Tracks, with the aid of Paul Rixon himself, have done our best to try to create as close a facsimile as possible to those first two McTells cassette reissues on Bi-Joopiter. Consider it a teaser for a more complete vinyl/CD reissue in the near future, we find these releases stand the test of time both on a musical and aesthetic level.