Malefactor, Ade

Malefactor, Ade
Studio album by The Red Crayola
Released	1989
Recorded	1986
Studio
Label	Glass
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Track listing

Side one

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Extremism"	2:20
2.	"Baby Jesus Frog"	2:19
3.	"Blue Jeans"	1:08
4.	"Steve McQueen's Garden"	2:12
5.	"Colour Theory, No. 4"	2:24
6.	"Franz Von Assisi"	3:19
7.	"Sex Machine"	1:23
8.	"The Coaster"	2:39
9.	"Break a Leg"	2:23
10.	"T.B. - Tissues"	2:37
11.	"Dope"	1:11

Side two

No.	Title	Length
1.	"The Alma Fanfare"	2:36
2.	"Colour Theory, No. 3"	4:22

Background / Disco Doubt

Potential cover of Disco Doubt

The material on Malefactor, Ade was written and recorded in 1986 for an unreleased LP called Disco Doubt. The lyrics for the 33 songs were published in the book Gorki & Co. / 33 Songs the same year.

Some of Werner Büttner's exhibition catalogs list Disco Doubt as a Mayo Thompson album: "Werner Büttner und Albert Oehlen, Mayo Thompson, Disco Doubt, LP, 1986."

In 1987, a song Disco Death was included on the soundtrack for the film The Last of England.

In 2020, engineer Matthias Schuester posted an unreleased song from the session: Jimmy Silk. The song was later reworked into "Jimmy Silk/Supper Be Ready Medley".

Mayo Thompson

The material from which it came, the Disco Doubt tapes, were recorded in a day. Malefactor is a cull, and not too tampered with after the fact. That’s how we sounded. It was fun. Albert Oehlen, Werner Büttner and I had written thirty-three lyrics one night, the next we rented a drum machine, borrowed a guitar or two and some other stuff – we had a harmonica. We booked Matthias Schuester’s studio in Hamburg and bashed it down, hard. The fun in such cases comes from solving problems on the fly, improvising solutions, sorting each track in terms of its particular character, and, not least, bouncing ideas at one another. Their being Germans and my being Texan contributed to the exquisite sense of culture clash. In relation to English language driven popular music expression it offers a slightly tweaked view. It has an edgy, live feel, however deeply etherized the patients ultimately were.

Malefactor, Ade was released in 1989.

Reviews

Testcard

1998

Thomas Groetz

Malefactor, ade war durch seinen starken Bezug zu den Vorlieben und Obsessionen der bildenden Künstler keine große Popularität beschieden. Ein begrenzter Bezugsrahmen spricht auch aus der folgenden RED KRAYOLA-Platte, eine Single, die auf dem Cover Mayo Thompson ähnlich wie auf Malefactor, ade in der beengten Sphäre eines Zimmers abbildet: in der Woh-nung, der soziokulturellen Keimzelle und dem primären Zielort der Kunst, dort wo die Bilder an den Wänden hängen und die Schallplatten zu Gehör kom-men. Die auf Albert Oehlens Privat-Label „Leiter-wagen"-Records erschienene 7" vom Anfang der 90er Jahre, die wiederum Texte aus der Sammlung in Gorky & Co. vertont, ist das letzte klangliche Dokument von Mayo Thompsons Aufenthalt in der Bundesrepublik.