Video featuring John & Norman Perry, from 2002. Courtesy of NJRMSK, video production credit to Steen Magill.
A great singer songwriter from the Ballymena area with a long history of playing his own original material in bars and clubs around Ireland and the UK.
From a live recording session in the world famous Homestead Studios in Randalstown, N.I. NJRMSK offers THREE Free tracks from the Off the cuff album from 2002 to listen to.
Marthadog has a complex style of metal, fused with punk mainly with traces of jazz and classical scales interlaced with random injections of freestyle resetting. Far away from your typical guitar school, the style was formulated with the combination of a militarised approach to riffing and bridging riffs coming from Johns side and a more cruising down the coast road in a convertible corvette on a beautiful day, smoking a big one coming from the Ronnies side. The aim was mostly to play each phrase slightly differently from the last time and to keep trying to create new ways of enhancing new and old riffs as they emerged during practice sessions.
MARTHADOG, the concept, was that of John Perry. The concept being, to make guitar riffs that seemed incredibly difficult to play, forged into the raw Marshall sound. The concept led John to write many lyrics and accumulate a huge amount of riffs and entire segments of music that could be linked in any configuration. A few years into the project and through a couple of friends, John was introduced to Ronnie who was very much into the same styles of music. They played regularly until about 1998 or thereabouts and then less often for another couple of years.
After trying a few drummers and a couple of bass players, who didn't really get into it, the momentum fell away from the projects at hand. They finally got a bit of equipment for recording and producing their own tracks in 2009. They spent a few hours a week for a couple of months trying to rework many of the old ideas and getting some tracks down. By 2010 there was an EP released through Tunecore on all digital platforms and also in hard copy. Rough and ready but it was done. Title track DESTRUCTIVORES from their forthcoming album and the 2010 EP is free to download.
In 2002 John formed another band called THE dead badgers of which Ronnie was also part of, in an attempt to reinvent his own style and rework some old ideas and then mix them up with local talent from various age groups and backgrounds.
Courtesy of MARTHADOG
THE dead badgers and the label FIRSTCUTSRECORDS was conceived and set up one smokey afternoon in August 2002 by the founder of Marthadog Music 1989, guitarist John Perry along with poet, writer, singer songwriter and comedian, William McCullough.
The First Idea was to take a few "heads" from the local music scene in their home town and record random moments of brilliance that may occur under the right environmental conditions for these "shy when sober, genius'". Well needless to say, it was much more difficult to capture the goods than they had anticipated. Subsequently the two ploughed on through regardless, and with the help of other core members they were continually creating material and ideas for the project. After ten years worth of capturing moments on brilliance, they hit the cutting room like a pair of lame cows and created the album Sublimation Station.
Here are some links to some of those tracks.