The Telescopes
Trade Mark of Quality

The Telescopes were the five most notorious rock 'n' roll bastards, straddling the end of the transition decade and the beginning of the nineties. "Were," because their musical journey, still ongoing (!), has followed an almost parabolic path, exploring various musical styles over the years, essentially starting skillfully from youthful noise rebellion, then expanding, extending, and perhaps losing their way, blunting the sharper, edgier angles of their peculiar roughness in favor of a more digestible sound and a more popular appeal.

It happens that over twenty years ago they debuted with the brutal "Taste" (What Goes On Records, 1989), where, following the mold of "Psychocandy" and on the trail of "Sound of Confusion", they redefined and exacerbated the defining features of psychedelia and noise, combining them together and contaminating them with the garage fury of the Stooges and the guitar-spatial one of the Spacemen 3.
In short, they ventured into a territory not easily assignable to a single musical movement, but rather to various genres with a possible common denominator identified in the dirt, the filth of sounds, guitars, the voice, and its impetuous rebellious screams.

If the Velvet Underground and Who, for different aspects, were considered two of the noisiest bands of the sixties (and not only), the Telescopes, in turn, were certainly more babelic than even the Specemen 3, from whom they drew heavily, and even more overwhelming than the flag bearers of the era's sonic schizophrenia, who answered to the much more famous name of Sonic Youth.

So, inspired by such delightful names, after releasing a handful of singles and the solid "Taste", in 1990 they played at the Harlow Square Club the material that was then "collected" in this "Trade Mark of Quality", which indeed seriously seals with the distinctive mark of quality one of their major works.
A blistering concert, whose impetus could be equated, without too much head scratching, to that historical one of MC5 in the reinforced concrete pillar on an indestructible steel beam that is "Kick Out the Jams".

Sure, the crowd doesn't seem too enthusiastic between one track and another, but the crowd can never be trusted too much [...].
This is not only a concert to (re?)discover, but an experience that shakes you from head to toe and disrupts the senses; a cleansing of the auditory canal whose manifesto probably remains what is the definitive version of Perfect Needle - one of the band's first singles, later included in the already mentioned "Taste" -, with its fiery guitar riff destined to be remembered, and Stephen Lawrie obsessively screaming about having THE PERFECT NEEDLE FOR YOU until the euphonious original space-rock version is forgotten. Ah, undoubtedly also worth mentioning is the "punk" charge of the opening There Is No Floor. Goodnight.