Gallon Drunk w/ Derek Raymond"I was Dora Suarez"
1994 (Clawfist) / 2008 (Sartorial)
1. Empire Gate - 28:55
2. Roatta (Dora version) - 12:53
3. The Detective - 02:45
4. Scene of the Crime - 08:46
5. College Hill - 06:50
6. Dora - 04:07
7. Close - 12:46
DL: MP3-VBR(V0)-LAME3.97
By Cathi Unsworth from Wire Magazine (January 2010):
"At the inspired instigation of their friend Geoff Cox, who became the project’s unofficial PR, Johnston and Edwards made an album with the noir writer Derek Raymond, an adaptation of his 1990 book I Was Dora Suarez. The novel was a revelation. Raymond wrote of a London “scoured with vile psychic weather”, a frightening, fracturing city that evinced Margaret Thatcher’s curse: “There is no such thing as society.” His nameless Detective Sergeant worked a grim adjunct of the Met called A14 Unexplained Deaths, tending to the souls of the lost like a grievous, avenging angel. The black-haired girl at the centre of this story was a picture in a book of crime scene photographs that had affected Raymond so deeply he spent the next 18 months constructing the identity of Dora Suarez and, as he put it, taking her out of “that lifeless place”. Johnston, then living off Brick Lane, channelled the score from long walks around the East End, taking particular inspiration from the sounds of Liverpool Street Station. Empathetic sensitivity to the text is reflected in the soundtrack he and Edwards constructed, the sound of the trains forming the opening piano motif, the ominous drones and fractious free jazz squawks and screams that render the atmosphere of terror and decay, bringing the private hells of Suarez, her killer and the DS into focus."
