In 1986, she played a small acting role in Demme’s Something Wild this was to be Su Tissue’s final public appearance. Su went on to study piano at Berkley College of Music and released a small collection of mostly instrumental sagas full of hypnotic, repetitive piano sequences and faint vocals. Condensed from LP to EP, ‘Baby’ veered toward the realms of dance and funk-infused rock shortly after its release in 1983, Suburban Lawns disbanded and subsequently dwindled in mainstream musical memory. By the time they entered the studio once more to record their follow-up, fissures had emerged and guitarist John Geur had left the group. Alongside the song’s bizarre refrain “I’m a janitor, oh my genitals”, it is Su Tissue’s vocal style which establishes ‘Janitor’ as the group’s most memorable song her voice lurching from deep, Nico-like warbling to saccharine squeaks.ĭespite supporting the likes of Black Flag, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Fall, Lydia Lunch and The Clash, Suburban Lawns’ album failed to propel the band outside of their native California. The two-minute-long track titled ‘Intellectual Rock’ is an apt synopsis for the band themselves an outfit of art school absurdity, ricocheting between sanguine New Wave and Gun Club-esque surf rock (especially so when Vex Billingsgate is the principal singer.) Yet the instances when Su Tissue leaves the keyboard or bass and takes to the fore remain the most fascinating. A masterwork of rollicking songs, Suburban Lawns’ self-titled debut LP is as raw as it is expansive. The Long Beach-based quintet went on to release their first (and final) album in 1981 on IRS. Sounding as if The Beach Boys were unceremoniously submerged in the deadpan surrealism of Devo, Gidget meets a grizzly end in a fidget of twitching guitars (as visualised in the accompanying music video by Jonathan Demme, who went on to direct Silence of the Lambs.) Suburban Lawns’ debut usurped the character of Gidget (a fictional 1950s surfing teen heroine) to a high-tempo tale of juvenile delinquency. Su Tissue, Frankie Ennui, Chuck Roast, John Geur and Vex Billingsgate (the latter’s pseudonym named after England’s Billingsgate fish market) self-released their first single, ‘Gidget Goes to Hell’ on their own Suburban Industrial label in 1979. ![]() Following alterations in the line-up and band name, (previous iterations were called ‘Art Attack’ and ‘The Fabulons’) Suburban Lawns emerged in 1978, set to disrupt their namesake provincial monotony with lurching guitar lines and sci-fi sarcasm. The band that would become Suburban Lawns arose when Minneapolis-born Sue McLane (later to pick up her Kleenex-associated alias) joined William Ranson’s group after meeting at Cal-Arts School in the late 70s. ![]() Often lamented as the pinnacle of post-punk amnesia the incendiary absurdity of Suburban Lawns was all but neglected were it not for an enduring curiosity concerning the “disappearance” of Su Tissue, the group’s part-singer, part-bassist and part-keyboardist. The first instalment in our series investigating overlooked or obscured figures in musical history examines the enigmatic Su Tissue of LA post-punkers Suburban Lawns.
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