Sorcha Dallas

She’s responsible for at least two for the most famous record sleeves of the punk era – Buzzcocks’ 1977 ‘Orgasm Addict’ and the following year’s Magazine album ‘Real Life’ (“Like Goya with lipstick”, in the words of Manchester’s premiere cultural commentator, Dave Haslam). She’s been cited as muse to both Howard Devoto and, most famously, Morrissey (her concert photos of the ex-Smith would later adorn sleeves to 1992’s ‘Your Arsenal’ and its spin-off singles). As a visual artist, she’s filled a Widens classroom full of salt; transformed herself via prosthetic make-up into Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man With No Name’; and performed her own funeral requiem.

Such is Linder Sterling’s curriculum vitae as an accomplished artist, designer and photographer that we could be forgiven for forgetting the other string to her bow as singer and lyricist with Ludus, arguably the most curious band to ever emerge from Manchester’s original punk community.

Contemporaries of Joy Division, Buzzcocks (whom they supported on tour), Magazine and the Fall, Ludus were an extraordinary cult unto themselves. Limtied pressings that, as Sterling recounts, only the diligent could find in obscure reecord shops meant that after disbanding in the mid-80s, Ludus would remain forgotten heroes, sometimes referenced but rarely, if ever, heard.

All of which should change thanks to the recent release of ‘The Damage’, a CD retrospective on LTM which offers an exhilarating primer into the varying sounds and shrieks of Ludus, with sleevenotes from none other than S.P. Morrissey himself.

“It was like opening a time capsule that still had freshness and otherworldliness”, says Linder on first hearing the compilation. “I was surprised at how autobiographical the writing was and how vulnerable the sings sometimes sound. It brought back memories of struggle, discontinuity and anxiety – most of which is missing from pop today.”

For Linder, an attendee at the Sex Pistols’ infamous Manchester Free Trade Hall concert in 1976, the subsequent transition from punk-collage artist of ‘Orgasm Addict’ and her highly collectable ‘Secret Public’ fanzine (co-written with Jon Savage and the second release on the New Hormones label after Buzzcocks’ ‘Spiral Scratch’) to actual punk singer was straightforward. “I couldn’t see any difference between making photomontage and making music,” she recalls. “The principles of montage are fantastically liberating. You find your source imagery, cut it up, reassemble and glue. You can apply this method to most creative processes. Using my voice, writing words and finding musicians was simply the method to produce the raw material for the sound cut-ups. The songs were the glue, and even that we managed to dispense with for a while. Ludus at its most extreme was either a 60-minute improvisation or a three-minute pop song about hormonal victory. It was the triumph of curiosity over anxiety. We were never bored”.

“Singing was liberating,” Linder recalls. “The deeper delving into the possibilities of how many sounds a larynx can make was documented on our ‘Danger Came Smiling’ LP. On that, I did everything but sing. I laughed, cried, screamed and read out diary records of Reichian therapy. It could never be used as background music in wine bars. We were precocious and impatient.”

Though ‘The Damage\ exposes some of Ludus more melodic, post-punk/funk-pop triumphs (the classic ‘My Cherry Is In Sherry’ or their stunning cover of Brigitte Bardot’s ‘Nue Au Soleil’) it was their uncompromising, avant-garde sensibilities – particularly in concert that set them apart from the norm. Gigs were largely improvised, with set-lists reading ‘bass, drums, voice, next number’. “We emptied Cabaret Futura in 20 minutes”, laughs Linder.

It was a notorious show at Manchester’s Hacienda in November 1982, though, which ultimately sealed Ludus’ reputation as confrontational extremists. The venue hierarchy, in particular Factory Records boss Tony Wilson, went “ballistic” when Linder attempted to furnish every table with a paper plate encrusted with a stubbed-out cigarette and a tampon soaked in red ink. The Hacienda management had already got very edgy and withdrawn their ‘Bloody Linder’ cocktail fromt eh abr, Sterling reminisces, and tried to prevent Liz Maylor and Cath Caroll from their determined distribution of chicken innards wrapped in pornography. They were worried that the blood would stain the floor. Nobody, however was prepared for the pièce de résistance as Linder took to the stage in a dress made out of raw meat, under which she’d secreted a black dildo, which she exposed at the end of the performance. “The raw meat dress worked on many levels,” Linder remembers. “It was exquisitely crafted, and used the discarded parts of chickens sewn onto layers of black net. I was vegetarian and didn’t want to buy a dead animal so I used thrown away meat from a restaurant kitchen instead. The worst aspect was the smell. I drenched myself in Dior essence. I wore chicken claws in my French pleat. Only four of us knew what was going to happen. For the first two songs the stage lights were blue and from the audience the meat looked like strange flowers sewn into my dress. It was only as the lights changed that people could see the reality. For me, it was the end result of one too many nights at the Hacienda with its repetitive reels of pornography presiding over the dance floor. Pornography can never be casual without consequence, at least not in my world. Afterwards, the meat, the dildo and the cabaret felt like a full stop in performance.”

Indeed, soon afterwards, Linder and Cardiff-born Ian Devine, the core of the group, relocated to Belgium where Ludus sadly disintegrated. “Belgium seemed to offer escape and sanctuary but the reality was quite different,” she muses. “Ian and I left separately and didn’t talk again for over a decade.” In the interim years, Linder established herself as a professional artist, culminating in 1997’s ‘What Did You Do In The Punk Wars, Mummy?’ retrospective exhibition of record sleeves and collages from 1976-81. She has since continued making more conceptual art and performance pieces under the ‘Linderland’ banner, finally reuniting with Ian Devine on last year’s ‘Clint Eastwood, Clare Offreduccio and Me.’ Issued on the Land label with arts-council funding, its eerie, ambient drones laced with samples from ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ugly’ find Sterling and Devine, to paraphrase Ludus’ 1983 swansong single, still breaking the rules.

Alongside the new Ludus compilation, Linder is preparing herself for further trips down memory lane in 2002 with another exhibition of her punk art at the Mayor gallery in Manchester in conjunction with a book featuring guest essayists such a s Jon Savage and, once again, her reliable old chum Morrissey.

LTM are also planning CD reissues of Ludus’ original studio EPs/albums – ‘The Visit’, ‘The Seduction’, ‘Danger Came Smiling’ – another new collection of BBC sessions, plus that legendary Hacienda show in full. “That whole thing of looking forward and looking back at absolutely the same time,” beams Linder, “it’s amazing the amount of time and energy it takes just dealing with the past.”