Sun City Girls Live @ Club Transmediale 2007, images/CTM07_suncitygirls.jpg Options

[samurai.fm]

The trio of Rick and Alan Bishop and Charles Gocher never stay in one place for too long, even while performing. They have been playing together for over twenty-five years, their enormous, impossible to catalogue output is dwarfed by a huge backlog of unreleased material, yet they are constantly on the move – travelling, shape-shifting, and engaging with whatever they encounter. Their rare live appearances are notoriously full of sharp edges, dark corners, obtuse references and obscure ‘folk’ music. They are inspired by the sounds of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as rock, jazz, hardcore, drone – nothing is excluded and the result is… never what you would expect.

In Phoenix, 1980, the Bishop brothers met Charles Gocher on the open-mic scene and together, the three of them perform for the next year (along with other revolving musicians) as The Freeform Orchestra. The next year the Sun City Girls were officially christened in honour of a nearby retirement village, and the first Sun City Girls recording to make it to vinyl, Shutup! was released on the Ominous Clouds anti-nuke compilation. In 1984, their first, eponymous, LP appeared on Placebo. They have gone on to release nearly thirty official albums since then, as well as countless limited edition special pressings, cassettes and CD-Rs. In the early 80s and 90s they were a crucial part of the 'cassette underground'; the now hard-to-find recordings are extremely sought-after.

Sun City Girls live appearances have been sporadic over the years, though if side projects are included it has been more consistent. Their 2004 US tour was greeted with hysterical enthusiasm - in part because the group had not toured there since 1992, though they did visit Japan in 1996.

Also in 2004, the Sun City Girls played in Europe for the first time, at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival near London. They also made a one-show only appearance at the Instal Festival in Glasgow Scotland, where Alan Bishop threw cards and hit balls with hand written messages into the audience, and read aloud from the biography of Pol Pot (while wearing an Osama bin laden T-shirt and brandishing a copy of Mein Kampf). The Sun City Girls performance at Clubtransmediale was their first and now sadly last ever show on continental Europe.

2 weeks after the end of Club Transmediale 2007 Charles Gocher passed away marking their appearance in Berlin as the last the trio would ever make. Here as a tribute to the greatness of Charles and the trio as a whole we present a edit of their performance at CTM07

www.suncitygirls.com