Scum

Napalm Death's first album is made of two sides recorded at different times by line-ups with only one musician in common. The twelve songs of side A were played by Nicholas Bullen on bass and vocals, Justin Broadrick on guitar and Mick Harris on drums, and according to the sleeve credits they were recorded and mixed in August 1986 at Rich Bitch, an eight-track studio in Birmingham. The session ran through the night. Shane Embury, not yet in the band, remembers being invited along, together with Earache's Dig Pearson and a couple of members of Head of David. Bullen left Napalm Death soon after side A was finished. Side B, sixteen songs, was recorded at the same studio in May 1987, again according to the sleeve, with Mike Ivory as engineer. Mick Harris is the only musician on both sides: here the singer is Lee Dorrian, the guitarist Bill Steer and the bassist Jim Whiteley. Embury says he was asked to join when Broadrick left but could not bring himself to do it, and that songs he had written with this side in mind, among them "Practise What You Preach", "Mentally Murdered" and "Unchallenged Hate", were put aside until he came in on bass for the next album. The cover painting is by Jeff Walker of Carcass. Earache released the album in 1987 as a 12-inch LP, catalogue number MOSH 3, and on cassette as MOSH 3MC; Decibel gives the month as July. The 28 tracks last about 33 minutes. Not long after the release Whiteley left and Embury joined on bass. John Peel played the band again and again on his BBC Radio 1 show, and Decibel credits that airplay with bringing a new crowd to their gigs. On CD the album first appeared in 1988, paired with its successor From Enslavement to Obliteration on a single disc, Earache MOSH 8CD.