The Damien Bevan Discography Iceberg

This is a by no means exhaustive list of daz’s releases. it’s actually rather difficult to put together a complete complete list, given the scattershot nature of his releases, across a lot of different platforms, many rapidly deleted, some of unaccountable sources. This is more of a personal reflection on the work of an artist that probably shaped too much of my life, for too long, lol. I spent the best part of three years following hellborn on tour in my early 20s, where i became known for live blogging their tour-of-nowhere in 2041. you can read more about that and tcp-am here. This is part discography, part band history, part personal history. it is forever under construction. it may change any time. thats the hellborn ethos. enjoy. so, without further ado, let’s descend down the iceberg.

cheers

-- ally

The Riot Tapes (2036-2039)

Maybe not so much now, but at the time, this was the way a lot of people were introduced to daz & hellborn. If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that Hellborn started life as a riot band. Three scruffy kids a couple years out of juvie, barely gone 20, equiped with a microphone, a knockoff strat from ali express, a drum machine, and the ability to run like fuck when required. In this era, they were playing a lot of covers, improvised a lot and hadn’t developed a lot of material with much serious intent. But it’s a lot of fun! Punk classics, guest musicians joining them frequently for gigs. I paticulary recommend the DC ’37 tape where some marching band kids joined them at the march on capitol hill. I think it was about a senator fucking a kid and/or owning half the rental homes in the county or something. A lot was going on.

It was mostly keyboardist Kit on lead vocals in these days, a lot of chanted Oi! style vocals, lots of call and response and singalong stuff. There wasn’t much metal in it at this point. Daz would usually show up with an ancient and heavily stickerbombed MPC Live, sometimes they’d have something weirder, like a set of plastic buckets and sprite bottles. Chaz dutifully stood in the back playing the guitar as he always would. Frankly, I’ve never known a lead guitarist with less frontman energy, but satan below knows the band would have fallen apart (way sooner) without him. I digress.

Anyway, viral videos and fan recordings aside, daz made sure a lot of these got recorded with clean audio, and often to unusual mediums. “a record should be made, but only for those that really want it, and i want them to think about why they want it.”. There were distributed in various weird ways. There was a hotline you could call that would put a cassette tape in a lockbox in London that you could go retrieve, if you dared. They would hand them out on betamax tapes when they played gigs. There’s rumours of wax cylinders somewhere. I think there was some sort of statement being made about how dumb it was to try and capture a moment that was alive and bottle it, as if it’ll mean the same thing. I’m sure that’s how Daz would explain it.

The Hellborn Albums (2038-2045)

(2038) - we didn’t ask for this!!

Hot off the heels of their viral video stardom, the hellborn boys were fresh out of money. Some say they splurged all their ko-fi donations on increasingly lavish stunts, some say it was on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Some say that people were protesting for a reason, and that’s because life was unaffordable for the average person, and how the fuck were three troubled 20 somethings living in hostels meant to make ends meet on the donations of strangers. Whatever the truth, under some amount of financial pressure, they agreed to do an album that could be put on streaming, sell on £45 limited edition vinyl copies that will never get played and appear on playlists, presumably.

So, in a word, they did the whole thing rather sarcastically, as was always their want. Often misunderstood as a jumble of covers and a low-effort cash in, I would argue that the early signs of daz’s eclectic genius and a big part of his message on here. Many genres are attempted. Three young punks putting a middle finger up to the idea of what a punk record should be. It’s more of a jumble sale than an album, so let’s just pick some highlights.

1 - Who Do You Think We Are Mate? (2:28)

This very simple three chord punk tune pretends it’s setting the tone, with some simple verses reminescent of the punk of yore, about being the unlistened to working class. but that illusion is torn about 40 seconds in, with daz yelling “you think that’s all we got? you THINK that’s all we got?”, and then we’re into screams territory.

We are no longer to be ignored. We are the barbarians at the gate, led by the sum total of human knowledge, and upon our cry your baptism into the church of capital shall be reversed, we are the demons that will send you to hell, where you shall burn.

As best as I can make out. Cool. Then there’s that neat jazzy signoff at the end from Chaz. Did I mention how good chaz is on this album? I always wish we heard more of his ideas.

3 -Suburban Home (1:45)

A cover of the Descendents classic. not much to say about this one other than it had to be here, being an anthem of the rent riots and all. I think daz was always annoyed that many people misunderstood how sarcastic it was meant to be. The suburban home was not meant to be the aspiration. As such, this studio version is extra hammy. Extra sarcastic. Dripping with it. It’s fun.

9 -I Have Real And Serious Intent To Kill The President Of The United States of America (2:45)

Ive heard he was ripping off some ancient tv show here, but this was basically put on the end of the album as daz’s eternal test of “you have to really want it” to the label. a simple bossa nova beat from a shitty home organ leads in, with jazzy chords and improvization. The group sing in a faltering close harmony, instructions on how to manufacture mustard gas, leaked statements from CIA operatives involved in dismantling democracy in the global south and a 5-step guide to disarming and disabling a riot cop. Love this.

(2040) - get killed, die and come back worse!

Read on the sleeve as “Hellborn get killed, die and come back worse!”, obviously. Often simply refered to as DACW for expediency. By this time this was being recorded, the hellborn boys were spending less time at protests and more often playing illicit gigs in the woods and spending a lot more time “in the studio” - which usually just meant “kit’s converted campervan at 4am in the morning, parked in a layby somewhere in the Cotswolds.”.

During the production of this album, they relentlessly toured the UK and mainland Europe alike, attending freeparties and throwing their own gigs in obscure locations. Having phoned in an album, Daz was now very convinced that they could do it properly. Intentionally. They needed to go everywhere, they needed away from the profane city, they needed to connect with the people of the land. I’m sure that’s how he’d explain it. And by this point, the demonic part of their identity was starting to become more prominent, and the sound on this album, whilst still ecclectic definitely tilted in a thrashier, harder direction, with more deathgrowl vocals and longer, moodier tracks.

The punk spirit very much lived on, however. There were no neumman preamps and ssl EQs or 32 channel input setups here. There was laptops, behringer bullshit, and drumkits being set up in drainage underpasses. Daz would say that they were trying to capture the sounds of the earth, dying and decaying along with their music. To imbue it with it.

The result was an album that represents the best of their early period. A blend of righteous anger, appeals to return to a way of living where we rely on each other instead of kissing the ass of the dollar, the masterful rhythmic, moody thump of chaz’s tricked out £50 guitar, ran through a shoegazing arsenal of pedals, the blasts of anger giving way to long, eerie stretches of folorn synthesizer wailing.

Personal picks: the slow melting, electronic thud of “hope it was worth it”, “earth song ii” with its ridiculous and totally uncleared MJ sample, and ofc “the devil wears aussiebum”.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard this album. It’s the band working together at its best, and the last one that was really funny in a conventional sense. real heads will know there’s plenty of laughs to be had later on, just weirder ones.

(2042) - in the thickets and the hollows

Titled after the opening line of a short story by novelist M. Griff, this was the album where control over the band by Damien was at its height and it shows. The themes of fighting goverments, landlords and cops had really given way to fighting something larger, the very system of the false god, that had shackled the lands and the people along with it. A whole cosmology is ushered in in its 90 minute run time (nearly twice as long as either of the previou), telling the story of how they, the spirits of the land were twisted into rageful, vengeful demons as their way of life was destroyed and replaced with the falsities of mammon and the One False God, and how whilst now lost, their ultimate victory was short at hand. He would later refer to this album in an interview as “a manic episode he’d gladly relive, never have i ever been so close to the truth”. make of that what you will.

Content wise, well, again, if you’re reading this, you’ve heard it. Well, the title track at least. Part story, part manifesto, part myth, the sarcastic tone of the first two albums is harder to find here. A tale that begins with the pounding of taiko drums, crescendos with 200bpm blast beats and finishes with a choral track recorded by a choir of hellspawn lamenting the weeping earth as it bleeds its last drop of vitae, it’s a whirlwind tour de force of earthen forces fighting a relentless, techno-spirtual monster, with the music of the earth being represented by acoustic drumlines, pounding bass and gutteral growls, the evil of mammon represented by glitzy production, close harmonies and the eerie wall of sound provided by kit’s now absolutely massive modular setup.

It’s no secret that things started to get a little weird with the band during the iTaH sessions. They were spending less time in normal society, and they had a caravan of followers following them around like they were the Grateful Fuckin’ Dead. You could say it was a little culty. I should know, I was there. Damien was rarely seen without his demon regalia, and it was during this time he got the horns and canines. He says they were done roadside, but it was common knowledge at the time amongst the hellspawn that he disappeared off to south east asia to get them done at a clinic.

While true that this album was very much under the creative direction of “damien morningstar” (yeah) i can personally attest that kit and chaz were still very much onboard in this era, at least publically. Some say that they’d never really been in on the whole Ascendant Earthspirit, Rise of Mammon thing that Daz spent so much time posting about, but really, no - i spent a fair bit of time talking to the band in this era and they really seemed sincere about the mission too. perhaps they were just enthralled in the performance. perhaps they were too busy fucking each other to care. hard to tell. theatre kids, man.

Whilst a lot of the material was recorded in their traditional backyard fashion, making use of real world environments for the parts representing Gaia, there was actual studio time was used, especially to play the parts of “mammon”, he wanted to make actual original glitzy kpop style songs to spar against and sample and warp. the “screenshot of a screenshot” technique, he’d call it. He would hire producers and singers by the hour and waste time lecturing them, hurrying them through takes and giving them impossible directions, imitating the impossible demands of capitalism, completely in character.

So the whole thing was a pretty big tone shift from their early work, and it certainly divided fans at the time. the die hard hellspawn like myself lived for it though, it really felt at the time like we were part of a grand movement that was going to win. there was a lot of anger about the rent reforms not having gone far enough, millions were unemployed still, and it really felt like everyone had given up on building a world that was structurally better. the fun had gone, and the fire was in. and this was the fire me and many others like me needed at the time to believe, on a cosmic level, that the great downtrodden could have their day in the sun. Maybe we still can.

(2043) - charliehorse

Over the 2 years spent recording iTaH, Hellborn became as much a microcult as they were an experimental punkcore band. They had basically been on tour since 2040 at this point, and whilst im pretty sure Daz thought it was going to last forever, during the post iTaH tour, it was starting to wear a little thin on the other two. Damien had been making many proclamations about iTaH being the cumilation of their mission, after which whatever they had been looking for on their 4 year long tour would be found, and they would be able to rest, returning to a world changed in their wake.

So Kit & Chaz went back to Southampton, and as you may have guessed, Daz didn’t want to stop, and would in fact, be “flooding the zone” with even more ambitious music, that reached even deeper, even further, which would be impossible to ignore, he would create a movement so large it would be overwhelming to the “christo fascist forces that have raped the lands for millenia.” Daz would later speak of this period as a “manic episode that i probably wouldn’t repeat, but by god mate, i was onto something.”

Largely recorded by Damien and members of his entourage in the deep north of Scotland, which they’d decamped to after an extensive tour of Norway. The sessions were finished off at Kit and Chaz’s home, making this still a hellborn album, but more on that later. Any sense of order amongst the Hellspawn Caravan had disintegrated, and the use of dissociatives, psychadelics, and worse was at an all time high. There was an overdose in the first few months, heroin. Damien took it hard, and it drastically affected the course of the albu,. Remarkably, no one until this point had died as a direct result of the on-tour shenanigans. Many had been arrested at borders, there were lots of nights spent in cells, and there was a garden variety share of mosh pit injuries and broken bones. There was meant to be a rule, that no one put anything in their veins. Pete had joined the hellspawn caravan as it passed through dock in Aberdeen, as an addict in recovery, and hadn’t anywhere else to go. I don’t think anyone was really lucid enough to consider whether or not this was appropriate. We thought we were invincible.

Pete’s death woke me up, and this was the point where i decided it was time to call it a day on caravan life. We were due to stop in Inverness to re-supply, and coming into town, knowing pete’s corpse was black bagged in the back of damien’s vw camper a few cars down, i figured the fun was over, and that i probably wasn’t about to save the world following an increasingly manic and doped up satanist to my death, no matter how much of a musical genius he may have been. i had been talking to some readers of my blog, a few of which I’d gotten close to, one of whom i knew lived there in Inverness. They let me crash on their couch for a few weeks whilst i sorted the next chapter of my life out. They were awesome. they still are. hi there, spousewife. So what happened next i only have second hand accounts of. But from what i heard, the funeral that Daz put on was a shit show. Pete’s family had gotten word, they showed up, there was a fistfight. They didn’t appreciate the satanic rites being read over his burning body, that’s for sure, nor did they appreciate the live animal sacrifice that allegedly took place. Prudes! The audio was of course, all recorded, and the crackling of the pyre and the fight with the family made it into the background of “brown like the earth”.

From there, Daz got it in his head that Pete had been targeted by Mammon, and that if they stood a chance of defeating it, they would need to re-unite the band. So they tracked south. Daz didn’t discuss this plan with Kit & Chaz of course, and Kit & Chaz managed to avoid the topic of their newborn baby girl, so when these two realities met outside their cottage in the quiet hampshire countryside, the results were explosive. At first, Daz was delighted by the child, taking to calling her “Charlie Morningstar” after the fuckin hazbin character. he was convinced that the baby was his. K&C were not exactly impressed by the grubby caravan of helllspawn that had decamped on their nice new five acres, keeping their baby up all day and night. Daz didn’t seem to understand why he wasn’t wanted there. He had in his head that these were his loyal commrades, who had taken a pit stop to have their shared love child, and that they’d not told him straight away because they knew that daz had to continue their important mission. Wheras, what had actually happened, is on several ocassions now, K&C had made it quite clear to Daz that they were done with Hellspawn for now, they’d had their fun, they had a kid now, and they needed to go straight. they were at risk enough from having the baby taken as it was. Damien just didn’t really hear it.

Things came to a head one day when Daz decided he was going to make it up to them by “babysitting” charlie jr, absconding with her to London, taking her to a warehouse gig with a press junket, holding her up there and declaring her to be his daughter, and the future saviour of all mankind. He was not booked to play there. It was not his press junket. What happened next is not entirely clear, but as far as I can surmise, K&C made a frantic trip to pick a passed out damien and the baby up, before the authorities got involved. Not before appearing in their back garden with baseball bats to chase away the remaining hellspawn camped there. Daz was then held there for several days, where they must have made some sort of agreement, as by the end of it, charliehorse was out on streaming, and Daz was in the hands of a mutual aid organisation, in rehab for the ket, amongst other things.

So let’s finally get down to the content. It’s ugly. It’s sloppy. But in a way only Damien Bevan could make work. Continuing the narrative of iTaH, it starts off with “the longhaul”, a purely rhythmic track made from layers of live hand percussion, and a return to the chanted oi! vocals of their early work. Daz would describe it as a “satanic brindisi”. The energy builds through the first half of the record, it’s almost triumphant. this comes crashing down on “brown like the earth”, into a slow sludgy wail, and what follows on side b is 15 minutes of the most technically insane thrash-breakcore you will ever hear. “not anymore bitch” was a track daz had been working on for years (a lot of incomplete demo versions had been circulating already, in late night, quickly deleted uploads), and it was meant to explain everything - and honestly, it kinda does. Perhaps not in the way daz thought it did, but nontheless. A mind melting rise-and-fall of rapid fire chopped breaks, spoken word verses about the impending reckoning that was upon all mankind, it finishes off with a 2 minute loop of baby charlie crying, as damien dispassionately reads out a selection of hatemail he’s received in his comments section.

So… is it good? Yeah, I guess. But I think all the preamble I’ve had to give here should give you an inkling that this is one for people who already like Hellborn, and specfically Daz-run Hellborn. It’s the self indulgent product of a musical genius in the depths of mental illness. If you fuck with that, you may fuck with this. Some people say its their favourite, even.

(2044) - give us money

So, uh, one of the things that happened as a result of the debacle that was the Baby Junket incident was that K&C got control of the hellborn IP and publishing rights, and wanting to clear their name, they set to work bringing the band back to its roots, bringing in one of the more down to earth hellspawn, Rattail, as drummer.

this is more of a hyperpunk record if anything, and some say it shouldn’t be included in hellborn canon at all. i’m on the fence myself. This is very much a return to the tongue and cheek of their early style, with the storyline being: “there is no story anymore. this is a record about real life”. And it sure was. We were back to jibing at politicans, ineffectual liberals and the vapid decadence of western lifestyle. Which really, honestly, by this time, landed kind of hollow. They were married millionaires living in a nice bit of peaceful, leafy, expensive hants. Increasingly, they’d been getting involved in “AES” (Actually Existing Socialism). The real revolution has already happened, yknow, in China, and decadent westerners are too chickenshit to do what needs to be done, and rally around the vanguard. Groan.

Daz didn’t find out about the default judgement giving the band over to K&C until after “give us money” was already up on streaming. He was furious about it, of course, but by this point, he didn’t have a lot of recourse. he had made it a matter of principle never to sue anyone, any more physical violence on his record would land him serious jail time. He would make sure to comment on every single upload of every single track that he had nothing to do with any of it. K&C never responded to any of it, unlike daz, they knew how to quit when they were ahead, lol.

Fans don’t generally acknowledge this or any of the two others that follow it as hellborn albums. I’m not even gonna list the next two here. you can find them if you want. More interesting, is moving on to Damien’s solo work.