3 bands, countless demos and versions of songs. How do you manage to keep going, to want to leave your mark with a recording. To have the pressure on providing the definitive recording. To be there at the start and others have already released stuff who came after you.

The Voidoids music ? "...edgy and spiky. Taut neurotic, perverse and relentless, in its mood of testy despair, his first album was nonetheless riveting look into the world of a figure who'd mated poetry and left field rock action, honing the songs with razorblades." NME 1978

Yeah that just about sums it up!

Love Comes In Spurts / That's All I Know (Right Now) / Don't Die (Shake Records 1980)

Looks like punk...sounds like punk...this is the real McCoy from way back in 1974. Check out Hell on the cover with leathers and spiky hair. Urgent frantic and like nothing you've ever heard before. 'Love comes in spurts....Sometimes it hurts' he intoned and yes it does.

Blank Generation  - Sire 1977

Originally conceived back in 1975 The sublime Blank Generation is one of the classic punk singles of all time and influenced the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant. The connection is obvious but the differences are vast.

While the Pistols lyrics & music offer anger, no ideals and no sense of a future Hell offers us the blank to fill in as we choose. Instead of 'I Belong To The Blank Generation', Hell intended there to be a space where 'Blank' should be. Regardless of the semantics Hell's toon, delivery and look is pure punk. Originally released on the independent Ork Records, it was re-released on Sire in the US and on Stiff in the UK.

 Click to hear clip of 'Blank Generation' 

"I think once my album comes out, Television will just be fuckin' forgotten...Television will just be fuckin' demolished. Because we have everything they have and two hundred percent more. We're a rock'n'roll group, we can do everything they can  but we can also play rock'n'roll." Sounds 23.4.77

Its a mean sounding Hell above but the truth of the matter was the album didn't quite live up to the billing he gave it. Recordings for it were tortuous and reworkings of old songs are always problematic as an artist  because you've heard them so often. Both patchy and brilliant in places.

Blank Generation  - Sire Records 1977

"It follows that his music with the Voidoids should also be suitably nihilistic. It is. Love Comes In Spurts is Hell's love song, with an unmissable double entendre. His voice is shaky, unsure, like an American Vic Goddard. His lyrics however, are sharp, clever and reveal his intensely intelligent mind which is hidden behind the dumb punk exterior.  Hell remains a romantic, albeit a doomed one, throughout and his follow up album Destiny Street is just as good if not better. Guitar supplied by 'virtuoso' and one time Lou Reed guitarist Bob Quinn. An excellent album, punk noise but ethics from somewhere else altogether." From Amazon review.