Erick Legrand was a barely containable force of nature
whose unruly muse is at full anarchic throttle on this
collection lovingly selected and wrangled by Nina into a truly
startling body of work.
Along with Andrew Weatherall, her creative partner of
over 30 years, Erick figures strongly in Punkadelica!, the
upcoming biography charting Nina’s remarkable life. French-
Algerian, he hailed from the Camden noise scene when they
met at London cultural hotspot the Fortress.
“Erick was a complete lunatic,” laughs Nina. “He was
known as Mad Erick and absolute trouble but I fell for the
guy. He was a complete laugh. There was an instant
connection between the two of us. I knew all the risks. I knew
he had a time bomb in his head and only had a certain amount
of time left but we didn’t know how much. He lived his life to
the absolute max. He didn’t like the side effects of the
treatments he was given so declared, ‘I’m just going to live a
shorter life and enjoy it, and not have nightmares every time I
shut my eyes.’ We had a lot of fun and learnt a hell of a lot
together. I almost married him for his second name; Nina the
Great!
“I gave Andrew open access once he’d got his head around
the whole kind of loop thing. We called it the Akashic Library
of Sound after Madame Blavatsky’s Akashic Record, the
record in the ether that holds all of the information in all
consciousness. It’s what psychics tap into. I would refer to
Erick’s hard drive as the Akashic Sound Library because his
filing was so atrocious you would keep finding more and
more folders. If there was something in a folder labelled
‘Bass’ when you opened it it’d be a load of beats. You’d just
keep finding stuff. It was twenty years of him writing and

making all these loops. He was a great drummer with a
brilliant ear for melodies. Andrew and I had access to all that
music incorporated that, so Erick lived on. I set up his
Bandcamp after he passed.”
Like his metal sculpture garden up in the pair’s old
allotment, this frequently toupee-whisking set provides an
insight into what Nina calls “Erick’s slightly distorted yet
beautiful mind.” Fine-tuned by Nina, each of the fourteen
tracks becomes a kaleidoscopic vignette distilled from Erick’s
hall of mirrors filing chaos, gloriously capturing her late
partner’s unfettered creative juices cranking into overload
from a parallel dimension where musical mutants intertwine
eternally in a Bosch-like frenzy where anything can happen.
Like a teeming nest of emotionally charged circuit
tentacles battling for places in Erick’s ever-shifting sonic
mosaics, the first four tracks alone are enough to present the
sheer scope of the wild musical visions tamed into killer
capsules by Nina. Swooping in on acoustic guitars and hen’s
conkers percussion, ‘Glwadys’ unclogs the mental wet-suit
aboard a mesmerising central motif that shimmers like a light
sabre, highlighting the unashamed hedonism that powers each
track with the tower-toppling force of Godzilla’s stiffie
busting out of its monster thong, headed heavenwards as
strings and brass tones soar and subterranean pleasure sparks
spring back to life.
Igniting through a core acoustic guitar riff initially not
unlike the Stones’ version of Robert Johnson’s ‘Love In Vain’,
‘Petitpooh’ soon gets hijacked by the mischievous ghost of
doomed studio genius Joe Meek in the futuristic space period
when its commercial face manifested in 1962 as the Tornados’
‘Telstar’. Meek’s impulsive inventions pop a cosmic whoopee
cushion under several tracks, including in the mysterioso
space organ that carries ‘Heidi’ until its resonating twangs are

joined by pulsating skyscraper guitars, underpinned by deftly
placed beats.
The brain-twisting ‘Whitney’ could be an ultimate potted
realisation of Erick as multi-tentacled force of nature,
invoking Suicide-like malevolence in the snarling electronic
chain-gang groove, offset by tin can drums, female vocal
injections and guitar-bass pyrotechnics that recall no one as
much as the Birthday Party in Beefheart’s Magic Band
pillaging mode before goosing jazz and ending with an
orgasm – all in three minutes! After this brilliant onslaught the
unexpected becoming the norm remains a liberating strand in
this music’s DNA.
By now the set had become a fiercely unpredictable
experience in itself, ‘Mother’ planting the ‘Telstar’ organ
against a post-punk bass-drums setting lacerated with fuzzed-
out guitar grind that somehow morphs into metronomic
motorik to become a swelling kosmiche mantra. ‘Martin’
starts with a primal guitar riff that sounds like the Stooges
transported to a 1966 San Francisco ballroom and spiking the
Quicksilver Messenger Service with lethal drugs. With |”I hate
this job” and mysterious howl as its hook, the killer stroke
arrives with a rare case of Lou Reed’s “ostrich” guitar style as
heard on the Velvet Underground’s ‘European Son To
Delmore Schwarz’.
Spanish guitar flourishes take ‘Oli’ into Sergio Leone
realms compounded by Mariachi brass, again suitably mauled
and subtly shifted to parade easily into the set’s fever dream.
‘Thierry Bonholm’ reaches deep into the alien’s lunch-box
and pulls out a big rock guitar riff to sit, trouserless and
blinking on a throne surrounded by renegade hiphop break
and the exposed entrails of collapsing concrete infrastructures.
Straddling an enticingly dirty funk rhythm, ‘Utah’ boasts a
magnificent turtle’s head of a bass-line over gathering eastern

flavours that drop-kick the track into the realms of forbidden
ritual. Continuing on Erick’s expansive drum tattoos,
‘Indianna’ introduces Indian sitar textures while displaying a
Nina and Andrew connection through the sensual “dance of
love” clip that appeared on their Fort Beulah series.
Of course there has to be a piece called ‘Nina’, bolstered
by string bass, spy movie brass clip and ham-slapping beats,
taking the album’s journey into spacier pastures, consolidated
by ‘Doc Roc’ flying ‘Broadway’-like piano, lonely planet
Martian boy on the bog ambience and B-movie sci-fi
skirmishes. Slo-mo bass enhances Erick’s hard-nosed funk
and the tourniquet piano-splashed drones that swell on
‘Droog’ - named after a much-missed old doggie and
introducing the subliminal canine presence that has inevitably
impacted on Nina’s work this century. Starting with the ocean
before dissonant guitar figures jostle and grind, ‘Raymond’
brings down the curtain - that must have been fearing for its
life, beautifully following the previous three sets with some of
the most truly original and naturally untethered music to rear
this year.
Uncannily providing a graphic novel soundtrack to the
socio-political turbulence raging in 2022, Mes Amis displays
Erick’s colossal influence on Nina and Andrew Weatherall
while continuing to open the doors to his unique creative
methods and world view. Harnessing these disparate files and
elements into one tour de force album is a proper labour of
love.

Kris ‘Wild Squirrel’ Needs




We all came to London to find ourselves, who we really are, and how to be that person. Eric was one of my co-conspirators, a musical brother and close family member. Our lives would entwine over three decades but our love and respect for one another was never interrupted, OK when we kicked him out the band for a short while, but apart from that.

I first met Eric through various people and bands in Camden, I had driven for bands long enough to be inspired and encouraged into starting the ultimate band that would rock the world. It didn’t, but few do. As many bands start with ambition and drive and very little talent, ours was no different. Our first meetings with Eric were quite abstract and surreal. He didn’t have a kit or a set of sticks but he could go bah bah bah vocally and slap his thighs really fast. That seemed OK to us. He was in.

The next two years were an amphetamine and alcohol induced none stop tour. Not a squat, back of lorry and shady area of a shady pub wasn’t played in. We were pretty bad but that didn’t stop us. Eric was pretty out there and I was known as ‘mad Martin’ so we kind of gelled together. Brothers from another mother.

Our squatting lives in the late 80’s early nineties was full of music and art. Everyone was an artist or in a band, a beautiful time with beautiful energetic people making something out of nothing. Through Eric I met people from all over the world, a kind of euro café of enlightenment.

Around 2002 I met Eric on a chance meeting, he had just got off the Eurostar after trying to a be a Frenchman again in Paris, I was running a youth Project in Islington. When we parted after ten minutes he had rented a room at my house and joined another band I was forming. Our lives were joined at the hip again. For us both this was very natural.

Towards the end I knew we may not have as much time as we’d like together. I’d visit him everywhere and as regularly as I could. Hospital, hospice, hotel, Hackney. Such a forward thinking intelligent man, great at arguing and sometimes picking the wrong side just to have a good row. But Eric was a very private man, liked his space and time to be, Eric. Music drove him and brought us all together.

Martin Willis ( Headcleaner, Tinnitus )