You dig and you dig and you find things. Sometimes you find one of your favorite things!

This band, The Pack, released two singles — one somewhat less impossibly-scarce than the other — and then a 4-track EP with mostly the same songs, and then maybe a couple other things with mostly the same songs. There’s a total of about six songs, some in different versions.

When I say ‘impossibly scarce,’ I mean that I’d rifled through record bins for years in New York and New Jersey, picking up stuff and noticing this unknown thing and that one-off oddity, and then saw a Pack single earlier than the one I’d previously found in someone’s collection in Germany, and freaking scoured England’s record bins, auctions, and set-sale lists to find one — which I eventually did, paying about two dollars for this weird record that nobody especially wanted. This is it, in any case. I eventually sold mine with a huge bunch of other stuff, to pay for college.

Anyway, Kirk Brandon, the singer, later did Theatre of Hate and Spear of Destiny, both of which had some really good songs. The general theme was ripping off the first PiL album, with its heavy guitar and Jim Walker’s drumming. (Walker, a Canadian somewhat adrift in London, soon quit PiL and turned up here and there in a general axis of bands whose members included The Pack.) The drummer here, I think, is Rab Fae Beith, who was later with the UK Subs. Boring bird-watching stuff, anyway. But here’s a super-unseen video.

Personally, I can’t listen to the Kirk Brandon bands much anymore, because he projects a certain grandiose narcissism that I think I was afflicted with (and sympathetic with) in my 20s, but that just makes me cringe now. There’s a vid of the Theatre of Hate song, Westworld, below, and I think it speaks for itself in that respect. Ee-yow.

My self-indulgence for the week. I hope someone else can understand what a nugget this is. Holy God! On YouTube!