
Nash The Slash
DINDISC 1980
A-side: ‘Dead Man’s Curve’
Futuristic one-man band at his theatrical peak.
With his bandaged head, top hat, white dinner suit and impenetrable shades, Nash The Slash looked like a reanimated Biograph Company ‘trick’ film lead. The alter ego of Jeff Plewman, veteran of 70s Toronto progressive rockers FM, the singular Slash’s fortunes shifted from cabaret curiosity to WTF notoriety in 1980 when the world’s first electronic superstar Gary Numan chanced upon his act in a nightclub on the eve of his first Canadian tour. Numan was so bowled over he offered Slash the support slot on the spot. Slash went on to support Numan worldwide on his subsequent Telekon dates, snagging a deal with DinDisc on the way. Its first bloom was the A-side’s relatively restrained take on Jan & Dean’s surf-death anthem ‘Dead Man’s Curve’, B-side ‘Reactor No 2 was much more akin to the head-swirling live Slash experience – a crazed one-man band wildly live-looping a sequence of homemade ‘devices’ long before anyone else had worked out how-to – to conjure a heavy-heavy wall-of-sound that he offset with fizzing theatrical strings, played alternatively on electric violin or mandolin. Omitted from his Steve Hillage-produced UK debut Children Of The Night, ‘Reactor No 2’ echoed the timbre of Plewman’s other creative outlet as a film composer (creating scores for Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, later working with director Bruce McDonald), its foreboding sense of menace matching his noirish name and image to a tee.