About This Site: Cultural Amnesia

Images (top to bottom): 1. CA 1983 © Helen Craig; 2. CA 1983 © Helen Craig: 3. CA 2025 © Vit Hopley

Cultural Amnesia. Postpunk Electronic Ensemble, est. 1980

"What does one say? Cultural Amnesia have never ceased to amaze me with their finely honed songs of innocence and insecticide. Each gleaming tune a button on their hair shirt. There is a raw spirit of experiment, of mis-adventure with emotions, that is almost awkward to listen to. Time shifts and personal twists reveal a complex web of older children, playing with something they know full well is not really for the general public. Using a vocabulary of myths and symbols, along with splintered shards of themselves, caricatures and alter egos weave and parade in drunken 'night on the town' scenarios, in crazy-glass-house confrontations with each other. All life is here. Bitter and sweet. Love, sex behind supermarkets, truth and lies, jealousy and an all-pervading earthy magick. And Death..."
– John Balance, the Ides of March 1983

"One of the UK's "very best tape-culture bands" 
– Electronic Sound magazine, November 2025

"... Cultural Amnesia teeter on the brink of total psychosis. Nine Inch Nails are a lullaby in comparison. The band's three albums, all cassette-only releases, are very difficult to find nowadays, with originals selling on the Net for about 50 Euros … For a moment they are a cyber-Doors, then Joy Division adrift in one of the lower circles of hell, then an evil Tuxedomoon. Paranoia, noise and anxiety, dark-wave and electro-noise, distorted sounds as though emitted from pipes, screaming synthesisers and a rain of static floating through the entangled cables of the digital world-net... This band's message: there is no exit from the abyss."
– The Hidden History of Pop – Top Ten 'Unknowns'", Popbooks, Web Magazine of Popular Culture (Belgrade), March 2005

Well... CA's music may be more various than Popbooks's above very flattering notice evokes, and our means of production have dramatically changed over our 45-year history, but the personnel and the essential approach remain the same...

The focus of this site is the British post-punk/art-music ensemble Cultural Amnesia (Ben Norland, John Peacock, Gerard Greenway), who were first active between 1980 and 1983, during the post-punk years, in what has come to be known as the “cassette culture”, an amateur subculture of music production and circulation that used the Compact Audio Cassette, both largely for recording and as the medium of distribution. Cassette culture, or the “tape scene”, was an extremely extensive, international, development in alternative music making. Most cassette artists, including Cultural Amnesia, had no access to professional studios, but rather recorded largely in their homes, using newly affordable electronic instruments and recording machines. Some people swapped or sold directly their cassette releases, others (such as Cultural Amnesia) worked with small companies. In the UK the scene began to decline with the coming of the middle 1980s.

Cultural Amnesia (CA) were very lucky to work with a young man called Geoff Rushton, who in 1982/3 would change his name to John Balance and form Coil with Peter Christopherson. Geoff acted as the manager and publicist for Cultural Amnesia, on whose behalf he was extremely energetic, and he also wrote a number of songs for the band. Geoff was a central figure in the tape scene due to his editorship of Stabmental fanzine and Cultural Amnesia had the benefit of his contacts, which were second to none.

CA resumed activities in 1998, and culturalamnesia.com was launched in 2003 with the aim of providing full coverage of the history of the band from its inception in 1980 and to document fully our activity and provide information on all those we have worked with or been involved with over the years. The site is our repository and place of collective Cultural Anamnesis. It also includes broader materials relating to the milieu of the cassette culture and aims to serve, to some extent, as a general resource. The site was conceived and executed by John Peacock of the band, and is authored by the three members.

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E-mail: Info@culturalamnesia.com

If you want to keep up to date with all of our output, then please follow us at our Bandcamp page.

A Note on the Index
Entries have been tagged with the below categories. Those that do not have categories are in the great majority individual tracks, and then other miscellaneous entries. The Homepage is our “AtomNoise” logo to the left of all pages. The Index link is to the right of all pages.

Album
Compilation Album, Cultural Amnesia (CA)
EP
Compilation Album, Various
Session
Listing
Band
Company
Genre, Scene
Person
Instrument
Document
Publication
Concept

Iron Banana is Cultural Amnesia’s aspect as a production company, and also acts occasionally as our label, and all productions of the band (music collections, videos, publications) carry an IB catalogue number. IB1 was out first cassette album, Video Rideo (released in June 1981 on Con/ventional Tapes).

culturalamnesia.com. IB4B

Created 22/09/2026