About This Site: Cultural Amnesia

The focus of this site is the British band 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 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 the band’s 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. 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 designed by John Peacock of the band, and is authored by the three members.

If you would like to receive occasional updates on Cultural Amnesia’s activities (new releases, etc.), please join our e-mail list by clicking on the e-mail icon in the top-right of the Homepage.

CA Instagram
CA Facebook
E-mail: Info@culturalamnesia.com

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: IB tba

22/09/2026