Severed Heads came out of Sydney in 1979. Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright had started an electronic group called Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign, Tom Ellard joined them, and Fielding renamed the whole thing Severed Heads. The name was a ploy: a Sydney radio DJ had a taste for early industrial acts, and a demo tape under that name stood a better chance of getting played.
The early music is built on tape loops and found sound with the occasional conventional instrument dropped in. Ellard is the only person present across two and a half decades of shifting lineups. “Dead Eyes Opened” from 1984 is the track everyone knows, and its remix ten years later did better still.
