More Unspeakable Confessions of Zodiac Mindwarp

By Emily Carney

If you’re interested in the twee, unchallenging sounds of Arcade Fire and Belle and Sebastian, you may want to stop reading this article now.

The story of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction really starts with Mark Manning, who was a graphic designer working for the UK music magazine Flexipop in the mid-1980s. Manning can best be described as looking like Ché Guevara if Ché decided to wear bandannas, Ray Bans, and join the Hell’s Angels. His look was all about leather, spandex, sunglasses, goatees, and long, dyed-black, heavy metal locks.

Already being an apocalyptic fashion plate, Manning really wanted to be a genuine rock star and to experience the Rock n’ Roll Life, along with the insanity, alcohol abuse, hair spray, fishnet stockings, and everything it entailed. With this idea, he formed Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, UK bastions of sleaze rock. They even had a band member called Evil Bastard.

If you dig sleazy, cheesy guitar riffs and hilariously offensive lyrics, this is your band. The song “Kick Start Me for Love” (1986) features lines like, “I got a rumbling throbbing monster/Snarling beneath my thighs/My motor’s overloaded and me temperature’s started to rise/Jump up here on the back of my seat/You make my engine overheat.”

Of course, this made people all over the UK lose their shit; remember, this was during the era when warning labels started materializing on albums and cassettes, after US political trophy wife Tipper Gore freaked out publicly over the Prince song “Darling Nikki.” Politicians worldwide legitimately wanted to make music sales suffer due to suggestive content. Naturally, anything controversial has the opposite effect upon teenagers and Zodiac Mindwarp became a huge success.

Zodiac Mindwarp took tasteless to even higher heights than Spinal Tap ever could imagine; as a result, Mötley Crüe, who collectively OD’ed and clinically died more times than Courtney Love ever did in her 47 years, became huge fans. The aforementioned US rock band immediately started looking like their UK counterparts in sleaze. The band was then invited on tour with Guns n’ Roses. Many interesting adventures during this time are chronicled in Manning’s book, Fucked by Rock: The Unspeakable Confessions of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction.

In this tome, Manning describes his ascent to fame and how it made him a legitimate psychopath. It is probably one of the greatest rock books ever committed to print. The band was also aided in their ascent to ubiquity by the KLF’s Bill Drummond, which is not surprising. The KLF had many controversial moments of their own, including the times they burned £1 million in a field and stole a large portion of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” for one of their songs.

Although Zodiac Mindwarp’s completely nasty star descended during the early 1990s, when dance-pop (and ultimately “grunge,” although I hate that term) was favored over hair metal, the band left resonances. They are back with a new album called We Are Volsung, which is described by the band’s website as “a celebration in the Norse tradtion” (no idea what that means, but it sounds freakin’ awesome). A 2000 interview with Mark Manning from The Guardian still inspires the most inappropriate giggles ever. At the end of the interview, Manning’s then 14-year old daughter discovers his stash of porn. “It’s my pornography,” he said to his shocked daughter; he turned to the poor journalist and said, “She has no respect for me whatsoever . . . which is how I like it.”

Watch one of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction’s greatest moments, “Elvis Died for You,” in 1987.