According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world’s most foremost authority on verifying facts and achievements, Napalm Death hold the record for the shortest recorded song.
In the time it takes light to travel from the Earth to the Moon or a Zoomer to lose their attention span while watching online ads, the Birmingham grindcore pioneers recorded their shortest song in 1986. It has a running length of just 1.316 seconds.
You Suffer appears on the first half of the band’s 1987 debut Scum. We say first half, because two-thirds of the band who wrote and recorded the first 12 songs – guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist/vocalist Nicholas ‘Nik Napalm’ Bullen – left to pursue other musical interests and university studies before a brand new line-up joined drummer Mick Harris to complete a further 16 songs for the album’s second half.
The first half of Scum was mostly written in the Broadrick’s teenage bedroom in Shard End, Birmingham, where he lived with his mother and step-father. Partly inspired by Oregon crossover thrashers Wehrmacht’s own cough-and-you’ll-miss-it-song, titled E!, Bullen added his lyrics – four words: ‘You suffer, but why?’ – before the trio entered Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham’s Selly Oak in August, 1986.
“I was a barely functioning 15-or-16-year-old during my time in Napalm Death,” Broadrick told Metal Hammer. “Everyone else in the band was two years older, but what I could do prolifically was write music and create songs. I was writing the majority of the music, and Nic was writing pretty much all the lyrics.”
“You Suffer was largely a comedy thing, a one-second song,” Bullen told Decibel magazine in their book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. “It’s ridiculous, but it was hilarious. We played that song in front of 30 local kids, like, every weekend. We played that song 30 times. It was a laugh.”
Sometimes the laughter was directed at the teenage band, rather than with them. But gradually, people began to embrace the Napalm Death’s relentlessly chaotic take on metal and punk.
“People would often come to laugh at us because we were like a kid band who played super-fast,” Broadrick told Skinny Puppy‘s cEvin Key on his podcast. “We were like a laughing stock, you know, but eventually we weren’t – people started taking this quite seriously. We saw people flocking to this sound. I remember thinking, ‘What the fuck is happening here?’”
The cover art of Napalm Death’s debut album Scum, released in 1987 (Image credit: Earache Records)
By the time Scum was released in the summer of 1987, the band’s line-up had solidified to feature Lee Dorrian on vocals, Bill Steer on guitar, Shane Embury on bass, and Harris on drums. The four-piece were invited by John Peel to record the first of several Maida Vale sessions for his BBC Radio 1 show, and the late DJ would later play You Suffer a handful of times during a single show.
“There was a period when we had thrash band after thrash band after thrash band coming in to do Maida Vale sessions,” said Peel. “These bands played pretty hard, full-on music, and they’d been in a tour van for the last two weeks, and you’d walk into their studio and you’d know they’d been working hard, if you know what I mean. Napalm Death was an extraordinary session because the songs were so short. When a song only lasts two seconds you can hardly say to the band, ‘Can you play that again, please, I think a guitar was out of tune.”
During this session, which was broadcast on September 22, 1987, the band performed a slightly longer version of the song, titled You Suffer (Part II).
“There is a bit of a novelty,” said Harris. “Let’s do the shortest, fastest thing you can do. And yeah, there are notes there. People think we just go, ‘Blllp,’ and that’s it. And I believe there’s, like, four notes or something. There’s a lyric, ‘You suffer, but why?’ And it’s played quick, fast and sharp and as tight as we could. We had a bit of reverb on there. It probably made it longer.”
In 1989, the song was given away as a free seven-inch single as part of Earache’s scene-defining Grindcrusher compilation. Backed by the Electro Hippies’ micro-ballad Mega-Armageddon Death Part 3, it became the shortest single ever released, a feat recognised by Guinness Book of Records.
“We didn’t ask for it,” Harris told Decibel. “It just got put in there. We were told, ‘You’ve made the Guinness book of World Records.’ And we were like, ‘Nah, get out of here,’ and yes, there it is. It’s sort of funny, isn’t it? A bit of achievement, I guess.”
When a song only lasts two seconds you can hardly say to the band, ‘Can you play that again please, I think a guitar was out of tune.’
John Peel
Unbelievably, the song was brought to national attention two decades after its release, when current Napalm Death vocalist Mark ‘Barney’ Greenway guested on Labour MP Ed Miliband’s BBC Radio 2 show.
The MP, sitting in for presenter Jeremy Vine, invited Greenway into the studio to talk about the band’s upcoming appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. During the segment, the former Labour leader was given a lesson on how to become a grindcore vocalist.
“I’m going to now take my career into my hands if it’s not already gone down the pan and you’re going to try and help me to sort of do a bit of this extreme metal,” said Miliband, before failing as quickly as the song itself.
The MP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(LouderSound)
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