CASSIUS WOLF
& DAS ABS
“Bill puts it down to Carl Jung’s creative energies being focused on Mathew St. The amount of successful bands was certainly disproportionate to the size of the venue.”
Some bands skip the nostalgia and go straight to the source. Cassius Wolf & Das Abs — the project of Cassius Wolf and Don Watson — spent the formative years of their musical lives inside Eric’s, the Liverpool club that functioned less like a venue and more like a pressure cooker for what became one of the most concentrated creative scenes in British music history. Echo & the Bunnymen, OMD, The Teardrop Explodes, Pete Burns, Ian McCulloch — these weren’t influences Cassius and Don absorbed from a distance. They were colleagues, contemporaries, faces at the bar.
Now, with An Afternoon in Bedlam due May 29, the duo are releasing that era’s music on its own terms — restored from early 80s cassette recordings, reinterpreted with contemporary production, and sent out into a world that has been quietly circling back to exactly this kind of sound. The timing, it turns out, was always going to be right. They just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.
“It was a very creatively competitive environment and I think that’s why the music has stood the test of time. Everyone tried to be better than everyone else.”
That studio in the garage is where An Afternoon in Bedlam began to take shape — but the raw material came from much further back. Working at Eric’s in the late 70s and early 80s put Cassius and Don at the centre of something that most people only ever read about afterward.
Roger Eagle’s instinct — that a scene built on originality rather than imitation would outlast anything built on trend — proved correct in ways even he might not have predicted. The cross-pollination with Manchester was part of that story too.
Decades later, those cassette recordings from the early 80s became the foundation of the new album. Hearing them again for the first time in years was its own kind of reckoning.
“It’s like restoring a painting or an old photograph — you have to keep the essence of the original intact or you will lose all its meaning.”
That tension between preservation and renewal runs through the album’s emotional core too. The songs on An Afternoon in Bedlam were written from a very specific place in time — and performing them now, or presenting them now, means carrying that distance.
The reference points for the album span a particular tension — between the melodic discipline of post-punk’s most accessible moments and its most restless, avant-garde edges.
That instinct — that melody and experimentation aren’t opposites — is exactly what defined the best music to come out of Eric’s. It also sits at the heart of what Cassius and Don are calling PCore: a framework for understanding what it means to keep going.
“Being able to release our music at this time has been a liberating experience and so much fun. We don’t have any pressure or expectations.”
It’s a title that earns its weight. There’s something in the combination of spectacle and suffering, of being both inside and outside the chaos, that maps onto what post-punk was always doing at its best — holding a mirror up to the world’s disorder without flinching from it.
