The Decayes were a loose L.A. based experimentalist collective centered around Ron Kane in Southern California.
Excerpt from Gary Steel's AudioCulture profile:
The last Decayes album, Ten Guitars (1983) was only released in New Zealand, and Jayrem boss James Moss can still be heard quietly complaining that it was the worst selling item in his catalogue. Kane turned up in New Zealand in early January 1983, intending to get his latest album pressed here, but finding all the pressing plants closed. Moss agreed to take on the project, and I have to confess that I played a small part in it: helping to “design” the cover. As Kane notes in the liner notes to the 2004 CD reissue of horNetZ, “The cover was designed in one afternoon with my friend, journalist Gary Steel – we were not thinking about anything. The original title of the illustration was ‘Clown Vomit’. For the back cover of the LP, we had some circles left over. We placed them randomly. Years later, I was asked why we put a map of France on the LP cover.”
Explaining the origin of the album’s name, Kane writes: “I asked Gary, ‘what would I have to name an LP to get New Zealanders interested in it?’ He said Ten Guitars, which was a song by Engelbert Humperdinck that was popular among Maoris (New Zealand’s indigenous people). It was our first printed cover!”
See also
