Venus and the Razorblades

  • Venus and the Razorblades
  • Songs from the Sunshine Jungle (Visa) 1978 

After Kim Fowley helped assemble the Runaways, he worked on Venus and the Razorblades, a less stable project along the same lines — finding young Los Angeles punks with promise and fashioning them into a band. Including, variously, guitarist Steven T. (with whom Fowley wrote the group’s material), 14-year-old female wunderkind Dyan Diamond, Roxy Music bassist Sal Maida (sessions only) and others, Venus and the Razorblades managed a short but unsightly career. This posthumous record, cobbled together from miscellaneous tapes Fowley had produced, is their legacy — well-played, noisy-but-safe melodic punk that owes more to California wholesomeness than Bowery decadence.

[Ira Robbins]