Holy Scum – All We Have is Never

Members of GNOD, Ghold and Dâlek assemble for a brutal broadside against ‘fancy music’

On Valentines Day, 1945, agricultural worker Charles Walton was found brutally murdered in Warwickshire in what appeared to be a ritualistic killing. Rupert Russell’s new film, The Last Sacrifice explores the psychic and cultural impact of this case, suggesting that the still unsolved crime planted the seeds of the notion of a ‘hidden Britain’: an occluded darkness lying beneath our fertile soil. It was this feeling, Russell argues, that birthed the classic era of folk horror cinema, reckoning as it did with the ominous ‘otherside’ of this green and pleasant land.

When noise-rock supergroup Holy Scum decamped to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to record their new album All We Have is Never they were no doubt aware of the area’s unique pre-Christian identity. Home to the neolithic Callanish Stones and the mythic Seonaidh (an ale-guzzling Celtic sea god), the island is rich with strange history. In 1882 a German ship reported the sighting of a forty-metre sea monster in the waters off Lewis’ rugged coastline, cementing the island’s fortean reputation.

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