Am I Barry Pyramid?

Kettlecup Is Dead

As has been noted elsewhere, Firepower caused serious relationship problems for both members. Put simply they were both living with their relationship partners when the record was made but this was not the case when it came time to record the follow up. Gary's partner had kicked him out and Lee's had decided to move back to Wales leaving Lee in need of a lodger's rent to help pay the mortgage.

So when Gareth came home from Australia it made sense for the members to live together for the first time. They lived together and worked together to make Cultural Wasteland using samples from the petrol station tapes and the sounds they had recorded during the Ford Laser trip. It didn't take long and they enjoyed listening to it as it reminded them of the road trip. They kept the tape sleeves and the map to make the artwork for the CD but they didn't get around to doing this until years later when they finally sold the only copy.

Jam Factory Website entry for Cultural Wasteland:
Kettlecup Corporation's Lee Cabinet and Gary Money take you on a journey around New South Wales, Australia in a rented Ford Laser! This "synthetic mix album" is an entirely loop based production, where little chunks of music from tapes bought in N.S.W.'s service stations are crashed into recordings made by the duo during the journey. Lo tech and arranged and produced over a two week period almost a year after the original journey's completion Cultural Wasteland sounds like nothing else on earth. Often cited as their personal favourite, it's not a mix album and yet contains not one original note or beat.

Ever since the members had started making music together Lee had delighted in exclaiming "We're gonna be rich" every time they completed a track or completed an element of a track or even if they just had an idea that they agreed on. He talked about money a lot either humorously or delusionally and eventually started to refer to his fellow member as Gary Money enthusing to anyone who would listen: "Gary Money gonna make us rich".

When it came time for Gary to return the compliment and generate a new identity for Lee he felt like he had only one option. For the last three weekends straight Lee had been building an "arcade cabinet" to the exclusion of virtually all other activities other than those necessary for survival. The obsession had started some time earlier when he had received an interesting .exe file via a random email much like he had received ACID via email a few months before that. MAME was a simple way to play old arcade games on a PC and at first nobody who saw it in action could quite believe that it existed. Suddenly it was possible for Lee to play all the games that had preoccupied him in the Seventies and Eighties. Pac Man, Space Invaders, Defender, Galaxians, Phoenix, Scramble, Q*Bert and basically any you could think of. Not content with collecting and playing them Lee became one of the country's original wave of "cabinetists", researching the different steps required to create a homemade arcade cabinet on which to run MAME. He found a set of plans and also online providers of joysticks, buttons, coin doors and everything else needed to live the cabinet dream. He bought two very large pieces of Contiboard at B&Q and found that they would not fit in his car. Luckily B&Q were willing to cut them in half for free and also sell him a few bits and pieces that might be enough to fix them all back together once they were in the house.

Once assembled (three weeks later) the cabinet was miles too big, despite following the plans to the letter it was much bigger than a real arcade cabinet. Lee had had enough of fucking about with the cabinet and abandoned the plans for the joystick, buttons, coin door etc. He also abandoned his plan to include a monitor behind plexiglass like a real arcade cabinet and preferred to widen the cabinet even more than before so he could use it for his TV and his existing Sega Dreamcast and Atari Jaguar games consoles. Unfortunately he could not leave it at that and suddenly decided it was necessary to collect every games console he could think of, starting with an NES and a Gamecube. He decided to buy the prohibitively expensive Panasonic Q version of the Gamecube which could play Gamecube games and DVDs, but unfortunately it could only play Japanese Gamecube games and Japanese DVDs which were hard to come by and of course also all in Japanese. He also needed a special NTSC to PAL video converter that required its own power supply and was very unreliable. Finally he needed a large, heavy, expensive step down converter to run the 110v system on UK mains power. All in all the project was a right old mess, and Lee alone could not see this.