This Is Serious Mum demo cover art, 1984
From their formation on 30 December 1982 until at least 1988, This Is Serious Mum (later commonly known by their acronym TISM) recorded a series of home demo tapes, commonly referred to as the bedroom recordings, containing a large number of original songs.
The "bedroom recordings", captured on a consumer-grade reel-to-reel tape recorder, were the basis for TISM's earliest releases; although many of the demos have been excerpted on a number of official releases, none have been officially released in their entirety to date (although several were listed in the book The TISM Guide to Little Aesthetics). One later "bedroom tape", recorded in 1996, is also known to exist.
A demo tape simply titled This Is Serious Mum, was circulated in small numbers at TISM's live performance at the University of Melbourne in November 1984, and was reissued on CD, cassette and vinyl by DRW Entertainment and genre b.goode in 2021. To date this remains the only one of TISM's demo tapes to have been released to the public in its entirety.
Various excerpts from the bedroom recordings have appeared on the band's official studio albums over the years, and a handful of tracks from the demos have been included as bonus tracks (sometimes unlisted) on the 1995 box set Collected Recordings 1986-1993. In 2000, twenty-five songs from the bedroom tapes were remastered by Humphrey B. Flaubert and Jock Cheese for A Collection of Bedroom Recordings 1982-1992, a bonus disc accompanying the special edition of the compilation album Best Off.
Further excerpts from the demo tapes (including almost the entirety of the 1985 tape Muggy Climates in My Jockettes) have been released to the public, scattered throughout the catalogue of TISM reissues which began in 2021.
List of This Is Serious Mum bedroom recordings[]
- Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance (1982)
- not to be confused with the 1988 studio album of the same name
- Form and Meaning Reach Ultimate Communion (1983)
- not to be confused with the 1986 mini-album of the same name
- Hooked on Crap (1983)
- It's Novel! It's Unique! It's Shithouse! (1983)
- TISM V – Harshness, Reality, That's What It's All About / We Live in Oil (1984)
- If You Want the Toilet, You're in It (1984)
- Muggy Climates in My Jockettes (1985)
- There's More Men in Children Than Wisdom Knows (1986)
- It's a Screaming World and You're Just Another Screamer (1986)
- The Vic Hugo Experience – Are You Miserable? (1986)
- Tissongs (1987)
- Free Nelson Mandella – With Every Record (1988)
- Three Blake and a Dollar's Worth of Chips (1988)
See also[]
- TISM discography
- This Is Serious Mum (demo tape)
- Collected Recordings 1986-1993
- Best Off
- Punt Road
- The TISM Guide to Little Aesthetics