The most useful fact about Brigandage might be etymological: the name means the practice of armed banditry, which suits a band that spent the early 1980s refusing to settle into any single lineup, sound or scene.
The band formed in London around 1982, fronted by Michelle. By February 1983 they had a John Peel session behind them and had been swept into the positive punk feature that Richard North wrote for the NME that month, a piece now widely credited with giving the emerging goth scene its first name. The attention split the group almost immediately, and the original line-up dissolved within months.
What happened next says more about Brigandage than the Peel session did.
Michelle rebuilt the band around Richard North himself, who had written about the scene before he ever played in it and now took up bass under his own name, Richard Cabut. Des Connolly joined on drums, with Glen Cahalin completing the line-up on guitar. The reformed group had no interest in chasing a label deal. They ran their own imprint, Fuck Off Records, and in 1984 used it to put out F.Y.M., a thirteen-track cassette built entirely from live tapes rather than studio sessions.
It sounds like it was recorded on whatever was lying around. Vocals fight the mix, the crowd bleeds into the guitar, and half the tracklist is barely legible under the hiss. None of that undersells the band; if anything the static makes the performances more convincing, proof the songs held up without a producer smoothing anything over. Fragile, carried by Cabut's driving basslines, is the exception: cleaner than the rest and infectious enough that it had already stood out as a highlight of that same Peel session two years earlier.
Art Of Stealing sits on the same tape and could pass for the collection's title track in spirit. The whole project reads as an attempt to reclaim some urgency from a scene that was fast curdling into a fashion. That instinct set Brigandage apart from the theatrics going on around them: where bands like Sex Gang Children built a look around doom, Brigandage stayed spiky and confrontational rather than spooky.
Two years on, the band signed briefly to Gung Ho Records for the more considered mini-album Pretty Funny Thing, with Cabut co-writing Angel of Vengeance. But F.Y.M. remains the more honest record of what Brigandage actually were on a given night in 1984: loud, undocumented by design, and entirely uninterested in sounding like anyone's idea of goth.
