R.I.P. Marlene Marder

Ueli Frey (www.drjazz.ch)

R.I.P. Marlene Marder

Ueli Frey (www.drjazz.ch)

Marlene Marder, guitarist for the great Swiss punk band LiLiPUT/Kleenex, has died, as FACT reports. No cause of death has been reported. Marder was 61.

Marder helped to found Kleenex in Zurich in 1978. The band played sharp, spartan punk rock full of strange melodic turns and otherwordly intensity. They signed to Rough Trade after releasing an EP, and they changed their name to LiLiPUT after the owners of the Kleenex brand threatened to sue in 1979. The band went through some lineup changes, but Marder stayed with them until they broke up in in 1983. And while the band were a strictly word-of-mouth phenomenon in their era, a double-disc reissue of everything they’d recorded, which Kill Rock Stars reissued in the US in 2001, helped keep their influence alive long after the band had broken up.

Below, watch some footage of LiLiPUT/Kleenex performing live.

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