“NOW HEAR THIS!” Tony Horgan began his review in CU Amiga in January 1993. “LSD’s Jesus on Es is the best music demo ever to hit the Amiga!” The bad news came next: you needed two floppy drives to run it. What you got for the trouble was, in his words, “a non-stop 27 minute rave demo”: a soundtrack of hardcore techno that opens with a few bars of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells before the breakbeat crashes in, and graphics that flash and pulse in time with it all the way through.
Many Amiga demos of the time were a series of effects with a tune behind them. Jesus on E’s was built the other way round, around a continuous mix, with the pictures cut to the music.
Fast facts
- Group: LSD, an English Amiga group.
- Credits: music by Echo; code by Shagratt; graphics by Shagratt, Mark, Pazza and Watchman (credits as listed on Demozoo).
- Released: 24 October 1992, at the Digital Symposium party in Rotherham, England, where it came fifth in the Amiga demo competition.
- Form: a music demo on two disks, lasting nearly half an hour.
Rotherham, October 1992
The Digital Symposium was an Amiga party held on 24 October 1992 at the Rawmarsh Leisure Centre in Rotherham. According to results compiled from party reports in the diskmags Stolen Data and LSD’s own Grapevine, a jury chose the winners rather than a vote of the audience. The jury did not put Jesus on E’s near the top. Anarchy’s Flower Power won the £200 first prize, The Silents’ Enjoy The Silents came second and Jesus on E’s finished fifth.
LSD had published their own disk magazine, Grapevine, since May 1991. Magazine readers came to the demo through a different route: Britain’s public-domain libraries, which copied demos onto disk and sold them by post. 17 Bit Software in Wakefield sold Jesus on E’s as a two-disk set for £3.00 including postage.
The show
Horgan described a soundtrack that “chugs away with loads of hands-in-the-air vocal samples, tons of squidgy techno loops, spine-tingling Omen-style choirs, and a constant supply of new drum loops”. On screen, “Zoo TV-style strobes flash up”, logos come and go, the cartoon character Fat Freddy of the Freak Brothers appears for a split second, and subtitles flash up to match the vocal samples. There are “pulsating, gyrating blobs of colour” and full-screen digitised animation loops of skaters, clubbers and gymnasts. “From start to finish, the music never once gets repetitive, and the graphics are still fresh when it all winds down nearly half an hour later.”
Amiga Format reviewed it in its public-domain demo pages in February 1993. The magazine called it “an incredibly long megademo, featuring flashy graphics synchronised to a powerful rave-style soundtrack”. Rave demos had become popular lately, the reviewer noted, “but this release by LSD beats them all hands down”. Public sources say nothing about how LSD programmed it.
Reputation
The demo sold. In March 1993 Mercury PD’s list of its ten most popular demo disks, printed in Amiga Format, put Jesus on E’s first, ahead of Budbrain’s Megademo. By that June, Amiga Computing was calling it “the now near-legendary dance double-disk demo” when it compared another music disk to it.
It also became a measure for other rave demos. When Amiga Format reviewed Spaceballs’ State of the Art in March 1993, it found the music “quite ravey, but it’s not up to the standard of” Jesus on E’s. In May 1994 Steve Bradley, complaining in the same magazine that few demos held a viewer’s attention, wrote that “few demos match the standards of State of the Art, Jesus On E’s and Nine Fingers.”
A Retro Gamer retrospective in the 2000s said that the demo “changed the look, shape and sound of the scene” and became “the yard stick by which all music demos were measured”. It gave the running time as thirty minutes. The few complaints, it said, were about repetition in the visuals, and it put those down to a misreading: the demo was built as much around the music as around the pictures.
The demo reached another machine in June 1996, when a Spectrum owner converted pictures from it for the 48K ZX Spectrum; see Jesus on E’s (Spectrum).
Sources
- Digital Symposium 1992, party entry on Demozoo, compiled from the party reports in Stolen Data issue 10 and Grapevine issue 13 (web, secondary): date, venue, jury voting, Amiga demo placings and prizes. https://demozoo.org/parties/421/
- Demozoo, production entry for Jesus on E’s (web, secondary): release date and party, credits. https://demozoo.org/productions/112329/
- Demozoo, group entry for LSD (web, secondary): an English-based Amiga group; Grapevine issue 1, May 1991. https://demozoo.org/groups/1503/
- Tony Horgan, PD Scene, CU Amiga, January 1993, p. 150: review of Jesus on E’s (17 Bit Software disk 2268 a+b, £3.00): two drives needed, the 27-minute running time, Tubular Bells, the soundtrack and the graphics.
- PD Demo Zone, Amiga Format issue 43, February 1993: review of Jesus on E’s (NBS disks 13/D9 and 10): “an incredibly long megademo”, “LSD beats them all hands down”.
- PD Demo Zone, Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993: review of State of the Art, comparing its music with Jesus on E’s; Mercury PD’s “Top 10 Demos of the Month”, with Jesus on E’s first.
- Public-domain music disk reviews, Amiga Computing issue 61, June 1993: “the now near-legendary dance double-disk demo”.
- Steve Bradley, feature on public-domain demos, Amiga Format issue 59, May 1994: “few demos match the standards of State of the Art, Jesus On E’s and Nine Fingers.”
- Feature on the Amiga demo scene, Retro Gamer issue 22: “changed the look, shape and sound of the scene”; the thirty-minute running time; LSD’s diskmag Grapevine.