8-Eyed Spy

8-Eyed Spy was a late 1970s No Wave/Post-punk band featuring Lydia Lunch, Jim Sclavunos, Pat Irwin, Michael Paumgardhen and George Scott III. They covered the Swamp rock classic "Run Through the Jungle" by Creedence Clearwater Revival and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit". Their music was infectiously rhythmic and visceral, using throbbing bass guitar, lugubrious saxophone playing and Lunch's petulant vocals. The band recorded only briefly, and released a live album. 8-Eyed Spy broke up shortly after the death of bass player George Scott III (1953-1980), who died of a heroin overdose.

The 8-Eyed Spy recordings featured on Lunch's retrospective album Hysterie open with the instrumental track "Swamp" and features the folksy song "Diddy Wah Diddy" (Willie Dixon/Ellas McDaniel) which Lunch adds No Wave effects to by screaming alternated with alienated howling. 8-Eyed Spy was a fusion of Swamp rock and what was at the time, more fashionable No Wave style. In the song "Dead Me, You Beside", Lunch mimics the sharp vocal and lyrical style of No Wave singer Bobby Swope and stop-start "Peter Gunn"-style guitar playing featured in Lunch and Swope's band, Beirut Slump.

Another cover performed by 8-Eyed Spy was "Lightning's Girl" (Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood), sung in a Southern U.S. accent which suggestively states a lover's warning of when her tough boyfriend would return.

Liner notes on the Hysterie compilation describe the "frantic patchwork" of 8-Eyed Spy. The band's motif was an octopus and the 8-Eyed Spy LP cover features a pen and ink drawing of a bohemian man wearing a pork pie hat, suggesting a mid-twentieth century roots musician of South Eastern U.S.A., but not specifying a particular style of music.

At the time of the band's existence, George Scott stated that 8-Eyed Spy referred to the U.S. intelligence nickname for a mid 20th-Century Chinese espionage cadre, one consisting of four men operating in the U.S. The face portrayed on the LP cover represents one of these four. The icon in the lower right of the jacket symbolizes four sets of binoculars looking outward. There are four tiny figures running in the background. George Scott's first band had been called Jack Ruby, which he referred to in his pseudonym on the Lydia Lunch LP Queen Of Siam. The original Jack Ruby's connection to Oswald & conspiracy theories, combined with the idea of Communist spies operating in the U.S. shows a taste for the aesthetics of paranoia, very prevalent at the time of No Wave.

Lunch and Sclavunos later rejoined on Lunch's In Limbo mini LP, with Thurston Moore, Pat Place and Kristian Hoffmann.