Authenticity, meaning it, not ripping your fans off, doing it for the kids – all a bit overrated in my view, give me a cheapo cash-in to buy any day, especially if it comes in a shite cover and I’ve got most of the songs already! Enter: Sex Pistols Flogging A Dead Horse, 1980’s singles collection from a band who only ever made one LP with their proper line-up.
Obviously I’m a highly intelligent, handsome, discerning kind of guy who owns a, much cherished, copy of Never Mind The Bollocks so why did I buy it? Partly because I just love the cynicism at work here, I truly do – bundle up a load of shit, wrap it up in a crappy cover, call it Flogging A Dead Horse for God’s sake! and sit back and let the punters buy it. Well consumer, you could never say you weren’t warned. But the other parts of the equation was to get my hands on two B-sides, ‘No Fun’ and ‘Did You No Wrong’, as well as an urge to just pay homage to the gods!
Because, dear reader, they were fucking gods. Born as a conceptual joke, a vehicle for mischief and shaking up the status quo*, through a completely fortuitous mix of personalities and latent talents they became such an incredible band so quickly, it was like making Semtex by accident by randomly chucking some chemicals together in a lab. They were just too good. I love this about them, it all just combined perfectly, because of Matlock’s song writing abilities, Jones and Cook’s locking together and Rotten’s feral sarcasm, instead of just being McLaren’s little dolls, his agents in the destruction of rock – they simply became ROCK and banged out one of the great rock LPs. Of course the fallout and messiness that followed the split of the original band diluted what had been there, but they were still capable of banging out more than a few good tunes.
I would argue that Flogging A Dead Horse is the best way to get the full rock hit from the Sex Pistols, none of that wussy oddness and sharp corners that distracted from their full-on rock assault**. The first side alone contains their four biggest hitters, ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Holidays In The Sun’, four of my favourite punk/rock songs ever*^ and four quite incredible singles period. The playing, the intensity, the sheer noise of them all. I always hum ‘Holidays In The Sun’ to myself in a totally non-ironic fashion whenever I go on a holiday, umm, in the sun; I can’t help it. But what a track! It’s those goose-stepping feet at the beginning that get me, can there be any more exciting start to a song? From there on in, you just know how great this is going to be.
The singles are interspersed with B-sideiness. I’m no real fan of ‘I Wanna Be Me’, but ‘Did You No Wrong’ is pure dumb rock, set up and punctuated with some real guitar greatness by Steve Jones; I first heard this track on his great 1989 Fire & Gasoline LP with Axl Rose on vocals. Even better though is their six-minute long cover of the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’, which is one of those rare beasts a cover of a song I really like, being even better than the original. Right from the start you get the sense you’re at the start of a rollercoaster, that bit, that lip just before you start to hurtle downwards as Rotten announces,
Right here we go now
A sociology lecture
With a bit of psychology
A bit of neurology
A bit of fuckology
No fun …
Even then you have to wait, Jones’ rebooting of the riff is so vast that it almost needs room to breathe before it crashes down on you. Rotten never, ever sounded so wild, so pained, so vital again as he did on ‘No Fun’, it’s almost frighteningly good at one point as he rages, sneers and screams. Iggy never got halfway close to this. In his autobiography Rotten: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish he mentions how much he liked Iggy but that he found a flippancy about his lyrics he didn’t like, although he doesn’t change the lyrics here, it’s his sheer performance that drags this track over the cliff face. David Goodman just captures a vast, cavernous sound here. No fun? I disagree.
The second side of Flogging A Dead Horse just can’t compete, but given what it’s up against, that’s no disgrace. Whilst I do have a soft spot for Sid’s Eddie Cochran fixation, I was raised on the originals and I’ll stick with them thanks. Sid’s ‘My Way’ is always good, an appallingly egotistical tune given the back alley beating it so richly deserves. I have a lot of time for their angry cover of ‘(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone’, which has another, umm, vicious performance from Rotten^ and ditto the band’s great, poppy post-Rotten single ‘Silly Thing’, which originally had a very rude title indeed.
Overall though my fave track on side two is ‘No One Is Innocent’, train robber Ronnie Biggs’ bow on vocals. The band, effectively Jones and Cook, are absolutely at the top of their game here in this outrage-athon as Biggs lists various horrible folk who need some understanding. It’s crass, there’s a tasteless reference to Nazis^* and the gang vocals would give rise to a whole genre of thrashy terrace-chanting punks who came afterwards^^, and yet .. and yet .. I really like it. There’s something ridiculously English about the whole enterprise, travelling to Rio especially to record vocals from a criminal on the run from British justice.
God save politicians, God save our friends the pigs
God save Idi Amin and god save Ronald Biggs
God save all us sinners, God save your blackest sheep
God save the good samaritan and god save the worthless creep
But that’s enough about the music, I’m a much shallower prospect than that. Jamie Reid designed the cover as cheaply as he could, hiring the cheapest model he could find, keeping all the fonts bland – it’s designed to look like one of those cheapo pop hits LP’s you used to find at the time, with all the original songs replaced by session musicians. Ghastly. And just in case that and the title were a bit too subtle for you the back cover of Flogging A Dead Horse features a (fake) dog turd on a gold disc for Never Mind The Bollocks. If you didn’t get the joke/comment/complex visual metaphor then please, please, just get out of here you freaking knuckle dragger.
I’ll swear I just saw the horse move, a bit.
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*and probably Status Quo.
**which are precisely what elevated Never Mind The Bollocks to greatness.
*^Hey why not run the two words together? we could invent a whole new genre and everywhere I went people would point at me and say, ‘Look daddy, that’s the man who invented Rockpunk’.
^see what I did there?
^*which we’re much more sensitive about today, than we ever were back then just 33 years after the war ended, look at how many UK comedy shows featured men dressed as Nazis (step forwards Monty Python). The past is a very strange country sometimes.
^^to much brain-dead effect.
Sooner or later
You’re gonna listen to Ralph Nader
With those lines in the first song on their debut LP I swooned and fell in love with the Buzzcocks for ever more. I already liked them a lot, there are tribes as-yet-undiscovered in the Burmese interior who can hum at least one of the many cover versions of ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ and what mucky minded (overgrown) teenager doesn’t love to jump about to ‘Orgasm Addict’ in his bed room? This was my first dabble with one of their albums and I picked out Another Music In A Different Kitchen out of a stack of LP’s that my dad was storing for a friend, intrigued by the neat, clean design and colour scheme. Put it on and … this was punk Jim, but not as I knew it up to that point.
Punk was often touted as the end of rock and roll and a Pol Pot style return to year zero, it wasn’t of course. The best and most popular punkers, Sex Pistols, Clash and Ramones to name but three, at their very best just burned away all the impurities in the crucible of their raw punkiosityness and served us up a pure hit of the rock and roll the world was craving. Wonderful stuff and some of my favourite music ever but not new. This was the first punk from ’78 that could fit that bill, another music.
There was no discernible swearing, no reheated and sped up Small Faces riffs, no jokey cover versions, no ham-fisted politics and/or shouting about the cops/anarchy/refusing to tidy up your bedroom. This was spiky, angular, funny, intelligent, very arty and rather arch, owing far more to Television than the Ramones – I wanted in. I know you all have me down as a bit of a Conan figure, but I just adore the way that Pete Shelley keeps all traces of anything macho out of his voice, making sure it all ends up a bit more fey and interesting than anything else around in the scene at the time. Now, add all those qualities to some proper pop smarts and you have the whole package.
‘Fast Cars’ kicks of by quoting their own track, ‘Boredom’ from the Buzzcocks own, legendary, Spiral Scratch EP from the Howard Devoto era of the band*, it’s clever, it signals that Buzzcocks have moved on already and they aren’t going to even let die-hard fans get nostalgic about the last single – onwards! ‘Fast Cars’ comes crashing out of the gates like a, umm, fast car? John Maher’s drumming is absolutely brilliant, propelling the track spasmodically forwards at a rate of knots**, the rest of the band lurching forwards in an effort to catch up, buzzing guitars to the fore. Great song, what better way to show that this really was Another Music In A Different Kitchen, a break with the past, than to yawn at that great rock staple/fantasy, a fast car? 2:16 later and we’re straight into ‘No Reply’, again another brilliant rhythmic workout, two songs into their debut and the band have walloped down their template and reinforced it. I love to pogo to this one, it got played on a punk night I was at once and the whole place just went mad – Steve Diggle (I think) even sneaks in a tiny guitar solo in; take that punk orthodoxy!
You want odd chords, a bored dismissive attitude to doing sex things and an almost claustrophobic wall of sound? well then, ‘You Tear Me Up’ is all yours. Look, I won’t go through every track because it will just get very repetitive reading me going, ace/brilliant/fab/buzzing/fucking great over and over again – both you and the Buzzcocks deserve much better than that. Suffice to say I love their jagged tracks like ‘Sixteen’, their witty punky blasts (‘I Need’) and their poppier more conventional ones like ‘I Don’t Mind’ equally, devotedly. Every single track here just fizzes and, umm, buzzes.
The real jewel in the crown of Another Music In A Different Kitchen, for me at least, is the LP closer ‘Moving Away From The Pulsebeat’, a seven-minute blast of punky exposition fuelled by the band’s love of Can and Krautrock in general^. Again, it all hinges on a brilliant drum rhythm captured perfectly by the producer Martin Rushent, the guitars snap and whine as the track pulses on. It was circulated as a DJ 12″ at the time, it would have taken a pretty assured DJ and a knowledgeable crowd to have gone for that on a night out – by the way, anonymous millionaire benefactors, if you’re listening I’d love one of those for the 1537 archives. ‘… Pulsebeat’ is a mighty, mighty achievement for a bunch of arty oiks from Manchester, tied to a movement where it was considered cooler not to be able to play too well – it just transcends anything else coming out of the UK punk scene at the time. Bonus 1537 points are awarded for the ‘Boredom (Slight Return)’ section at the end of the track and the beeps on the run-out groove of the LP.
Another Music In A Different Kitchen is up there with Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables as the punk LP with the truest and best title. All manner of other interesting music would sprout from and build upon the achievements of the Buzzcocks debut LP. You know what? six months later they’d released an even better album, with an even better Krautrock influenced closing track. Wow.
614 Down.
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*the fact they also play a further snippet towards the end of closing track, is the sort of thing that moves the Fanorama-Lama-Ding -Dong dial mounted prominently on my forehead from ‘Admire’ to ‘Worship’. True story.
**great drummer, you never see John Maher get any/enough credit at all. He could smash a tune forwards, as well as hit some really interesting, technical patterns.
^I’m pretty sure Pete Shelley did the liner notes for a Can compilation album later on.
Christmas, eh? What’s it all about? A time of togetherness, family, the giving and exchanging of Yuletide gifts; a time to be thankful for what we have; a time to gather our loved ones close to us and sing Christian rhyme to celebrate the birth of our redeemer?
Nah, fuck that! We’re going to get pissed and d-e-s-t-r-o-y, before getting into a fist fight in a chip shop and being sick around the back of the pub. Welcome to The Yobs Christmas Album, a true low light of 1980. You like punk? You like swearing? You like Christmas? You want to own a version of ’12 days of Christmas’ that begins ‘On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me / A vibrator with a battery’*? You’ve come to the right place, son. Just please, check your decorum, your early 21st century sensitivity to sexism at the door and make sure you’re not carrying any sense of subtlety about your person, it won’t be required here.
The Yobs were the spoof band set up by the-beloved-by-me-but-hardly-household-names punk group The Boys**, to enable them to belt out daft obscenity-drenched childishness instead of peddling wry, infectious punk songs about boredom and romance; I prefer them in their former mode, but it’s Christmas! This Christmas Album is a mix of bits I find funny, some straight up good tunes, a couple of oddities and a few tracks that were just so far off-beam for 2015 that I had to skip them.
The good? Their pretty straight cover of ‘Silver Bells’, Jim Reeves never sounded so good, likewise their own (?) ‘Another Christmas’ and, my fave, ‘The Ballad Of The Warrington’ – an amusing spoof of all those American country songs, where some poor sod dies and you’re given a meaningful voiceover – this one’s about walking to the pub in the snow, of course. There are more sound effects than in the whole of Pink Floyd’s discography and you have to love the American accent he puts on for the speaky bit. I’ve put the lyrics below so we can all enjoy a global Christmas sing-song together.
Well there’s a blizzard blowin’ hard
And from the Alfred we’ve been barred
And John’s so pissed that he can’t hardly stand.
Listen to that drunken git
‘Cause now he’s being sick
But it’s only a hundred yards to The Warrington!
Yes, it’s only a hundred yards to The Warrington!
You can bet we’re on Tom’s mind
‘Cause it’s nearly closing time.
And pretty soon last orders will be called.
Christ, my balls feel like they’re froze
And there’s numbness in my toes
And it’s only eighty yards to The Warrington!
Yes it’s only eighty yards to The Warrington!
The winds howling hard it seems
And now he’s shit his jeans
I think I’ll have to carry him if I can
John just think about that beer!
It’s only over there!
And it’s only fifty yards to The Warrington!
Yes it’s only fifty yards to The Warrington!
John, get up you drunken git
Don’t just lie there in that fucking shit
I know we’re pissed but we can make it if we try.
Alright, I guess it’s best if we
Stop a fucking while and rest
But it’s only twenty yards to The Warrington!
Yes, it’s only twenty yards to The Warrington!
Late that night the storm was gone
And I found them there alone
He could’ve made it, but he wouldn’t leave old John.
I found them froze in the street
Jack’s boot down John’s teeth.
They were only ten more yards from my house, that is The Warrington!
Yes, they were only ten more yards from The Warrington!
Which really is as complex as this album gets – basically this is for us folks who got a bit intellectually confused by Sex Pistols ‘Frigging In The Rigging’.
Now the bizarre. ‘Doggy’, a 30-second acapella snatch of ‘How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?’, for no adequately explained reason; a synth version of ‘Jingle Bells’ done in a flat Germanic Kraftwerk-style; a couple of racially insensitive excursions into reggae. Should any of those be your bag, then feel free to dig in, I shan’t judge you^.
The bad. Hmm. I like swearing, I really do. I’ve been an enthusiast, ever since I realised it was a thing – at 7 years old, much to my parents’ secret amusement, but outright horror, I once told a pushy aunt who was trying to make me perform ‘a little Welsh song’ in front of the whole family, to ‘piss right off’. True story^^.
Now, there’s too much of it and of the wrong sort in here. I mentioned ’12 Days of Christmas’ earlier, it starts off amusing but ends up just a bit gross and a touch misogynistic too, ditto ‘C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S’, look away now Rosemary Clooney I’m afraid this time ‘C’ is definitely not ‘for the Christ child’. It’s precisely the sort of thing that my mates and I would have found hilarious aged 13, however as I have recently attained the mental age of almost 18, I have outgrown it and can’t help my other sensibilities kicking in. Double ditto, the version of ‘Silent Night’ sung in German, with a Hitler speech dubbed into the background; Germans = Nazis, get it? the difference is I would have found that bit as offensive at 13 as I do now.
But let’s not part ways after concentrating on the (very) iffy bits of Christmas Album, just like the Phil Spector, Elvis and Bing Crosby Christmas albums it captures a certain aspect of the festive season for us on wax and will preserve it for us to cherish for ever; sick in aspic, can’t beat it.
619 Down.
PS – Note that the LP was, very topically, produced by Daft Fader!
*and deteriorates rapidly from there.
**Authors of one of the most perfect punk pop singles ever, ‘The First Time’.
^you freaking weirdo.
^^it really is. My mother told me, many many, years later that she’d been very proud of me. The phrase came from a mate of my dad’s who was a bit less careful about swearing in front of children than my own folk were.
There’s nothing in my dreams
Just some ugly memories
Kiss me like the ocean breeze (Gimme Danger)
I was only just 17 when I got napalmed for the first time. In the cheap LP rack at Boots in Carmarthen I bought Iggy & The Stooges Raw Power mostly because I really liked the only other record of Iggy’s I’d heard and bought, the single Real Wild Child (Wild One) and partly because I loved the way that Iggy just looked like a creature on the back cover; a creature wearing Bacofoil trousers no less.
Raw Power was a real anomaly in my life too, it was the first music I had ever played where my mum came into my room and told me it was an awful racket. Yes!! You have no idea how bloody hard it was to rebel musically against my parents! Raw Power took me over that line and for that reason alone it will always have a place in my old cold black flinty heart*.
I was totally unprepared for the sounds that filled my bedroom on the evening of 6 October 1989. I still feel unprepared for them today. Raw Power sounded like nothing else did in 1973 and it still sounds like nothing else out there in 2018.
Way before anybody had labelled anything punk** there were the Stooges, who somehow rammed juvenile delinquency and a shamanic heavy-handed primitivism together like nobody and nothing else ever had. Drugs, volatility and all round heaviness fractured them and Mr Pop headed to England with guitarist James Williamson to record an LP under the patronage of David Bowie, thinking that he’d easily pick up a rhythm section there, couldn’t find one rough enough and so brought Ron and Scott Asheton back into the fold as hired guns; hence the fact Raw Power is credited as Iggy & The Stooges.
The album sounds like the death throes of rock and roll, it is feral and unpleasant, not an LP to trust around your womenfolk/menfolk (delete as applicable). David Bowie’s production gets a rough press historically, but I think he does a great job^ – nothing in the mix is where you expect it to be, trebly guitars lurch and cut at you from unexpected quarters. The whole terrain is utterly irredeemably hostile.
I’m not even going to say a thing about the proto punk genius of ‘Search And Destroy’, I don’t need to, just listen to everything the punks did 3 years later. The title track is the closest Iggy ever gets to a personal manifesto, to explaining the forces that coursed through him whether he wanted them to, or not:
Raw power got a healing hand
Raw power can destroy a man
There is just something about that aggressive pecking riff that gets me off every time I hear it, something about that piano^^.
But it isn’t all street walking cheetahs on Raw Power, two of my very favourite tracks are the slow rumbling duo of ‘I Need Somebody’ and ‘Gimme Danger’. The former is a numb yowl of lust and despair (‘Well I’m losing all my feelings / And I’m running out of friends’) and the latter is sometimes one of my very favourite songs. On ‘Gimme Danger’ Pop and the boys get to pretend they were the Doors; except they don’t manage it very well because despite the wonderful acoustic guitar tone and Iggy’s smoked mahogany croon, their essential delinquency just bleeds out all over the end of the track to great effect.
I love the way ‘Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell’ starts so abruptly, like someone just opened the door into the recording studio. Pop sings this shady misogynistic tale in a ogrish growl that he’s never used before or since. James Williamson’s plays his cojones off all over this track, what a player he is too^*. The production is just textbook for this album, the song just sounds like hostile terrain; which it is.
There is only one track on Raw Power that uses a celeste, ‘Penetration’, a track so good one of my fave punk bands named themselves after it, adopts a totally different sonic blueprint – low-slung, quiet menace. It sounds like Satan tried to cover David Essex’s ‘Rock On’ (also 1973) backed by a band of demons using instruments made entirely out of nuns. True story*^.
How did I never notice that ‘Shake Appeal’ is such an perfect distillation of 1950’s rock, before now? maybe because it has been filtered through the Stooges thuggish tendencies. It is the least substantial track on Raw Power by far, but is still better than most band’s whole careers.
In contrast the album closer ‘Death Trip’ is another drawn-out death rattle of a song, a nihilistic outpouring of all sorts of unsavoury rantings. Again Bowie lets Williamson’s guitar lurch out of the mix at you from unsettling angles, just like music shouldn’t, which is all fine with me.
Apologies, I’ve gone on a bit here but I’m excited – Raw Power was a real game changer for me, steering me away from the normal towards the decidedly unhealthy, forever. I am only ever a voyeur down at the dark end of the street though. I stare at the pictures on the LP cover, try to imagine the world inhabited by these creatures and fail, I can’t quite conjure up that critical deparavity; but that’s fine, we have the music and the power for that.
Dance to the beat of the living dead
Lose sleep, baby, and stay away from bed
Raw power is sure to come a-runnin’ to you
853 Down.
*when I had blasted AC/DC what did my fascist parents say? they told me that there was a band called Led Zeppelin they had seen back in the 60’s that I’d probably really like. Yeah, right old timers! Like you know anything.
**may not be strictly, strictly, strictly true – but for the sake of my flow we’ll pretend it is.
^I have heard various re-re-remixes of Raw Power, Iggy’s in particular – all of which are much more reasoned, measured and conventional and totally miss the point of all the queasy toxicity the album invokes.
^^when I saw Henry Rollins on one of his speaky-speaky tours hundreds of years ago he must have spent a good 10 minutes talking about this track – he came on to what sounded like a really badly recorded live bootleg of it too. True story.
^*as well as the best fighter by far in the Stooges, not an empty title when you had Scotty Asheton in the band too.
*^’Rock On’ is freakin’ brilliant too, of course. Hail Satan and David Essex!
So to begin at the beginning: It is an Autumn, moonless night in Manchester, starless and bible-black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and- tramps’ railway arches limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, barge-bobbing shipping canal.
Buzzcocks Love Bites, as Ian Dury said, there ain’t half been some clever bastards and make no mistake Buzzcocks are four of them.
Much as I love their debut LP the Buzzcocks’ 1978 follow up is better and marked that rarest of things, a young band living up to and exceeding every last aspect of their immense promise*. They took their joyous spasming punk energy and used it to hot wire their melodically ambitious songs of love, lust and regret, tapping into their admiration of Can on the way. Almost incidentally they scored their biggest hit, the evergreen ‘Ever Fallen In Love’. Clever bastards.
I love the individuality of the Buzzcocks, they refused to let the tumult of the punk phenomenon ossify around them; no daft safety-pin and leather uniforms for this lot. Love Bites greets us with a nice portrait of four keen looking young men looking young enough to have just bunked off school that morning for the photo shoot. The LP cover is a doozy too, the band name embossed over the portrait, ‘Love’ embossed’ on the front cover and ‘Bites’ embossed on the rear** in Magritte-borrowing script.
It starts with an appropriately loud racket for 1978 too. ‘Real World’ hoves into view guitars sawing like, erm, saws – a fabulously cold metal din. Then Steve Garvey’s bass slithers in to add some melody and the tune grinds on with Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle’s guitars sounding belligerent. As always Shelley’s vocals are great, beamed in direct from a secret lair halfway between angry and ennui.
I will ignore ‘Ever Fallen In Love’, you know how great that is. I remember the comedian Stephen Wright telling a joke about having a tape of The Best of Music^, well if I was compiling one ‘Ever Fallen In Love’ would probably be the opening track on it. I’ve spent many a sweaty night happily bouncing around a dance floor to it. So consider it ignored for the purposes of this review then. Yup, so, like totally ignored.
I have a bit of a thing for the churning, pulsing ‘Operators Manual’, the band shoehorned all manner of time changes and melodies into a song lasting only 3:33. I love the nascent cynicism of ‘Nostalgia’, there’s a different kind of tension here stretching a young man’s past present and future, ‘nostalgia for an age yet to come’; all that good existential bollocks that young folk have got the time to worry about.
‘Just Lust’ and ‘Sixteen Again’ take us careering down the same paths as ‘Nostalgia’ did, albeit with a few new hormones in the mix. The Buzzcocks are a wiser, weightier, somehow sadder band than the ones who cracked off ‘Orgasm Addict’ only 10 months earlier. Again the band are absolutely firing on all cylinders here.
Love Bites chucks us an instrumental to kick off side 2, ‘Walking Distance’, a spritely bit of rocking features some great chiming guitars and busy drumming from, the ever brilliant, John Maher. The Steve Diggle penned and sung track ‘Love Is Lies’ is up next, featuring an (be shocked punk!) acoustic guitar and a lovely tune that sails down the Manchester Ship Canal to fraternize with a distinctly Merseybeat tinged tune.
But 47-year-old steely eyed nihilist that I am, I enjoy ‘Nothing Left’ rather more, even though it cops some tricks from ‘Real World, hoping you might have forgotten what was happening 8 songs ago. Again the guitar sound is particularly yummy and deep, breaking out nice and discordant to the left and right of the thrumming rhythm. Whereas ‘E.S.P’ is just a superb, dark tuneful racket, that I found myself humming in a lift this morning.
The crowning glory on Love Bites for me is the excellent closing instrumental ‘Late For The Train’, a close cousin to Another Music In A Different Kitchen‘s ‘Moving Away From The Pulsebeat’. My mate had a Can compilation where Pete Shelley wrote the liner notes and you can hear the Krautrock influence ringing true and through this closer. JUST LISTEN TO THOSE DRUMS!! Bunch of skinny kids who can’t play? that definition of punks just doesn’t fit here. I would happily listen to albums and albums worth of Buzzcocks doing this. It is a shame they didn’t.
Endlessly inventive, rather arch and naïve, euphoric and melancholy. Sitting back all this time later, having lived with these tracks for almost 30 years now, I wonder if any band ever captured all the contradictory feelings and crisis of being a smart aleck adolescent as well as Buzzcocks.
Love Bites, it really does.
896 Down.
PS. ‘There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards’ by Ian Dury & The Blockheads features my second favourite verse of a song about Albert Einstein ever. True story.
Einstein can't be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frightened everybody shitless
*even if there was only 6 months between the two LPs, bands had to work for a living back then.
**much like my own.
^and only liking the first side of the tape.
Oooh, I like a hostile LP and LP’s don’t get a lot more hostile than Pere Ubu The Modern Dance; absolutely user unfriendly, no-fucks given, ‘let’s see you listen right through to the end of this one, you wankers!‘, whatever-the-opposite-of-ergonomic is.
Crunching into our planet 41 years ago, we still haven’t reached how far Pere Ubu were ahead of their time in 1978. I had vaguely heard of them 15 years ago when I bought a cheapo 1988 Fontana reissue of The Modern Dance, assuming they were a punk outfit.
Imagine if you will, a band conceived amidst the Stooges most outré Fun House sax skronking, weaponizing Television’s odd angularity and being fronted by a psychotic, rather than an Aspergic, David Byrne. Pere Ubu were one of those precious rare bands that understood punk as a challenge to unpick the stitches of rock and roll, rather than just as another uniform to wear whilst playing it fast.
Take ‘Life Stinks’, with lyrics from deceased-by-time-LP-came-out bassist Peter Laughner*, from which this post gets its’ title. It’s a standard punk sentiment, but here it lurches at you hyperkinetically all jitters and jags, despite a slight touch of rock guitar about the edges, sounding like very little else. By way of a perfect contrast it snaps straight into the chugging oddnik recital of ‘Real World’.
That The Modern Dance then flips into the atonal sax offender blues of ‘Sentimental Journey’, replete with all manner of savage muttering, smashing glass and no melody whatsoever, just makes me nauseous. If you can sit through that more than twice in a 24 hour period then you’re probably … me. Oh. Kinda ‘Sheena Is a Disembodied Howl Of Industrial Desecration’; that’s why they don’t sell Pere Ubu T-shirts in fashion shops.
Most hostile of all though is the hideous shrill siren/squeal that precedes LP opener and catchiest tune on The Modern Dance. True dat.
When I blasted this earlier today, my son and wife started shouting at me about the smoke alarm. Don’t worry folks, it’s just the off-kilter art-punk genius alarm tripping again. ‘Non Alignment Pact’ is that, easily. David Thomas is all over the place with his vocals, simpering and rocking out, whilst reeling off a bunch of chick’s names that would do an early 60’s surf band proud; ‘I wanna do a deal with you girl / And get it signed by the heads of state’. Nothing in this tune is where it should be, magnificently so – the production lurches and cuts at you. I must have played this song at least 1.926 million times and it still puzzles and intrigues me to this day.
The comparatively mannered, percussive ‘The Modern Dance’ follows, complete with odd crowd noises and wholesale alienation. The strident, abrasive ‘Laughter’ and ‘Street Waves’ follow, scouring your ears and sensibilities clean ready for new possibilities.
My favourite track on The Modern Dance, tonight anyway, is ‘Chinese Radiation’. It is just sublime. Sliding in under a gently insistent guitar and bass strum, augmented by unidentifiable ping/swish noises** a romance is wistfully introduced referencing Mao’s red book and grey worker’s caps. Then a break, some applause and suddenly it sounds like a drunken creep fronting a wonky bar band for a spell, before it all boils down again to a gorgeous piano and drum outro. There are simply no reference points for this tune, it leaves you flailing and all alone in the godless steppes. Heavy and hopeful, or heavy and resigned? I really can’t deicide.
The musician ship is canny and effective rather than remotely virtuoso, the only comparison point I can think of for guitarist Tom Herman is Marc Ribot, bassist Tony Maimone particularly impresses as does keys and sax man Allen Ravenstine (now a commercial pilot).
So I sit still for a while, putting my head back together again after listening to The Modern Dance and as I always do, I struggle with it, whatever it is. Sure it’s arty, but not in a studied way. There is nothing remotely self-conscious about the weirdness herein, this is pure organic creative oddness and it really should be cherished as such.
Someone get that signed off by the heads of state.
908 Down.
*his obituary being possibly the most Lester Bangs like piece of writing that Lester Bangs ever published.
**excuse me if I am getting too technical for you here. I think they may have been made by David Thomas’ musette.
It’s Saturday night, time to take everything down a notch, dim the lights, slip into something less restrictive around the midsection and get all lovey-dovey-dovey. From Edinburgh with love:
The Exploited Punks Not Dead* is an abrasive full-force-fist-in-yer-coupon from these second wave of UK punk, punkers, released in that storied year 1981. The very first words on the LP, taken from a live introduction for the title track are:
Every cunt's trying to say punk's dead, right, read it in the papers all the stupid cunts, this one's called 'Punk's Not Dead'.
The ditty that follows is a pounding relentless wall of anger and percussive singing, complete with a neat drop out bit and almost a guitar solo. Driven hard by Gary McCormack’s bass and some frenetic riffing, by future Nirvana guitar tech** Big John Duncan it hits hard. As does the lighter ‘Mucky Pup’^ and the totally frantic and fucking brilliant ‘Cop Cars’. Spoiler Alert: The Exploited are not friends of the boys in blue.
The whole idea of the second wave of UK punk was that the proletariat had seized the means of production from the more rareified art school chaps and lasses and turned their gunfire ire more explicitly on more street-level concerns. As always that’s an over-simplification, but it works. Football style chanting, unseemly amounts of swearing and blunt instrumental trauma all worked for the Exploited, Blitz, Conflict, (my beloved) Discharge and others. The dress got more out-there as the impact got heavier, singer Wattie from the Exploited rocks the mohawk properly; he still does 38 years later.
Punks Not Dead lashes all the usual targets cops, the royal family, being on the dole, how awesome their fans are, anarchy, IRA bombs and, thanks to Wattie’s experience of being a teenage squaddie, army life. What I rather like here is that when the Exploited write a song about something, they call it what it is, none of your florid obscuritanism here – song about being on the dole? ‘Dole Q’; song about life in the army? ‘Army Life (Part 2)’; song about terrorist bombs? ‘Blown To Bits’. And so it goes.
Heavier on the profanity than the profundity, at its best Punks Not Dead is like opening a box of lit fireworks indoors, the venomous ‘SPG’, the title track, ‘Cop Cars’ and ‘Blown To Bits’ are particularly fine exemplars of their art. I know it’s the whole point of it but I find listening to it all in one sitting is a bit like being beaten over the head with a light tin tray by a shrieking madman for 38 minutes, on a bus, in a thunderstorm. In this context my very favourite track here is side A closer ‘Sex & Violence’, beginning with an appalling approximation of a Yorkshire accent it swiftly becomes something brilliantly tribal (Adam & The Rants, maybe?), it’s about my level of subtle too:
At 5:12 ‘Sex & Violence’ is the Exploited’s ‘Supper’s Ready’, or ‘In-A -Gadda-Da-Vida’. I think it really is all kinds of great.
The Exploited and their peers were part of what energised the US hardcore scene an therefore half of the DNA that formed 80’s thrash metal. Slayer and Ice-T covered ‘Disorder’ for, 1537 fave, the Judgment Night soundtrack after all^*. Like a lot of their fellow punkers the Exploited shed members and eventually turned their hand at thrash metal themselves, unlike almost every other band that went that way they were startlingly good at it^^.
Whilst not the best LP that came out of this wave of punk^^^ Punks Not Dead is up there as an accurate document of a harsh time, a vital not-to-be-patronised life-affirming racket of the best kind. A few of the attitudes and language would not pass muster in today’s fussier (and rightly so) climes but it still sounds like an authentic voice from the street and deserves to be embraced as such.
Wattie was right, punk wasn’t dead, it was very much alive and getting ready for a night out jacked up on cheap speed and cider, looking for a fight and a shag. So raise a glass to Punks Not Dead and prepare to careen around your living room, bumping into things and frightening your pets.
Mee-maw, Mee-maw, cops are after me Mee-maw, Mee-maw, cops are after me Mee-maw, Mee-maw, cops are after me Here they come!
God bless Angela Rippon.
955 Down.
*as a pedant and scholar the punctuation of the LP title just kills me every time I type it. Gentlemen, this is not an assertion that multiple punks are still alive, in fact it is a statement that the movement is still vital; Punk is not dead. There are rules governing this sort of thing gentlemen, RULES! And if there is one thing I know about punk it is about slavishly obeying rules. Please change the title on subsequent repressings to Punk’s Not Dead, so I can enjoy ditties like ‘I Believe In Anarchy’ with an easier mind.
**and for one gig only, second Nirvana guitarist.
^possibly the only song in the whole of the 1537 that ends with a homage to Angela Rippon’s Bristols.
^*which is, minutiae fans, a compilation of 3 Exploited songs – War, UK 82 and Disorder.
^^Truly deeply hardcore:
^^^Discharge Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, by a country mile.
‘I’m Not A Sicko, There’s A Plate In My Head’
Very sadly, I don’t have a plate in my head and so I just have to fess up to being a sicko. Damn, outed myself again, mind you actually owning a copy of the Oblivians Never Enough does pretty much the same job.
I was lulled into the fold through Oblivians’ southern-flavoured 2013 LP Desperation and I soon scurfed up the cash for the gnarly needy 10″ atrocity that is 1994’s Never Enough. Released on one of my very fave labels, Sympathy For The Record Industry (motto: ‘Yesterday’s sounds tomorrow, today’s sounds sometime next week‘) with a cover featuring a curvy naked chick listening to an Oblivians single on a Dansette record player, this somehow tweaked my curiosity; it was probably the font they used on the cover. Plus you have to love a record that does not print its title anywhere on it, there’s a cussedness to admire right there.
Coolest thing about Oblivians, always, is the fact that not only do they go for the 1537-approved band-name-as-surname trick, but even more democratically Greg, Eric and Jack Oblivian swap around their instruments live and in the studio at will.
These Memphis sickos* serve us up 8 slices of punkorama-lamma-lamma-big-dong punky garage oddness on Never Enough. It has its moments but is far from the full-frontal assault I thought it would be when I bought it; it’s more interesting than that.
Over the 18:40 of Never Enough the Oblivians ladle in some almost country stylings, before deep frying them in cheap drugs and head cheese, before serving them in a rockabilly sauce. I’m thinking mostly of the rumbling epic** closer ‘Show Me What You Like’ which sounds like the Stooges soundtracking a life-changingly sordid act by a Stetson wearing good ol’ boy in a cheap motel.
Other highlights include the ripsaw rock of ‘Five Hour Man’ which sounds like hideous chemically-enhanced priapic one-upmanship on Billy Ward & The Dominoes ‘Sixty Minute Man’ (of Fallout 4 fame, for me at least). Spoiler Alert: he meets an 8 hour lady. On a similar tip I love the let’s-go-out-tonight ‘Feel Real Good’ and the bouncy oddness of ‘Happy Blues’, this latter puts me in mind of the Numerators headfuckiness.
The wonderfully negative ‘Never Enough’ sounds like it was hewed from wood, all splinters and rough shapes whereas the splendidly named ‘I’m Not A Sicko There’s A Plate In My Head’ is spat out of the rockabilly cannon straight into the side of a cliff, it hurts good.
How much you like Never Enough will depend on a few factors, chief amongst them being how much you can hack noisy, crudely played garage punk by sickos who could and should know far better. If you’re one of those lightweights demanding melody and basic instrumental competence then just, jog on Mantovani. The rest of us can just lurch around enjoying ourselves and blaming the plates in our heads.
973 Down.
PS: In a bid to make this a more seasonally appropriate post (I started it on 21 December!):
PPS: Because you’re worth it:
*plate/cranium status unconfirmed at time of going to press.
** 3:39 qualifies as epic in this company.
