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.

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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

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*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.

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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.

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*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.

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*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.

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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.

The law don't mean shit if you've got the right friends
That's how this country's run
Twinkies are the best friend I've ever had
I fought the law and I won
I fought the law and I won

I fucking love Dead Kennedys. They just do it right. Their version of ‘I Fought The Law’ was printed on a flexi disc to be given away at street protests against Harvey Milk’s murderer Dan White returning to San Francisco in 1985*. Topped by their lyric changes (‘Gonna right my book and make a million / I fought the law and I won’), that’s real punk happening right there; not just fast songs and daft clothes.

I fucking loved Dead Kennedys before I bought Give Me Convenience, Or Give Me Death**, but I loved them a whole lot more afterwards. I owned Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables already but this singles and rarities compilation was a very convenient buy indeed. Rumours that I bought it almost entirely to own ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’ because of the swearing are almost entirely true.

Coming complete with a 7″ flexi disc and a low-quality, highly informative booklet Give Me Convenience would be worth every penny if the music were only half good, that it is frequently insanely good, funny and righteous just makes this ambrosia for the rebellious soul.

The single versions of ‘Holiday In Cambodia’ and ‘California Über Alles’ are lesser than the versions on Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables and so, superb though they are, I will leave them for a later discussion. So let’s hit up the others.

‘Police Truck’ is just amazing, riding that oddly militaristic surf rock sound that the Kennedys just mastered at their very best^, dealing with police brutality in horribly graphic terms but somehow amusingly and lightly too? no mean trick that, it’s the rhythm I reckon. Ditto ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’, which is just one of my very favourite songs by anyone, ever. Hideous frat party happenings were never dealt with a better sneer and more contempt ever – plus the puking sound at the end, has to be real surely?^^ It made history as the first song in the UK Top 40 to have ‘Fuck’ in the title. Told you I loved Dead Kennedys.

Obscurities, the menacing ‘Man With The Dogs’ and ‘In-Sight’ are up next the former has a great melody and the latter is another twisted surf-rockin’ punker. They outdo themselves in the anger stakes on ‘Life Sentence’ where Jello Biafra really sounds like he’s going to swallow the microphone. True story.

Give Me Convenience kicks off side 2 with ‘I Fought The Law’ which, as much as I like the Bobby Fuller Four version, is the definitive version – distinguished as much by its wit as by its utterly righteous anger. To deal with one’s enemies and their sympathisers amusingly and contemptuously has to be the aim, they are bang on the money here.

The queasy ‘Saturday Night Holocaust’ somehow likening the US disco scene to the final solution, albeit satirically, doesn’t cut it for me. But, no matter, we’re up to one of my favourites next.

‘Pull My Strings’ is genius. Booked to play the Bay Area Music Awards in 1980, the band abandoned the promised ‘California Über Alles’ after a few bars to sing a very pointed song abut how the music industry loved new wave and why. It’s hilarious, bearing in mind many of the songs targets were there in the audience. It also features a particularly funny histrionic 70’s style guitar solo from East Bay Ray.

Is my cock big enough?
Is my brain small enough?
For you to make me a star?
Give me a toot, I'll sell you my soul
Pull my strings and I'll go far

That’s some more real punk right there.

Next up is another favourite, ‘Kinky Sex Makes The World Go ‘Round’ features the US secretary of war calling up a surprisingly orgasmic Margaret Thatcher, who moans erotically at every fresh outrage/dirty trick/atrocity he suggests. All this is played over the band’s own ‘Bleed For Me’ in the background.

Elsewhere on Give Me Convenience we get sinister street killer ode ‘The Prey’ which is excellent and goes strangely Bertolt Brecht at one point – ‘I can almost taste your dandruff / As I reach out for your face / And I strike!‘. I’m also very keen on ‘Night Of Living Rednecks’, recorded live in Portland, OR. where Jello recounts being chased by a bunch of fuckwads the last time he was in Portland, over an improvised be-bop jazz played by the band while Ray changed a string.

Give Me Convenience is a great collection of Dead Kennedys tracks, a wonderful nugget of dark humour, noise, fierce wit, surf rock stylings, contempt and an ungovernable burning rebelliousness, way WAYY beyond most bands’ ken.

I leave you with the 13-second blast of ‘Short Songs’, as Jello says, ‘Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out!’

1068 Down.

PS: I really do like short songs.

*I have simplified things there, as is my wont, George Moscone was killed by him too, no less tragically. I would utterly recommend The Times Of Harvey Milk, a brilliant documentary film.

**henceforth to be known as Give Me Convenience for finger fatigue reasons.

^just how frigging great a guitarist is East Bay Ray? that’s one of them fancy hypothetical thingies folks.

^^song credits include ‘gagging and puking sounds by Geza X’, well-played Mr X!

Ladies and gentlemen let me present at no additional expense to yourselves, included in your basic 1537 membership package, with no obligation to purchase* a mini bonus review.

Ramones Sundragon Sessions.

Released for RSD 2018 Sundragon Sessions are the basic tracks laid down for Ramones Leave Home, before the guys who got paid money to buff up, beef up and hone the sound did their thing to it.

As you would expect given that, bar some overdubs and tweaking/twerking these are the very same takes that were used for the final LP, there is not a world of difference to be encountered here. For a numbskull collector completist obsessive like myself it is an interesting LP to have.

The differences are mostly subtle, illustrating the shifts of emphasis the producer Tony Bongiovi gave the finished record. As you would expect in most cases the man earned his money and improved what he could, Leave Home has a polished (but not too polished) sound that is missing on the Sundragon Sessions.

To my mind there are only two tracks that I prefer in this iteration – Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy and What’s Your Game. The former, my favourite anyway, comes over with more immediacy to me and the latter carries even more of lovely Joey’s personality in the vocals.

Which isn’t to say it is a washout by any stretch. It is interesting to hear ‘Pinhead’ stripped of opening vocal FX and daft bits at the end, much as I love them. Interestingly whilst Tommy’s drums often sound a bit underpowered, which TB fixed, you do get to hear more of Dee Dee’s bass in these rough mixes too.

A big draw for me was the track ‘Babysitter’, which was used to replace ‘Carbona Not Glue’ on later UK copies of Leave Home – which I had never heard. It’s a pretty average Ramones track with good lyrics about being frustrated in your amorous intent by a kid who won’t go to sleep.

She went to see if the kids were asleep
She says they're quiet expect for one little creep
We can't start kissing and I'll tell you why
We can't start kissing 'cause the kid's a little spy

Sundragon Sessions was limited to 10,000 copies, which is sooo limited that mine is probably only one of 12 households on my road with a copy. I like it and I do play it occasionally but it is no match for the original Leave Home.

Dang my diddlies for being such a darn completist!

1085 Down (still).

*terms and conditions apply; not that you’d probably understand them, even if you did actually bother to read them but basically everything you own and cherish gets signed over to me. Send an A4 envelope to the usual address and I undertake to send you the precise terms and conditions within 42 days of receipt; unless said day of receipt is a Tuesday in which case the 42 days shall be said to commence from the penultimate Thursday after posting, unless that Thursday is equal to or later than the 13th of the month** whereupon the envelope is declared void and should be sent again within 3 days of the appropriate voidance notice being sent, 4 days if the recipient is left-handed AND can be proven to take a UK shoe size 10, or below; or the nearest US/European equivalent.

**or the 14th on leap years and/or years beginning on a Monday, unless where Rule 14.b(ii) applies^.

^referees decision is final.

There is a school of thought that posits that the egg is the most beautiful shape found in nature. Over aeons reptiles and birds have evolved* their eggs for maximum efficiency and practicality, emerging with a shape that has the added bonus of aesthetic perfection.

Such musings have fuck all to do with today’s off-ering, except by way of being a feeble pun on the band’s name. Deal with it. Off! Live From The BBC. This was recorded by my favourite ongoing** hardcoreistas in 2014 and released as a limited edition 10″ LP for RSD 2015*^.

The set list for Live At The BBC is almost completely culled from the Wasted Years LP, one from Off! and a trifecta of tracks from 2010’s First Four EPs. It’s a doozy, 10 tracks in 15:49, no hanging about, no messing around, no time wasters here.

Off! rattle through their set as you’d expect, but there is absolutely nothing sloppy here at all, everything is really precise and energized. It still fascinates me how they can pack so much into a track like ‘Red White And Black’ that it seems so much longer than it is.

Virtually every track is a highlight here, Keith Morris is still a superb punk singer^ and the musicianship, as you have a right to expect from Dimitri Coats, Mario Rubalcaba and Steven McDonald is absolutely top notch. You can hear every word, which is important when the lyrics are this good.

I am not a huge fan of live LPs despite, as Bruce Connection rightly points out, owning a goodly number of them. They have to add something for me to be interested in them, just playing the tracks faster, with an extra solo and some added audience noise … nah.

Live At The BBC is a studio session so bang goes the audience noise for starters but Off! do an interesting thing here. They use the session to really boil down the essence of the tracks here, they add even more vehemence^^ to the music and a real cutting precision.

The better songs are from Wasted Years but the most interesting cuts are ‘Poison City’ and ‘Darkness’ from their early EPs, both seem to have been given a harder, sharper edge in this incarnation.

Off! are simply a righteous band, I would do almost anything to see them live, including some things which any morally, spiritually, or physically hygienic person would baulk at. I’m not proud, well just a bit.

Now, oeuf you go.

1100 Down.

*or if you’re an evolution denier, the great green pixie willed it to be so, possibly last Tuesday afternoon.

**I can type ‘ongoing’ as, after a 7 year hiatus they have recently contributed to the recent Metallica beanfeast, bettering the original with their version of ‘Holier Than Thou’ and cutting a brilliant video starring David Yow, to boot:

*^currently available for about £8 less than I paid 6 years ago, c’est la vie as we Welsh say.

^the dude is now 65, which given his past is an achievement in itself.

^^took me 3 goes to spell vehemence correctly.

‘The first gig we did in London was at Dingwalls and it was magnificent … It was so packed, I thought … Oh boy, we’re gonna be the next Beatles. Of course, the last Beatles weren’t wildly self-destructive junkies … ‘

Leee Black Childers, manager of the Heartbreakers.

The Heartbreakers were the great missing link between rock and punk, any sleaze rock you have ever liked has their slime in its DNA. Ex New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan roped in Walter Lure and Billy Rath and hopped over the pond in ’77 to London to seek their fame and fortune. They brought effortless NY cool, biker jackets, biting rock n’ roll, non-punk-regulation hair, great musical chops and heroin to the UK punk scene**; three junkies and a meth addict, they weren’t born for the long haul.

A great guy I worked with unloading lorries in a warehouse in Leeds, called Ian Bailey* who was an original punker, once taped the track ‘One Track Mind’ at the end of something for me. It blew my mind. Ian told me most of the LP was terrible, a disappointment^. Thus began the quest.

I bought a CD copy of L.A.M.F years later and it just sounded muddy as hell, which was frustrating because you could hear how great the tunes would be if they were mixed and fixed properly. Over the years I have chased the dragon through the medium of cassette only versions of demos on ROIR records, the ‘Lost ’77 Mixes’, alternative mixes, yadda, yadda, yadda. Sometimes tracks sounded better, you’d get a glint of gold at the bottom of the bass pan, sometimes it just sounded wrong.

So obviously when Jungle Records announced L.A.M.F: The Found ’77 Masters^^ for RSD 2021, on purple vinyl, limited to 1100 copies I said, ‘no, I am a mature personage who has already frittered away his family fortune on chasing down the non-existent perfect mixes of this LP, begone with you and your siren call I will spend my money on some morally improving literature instead’.

I queued up to buy it that Saturday, of course.

It took me about four days to play L.A.M.F because I just didn’t want to be disappointed yet again. I schlepped it on the turntable one lunch time and within minutes the neighbours were treated to a graceful and heartfelt display of air-microphoning, this version of L.A.M.F does exactly what every other previous improved version promised it would.

The sound is as clear and warm as it should be, you can hear the instruments properly separated and so you can hear how great the songs really are, how great the band were, just how damnably great L.A.M.F really is. I finally feel like my faith in the Heartbreakers has been vindicated.

Bursting right out of the gate with ‘Born Too Loose’^* this LP just feels like a homecoming to me; not that I ever lived in a rat-infested needle strewn alley, where embittered junkie ladies of the night serviced their clients up against a dumpster. It’s a great loser anthem and establishes the swing and guts of the band up front.

From there the Heartbreakers careen through another 13 great tracks of heavy, thuggish rock and rolla punk-a-boogie. The band’s love of a good tune and dynamics are really allowed to shine through now. And boy do they have some good tunes:

• Chinese Rocks: A cowrite between Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders, is my favourite song about copping heroin at the moment. A lot less flippant than the Ramones version.
• Get Off The Phone: Power pop before its’ time.
• All By Myself: Just a great chord progression and spiky tune.
• I Wanna Be Loved: A right rave-up, like a sloppier Yardbirds, complete with an ace guitar solo.
• Do You Love Me: A bonus track, B-side tear through of the old Contours track.

The real gems in the crown are the trifecta of ‘Pirate Love’, ‘One Track Mind’ and ‘It’s Not Enough’. The appropriately swashbuckling heaviness of the former is now served up perfectly with a distinctly audible rhythm section, bassist Rath is just brilliant on this one.

I got tracks on my arms
Tracks on my face
There's track on the walls
And all over the place    (One Track Mind)

The none more junkie anthem of ‘One Track Mind’ is what led me here in the first place, it’s scabrous and mean, heavy and pounding. There’s simultaneous self-loathing and braggadocio here, not to mention a fucking great guitar solo – this is that shot of adrenalin right into your heart. Perfection. When Thunders snarls the lyrics here you know he’s been there:

Everything's nice
When you're covered in ice
But you open your eyes
And it's one big lie!      (One Track Mind)

My other choice is the yearning, heartfelt ‘It’s Not Enough’ where Johnny shows us one of his few remaining intact, untapped, untracked veins of emotion. Yeah, yeah I know I’m a sucker for a slightly off-key male confessional but there’s something genuinely touching here; plus I like the fact it’s a blatant steal of ‘Needles And Pins’, dragged through a NY gutter.

Unsurprisingly given their recreational habits, the métier of the Heartbreakers is pure want. However that want is expressed, freedom, money, love love love or junk, L.A.M.F and all its energy was generated from that desperate need that lay right at the heart of the band. I find it compelling.

As did the legion of sleaze-os that picked up on the Heartbreakers in later decades filtering their music back into the mainline via Hanoi Rocks, GNR, a thousand bands from L.A, London and Oslo. L.A.M.F lives!

Sadly we may never know what the Heartbreakers meant by the acronym L.A.M.F, ah well, over to you future historians, I am sure it meant something nice and wholesome.

• Lick a marshmallow fiercely?
• Lemon and mango fritters?
• Looking at my feet?
• Light animals might fly?
• Lost and mysteriously found?

I should also say that the whole package for this edition of L.A.M.F is excellent, it’s a fittingly good pressing on lovely purple vinyl, with great sleeve notes and a poster of an outtake from the Roberta Bayley photoshoot for the LP cover. Highly recommended.

1106 Down.

PS: Taken from New York gang graffiti L.A.M.F stands for Like A Mother Fucker, obvs.

PPS: Great track and an explainer about the master tapes – I ran out of space and didn’t want to test your patience:

*I remember he was from Castleford and ludicrously strong. Nice fella.

**as well as Nancy Spungen; I recommend Viv Albertine’s brilliant Clothes Music Boys on Nancy’s arrival on the scene.

^the sad story of the LP mixing and the Heartbreakers heartbreaking lack of luck would fill a book, I’ve got at least 5 that discuss it all. Short version: junkies often don’t make good career decisions.

^^I will revert to L.A.M.F here, L.A.M.F.T.F.77.M is just silly.

^*a misspelling of ‘Born To Lose’ that the band kept. I’ve always wanted to cover it as ‘Born Toulouse’ in an outrageous French accent, anyone else want to join Les Cœurbreakers?