Frequencies - Blame Frequencies (2016)

I was at junior school with Sean, the bass player. I lived on a farm. Sean and my friend Matt lived in nearby villages. We'd spend most of the summer holidays commuting between our respective houses on bikes. Sean was the first person I knew with a record by the Sex Pistols, also Tubeway Army and Cheap Trick - which was an interesting development being as we'd spent at least one summer prior to that formative moment playing the Wombles album into a flexidisc. I mention this just so you know this is unlikely to be an impartial review.

Sean and I lost touch for a couple of decades, then hooked up again more recently, which has been nice, bringing the unexpected discovery that those early friendships have ultimately proven more enduring, and more fun, than most of those made in more recent years. Apparently the stuff you believe yourself to have in common with people isn't always what you actually have in common with them, but enough of memory lane. Let's give the disc a spin.

Sean gave the disc a spin - several spins in the end - as the three of us sat around shooting the breeze at his house, filling in a couple of decades worth of gaps, the usual stuff. I hadn't been aware of his musical inclinations when we were children, it being something which just kind of grabbed him in his twenties. There was, for me, a moment of unease - as there usually will be when your old friend gives you a blast of his band and you're scared it's going to be the worst music you've ever heard, and fuck it you're going to have to say something nice; but thankfully it never came. The music, I soon realised, sounded good. Then we played it again, there being just seven tracks on Blame Frequencies and I realised it sounded like something I would listen to out of choice - which is pretty good going. I have a fair few all-time favourites which didn't really sound like anything until I'd been playing them for at least a week.

I kept thinking of Led Zeppelin as we sat listening, not that it sounds anything like Led Zeppelin, but it has that same breezy quality they had in their gentler moments, like a spring morning captured on tape. Listening now and hence probably closer, Led Zeppelin doesn't work at all, although it retains that elusive early morning sparkle, invoking an era before rock bands channelled themselves into whichever genre got the bums on seats, before anyone was really trying to sound like anyone else, when you might hear an accordion or even bagpipes on a record despite a painting of Satan on the cover and the band logo in sheet metal lettering. The bass slaps and throbs, funky as anything. The guitar illustrates with metal chords, jazz chords, or the sort of frenetic chopping that famously got James Brown up off of that thing; and the vocals are golden, soaring up from the music with everyone else perfectly balanced in their own corner of the sound. It's beautifully put together - tight, clean, clear, and no flab. This is probably what you'd call classic rock these days, except I wouldn't because it seems a little insulting, implying a revival or preservation of something we used to enjoy, and Frequencies shouldn't be defined as such. Their myriad influences were, I would guess, never more than starting points, and none of them seem obvious;, although if it helps, Blame Frequencies also reminds me of Porcupine Tree in so much as that they too invoke what you'd probably call classic rock without sounding like revivalists, beyond which, the comparison is vague, more to do with mood than anything.

Anyway, I have no idea how you would get hold of this disc should you be so inclined, and it seems the band no longer exist in quite this form, a shift of line-up having regrouped as something which will probably be called Squoove, which I may have spelled wrong; but they play live, and I'm sure there will be other discs so - I don't know - keep watching the skies, I guess.

Stooges - Funhouse (1970)

 

I grew up with an instinctive dislike of the sixties, informed mainly by my having been told that the sixties were amazing to an at least weekly schedule; because even at the tail end of the seventies, we hadn't quite got over it, and punk rock just meant we were apparently  in need of reminders. I still feel that this instinctive dislike is partially justified by most of the stuff routinely squirted in our faces by the nostalgia machine, but I've otherwise mellowed. Clearly it wasn't all Tom Jones and the Beach Boys.

The Stooges, for example, represent a massive oversight on my part. I knew of their having existed and I liked the sound of them; the Pistols covered No Fun; my bestest pal Carl was always very much a fan; and, going back to school days, there was a copy of Metallic KO in the collection of my friend's big brother, Martin - and we all thought Martin was the most amazing person in the universe. I'd more or less duplicated Martin's record collection in its entirety by the time I was forty, such was his influence on my formative listening choices, and yet still no Stooges. It was probably the blind spot.

Anyway, a few months ago I was browsing the records in my local Barnes & Noble, mainly because it's strange and exciting to have record stores back, even blandly corporate ones full of tasteful purchases by which you tick off all the boxes on the list of one hundred vinyls you must own. Funhouse was the only record which I'd consider hearing that I didn't already have, bringing with it the realisation of how weird it was that I should be this old and only now buying my first Stooges. What the fuck is wrong with me?

Naturally, it exceeds expectations - as I kind of expected it too, if you see what I mean. The Stooges were the opposite of everything I've ever disliked about the sixties, and continue to dislike as I see the same garbage all around in the American present. It's a dirty jazz-blues noise with howling and madness and the biggest tunes ever, something which could only have been born from places you'll drive straight through without stopping. Some of these tracks just keep going forever, on and on, grinding away like they're trying to escape from themselves - and they still don't sound like jams. It isn't cool. It isn't poetry readings. It isn't members of the Velvet Underground stood around pouting, admiring the abstracts in some New York gallery and describing everything as really interesting while trying not to fall over. You know that American dream we keep hearing about? Well, this ain't it, and that's why it's wonderful. You'll never hear any of these songs smoothed out and autotuned by diva-style entertainment creatives on America's Got Marketing Strategies.

This is what music rock should sound like when it's doing what it's supposed to do, and shame on anyone who loses sight of that; and shame on me for failing to take the hint until now.

Bollock Brothers - The Lydons and the O'Donnells Family Album (1986)

It wasn't that I was avoiding the Bollock Brothers, but they had about them a sense of desperation which kept me from feeling like I needed to rush out and buy anything. It was only when I heard their version of the first Pistols album - covered track to track in its entirety with sarcastic Mike Oldfield samples and vocals from the bloke who shimmied up the royal drainpipe to the Queen's bedroom - that I realised, here was something too stupid to be ignored. It also helps that, as I've come to realise, musically speaking they were more or less Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub instead of Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. So the Bollock Brothers were often quite listenable. This one, so credited as to place the usual emphasis on once having stood next to Johnny Rotten at the urinal, turns out to be a collection of singles you didn't buy because it was obviously the Bollock Brothers under yet another fucking stupid name; also a couple of allegedly live things which don't sound significantly more haphazard than the studio material.

I said, also a couple of allegedly live things which—

Wait! Come back! We have guest stars!

It may well be Killing Joke's Geordie impersonating Steve Jones on the Ivor Biggun-esque R.U. Dirty, and the bass playing is good enough to be Youth, but I'm fucked if I can hear Bananarama's alleged backing vocals; and as for Tony James, Billy Idol and Johnny Rotten's dad, we may never know for sure.

But none of this really matters because, all novelty concerns aside, this is a pretty great record even if it gets a bit fucking stupid in places. You can tell they had a whale of a time recording this stuff, and they may not actually have intended to do quite so good a job as they did because it certainly goes beyond Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub, even to the point of sounding like its own thing. Had the Bollock Brothers never been signed, had they never conned anyone into releasing their records, had they been some band who'd put out a couple of C60s with crappily scrawled photocopied covers and then vanished, we'd now be paying hundreds of pounds for those tapes and there would be a Vinyl on Demand boxed set costing more than your house. Also, according to the press cuttings on the cover, the NME hated them, which is about as high a recommendation as can be had.

The Men with the Golden Gonads Play the Men with the Golden Gonads and Other Misses (2022)

What follows will inevitably be completely biased given my friendship with both the late Tim Webster, who formed the Men with the Golden Gonads, and Prez, who plays organ on this record. I first met Tim at the tail end of the eighties. I was unemployed and thus spent three or four hours a day in the Gruts cafe in Chatham. Tim had a guitar workshop on the opposite side of the road and employed Tim O'Leary - who took the photo of the Frankenstein monster on the cover, presumably spawn of the aforementioned workshop. Prez, formally Prasun Amin, was also a Gruts regular, as was Billy Childish who produced the album.

Anyway, we lost Tim Webster a couple of years ago, which remains upsetting, although he's thankfully well-remembered, and his legend is now fortified by this astonishing collection. He was a very busy individual back when I knew him, and seemed to be in about three or four regularly gigging bands, Johnny Gash being the main one at the time. I remember him mentioning the Men with the Golden Gonads but didn't even realise it was necessarily anything with which he was directly involved, much less that Prez had been recruited.

This is the Medway Delta sound, but distinctly the Webster variant - sharing beat music, rock 'n' roll, and rockabilly influences with the Milkshakes and others, but with all that raw punk rock energy channelled into something which, if not exactly smoother, is certainly less abrasive for the presence of a horn section. It's been called trash, probably thanks to the Cramps, but I've always felt a bit uneasy about the term, it being an often misleading label which drips with lazy irony in the wrong hands; and Tim Webster - arguably the realest motherfucker you could ever wish to meet, if you'll pardon the vernacular - was about the good stuff, not trash, and certainly nothing artistically cynical. The quota of covers on this record does not constitute a knowing wink to the camera. As with his earlier group, the Sputniks, there has always been something family friendly about Tim's music - aside from the nautical terminology, obviously - an element of the variety show but never at the expense of energy. Accordingly we get at least a couple of telly themes, notably the one from Hawaii 5-0, but delivered with a joyful fury which blows the Shadows and their like right out of the hall. Elsewhere we touch upon old school soul and even driving go-go on Ride Your Pony, yet at no point does this feel like some recreation or revival. Billy Childish has countered accusations of musical revivalism by pointing out that if it still works, then you may as well do something with it, which The Men with the Golden Gonads demonstrates to powerful effect because the sound is such that it feels as though the band are actually bashing away inside your house.

The raw power of this record is the same as you hear on anything by the Pistols or the Hamburg-era Beatles or whoever; and Tim was very good with his hands, with engines, with machinery, and seemingly able to get even the rustiest heap of scrap running again, and The Men with the Golden Gonads benefits from the same craftsmanship and attention to detail, and I doubt any tremolo twang has sounded quite this powerful, at least not since Link Wray was last open for business. Should you have somehow failed to understand the appeal of rock 'n' roll as it once was - because it's 2022 and youth culture is now a complete waste of time - this record will answer any fucking stupid questions you may still have.

Available from Spinout Nuggets unless they've all gone.

Heartbreakers - LAMF (1977)

The New York Dolls were once quite important to me, and have remained so, impressions to the contrary stemming only from my making time to listen to other things because spending your entire life obsessively listening to just one band is fucking nuts, obviously. Despite which, I never got around to properly hearing the Heartbreakers until this year, even though I liked everything I'd heard and was pretty sure they would be right up my street. I plead poverty and there once having been so many records I liked at any one time that I never could have bought them all.

Anyway, this being reissued reminded me of its having existed and so here I am. The reissue was inspired by someone having found the master tapes and given the thing a decent mix, because apparently the rest of you have been listening to the shit version all these years. That's what it says on the cover. I haven't heard the shit version, although the announcement reminds me a little of claims regarding the muddy quality of the first two Dolls albums, both of which sound fantastic to me, so who knows?

LAMF is an older, slightly wiser, less hysterical Dolls captured at about three in the morning after the weirder drugs have mostly worn off, just before everyone gets their second wind. Some bloke on the internet described it as the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time, which seems fair, despite it not being Machine Gun Etiquette. Listening to this, it's not difficult imagining the Heartbreakers sharing a stage with the Pistols and the Damned. It's bluesier, definitely New York spawned, and pops and crackles with a breezily spiky energy that probably shouldn't be possible given how much arm candy was allegedly involved.

Honestly, every last song is pure spun gold, although the review probably could have been left at features Born to Lose because I'm not sure you even need further information, and I don't even want to think about the sort of person who would. The Heartbreakers were the opposite of ELO, and I don't know if there can be any higher recommendation.

Sid Vicious - Sid Sings (1979)

If there was ever a mythology which outstripped the individual from whom it was spun more than Sid - and there may well be - I can't think of anyone at the moment. The spectacle of Sid grew to such proportions following his death as to become indistinguishable from mainstream caricatures by Kenny Everett and the like, and so much so that it hardly seems worth stating. On the other hand, the image of Sid as some useless chump - lucky doesn't seem quite the right term here - who barely knew which end of a bass guitar was which, a man named after his own hamster - doesn't seem entirely fair either. As usual, the truth was probably somewhere in the middle. My friend Eddy remembers him as just some amiable, slightly lively bloke who turned up at all the early punk gigs, someone you'd say hello to without feeling you needed to know the story of his life - which seems to match the accounts given by other Sex Pistols. Rotten describes him as easily led, maybe a little guileless; although during the Vermorel interview he comes across as, if not a high-functioning genius then certainly far from stupid. Additionally, you can hear him idly plucking away on his bass at certain points on the tape and he's not actually bad even if his playing suffered following four-thousand pints and an arm candy chaser. At least he was technically no more basic than a million other punk bassists of the time.

This cobbling together of posthumous live recordings was massively cynical but naturally I bought one, even though it could be argued that the free Sid poster was probably closer to the spirit of the enterprise than the music on the record. The music is mostly Iggy or Dolls covers performed with various Heartbreakers, notably excepting Born to Lose from the final English Pistols performance, at least prior to the reunion. The quality isn't great but it's good enough and I've heard worse, and Sid was actually a decent vocalist. He didn't change the world but he was funny and he made things a little more interesting for a while.

C'mon Everybody and Something Else were both very important to me at the time, regardless of anyone trying to point us in the direction of better art or superior musicianship; and ignoring the bullshit, looking past the whole whining caboodle to Sid Sings as a record of some punky bloke having a good time on a stage, it's hard to fault.

Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance (1981)

PIL were an early discovery for me, a band which loomed large in my teenage world for what seemed like an age - the era prior to my discovery of Throbbing Gristle and all the really weird, scary stuff - but which may actually have been a matter of months. I was hypnotised by that first single before I even realised there was any kind of Pistols association; I was chilled yet thrilled by what Annie Nightingale played of Metal Box before it hit the shops; and I was so primed and ready for Flowers that it may even have been the first album I bought on the day it came out.

I never really tired of this stuff but I came to play it less and less as it was eclipsed by other things, and it didn't help that my copies of the first two albums took to skipping all over the fucking shop whenever I tried to listen to them. I assumed it was something to do with those bass frequencies collapsing the walls between the grooves during mastering; then recently I bought a new needle and found First Issue was just fine when I happened to play it, as was Second Edition. It seems that I've spent three decades listening to music with needles which weren't actually quite so good as I had believed, given that I never experienced the skipping problem with anything else. So, after all this time the early, spikier incarnation of Public Image Ltd. were suddenly back on the menu.

It's therefore been one fuck of a long time since I gave this a spin, and Christ almighty - it still sounds incredible. The loss of Wobble really seemed like a disaster at the time and I couldn't see how they would come back from it, at least not without taking on another bassist; but Levene, Lydon, and Martin Atkins squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons, producing something which, although rhythmic, is otherwise almost completely unmusical by any conventional terms but succeeds by the sheer force of its overpowering atmosphere; and it probably doesn't hurt that Lydon's vocalisations had grown particularly haunting and lyrical by this point. I'm still not sure quite where any of it came from, besides being vaguely aware of Lydon and Levene's eclectic influences, but it seems to foreshadow Einstürzende Neubauten of all things, at least in terms of crushing atmospherics derived from flawlessly recorded and immediately recognisable sound sources captured with pseudo-classical clarity.

I vaguely recall some radio interview from the time during which the lads expressed dismay at Adam & the Ants having produced such a relatively weedy sound despite having two drummers, and in light of this monster, they had a point. I'm trying to think of something so heavily reliant upon just percussion as was The Flowers of Romance which came anywhere close to sounding so powerful, but I'm drawing mostly blanks.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

Girl Guided Missiles (2021)

You can probably be forgiven for having missed the Girl Guided Missiles first time around. They released one single - now worth a fortune if you can find a copy - and made enough of a rumpus on the local live circuit for a guy I hadn't seen since school to remember having seen them in some pub roughly forty years ago. I only know them because I've known Martin de Sey since the eighties, Martin being the Girl Guided Missiles' guitarist, occasional vocalist, and apparently the only member to have troubled his local barber shop while they were together as a group. Knowing Martin as I do, this is unlikely to be the most impartial review you'll ever read but you're free to stop reading at no additional charge.

The Girl Guided Missiles may be one of the few bands who ever formed due to musical differences, as the cover notes report, which actually makes a lot more sense than you might expect once you listen to the disc. In essence they seem to have comprised one ex-Cravat turned sharp suited mod and three denim clad hairies, and the sounds they made were a similarly incongruent musical Frankenstein monster which somehow pulled together and worked through the raw enthusiasm of the enterprise. I'd hesitate to guess at potential influences but I can hear traces of T-Rex, Buddy Holly, the Pistols, Status Quo, Suzy Quatro, and possibly even Kiss - or at least there are comparisons to be made with Paul Stanley's pseudo-operatic falsetto; and yet a couple of the tracks made me think of a biker version of the Moody Blues, while Games's Up and Trendy Wendy don't fall far short of channelling the Undertones. I should probably also mention that Further Education is an absolutely classic punk single (or should have been) of the kind which might have seen the light of day through the Step Forward label in an alternate universe; so I've described what probably sounds like a compilation album even without mentioning the cowpunk of Josalea, despite which, it's all quite clearly the work of one band with a very clear idea of what they were doing.

Having known one of the lads since we were kittens, I'm familiar with about half of the songs here, which qualifies me to add that I'm impressed by how great they still sound; also that I'm genuinely surprised to recognise the noodley middle eight - or whatever you call it - from Drinker with such a powerful hit of memory sherbert. Had you played it to me in isolation I would have assumed it to be some half remembered passage from something by Steppenwolf or Led Zeppelin. The other songs are new to me, but it already feels as though they're old favourites.

The Girl Guided Missiles were one of those rare bands which shouldn't have worked but somehow managed to sound effortlessly great despite the odds and so briefly carved their own unique furrow, at least in my tape collection, as well as at a succession of drinking establishments in the vicinity of Studley. This posthumous collection beautifully rescues their studio recordings from the tape hiss to which I've become accustomed, and should probably be snapped up by one of those punky boutique labels of which there seem to be so many at the moment.

Macintosh Plus - Floral Shoppe (2011)

I kept reading that this was the vapourwave album you need to hear before you die, and all of the usual shit, but every time I tried it was gone - removed from whatever platform it had turned up on due to uncleared samples. At least that was the thrust of the apology as I remember it, unlikely though it now seems given that the entire thing is nothing but samples and yet here it is again; and this time I managed to nab a copy before they all vanished.

Vapourwave seems to have been an internet phenomenon, popular amongst young people who spend way too much time playing computer games and talking about Chinese cartoons in chatrooms. I don't think it ever occupied any space formerly inhabited by the music biz as it existed in the days of physical media, so it's probably a bit odd that this vapourwave Never Mind the Bollocks should have been pressed onto vinyl. I'm not complaining because it means I can listen to it, although it seems equivalent to some ageing fifties guy rejoicing that they've taken the trouble to issue the songs of this Elvis Presley person on wax cylinder. Should anyone be grumbling about such parallels, citing the distinct absence of gangs of vapourwavers slashing cinema seats at their local picture house as evidence of it having failed to be a thing in any meaningful sense, then it's probably worth remembering that not everything is a repeat of some earlier form.

Perhaps ironically, vapourwave sort of is - or possibly was, given that I have no idea what the kids on the streets are up to these days so it may all be ancient history - constituting a repetition in so much as that it's mostly sampled eighties muzak, emphasising the slick, bland, overproduced and even corporate to the point of surrealism - swollen synth and MOR sax slowed down, cut up, processed, stripped of context and pulled back together without concessions to familiar structure or purpose; and Floral Shoppe seems to exemplify this like few other albums, so the legend would have it.

I haven't heard a lot of this stuff, although for my money, Blank Banshee do it better, further abstracting the source material before building it up into something new, weird, and shiny. Nevertheless, Floral Shoppe really is one hell of a record. The sampled material sounds almost familiar, something on the tip of one's recall which never quite gets there, heard through a codeine haze and repeating bars in rhythms which ignore the existing tempo and feel like fractal thoughts going through the mind of a console game with a hangover. The effect is weirdly hyperreal and is perfectly illustrated by the cover art. It's something bland polished up and put on a pedestal, presenting a juxtaposition of past and present so weirdly angular and shocking as to invoke J.G. Ballard - or what J.G. Ballard seems to represent to people who actually enjoy his writing, which I mostly don't.

Of course, it's supposed to be ephemeral - or that's the impression I get - but then maybe its having been immortalised on vinyl can be taken as simply another contradiction, just one of the many. Vapourwave, and particularly this album, demonstrate the impossibility of predicting the future - being absolutely alien while sounding familiar to the point of mundanity, and that's a good thing.

Neu! (1972)

My introduction to krautrock was Glenn Wallis selling me a massive pile of albums in one huge job lot back in the nineties - forty, maybe fifty of them incuding Neu!, Kluster, Kraftwerk, Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, pretty much everything. I hadn't actually expressed any real interest in the form beyond that some of it sounded okay from what I could tell, but Glenn was converting to compact disc, needed the money and was asking just a few quid per album. I guess he'd reasoned that it was better that I should benefit than for him to get a few quid per album from some shop which would then have them all in the window for treble figures the following week. Vinyl Experience in Hanway Street had a bit of a reputation for such transactions, for example.

Really, I agreed to buy the collection more or less based on the idea that what I'd heard sounded okay and might turn out to sound amazing on closer inspection, and if so then I'd already have a ton of the stuff and wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of tracking it all down. However, the collection was such as to stop up a sort of mental bottleneck in my listening habits, meaning I never quite got around to giving any of it the attention it probably deserved because there was so fucking much of it and anyway, maybe I was busy listening to - off the top of my head - the first Denim album that week; which is probably why it's taken me nearly thirty years to get to grips with this one.

I'm a little weary of hearing about how everything can now be traced back to krautrock and how I was listening to krautrock when none of you lot had even heard of it and so on and so forth, not least because it gets in the way of the music, and the music is - in this instance - pretty great and a lot more accessible than might be suggested by its reputation.

Neu! was formed by two members of Kraftwerk who decided they didn't want to be robots, and continues the original, somewhat more organic spirit of the same, combining the machine with the music but without negating the human component. It's possibly not actually that far removed from either Pink Floyd or similarly flared psychonauts of the musical abstract of similar vintage, but my reference points are limited to Neu! essentially being Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report five years earlier but without either the darkness or Porridge's ego getting in the way. It's very much the same sonic exploration with effects transforming music to noise, subtracting nature from the sound, and predating Neubauten's road drills by at least a decade. As a whole, it really is a sonic sculpture, and it still works because I guess it was so far ahead of the curve that it could have been recorded yesterday. Where Gristle may have invoked castration and other unmentionables, here we have - pure and unalloyed - the sheer euphoria of strange new sounds which take our thoughts to places previously unvisited.

It wasn't to last, and Dinger in particular perpetrated some truly underwhelming stuff under the same name in later years, but this remains arguably as startling and joyous within its field as did Never Mind the Bollocks in its own; and the reputation is, for once, fully deserved.

Sleaford Mods - All That Glue (2020)

I must admit to having raised an eyebrow at the release of this, having dutifully snapped up all those obscure singles as they came out, then bought at least a couple of them again when they were reissued on the Chubbed Up + compilation, and now here's the opportunity to buy Jolly Fucker and others a third time along with some unreleased stuff, including the title track, All That Glue - the first thing ever recorded by Fearne and Williamson - but only as a fucking flexidisc issued with the gold vinyl edition.

Bollocks, I said to myself and bought the compact disc in protest, and because my shelves now have space for about another fifteen vinyl albums and not much more before I'll need to schlep down to Lowes and buy a new reinforced shelving unit, possibly also a new room for the house.

Grumbling aside, Glue duplicates only four tracks from Chubbed Up +, but they're four good 'uns, and as something vaguely intended to serve as an introduction to the Sleaford Mods for those who might require one, it's hard to fault. Actually, Glue is hard to fault even if you already have most of the previous albums. Not only does this represent their absolute best, but the sequencing from 2012's McFlurry at the beginning through to closing with When You Come Up To Me from 2018 reveals a progression and even a sophistication you could be forgiven for having missed. It's not all Bontempi loops and Jason yelling the word bollocks even if it may sometimes seem that way. There's a much greater variety of emotion here than I realised even with anger, frustration and sarcasm as the core, and for all its apparent simplicity, even rudimentary composition, the music evokes Joy Division, Suicide - the band rather than the deed - the early Pistols, and all manner of unsung laptop weirdies without actually sounding like anyone else out there; which is to say that even familiar tracks such as Jobseeker or Tarantula Deadly Cargo seem freshly dosed with manic energy as part of this collection, spliced together with tracks which somehow slipped through the cracks, of which Blog Maggot is possibly the greatest.

So I was completely wrong. This is just as essential as the rest, just as vital, and I only wish the awkward buggers had included the track from which the title was derived on the CD, but I suppose they must have had their reasons. Having achieved something resembling fame, and enough so as to summon the threatening stench of a regular restaurant review column in the Guradian like that bloke from Franz Ferdinand, we're now approaching the point at which gentlemen of a certain vintage will inevitably announce either that they only liked the first record, or they never really liked the Sleaford Mods in the first place - contrarian bollocks at least as risible as refusing to listen to anything which fails to tickle the hit parade. All That Glue serves as a timely reminder of what makes this band great and why we listen to their records. Let's not take them for granted.

The Tubes - Remote Control (1979)

Amongst my memories of first discovering music, or at least music which wasn't the Beatles, the arrival of my first tape recorder is significant for reasons which are probably obvious. I don't remember hearing much music on the radio as a kid, but I heard enough to be aware of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. I used to go to stay at my grandparents' house in Kenilworth every other weekend, and there was a point at which whatever the usual arrangement had been, suddenly it was just my dad coming to fetch me home on Sunday evening, and because it was my dad, he had the radio on, usually tuned to the top forty countdown. This meant that I heard a selection of the same songs with such frequency as to imprint them on my memory as things I liked, and when I was given a tape recorder for my birthday, naturally the first thing I did was start taping things I liked from the radio; and Prime Time by the Tubes was in there right from the beginning, even though I'm not sure the dates add up right.

Later I learned that the Tubes were an American punk band, and later still I concluded that they were an example of how America never understood punk. I no longer quite hold either of these views, although I still maintain that a bunch of poets hanging around with Lou Reed in some New York loft was never, ever the birth of punk.

Anyway, I loved Prime Time so much that I immediately ran out and bought the album some forty years later when I happened across a copy in a crappy second hand store which seemed suspiciously like some guy's front room. I played it once and decided that I'd been right about Americans failing to understand punk.

Then, another year or so on, I dig the thing out for a second play and find that it has something, even if hanging onto the idea of the Tubes as an American equivalent to the Pistols is obviously a waste of time. I guess they were punk in so much as that they were a bit freaky, relatively speaking, and none too bothered about fitting in; plus there was a fairly low calorie anti-establishment message centered around the idea that too much telly is bad for you. I don't know about the earlier material, but musically this one is operatic and conspicuously well played, a little like a weird conflation of Kiss and Devo but coming out sounding a bit like Styx in their Mr. Roboto period. It's so theatrical it's almost Rocky Horror. Guitar solos, mullets, vocal harmonies, futuristic monosynth and sax solos: ordinarily I might duck for cover before Michael J. Fox shows up and tries to teach me a thing or two about what it's like to be young, but fucking fuck it - this is a great album. The songs, big pompous poodle-haired wedding cake compositions though they may well be, have got serious pull, never mind just Prime Time. There's TV is King, I Want It All Now, Only the Strong Survive, and about the only song I was less struck on is the ballad, Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand) but my wife has been going crackers over that one, so everybody's happy.

Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.

My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.

Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.

This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.

The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.

The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.

Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.

All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.

Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp (2017)

Aside from being a big deal in terms of Dada and anti-art, Marcel Duchamp could probably be regarded as the father of post-modernism through being the man who arguably introduced choice to the art world as a technique in its own right. Duchamp chose a urinal for one piece and it therefore became art, thus doing away with all of that mucking about with brushes and canvas and so on. Duchamp is therefore probably directly to blame for Damien Hirst and all of the other useless wankers who missed the point in much the same way that Malcolm McLaren missed the point of the Sex Pistols. The urinal, the bicycle wheel, the bog brush - it was provocation, a massive fuck you to the establishment delivered by refusing point blank to play its game, to acknowledge either its aesthetic or its values. If it was art - and the answer to that one is sort of inherent in the term anti-art when you think really fucking hard about it - then it was art which dared you to reveal yourself as a complete arsehole by treating it as such. The continued canonisation of found art therefore seems akin to the collective retort of the herd in Life of Brian.

Yes, we are all individuals.

That's my take on it anyway.

All the same, Duchamp was responsible for some great art, albeit great art which was massively unconventional by the standards of the time, not least of these being the Large Glass. It could be argued that his anti-art was exploratory, just one avenue of research. This was another, and one of which I was only dimly aware before I found this record in the racks of Half Price.

The music here was composed through numerous ingenious and peculiar means of generating random numbers, wooden balls dropped into the cars of a toy train set as it passes beneath a funnel and so on, with each wooden ball representing a different note. The notes were transcribed, presumably back in 1913, then performed on a variety of instruments - piano, voice, flute, trombone and so on. As one might imagine, the numerical sequence yields notes but has nothing much to say about intervals, timing, or emphasis, so these details were left to the performers.

Comparisons with Beethoven are inevitably a bit of a waste of time, and this music more closely resembles the experiments of Stockhausen and Xenakis in terms of chance notation and anti-melody; but the strangest thing is that for all the momentary clashes and passing dissonance, Duchamp's music - thus credited having been generated by the man - is surprisingly pleasant and even relaxing, possibly thanks to the even tempo at which random piano notes fall from the instrument. I may be simply admiring the formalistic properties of the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall next to the gallery's exit, but Duchamp's music is actually sort of beautiful, even powerful, and enough so as to change the nature of the space in which one listens.

Needless to say, it was also about a million years ahead of its time, foreshadowing degrees of experimentation which few would consider for at least another couple of decades; and it was easier on the ear than Russolo's noise machines.

Bollock Brothers - Never Mind the Bollocks 1983 (1983)

I'm sure I can't be blamed for assuming this would be complete shite before I heard it. Jock McDonald, having become a name by way of some Sex Pistols bootleg or other, was beginning to look a lot like the Jonathan King of punk, and there was the band with Johnny Rotten's little brother, and then there was the Bollock Brothers, so named as to present the impression of trying far too hard whilst simultaneously not actually trying at all, not even a little bit; all of which may as well have been Bryan Ferry crooning Scott Walker numbers at Astrud Gilberto by comparison with covering Never Mind the Bollocks in its entirety.

You would think so, wouldn't you? Nevertheless, this one manages to be fucking ridiculous, bloody awful, and yet somehow amazing all at the same time, and amazing because it's fucking ridiculous, bloody awful, and so on and so forth.

The 1983 version is a synthpop revision of the original utilising some sampling, some speak and spell, but mostly it's not even the proper stuff, instead occupying a point somewhere between early console games, karaoke tapes, and the kind of synthpop one would routinely encounter when children's telly tried too hard. Had an episode of Crackerjack ever concluded with Peter Glaze and Don MacLean grinning through a saucy seaside cover of Bodies, it would have sounded like this record.

However, the weird thing is that if you turn it up loud enough, it works in spite of itself. For starters, although the songs are reproduced with fannish fidelity to the originals, there's some additional fucking around with the formula - the chirpy sax sample on God Save the Queen, and how Holidays in the Sun keeps threatening to turn into Tubular Bells for example. Also, we have Pursey-esque guest vocals from Michael Fagan who made the front pages after breaking into Buckingham Palace back in 1982, who somehow makes the songs his own with additional lyrics, turning God Save the Queen into an appreciation of herself, for one example. The rest is sung by Jock McDonald who wisely avoids the stereotypical Lydon impersonations you might anticipate, instead relying on his own voice, which actually carries the songs very well and has something of Mark Perry's post-adolescent wail to it.

No, I don't know what the point was either, but in some respects it sort of saves Bollocks from itself by pissing all over the legend, annoying the kind of purists who missed the point in the first place, reminding those who might need reminding what a great album it was, beating Richard Branson at his own game, and generally being a shitload of fun - and stupid fun, which as we all know is the best kind. Whilst I tend to wince on principal at discussions of the queer narrative - mainly because I still don't think such partisan labels are always helpful - this version of Bollocks goes somewhere in that direction, serving as a reminder that Johnny Rotten at age twenty was one hell of a lot more Kenneth Williams than he was ever John Wayne, or even Joe Strummer.

Broken Britain (2011)

I wouldn't ordinarily bother to write about anything below a certain level of crapness, despite the thrill of shooting a fish in its proverbial barrel; but this makes the cut because it's so crap as to be genuinely impressive whilst still being amazingly crap - so none of that stuff about something being so bad that it's good here. Broken Britain really is absolutely shite. It's a punk compilation from a couple of years ago, or at least that's what it seems to aspire to be - a memorial to that time when we all kicked in our television sets because Sid Vicious swore on Midlands Today, and when the Clash had that hit with a song about the Queen being a moron.

Presuming you remember those Top of the Pops albums of the seventies - copyright dodging hits of the day faithfully reproduced by session musicians; well, that's sort of what we have here, except obviously that would be tacky and not very punky at all, so I think we're pretending this is something else - just like in the Sid Vicious song, Something Else, yeah?

Hooray for punks and punk rock!

Stick your bollocks up your arse, misses! Ha ha!

So far as I can tell, we do actually hear 999, the Business, and the Stranglers on this disc, although fuck knows where they found a Stranglers cover of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth; and that's definitely punky cockney dolly bird Lydia Luvaduck Lunch giving it some welly on a live version of In My Time of Dying, probably live in broken Britain or something. The rest though…

We have massive punky hits faithfully covered by bands you've mostly never heard of, bands which sound suspiciously as though they've all been recorded in the same studio with the same instruments - four from the Clash, four Pistols numbers, then Teenage Kicks and a couple of Joy Division biggies, and er… Denis, the Blondie song, instead performed by the likes of the Belfast Dolls, the Badgers, Discord 76, and Mandi and the Morons - a more punkily anarchistic bunch you couldn't wish to meet, if the names are any indication. On the other hand, Beki Bondage is undeniably real because I remember both Stand Strong Stand Proud from listening to Peel and her truly splendid knockers from the pages of Sounds, which were quite rememberable* due to my being a sixteen-year old boy at the time. Here she covers the Pistols' EMI, complete with faithfully reproduced ad libs which only made sense sung by Rotten at a very specific time of his career. Likewise, some of the Clash covers sound similarly odd given that Complete Control - for one example - is about being in a band called the Clash; and I don't know who the Cook 'n' Jones responsible for Silly Thing could have been, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Steve or Paul.

Plucked from the cheapo rack of the store, or possibly even a gas station, Broken Britain promises a couple of familiar names alongside covers rendered by obscure types who probably had one single played on local radio before they fizzled out and all got jobs at a local car showroom, but I don't think that's what we actually have here. Second - or possibly third - impression is that this might do well if you listen to it with the air conditioning on full blast, or if you're not really familiar with any of these songs. Should you be some punky young dude browsing the stalls of a Mexico City street market, and a punky young dude who doesn't speak much English, then Broken Britain might seem worth a punt.

Maddeningly, even this theory is undermined by a peculiarly operatic cover of Who Killed Bambi? and Dresden's version of the Talking Heads' Psycho-Killer, neither of which give a shit about duplicating the originals. This Bambi, if otherwise completely pointless, at least allows us to hear the lyrics, such as they are, for the first time ever; and Dresden, whatever it may be, sounds suspiciously like John Otway or even Unlucky Fried Kitten. I was never that struck on Psycho-Killer, and now I understand why - because it should have been recorded by Frank Butcher from Eastenders as is apparently the case here; which is why, despite everything, I'll be hanging on to this otherwise entirely pointless piece of crap.

It was a Christmas present, in case you were wondering, but thankfully not mine.

*: This is a word invented by a Wheel of Fortune contestant which I'm trying to pass into common parlance.

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Superstition (1991)

This, on the other hand, was mostly chug but it fills a gap in the collection. My girlfriend owned a copy back in the early nineties and she used to play it a lot. All I recall of this is a vague impression of Superstition not making much of an impression on me, but I'm a list-making completist at heart so I wanted to see whether it would sound better with the benefit of hindsight, or whether my aforementioned first impression had been accurate; and it seems that it had indeed been more or less on the money.

Should it need stating, Siouxsie & the Banshees tend to make more sense if you think of their career as parallel to that of Roxy Music - which was probably who they were listening to back when everyone else was banging on about the Dolls and the Stooges - in which case, Superstition was probably where they entered their smooth period as did Roxy with Avalon and the like. 1991 was apparently all about those shuffling baggy types, seemingly obliging everyone else to make themselves appear ridiculous by claiming there's always been a dance element to our music, and so on top of the technological studio smoothery, Superstition was the Banshees demonstrating that they too were mad for it, as the kids of the time would have it.

Well, maybe not, but this record does chug quite a lot, and there's the peculiar use of a Schoolly D sample on Kiss Them For Me - although I'm probably just showing my ignorance of what is either some preset drum pattern or something Schoolly D nicked from elsewhere.

So, is it actually a bad album?

Not really. It creeps up on you after a while, which is mostly the songs taking their time to emerge from Stephen Hague's efforts to make them sound like New Order; but emerge they eventually do, and the differences slowly become apparent, allowing the ear to hear something beyond what initially resembles an hour long version of Dazzle. Silly Thing sadly isn't a cover of the Cook and Jones classic - and Lordy what I would have given to have heard that - but was the first tune to break cover, revealing Superstition as more than simply Kiss Them for Me plus eleven b-sides. The whole is too slick, too smooth and too electronic - as the Banshees themselves apparently thought - but remains a lesser record by what was still a great band, the Banshees equivalent of a stadium-era Simple Minds album, which I propose as someone who nevertheless quite liked stadium-era Simple Minds.

The Butts Band (1974)

I always had a bit of an uncomfortable aversion to the Doors. On the one hand I've never been particularly impressed by Jim Morrison, or at least I've never been impressed by the myth of Morrison as visionary prophet; but on the other it's difficult to deny the quality of the music, even with himself belching his sixth form poetry over the top. I'm not even sure why I'm bothered, given the high quota of shitheads already taking up shelf space in my record collection and how I can still listen to the Pistols without recalling Lydon sharing a trustworthy working class pint with grinning Nigel Farage; but never mind because I've just discovered the existence of the Butts Band.

I never realised that the Doors had recorded albums without Morrison, which is probably my fault for assuming that all music was shit prior to the Damned releasing New Rose. It turns out that just two Doors were involved, but crucially neither of them were Jim Morrison due to his having departed for that great sixth form common room in the sky, making it possible for me to appreciate the vibe without anything of a self-important disposition getting in the way; and they must have been doing something right, because this is some considerable distance outside of my comfort zone.

The problem I have with the seventies is that, contrary to the claims of nostalgic telly shows, it really wasn't all David Bowie and Marc Bolan popping around Twiggy's house to watch Doctor Who, and I know this because I was actually there, meaning I was actually there in the seventies rather than at Twiggy's house. Mostly it was young beige men with flares, beards and sunglasses wishing they were on a beach in California, and the music was horrible and earnest and twiddly in all the wrong places*; but in every shower of shite there's always some undigested diced carrot representing the form as it should have been, and should be remembered - something which sounds amazing even before Quentin Tarantino ironically stripes it onto footage of a sharp dressed man kicking someone's head off. I can think of about a million records that should have sounded like the Butts Band but didn't, but never mind.

They've retained that bluesy quality which made the Doors sound so powerful, dark and brooding without becoming ponderous; and on this foundation they've built a record which is actually sort of light without being fluff, and even pretty funky. It has a soulful edge without sounding like it's trying to prove anything, and which probably means we're long overdue Michael Gira feeling he has to cover I Won't Be Alone Anymore. This is a record which probably constitutes a postscript, and yet to my ears it sounds like a refinement of what they were doing before. Would that a few more seventies also rans had been this good.

I gather there was a second album with a different line-up augmenting Densmore and Kreiger, but they got it so right on this one that I'm a bit wary of tracking it down.

*: Relax, Daphne - I didn't mean ELP.

Looney Tunes (1976)

I discovered punk rock at the age of fourteen, roughly speaking. Prior to that, I had my four Beatles albums - which had been my record collection since the age of eleven or so - and I thought Abba were quite good, but most of all I liked novelty records because I was a kid - my friend Sean's Wombles album, the Goodies, and this compilation, borrowed from Paul Moorman who lived on the farm next to ours and who was in my class at school. K-Tel's Looney Tunes is significant in being the first album I ever taped, having been given a mono portable tape recorder for Christmas, or possibly my birthday. I hadn't really thought about the thing until I chanced across a copy in Half-Price Books and realised what it was. I hadn't really thought about it because Looney Tunes dropped off my radar pretty fucking quickly once I discovered punk rock, which I regarded as proper grown up music, although it's probably ironic that the thing which first drew me to punk rock was that they said rude words on the telly, which was funny. Not for nothing does Stewart Home characterise the most successful punk bands as novelty acts in Cranked Up Really High, but anyway...

Thirty five years later, these twenty-four tracks, all crammed into tiny grooves so as to achieve maximum value for money, sound astonishingly good, perhaps even better than they did to my fourteen-year old ears, not least because this is mostly stuff you won't read about in the usual rock histories, the usual grown-up rock histories…

Interestingly, it's not even a couple of dozen actual looney tunes. Naturally, we have out and out comedy records such as Shaving Cream and The Streak, but there's plenty which simply chugs along on some kind of vague novelty value - The Bird's the Word or Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, which surely only count as comedy on the grounds of having presented a more authentic doo-wop experience than Perry Como; and then we have Tiny Tim's song about tulips, whatever the hell you'd call that. The thing which stands out for me - excepting the two proper children's numbers, Rubber Duckie and that fucking awful Chipmunk shite - is how most of those gathered here are just great songs, regardless of comic thrust. Susan Christie's I Love Onions still reminds me of the Residents; and Jumpin' Gene Simons' Haunted House is a gorgeous slice of hillbilly inflected country evocative as a childhood sunset; and Lonnie Donegan's surprisingly enduring My Old Man's a Dustman establishes a clear link to the Sex Pistols and all that, even though I probably wouldn't have quite been able to say why back when I first heard it.

The more you listen, the more obvious it becomes how some of these songs are genuinely odd, even avant-garde but for the lack of a beret. Buzz Clifford's Baby Sittin' Boogie flavours its breaks with the perfectly syncopated gurgling of an infant to genuinely peculiar effect, which can surely only have been achieved through mucking about with tapes; and there's the similarly bizarre vocal acrobatics of Joe Perkins' Little Eeefin' Annie knocking Can and all those other supposedly groundbreaking acts no-one actually listens to into a cocked hat. Rarely ranging much beyond doo-wop, rockabilly, country, and maybe a touch of traditional music hall, Looney Tunes is mainstream as hell, and yet manages to be seriously fucking weird for most of the playing time - arguably excepting the aforementioned children's numbers and Charlie Drake as ever trying far too hard on My Boomerang Won't Come Back. Transfusion by Nervous Norvus will save you the bother of ever having to read J.G. Ballard, and there's the distinctly rapey Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs to keep power electronics enthusiasts happy; and, in essence, what I mean to tell you is that this album has fucking everything you could ever need from a record. As some dude identifying as DaKreepa on YouTube states, the Looney Tunes album was the best fuckin' thing man has ever made, meaning that we can stop looking, having finally found the eye of the YouTube comments storm where truth finally happened.