Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7th Time (1997)

 

I've tried with this one, but I've tried by means of a Discman while out riding the range on my horse. Now listening to the thing at home, I realise it benefits somewhat from being played over speakers like background music. This is annoying because I'd already built up a significant head of ambivalence and had worked out what I wanted to write; but fuck it, I'll just say what I was going to say and you can assume that it's probably better.

I first heard of this lot back when Morrissey recorded that album of Skrewdriver covers or whatever it was that he did, and Cornershop wrote him a letter to explain how disappointed they were - much to the delight of the music press. It was something along those lines anyway. If the sentiment was worthy, I remained unimpressed on the grounds that Morrissey had spent his entire career eulogising the good old sixties, Granny Grove on black and white telly, penny chews, and how everything used to be much better than it was in the nineties. He'd never struck me as an ambassador for multicultural Britain, and it seemed bizarre that anyone should be surprised after Bengali in Platforms.

Anyway, I saw Cornershop live at least once, possibly twice, but don't remember much about the experience. I had, and still have, a few of their first records. I dig Hold On It Hurts out roughly every five or six years to give it another chance, but beyond that Born Disco, Died Heavy Metal is fairly amusing, it still sounds like a fucking racket, and not even an interesting racket; then I encountered this for a single dollar in the usual place.

It's not terrible, and you could get a fairly respectable 10" out of this bunch by excising all the pissing about, the tracks which don't really count as songs. Sleep on the Left Side and Brimful of Asha are both reasonably wonderful as vaguely summery John Denver impersonations with maybe a bit of Velvet Underground chucked in, and there are perhaps four or five others; beyond which we have a lot of that stuff which always washed ashore every time one of the music papers published yet another krautrock retrospective - three minutes of drumming, someone pissing about with a digital delay, strum strum strum about halfway through then someone pushing an easy listening record around by hand and pretending that it's scratching. It's all very well, and God knows that could serve to describe half of the bands with which I've ever been involved; but it was long in the tooth even before I got hold of it, never mind this bunch. The best you can say of these examples is that they probably worked well as linking music for that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sitcom, the one without any actual jokes. To me, tracks of this general type make it sound like you don't actually know what you're doing but - hey - look, we're nearly up to an hour now, the album is finished! Just because you were there doesn't mean it's interesting, and no, calling it improvisation really doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

That being said, When I Was Born for the 7th Time sounds much better on speakers, blending into the background as something not unlike elevator music; which was maybe the whole point.

If you read through the above a couple of times, I'm sure you'll eventually find something useful.

Kid Rock - Devil Without a Cause (1998)

I must admit it's been a while since I dug this one out. It's the whole hanging out with Donald deal which bothers me, although realistically the aforementioned hanging out with Donald is only the latest idiocy in a career founded on the same, and I doubt that anyone was surprised. Kid Rock's whole schtick is that he's a bit of an arsehole, and so Devil Without a Cause is largely about boozing and shagging until your liver explodes and your knob falls off, then doing it again whilst listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd turned up to eleven. I haven't looked too closely for fear of what I might find, but I expect he doesn't have much time for what I'm sure he terms political correctness, and I really, really wish he hadn't had such a hard-on for the Confederate flag; but then I like the music I like because it's music that I like rather than because every last opinion held by the artist synchronises perfectly with my own, and I'm probably going to hang onto those Kate Bush albums even though she's just outed herself as a massive fan of Theresa May. I draw the line at where the thought crimes of the artist are so overpowering as to infect my perception of the music.

MC Ren rapping about killing whitey doesn't bother me because it's obvious he was simply having a bad day, plus it's funny and you can see where he was coming from. I can still just about listen to Death in June with a peg over my nose, although they sound somewhat comical on this side of the millennium. I wish I'd never found out about Beck being a Scientologist. Skrewdriver, on the other hand, helpfully recorded music which was already shite thus saving the rest of us any need to debate whether it's possible to enjoy the stick 'em in a boat and send 'em back song without condoning the message, such as it is.

Maintaining a set of rules about what you will allow yourself to enjoy is a waste of time, so selections probably have to be made on a case to case basis extrapolated mostly from gut reaction; and I guess it must take a lot to stir my gut to righteous indignation.

The fact of my having felt the need to write those three paragraphs probably relates to why Kid Rock enjoys playing the arsehole, not to mention that he was never going to get to hang out with the cool kids or NME readers, regardless of his serious yet routinely overlooked credentials. So he's a white rapper, or was, but I guess we're all over that one by now. His flow belongs clearly to that sing-songy old school cornball style which is otherwise fine if we're digging out old Run DMC records or banging on about the tediously studied authenticity of Ugly Duckling; and while Kid's descent into autotuned stadium country has been appalling but probably inevitable, he's nevertheless paid dues and was once something of a whizz on the two record players - as we rap types call them; and Devil Without a Cause is unfortunately a fucking great album - not merely better than you expected, but one of those discs which glues itself into the player and stays there.

If he's an arsehole, he's the best arsehole he can possibly be on this record; and the music effortlessly weds pounding boom bap to Led Zep riffing and the kind of Skynyrd-isms which turn even the most urbane of us all misty eyed and countrified - not least on Black Chick, White Guy which just plain tears your heart out; and Welcome 2 the Party gets under your skin like nothing since the wholesale borrowing of Good Times by Chic. It's a populist album in the broadest sense, just like those early rap records before we got all uptight and snooty about it; and it's a populist album aimed squarely at people who maybe didn't make it to college, and who maybe don't have much going for them, and who probably won't respond too well when you sneer and suggest they might do better to listen to someone less sexist, J-Live for example. It's low rent, but there's a generous spirit here, and it's inclusive and probably doesn't really care if you voted for Hillary providing you're not going to be a dick about it.

While Kid Rock may be a dick who has been occasionally known to hang out with Ted Nugent, close inspection reveals him to be an otherwise decent guy in most senses that count, or at least some way from being your archetypal Republican shithead. Similarly this album almost certainly isn't what you may believe it to be, even if it does spend a lot of time belching in your face and then chuckling over how upset you are. It will probably be at least another hundred years before Devil achieves the sort of recognition it probably deserves, so don't whine about never having got the memo.

Wreckless Eric - amERICa (2015)

Wreckless Eric made a huge impression on me at an early age, and at least a couple of years before I actually knowingly heard any of his records. Most of my taste in music is fairly firmly rooted in me and Grez raiding his older brother's bedroom when we were teenagers. Grez's older brother - or Martin to his friends, that being a category which didn't include us - had all these amazing albums by people we'd never heard of, Alternative TV, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Faust, the Residents, Skrewdriver…

Well, it was All Skrewed Up which I believe predates the racist phase, but let's not get off the subject. Amongst Martin's records were several by Wreckless Eric, notably that legendary 10" album on brown vinyl; you know the one. If you don't, might I suggest euthanasia followed by reincarnation and then trying your hardest to get it fucking right next time around? How many 10" brown vinyl albums have there ever been?

Assuming we all know what I'm talking about, I maintain that the aforementioned 10" is blessed with one of the greatest covers ever. Eric looks like he's drunk, about to fall over, but really doesn't give a shit because he's having an amazing time regardless; and then there's that jacket, some funky print of eagles soaring across what probably isn't silk - all very New Faces or Opportunity Knocks and yet somehow so punk rock as to make most of those King's Road clowns look like ELO. Whether you ever regarded Wreckless Eric as punk rock probably depends on where you were stood at the time, but I guess it's okay if we keep in mind that the point of punk rock, at least according to some Sex Pistol or other, was not to destroy rock 'n' roll so much as to take it back to its roots, to take it back from all the bouffant hairdo fuckers who'd lost sight of what it was supposed to do in the first place, Geoff Lynne.

So, in accordance with my vaguely punky roots, I still find myself getting ready to sneer at the slightest suggestion of artists working past their sell-by date, but it's just a knee jerk thing, and it really doesn't apply to Wreckless Eric; because this isn't a comeback album, nor recapturing the glory days, nor sensitive sound recordings of all his new forest pals in Papua New Guinea, nor a true return to form as the perpetually misleading promise always has it, nor our man dabbling with ambient sludgestep; because amERICa is simply a new Wreckless Eric album and that's all you should need to know.

May as well cover the full distance and take the remaining few steps up my own arse, seeing as we've come all this way.

It took me a couple of years, but I chanced across the brown vinyl 10" in a second hand place in Norwich, and I bought it because Grez and myself had never got around to actually playing his brother's copy, for some reason. I bought it because I recognised the cover and I knew it would be good, as indeed it was. In fact it was more than just good. It was one of those greatest album ever recorded deals, or that's how it seems when you're in the middle of listening to the thing, playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror and miming along to Reconnez Cherie. It's difficult to pin down what made Eric seem so unique, and why I can't help bristling a little whenever I hear that pub rock song by Denim. He has an ear for a tune, and a weird little voice which sounds more like one of your mates than anyone you'd expect to hear on a record, and somehow it all comes together with such raw honesty that it would hurt if it didn't also have a decent sense of humour - it's something along these lines. Stand Wreckless Eric next to almost anyone you care to mention and the other person will look like a fake, a part-timer, an idiot with no idea what he or she is doing; and the crucial detail is that unlike so many rock 'n' roll hall of fame bores, Eric just gets on with it. He really is all about the craft unhindered by bullshit of any stripe. I had an argument with my mother about Shakespeare, her position being that the works of Shakespeare are the greatest things written in the English language because, whatever it is you wish to express, there will always be one particular way to say it which works better than all the others, and which is the most fluent; and so everything Shakespeare has said has been the best way to say that thing. I'm still not that bothered about Shakespeare, but I take the point and I'd say it applies just as well to the songs of Wreckless Eric. In terms of the heart, it doesn't get better than this. It speaks to me about my life, I suppose you'd say.

amERICa is Wreckless Eric's response to his having moved to the United states, which speaks to me about my life with particular resonance because that's what I've done too, and I know exactly what he's talking about. There's a faint country twang, but it still rocks like that bloke in the print jacket, and the honesty is both funny, painful, and even a little sad, just like on the best soul or blues records; and Transitory Thing nearly tears my fucking heart out each time I play it. Bloody hell. At the risk of hyperbole, amERICa might even be the greatest album ever recorded.

A Certain Ratio - Early (2002)

I felt a bit sorry for A Certain Ratio being more or less reduced to a joke about fake tan in Michael Winterbottom's otherwise fine 24 Hour Party People, not least because any conversation banging on about the eternally seeping talent fistula of the Manchester music scene will almost certainly neglect A Certain Ratio whilst singing the praises of crappier entities who flogged more records; although it turns out that Martin Moscrop was musical supervisor for the film, so maybe that was just how it looked to me. I gather A Certain Ratio used to slap on the fake tan before taking the stage back in the early days. I assume it was simply an exercise in generating some distance between themselves and the ruthlessly pasty punky new wave environment of the time.

I don't for a second believe there was really anything inherently racist about punk or new wave at the end of the seventies, even if it was mostly a white thing, but at the same time it seems potentially significant that bands such as Skrewdriver were able to shift ideological gear without actually sounding any different; and then of course it occasionally seemed like there might be a bit of a subtext to the traditional punky hatred of disco. Anyway, I can see why A Certain Ratio might have felt inclined to get away from that, and from - I suppose - pale grey audiences of Joy Division fans crying into their chips. Never mind all that there's always been a dance element to our music, man bollocks, A Certain Ratio were a big, funky disco act which just happened to have emerged from the north of England rather than some New York club, and they were a big, funky disco act long before it was cool, and way before Cabaret Voltaire started slapping that bass whilst mumbling about James Brown. In fact, so far as I can tell, you might legitimately trace most of England's eighties white soul back to this lot, which probably means that Blue Rondo a la Turk and Spandau Ballet were sort of their fault, but never mind.

The thing which set them apart from many others was an understanding of their limitations and a willingness to work around them, which is why you might not even immediately recognise that sound as belonging to a big, funky disco act - because this is actual soul, dance, disco or whatever the hell you want to call it, rather than a bunch of white guys engaged in a Kenny Everett impersonation with unconvincing handclaps and whoops of get on up in a phoney American accent. At the same time, of course it's an experiment - as I suppose might seem implicit from the Eno reference in the name - but one with which they were fully engaged, as should be any musician doing anything other than just going through the motions and making the right noises; and this is why you get oddities like the misleadingly named All Night Party - as sunless an entity as ever was and which at least saves us the trouble of bothering to own Bauhaus records. Sometimes the horns don't quite get there, sounding like the brass equivalent of one of those school bands all sawing away on their strings, but the spirit of the enterprise as a whole keeps it together.

I'd say this band were magnificent but of course they're still going in some form or other, so I suppose the past tense is misleading, being a specific reference to the material collected on these two discs. With hindsight, this version of A Certain Ratio might represent the raw seam of sweaty goodness which others tapped for eventual transformation into all that was horrible, slick, devoid of soul, and gratifyingly annoying to Morrissey in the eighties. A Certain Ratio was what all those really shit bands were supposed to sound like, but they just didn't have what it takes.

Death In June - Nada! (1985)

There has been, over the years, a seemingly infinite tide of complete bollocks written about this bunch, so a few more paragraphs probably won't make a whole lot of difference. Even in taking the disparaging view towards which I am driven, there will inevitably be some reverse-McCarthyite on a witch-hunt protesting that the voices raised in condemnation are not quite loud enough and Herman Goering once used the phrase not quite loud enough in a letter written to his mam, therefore aha! To such persons I say screw you too, and congratulations on turning into a model of the inflexible ultrapolarity to which you claim to be opposed.

Anyway, I used to go nuts for Death In June back in the nineties, back before it all went bad, or was at last exposed as having been somewhat minging all along depending on which version you prefer; and it wasn't even like I had to rush out and buy everything I could get my mitts on because I was at the time in a band using the same distribution company as were Death In June. The company was World Serpent and their office was just around the corner from where I lived in Lewisham and I was prone to sporadic bouts of hanging around and blagging freebies simply because I could. I still have about thirteen or fourteen Death In June albums in my collection - depending on what you define as an album - and I think I paid for maybe two of them; although it could be argued that being pals with World Serpent's David Gibson was itself a form of payment, and a much harsher form than any more conventional numismatic equivalent.

Then, around the time of Take Care and Control, the release of which segued directly into Death In June parting company with World Serpent, the word seemed to get around that Douglas P's continuing exploration of controversial ideas and images might derive from political views of slightly more astringent composition than a simple dislike of reggae. The embarrassing thing about this was of course that it had been staring us in the face all along in so much as that it was specifically because Death In June were so fucking scary that we'd been drawn to them in the first place. I know a number of people who've since got rid of their Death In June records; and I can understand why because, if for no other reason, the possibility that those responsible might genuinely believe the wrong side won the second world war feels like a betrayal given how hard we all worked to sustain the benefit of the doubt for so long; and it makes us look like idiots.

I, on the other hand, still have these things in my possession. I don't listen to them because it was a long time ago and I've moved on, but I once played the shit out of Nada! and others, and it can be difficult to completely let go when you loved something that much; plus they still sound decent - or at least artistically interesting - regardless of what retarded motives may have informed their recording, which can't really be said of Skrewdriver.

So let's take a look at this thing, and if possible without getting hysterical or denouncing anyone as a Nazi just because we have a picture of them smiling whilst eating a frankfurter.

Death In June, if we assume for the sake of argument that Nada! is just a record, expand on the sort of faux classicism which Joy Division first introduced to the hit parade, which was itself probably somewhere between a slightly pretentious poetic tendency and a desire to put some distance between itself and its belching punk rock roots. Much popular music at the arse end of the twentieth century has been about pissing somebody off for chuckles, usually parents who don't understand, but also those of our peers who don't seem quite sufficiently elevated, obscure, cool, poetic, back-combed or whatever and might be better served staying at home with their ghastly working class Showaddywaddy albums, or whatever else it was that Morrissey didn't like that week. In terms of the vague genre which has been posthumously and somewhat ludicrously dubbed industrial music, the pissing someone off for chuckles often amounts to cheap liberal baiting because what could be funnier than sticking your tongue out at your biggest fans, at those who would defend your dubiously rendered outsider art with the most passion, those bleating sheep-like losers! Exploring controversial ideas and imagery is of course always a chortlesome means of alienating those thou wouldst deem to be but twats and serfs, which isn't to say that Porridge's interest in Charles Manson wasn't absolutely sincere; but sincere or not, the subtext always came across as here's a horrible thing and there's a possibility that I might actually approve of what it says or does, and I'm amused that this upsets you. It's the same as that not-particularly-fateful school dinner of my distant youth during which my friend Paul pointed to the tiny brown husk of a watercress seed in my salad and told me, 'those things are poisonous,' before adding with glee 'my family eat them!'

As four million heavy metal bands are my witness, this is not a new idea, it being in the tradition of all those album covers with Old English lettering and a leering Satan looking at women's tits. The difference is that whilst leering Satan looking at women's tits patently belongs to some kind of showbiz tradition and is therefore inherently theatrical, supposedly industrial equivalents employ poetic faux classicism so as to pull a serious face thereby presenting the suggestion that they might actually mean it - hence all those groups pretending to be dubious organisations rather than merely noisy rock bands. Death In June are Adolf Hitler looking at women's tits, and the art is in the ambiguity: maybe they're for real, or as it is written within the run-out spiral of this very album, we aim to please with constant unease.

The above two paragraphs account in part for why I had Death In June records in my collection in the first place, but probably shouldn't be regarded as the whole story.

Nada! works as an album because it retains a sort of dark beauty which bypasses whatever intellectual argument you might set against it. It hints at dramatic and horrifying acts or emotions - death, pain, betrayal, and all those other po-faced martial clichés - in a pseudo-mystical language invoking mournful looking statues and other reet classy stuff, all a long way away from the great belching leviathan of rock and roll. Nada! does it's job very well, or did it's job very well at the time by sounding like nothing else of its day - kettle drums, acoustic guitar, trumpet, golden voices and pulsing electronics; and it did it's job very well, contrasting all the skulls and daggers and ambiguous threats with an audio palette which sounds like it wants to be a Titian landscape when it grows up, yet without actually saying anything.

Blood flows...

Fields of Rape...

She said destroy in black New York...

...what the fuck? Black New York? You mean like the black neighbourhoods? Did he really say that?

Où est Klaus barbie...

Il est dans le coeur noir...

Claudette va à l'école tous les jours...

I suppose you might say the problem with Death In June - or at least one significant problem - can be reduced to whether they mean it, maaaan, but have been playing the get out of the art gallery free card all this time so as to prevent horrible working class Showaddywaddy fans calling them names and saying that they smell and that they're a bit like Hitler; or whether the ambiguity really is the whole point, and it's just art - and art and politics don't mix as one former massive knob put it, presumably because he was playing drums for Death In June at the time. Unfortunately, if ambiguity is the whole point and allusions to the Third Reich are all just one big convoluted metaphor for feeling a bit glum, then as art it's too repetitive and clumsy to have been informed by the sort of intellectual classicism to which it purportedly aspires, not least because even after all this time Death In June still don't seem to have actually said anything you wouldn't find on any other tenth rate goth album, not even by accident; and in case anyone was wondering, I've picked on Nada! because it still sounds like an actual record. More recent efforts would have constituted shooting a fish in a barrel - The Rule of Thirds from 2008 for example just seems to be strum whine moan strum strum angels and stuff strum Martin Boorman was nice to his goldfish blah blah blah... It sounds like he's making it up as he goes along, just more generic neofolk product by which to pay off a substantial tab at Millets. Those camouflage underpants ain't cheap.

Yet whilst Death In June don't appear to have actually said anything, Douglas P himself certainly has, and it's all over the internet and isn't difficult to find. Mostly it seems to be nebulous crap along the lines of how the European gene pool has seen better days - stuff at roughly the intellectual level of someone you knew from school who turns up on facebook after twenty years, working for an insurance company and who thinks that UKIP are only stating what many people feel they aren't allowed to say due to political correctness. In fact, Douglas P's infrequent almost but not quite political observations seem to present an intriguing third possibility that he hasn't really thought about it all that much because the fucker simply isn't that bright, and the fact of his having got away with singing veiled tributes to Adolf Hitler all these years has really been sheer dumb luck - not so much a Nazi as just something of a berk.

So in conclusion, I don't know whether he is or he isn't, and I'm not sure how much I genuinely care. On the other hand, my bottom line is that when fans turn up to your gigs wearing full SS uniform to appreciatively sieg heil your songs, and this doesn't inspire you to take a long, hard look at just where you've gone wrong, then you're a fucking twat regardless; which I'd say applies just as well when you see no ideological problem in sharing a stage with acts who openly endorse racist or otherwise extreme right-wing ideals. Whether it's art, or you like to keep an open-mind, or you're thinking outside the box, or you're simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, you're still a fucking twat.

The bottom line to this bottom line is that it won't necessarily stop me listening to your records, any more than I'll ever stop listening to and enjoying MC Ren urging us all to buy guns and take out as many white people as we can before the cops arrive - which is different for too many reasons to go into here - but it may somewhat change my regard of you as an individual with a presumed ability to think in a straight line without either falling over or shitting yourself. So feel free to continue to listen to and enjoy Death In June, but please don't pretend it does anything deeper than what little it has the courage to admit on the tin. Sometimes if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it looks like a duck, then maybe it's a fucking duck. It might simply be pretending to be a duck for reasons best known to itself, but we could be stuck here all day debating just what the difference is.

Skinny Puppy - Cleanse Fold and Manipulate (1987)

Should there not be a comma in there somewhere? Anyway, none of it will really matter once I get my bill through congress, specifically my bill to have almost all industrial music officially reclassified as Belgian New Beat. If it wasn't actually recorded by a member of Throbbing Gristle or SPK in 1978 - excluding those who bravely vocalised their hatred of gypsies or else went on to bash the skins for Skrewdriver whilst insisting that music and politics should never mix - then it ain't fucking industrial and is therefore Belgian New Beat so far as I'm concerned. Once applied, the bill will float works by Whitehouse, Ministry, Cassandra Complex and the Neon Judgement on the open market where they will be obliged to compete with the musically superior work of TNT Clan, Lords of Acid, and the Confetti's. Record stores and mail order operations will be required to reorganise their stock and the categories through which it is sold; and Oxford University Press will be obliged to recall, revise and reprint all copies of S. Alexander Reed's Assimilate: A Critical History of Belgian New Beat - as will be its new title; on which subject, here's an excerpt from the first chapter:

It was April 5, 1991, and Gary Levermore was worried. He'd spent thousands flying the band Front Line Assembly from Vancouver to London for a concert he was promoting that night at the Venue, a seventy-year-old stone building in New Cross. 'It wasn't in the centre of town where you'd think it would be easy for people to get to. Instead it was a few miles further south; not on an underground line,' he remembers. The first time Front Line Assembly had played London, in July 1989, the turnout was disastrously low...

When Levermore arrived at the old theatre, though, it was clear there would be no repeat of 1989's miserable show. Wrapped in a long queue down Clifton Ride were some three hundred industrial fans, dressed in black...

I suspect he's referring to Clifton Rise, there being no such place as Clifton Ride. Additionally, the Venue is about three minutes walk in a straight line along a main road from New Cross station, which is on the East London Line in terms of the underground network; and I myself was present at that gig, and the place was conspicuously less than half full; and all of this on the very first page, which is one of several reasons why I've yet to avail myself of a copy of Reed's Critical History of Belgian New Beat. I'm also a little put off by the title coming from a Skinny Puppy track because - all joking aside - they really sort of are Belgian New Beat, apart from being Canadian.

I never really got Skinny Puppy, and this album, picked up for mere dollars with the idea that I may have been wrong all these years, goes some way to illustrating why this should be. I'm sure I've seen it turning up in a few of those dreary ten industrial albums you must hear kind of lists, invariably alongside Coil's CD of the humming noise made by their fridge and Sol Invictus gathering together a few entirely harmless songs about how the world would be a better place without certain kinds of people if you know what I mean, not mentioning no names or nuffink.

I'm actually not averse to a spot of Belgian New Beat. Front 242 have barely ever set an electronic foot wrong to my ears, and whilst Front Line Assembly are really just Napalm Death with a synthesiser, they've usually sounded decent to me; and then there's Nitzer Ebb, and the Severed Heads were pretty much one of the greatest bands of all time, but then I hear this...

The first thing you do when you buy a digital effects box is you select reverb, you whack the decay up to about two minutes - or as far as it will go - and then you tap your finger gently against the microphone and summon forth the screaming cacophony of the void as the black stars of the netherverse devour the fabric of reality. After another ten minutes you either get bored of this or else try to make a career out of it like that Lustmord chap. Whilst Cleanse Fold and Manipulate also has sequencers and drum machines to impersonate medieval armies smashing up your castle thanks to the magic of the two minute reverb, it kind of comes from the same place; and the singer appears to be auditioning for the role of wicked goblin number two in Lord of the Rings, and it really sounds to me like he's singing with an affected English accent because the English are always the bad guys in the movies; and there's a bloke called Nivek Ogre on this record, and Nivek is Kevin spelled backwards; and the whole thing sounds so cock-obviously digital it borders on being a Duran Duran extended club mix from when they were famous, without irony, right down to stabs of orchestral sound.

Nevertheless, after three or four plays I begin to hear past the above, and see at least some of the appeal which lays in Skinny Puppy having been - probably unintentionally - a sort of Belgian New Beat Virgin Prunes. There's nothing much you would call a tune, just grooves, a lot of scraping and scowling, and a texture emerging from the relative chaos which works by similar means as did those very early Throbbing Gristle tapes - unfamiliar noises and effects rendered familiar through repetition. Much to my surprise, I ended up  enjoying this in spite of it all having been a bit studied and obvious even back in 1987, and in spite of there being a million other things which do the same job better. It's still not feckin' industrial though.

Throbbing Gristle - Part Two: The Endless Not (2007)

I discovered Throbbing Gristle when Graham and I - Graham being my best friend at school - would sneak into his older brother's room to gaze with great wonderment upon the punk rock records therein, the ones with all the swearing and the street credibility words; and even better was that it wasn't all punk rock either - Alternative TV, Here & Now, The Residents, Faust, Wreckless Eric, All Skrewed Up by Skrewdriver from before they took to experimenting with racism as a medium, and Throbbing Gristle who had the most entertainingly disgusting band name in the world. We listened to a bit of his brother's Best of Throbbing Gristle Volume II tape, and I was immediately fascinated by this music which sounded like a factory assembly line chugging away whilst some guy whined on about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. I'd probably been primed to enjoy this sort of thing by the grating electronic soundtrack of certain 1970s Doctor Who episodes, although that didn't occur to me at the time.

I quickly became a Throbbing Gristle convert, buying up every bit of vinyl or tape I could get my hands on, reading whatever material was out there, the interviews in Sounds or Re/Search magazine. Genesis P. Orridge, the singer - or at least vocalist - of the group, seemed to articulate all that good anti-establishment stuff I already recognised from punk rock, but with greater wit, and a more developed sense of art; and I couldn't get enough of it, which worked out well because as it turned out P. Orridge was barely able to do so much as spend a penny without declaring it a subversive and playful challenge to some convention or other. The man never shut up, and being fifteen, I found it immensely entertaining, even inspiring. It was fascinating, just waiting to see what he would come out with next.

One version of the story has it that Throbbing Gristle split in 1981 precisely because P. Orridge just couldn't shut up, and at least two of the others were beginning to resent his presuming to speak for the entire group, and at having apparently become his backing band. Whatever the case may have been, so far as P. Orridge was concerned, once the first couple of Psychic TV albums appeared it became obvious that the jig was up as he revealed himself to be a man whose work was only ever as interesting as whoever he was stood next to at the time - Alex Ferguson, Dave Ball, Fred Giannelli or whoever. The supposedly revolutionary insight which had so impressed me when I was at school turned out to be nothing more profound than a sort of postmodern Tourette syndrome, an endless fountain of pseudo-Situationist word salad for which there was no off button, all content secondary to the myth of Genesis P. Orridge, controversial author of A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to William Burroughs' House. I had imagined him as some great bringer of wisdom, the one to truly see through the bullshit veil of societal conditioning, but it turned out that he really just wanted to be Lou Reed, stood in one room feigning indifference to the knowledge of everyone in the next room discussing his genius.

Well, that's how it has looked to me since about 1981, and the testimony of at least Fiona Russell Powell seems to support the impression I picked up from a number of mutual acquaintances whose lives have intersected with that of himself, not least various members of the more interesting, supposedly unauthorised and later incarnation of TOPY. The acronym stood for the Temple of Psychic Youth, which was ostensibly an international network of like-minded persons with an interest in challenging art, the occult, philosophy and the like. In practice it turned out to be more or less a fan club for P. Orridge, its founder. I ignored TOPY on the grounds that by 1985 I was already bored shitless of the number 23 and its attendant pseudo-mystical bollocks, paying attention only when the organisation began to evolve into something more interesting in the early 1990s under the guidance of a group who had taken it upon themselves to rescue TOPY from its absentee father figure; at which juncture P. Orridge, the voice of playful subversion and unrestricted artistic liberty turned into Phil Collins getting testy over uncleared samples and intellectual copyright. He wasn't about to let anyone get their mitts on his fan club, even though it wasn't a fan club, obviously.

So, to condense all of the above to a single, simple point: I've never felt quite so let down, even so betrayed by a famous person whom I've never met turning out to be just some hat-wearing self-involved bozo as with P. Orridge; so there may be a certain embittered fervour to my poor regard of the man, and perhaps even some bias; so I'm just letting you know.

I found most Psychic TV dull to the point of being unlistenable, lacking imagination, and musically pedestrian - a well-meaning but definitively past-it youth club leader speeding his tits off and trying too hard to appear mysterious. I never really warmed to Coil either. Their music just wasn't that exciting, and it seemed like they might have done better just releasing lists of whatever droning occult tedium they had been researching that week. Of all former members of Throbbing Gristle, Chris and Cosey at least managed to make some decent records, although personally I began to find it all sounding a little samey by the time of 1991's, Pagan Tango. It just didn't give the impression that they were enjoying themselves.

Anyway, Throbbing Gristle always struck me as the most unlikely of reunions. Even in the studio, their music seemed so firmly of the moment that a twenty-first century revival would surely be pointless - playing Persuasion once again like Showaddywaddy invoking the flaccid spirit of Carl Perkins and Elvis; or worse - a Chris and Cosey record with P. Orridge crooning about having a wank over the top. I bought Part Two expecting it to be shite, nevertheless overpowered by my own curiosity...

...and as I suppose we all know by now, against all odds, it actually sort of worked; thanks to no effort made in tribute to the past, excepting perhaps in the cover photograph of Mount Kailash, a sacred Tibetan site to which people of all faiths make their spiritual pilgrimages, if that isn't too wild or wacky a metaphor. The technology is all new and generally far beyond the toys used last time these four were all together in the same room, but the spirit remains roughly what the fuck, let's see what happens when I press this, and so we have something technologically resembling Nine Inch Nails whilst sounding exactly like the record Throbbing Gristle made after Journey Through A Body, and most importantly it sounds mostly just as strange and powerful and as full of surprises as they ever did, with not so much as a whiff of Mick and Keith chugging through a geriatric Satisfaction for the ten millionth time.

That said, P. Orridge, formerly the weird and slightly disturbing pixie who somehow made it all work has ended up the weakest link, having since submitted fully to his own outsider celebrity status. He could never really sing, but it was easier to forgive him back when he was at least aware of this and didn't bother trying. As such, the better tracks here seem to be those on which the P. Orridge voice is reduced to a sound source; less so songs like Almost A Kiss wherein everyone is obliged to accommodate our kid's belief in himself as Marlene Dietrich, and which sounds like some old dosser howling away outside a pub in Huddersfield at two in the morning; but I suppose it's preferable to crooning requests for stamped addressed envelopes full of manly sex tadpoles.

On reflection, it's probably for the best that this wasn't going to go much further - referring here to the split prior to Peter Christopherson's tragic and untimely passing - given that good things tend not to endure. There was always something magical about the combination of these four people, and it seems a minor miracle that it should come around a second time without falling on its arse; and given Chris and Cosey being the two with the actual ideas, I really should have a look at what they've been doing these past few decades, shouldn't I?