Ganja Crew

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY pieces. I rather like this one, though it does very slightly poke fun at other contributors to the zine.

LADYTRON – 604 (Invicta Hi-Fi)

We probably all have a phonobiography, a list of music that is intrinsically tied to certain eras in our lives. We read a lot of that in this very zine, records that spun as writers met their spouse, recovered from measles, or finished Manic Miner, discs dropped like markers on the Google Maps of their own history. Well, the past is a foreign county, LP Hartley reckoned (in between fly fishing and making jam, probably, I’ve done no research), so why not a country I’ve never visited? One where I don’t even know the currency or the approximate average rainfall: an Azerbaijan of times past, let’s say. 

So, the other day I went into the charity shop where one could get 10 CDs for a fiver - which is really too many for a deal, but I can rarely walk away from them - including 604, Ladytron’s debut album released in February 2001. I have never heard this record before, and have only the vaguest memories of hearing a track or two by them in the past, and I’ll type this review live as I listen for the first time.  Warning: may not include full sentences. Or full sense. What we're gonna do right here is go Baku, way Baku, Baku into time. 

mu-tron: Stomping descending motif.  Wiggly pre-wub bass tones.  Layers of treacly synth, a bit like a Add N To (X). Atonal elements.  An almost melancholic stately melody line on top, hints of Aphex. This is great, actually. 

discotraxx: What language was that?  It would be cool if it were Azerbaijani, but It was probably Bulgarian, judging by the fact the vocalist, Mira Aroyo is from there, as Wikiedia tells me.  Must stop checking Wikipedia, this temporal foreign country doesn’t have Ordnance Survey. Anyway, adding Marilyn Monroe-as-a-girl vocals changes the vibe, not yet sure whether I like that as much. Cantering bassline with a Bangelis vibe (that’s Vangelis that slaps harder, FYI).  

another breakfast with you: Telephone type noises, reminding me of that B12 track ‘Telefone 529’ (I’m allowed to look that up, don’t write in). Thin organ.  you can hear the live playing in the topline, it’s not quantised. Sort of like half a Madonna song. 

CSKA sofia: I guess I’m not allowed to look up what those letters mean, but I guess Sofia is the Bulgarian capital, not some girl. Kitsch instrumental with Farfisa-like tones and non-dance drum machine parts.   

the way that I found you: Simple uninflected but slightly breathy vocals make this like Broadcast, without the VHS horror and art archivism.  Simple romance for consumers. 

paco!: Clearly an homage to Are You being Served: “4th floor, electronica, fake antiques, and lingerie”, which is a rum mix. Nice thin bongo rhythm, glides mechanically but smoothly, like a long shopping centre escalator. 

commodore rock: The title makes me thing of ‘Computer Club’ by Datarock, though perhaps Commodore Rock is in the navy (the capitalisation is pretty random on the sleeve, so I have no idea). Proto-techno gyrations, the first time this LP has made me feel like dancing. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes advertising jingle by Model 500. French-accented spoken vocals remind me of Dr Calculus (see previous LFTWY article, if you know what’s good for you). 

ZMEYKA: Violin scrapes, and interesting background noises. Not in tune, or even noticeably related to what’s happening up front. Reminds me of MES methods, and it makes what might be a slightly generic eletro plod more interesting. 

playgirl: Tapping into that sort of Barbarella wide-eyed innocent sexiness. Bit dated, to be honest, but still no harm done. The chords cycle comfortably, it’s decent, but a bit static and thin on ideas – compare this with Stereolab’s take on 60s chintz, and it loses. 

I’m with the pilots: Shimmying sassy little bassline.  Sounds like it could be a Christine Aguilera track. Sprechgesang vocals, wry and aloof, like Black Box Recorder, though this doesn’t have the supercilious humour. 

this is our sound: Title is valid, they do sound like this (I mean, there’s a paradox there, but you get the gist) – perambulatory paced synth bass, simple drums, airy ditty vox. 

he took her to a movie: Unashamedly ‘The Model’. Like, not even trying to hide it at all. Title is most of the lyrics. Warhol faux-simplicity. 

laughing cavalier: Abstract and moody, like something from a Czech art film. Only a minute long, so no time to type any mo- 

lady bird: It’s two words, so maybe it’s about the old US first lady, not the insect. Quite close to a chart pop song, if the buzz and clunk were brightened and smoothed. Hints of Kylie. Nothing wrong with that, mind. Nice synth-glock outro. 

JET AGE: These capitals are driving me mad, I’m spending more time checking these are right than reviewing. Is there a snippet of the percussion breakbeat from ‘Apache’ by Incredible Bongo Band? A more wintry tone than the rest of the album. 

skools out: Quiet and tinny music, with the vocals very loud (are my computer speakers a little broken?  Surely it can’t be as “AM radio on the other side of a sand dune” thin as this.  Oh wait, the bass and mids have come in, as you were). Bassline one is from classic grease rock – I guess because of the titular ref to Alice Cooper (though their music is more elegant, for the most part, this sounds like something Ten Benson would have swiped from some forgotten dumbass protoglam single). There is no hidden track, the 90s are over, fools. 

Well that was quite good fun. I honestly liked the album, but just inspiring this stupid idea for a zine article was worth my 50p - which at the current exchange rate is 1 manat and 14 gapiks (yes, I looked it up...but I kept the mean precipitation as a sweet mystery to uncover another day). 

Ha, Marsupial Star

As promised, here's another from a LFTWY annual round-up. I'm pretty happy with this piece, it makes a valid general observation, whilst still acting as a review of the record itself, and it's pretty concise (there are no word limits at LFTWY, but I still keep myself to a few hundred, I think it's better for all concerned).

KID KOALA – CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME (Ninja Tune) 

You all know what guitarists are like. These blokes – they're always blokes – spend countless hours arguing about technique, studying the minutest elements of their heroes’ performances and attempting to emulate them, giving ability primacy over invention, and being, you know, no fun at all to be with. But, true though this might be, it’s triply true of turntablism fans. I can think of no instrument that is so tied to a narrow clutch of stylistic tropes as DJing and no group of fans that are such a bro-centration of conservatives (listening to deckheads arguing about how vinyl scratching is better than the modern digital version for five minutes is enough to make you long for that sweaty guy in the blues jam lecturing about valve amps). Do a quick search online for great turntable performances and you won’t find sweet musical excerpt, like Eric B clinically exploring a vocal phrase whilst Rakim takes a break on the mic, you won’t find the foundational methods and creations of Grand Wizard Theodore, and you sure as hell won’t find experimenters like Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What you’ll find is hundreds of extracts from DMC mixing championships over the years, and a slew of clips in which a DJ does exactly the same things, but just fractionally faster, slicker or, occasionally, whilst standing on their head. More than any other slice of musical life, DJing is intrinsically connected with competition. Scratching isn’t art, it’s athletics. 

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a great DJ record because Kid Koala has technique coming out of his tufty grey ears, and has a crate-digger's sense of a funky rhythm to loop in classic hip-hop style, but he also has exactly zero interest in showing off, and instead a huge desire to intrigue and entertain. You can definitely dance to some of this record – or, at least, nod along whilst slumped in a sofa in the early hours – and ‘Fender Bender’ and ‘Roboshuffle’ aren’t too far from the sort of grooves you might get from DJ Shadow or Cut Chemist, but a lot of the record explores abstraction in a way that’s as close to Martin Tétreault as it is to Grandmaster Flash: check the tiny insectile clicks and chitters of ‘Scurvy’ , or the tiny fludge sounds stacked up on ‘Nerdball’, which are fast as hell and doubtless mindblowingly difficult to pull off, but also a world from the clean cuts that accepted technique requires. Lots of spoken elements are sliced or sped up so intensely that they are disconnected from any meaning, untethered phonemes swarming like flying ants, and when statements are clear, they are normally comical, from the wry knowingness of a Foley artist discussing how to make different noises or a stand-up ridiculing DJs, to the outright gagginess of the two ‘Barhopper’ tracks, which act as surreal lessons in pick-up artistry by jamming together lines form a multitiude of sources.  

The funniest parts of the record require no words at all though. ‘Drunk Trumpet’ sounds exactly as you might imagine, a hilariously woozy attack on a horn sample over a stumbling double bass lope, and I can’t imagine anyone not laughing at the wonky poultry party that is ‘Like Irregular Chickens’. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a brilliant album to play to someone who doesn’t like hip-hop DJing so they can find out what a thoughtful and witty artist can create, but it’s an even better record to play to somebody who likes it too much, just to remind them that creativity is always more important than dexterity. 

Pole Opinion

I have received a new batch of LFTWY issues, so expect 3 old album reviews in quick succession. This is from the 1999 issue. Small but crucial typo from the print version fixed, accuracy fans!

POLE – 2 (Kiff SM) 

The great paradox of dub is that it sounds simultaneously cosmically other-worldly, and entirely organic. For all the toms that sound like they’re being played inside Krakatoa, or the hi-hats that sound like they’re being beamed in from Venus, you can never forget the physical input required to make this music: fingers pushing faders, hands leaping between dials, tape spooling in a battered Echoplex. Although there were plenty of decent records produced in the early 90s’ European digidub micromovement, the slick computer effects lack this earthy ruggedness. A few years later, Stefan Betke, AKA Pole, managed to rough up the smooth digital sheen, not with analogue equipment, but by using a digital device that was lightly shafted (the act name comes from something called a Waldorf 4-pole filter which Betke dropped on the floor, and which started going all wobbly). 

Opener ‘Fahren’ sounds most like Pole's digidub predecessors, and the synth melodica line recalls early Zion Train, but although the music is spacious it is neither ominous nor groovy. You might rightly call this dispassionate clinical music “cavernous”, but it sounds like a surveyor mapping a Victorian culvert, rather than someone lost in a haunted cave. ‘Stadt’ opens with plenty of hisses and crackles, and is superficially similar to the glitch music found on Mille Plateaux records around the same time, but it still manages to retain the ghost of a reggae riddim. 

‘Streit’ opens with a squitty little rhythmic twitch, the sound of a salivatory gland wired up to a dot matrix printer. Theres a slithering two-note bassline worming through the track, but again, you’d be hard pressed to skank to this one. There are equally unrhythmic strands of percussive noises on ‘Huckepack’ (which apparently means piggyback in German, but in my mind it will always be the Teutonic variant of vintage dance craze the hucklebuck). Here a tiny recurrent strand of pips – not so much a motif, more a tic – sounds a lot like someone unzipping a tent. 

Other ersatz sounds are the highly treated drum noise on ‘Hafen’ whcih sounds like a piece of cardboard coughing, and the pseudo-organ stabs that hang in off-beat clouds on ‘Weit’ so that listening feels like pushing one’s way through a forest of sere, dead bullrushes that crumble at the touch, whilst higher-pitched notes hang like zombie mosquitoes just out of reach. Except, you know, pleasant. Although the four albums Pole made in this style sound like a dead end now, an evolutionary avenue that died out whilst a more dominant strain mutated into dubstep a few years later and eclipsed its cousins, there’s still more than enough to intrigue on this record, arguably the pick of the four. This is music that doesn’t sound human, but equally doesn’t sound cold and regimented like most music that celebrates its lack of humanity. Warm yet impersonal, flawed yet robotic, there’s nothing else that sounds quite like this on my shelves. 

REMinders

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY annually-themed reviews, this time partying like it wee still 1999.

R.E.M. - UP (Warner Bros) 

I like Bill Berry, and it always feels a little bit like betrayal that one of my favourite R.E.M. albums is the one they made right after he left. Still, they had the decency to make it with hardly any live drums. Come to think of it, even the programmed drums and are so far back in a fuzzy mix that they feel less like percussion and more like a sort of misty backdrop to a German Romantic painting of a bloke on a craggy mountain. Up is a big major label album by a superstar band, but it’s really a demo writ large, a quiet album of sketches with a tape-hum atmosphere; “hauntology” was a still a few years away in the pop-critical lexicon but this album shares some of that microgenre’s lofi sonic memory-triggers, and in retrospect seems to be an indie bedfellow to the electronic blurriness of Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children, also released in this year.  

The band knew they were going to lose a few fans of their stadium bangers with this record, and so decided to put ‘Airportman’ at the top of the tracklist, like a dragon guarding the entrance. It has a hypnagogic Eno feel which pre-empts a lot of what Radiohead would be doing a couple of years later. Still, it’s easy to forget that there is plenty of precedent for this sort of introspective, lightly experimental music in the R.E.M. catalogue, and many people who like to holler along to ‘Man On The Moon’ on Greatest Hits Radio might be nonplussed by the precedents here: the unpretentious ‘New Orleans Instrumentals’, the wraithlike mumble of ‘Star Me Kitten’, and the improvised ambient drama of ‘Country Feedback’ (which is the best song R.E.M. ever wrote, in case you were wondering). There’s more Frippy guitar on ‘Why Not Smile’, though there it’s joined by baroque gamelan doo-wop loops. 

The not-very-single-like-at-all-really single ‘Daysleeper’ is barely more solid, doused in radio static and quiet keys which are the aural equivalent of the beige office walls in yellow electric-light at which the narrator presumably stares. The lines “I cried the other night, I can’t even say why” are still improbably beautiful, even all these years later. It’s followed by ‘Diminished’, the sun-drowsy Sunday afternoon snooze balancing the wintry midweek worknight. It has a stoned loping bass and percussion boasting some of the untroubled drawl of The Folk Implosion around the time of the Kids soundtrack. It also has a hidden track at the end, even though the album still has two more tracks, which is pretty unusual. ‘Suspicion’ has some of the weltschmerz boogie of Paul Simon’s masterpiece Still Crazy After All These Years, with a surprisingly lovely vocal line which harks back to the soft mumble of the band’s first two albums. 

There are also a few songs a little closer to the rock template. ‘Lotus’ is a simple electric piano vamp, like a looped fraction of a Supertramp or Gilbert O’Sullivan rhythm, with lovely late-60s guitar (though there are still no histrionics). ‘Walk Unafraid’ is a rocker that dare not squeal its name, inspired by Patti Smith, who of course previously guested on ‘E-bow The Letter’. (Random aside:  when ‘E-bow The Letter’ got its first play on The Evening Session they claimed that the title meant that the letter L had been elbowed from the word elbow, which is a misunderstanding of cryptic genius.)  

A lot was made at the time of the Brian Wilson influence on the record, but it’s only really ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which brings his great songs to mind (though ‘Parakeet’ has a whiff of the sandbox as well). It’s more Bleach Boys than Beach Boys, though, fuzzy and scraped thin. Leonard Cohen was given a co-credit on ‘Hope’ which has saved me 20-odd years of racking my brains to work out what the vocal reminds me of - ‘Suzanne’, if you’re wondering – and has the most timid, wooly drum machine sound ever, like the opposite of Mantronix. 

At just over an hour, this is only about half of the album, and it’s all strong, except perhaps ‘Sad Professor’, which is shapeless in an awkward way that drags a little. Back in 1988 Mudhoney released a foundation stone of grunge with Superfuzz Bigmuff, but Up could have been called Hyperfluff Softscuzz, such is the warm C90 burr wrapping all of these songs. Once ‘Fails To Climb’ has concluded the album, sounding like Tangerine Dream scoring an old Anglican hymn, you might just feel like sitting silently for 5 minutes, preferably in a dim crepuscular light.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

The Ups And Downs

It's finally time for me to write about The Fall for LFTY! I've been holding off picking one since the year-themed specials began, and this is the one that got up and waved to me.

THE FALL – LEVITATE (Artful) 

“There is no culture is my brag,” declaimed Mark E Smith in 1982, but he might equally have stated, “There is no consensus concerning my oeuvre”. There are many noteworthy things about The Fall, but one that rarely gets mentioned is how little agreement there is amongst admirers about what constitutes the best material. Beatles fans might argue at length about minutiae of the fab output, but as close to none of them as makes no difference think With The Beatles is better than Revolver, whereas no randomly selected bunch of Fallophiles would get close to honing in what are the best and worst records. Perhaps this is because all Fall albums contain gold cushioned in straw, a mixture of incredible music and perplexing old nonsense, sometimes in consecutive bars (and perhaps this is what makes them so constantly mystifying and exciting). But even so, 1997’s Levitate is an album that is rarely top of anyone’s pantheon, as it’s an awkward, uneven album, where jokes fall flat and smiles turn sinister, where euphoria comes with a hint of wintry regret, where musical inspiration comes with a scribbled Post-It note saying “Will this do?”. 

And I’m here to claim that this is what makes it essential to the story of The Fall. 

First up, let’s dismiss the historical context. Yes, this is the last album to feature the great Steve Hanley on bass, The Fall’s longest-serving non-ranting member, and it was released not long before the Brownies incident, in which the group collapsed on a NYC stage and after which MES was arrested. People claim you can hear the tension on this record, but I’m not sure it is any more true here than in many other places. Nope, the reason this record sounds so odd is that it has the credit “produced by Mark E Smith”, and may be the closest we’ll get to the inexplicable sound that hummed in his head. 

First up, there’s undeniably good music here. ‘Ten Houses Of Eve’ is built using a Fisher Price My First Breakbeat TM with a tarmac-thick vocal trill/hook borrowed from The Seeds’ ‘Evil Hoodoo’.  The breakdown - or do I mean stumbling halt? – which laments “If only the shards could relocate” over eerie piano is lovely. ‘Hurricane Edward’ oozes melancholy and you can almost feel a cutting wind blowing across stubbly autumnal fields even as you have no idea what the lyric about a farmhand might mean. ‘4 ½ Inch’ is an industrial car-crusher trying to do big beat, and is glorious. ‘The Quartet Of Doc Shanley’ has an amazing sludgy bassline, which said S Hanley later admitted to nicking off The Osmonds, of all people. The Wire’s reviewer noted that ‘Jungle Rock’ best encapsulates the Fall sound, even though it’s a cover; certainly the tuning and wonky antidub space in the mix would not pass muster in the majority of bands.  

‘Spencer Must Die’ is hypnotic and chilly with whispered lyrics, and is forgettable, but only in the sense that it’s a wonderful discovery every spin. It ends pretty much in the middle of a phrase, which brings us on to the strange portion of the record. ‘I’m A Mummy’ is a tossed-off 50s novelty song with some toxic trebly guitar, and it’s hard to work out why it’s here, or indeed, anywhere. ‘Masquerade’ sounds as though 40% of the track is missing, a messily syncopated inscrutable little song.  ‘I Come And Stand At Your [sic] Door’ is a plodding cover of the famous song-poem about a young Hiroshima victim, which almost sounds touching, though this effect is minimised by the redundant instrumental version’s unsavoury, dismissive name, ‘Jap Kid’ (I mean, come on). ‘Ol’ Gang’ is a good scuzzy kraut groove, utterly marred by the quarter-arsed vocals which seem to have been dubbed (daubed) on at the last minute and which feature almost the same hackneyed opening couplet as THE PREVIOUS TRACK. The title track is a simple little tune with the drums mixed as loud as the rest of the band put together, and it’s likable but, again, feels overbalanced. 

Add to this the fuzzy disco-pop of ‘Everybody But Myself’ which sounds as though it was mastered from a fourth-generation C90, and ‘Tragic Days’, a pointless 90 seconds of tape noise, and that’s the album. Levitate falls almost exactly in the middle of The Fall’s recording career, 18 years after their debut album and 18 years before their swan song. It sounded wrong and illogical on release, and still has the power to confuse and enrage. It’s a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a shit mix. It is great because it has no desire to be great, and doesn’t know or care when it’s awful. It captures the purest essence of The Fall. 

I have literally this second realised that the album’s title basically means the opposite of the band’s name. That contradiction is the album in a nutshell. It’s essential. You probably shouldn’t buy it.  

Sub Pub

I've just recently taken delivery of the last 3 Lunchtime For The Wild Youth annual-review editions, so expect to see some late-90s action here in the coming days.

dEUS – IN A BAR, UNDER THE SEA (Island) 

Having read a fair few of these zines now, I’m interested in how many people write about albums that seem to encapsulate a moment of their lives, or which got them through some difficult period. I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t really listen to music like that, even though listening to music is a huge part of my life. Firstly, I’ve never been one to cane a record, and I almost never listen to the same thing over and over – at least, not since I was about 13 and didn’t have many records to choose from. Music is tied to certain memories simply by ubiquity, rather than quality. For example, if I think of dance music from my university days, I don’t come up with the scattershot genius of Aphex’s I Care Because You Do, or the clinical precision of Photek’s Modus Operandi, but the cheeseball Clayderman trance of ‘Children’ by Robert Miles, or that Armand Van Helden remix of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos (although, listening again just now, this isn’t bad, even though the vocal samples sound like they’re saying “Honey, bring me toast to my lips, he’s got a big dick”...or is this an aural Rorschach test which is revealing something about my deepest thoughts?). 

So, for this issue I thought I’d review an album that, far from being a key milestone in my life or one of the greatest records ever heard, is one I can barely remember. dEUS – note to self, don’t start a sentence with the band name again, because the word processor doesn’t like the lower-case initial  – were a Belgian band who, in one of those odd quirks, had a minor hit in the music press with the lopsided Beefheartian indie of ‘Suds and Soda’ - it didn’t break the top 40, but go far more radio play and kudos than such a strange little European single would normally. I say “were a Belgian band”, but I now discover I should have typed “are a Belgian band”, as they’re still going, and the last five of their eight - eight! - albums have been number one in their home charts. Well, fair play. 

In A Bar, Under The Sea was their second album, and I bought it when it was released, although I’m not sure why: maybe HMV in Oxford had a big display for it, or something. I recall playing it a few times, liking it, but then basically putting it on the shelf and forgetting about it. So, here’s to the first spin in...who knows how long? What I discover is that it’s a very low-key album, from the tiny lofi scrap that is the opening track, to the mumbled lyrics, and after-hours jazz stylings of some of the numbers. The overall vibe is of busked ditties and organic hip-hop grooves, and good touchstones would be Beck’s music from the same period, Money Mark’s stoned organ doodles, or that brief era of low-slung beats on Folk Implosion songs. You’re far more likely to nod your head to this album than lose your mind to it. I have also decided that my lack of memory of the album is rather less about the quality of my memory than the understated nature of the music: ‘Serpentine’ is a sort of R.E.M. nursery rhyme with some nice pizzicato strings but it drifts by unobtrusively, ‘A Shocking Lack Thereof’ has lovely cheap metallophone elements sprinkled across it but underneath is a greyscale bluesy grumble, and ‘Disappointed In The Sun’ is a slightly wry piano tune sounding like a shy, awkward Ben Folds. 

Unusually, I find I like the singles the most. ‘Theme From Turnpike’ has some scuzzy jazz loops and comes off like a trip-hop Tom Waits, and this is followed on the LP by ‘Little Arithmetics’, a lovely tuneful little lope with a tiny hint of The Byrds, which is hugely catchy. ‘Roses’ starts off somnolently, as if it were a tentatively strummed demo of something designed to emulate Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’, but slowly builds a head of grungy steam until it begins to resemble Sonic Youth from a few years earlier. Only ‘Fell Off The Floor, Man’ doesn’t quite deliver, being a strange bit of disco at which different sonic elements have been tossed apparently without plan programme. Listening to this CD provides and important reminder: not every album needs to be earth-shattering. I enjoyed a lot of this, even if only a percentage of my attention was held at certain points. Not every record needs to be Rubber Soul, or Hex Enduction Hour, or The Goldberg Variations (Gould for me, thanks, if you’re offering), sometimes something lighter or slighter will work its own magic. Hell, I might even seek out dEUS’s 2023 album How To Replace It, stranger things have happened. 

Piney Gear

Happy new year!  Unless you read this within 8 hours of my posting it...or unless you read it months after I posted it...or unless you read it twelve months after I poster it, in which case, it works again.  So, whilst I'm here, happy Easter and happy Passover and happy flying ant day.

MU-ZIQ - ...IN PINE EFFECT (Hi-Rise) 

I went to school with Squarepusher. He was a year above me. I once told him that bass solos were pointless. That is my IDM anecdote. 

My IDM discussion point, the one that leaves me shunned in parties, is how nobody can decide where to file μ-Ziq. Some record shops treat that Greek character as an M, because that’s pretty much what it is; some read it as representing the syllable “mu”, as I have above; some don’t look carefully and file under U; some just ignore the weird squiggle altogether and stick it under Z (nip into Oxford’s HMV for evidence of this, clearly the worst of all approaches). I maintain that this is because the name is unique, and I for one cannot think of another act where a character from another alphabet has to be named, rather than sounded, to pronounce the act credit.  Oh sure, loads of acts have done it with numerals – 2 Live Crew, 4Play – but not letters. And before you ask, grabbing a Cyrillic or something and sticking it in your band logo might look cute, but it’s not the same thing (System 7 once released a record where the name was made up from the digits 1-7 at different angles, which was clever...and a damned sight more interesting than the drab hippy trance on the disc).  

Whether this typographical oddity is why Mike Paradinas’s output is not quite as celebrated as those of his chums Richard James, Luke Vibert and Tom Jenkinson, I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s because he tends to stick to a narrow and tested palette of sounds (and, yes, ‘Within A Sound’ on this album has those trademark crunchy drums that sound like someone putting the boot into a box of Frosties in an aircraft hangar). And even within his oeuvre, this album gets less love than I think it deserves: the opening duo of Tango N’ Vectif and Bluff Limbo get props – perhaps because they were on Rephlex – and 1997’s Lunatic Harness was the one to get the lavish rerelease treatment, but for my money, ...In Pine Effect is the pinnacle. Maybe I just like that ellipsis at the start – how do you file that, eh? 

The album as a whole is neat smash-up between clanky, intense techno and easy listening, with ‘Phiesope’ sounding like some laid-back KPM library music that might have popped up on behind a montage on Holiday 83, with strummed guitar and xylophone...or cheap synthesised equivalents, anyway, because this album does seem to revel in the otherwordly qualities objectively naff sounds can have, in common with a lot of Paradinas’s work – check out the “hip-hop producer does hotel lounge music” vibe of the Jake Slazenger records. Perhaps the wonkiest example is ‘Roy Castle’, which adds ersatz horns to a perky beat, though they’re less in the style of the eponymous jazzer-turned-presenter than Herb Alpert’s cheese-grin efforts. In related news my brain has suddenly started singing the words “Tijuana Brass” to the tune of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ as made famous by Cliff – send help. 

On top of that we have tracks like ‘Dauphine’, which starts out with brooding menace but turns into the sort of squelchy synth boogaloo that might have accompanied Morph’s antics, and the title track which is just a big dumb fragment of some fake boogie-woogie repeated for a while (and ‘Green Crumble’, even more so). But it’s not all rollicking fun. ‘Mr Angry’ delivers on its nominal promise by being a greasy chunk of Aphexual tweaked percussion over which someone howls with rage. A lot. Whereas ‘The Wailing Song’ sounds like someone tried to condense Górecki’s 3rd symphony to a few minutes using a budget keyboard. ‘Problematic’ doesn’t seem too unusual, until an ear-scratching lead synth line gets all atonal round the edges. 

I have also just this minute found out that the CD version actually had fewer tracks that the vinyl version. That just didn’t happen in 1995. Now I’m annoyed that I have been missing out on 8% of the album. Might put ‘Mr Angry’ on again... 

Sole Music

The Lunchtime For The Wild Youth reviews tend to come in batches, as the editor sends me occasional packages of recent issues. In this one, covering 1994 releases, I look at two discs of abstract ambience, which as you might imagine none of the other writers do. Someone does review Disco Inferno, though, god to know someone else in the world likes them.

V/A - ISOLATIONISM (Virgin) 

The potted pop histories tend to leap from grunge to Britpop, but there was another significantly influential genre nestled between the two in the guise of ambient (jungle was also big business, but wasn’t an album genre at this time, and only became one when it morphed into drum ‘n’ bass). In the wake of The Orb’s success, lush and primarily beatless music sold a fair few copies and filled a fair few columns. This allowed Virgin to scour their back catalogue and throw together a bunch of double CDs, offering a new generation some mostly excellent music from names like Sylvian, Eno, Fripp, and Froese. The compilations were decent, even if the covers were hideous. 

Volume 4, however, was unusual because not only was it mostly comprised of new material, but it was a collation of colder, bleaker sounds under the title Isolationism (what would more likely be called dark ambient nowadays, and post-industrial beforehand). The set was pulled together by Kevin Martin, who is best known as The Bug today, but then was thought of (if at all) as half of Techno Animal with Justin Broadrick. He sets out a mini-manifesto in the sleevenotes – peak mid-90s arty digital design making them bloody hard to actually read – to drag ambient away from the joss-sticks-and-joints crowd and back to the experimental mindset of New York minimalism and Krautrock, painting Future Sound Of London as the anodyne ambient enemy (which seems harsh, as a record like that year’s Lifeforms is pretty inventive and not afraid to be unnerving and creepy at times, and there are tons of better candidates for scapegoat...perhaps there was some bad blood from Broadrick’s sampling of pre-FSOL acid classic ‘Stakker Humanoid’ in his Godflesh guise). To be honest, there’s not really a meaningful ethos or ideology behind the record, but it is a fantastic two-and-a-half-hour journey, and I bet it shocked a few 90s neo-hippies who bought it expecting more friendly tones from the likes of Laraaji and The Grid. Interestingly, although this was last comp to go under the Ambient name, future releases kept the AMBT catalogue number, though these stray ever further from the ambient concept (not that they’re not generally good, and I recommend seeking out the early post-rock selection Monsters, Robots & Bugmen, both the Macro Dub Infection sets which are also Martin’s curatorial work, and David Toop’s selections of favourite singers, guitarists, and electro producers).  

Here are a few Isolationism highlights: 

ICE – The Dredger Techno Animal also show up on the album with some chain-rattling eeriness, but this alternate project from the same duo is better, boasting a thick hawser dub bassline overlaid with metallic sax scrapes.   

:zoviet*france: - Daisy Gun I’ve included this partly for the nice papery delay on offer, but mostly just because I like the way the punctuation marks look. 

Labradford - Air Lubricated Free Axis Trainer Again, this warm tunnel of organ with buzzing spring sounds is good, but mostly I just like the name. 

Paul Schütze - Hallucinations (In Memory Of Renaldo Arenas) Considering the ostensible froideur of the compilation, this is quite a funky groove, with a submerged ostinato and relentlessly rolling percussion. 

Scorn – Silver Rain Fell (Deep Water Mix) Sounds like a hip hop behemoth clumping along in the next valley. 

Disco Inferno – Lost In Fog An odd addition as their music is very poppy underneath all the MIDI monkeying (their second album, DI Go Pop from this year is worth tracking down). 

Total – Six In that strange zone where noise is so abrasive it becomes soothing. 

Nijiumu – Once Again I Cast Myself Into The Flames Of Atonement Keiji Haino, by any other name. As ritualistic as the name suggests, but quite restful. I’ve only just realised that the name implies the guy keeps fucking up and having to make up for it. 

Aphex Twin – Aphex Airlines Probably the main selling point for the compilation. This is from the absolute pinnacle of Richard D James’s output, where great albums like Selected Ambient Works II, Surfing On Sine Waves and I Care Because You Do just seemed to spill out. He even tossed great tracks onto compilations without fanfare, such as ‘My Teapot’ on Warp’s second Artificial Intelligence album, and its sister track ‘Phlid’ on a Select magazine covermount (I had no idea what the track name meant at the time, and I now wish I didn’t). This track is like a tired ogre with indigestion, and perhaps not up with the best work, but all Aphex is worth hearing. 

AMM – Vandoeuvre  A very different approach from the free improv stalwarts, which is not harsh or unsettling, and in fact comes across quite cosy and cuddly. 

O’Rang - Little Sister Tex Mex in dub?  Something like that. 

Final – Hide The volume leaps up about 30 seconds in: is this art, or a mastering cock-up? 

Lull – Thoughts It’s a touch obvious, but effectively cold and windswept. It’s the work of Mick Harris, erstwhile Napalm Death drummer, I bet you weren’t expecting that. 

 

Mad Capulet Markets

 Christmas, innit? So, yeah, happy Christmas, or whatever.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE BRODSKY QUARET – THE JULIET LETTERS (Warner Bros) 

I used to buy cassettes from Boots. That seems like an absurd false memory now, as if I’d bought spanners from Holland & Barrett or Anusol from Timpson’s, but Chelmsford Boots had a decent little music section, and when my parents were buying grown-up stuff like shampoo and aspirin (I'm pretty sure not Anusol, and I'm not going to check), I’d browse through the records. They often seemed to have some very good tapes on special offer at the counter, and I recall every one of these that I bought was a cracker: Lou Reed’s Transformer, Coldcut’s What’s What Noise? (my introduction to Mark E Smith, believe it or not), Baby Ford’s Fordtrax, and this one. I was 17 for most of 1993, so I suspect I might have been in Boots on my own by this time, but I don’t recall; I’m certain it’s the last thing I bought from there, though weirdly I remember buying marked-down copy of the triple-tape Secret Broadcasts set by Glenn Miller from Oxford’s Boots when I came up to study a couple of years later, and I find it pretty amazing they were still doing music in 1995, it can’t have lasted much longer. 

The album is a series of epistolary songs for solo voice and string quartet, apparently inspired by people who wrote to Juliet Capulet – presumably C/O That Big Crypt, Verona - with their troubles. Only one of the 20 tracks addresses this theme specifically though, the others zipping over all sorts of ground, which has allowed Costello to give reign to some highly inventive lyric-writing. Some of the words are very funny, and this small chamber set-up means every one is easily audible, which I think Elvis relished – listen to the swift judgment of Damnation’s Cellar (which looks like an Entombed song title, but is about bringing people back with a time machine), and the Gershwin-level tricksiness of ‘This Offer Is Unrepeatable’, a satire on hard-sell Christianity in the form of junk mail: “Girls will be swooning because you’re exciting them/ Not only fall at your feet but be biting them...The wine that they offer will go to your head/ You’ll start seeing double in fishes and bread”. There are also some heart-wrenchingly emotional songs on display, which teeter on mawkishness but manage to survive, and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ can still bring a lump to the throat. 

The whole endeavour, of course, is pure South Bank show shit, the sort of Arts Council bait perfect for a middle-aged artist with an eye on a Sunday supplement spread, but what’s noteworthy about this album is how often it rises above middle-brow novelty. The music is strong with a broad sonic palette, from drawing-room elegance to arthouse intricacy, with plenty of aggressive percussive playing and excellent use of sudden dissonance to balance some incredibly catchy tunes. Costello is in fine voice too, his scuffed intense vibrato sounding oddly like Horace Andy at times, and his pitching and sense of drama are immaculate - but if you were worried that he’d gone opera and lost his punky rots, check the mad-eyed screech of ‘Swine’’s final word, “penknife” (this “letter” appears to have been carved into flesh). Amongst all this there’s space for a very straightforward soulful pop song, ‘Jacksons, Monk And Rowe’, a slightly inscrutable tale of a large close-knit family which doesn’t seem to be a letter at all, and this Pop Private Eye has concluded that it was written before the Brodksy project began and swiftly adapted. 

Many people at the time were disappointed at how far this was from Elvis’s new-wave roots, though that’s odd because we’d already had the country-beard vibes of King Of America and the lush, McCartney-bothering Spike and Mighty Like A Rose. Still, those who missed the full-throttle brain-pop of the late 70s only had to wait one more year for a return, with what might be the best Costello album, Brutal Youth...but that’s a tale for another day (or next issue, who knows). 

Apollo, Gee!

Two LFTWY retrospective reviews in quick succession. I think this one lands much better than the last.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - APPOLLO 18 (Elektra) 

Wackiness is a terrible curse. It took me a couple of exposures to Oxford's superlative dreamy folk-pop band Stornoway to realise how special they were, because the Grumbleweeds goof-off that is 'The Good Fish Guide' made me shy away instinctively. Whilst not taking yourself seriously is usually a good idea for band, if you look like you're in some benighted rag week you've gone too far. They Might Be Giants (hereinafter “TMBG”) have certainly skirted the precipice of "I'm mad, me" many times, but pull back at the last second. On Apollo 13 probably the closest to cringe  is 'Spider' a bit of throwaway stop-start mambo with samples from 70s TV staple Monkey, but even this is actually fun, and lasts less than a minute anyway. Elsewhere 'She's Actual Size' pastiches 40s gumshoe talk over a Harle-flavoured sophisticated sax duet, 'The Statue Got Me High' is 60s bop with lead-booted drums and some accordion, and 'Hypnotist of Ladies' is a great scuffed indie half-inch of the Bo Diddley beat.  

And then there's 'The Guitar' an odd detournement of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ made famous by Tight Fit (though it was a cover of The Tokens (though this was based on ‘Wimoweh’ by Karl Denver (though this was a translation of Solomon Linda's 'Mbube' from 1939))). This is, apparently, in some way about space exploration, and this album was part of TMBG's deal as "musical ambassadors" for NASA in International Space Year: you have to assume that NASA was stiffed on the deal, because apart from a few randomly dropped terms like "constellation" and "space suit" this collection of new wave bounces and adult nursery rhymes won't be convincing anyone that their tax dollars are best spent on the final frontier.    

Although Apollo 18 didn't tell me anything about space, 'Mammal' is educational, and I certainly didn't know the words "monotreme" or "echidna" until I heard it. References often run quite deep in TMBG's little referential world - it was about 30 years after buying this album that I understood that the ocean creatures fighting in space on the front cover were a reference to a famous tableau in the American Museum of Natural History in New York (I learnt this from the film The Squid & The Whale, which is a miserable sketch of a miserable family arguing a lot and is best avoided - no wonder producer Wes Anderson now only makes films of expressionless ciphers interacting in airless beige and pastel anterooms). 

Amongst all this is 'Narrow Your Eyes' a deceptively serious and wonderful love and break-up song (cf "They'll Need A Crane' a few years earlier), which says a lot more about the complexities of relationships than the charmless divorce porn of The Squid & The Whale.  Seriously, it's a shit film, don't watch it.  Where were we?  Oh yes, Apollo 18. Musically there are plenty of TMBG tricks and techniques, with lots of chirpy pre-Beatles references to early rock, Tin Pan Alley and cheap musicals all squished together with the drums turned up so it sounds like a non-menacing Clinic, and typically very long multi-clause sentences spread over whole verses. Apollo 18 is the last the 'Rhythm Section Want Ad' albums, where the TMBG cobble tracks together with elementary drum machines and any muso pals who are kicking around, and interestingly their next album, John Henry, is a proper grown-up rock record with a permanent band.  It's good too, though it might be the last TMBG album you actually need to own.  

I probably have to mention 'Fingertips' here, an exhausting parade of micro-songs, pop jingles and single lines that sounds like an ADHD spin through a whole week of Radio 2 shows, but it’s worth it for the (possible) piss-take of Morrissey at the end. Oh yeah, I forgot the song 'Turn Around'. That one is a bit annoyingly wacky, sadly. Still, 17 out of 18 is a pretty great hit rate, and as ‘I Palindrome I’ begins with the words “Someday mother will die and I’ll get the money”, we can leave the album certain that there’s more on offer than zany games and carnival winks. 

Baby's Got The Blends

Another little summary for my friend Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussed on albums from 1991. I don't think I do a great job on this one, but it's true that the record is far better than it has any business being.

KRAFTWERK – THE MIX (EMI) 

There are many prodding poles used to nudge an artist over a contractual finish line: best-ofs, B-side collections, live sets, remix anthologies. But the least common is the rerecording of old material, often in a stripped back format, employed because brings the listener closer to the heart of the music [did you mean to type “costs very little to produce”?].  Kraftwerk are famous for many things, but producing one of the few artistically satisfying examples of the “new jog round old paddocks” genre is one of their least celebrated achievements. 

The band hadn’t released an album for 6 years when The Mix hit the shelves, an album of 11 classics – well, 10 if you admit that 'Dentaku' and 'Pocket Calculator' are the same song in different languages, and 8 if you’re prepared to note that 'Abzug' and 'Metal on Metal' are just bonus bits of 'Trans Europe Express' - given a shiny digital makeover. The tracks sound fantastic, all muscular and sleek, with a new techno heft not overpowering the crackly transistor bubblegum charm found in the originals. Some of the tracks cleave very closely to the original arrangements, with opener and lead single 'The Robots' being the familiar song wearing its big bot pants. The next track, 'Computerlove' is also pretty much in line with the old version in arrangement terms, but it’s encased in a burnished techno carapace owing a fair bit to Model 500 (which seems like a fair bout of influence exchange). One might argue that The Mix fills any sonic gaps in the original songs with electro-Polyfilla killing off the human heart that used to beat within, but if any band can make a virtue of soullessness, it’s Kraftwerk. 

The record is most fun when it throws in some new, and surprisingly playful, innovations. 'Pocket Calculator' hasn’t been playing long before it throws in some odd jazzy clusters of percussive buzzing synth notes, as if mecha-Cecil Taylor had dropped into the studio, and 'Homecomputer' opens up clean dubby chasms beneath that famous rising motif. Perhaps most noteworthy is the absurd drop into a three-register vocal break six and a half minutes into 'Autobahn' with cyborg trills that sound like an Italian opera troupe have all swallowed Stylophones. 

Astonishingly, not only is The Mix satisfying as an album in its own right, but it marked the point at which Kraftwerk essentially stopped writing new music and returned to their back catalogue in an inward-looking spiral that continues to this day, marking out an improbable space between heritage act and conceptual art: as the final track title has it, this is Music Non Stop, but also music with no new starts. 

 

Young, Gifted, & Plaque

Another piece for my pal Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussing on records released in 1986.  You can buy the hard copy and read all the reviews at Merch | Lunchtime For The Wild Youth (bandcamp.com)

DR CALCULUS – DESIGNER BEATNIK (10 Records) 

Stephen Duffy is one of Britain’s most underrated songwriters. He may have found a late-career payday writing for Barenaked Ladies and Robbie Williams, but most of his work is unknown to the general public: a founder member of Duran Duran, he left a year before they signed to EMI, making him the yacht-rock Pete Best; as Tin Tin he had a couple of glossy pop hits with albums to follow, which are treasured by the popnoscenti but mostly forgotten; he’s made 12 albums with The Lilac Time, who in their late-80s heyday were a literate folk-pop outfit, a sort of Fairport Convention for polo-necked Lloyd Cole fans; he made a beautiful album of French cinema-influenced chamber-pop nostalgia which even a co-credit for Nigel Kennedy couldn’t convince punters to splash out on; and he was in Me Me Me, with Alex James and the drummer out of Elastica, although that’s an exception because it’s shite. 

But of all the obscurities in the Duffy back catalogue, none is less known and more deserving of love than Designer Beatnik, the sole album by Dr Calculus, a shockingly prescient chunk of ambient house funk pop collage surrealism which sounds so far ahead of its time, I had to double check it was actually released in 1986 (at which point I discovered some of it was recorded in 1984, and had to have a little sit down). This knowingly arty ecstasy-influenced soundscape – the back cover cheekily places “m.d.m.a.” after the titular doctor’s name – predates almost any piece of club music detournement you can think of, coming a year before The JAMs, and two years before any of Akin Fernandez’s Irdial Records acts, and a few years before The Orb hit their stride. Only the Situationist Synclavier* of The Art Of Noise is a true pop-angled experimental predecessor here, and the debt is clear from the style of the sleeve, which was designed by Stephen and his brother Nick (who is also in The Lilac Time, do try to keep up at the back). 

The 11 tracks generally fall into two camps, the strangely danceable and the proto-chillout. The former throws magpie lyrics or vocal samples over rectilinear electro drum machines and meaty horn parts, courtesy of members of Pigbag’s brass section, with a few psychedelic flourishes; the latter layers field recordings, woozy pitched percussion, and the sort of post-Miles doleful horn lines that would have made a 1993-vintage Wire reader drool, and they still sound contemporary today. ‘Moments of Being (Reprisal)’ lies somewhere between Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Global Communication and captures an extract from a chat with a bikini model talking about boredom and Special Brew, and the title track boasts a gorgeously striated trumpet with full-on phaser and what might be a couple of backpackers catching up in North Africa.  

But the album still finds time for oddities like ‘Man’, a loving parody of acid jazz before the genre really existed, and ‘Perfume from Spain’, a sleng teng rhythm in so many inverted commas it can barely stand up straight, with the poshest white girl rap imaginable - although it also features a verse by Junior Gee, one of the UK’s first rappers, whose 1983 track ‘Caveman Rock’ is a nice Newcleus-esque footnote in British hip-hop history. Oh, and the album’s lyrics, if that’s the right word, steal from Hamlet, invoke a yuppie eroticism with lines like “You are my neon love in the hot baths”, and revel in pop-art Burroughs non-sequiturs like “Sacred heartbeat outlaw.  I wanted to be a painter. Hello honey, I’m home”.  

If you want to hear an album that sounds as though it might have been made by some uber-trendy producer last month, whilst also capturing the open-eyed optimism of mainstream songwriters discovering cheap music technology in the 80s, seek out Designed Beatnik.  And remember, as ‘Dream Machine’ puts it, “the film begins when you leave the cinema” - which might be profound or a piss-take, you won’t be entirely sure. 

 

*AoN used a Fairlight, rather than a Synclavier, so far as I know, but why waste a nice snappy bit of alliteration? 

All the Best Last Puns Have Already Been used for Actual James Last Albums, so...

Another strange wee review for my pal Russ's zine. People had to write about their favourite albums of 1985, but when the ones I wanted to do were already taken I got in a huff and did something stupid instead! To be honest, it's not a great piece, I'm trying to justify the whole of my interest in easy listening and review an album in a few hundred words and I don't think I manage to chew everything I've bitten off there. But, it's probably the best James Last review you'll read today.

Oh, and in breaking news, Discogs lists this as released in '86, so it doesn't even fit the brief!  But the sleeve makes it look like it was released in '85.

And in doubly breaking news, this full Last discography says '85, so I think it's OK.  Phew.  www.grandorchestras.com/jlast/albums/jlast-discography-reference.html

JAMES LAST - SWING MIT JAMES LAST (Polydor) 

In the mid-90s, some friends and I would buy old uncool vinyl for pennies, and spin it whilst drinking cheap wine. The decision to listen to music we thought tawdry was conscious and ironic (the decision to drink cheap wine was, however, purely economic). But after a while  doing something you don’t like for the sake of supercilious wryness paled, so we stopped...at which point I realised that I had not been disliking all the music at which I performatively sneered, and started to go back to some – though, dear God, not all – of those cheesy platters. Of all the easy and exotica acts to whom I came back - Kaempfaert, Denny, Alpert – James Last towers over them all, like the Colossus of Rhodes in a spangly jacket. 

In one way I still listen to easy listening ironically, in that I am conscious of the distance from the context and culture in which it was made – this is just as true as when I listen to Renaissance motets or roots reggae. And easy listening can sound odd. It’s perhaps down to the intense primacy melody has, and when arrangements and performance decisions are based wholly on supporting a tune-delivery system, some unusual choices can be made. Sometimes I find this sort of music quite psychedelic, even though it wasn’t the intention of the creators (then again, Victorian children’s illustrators didn’t intend for their work to look trippy to 60s Haight Ashbury stoners, either).  

Swing Mit... is ostensibly a tribute to the big-band sound, as the name implies, although the material comes from a range of sources, from Ellington mainstay Juan Tizol to Romantic composer Offenbach, from jukebox jazz saxophonist Earl Bostic, to no fewer than 3 tracks written by or associated with Huey Lewis & The News for some inexplicable reason.  The album opens with 'Study In Brown', a bona-fide swing classic written by bandleader Larry Clinton, which Last strips down till it's functional and smooth to the point of being undetectable by radar. This could have been the underscore in a round in The Generation Game.  'Perdido' is also a piece of utilitarian swing with some breathy female vocals doubling the horn lines, and buried so deep in the mix you might miss them – this was a common trick of Last’s, possibly because he didn’t want to foreground too many English lyrics for his pan-European consumers – and 'All By Myself' (no, not that one) is a bouncy confection that could have accompanied illusionists at the Palladium. 

But it’s the more unusual selections that stand out. 'Nutcracker' is credited to Peter Hesslein and Frank Jarnach, but this is a blag because it’s a march written by Tchaikovsky, and the arrangement owes a lot to B Bumble & The Stingers’ novelty rock ‘n’ roll version, 'Nut Rocker', but this has a meatier kick drum and some yummy Vangelis synths. 'Who Cares' is a track from Huey Lewis’s debut album (again, don’t ask me why), and whilst it’s one of his better power-pop tracks, this version punches far harder, with sharp horns stabbing ever more wildly above the insistent earthy bass ostinato, with the breathy backing babes intoning the title occasionally. This is tight and infectious, and has at least as much energy as a hundred rediscovered disco cuts now selling for funny money.  The album ends with what may be the best track, 'The Heart Of Rock And Roll' by Huey Lewis (I repeat, what the fuck?), which removes his smug demeanour, burnishes the music to an almost krautrock sleekness, and has the backing ladies deliver fragmentary words and phrases with a strange dub logic. 

This is not the best album of 1985 – that's Steve McQueen, Fables Of The Reconstruction, or Rum, Sodomy And The Lash - and it’s a fair way from being James Last’s best album, which are all from the 70s - but there is music here of a near post-human tightness and directness you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere in the era. Take a listen...but pick up some half-decent wine. 

I'm Bringing Flexi Back

An unusual one today, it's a brief piece I wrote for a my friend Russell's zine, Lunchtime for the Wild Youth (https://lunchtimeforthewildyouth.bandcamp.com/). The issue is all about covermounts, so I wrote this.  Turns out that everyone else pretty much wrote "this free tape changed my life" type stuff, so I'm glad I took a different tack.  Why not buy a copy of one of Russ's mags?  I recommend Ghost Zine, written - or scribbled - by his son, it's a work of art.

The Oinkletts – The Oink Song/ Uncle Pigg – Oink Rap (Free with Oink! Issue 1)

 I was always the ideal editor’s target market, one who would scour the newsagent shelves every week and month and buy any magazine with a sufficiently tempting cover CD (or tape, in earlier days).  I still have reams of these, from dodgy old Q compilations, kept because of a ropy R.E.M. live track, to a surprisingly diverse range of films included with Sunday papers in the noughties, to a complete set of The Wire’s Tapper CDs.

The first ever covermount I got, though, was not a tape or CD but a flexidisc, a concept already pretty dead by 1986 when I bought issue 1 of puerile periodical Oink!, aged 10 (for those who don’t know, Oink! was to Viz what Grange Hill was to The Sweeney).  Unsurprisingly, the disc flexed one too many times well over 30 years ago, so I shall write this review from memory; sure, it’s bound to be on YouTube, but searching the music out seems the wrong way to approach this little piece of pink ephemera (I think the disc was a shade of porcine pink, but that might be the first of many mnemonic fumbles in this article).

Side A was a scrawny nasal little punk pop smirk which I’m surprised to discover wasn’t actually called ‘Poo Poo Tinkle Tinkle Parp Parp Oink’, as this was both the main refrain and what we listeners were encouraged to sing when life rubbed us up the wrong way.  I now see that it was heavily indebted to The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’, though it lacked most of the charm.  I heard later that it was written and performed by Marc Riley, so now I know what he did between being in The Fall and turning up on Radio 5 and launching his DJ career; he’s allowed a lacuna of crap between these two, I think you’ll agree.  I remember wanting to like this song, but actually finding it acutely annoying.  The nadir was the verse about teachers, stating

They make me wear school uniform

And stop me chewing gum,

I wish I were a bumblebee,

I’d sting them on their....elbow!

 Even at this tender age, I was aware that the verse-end non-rhyme swear-dodge was a hackneyed ruse deserving of my finest supercilious sneer.  Also I didn’t like chewing gum.  Also, I had heard that bumblebees die when they sting you, so pre-Lard’s staff-room victory would be pyrrhic at best.  Nowadays I’d doubtless link the adenoidal singalong to the work of Frank Sidebottom, though this is notably less really really fantastic.

 The B-side – or were both tracks on one side?  Yes, that seems more likely - was far superior, a chunkily minimal drum-machine clunk which was effectively a rewrite of Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, though if I knew this at the time I certainly only had the loosest conception of the original.  “Don’t eat pigs cos they’re made from ham,” advises Uncle Pigg (the fictional editor of the comic), “eat the nasty butcher man”.  The leap from vegetarianism to cannibalism in a single couplet amused my half-formed mind, as did the authoritative vocal presence.  Although I reasoned that people eat pigs precisely because they’re made from ham, and so was not swayed by this argument, the track was a hit on the Dansette-style turntable my parents had found in the attic for me. 

 This cheap and brash little artefact is not one that I advise you to seek out, more a sonic Kinder toy than a forgotten treasure, but even the terrible music we listened to when young shapes us.  Tellingly, I can still sing at least half of the lyrics from memory.  “I’ll sing it till I stop”, as ‘The Oink Song’ claimed in its dying moments.  Quite zen, really.  For a record made by a pig.