I wouldn't ordinarily bother to write about anything below a certain level of crapness, despite the thrill of shooting a fish in its proverbial barrel; but this makes the cut because it's so crap as to be genuinely impressive whilst still being amazingly crap - so none of that stuff about something being so bad that it's good here. Broken Britain really is absolutely shite. It's a punk compilation from a couple of years ago, or at least that's what it seems to aspire to be - a memorial to that time when we all kicked in our television sets because Sid Vicious swore on Midlands Today, and when the Clash had that hit with a song about the Queen being a moron.
Presuming you remember those Top of the Pops albums of the seventies - copyright dodging hits of the day faithfully reproduced by session musicians; well, that's sort of what we have here, except obviously that would be tacky and not very punky at all, so I think we're pretending this is something else - just like in the Sid Vicious song, Something Else, yeah?
Hooray for punks and punk rock!
Stick your bollocks up your arse, misses! Ha ha!
So far as I can tell, we do actually hear 999, the Business, and the Stranglers on this disc, although fuck knows where they found a Stranglers cover of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth; and that's definitely punky cockney dolly bird Lydia Luvaduck Lunch giving it some welly on a live version of In My Time of Dying, probably live in broken Britain or something. The rest though…
We have massive punky hits faithfully covered by bands you've mostly never heard of, bands which sound suspiciously as though they've all been recorded in the same studio with the same instruments - four from the Clash, four Pistols numbers, then Teenage Kicks and a couple of Joy Division biggies, and er… Denis, the Blondie song, instead performed by the likes of the Belfast Dolls, the Badgers, Discord 76, and Mandi and the Morons - a more punkily anarchistic bunch you couldn't wish to meet, if the names are any indication. On the other hand, Beki Bondage is undeniably real because I remember both Stand Strong Stand Proud from listening to Peel and her truly splendid knockers from the pages of Sounds, which were quite rememberable* due to my being a sixteen-year old boy at the time. Here she covers the Pistols' EMI, complete with faithfully reproduced ad libs which only made sense sung by Rotten at a very specific time of his career. Likewise, some of the Clash covers sound similarly odd given that Complete Control - for one example - is about being in a band called the Clash; and I don't know who the Cook 'n' Jones responsible for Silly Thing could have been, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Steve or Paul.
Plucked from the cheapo rack of the store, or possibly even a gas station, Broken Britain promises a couple of familiar names alongside covers rendered by obscure types who probably had one single played on local radio before they fizzled out and all got jobs at a local car showroom, but I don't think that's what we actually have here. Second - or possibly third - impression is that this might do well if you listen to it with the air conditioning on full blast, or if you're not really familiar with any of these songs. Should you be some punky young dude browsing the stalls of a Mexico City street market, and a punky young dude who doesn't speak much English, then Broken Britain might seem worth a punt.
Maddeningly, even this theory is undermined by a peculiarly operatic cover of Who Killed Bambi? and Dresden's version of the Talking Heads' Psycho-Killer, neither of which give a shit about duplicating the originals. This Bambi, if otherwise completely pointless, at least allows us to hear the lyrics, such as they are, for the first time ever; and Dresden, whatever it may be, sounds suspiciously like John Otway or even Unlucky Fried Kitten. I was never that struck on Psycho-Killer, and now I understand why - because it should have been recorded by Frank Butcher from Eastenders as is apparently the case here; which is why, despite everything, I'll be hanging on to this otherwise entirely pointless piece of crap.
It was a Christmas present, in case you were wondering, but thankfully not mine.
*: This is a word invented by a Wheel of Fortune contestant which I'm trying to pass into common parlance.
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