World Domination Enterprises - Let's Play Domination (1988)

I hadn't thought about them in some time, then two days after I dig this out on a whim, they turn up on Bandcamp with Go Dominator, a new single, the first in a couple of decades - albeit a new single  which was recorded yonks ago but never released. It's as though the universe is trying to tell me something, something above and beyond that the time is right; because the time has always been right for World Domination. With each year that passes, these songs seem ever more relevant.

My first encounter was the phenomenal Asbestos Lead Asbestos, possibly one of the most wonderfully unpleasant songs ever committed to vinyl; although never really having had my finger on the pulse of anything, it was a couple of years old by the time I heard it and seemingly contemporary to the Acid Angels' Speed Speed Ecstacy which similarly named two substances in the title, and one of them twice, so Asbestos Lead Asbestos somehow felt like its dark toxic counterpart, at least to me.

I wasn't convinced by the album when first I heard it. I recognised the fucking horrible racket, but it seemed to lack the restraint which worked so well for Asbestos Lead Asbestos, taming the chaos just enough to suggest something in the vicinity of a funkier, noisier Public Image Limited around the time of Metal Box.

Anyway, I persisted. Initial impressions additionally suggested comparisons with the Pop Group, but where the Pop Group were overtly funky between the squalls of guitar noise, Let's Play Domination seems more like some primal rockabilly enterprise spinning horribly out of control. It's the bluesy inflections and the one foot somewhere in the Venn diagram with black music - dub, reggae, rap, disco and so on, hence covers of U-Roy, LL Cool J and Lipps Inc.'s Funkytown blasted out without any obvious trace of irony or sarcasm and so firmly distancing World Domination from fellow guitar noise merchants of the time.

You may notice I've already used both horrible and unpleasant as compliments, which is because it's hard to know what the fuck to do with that guitar sound. It's like a detuned power station throwing up, something with no equivalent in nature which has congealed in the grooves, a truly untamed beast which seems to contrast wildly with the tight but excitable rhythm and Keith Dobson's teen idol vocal, teen idol here meaning Ricky Nelson rather than Donny Osmond. The combination seems so perfect and simple that it's bewildering how no-one else thought to do it this way. There hasn't been much which has sounded quite like this album before or since, possibly because groups this violent and noisy rarely sound quite so happy about rubbing our faces in everything which is repulsive about human society right now, yet without simply adding to the shit mountain; and in Ghetto Queen, I'm not sure I've heard anything so beautiful which doesn't really communicate anything you would call a tune, just the jagged drone of electricity pylons fighting on the horizon in a world where the Cramps were actually the Swans, sort of.

New single available here.

The Beatles (1968)

I've no doubt that whole books have been written about the white album - as I'm not going to call it - but I haven't read any of them, have no plans to read any of them, and I'm not even going to do any internet homework with this one in the hope of coming to it absolutely fresh, as I suspect the lads would have wanted; and because I have a theory that this was the whole point of the album.

The Beatles were the first pop band I noticed when I was a kid, mainly because their music kept turning up on the telly and with such frequency that I began to recognise a few of the songs and asked my mum about them. The Magical Mystery Tour album turned up one Christmas in response, followed by Yellow Submarine, Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul all within the next six months. I planned to get the rest but I suspect the strain of saving up my pocket money month after month was getting a bit much; then I discovered punk rock, and eventually began to find everyone still banging on about the fab four two decades after the event a little exhausting. It wasn't that I'd had a change of heart so much as a change of focus, and it had become difficult to listen to the Beatles what with their music still getting heavy airplay on every radio station everywhere in the universe. You can only have so much of a good thing.

Eventually it died down so much that I no longer found myself subjected to Penny Lane on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what those other Beatles records had sounded like, and so I picked up where I'd left off as a sort of favour to my nine-year old self.

Happily, it's quite easy to apply fresh ears to the eponymous 1968 double because, of its thirty tracks, I count only three which have suffered from the same overexposure as Hey Jude and the rest. Dear Prudence I recognise mainly from the Banshees cover, and there are bits and pieces I recall as having been sampled on Jay-Z's Grey Album, but otherwise there's a lot here which I've never heard before. In case you missed the inference of that sentence, the significant detail is songs by the Beatles which I've never heard before, which seems pleasantly incredible in the second decade of the twenty-first century. More specifically, for me this means Beatles without baggage, without specific lines or riffs conjuring unwanted images of smirking regional television reporters introducing light-hearted news features about a foolish resident of a hill or a woman named Lucy who has her own jewellery business on the Isle of Skye.

What with the plain white cover and general lack of flash, I get the idea that the Beatles were trying to get away from being the Beatles, or at least from what the Beatles had become in terms of their fame - hence, I guess, the seemingly sarcastic revelations of Glass Onion which must surely have been addressed to those reading far too much into the back catalogue. To invoke what probably wasn't yet a cliché in 1968, it was just about the music, man.

Yet The Beatles is no reductionist return to basics, and is at least as progressive and experimental as the fab and swinging sixties albums which preceded it, arguably more so with the likes of Revolution 9, inspired doubtless by persons such as Pierre Schaeffer and actually much easier on the ear than its legend would suggest. Of course, they do return to basics on tracks such as the frankly still fucking incredible Back in the USSR which seemingly takes the piss out of the Beach Boys - something else I hadn't really noticed until now; but they were doing something with those basics - inventing heavy metal as some have argued, although I'm not convinced by that one - and they were doing it as the reinvestment they wanted to hear without intrusively commercial considerations. I'd say this holds true for most of the album despite that we're still talking about the Beatles rather than Arnold Schoenberg, so it pops but entirely on their terms; and as such comes across as a surprisingly intimate work compared with the more overt populism of the previous efforts. It's almost talking to itself with just one other individual in the room, that being yourself, the listener - which additionally provides, I suppose, some insight as to why Charles Manson believed the Beatles were sending secret messages specifically to him on this record.

It's become fairly easy to lose sight of why anyone ever liked this bunch, and I still refuse to believe that their legend deserves to eclipse any other legend you may care to name; and excepting Ringo, I found the solo material mostly underwhelming, but something about the combination of the four of them was genuinely wonderful and I'm impressed that an album of a full half-century vintage can still yield surprises, and so many.

Neu! (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (2013)

Well, as we all know, Adam was substantially unwell for a little while, as became apparent when a friend discovered him digging a tunnel in his kitchen using just a teaspoon, a tunnel proposed as a means of visiting an ex-girlfriend. I possibly have some of the details wrong but that's how I heard it, although for what it may be worth a number of my most valued friends have spent at least a little time detained at the pleasure of the psychiatric profession. To be honest, I was more bothered that the previously reliable Ant had seemingly fallen so hard with those last two albums, Manners & Physique and Wonderful. To be fair, I've only heard them in bits, but what I heard wasn't anything great, so I stand by my perhaps only vaguely informed disdain. He could be forgiven Strip, and he could be forgiven Where Did Our Love Go on the telly at the behest of a man who is alleged to have married small boys during clandestine wedding ceremonies, but somehow, somewhere it felt as though a bridge had been crossed and that it was kind of a one-way deal; and yes, I know he wrote a genuinely great autobiography, but even so…

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter suggests a certain degree of mania as titles go, which might not bode well. I suppose one could argue that Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is actually the title of an enterprise in which Adam Ant plays a character called the Blueblack Hussar, but maybe it doesn't really matter. After all, he's done this sort of thing before - Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios etc. etc.

Just to get the objection out of the way, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is listed as alternative rock, lo-fi on Discogs which can fucking fuck the fuck off for starters. I assume most of the album was recorded in Boz Boorer's spare room on his computer despite which, it doesn't sound like a tape by Another Headache from 1992 and is no more fucking lo-fi than those early Beatles albums recorded using a Coke can and a bit of string for a microphone - or even Sgt. fucking Pepper for that matter. Lo-fi is what young men with beards listen to as they open up their Hoxton cafés ready for another day of selling overpriced breakfast cereal to tossers. Lo-fi, my arse.

Anyway, to get to the actual point, Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is the last thing I expected to hear from Adam Ant - not only a decent record, but a record that's at least as decent as most of the good ones. I get the impression it's mainly Adam with Boz Boorer, musically speaking. You could argue that it resembles an extended demo tape by virtue of the fact that they obviously liked these tracks well enough to stick them on the record rather than shell out for a fancy studio, but I'm not sure it matters. As a whole, the thing doesn't sound like a manifesto as Dirk and maybe a few of the others did, but it holds together simply as a set of fucking great songs pulled together by people who clearly had a blast writing and recording them. Cool Zombie is at least as monumental as Deutscher Girls, Miss Thing or any of the others. There are even surprisingly moving tributes to both Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren - surprisingly because I've tended to regard those two as a pair of twats, personally speaking. My expectations were fairly low, but this album really got to me through its raw honesty and emotional power. I don't know if it will be his last one - given that it came out about eight years ago and I've only just heard of it - but if so, he's ending on a much higher note than surely any of us could have predicted.