I first encountered Gambit of Shame on 1983's A Sudden Surge of Power cassette compilation which famously featured material from Chris & Cosey, Attrition, Test Dept and others. Massively impressed, I bought the single pairing the title track of this retrospective with 18 Out of 20 and waited for the legend to grow, which sadly never happened. The Gambit turned into Skin Side Out who issued a further couple of characteristically wonderful singles, following which it all went quiet until now.
No Bounds assembles the single, the compilation tracks, and other material recorded at the time, amounting to twenty-one blistering songs which seriously beg the question of why it never came to pass for them. There's a touch of the sixties spy movie soundtrack, certainly Josef K - or at least whoever influenced Josef K - like a slightly punkier, snappier version of early Roxy Music amounting to a wild, swirling sound which prefigured Franz Ferdinand more directly than any more obvious source of inspiration; and strangest of all, at least to me, my favourite tracks turn out to be not those I've had rattling around my head for the last three decades, but Maisonette Fairlawns and Ideas in London, neither of which I'd heard until a couple of weeks ago. That said, the single tracks still sound great, and it's nice to hear the eponymous Gambit of Shame from Sudden Surge without all that tape hiss for the first time ever. This lot were better than most of whatever else I was listening to back then and should have been fucking enormous.
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