Hard-Fi - Stars of CCTV (2005)

Here's another one about which I've never bothered writing, having assumed I'd already done so at some point; the reason for the assumption being that I listen to it quite a lot and that it's probably one of the greatest albums of all time, at least to my ears.

At least based on what I recall hearing on the radio at work, rock music was pretty much a complete waste of time by 2005, a vast Glastonbury shaped sludgepit full of grinning NME-sponsored idiots channelling the Kinks through a fuzzbox in hope of landing a car insurance advert as Jo Whiley stood to one side pretending to be your mate. Somehow Hard-Fi couldn't fail to shine because they sounded like a real band rather than something which crops up during the closing credits of an edgy Channel 4 sitcom about teenagers smoking crack during a media studies degree.

Stars of CCTV sounds a little like it may have happened as a result of my generation having kids, kids which were then raised in houses featuring a dad who still listened to the Jam on a daily basis. It's not quite the Jam, but there's something of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight in there - the smells if not quite the sounds - a little power pop, maybe even a few old Motors records, and of course the name comes from Lee 'Scratch' Perry; so it's all those things and yet not quite any one of them, because it does something different which isn't reliant upon nostalgia.

The first time I heard Hard to Beat it seemed to suggest what the Jam would have sounded like had they formed two decades later as some filter disco act; and the rave, or possibly post-rave aspect is part of the wallpaper which nailed Stars of CCTV to the place it was coming from, and the place it was coming from wasn't much different to where I was living so I was seriously feeling this shit, as the saying goes. Stars of CCTV sounded like a genuinely working class voice in a world turned over to consumer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. I recognised the stench of south London fried chicken, hangovers, post-war housing, belches of beer past the sell by date from Weatherspoons, freezing your bollocks off outside some club in November, estuary English and bills which may or may not get paid on time. This is what it was like living in south-east London in 2005 but without the voyeuristic glamour of wobbly camcorder documentaries, and without even trying to sell the grime as an aesthetic. It's grim, and yet it's mostly a celebration with all the joy of forked fingers waved at a security camera. To be honest, it's actually similar to what many grime acts were doing at the time but for the fact that it's rock music, even mod in an absolutely literal sense. Stars of CCTV is not a happy album, but it's a long way from being a miserable one, and every last track packs a serious punch. This was what it was really like to be young.