Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd (1973)

Typographic jiggery pokery usually gets on my tits when it comes to music artists and their work, but Skynyrd get a pass because 1) it was the seventies, and 2) it's fuckin' Skynyrd, dude - get a grip. In the event of that having been an H.M. Bateman sound effect I just heard, and because I suppose we have to get it out of the way - no they weren't; it was the record company's idea; no it isn't; Neil Young himself admitted it had been a dick move on his part; and anything else you may feel you need to know is explained in detail on the internet, most of which is fairly easy to find.

I first discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd when I heard Free Bird on the radio back in the eighties. I'd missed the beginning of the song and the DJ didn't bother to name names once it was over, and it took me a couple of years to work out what I'd taped - because it had seemed worth taping. Initially I thought it was some lost Bowie number from the Ziggy Stardust era. The vocal didn't sound quite right but the guitar was definitely something in the vein of Mick Ronson, or so it seemed to me.

Eventually the penny dropped and I also added Sweet Home Alabama to the tally of still guilty pleasures, or at least pleasures which some bigger boys had explained were to be considered guilty; so I picked up a greatest hits CD on the cheap, half expecting it to comprise two admittedly sublime songs in amongst a whole passel of gun toting anthems to slave ownership, that being the narrative one tends to find affixed to Lynyrd Skynyrd; and being white working class guys from the south, it doesn't really matter if it's true or not because it probably is - so we're habitually told. Unfortunately, it turned out that every single track on the disc was amazing - not even merely listenable, but as unto pure spun gold plucked from the harps of a heavenly host of particularly bluesy angels; and so now, realising I've wasted most of my life by not listening to this band, I'm backtracking; and the first album seemed like a good place to start.

Anticipating a couple of admittedly sublime singles in amongst a half hour of twanging sounds of lesser substance, I'm once again surprised and even humbled to realise how great this band were at the height of their powers. This was post-sixties guitar rock drawn heavily from the blues, but drawn by dudes who lived that stuff on a daily basis and who learned it from the stoops and porches of the wrinkled old guys who came up with it because the wrinkled old guys who came up with it lived in the same neighbourhood; meaning Skynyrd were a very different affair to Clapton and those taking a cheap if expertly played holiday in someone else's tradition, because this was a continuation, part of the same heritage, and it was anything but colonisation. Not only do you listen to this music, but you feel it in all parts of your body because it communicates to heart and soul with such intensity as to amount to a direct link to whatever went into these songs, which are so fresh and clear that they could have been laid down only yesterday; and I didn't even realise this kind of music could do that, even the whiskey soaked honkytonk numbers. This also means that Lynyrd Skynyrd may be one of the most unfairly maligned groups in the history of music, at least regarding the idea that there could be even so much as a whiff of anything which people who went to better schools might declare to be racism; but as I've come to appreciate since I first arrived in Texas, some people simply don't like the south, and their disdain is such as to sustain all of the usual stereotypes without trial. Honestly, aside from the sheer pleasure of being part of the right gang, I suspect it's down to fear. No-one likes to be reminded of the underclass, particularly those who've either escaped or insulated themselves from it, and they particularly dislike that underclass trying to tell them anything.

Well, have you ever lived down in the ghetto?
Have you ever felt the cold wind blow?
Well, if you don't know what I mean,
Won't you stand up and scream?
'Cause there's things goin' on that you don't know.

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right,
I hope they never sleep at night.
They better make some changes,
And do it soon.

I was told to expect something from the depths of hillbilly hell, and against all expectations this turns out to be one of the most powerful, heartfelt, and expressive rock albums I think I've ever heard - musically, emotionally, even spiritually if you like. I just wish it hadn't taken me a whole four decades to reach this understanding.

Campbell / Mallinder / Benge - Clinker (2021)

I've been listening to a lot of Cabaret Voltaire since the death of Richard H. Kirk, and because I'm a pedant who becomes physically aroused at the mere thought of things arranged in alphabetical or chronological sequence, I started with 1974-76, working my way through, one album at a time and incorporating the singles so as to get some sort of overview of their progression. Interestingly enough - at least to me - there were a few surprises, not least being that The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord isn't anything like so great as I remember; and there were even a few revelations - patterns I wouldn't have noticed from listening to an individual record. Most blatant was how little they ever truly owed to rock music, which I state having once regarded Mix-Up as essentially a much weirder take on the Velvet Underground; and conversely how much they owed to black music, James Brown, soul and so on. The influence was never hidden, and was expressed most vividly in Cabaret Voltaire's propensity for extended beat driven jams - grooves rather than songs; but it's easy to get lost in all of the weirdy effects and treated percussion and to lose sight of this element, and of how fundamental it always was to their sound.

Clinker isn't Cabaret Voltaire, but it continues the journey through the presence of one of their number, reaffirming the vision through collaboration with parallel travellers. As with the Wrangler albums, the sound is quite dry, relatively clean compared to Mallinder's previous group, with effects used sparingly, allowing the analogue electronic sound to breath. Julie Campbell's unashamedly funky guitar serves as a perfect complement to the electronics yielding what is essentially a disco record in a reasonably traditional sense but for the absence of backing singers - and by disco I mean that warm sound with the congas and glitterballs, yet remaining awkward and left-field, and without sounding like a retread - imagine Marshall Hain's Dancing in the City stepped up a few beats and with androids as much welcome on the dance floor as anyone else.

It would be unfair to single out Mallinder as uniquely responsible for how great this record is - particularly given the presence of the other two and that the overall sound is much closer to Campbell's Lonelady than to anything of Mal's previous bunch, but for a man with a back catalogue extending into three figures, this may be one of the best things with which he's ever been involved.

Come - Rampton (1979)

I suspect the increasing ubiquity and multiplication of noise artists may have somewhat reduced the impact of the form in certain respects. My first encounter with Whitehouse, for example, was in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine contemporary with the release of Psychopathia Sexualis - so about 1982, I guess. The first thing which struck me as weird was that I'd never heard of this band and yet they seemed to have quite a following. They sounded absolutely terrifying, the music papers refused to write about them, and Rough Trade wouldn't stock their records, and so it was inevitable that I should at least wonder. Forty years later and I'm still not sure what I think about Whitehouse - or even that what I think about Whitehouse really matters - but Come seemed initially promising.

Come was William Bennett's first attempt to scare the living shit out of the public following his exit from Essential Logic, and might therefore be regarded as a formative version of Whitehouse. I thought Come Sunday 2 on the Für Ilse Koch compilation album was terrific, a vertiginously flanged swirl of understated menace reminding me very much of Gristle's live material, so I bought the 7" - effectively the first version of Come Sunday - and discovered the compilation track to be the single fed through a powerful effects pedal. Without the benefit of the aforementioned powerful effects pedal, it was kind of clean, very minimal, and just sounded a bit odd. I still probably would have given Rampton a shot, but Come Organisation vinyl was selling out within weeks of release by that point; and I didn't have much faith in the cassette versions, having originally purchased the tape of Für Ilse Koch and listened to William Bennett pissing about in one channel for the duration, presumably running off the copies on his home stereo little realising he still had one microphone plugged in - watching a bit of telly, making a cup of tea, playing guitar and so on. It was amusing but I traded it in for the vinyl.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's Rampton once again, nicely remastered and pressed, the cover printed rather than photocopied, and me not having to pay four hundred dollars for a copy. I wasn't massively impressed with the Come Sunday 7" but was assured of it being the weakest track on what is an otherwise decent record, and so curiosity caught up with me; and the whole is actually stranger than I expected, possibly not so much for what it does, as for what I expected it to do, which it doesn't. Lest we should have forgotten, William Bennett is a pretty decent guitarist, and Rampton is mostly angular guitar riffage with Daniel Miller playing a bass synth and someone pounding out a pseudo-tribal rhythm on a couple of floor toms. Vocals are way down in the mix and tend to be vocalisations rather than singing. The whole is surprisingly minimal and lacking in effects, excepting a light slapback echo on the vocal, and somehow - and I'm assuming here that it's on purpose - this is its power. This unsettling quality is the fledgling form of all that feedback and implied violence because, no matter how many thousands of industrial music rarities you may have accumulated over the past few centuries, the initial most logical reaction to this record is holy shit, what the fuck am I listening to?

Bennett has cited Yoko Ono's Don't Worry, Kyoko as a significant influence on Rampton, which I can definitely see although this is, frankly, a much better record. The vocals, perhaps not on purpose, are vaguely ridiculous upon close inspection, mostly the sort of lines we used to come out with in the playground when impersonating the mentally ill, and yet somehow this makes the record additionally disturbing when combined with those jagged shards of guitar - regarding which, it's easy to hear why he was asked to join Siouxsie & the Banshees as replacement for John McKay.

Rampton doesn't quite stick its fingers down your throat as did Whitehouse, but there's a powerful sense of something wrong on this record, so much so as to overcome what initially seem like limitations, and even Come Sunday sounds better in the context of the whole. The only wobble, at least for me, comes with the use of tracks from side two of the BBC's Sound Effects volume thirteen - Death & Horror, an assortment of screams seguing into heavy breathing, then more screams as Rampton comes to a close. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone I knew in the DIY tape scene of the time had at least one track featuring those same screams, and naturally I'd done it myself, so hearing that the Master of the Overviolence also went there, admittedly a year or so before the rest of us arseholes, is akin to discovering that Lemmy briefly presented Blue Peter back in the sixties.

Never mind. I'm very glad to have heard this regardless, and should Susan Lawly see fit to stick out either In Country or I'm Jack, I'm certainly curious.

Smell & Quim - Nativity Colostomy (1993)

I'm still to hear anything from Smell & Quim which isn't interesting, at the very least, and I tend to shell out for reissues of things I missed first time around without having to think about it; but even so, Nativity Colostomy has surprised the fuck out of me, not least with the realisation of there being something I regard as the classic line up, specifically Milovan Srdenovic and Paul Nonnen. They're still releasing classics all the time, but there was something monumentally special about the pungent fruits of those early years, some dynamic which suffered as the line-up expanded to incorporate more and more members, none of them Paul Nonnen.

Similarly surprising to me was that I listened to this disc immediately following a compilation of early electronic works by Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry and others, and after a while I realised that I hadn't actually noticed the switch. I've often thought of Smell & Quim as the result of a Star Trek transporter accident occurring when members of Whitehouse and the Residents beam down to the same planet, but Nativity Colostomy sounds very much like a continuation of the avant garde classical of the sixties, yet without really doing anything that would have been out of place on The Jissom Killers or The English Method. The five tracks of Nativity Colostomy are all instrumental, or at least bearing no obvious resemblance to songs, and the noise is harsh, unpredictable, not always clear and, as with the work of Schaeffer and those guys, they're working with something ugly and rudimentary which hasn't been subjected to technological prettification. It actually makes Nurse with Wound sound prissy by comparison. There's some sampling, although it could be tapes and loops - it's hard to say for sure. Jagged snatches of what might be a cello repeat on the impressively appalling Drinking a Dead Woman's Piss, but the repetition is uneven and not entirely mechanical, and so - as with the very best genuinely experimental music - we're never quite sure of what the fuck we're dealing with and usually need to play it a few more times before it begins to sink in; and this one is a pleasure to hear, over and over, albeit a pleasure akin to having a really good shit after a night on the sauce.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (1968)

I'm not entirely sure how I'd heard of Stockhausen back in May 1982, but I assume his name may have come up in something written about Throbbing Gristle. I had a couple of their albums but had only just begun to dip toes in such waters and was still to hear what Cabaret Voltaire sounded like - for example. Anyway, I found this at my local record library and vaguely recall being disappointed that it didn't sound anything like as electronic as I'd hoped although there was nevertheless something fascinating about it. Then a couple of years later, having left school and signed up for beer studies at Maidstone College of Art, I was lucky enough to see Stimmung performed at the Barbican as part of their Stockhausen week. That was January, 1985.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, I've discovered another used record store in San Antonio, one called Crazy Rhythm which I'd passed many times, but never as it was open. When a random break in my usual routine deposited me outside Crazy Rhythm during its opening hours, I went in and immediately noticed that one of the racks was marked avant-garde classical, and I noticed this because I always look for that section in whichever used record store I happen to enter but never find it. I always look for that section because it's not quite familiar territory for me and is therefore likely to yield surprises; and accordingly the first record I encountered as I began to browse was Stimmung - same Deutsche Grammophon edition, even the same cover as the one I'd borrowed from the library in Stratford-upon-Avon nearly forty years ago. It was ten dollars and is in wonderful condition, so I also picked up Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré while I was there. It was all I could do to keep from giving the cashier a big old Frenchie. Stimmung isn't quite where it all started for me, but it's pretty close.

It's a lengthy piece, over seventy minutes and sounding clear as a bell on this single album - somewhat calling into question recent boutique vinyl reissues expanding supposed classics to six fucking sides of a triple album in ten minute helpings. It's also entirely choral, having been scored for six vocalists, hence my being disappointed that it didn't sound more like Second Annual Report back in 1982; and at least one of those vocalists - specifically Wolfgang Fromme - is one of the people I saw on stage back in '85. Stimmung is mostly vocalisation with words, phrases and names - mostly of mythological figures - here and there for the sake of punctuation. It's scored but with some leeway for the performers to react and improvise within the whole. Perhaps what takes the most getting used to, is how much Stimmung relies on vocalisations amounting to the sort of weird noises we probably all made as children when left to our own devices, weewah and oyoyoy and that sort of thing, which aren't the sort of sounds one expects to hear on a record, being mostly too peculiar to work as anything cool or emotive in the conventional sense; so I suppose one might term it sound poetry, or at least acknowledge that Stimmung is a relative of the same. However, the harmony of Stimmung is strong, generating a semi-hypnotic drone within which the more unorthodox vocalisations become texture, weaving together so well as to distract from this even being a vocal performance; and over seventy minutes, the cumulative effect is emotionally very powerful.

Most surprising of all is how well Stimmung has lasted. If it has a strong sense of the sort of post-Dada theatrical experimentation one associates with the sixties, it nevertheless sounds fresh, like something new and unfamiliar experienced for the first time.

Stockhausen remains an approximately controversial figure. Referring to the events of September the eleventh, 2001 as the biggest work of art there has ever been probably wasn't the greatest career move, and Cornelius Cardew famously denounced him as a tool of capitalism - which might have carried more weight had the same not taken to wearing a flat cap and affecting a Lancashire accent so as to be down with the mans dem - but fuck it, on the strength of his work, Karlheinz really was a visionary and probably a genius, if that term actually means anything.