What follows will inevitably be completely biased given my friendship with both the late Tim Webster, who formed the Men with the Golden Gonads, and Prez, who plays organ on this record. I first met Tim at the tail end of the eighties. I was unemployed and thus spent three or four hours a day in the Gruts cafe in Chatham. Tim had a guitar workshop on the opposite side of the road and employed Tim O'Leary - who took the photo of the Frankenstein monster on the cover, presumably spawn of the aforementioned workshop. Prez, formally Prasun Amin, was also a Gruts regular, as was Billy Childish who produced the album.
Anyway, we lost Tim Webster a couple of years ago, which remains upsetting, although he's thankfully well-remembered, and his legend is now fortified by this astonishing collection. He was a very busy individual back when I knew him, and seemed to be in about three or four regularly gigging bands, Johnny Gash being the main one at the time. I remember him mentioning the Men with the Golden Gonads but didn't even realise it was necessarily anything with which he was directly involved, much less that Prez had been recruited.
This is the Medway Delta sound, but distinctly the Webster variant - sharing beat music, rock 'n' roll, and rockabilly influences with the Milkshakes and others, but with all that raw punk rock energy channelled into something which, if not exactly smoother, is certainly less abrasive for the presence of a horn section. It's been called trash, probably thanks to the Cramps, but I've always felt a bit uneasy about the term, it being an often misleading label which drips with lazy irony in the wrong hands; and Tim Webster - arguably the realest motherfucker you could ever wish to meet, if you'll pardon the vernacular - was about the good stuff, not trash, and certainly nothing artistically cynical. The quota of covers on this record does not constitute a knowing wink to the camera. As with his earlier group, the Sputniks, there has always been something family friendly about Tim's music - aside from the nautical terminology, obviously - an element of the variety show but never at the expense of energy. Accordingly we get at least a couple of telly themes, notably the one from Hawaii 5-0, but delivered with a joyful fury which blows the Shadows and their like right out of the hall. Elsewhere we touch upon old school soul and even driving go-go on Ride Your Pony, yet at no point does this feel like some recreation or revival. Billy Childish has countered accusations of musical revivalism by pointing out that if it still works, then you may as well do something with it, which The Men with the Golden Gonads demonstrates to powerful effect because the sound is such that it feels as though the band are actually bashing away inside your house.
The raw power of this record is the same as you hear on anything by the Pistols or the Hamburg-era Beatles or whoever; and Tim was very good with his hands, with engines, with machinery, and seemingly able to get even the rustiest heap of scrap running again, and The Men with the Golden Gonads benefits from the same craftsmanship and attention to detail, and I doubt any tremolo twang has sounded quite this powerful, at least not since Link Wray was last open for business. Should you have somehow failed to understand the appeal of rock 'n' roll as it once was - because it's 2022 and youth culture is now a complete waste of time - this record will answer any fucking stupid questions you may still have.
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