It may resemble the out-takes and rarities of a band no-one heard of, whose biggest hits only ever reached the same quota of ears as will this lot, but it isn't. The Apostles caused a minor kerfuffle roughly contemporaneous to the emergence of anarchopunk as something with legs, playing the same venues, going through the same channels, making use of the same DIY aesthetic, but otherwise entirely in a class of their own. They were political, arguably moreso than many of the anarchopunk bands through being unafraid to point out the inevitable hypocrisies and contradictions of such scenes; but they tended to focus on the personal, the day to day stuff of life in the late twentieth century and why many of us felt so completely dispossessed by the world we were born into and amongst our supposed peers. In this sense, the most obvious comparison would be with early Alternative TV, except the Apostles were more musical, despite having to learn on the job in terms of instrumentation, and somehow they sounded like the most important realisation in the world, the feeling you get when you're completely out of options.
Those early tapes, notably 2nd Dark Age, wormed their way into my subconscious like nothing has really done since - wrist-slashingly bleak and yet somehow uplifting at the same time, the ray of sunlight giving definition to the sort of depths which made Joy Division sound like just some rock band. Typically, although those early tapes were pretty much just a couple of them stood in front of a tape recorder trying not to sound crap, sometimes with a drummer, sometimes with the cheapest drum machine they could afford or borrow, they somehow never quite achieved the same intensity in any more expensive setting, and certainly not with any of the legitimate studio albums on which the drumming is reduced to someone tapping a biscuit tin with a pencil in the next room. Chris Low, drummer to a later incarnation who put this thing together, comments that by the time he joined he had a feeling that the Apostles' best days were probably already behind them, and sadly he seems to have been right, even though it's hard to say why.
These two slabs of lovingly pressed vinyl comprise what can fairly be described as ropey recordings, songs and pieces of music which are played well, possibly not perfect, and with flaws and screw ups up front; but you can hear everything you need to hear for the tracks to work, and the sheer power of this stuff - even forty fucking years later - is terrifying, heart breaking, and a shitload of other adjectives ramped up to eleven. In all honesty, I don't think they ever bettered any of these recordings in terms of the raw emotion pouring out of the speakers. The only explanation I have is that possibly they spent too much time working on their own strengths and in doing so, lost sight of them. The playing isn't perfect and the lyrics occasionally clunk but it doesn't matter because this is rock (just about) as it was supposed to be - no bullshit, no showbiz, no sales pitch, just music that would reduce a statue to tears and so much honesty that it hurts.
I should probably mention that I was myself in a band with two former Apostles in the nineties, so can't really be described as an unbiased source; but I recall thinking that Andy Martin was one of the few people I've known who could genuinely be described as a genius*. Best Forgotten reminds me why I thought that.
*: Although part of that genius unfortunately involves shooting himself in the foot on a fairly regular basis, thus eschewing the problem of the Apostles acquiring an enduring following - which would have been a good thing because it hopefully would have meant more records in better studios.
No comments:
Post a Comment