Bollock Brothers - The Lydons and the O'Donnells Family Album (1986)

It wasn't that I was avoiding the Bollock Brothers, but they had about them a sense of desperation which kept me from feeling like I needed to rush out and buy anything. It was only when I heard their version of the first Pistols album - covered track to track in its entirety with sarcastic Mike Oldfield samples and vocals from the bloke who shimmied up the royal drainpipe to the Queen's bedroom - that I realised, here was something too stupid to be ignored. It also helps that, as I've come to realise, musically speaking they were more or less Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub instead of Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. So the Bollock Brothers were often quite listenable. This one, so credited as to place the usual emphasis on once having stood next to Johnny Rotten at the urinal, turns out to be a collection of singles you didn't buy because it was obviously the Bollock Brothers under yet another fucking stupid name; also a couple of allegedly live things which don't sound significantly more haphazard than the studio material.

I said, also a couple of allegedly live things which—

Wait! Come back! We have guest stars!

It may well be Killing Joke's Geordie impersonating Steve Jones on the Ivor Biggun-esque R.U. Dirty, and the bass playing is good enough to be Youth, but I'm fucked if I can hear Bananarama's alleged backing vocals; and as for Tony James, Billy Idol and Johnny Rotten's dad, we may never know for sure.

But none of this really matters because, all novelty concerns aside, this is a pretty great record even if it gets a bit fucking stupid in places. You can tell they had a whale of a time recording this stuff, and they may not actually have intended to do quite so good a job as they did because it certainly goes beyond Public Image Ltd as formed by a bunch of pissheads from the pub, even to the point of sounding like its own thing. Had the Bollock Brothers never been signed, had they never conned anyone into releasing their records, had they been some band who'd put out a couple of C60s with crappily scrawled photocopied covers and then vanished, we'd now be paying hundreds of pounds for those tapes and there would be a Vinyl on Demand boxed set costing more than your house. Also, according to the press cuttings on the cover, the NME hated them, which is about as high a recommendation as can be had.