Dick Hyman - The Age of Electronicus (1969)

 

This turned up in a batch of donations from a very, very old person who, having been left technologically beached by the endless march of progress - or at least the endless march of built-in obsolescence - was no longer able to appreciate all those Mantovani discs. To be fair, of the hundred or so vinyl records, it was a fairly interesting selection with some decent stuff, the strangest of all probably being this. I gather back during the dawn of the synthesiser, specifically the Moog synthesiser, there was a lot of this around - selections of pop hits magically transformed into futuristic cybermusic to be enjoyed by Martini-chugging sophisticates at dinner parties and which now sounds like the music enjoyed by the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers. Typically, we get a couple of Beatles numbers performed by electronic bees but never mind.

It takes a little getting used to given the difficulty of listening without the mind's eye becoming flooded with images of ironic teenagers, but not so much as you might expect. Dick Hyman was - and incredibly still is at the time of writing - a respected jazz pianist with a great ear for sound dynamics if this album is an indication, and the jazz drums complement the electronics beautifully. The possibly inevitable Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da is about as good as you'd expect and is dispensed with at the beginning of side one, in the wake of which the choices are interesting enough to allow for some sense of individual expression beyond populist novelty robotics. So we get a cover of James Brown, two from Booker T & the MGs and a Joni Mitchell number (which greatly improves on the original) amongst others. The magnetic poles of the record might be Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da at one extreme and Kolombo, Hyman's own composition, at the other. Kolombo with its moody rhythm and pseudo-Arabic melody could easily have come from one of those Cluster albums we all love so much; and with even the familiar titles sharing more in common with Kolombo than with the Beatles' worst song, this is a pretty great record which, for what it may be worth, pisses all over Switched On flippin' Bach.

Money 3 (2025)

 

Watching Secret Mall Apartment, the 2024 Netflix documentary about a group of artists who managed to live in a shopping mall for four years before they were discovered, it occurred to me that real art - as distinct from AI renderings of Winnie the Pooh as a Japanese ladyboy on the one hand, or a child's pram filled with actual human turds on the other - doesn't need to introduce itself by telling you that it's art because it will be self evident. Money 3 qualifies as art without having to send out memos - art in the sense of it being akin to setting up a sound installation in your listening space, wherever that may be.

Of Love Earth Music's most recent care package, I'm surprised to find I've played this one the most - surprised because it's over three hours of whatever it is on three discs and I don't understand what the hell I'm listening to; or why I keep listening to it. There's something fascinating here.

Money 3 seems to be the name of the album as the third in a series, with Money 4 having been issued about a month ago. Aside from a label graphic and track titles - and all seven listed tracks are called Money - there's no other information and nothing to identify the creator, although I suspect it will be someone from +DOG+. The artwork is mostly images of dollar bills, so maybe they want us to think about money. Maybe it's the sound of someone rubbing a dollar bill against a microphone time stretched to three hours. I doubt it, but I wouldn't rule anything out.

What you hear is minimal and abstract with a faint suggestion of the familiar. Excepting track five, there's arguably more silence than sound on here, or if not silence, then at least space, the kind found in nature. Electrical glitches suggesting faulty leads open the first disc, crackling intermittently with some vague sine wave peep way down in the unusually quiet mix. It's rhythmic without quite having a rhythm. It repeats without looping, and there's not much evidence of digital processing or sampling. I listen to most CDs while cycling, and this one blends seamlessly with the whistle of wind, distant cop cars, traffic noise, and other sounds you hear out there. It feels as though it's born through neither human nor artificial action but rather is simply something which exists and which obeys only its own aesthetic. Only when we reach track four do we encounter anything you could call notation - possibly a piano, although it sounds only a couple of times. The next disc continues with oscillators, or something which suggests at least remote human agency, comparable to musical composition more than the rumble of traffic over an underpass invoked on the first disc, if not much more. The sound changes over time, nevertheless remaining consistent with the whole, whatever that is. It's not laptop glitch; it's not treated environmental sound so far as I'm able to tell; it's nothing to do with songs made famous by either Pink Floyd or the haircut-era Beatles, and I've a feeling it means whatever the listener brings to the equation. Maybe it's telling us that money is essentially meaningless.

I have no idea, but it's food for serious thought and it makes Nurse With Wound's Merzbild Schwet sound like the Beach Boys; and I'm glad we still have a world in which something like this can exist.

You'll find a link to Love Earth Music on the left under Some Stuff, and that's where you can buy copies of this one.

Wreckless Eric & the Hitsville House Band - 12 O'Clock Stereo (2014)

 

I seem to remember having formed the impression of AmERICa representing some kind of comeback, which is patently rubbish because this one came out the previous year. Anyway, I'm all caught up now and am duly embarrassed by previous misunderstandings derived from not bothering with the homework. Talking of homework this, as with others, comes with extensive sleeve notes detailing its recording and how it all came about. Ordinarily this might be surplus to requirements but Eric's testimony is always interesting, usually surprising, and a different business to reading about how Puff Daddy came to choose that particular sound. Here we read of his drive to get a live band together and subsequently finding a drummer and a bassist with dispiriting day jobs playing in a rockabilly themed exhibit at Euro-Disney, and the saga of buying an eight-track recorder the BBC were getting rid of, a behemoth weighing as much as a Mini Cooper - it says here - and the subsequent difficulties of getting it across the channel, into France, and into his home with the help of the village schoolteacher necessitating the removal of a couple of doors and a bannister. The point of my paraphrasing all this is that there was clearly a lot of hard labour went into this album, and hard labour of the sweaty kind. You can kind of hear it in the sound. It's not a record that just casually popped into existence when the wind happened to blow a certain way through a rainbow.

Eric, these days reputedly ambivalent to the Wreckless prefix, has endured long enough to have become unique by some definition, definitely not just another pub rock bloke who won't go home. He's never had the voice of someone who should be in a band, as your school pals might once have told you, but it hits the notes and swings effortless from rage to pathos to caustic wit to wrist-slashing heartbreak without pausing for breath, sometimes in the space of a single line, and all without trying to resell itself as poetry. It's the contrast of light and dark that always gets me, and his range spans a greater width than most. Witness the jaunty chug of Kilburn Lane at odds with its own lyrics wherein a man kicks his wife in the kidneys and life is but piss, rain and misery, with the music only tuning into the current of grinding reality as the chords terminate each verse. It feels as life often feels because of the conflict, moods thrown into sharp contrast by their opposites, those opposites themselves given form in the earthy acrobatic wit of lyrics often so extreme as to seem like parody but always firmly rooted in something which feels like it could have happened to you.

The contrast works across the full span of the album from one song to the next with one number chucking up in the gutter after a kicking followed by odes to women who may or may not have married extraterrestrials: The Guitar-Shaped Swimming Pool; the opening bars of The Marginal promising that the circus is in town; and breezy open-top Cadillac cruising tunes about wanting to kill people you don't like - which might have worked better for Morrissey if he didn't always sound like Morrissey. 12 O'Clock Stereo is not any one thing as a record. It's everything, and all life is here.

Despite having shelled out for a fancy eight-track, technical issues led to the album being mixed in mono, or rather two mono tracks, one left and one right - each at twelve o'clock on the dials in mixing terms; but it suits the music perfectly, decanting each song into a timelessly direct and beat driven sound. It was good enough for the Beatles, and if this doesn't sound like the Beatles it has that same presence of songs carved from the ether, grounded and fundamental, like music that was always waiting to happen.

Some times I feel I write something which gets to the essence of a record, and sometimes it comes out as something which I'm aware is probably bollocks, because the best music is for listening more than it's for writing about, and 12 O'Clock Stereo fits this bill. So in summary: just fucking listen, because he may honestly be our greatest living songwriter and we should appreciate the guy's work while he's still bashing them out.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

Excepting David Bowie and four Beatles albums inherited from childhood, my first broad appreciation of music was punk rock and the weirdy electronic noise which seemed to share its general spirit. I came to Led Zeppelin late, never having heard them on the radio and being naturally suspicious of anything embraced by the hairies with which I shared a school and a rural hometown, assuming it was probably all pretty much the same deal as Whitesnake; although I actually enjoyed Iron Maiden on the quiet, for whatever that may be worth. I finally popped my Led Zeppelin cherry, so to speak, in 1988, prior to which I hadn't knowingly heard so much as a note of their music. My friend and (at the time) downstairs neighbour Martin gave me this double album, having found a ratty looking copy in Oxfam or somewhere and taken it upon himself to repair the sleeve and clean up the two discs. He already owned the album but didn't like the idea of there being an unloved copy somewhere in the world.

'Thanks,' I probably said without obvious sincerity while not wishing to appear ungrateful, then listened to it mainly so I could at least tell him I'd done so before tactfully explaining that it really wasn't the sort of thing I enjoyed.

The first massive surprise was that it didn't sound anything like I'd expected. It sounded so raw and loud, yet without mere volume being a consideration, that it seemed like the band were hammering away right there in the corner of my damp bedsit. The second massive surprise was that I really, really liked what I was hearing. The emphasis was on the music and the interaction of those playing it. It had some of the raw energy of punk with bluesy touches, but not the sort of blues I'd come to associate with late night dullards, and while there was instrumental noodling aplenty, it all seemed to have a point - none of that widdly-widdly histrionic bollocks which always sounded like some twat trying hard to impress his mates. It didn't sound like anyone was wearing a cut off denim jacket with Judas Preist or Angle Witch tattooed on the back in leaky ballpoint; and above all, it didn't sound old, like a relic of times been and gone. Somehow it seemed marginally closer to David Bowie than all that other stuff.

More than three decades later, it still sounds fresh to me, still with that early morning sparkle of a clear blue sky, no fat, no stodge, no blubbery indulgence or congratulating ourselves at what bad boys we are; and for a group who pointedly stuck to albums in the expectation of you giving it your most serious attention, they're kind of populist with big, big tunes cranked out in heavy, heavy chords, and yet nothing which quite sounds like a run through of whatever anyone else had been doing. For something which was, at the very best, merely adjacent to prog rock, few of the songs truly follow any established structure, each going its own direction and taking whichever path seems to work.  So instead of fifteen grunting anthems to shagging while drunk in charge of a motorcycle, we have songs as soundtracks with instruments unheard on rock records of the time, the pensive neoclassical grandeur of Kashmir, blues for standing stones, the Biblical epic of In My Time of Dying, and even a spot of country. For one of those bands routinely described as the fathers of this, that and the other, they were almost entirely their own unique entity.

Ringo Starr - Ringo the 4th (1977)

 

While did the reviewer even listen to the record customarily serves as the feeble defense of those who wouldn't recognise good music without the application of some sort of response conditioned by electrodes and positive reinforcement, no cliché is ever entirely without some moment at which it briefly applies with thermonuclear conviction, and that's what the fuck we have here. Google searches for this album will summon the same shitty review rephrased over and over and over amounting to another hilariously terrible failure by the guy who made tea for John, Paul, and George, even more worthless than the previous album, and that was bollocks…

I don't know what people really ever expected from Ringo given that he wasn't actually John, Paul, or George disguised with sunglasses and a fake hooter, so the routine criticism of his having  yet again failed to record either Band on the Run or Mind Games seems extraordinarily redundant and even unfair. This one is alternately either a dinosaur-rock artefact or Ringo climbing aboard the booty-shaking bandwagon with all the grace of a rhinoceros mounting a swan, and I'm sure there are others out there if you can be arsed to look.

Anyway, as the title implies, it's Starr's fourth solo album, excluding two covers collections released while he was still a Beatle, and honestly a significant improvement on Ringo's Rotogravure which had followed the warmed over Beatlisms just a little too far down the trail into easy listening territory, possibly hoping guest spots from famous friends might compensate for any shortfall. Ringo the 4th, once you're able to hear past its failure to chart - which I realise doubtless spoils it for many - is accordingly more upfront and strident, borrowing from both Motown and disco, most likely because that was what was happening at clubs and parties, and our man was spending a lot of time at clubs and parties due to his being Ringo. It's not hard to understand.

Without calling in favours from McCartney, Clapton, or any of the usual suspects, the record at least doesn't feel like an ex-Beatle holding on for dear life, and if it fails to work as the greatest album ever recorded, it fails on its own terms. It's mainstream, but not really MOR, and efficiently rather than over-produced. You already know what Ringo sounds like, and that's how he sounds here, so unless you were expecting Bauhaus then there shouldn't be a problem. It rocks in the right places and features a good quota of cracking tunes; it chugs in the right places; as Ringo's disco album I'm not convinced it isn't actually better than Bowie's disco album; and there's something genuinely warm and soulful in these songs, if you can just make the effort to get the fuck over yourself.

Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture told me about visiting his friend Roro Perrot Vomir. They were listening to this record and Andy asked why Ringo had a woman sat on his shoulders on the cover.

Because he's Ringo, Roro replied. He can do what the fuck he likes. This album was Ringo doing what the fuck he likes, and whatever you hear probably says more about you than it does about himself.

Mozart Estate - Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping (2023)

Ever since Denim ground to an unceremonious halt in that Paris underpass, whenever that was, I've been waiting for Go-Kart Mozart to deliver on the promise of Back in Denim. I know Go-Kart Mozart were a different group - sort of - and one for which disappointment might even be considered a central theme, but then I'm nothing if not an optimist*. Anyway, I've been listening to Mozart Estate for about a month now, and I think he's nailed it this time.

Surprisingly, and despite the glaring similarities, the Estate does indeed seem to be a slightly different animal to its pram-wheeled forerunner, occupying a reasonably comfortable midway between the airbrushed studio stomp of Denim and the bargain bucket novelty of the intermediary incarnation. I'm fairly certain the drums, for example, are programmed, but you have to listen closely to tell and the Bontempi organ has seemingly been relegated to the cupboard under the stairs. It's mostly business as usual, I suppose - songs which sound like seventies television commercials, chirpy sub-Beatles jingles, the potential influence of Mike Batt, and everything with a synthetic fibre sheen of the artificial so squeaky clean that it's initially quite hard to listen to; but the themes are even darker than usual, with the grinding squalor and despair thrown into contrast as sharp as a Stanley knife at the cup final by unrelenting jollity, and yet with nothing I can identify as either cynicism or irony. There's the typically unsavoury view of the homeless alongside a cheery homage to Poundland, Vanilla Gorilla which seems to stand in praise of white van man, the thoroughly unsettling I Wanna Murder You, and pretty much every track delivers a distinct whiff of the unsavoury with its broad showbiz grin.

I'm about to do something crazy.
You'd better give the cops a call.
The things I need to express,
Are all against the law.

Nothing specifically invokes Savile but this record nevertheless feels somehow like Consumer Electronics with tunes, and not just tunes but a full stage show with glittery dancers filling the slot between Doctor Who and Brucie's Generation Game. Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping is potentially the most horrible record you've ever heard and probably qualifies Lawrence as an actual genius.

 *: This is patently untrue.

The Men with the Golden Gonads Play the Men with the Golden Gonads and Other Misses (2022)

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.

Available from Spinout Nuggets unless they've all gone.

Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)

I kept hearing this amazing song on the radio at work, but I could somehow never catch what it was or who it was by; and it took me about a year to work out that it was actually Coldplay. This came as something of a surprise because although admittedly it sort of sounded like Coldplay in slightly more pensive mood, it sounded better than Coldplay.

I never developed any particular loathing for Coldplay, but never saw any particular mystery in the idea that anyone might have done so. They sounded like an absurdly formulaic version of something which might have been more listenable under other circumstances, music for estate agents and automotive commercials, music for photogenic home insurance couples who'd listen to U2 but would rather not have to think about those kids in Africa with flies on their faces - corporate angst; and that's even before we get to Gwyneth's fanny candles.

Nevertheless, God Put a Smile Upon Your Face really wormed its way into my head - a song which sounds like the moment before a thunderstorm stretched out to three minutes, a depressive, doom-laden crescendo running away from itself. I would have bought the 7" but I'm not sure it existed, and CD singles always seemed like a bit of a waste of time, so here I am with an entire album - eleven fucking tracks. Strangely, tracks two to five were all singles, preserved here as a big chunk of hits at the beginning of the album and serving as a lesson in why it's taken me two decades to buy a cheap second-hand copy. It's not that In My Place, Clocks, or The Scientist are poor songs so much as that they're the same fucking song, and hearing it every thirteen minutes or so on whatever turdy indie station we kept it locked to at work used to get pretty fucking painful some weeks. Hearing them again after twenty years without the additional gurgling testimony of Jono Coleman or Christian O'Connell or some other dreadful fucking twat is less painful than I expected, and the more I listen, the more obvious it becomes that it's the context rather than the songs. This may also tally with the fact that God Put a Smile Upon Your Face didn't do anything like so well as the other three singles and never quite got to the point of outstaying its welcome at East Dulwich SDO.

Starting again at the beginning, allowing Coldplay a fair crack at the whip and ignoring both the terrible name and unfortunate association with Gwyneth's fanny candles, this isn't a bad album. In fact I find it unusually listenable. It isn't really that the good stuff amounts to the tracks which weren't singles, although there's a subtle difference in mood which probably accounts for In My Place, Clocks and The Scientist having been picked out; but the material you may not already have heard a million times somehow sounds more like a real band, and certainly less formulaic in pushing all those emo buttons with wistful verses building up to the same crescendo every time. Wikipedia gives their influences as bog standard hyper-mainstream shite but to me they sound like a post-psychedelic band, essentially Codeine with bigger production and Beatley chord changes; and this album is a lot more depressive than you might expect. I realise that this record should be shite but isn't probably doesn't fully qualify as praise, but I'm still slightly stunned to find myself listening to Coldplay and enjoying it. Had we never heard of them, had we not had to endure so many years of having them shoved down our throats over and over and over, it might be easier to listen past the bullshit and appreciate what they do.

Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

The Beatles (1968)

I've no doubt that whole books have been written about the white album - as I'm not going to call it - but I haven't read any of them, have no plans to read any of them, and I'm not even going to do any internet homework with this one in the hope of coming to it absolutely fresh, as I suspect the lads would have wanted; and because I have a theory that this was the whole point of the album.

The Beatles were the first pop band I noticed when I was a kid, mainly because their music kept turning up on the telly and with such frequency that I began to recognise a few of the songs and asked my mum about them. The Magical Mystery Tour album turned up one Christmas in response, followed by Yellow Submarine, Sgt. Pepper and Rubber Soul all within the next six months. I planned to get the rest but I suspect the strain of saving up my pocket money month after month was getting a bit much; then I discovered punk rock, and eventually began to find everyone still banging on about the fab four two decades after the event a little exhausting. It wasn't that I'd had a change of heart so much as a change of focus, and it had become difficult to listen to the Beatles what with their music still getting heavy airplay on every radio station everywhere in the universe. You can only have so much of a good thing.

Eventually it died down so much that I no longer found myself subjected to Penny Lane on a daily basis, and I began to wonder what those other Beatles records had sounded like, and so I picked up where I'd left off as a sort of favour to my nine-year old self.

Happily, it's quite easy to apply fresh ears to the eponymous 1968 double because, of its thirty tracks, I count only three which have suffered from the same overexposure as Hey Jude and the rest. Dear Prudence I recognise mainly from the Banshees cover, and there are bits and pieces I recall as having been sampled on Jay-Z's Grey Album, but otherwise there's a lot here which I've never heard before. In case you missed the inference of that sentence, the significant detail is songs by the Beatles which I've never heard before, which seems pleasantly incredible in the second decade of the twenty-first century. More specifically, for me this means Beatles without baggage, without specific lines or riffs conjuring unwanted images of smirking regional television reporters introducing light-hearted news features about a foolish resident of a hill or a woman named Lucy who has her own jewellery business on the Isle of Skye.

What with the plain white cover and general lack of flash, I get the idea that the Beatles were trying to get away from being the Beatles, or at least from what the Beatles had become in terms of their fame - hence, I guess, the seemingly sarcastic revelations of Glass Onion which must surely have been addressed to those reading far too much into the back catalogue. To invoke what probably wasn't yet a cliché in 1968, it was just about the music, man.

Yet The Beatles is no reductionist return to basics, and is at least as progressive and experimental as the fab and swinging sixties albums which preceded it, arguably more so with the likes of Revolution 9, inspired doubtless by persons such as Pierre Schaeffer and actually much easier on the ear than its legend would suggest. Of course, they do return to basics on tracks such as the frankly still fucking incredible Back in the USSR which seemingly takes the piss out of the Beach Boys - something else I hadn't really noticed until now; but they were doing something with those basics - inventing heavy metal as some have argued, although I'm not convinced by that one - and they were doing it as the reinvestment they wanted to hear without intrusively commercial considerations. I'd say this holds true for most of the album despite that we're still talking about the Beatles rather than Arnold Schoenberg, so it pops but entirely on their terms; and as such comes across as a surprisingly intimate work compared with the more overt populism of the previous efforts. It's almost talking to itself with just one other individual in the room, that being yourself, the listener - which additionally provides, I suppose, some insight as to why Charles Manson believed the Beatles were sending secret messages specifically to him on this record.

It's become fairly easy to lose sight of why anyone ever liked this bunch, and I still refuse to believe that their legend deserves to eclipse any other legend you may care to name; and excepting Ringo, I found the solo material mostly underwhelming, but something about the combination of the four of them was genuinely wonderful and I'm impressed that an album of a full half-century vintage can still yield surprises, and so many.

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter (2013)

Well, as we all know, Adam was substantially unwell for a little while, as became apparent when a friend discovered him digging a tunnel in his kitchen using just a teaspoon, a tunnel proposed as a means of visiting an ex-girlfriend. I possibly have some of the details wrong but that's how I heard it, although for what it may be worth a number of my most valued friends have spent at least a little time detained at the pleasure of the psychiatric profession. To be honest, I was more bothered that the previously reliable Ant had seemingly fallen so hard with those last two albums, Manners & Physique and Wonderful. To be fair, I've only heard them in bits, but what I heard wasn't anything great, so I stand by my perhaps only vaguely informed disdain. He could be forgiven Strip, and he could be forgiven Where Did Our Love Go on the telly at the behest of a man who is alleged to have married small boys during clandestine wedding ceremonies, but somehow, somewhere it felt as though a bridge had been crossed and that it was kind of a one-way deal; and yes, I know he wrote a genuinely great autobiography, but even so…

Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter suggests a certain degree of mania as titles go, which might not bode well. I suppose one could argue that Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is actually the title of an enterprise in which Adam Ant plays a character called the Blueblack Hussar, but maybe it doesn't really matter. After all, he's done this sort of thing before - Picasso Visita el Planeta de los Simios etc. etc.

Just to get the objection out of the way, Adam Ant is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is listed as alternative rock, lo-fi on Discogs which can fucking fuck the fuck off for starters. I assume most of the album was recorded in Boz Boorer's spare room on his computer despite which, it doesn't sound like a tape by Another Headache from 1992 and is no more fucking lo-fi than those early Beatles albums recorded using a Coke can and a bit of string for a microphone - or even Sgt. fucking Pepper for that matter. Lo-fi is what young men with beards listen to as they open up their Hoxton cafés ready for another day of selling overpriced breakfast cereal to tossers. Lo-fi, my arse.

Anyway, to get to the actual point, Marrying the Gunner's Daughter is the last thing I expected to hear from Adam Ant - not only a decent record, but a record that's at least as decent as most of the good ones. I get the impression it's mainly Adam with Boz Boorer, musically speaking. You could argue that it resembles an extended demo tape by virtue of the fact that they obviously liked these tracks well enough to stick them on the record rather than shell out for a fancy studio, but I'm not sure it matters. As a whole, the thing doesn't sound like a manifesto as Dirk and maybe a few of the others did, but it holds together simply as a set of fucking great songs pulled together by people who clearly had a blast writing and recording them. Cool Zombie is at least as monumental as Deutscher Girls, Miss Thing or any of the others. There are even surprisingly moving tributes to both Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren - surprisingly because I've tended to regard those two as a pair of twats, personally speaking. My expectations were fairly low, but this album really got to me through its raw honesty and emotional power. I don't know if it will be his last one - given that it came out about eight years ago and I've only just heard of it - but if so, he's ending on a much higher note than surely any of us could have predicted.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

LCD Soundsystem (2005)

I love this album but I've never been quite sure what to make of it. I appreciate that there are few artists whose work doesn't expose at least a little of their influences, but there's a point at which influence crosses over into homage, postmodernism, or just plain chicken-in-a-basket summer season impersonation. Stereolab, for obvious example, almost fall into this latter category as the Showaddywaddy of krautrock, and yet they just about get away with it by virtue of the Billy Childish defence, namely that if it still works then you can still use it.

LCD Soundsystem are, or at least were, the same sort of deal, but stealing down the midnight stairs for a secret swig of populist postpunk lemonade; and 1978 was, after all, a very good year. There's something almost willful about it, I suppose, but maybe it's no different to the fact of some people still playing the blues on a knackered guitar, and occasionally there will be one guy who does it really, really well. Here we have a dry, unfussy production seemingly inspired by late seventies disco, just before programmable beat boxes came in, electronic instruments played manually, a live sound, syndrums pew-pew-pewing all over the chorus, and long grooves based around riffs and catchphrases - mostly stuff which became subject to a degree of sneering during the rise of haircuts and sampling technology. LCD Soundsystem, however, showed that you could do something of worth with such neglected tools, and something which sounded fresh as fuck. The thing is, he - or possibly they - went even further, releasing a debut which could almost be a compilation. There are snatches of seventies metal, Never as Tired as When I'm Waking Up which might be a lost Beatles demo, Disco Infiltrator which probably should have been on Remain in Light, Great Release which sounds like something from one of Eno's first couple of solo records, and then Mark E. Smith vocalising for disco-era Blondie on the rest. It's only because the music is so fucking good that you don't notice this weirdly eclectic skipping from one genre to another, and the music is so good because I guess LCD Soundsystem don't give a shit.

No-one remembers the cod reggae track on that Whitehouse album or Elvis Costello's brief excursion into techstep because they never happened, because most artists tend to stick to a furrow, or at least few artists commit the musical equivalent of a muscle spasm depositing three unexpected minutes of New Orleans bounce halfway through side two of a Ramones album.

Why not, we might ask? Truthfully, while it's nice to know what you're getting, and there's a certain virtue to variations on an established theme because no-one likes inconsistency, isn't it all just a little bit affected? Isn't it all just a little like those who refuse to allow themselves to enjoy anything outside whatever mileau they have established as the sum of their personalities, whether it be Psychic TV, rockabilly, or whatever? Isn't all this denial a little bit Oliver Cromwell, a bit like being at fucking school? Anyone remember that Lustmord album with the riotous pub rock knees up* as the first track on side two? Me fucking neither.

Anyway, I wonder if this album is therefore a deliberate flouting of some unspoken cooler than thou etiquette - flinging it all around with mad abandon simply because you can and it's fun. I also wonder if I've been thinking about this one too much, because it actually doesn't entirely sound like a compilation, despite the absurd range, with all tracks achieving a sort of unity through shared production, instrumentation, general spirit and so on. It's not karaoke, just great disco as you've either never heard it, or hadn't heard it for a while; or it was as of fifteen years ago.

It's not - ugh - "retro cool" either.

Piss off.

*: Conversely I draw the reader's attention to Wreckless Eric's weird electronic album, Bungalow Hi, which exists because Wreckless Eric was, is, and will forever remain artistically superior to the majority of his contemporaries.

The Tubes - Remote Control (1979)

Amongst my memories of first discovering music, or at least music which wasn't the Beatles, the arrival of my first tape recorder is significant for reasons which are probably obvious. I don't remember hearing much music on the radio as a kid, but I heard enough to be aware of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. I used to go to stay at my grandparents' house in Kenilworth every other weekend, and there was a point at which whatever the usual arrangement had been, suddenly it was just my dad coming to fetch me home on Sunday evening, and because it was my dad, he had the radio on, usually tuned to the top forty countdown. This meant that I heard a selection of the same songs with such frequency as to imprint them on my memory as things I liked, and when I was given a tape recorder for my birthday, naturally the first thing I did was start taping things I liked from the radio; and Prime Time by the Tubes was in there right from the beginning, even though I'm not sure the dates add up right.

Later I learned that the Tubes were an American punk band, and later still I concluded that they were an example of how America never understood punk. I no longer quite hold either of these views, although I still maintain that a bunch of poets hanging around with Lou Reed in some New York loft was never, ever the birth of punk.

Anyway, I loved Prime Time so much that I immediately ran out and bought the album some forty years later when I happened across a copy in a crappy second hand store which seemed suspiciously like some guy's front room. I played it once and decided that I'd been right about Americans failing to understand punk.

Then, another year or so on, I dig the thing out for a second play and find that it has something, even if hanging onto the idea of the Tubes as an American equivalent to the Pistols is obviously a waste of time. I guess they were punk in so much as that they were a bit freaky, relatively speaking, and none too bothered about fitting in; plus there was a fairly low calorie anti-establishment message centered around the idea that too much telly is bad for you. I don't know about the earlier material, but musically this one is operatic and conspicuously well played, a little like a weird conflation of Kiss and Devo but coming out sounding a bit like Styx in their Mr. Roboto period. It's so theatrical it's almost Rocky Horror. Guitar solos, mullets, vocal harmonies, futuristic monosynth and sax solos: ordinarily I might duck for cover before Michael J. Fox shows up and tries to teach me a thing or two about what it's like to be young, but fucking fuck it - this is a great album. The songs, big pompous poodle-haired wedding cake compositions though they may well be, have got serious pull, never mind just Prime Time. There's TV is King, I Want It All Now, Only the Strong Survive, and about the only song I was less struck on is the ballad, Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand) but my wife has been going crackers over that one, so everybody's happy.

Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.

My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.

Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.

This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.

The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.

The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.

Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.

All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.

ABBA - The Magic of ABBA (1980)

I thought ABBA were amazing when I was a kid, definitely the bestest since the Beatles. Naturally I fancied the blonde one and have vague memories of some formative fantasy involving the Beatles reforming so that they could play a concert with ABBA, which would be the bestest concert ever, at the conclusion of which I'd somehow cop off with the blonde one, despite my being merely ten. ABBA was proper music, and so Matthew and myself would quietly sneer at Sean who was still listening to the Wombles.

My dedication waned as the years passed, particularly once I'd discovered Devo, but endured at least enough for my collection to include a scratched 7" of Knowing Me, Knowing You procured from a bargain bin at some point. Later when I joined Academy 23, Andy Martin developed some weird theory about my being a massive fan of ABBA and would entertain himself by imagining my visitors astonished and scandalised as I blasted them first with Coil, then all those ABBA albums like the crazy, unpredictable character he had apparently mistaken me for. The joke got on my tits after a while. I had one scratchy single and, in any case, had never particularly liked Coil.

ABBA's legacy was further diminished by Mamma Mia!, or the fifteen minutes I manged to watch of the DVD, wherein ABBA songs somehow punctuate the saga of Meryl Streep seeking to identify the father of her daughter, Karen from Mean Girls. It could be almost anyone, it seems, because Karen from Mean Girls was conceived during a train full of Ruperts pulled by Meryl Streep at some ghastly seventies sex happening.

Nevertheless, here we are. I always liked the idea of a greatest hits album without ever quite getting around to buying one. Friends and relatives now routinely present my wife with stacks of their old, unloved vinyl records which she paints and transforms into decorative objects, and the latest skip delivered to our door included The Magic of ABBA. It seemed a shame to turn it into another ornament given the record being in excellent condition, and given that we already have a whole garage full of Mantovani and the like.

Yet somehow I find it genuinely weird listening to this thing in 2020, having failed to truly pay attention to these songs since they seemed like the only real competition for the Beatles. ABBA wrote decent songs for sure, but with hindsight it sounds as though they may have been inadvertently responsible for that sparkly sound everyone assumes came from the Cocteau Twins, beloved of television and advertising executives around Christmas - the musical equivalent of Thomas Kinkade's twinkly winter scenes. The twin vocals are strange too, overproduced possibly with Phil Spector in mind, only really working when one individual vocal takes the lead and otherwise coming close to a forerunner of autotune.

Wankers will of course object on the grounds of it being cheese and just a bit of fun and I should lighten up and what's wrong wiv me and it's just a bit of fun; but I don't know. ABBA don't sound terrible, but being less shit than Mud or the Rubettes is hardly a recommendation, and no golden moment has endured without something getting in the way - never mind the Eurokitsch of Fernando, Chiquitita and their like, even the good stuff sounds strange. I can no longer listen to the proto-metal of SOS without my brain hearing Little Frank singing, but with my cardboard hands it would be no good; and Does Your Mother Know just seems a bit Jimmy Savile: yes, I would indeed like to shag you, but I'll politely decline your kind offer on the grounds of your being twelve, if it's all the same.

The darker, more haunting tracks, The Name of the Game and Knowing Me, Knowing You still just about manage to foreshadow Joy Division but seem to be exceptions to a generally underwhelming rule. This really should have been better. It's true what they say about how you can never go home.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968)

I'm out of my depth here, never really having had much to do with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or anything from the long-haired end of the sixties. It either hasn't grabbed me, or hasn't had the opportunity to grab me for one reason or another, which has never really felt like a problem given that I've always had plenty of other stuff to listen to, and I don't trust anyone who feels their record collection must include a representative selection of everything. It's not a fucking competition.

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel I've been missing out where Frank Zappa is concerned. I always liked the idea of the man, but never knowingly heard any of his work until the late, great Andrew Cox gave me this for Christmas. Given that Andrew passed away back in 2009, it's probably fair to say that it's taken me a while to click with the record, although in my defence there have been a few years spent in transit and without a turntable between then and now.

It seems Zappa viewed the long-haired end of the sixties with suspicion equivalent to my own. Scratch anyone who feels the need to tell you just how laid back and far out they are and you'll invariably find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Obviously this one was taking the piss out of Sgt. Pepper, or what Sgt. Pepper seemed to represent, but ran much deeper than mere sarcasm, revealing a healthy distrust of utopian sentiment as being no more revolutionary than the hula hoop or the beehive hairdo; and if it fails to offer an alternative to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, that's because it doesn't fucking have to because it's not chess. If you don't want to know that you're being used, then that's your tough shit.

Musically, Money goes along with certain conventions of its era, subverting ragtime, doowop and others to the cause of its opprobrium, then glueing all the bits together with an avant-garde sensibility hinting at musique concrete and the weirder end of jazz, but with a precision and targetting which can be mistaken for neither. There's none of that saggy far out shit here, no aimless giggling at its own reflection, but neither is the record in any sense mean spirited. Frank doesn't want to piss you off so much as he wants you to wake the fuck up - which is probably why you'll laugh your ass off with this record, at least if there's any hope for you.

I guess this is approximately where Devo got started, and certainly the Residents, or at least that's how it sounds to me. I'd say that I wish someone had told me, but they sort of did.

Pixies - Beneath the Eyrie (2019)

It's a couple of years down the line and I'm still reeling from the Pixies having reformed without sounding like their own remember the eighties tribute act. I suppose it will eventually sink in, and Beneath the Eyrie may go some way towards dulling the novelty. It's nothing shocking, and it sounds like the Pixies, which in itself seems pretty special - at least compared to Indie Cindy which felt a little closer to a Pixies impersonation that didn't quite pan out.

The element that's different this time, the new thing brought to the table, or at least that I've only really noticed with Beneath the Eyrie, is how the Pixies really are a very traditional rock band. Of course, I knew this from the start, part of their appeal being in the contrast of the homespun with the weirder stuff. Here it seems particularly pronounced, although I still can't tell whether this is the record or simply something I've only just noticed. It's not that they're actually a marginally spikier Small Faces or anything so obvious. It isn't even the occasional instance of country twang or Tejano, or the boogie of St. Nazaire. Some of these songs, once you subtract the volume, wouldn't have been out of place Beatling away in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. They remind us of what rock music is supposed to do, shimmering as though it's the first time we've heard it - and I mean rock music generally, not just this record.

It seems like one hell of a feat, using these ingredients to come up with something so breezy, so free of stodge, so unlike anything recorded by fat old cunts in mirror shades wishing they were smoking weed in seventies California; so I suppose that would be the customary teaspoon of weirdy supernatural piss and acid added for flavour, to throw everything into stark high definition contrast. It's like the Wire you can play to your dad without having him pull funny faces, or something. Beneath the Eyrie is yet another slab of genius routinely and apparently effortlessly turded out by one of the greatest rock bands of all time, all of which will probably sound like hyperbole, at least until you come to Silver Bullet at the end of side one.

Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-76 (2019)

I realise this one has been around for yonks but I've only just heard it. I missed out on the Industrial Records version by a couple of months, and was never tempted by any of the CD reissues because they all seem to have been reissued at the same time as five million other things, representing a tidal wave of rarities, and I didn't feel like taking a second job just for the sake of keeping up with all that Grey Area stuff. Now, however, it's been issued on vinyl as is only right and proper, so here we are.

Pleasingly, this material is somewhat less rudimentary than I imagined it would be, based on Is That Me (Finding Someone at the Door Again?), the b-side of Nag Nag Nag dating from the same era. Nevertheless, the music is fairly rudimentary, recorded on a domestic reel to reel - it says here - therefore possibly not even a four track; electronic rhythm is provided by one of those lounge boxes with five or six settings, samba, bossanova and so on; instrumentation is sparse, everything on the cheap, with a few rudimentary effects filling in. In other words, they did as much as they could with whatever was available, so it's somewhat noodly, like very early Gristle without the arts council funding - swooping sine waves, clangs, bleeps, and farts - but it's very atmospheric, and pretty impressive for something recorded around the same time as Diamond Dogs. Most peculiar of all is that 1974-76 seems more like a forerunner to the moods and loops of The Voice of America than to the velvet distortion of Mix-Up, their first album proper.

Oddities of particular interest include Do the Snake and She Loves You. Snake is what you used to get when suburban whitey rendered his low-fi interpretation of disco music safe in the knowledge that no-one outside the band would ever hear the thing, stilted and self-conscious exhortations to get on down and so on - we've all been there, I'm sure; and if you listen closely you will notice that She Loves You is actually a cover of the Beatles song, with all of its moptopped screamarama pared down to something weird and paranoid which sounds as though it was recorded inside a cupboard, which may well have been the case. Elsewhere on these two discs, you will find nothing obvious or overstated - as has generally been true of Cabaret Voltaire's work - and neither is there any padding, anything which could have been shed for the sake of brevity. As always, the strength of this band are elements which emerge and which remain difficult to pin down, never anything flung directly in your face; and even if it's a little basic in places, this collection holds its own in relation to the likes of Voice of America, Red Mecca, Microphonies or any of the others.