M - New York, London, Paris, Munich (1979)

As with many of my generation, I was completely hypnotised by Pop Muzik, albeit not enough as to have me rushing out to buy the album. I made a mental note to do so once I heard Moonlight and Muzak, the follow up single which seemed to suggest the possibility of quality. Finally getting around to ticking that box more than forty years later, I'm surprised to find that the record is weirder than I expected and doesn't exactly contain songs in the traditional sense. More surprising, at least to me, is that on the strength of this, M seemed to foreshadow both Heaven 17 and Yello, sort of. On the one hand we have what is essentially disco draped with the trappings of Motown-inspired hit factories, boogie with a suitcase, casinos and international playboys; and regardless of ostentatiously fancy song structure, Robin Scott vocalises, performs, and narrates rather than sings and is something like the disco equivalent of a hype man, which is where the Dieter Meier comparison comes in.

This adds up to something which combines the influence of pop art with a touch of Bryan Ferry, Bond movies, and Giorgio Moroder, resulting in what are mostly pieces of music with vocals rather than songs; and very expensive sounding pieces of music built with a  perfectionist drive for whatever was deemed state of the art at the time. We're building songs on melodies which border on pub rock but using sequencers and Brigit Novik's surreally flawless vocal harmonies, arriving at something so removed from the organics of its origin that it hints at a sort of Ballardian sterility; or, if you prefer, it's so squeaky clean that it's weird. Because even the occasional synthesiser pulse has been custom fit by the finest tailors, New York, London, Paris, Munich has somehow avoided dating, or at least hasn't dated as the usual retrofuturism. It's a novelty record, and entirely self-aware, which is its strength.

Bollock Brothers - Never Mind the Bollocks 1983 (1983)

I'm sure I can't be blamed for assuming this would be complete shite before I heard it. Jock McDonald, having become a name by way of some Sex Pistols bootleg or other, was beginning to look a lot like the Jonathan King of punk, and there was the band with Johnny Rotten's little brother, and then there was the Bollock Brothers, so named as to present the impression of trying far too hard whilst simultaneously not actually trying at all, not even a little bit; all of which may as well have been Bryan Ferry crooning Scott Walker numbers at Astrud Gilberto by comparison with covering Never Mind the Bollocks in its entirety.

You would think so, wouldn't you? Nevertheless, this one manages to be fucking ridiculous, bloody awful, and yet somehow amazing all at the same time, and amazing because it's fucking ridiculous, bloody awful, and so on and so forth.

The 1983 version is a synthpop revision of the original utilising some sampling, some speak and spell, but mostly it's not even the proper stuff, instead occupying a point somewhere between early console games, karaoke tapes, and the kind of synthpop one would routinely encounter when children's telly tried too hard. Had an episode of Crackerjack ever concluded with Peter Glaze and Don MacLean grinning through a saucy seaside cover of Bodies, it would have sounded like this record.

However, the weird thing is that if you turn it up loud enough, it works in spite of itself. For starters, although the songs are reproduced with fannish fidelity to the originals, there's some additional fucking around with the formula - the chirpy sax sample on God Save the Queen, and how Holidays in the Sun keeps threatening to turn into Tubular Bells for example. Also, we have Pursey-esque guest vocals from Michael Fagan who made the front pages after breaking into Buckingham Palace back in 1982, who somehow makes the songs his own with additional lyrics, turning God Save the Queen into an appreciation of herself, for one example. The rest is sung by Jock McDonald who wisely avoids the stereotypical Lydon impersonations you might anticipate, instead relying on his own voice, which actually carries the songs very well and has something of Mark Perry's post-adolescent wail to it.

No, I don't know what the point was either, but in some respects it sort of saves Bollocks from itself by pissing all over the legend, annoying the kind of purists who missed the point in the first place, reminding those who might need reminding what a great album it was, beating Richard Branson at his own game, and generally being a shitload of fun - and stupid fun, which as we all know is the best kind. Whilst I tend to wince on principal at discussions of the queer narrative - mainly because I still don't think such partisan labels are always helpful - this version of Bollocks goes somewhere in that direction, serving as a reminder that Johnny Rotten at age twenty was one hell of a lot more Kenneth Williams than he was ever John Wayne, or even Joe Strummer.