Charlatans - Some Friendly (1990)

I bought this when I was ill. I can't remember what was up with me but it was genuine for once. I was living in Lewisham and it was wet and miserable. I staggered out to the shops in hope of buying something which might cheer me up a bit, and this was the only album I could find in my local WHSmith which seemed even marginally promising, based mainly on The Only One I Know being so great a single as to have smashed through all of my growing resentment towards both baggy and what I have since come to think of as Austin Powers music. I got the album home and struggled back into bed. It sounded okay, if somehow a bit muted, but I nevertheless played side one again and again because I didn't have the energy to flip the record over; and it was quite a good illness soundtrack, possibly due to the neopsychedelic codeine swirls of Hammond organ reproducing the cotton wool effect of being confined to bed with a fever, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Weirdly, it still sounds as good now, perhaps even better. It may simply be an after effect of my hammering side one whilst feeling unwell, only coming to the flip a few weeks later, but Some Friendly feels a lot like a concept album, specifically one of those with the sides divided between head and dance floor. The first is powerfully immersive, a series of swells and lulls coming to a crescendo with the genuinely incredible Then and somehow reminding me of Faust IV. The second side veers a bit more towards Austin Powers music, requiring a few plays to dispel unwanted images of that fucking twat Mike Myers, but it gets there, and comes to resemble a more populist take on krautrock in a surprisingly short time, particularly Sproston Green, which seems an interesting parallel given that Happy Mondays were essentially a Can tribute act.

Stranger still, Wikipedia describes this as a problematic record with which the band were never particularly happy, not least due to having gone into the studio with only a handful of songs. Nevertheless, for my money it pisses over the efforts of most of their baggy contemporaries, but maybe it's just something to do with listening whilst unwell. It might also be something to do with their Birmingham origins, because Birmingham is better than Manchester.

Looney Tunes (1976)

I discovered punk rock at the age of fourteen, roughly speaking. Prior to that, I had my four Beatles albums - which had been my record collection since the age of eleven or so - and I thought Abba were quite good, but most of all I liked novelty records because I was a kid - my friend Sean's Wombles album, the Goodies, and this compilation, borrowed from Paul Moorman who lived on the farm next to ours and who was in my class at school. K-Tel's Looney Tunes is significant in being the first album I ever taped, having been given a mono portable tape recorder for Christmas, or possibly my birthday. I hadn't really thought about the thing until I chanced across a copy in Half-Price Books and realised what it was. I hadn't really thought about it because Looney Tunes dropped off my radar pretty fucking quickly once I discovered punk rock, which I regarded as proper grown up music, although it's probably ironic that the thing which first drew me to punk rock was that they said rude words on the telly, which was funny. Not for nothing does Stewart Home characterise the most successful punk bands as novelty acts in Cranked Up Really High, but anyway...

Thirty five years later, these twenty-four tracks, all crammed into tiny grooves so as to achieve maximum value for money, sound astonishingly good, perhaps even better than they did to my fourteen-year old ears, not least because this is mostly stuff you won't read about in the usual rock histories, the usual grown-up rock histories…

Interestingly, it's not even a couple of dozen actual looney tunes. Naturally, we have out and out comedy records such as Shaving Cream and The Streak, but there's plenty which simply chugs along on some kind of vague novelty value - The Bird's the Word or Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, which surely only count as comedy on the grounds of having presented a more authentic doo-wop experience than Perry Como; and then we have Tiny Tim's song about tulips, whatever the hell you'd call that. The thing which stands out for me - excepting the two proper children's numbers, Rubber Duckie and that fucking awful Chipmunk shite - is how most of those gathered here are just great songs, regardless of comic thrust. Susan Christie's I Love Onions still reminds me of the Residents; and Jumpin' Gene Simons' Haunted House is a gorgeous slice of hillbilly inflected country evocative as a childhood sunset; and Lonnie Donegan's surprisingly enduring My Old Man's a Dustman establishes a clear link to the Sex Pistols and all that, even though I probably wouldn't have quite been able to say why back when I first heard it.

The more you listen, the more obvious it becomes how some of these songs are genuinely odd, even avant-garde but for the lack of a beret. Buzz Clifford's Baby Sittin' Boogie flavours its breaks with the perfectly syncopated gurgling of an infant to genuinely peculiar effect, which can surely only have been achieved through mucking about with tapes; and there's the similarly bizarre vocal acrobatics of Joe Perkins' Little Eeefin' Annie knocking Can and all those other supposedly groundbreaking acts no-one actually listens to into a cocked hat. Rarely ranging much beyond doo-wop, rockabilly, country, and maybe a touch of traditional music hall, Looney Tunes is mainstream as hell, and yet manages to be seriously fucking weird for most of the playing time - arguably excepting the aforementioned children's numbers and Charlie Drake as ever trying far too hard on My Boomerang Won't Come Back. Transfusion by Nervous Norvus will save you the bother of ever having to read J.G. Ballard, and there's the distinctly rapey Little Red Riding Hood by Sam the Sham & the Pharoahs to keep power electronics enthusiasts happy; and, in essence, what I mean to tell you is that this album has fucking everything you could ever need from a record. As some dude identifying as DaKreepa on YouTube states, the Looney Tunes album was the best fuckin' thing man has ever made, meaning that we can stop looking, having finally found the eye of the YouTube comments storm where truth finally happened.

Happy Mondays - Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches (1990)

Sarah and I were walking along a road somewhere in Manchester on the way to some pub or other. Sarah had been my first girlfriend some ten or fifteen years earlier. It hadn't lasted long, but at least it had ended sort of amicably, and now the only thing which remained puzzling is how she had picked up such a thick Manchester accent in the time since. It sounded affected to my ears, but then it had been a while since we spoke to each other. Crossing to take some side street, we encountered a young man with a slightly vacant expression.

'A'right, our Liam,' said Sarah, and I'm going to assume his name was Liam, because it was something like that.

'A'right, Sarah,' he said, and the words slipped from his mouth as though deposited, sluggish and unengaged. His accent was almost impenetrable to my ears, and it sounded like he had a good pint of snot up there somewhere. 'I just been mugged.'

'What?'

'I just been mugged, like.'

'What happened?'

He explained how some person had approached him with a knife and asked for his wallet. He'd given the person his wallet, and now here we were.

'Are you okay?'

'Yeah. Bit pissed off, like.' He shrugged.

He'd been mugged at knife point and was describing the encounter like it had been some stranger cadging cigarettes. Are you even fucking alive in there? I wanted to ask but didn't, instead making noises like I understood because it's happened to all of us. Were this London, I thought to myself, someone would have had their legs broken by this point.

The encounter seemed to epitomise some kind of Mancunian experience, one I've never understood and would never want to understand - a dopey quality which cannot logically apply to every single person living in that city, but which I tend to notice because it irritates the living shit out of me. Possibly it's the drug thing. I've never understood how mere love of ganja so often equates to character for certain people, or how some can spend an entire fucking day just lighting one up, over and over. I've always found drug people a massive bore, or specifically I've found their drug talk a massive bore because it mostly seems to entail sitting around reminiscing over previous occasions of weed inhalation expressed as statements of the fucking obvious, and how side-splitting it was when we put some blims in that ham sandwich and then the dog ate it blah blah blah...

It was a while before I actually heard their music, but prior to that point Happy Mondays seemed like a band assembled specifically for the purpose of getting on my tits - an indeterminate quota of generic scallies stood around staring into fucking space with their mouths open, one of them possibly shoving a magic marker up his hooter and proclaiming himself mad for it every once in a while; and the whole bleeding world seemed to love them.

A friend from school - one of those who says hey, we really must keep in touch every single time you speak to him, with intervals never shorter than a year apart - seemingly phoned me up to go on about the Happy Mondays. 'New Musical Express is an anagram of Manchester Evening Post,' he quipped with the cadence of this being a joke he'd taken pleasure in cracking on a daily basis. Unfortunately it was lost on me as I didn't read the music papers at the time and had no idea what he was talking about. Then there was the fucking awful upper class Bohemian girl at some shitty party, trying hard to cop off with my friend Alan whilst clearly resenting my lemonesque presence, her every other sentence a weirdly lascivious reference to Shaun Ryder, with a little smile because we all know what he's like!

Yeah - that guy! What a rogue, and just everyone's talking about him! What a rogue he is stood there scratching his arse in his trackie bottoms and dealing crack or cake or mong or whatever it is that constitutes his muse, this week. He's just so real, you know?

So, to finally get to the point of all this bollocks, even without mentioning that there's always been a dance element to our music, man, the Mondays - as those self-consciously in the know referred to them - may as well have been put together by my worst enemy in an effort to induce me to a coronary by way of some sort of loathing overload. This in itself seemed to render them perversely fascinating to my point of view, and it was a major surprise when I heard Wrote For Luck and realised that I liked it. I later found out that what I actually liked was a radically different remix of the song by the plinky-plonky bloke out of Depeche Mode, but it provided an in-road; then Step On actually sounded all right, so good in fact that I didn't mind all the monkeys jumping around on the climbing frame in the background. Next thing I knew I was in WHSmiths in Lewisham buying this album because why the fuck not?

Do one thing every day that scares you, said Eleanor Roosevelt, although she probably didn't have a Happy Mondays record in mind.

I still don't buy that they were ever so revolutionary as was claimed, and as is still claimed in certain circles. For starters, dance music already existed back at the beginning of the nineties and had been doing just fine without the help of turdy guitar bands beloved of the NME, and secondly, Happy Mondays were pretty much a karaoke version of Can in so much as that their entire back catalogue bears a striking resemblance to Can's somewhat familiarly titled Hallelujah. That said, I've never really warmed to Can, which I suppose makes it all the more puzzling that Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches should sound so good to me.

In addition to the Can thing, Happy Mondays also seemed to be the heavier, sweatier end of seventies disco filtered through some vaguely post-punk sensibility or at least with that same spikey edge - PIL's Metal Box drinking something with a pineapple floating in it whilst drunkenly staggering towards a series of Motown or Stax covers. Of course, Manchester had something of a tradition of funky behaviour, mostly white blokes in vests frowning and playing the bongos with excerpts from Battleship Potemkin projected onto the backdrop. Happy Mondays might have been an outgrowth of that, except they mixed up the formula, keeping a tight underpinning as contrast with much looser embellishments and the fairly strong suggestion that at least half of the people on stage were almost certainly off their tits; and I suppose you could say they had the common touch in that they seemed accessible to their audience both as people and in terms of subject, just like someone you probably knew at work - obviously full of shit but not necessarily a bad person; and because of this, no matter how far they may sink into the realms of substances you snort up your nose with a rolled up copy of Readers' Wives, there's a joyous, uplifting quality to the Happy Mondays - something of such generous spirit that you don't mind the smell.

I am aware of my own tendency to sneer and how it informs at least the first two thirds of this review; but it should probably be remembered here that I'm expressing an opinion, and not one with which I necessarily expect the reader to agree. Weirdly, I suppose this is what I take from the disparity between my initial reaction to Happy Mondays and how much I ended up playing this album. Sometimes it's refreshing to know you were wrong, or even that your being right about something doesn't matter because it should always be possible to find something good in an unexpected place.

Oasis were fucking shite though.

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou - The Vodoun Effect (2008)

My experience of African culture - at least my direct experience - is fairly and perhaps sadly limited. William Bennett of seminal power electronics group Whitehouse has recently taken to recording African inspired confrontational music as Cut Hands. Some have pointed out that this may represent overcompensation for albums titled New Britain and those idiotic statements about gangs of National Front skinheads being an inspiring sight, or whatever stupid crap it was he came out with in the name of annoying liberals; but even if Cut Hands really is something other than William Bennett sitting next to one on the bus, I'd argue that it doesn't really help given its use of Africa as just another set of scary things waved in your face.

On the other hand, my eyes were well and truly opened when the British Museum had a rummage through its basement and put together its African galleries a few years back - African galleries as distinct from the crowd-pleasing and already fairly well publicised Egyptian collection. Even aside from it being the land from which we all originally came, Africa - it turns out - was never really quite the land of black people living in huts, moaning about elephants, and not much else as portrayed in post-colonial entertainment; but the image persists because the place is enormous, poorly understood by outsiders, and for every shovel of sand excavated in Egypt, a mere teaspoon's worth of archaeological investigation is undertaken in the name of the rest of the continent. It therefore came as a surprise to view Africa in terms of its archaeology and realise that it was never a land of cartoon savages, but rather was home to a great number of civilised and quite sophisticated societies with a lot more going on than we had at the time, at least until the Romans showed up and taught us how to use toilet paper. For one particularly striking example, as Janaki Lenin writes:

Farmers of the rainforests of Nigeria, Africa constructed an extensive network of earthen walls and moats. Astonishingly, in some places, the walls are twenty metres high and the moats twenty metres deep. What makes this even more remarkable is that Sungbo's Eredo - meaning Sungbo's Ditch - is thought to have been built around 1150AD on the orders of a childless matriarch, Bilikisu Sungbo (although the dates don't add up, locals believe that she is none other than the Queen of Sheba). The fortifications span 160km encompassing an area of 1400km2, the size of Delhi. Nearby Benin City has even more spectacular walls and trenches, extending 16,000km and covering an area of 6,500km2. This is thought to be the single largest archaeological phenomenon on the planet, an enterprise larger than the Egyptian pyramids. The zooarchaeologist, Juliet Clutton-Brock, believes they may be evidence of man's earliest elaborate defense of crops against elephants.

So, to swing back around in the general direction of the point, whilst I find African culture potentially fascinating, there's a hell of a lot of it and it's difficult to know where to start. Tsotsi was a great film; and I've never quite understood the appeal of Fela Kuti or that psychotically happy music they always seemed to use to advertise sporting events televised by the BBC; and that's about as far as I've got, until now.

To briefly fly off after another indirectly related train of thought, it could be argued that African art has had a profound influence on first world culture, at least depending on how much importance you place on the stuff hanging in our own art galleries. The influence of Picasso on contemporary art has been of undeniable significance, and of course Picasso would have remained just some randy Spanish bloke with the face of a plumber had he failed to notice that European painting was looking a bit saggy around the buttocks, and that those exciting angular wooden masks were just what the witch doctor ordered.

The same process has of course informed the evolution of rock and roll, and quite a lot of the music we listen to - with the possible exceptions of Beethoven, ELO, and all those Death In June bands - most of which can, roughly speaking, be traced back through rhythm and blues to traditional forms originated in Africa; and so in this collection of songs by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou from Benin in West Africa, I suppose it's fair to say I had an expectation of hearing the pure form of something or other, or, to paraphrase Nocturnal Emissions, what the music sounded like before they got hold of it, they being the agents of the spectacle. To be fair, I had that expectation because I'd already heard a little bit of it when Kevin Harrison posted a YouTube clip of Mi Ni Non Kpo on his facebook page, and I was so impressed that I ran straight to my nearest internet and snapped up a copy of this collection. Interestingly enough, this is not actually your strictly traditional African music in so much as Orchestre Poly-Rythmo were quite happy to reclaim some of that which had evolved from the original template on foreign shores, incorporating all sorts of bits and pieces from jazz, blues, soul, funk and all those other genres which have since come to carry unfortunate associations with overly-earnest middle aged white men. Yet even with the discernible influence of James Brown amongst others, there's an absolutely unique magic to these songs. Without actually sounding exactly like anything I've heard before, this nevertheless feels like a sort of ur-music, a pure seam of the stuff in raw form in which one may discern traces of almost everything else ever - Led Zeppelin, 23 Skidoo, Motown, Can, LCD Soundsystem, even acid house - it's all here, somehow. In fact it's quite tough to think of music which owes no debt to the greater whole from which this clearly derives; and if this claim were not in itself sufficiently preposterous, it might also be worth noting that most of these songs were recorded by sticking a microphone in front of the band and pressing whichever resulting recordings sounded okay as seven inch singles. The recording values suggest early soul records, or Billy Childish, or even Steve Albini, and there's real power in that sound, the sort of thing that might be lost in a better equipped studio, or even one with a roof.

So to summarise, William Bennett likes to pull scary faces, Africa is probably more interesting than you realise, elephants are serious business, Picasso was the Paul Simon of his day, and this CD is like a better version of every record you've ever heard. After 1,076 words of scrabbling around like I've dropped my contact lenses, the review probably isn't too likely to cohere into linear sense at this juncture, so the point worth remembering is probably that The Vodoun Effect isn't quite like anything I've heard before, and is of such robust and honest constitution that it actually feels like it's doing you good as you listen. The rhythms are fantastically inventive, the instruments don't always do what would be expected of them were they playing some more familiar form, and the whole thing leaves you in a frankly amazing mood without doing any of that pathologically happy stuff favoured by other, better publicised African recording artists.

New Fast Automatic Daffodils - Pigeonhole (1991)

One of the wonderful things about YouTube, aside obviously from ranting atheist neckbeards sharing their important views with the rest of us, is how it allows one to catch up with music about which you may have wondered without ever getting to hear. The New Fast Automatic Daffodils somewhat passed me by at the time as I didn't really listen to music radio, didn't like clubs or gigs, and they never turned up in the record collections of anyone I knew. I read about them in the music papers, but nothing inspired me to rush out and buy a record on the off chance that it might not be shit. So from time to time I'll YouTube up some name recalled from centuries gone by just out of curiosity, in case it turns out that I've missed out on something I would have liked; and occasionally I like something enough to chase up the album, as has happened here.

The New FADs as I seem to recall them being abbreviated turned up at the same time as that whole Madchester baggy thing to which I maintained some distance having bought a record by Northside from a bargain bin for twenty-five pee and found it to be shite. I can see why they got lumped in with the Stone Roses and all, but they were actually pretty good, and certainly not the also-rans I probably assumed them to be. If anything they sound roughly like A Certain Ratio working their way backwards, devolving into Krautrock, roughly speaking - actually not that much of a stretch Madchesterwise given that Happy Mondays were basically Can with more drugs. Most of the tracks here tend towards extended jams rather than songs as such, workouts with choppy wah-wah guitar and a fantastic rhythm section with a ton of bongos and that. I can see why tossers in fishing hats might have regarded this as top or even sorted, and given that this didn't exactly sound like any of those other groups, it's a shame they didn't shift a few more records at the time. The only criticism I can come up with is that New Fast Automatic Daffodils wasn't a great name, and this compact disc version of the album could have stood to lose the last four tracks - it's not that they're bad, and one of them actually reminds me of Cabaret Voltaire around the time of 2X45, but less is more, and particularly so with rambling funky workout jam session type things. They're probably all taxicab drivers or working in kebab shops by now, but I hope at least one of their number is still able to look back on this material with fondness, and know that he recorded something which didn't deserve to get lost in the tidal wave of baggy Mancunian toss.