Nurse With Wound - Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979)

My first Nurse With Wound was Insect & Individual Silenced, thanks mainly to a school coach trip down to that London and the wonderful Virgin Megastore, as was. Otherwise their work - as described by John Gill in Sounds in terms by which I knew I needed to hear it - eluded our local record shops and by extension me. We had a record shop in my tiny market town for about six months, and I recall Geoff, who ran the place, shaking his head and wondering why anyone would name an album Homotopy to Marie while my sniggering contemporaries browsed Def Leppard without actually buying anything, which is presumably why Geoff went out of business. About a decade later I had the first three on CD, including Chance Meeting, but I didn't have a CD player, didn't really plan to buy one, and ended up giving them away.

It's therefore taken me one fuck of a long time to finally hear this, and I'm sort of shocked to discover that it doesn't sound anything like I expected - although this is of course exactly what one should expect from Nurse With Wound. Steve Stapleton has said something about how he regards Homotopy to Marie as the first real Nurse recording, so this was himself pissing about with his pals, technically speaking, and was similarly distant from the insanity of Insect & Individual Silenced, for what that may be worth. The biggest surprise - although it probably shouldn't be - for me, has been how much Chance Meeting sounds like a relative of Faust and other krautrock predecessors* routinely ignored by history of industrial music podcasts put together by edgy fourteen-year olds with pierced eyebrows. Almost all of the sounds on this record are generated by actual musical instruments, albeit by unorthodox means - someone playing the piano with his arse, droning harmonium, and even a long-haired guitar solo. It's all improvised, of course, and I seem to recall reading that none of those involved had so much as picked up a musical instrument before getting this on tape.

It's a racket, as you would expect, but I've always felt Nurse With Wound made more sense as heirs to Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst than to even Yoko Ono's sonic experiments; and in this context, as firmly established by both Stapleton's cover art and the title deriving from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont, they work for me - at least in so much as the art of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst works for me. As with the very best music of this admittedly general type, it established the terms by which the listener experiences it, meaning there's probably not much point comparing it to Out of the Blue by the Electric fucking Light Orchestra; and while there have been a few weirdos doing this kind of thing, with the possible exception of Richard Rupenus, no-one really seems to do it quite so well as Nurse With Wound. Alan Trench of Temple Music, amongst others, said Steve Stapleton remains one of the few people he's met whom he would describe as a genius, which I honestly think is fair.

It lives in neither the rock venue nor the art gallery as we know it today, because like the landscapes of de Chirico and the rest, this Chance Meeting takes place in some psychological realm, one which may not even have existed before the needle first encountered the groove; and, should I have failed to communicate as much, it's also a lot of fun to listen to, albeit weird, angular, confusing fun.

*: I've also been surprised by how sonically close it sits to the first Konstruktivists album - clearly a case of shared influences. Steve Stapleton and Glenn Wallis were friends, although Glenn was never particularly a fan of Nurse With Wound.
 

Heartbreakers - LAMF (1977)

The New York Dolls were once quite important to me, and have remained so, impressions to the contrary stemming only from my making time to listen to other things because spending your entire life obsessively listening to just one band is fucking nuts, obviously. Despite which, I never got around to properly hearing the Heartbreakers until this year, even though I liked everything I'd heard and was pretty sure they would be right up my street. I plead poverty and there once having been so many records I liked at any one time that I never could have bought them all.

Anyway, this being reissued reminded me of its having existed and so here I am. The reissue was inspired by someone having found the master tapes and given the thing a decent mix, because apparently the rest of you have been listening to the shit version all these years. That's what it says on the cover. I haven't heard the shit version, although the announcement reminds me a little of claims regarding the muddy quality of the first two Dolls albums, both of which sound fantastic to me, so who knows?

LAMF is an older, slightly wiser, less hysterical Dolls captured at about three in the morning after the weirder drugs have mostly worn off, just before everyone gets their second wind. Some bloke on the internet described it as the greatest rock 'n' roll album of all time, which seems fair, despite it not being Machine Gun Etiquette. Listening to this, it's not difficult imagining the Heartbreakers sharing a stage with the Pistols and the Damned. It's bluesier, definitely New York spawned, and pops and crackles with a breezily spiky energy that probably shouldn't be possible given how much arm candy was allegedly involved.

Honestly, every last song is pure spun gold, although the review probably could have been left at features Born to Lose because I'm not sure you even need further information, and I don't even want to think about the sort of person who would. The Heartbreakers were the opposite of ELO, and I don't know if there can be any higher recommendation.

Wreckless Eric - Transience (2019)

I'm trying to think of any other individual who has managed to keep on chucking them out for four decades without any evidence of sag. I'm sure they exist, but excepting Billy Childish no-one springs to mind right now - and obviously I'm excluding bands on the grounds that they can replenish themselves with younger members as the older ones kick the bucket or otherwise run out of steam. Eric seems to have had about ten quiet years in there somewhere, but you'll have a tough time identifying the comeback point on your wall chart given that I'm not convinced he ever fully went away, and the pinnacle of his musical career seems to be what he's doing right now, at least since AmERICa.

If you're familiar with any of the arguably better publicised stuff from before the internet, you'll know what to expect up to a point, and this is quite clearly the same man who recorded Reconnez Cherie and Whole Wide World - the uncertain warble in the voice, a faint trace of punk rock without being a dick about it, the suggestion of everything held together by sheer force of will, songs which sound as though they've been punched in the face so many times that they've stopped noticing, but above all the suspicion that nothing can keep this man down. The rock and roll basics have evolved into something approaching psychedelia without getting too affected. The distortion of songs about to collapse under their own weight on Construction Time and Demolition has been further developed into something which might look like a significantly more pissed off Jonathan Richman covering mid-period Beatles whilst trying to drown out the noise of Stereolab rehearsing in the next room, at least if seen from a fast moving vehicle - but that's just because language sometimes lets us down, leading to sentences which look like the one I've just written. Without even being particularly lacking in cheer, Eric's music seems to capture that frame of mind where you're so irredeemably fucked off or bewildered or otherwise beaten down by the forces of everything which is shite in the world that you can't even be bothered getting upset over it, not anymore; and so there's something weirdly comforting here, like he's the only one in the entire firmament who could possibly understand.

To be fair, as a fellow immigrant, an old bloke and another former resident of the Medway towns who moved to America, it could simply be that I'm suffering from overidentification with someone in the same boat, or at least a similar boat, and the previous paragraph is at least as ridiculous as I suspect it may well be; but whatever the case, Transcience really nails it for me, describing a lot of my present existence, particularly how it feels and why half of it makes no sense - the dead ends all over the place, and those tiny fucking houses. I've a feeling this means that there probably isn't anything useful I can say about this record except that it's genuinely wonderful, and Eric is probably the Bob Dylan of my generation, or someone of equivalent stature who didn't end up hanging out with that complete knob from ELO.

Psychic TV - Those Who Do Not (1984)

Having been a fan of Throbbing Gristle to the point of evangelism, I knew Psychic TV would be even more amazing before I'd even heard a note, or at least a clang. I listened to Force the Hand of Chance over and over once it finally appeared, gritting my teeth and insisting that it was a work of unparalleled genius, as I would clearly begin to appreciate after sufficient exposure. Then out came the second album, which was better, but which in being better, obliged me to face up to the fact of Force the Hand of Chance having been a massive disappointment; and the more Porridge explained his own genius to the media, the more I began to feel a little as though I'd been diddled, until I eventually sold those first two albums and dedicated what little disposable income I had to purchase of music which didn't require quite such a massive suspension of disbelief.

Then my friend Thomas Hamilton came to stay for a couple of days, and he happened to have this record with him.

'I've given up on them,' I explained, 'because they're shit.'

Nevertheless, we stuck the discs on my record player, one after the other because there were two of them; and against all expectation, it sounded pretty good. In fact it sounded more like I'd hoped they would sound before Force the Hand of Chance pissed on my dreams. Three decades later, finally bothering to bag myself a copy, it's quite nice to discover that my memory hasn't been playing tricks.

I've generally tended to the view that Porridge is only ever as interesting as who he's stood next to at the time, whether it be Alex Ferguson, Fred Giannelli, Dave Ball, or the rest of Throbbing Gristle; because otherwise we're just left with his own ideas, such as they are, and a bunch of people stood around saying yes, Genesis, that's really great, or at least that's how it sounds to me - although the theory works better if you try not to think about the bloody awful records he's made despite the involvement of those named above, or others who should have known better. This time he was backed by John Gosling, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, and various members of KUKL, the Icelandic band from which the Sugarcubes were eventually born. It sounds like a live performance, mostly improvised, and of all Psychic TV I've heard, comes closest to the live ambience of Throbbing Gristle - which is a bonus because those live tapes constituted their best material, in my view. Being Psychic TV, the emphasis is on rituals and drones and spooky rather than electronic. There are bells and clangs and tapes and sounds amounting to something resembling a more ponderous Hawkwind, or maybe some obscure krautrock group; and Porridge sounds sufficiently unpredictable and scary enough to remind us why we ever liked him in the first place, those of us who actually did. It's a shame he couldn't keep it up, but two or three decent albums out of the hundred or so which have earned Porridge that prestigious listing in the Guinness Book of Records is still better than all of them having been duds; so yay - go Porridge, you old ledge!

Next week I shall be ruminating on the creative brilliance of Jeff Lynne's Electric Light Orchestra.

Bruce Woolley & the Camera Club - English Garden (1979)

Much like a newly hatched duckling, I fixated on Bruce Woolley's Camera Club at an early age, albeit briefly. Graham lent me his Devo album, heralding my realisation of there being bands which made good records that weren't played on the radio, and which sometimes didn't even get in the charts. Somehow I'd assumed that all records made it into the charts. This was around the time that Look! Hear! first aired on the telly, Look! Hear! being a regional BBC magazine show presented by Toyah Willcox and featuring the sort of stuff which the kids on the street were into, yeah? Look! Hear! featured a few of those bands who weren't played on the radio and didn't even get in the charts, and so I began compiling a list in the back of one of my school books. I needed to remember the names so I could look out for their records. I've a feeling the list wasn't actually very long, maybe just three or four of them. Neon Hearts were in there, having made a big impression on me, as was Bruce Woolley, but I don't recall any of the others.

So there was a bit of a gap between my taking down the name and finding the record - purely by chance - probably about thirty years. I couldn't remember what I'd thought was so great about the Camera Club at the time, and initial spins left me puzzled. It was power pop with a skinny tie and an overly ornate keyboard, really just like a lot of other stuff which had been around at the time and which had struck me as interesting mainly on the grounds that it wasn't ELO, that it hadn't been played by Dave Lee Travis on his smugly flabby show, and that it didn't sound like it would rather be in California; and yet, the more I listen to this record, the more I discern its own unique identity.

English Garden is of its era, more or less prog rock hopefuls moving with the times by incorporating a few jagged edges into their sound, but at least for the sake of an interesting record. In terms of musicianship, it has more in common with Genesis and that lot, which probably shouldn't be too surprising given the involvement of Thomas Dolby before he'd even started shaving, and that Woolley co-wrote Video Killed the Radio Star and Clean Clean with Trevor Horn and the other Buggle. Camera Club renderings of both songs are included here. Radio Star seems a bit too smooth for its own good, but the latter improves on the better known version. What makes the album is personality and good old fashioned proggy song-writing plucking all manner of esoteric subjects or angles from the ether. In this respect, English Garden makes me think of Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel with a noseful of speed - on which subject, I can't help but notice a parallel between the back cover of this record and the front of Harley's The Human Menagerie.

Considering this was the guy who wrote Video Killed the Radio Star, it's surprising how little of it you could really describe as immediate, but it really rewards the effort if you give it time - vaguely punky and yet lyrical with Queen style vocal harmonies. English Garden occasionally sounds like the theme music for regional news programmes of the seventies, and I'm thinking Weekend World rather than Midlands Today. This one really creeps up on you and ultimately it feels a more rounded, satisfying work than anything from Woolley's more famous writing partners.

Wreckless Eric - amERICa (2015)

Wreckless Eric made a huge impression on me at an early age, and at least a couple of years before I actually knowingly heard any of his records. Most of my taste in music is fairly firmly rooted in me and Grez raiding his older brother's bedroom when we were teenagers. Grez's older brother - or Martin to his friends, that being a category which didn't include us - had all these amazing albums by people we'd never heard of, Alternative TV, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Faust, the Residents, Skrewdriver…

Well, it was All Skrewed Up which I believe predates the racist phase, but let's not get off the subject. Amongst Martin's records were several by Wreckless Eric, notably that legendary 10" album on brown vinyl; you know the one. If you don't, might I suggest euthanasia followed by reincarnation and then trying your hardest to get it fucking right next time around? How many 10" brown vinyl albums have there ever been?

Assuming we all know what I'm talking about, I maintain that the aforementioned 10" is blessed with one of the greatest covers ever. Eric looks like he's drunk, about to fall over, but really doesn't give a shit because he's having an amazing time regardless; and then there's that jacket, some funky print of eagles soaring across what probably isn't silk - all very New Faces or Opportunity Knocks and yet somehow so punk rock as to make most of those King's Road clowns look like ELO. Whether you ever regarded Wreckless Eric as punk rock probably depends on where you were stood at the time, but I guess it's okay if we keep in mind that the point of punk rock, at least according to some Sex Pistol or other, was not to destroy rock 'n' roll so much as to take it back to its roots, to take it back from all the bouffant hairdo fuckers who'd lost sight of what it was supposed to do in the first place, Geoff Lynne.

So, in accordance with my vaguely punky roots, I still find myself getting ready to sneer at the slightest suggestion of artists working past their sell-by date, but it's just a knee jerk thing, and it really doesn't apply to Wreckless Eric; because this isn't a comeback album, nor recapturing the glory days, nor sensitive sound recordings of all his new forest pals in Papua New Guinea, nor a true return to form as the perpetually misleading promise always has it, nor our man dabbling with ambient sludgestep; because amERICa is simply a new Wreckless Eric album and that's all you should need to know.

May as well cover the full distance and take the remaining few steps up my own arse, seeing as we've come all this way.

It took me a couple of years, but I chanced across the brown vinyl 10" in a second hand place in Norwich, and I bought it because Grez and myself had never got around to actually playing his brother's copy, for some reason. I bought it because I recognised the cover and I knew it would be good, as indeed it was. In fact it was more than just good. It was one of those greatest album ever recorded deals, or that's how it seems when you're in the middle of listening to the thing, playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror and miming along to Reconnez Cherie. It's difficult to pin down what made Eric seem so unique, and why I can't help bristling a little whenever I hear that pub rock song by Denim. He has an ear for a tune, and a weird little voice which sounds more like one of your mates than anyone you'd expect to hear on a record, and somehow it all comes together with such raw honesty that it would hurt if it didn't also have a decent sense of humour - it's something along these lines. Stand Wreckless Eric next to almost anyone you care to mention and the other person will look like a fake, a part-timer, an idiot with no idea what he or she is doing; and the crucial detail is that unlike so many rock 'n' roll hall of fame bores, Eric just gets on with it. He really is all about the craft unhindered by bullshit of any stripe. I had an argument with my mother about Shakespeare, her position being that the works of Shakespeare are the greatest things written in the English language because, whatever it is you wish to express, there will always be one particular way to say it which works better than all the others, and which is the most fluent; and so everything Shakespeare has said has been the best way to say that thing. I'm still not that bothered about Shakespeare, but I take the point and I'd say it applies just as well to the songs of Wreckless Eric. In terms of the heart, it doesn't get better than this. It speaks to me about my life, I suppose you'd say.

amERICa is Wreckless Eric's response to his having moved to the United states, which speaks to me about my life with particular resonance because that's what I've done too, and I know exactly what he's talking about. There's a faint country twang, but it still rocks like that bloke in the print jacket, and the honesty is both funny, painful, and even a little sad, just like on the best soul or blues records; and Transitory Thing nearly tears my fucking heart out each time I play it. Bloody hell. At the risk of hyperbole, amERICa might even be the greatest album ever recorded.

David Bowie - Let's Dance (1983)

Just to reiterate, I drifted away after the third or fourth album hailed as a true return to form by latecomer Bowie zombies who had discovered the bloke when he played a whispy Gandalf in Labyrinth. I longed for a return to greatness, but time and again those amazing comeback and this time I'm not joking records proved themselves unlistenable. After Black Tie White Noise turned out to be an improvement only in the sense that a B.A. Robertson album is probably an improvement on anything by ELO, I decided that enough was enough. Of course it turns out that he eventually did remember how to make a decent record, and weirdly I've come to regard the run of albums from Heathen through to Blackstar as his best work. So, all you gormless wankers who spent the eighties crowing he's back and he's brilliant at every lame Tina Turner team-up, every guest spot with Gordon the Gopher, thanks for fucking nothing, you stupid cunts.

Anyway, it seemed like time to take the plunge and get hold of this one on the grounds that I may have been wrong. Let's Dance was a great single, but I hated China Girl with its plinky-plonky something Chinese this way comes riff, and the album cover looks like a card you'd buy for a fourteen year old boy. All that's missing are the words on your birthday and a racing car in the lower right corner; but the problem wasn't just that Bowie, having grown tired of pretending to read Albert Camus, wanted to be a pop star again. The problem was also that with the best will in the world, Let's Dance was never going to sound great stood next to Scary Monsters.

I've now played the thing a million times so as to give it every possible opportunity to sink in and to work whatever magic it may have, and okay - I will grudgingly concede that it isn't that bad, generally speaking. I can see how Dave may have felt inclined to revisit his roots, specifically his rhythm and blues roots as heard on those Lower Third records, because the problem with the sort of introspection which had informed his previous four or five albums is that one eventually gets sick of the sound of one's own voice, and so I guess he just wanted to have fun making a record again. With that in mind, it's to his credit that he therefore made a vaguely decent record with Let's Dance in so much as that it goes back to his roots without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia, even moving things forward a little in trying something new with the big, live, occasionally even raw, sound of Nile Rodgers' production. I suppose then this is almost Bowie's punk album, at least in spirit, or certainly more so than the austere noodling of Low or Heroes.

I can appreciate this record a little better these days, particularly given that The Next Day sounds like him trying to get Let's Dance right in a couple of places, but it nevertheless remains a flawed album. This investigation has reminded me that Modern Love was also a great single, and that China Girl would be decent were it not for the Charlie Chan riff; but if you took away either Modern Love or the title song, you'd be left with a great single and six above average b-sides. I firmly believe there's a case for Let's Dance as a better album than Low, Heroes, or Lodger, but I don't know whether that's really saying anything.

Dr. Dre - Compton (2015)

I have this theory which I've been developing over the last couple of years; well, not so much a theory as a classification, and one which I'm trying hard to convince myself is completely different to representatives of my father's generation sniffily insisting that the Sex Pistols weren't music. The theory is that at some point during the last decade, or maybe a little before, music bifurcated into two distinct families with very little in common beyond mutual transmission by means of sound waves, the families being that which we already understand as encompassed by the term music, and the new thing which I'll call post-music; and yes I am aware how closely this resembles those Dizzy Rasclaats you listen to, that's just noise.

Music, as we already understand it is, for the sake of argument, immersive - we go to the gig or we sit listening to the record and reading the cover as it plays. These are broad generalisations, but the core point is that the individual engages fairly directly with whatever they are listening to, at least some of the time, regardless of what it sounds like or what its constituent elements may be. Post-music is generally anything released since about 1995 which makes you feel either old, or like grabbing the monosyllabic little fuckers responsible by the scruff of their necks and rubbing their noses in it so they know not to do it again. Post-music is often easily identified by a ton of autotune, arcade game sounds, a certain ravey quality synonymous with music which could only have been composed by moving waveforms around on a screen, a general sentiment amounting to awesome, dude, and compositions equating to weird flavours beloved of small children which don't actually occur anywhere in nature, bubble-gum ice cream and so on. There's also a certain inability to distinguish quality from shite leading to disastrous results when combined with a weird view of nostalgia as positive in and of itself, hence fifteen-year old laptop prodigies synthesising Elton John or the dynamic of the Electric Light Orchestra.

The thing is, to be fair, post-music isn't really about the music so much as a projected memeplex of which the music is just one minor component. Post-music is for playing on your phone through a shitty speaker, not so much for your direct enjoyment as for the pleasure you may take from visibly associating yourself with the music as others pass by; in other words it may as well be a t-shirt with an awesome logo. The music is unimportant outside what it says about you to others. Similarly, the music will, without exception, have a video accompaniment, and the video accompaniment and that which it communicates will be at least as important as the song, and often more so.

Post-music artists include, I would suggest, LMFAO, Lady Gaga whoever shat out that Cha Cha Slide shit, We Are Young by Fun, and about a million others I can't bear to think about. It isn't that it's all a big pile of useless shite, but that it isn't music by terms I recognise even if music is an element; and this is why anything involving autotune is nearly always bollocks.

Okay, maybe not always, but I'll come back to that.

I've lost track of what happened to Detox, the long-awaited and never to arrive follow up to Dre's 2001 album. I gather a load of the tracks have turned up here and there but the man himself was never really happy with it and so called it a day and just popped this one out on the spur of the moment, almost certainly inspired by all that was stirred up during the making of the film Straight Outta Compton, at least if the intensely reflective lyrical content is anything to go by. It's paid off too, in so much as this sounds like a record which someone enjoyed making, or at least enjoyed making presumably more than he enjoyed wittling away at Detox for the last fifteen years.

Most surprising I suppose is that it doesn't sound anything like the Dre with which we are familiar, or at least it doesn't until the initial shock passes and you notice it's actually not a million sonic miles away from some of the Eminem records he's produced in recent years. I suppose the surprise comes from my assuming those records sounded as they did because of Eminem rather than his producer. Then again, Dr. Dre's success is probably in the dramatic evolution of his sound, and it's a tough call thinking of anyone else in the music business who has endured so well, advanced so much, and yet remained pretty much true to himself. I mean The Chronic was twenty-three years ago. Can you believe that?

Compton is Dre doing what I've come to regard as post-music, and showing that actually you can pull that shit off if you just make the effort. It's not only the autotune, but the whole dynamic, arcade blips and subsonic bass, crunk snare, and For the Love of Money which could almost be Three-6-Mafia; but somehow it's done with a certain light touch which elevates it way above mere ringtone status, and then the more you listen, the more you notice the old school touches, and just how soulful this record is; and he's made Snoop sound amazing again, and Cold 187um and Xzibit are back; and even the Game and he's not just reading out a list of his fave albums for once...

Compton is an incredible album. In case anyone ever doubted it, the guy is a genius, not least for snatching that rinky-dink ringtone crap back from the kids and making it work as something real.

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1971)

Black Sabbath initially came under the heading of artists to be avoided on principal thanks to my having grown up in a rural Warwickshire town in which a preference for Joy Division - or indeed almost anything with short hair - over Tygers of Pan Tang revealed one as a bare bummer who liked men's cocks and to dress up as a woman and was definitely gay and liked gay men's cocks and liked to feel them and thought Boy George was an inspiration 'cuz you were into men's bums and arseholes and that and being as gay as possible and liking men's cocks and if someone had invented a men's gay cocks sandwich you'd be first in fucking line for a bite, you gay cunt. To be fair, it didn't have to be Tygers of Pan Tang. In fact it didn't really matter so long as it was NWOBHM and you weren't a gay bastard who liked gay men's cocks because you were gay. I'm sure you get the picture.

Despite all the aversion therapy, I eventually came to understand the distinction between certain bands - notably Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden - and all the other useless wankers with knockery vixen warrior women clogging up the covers of their shitty records - Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Krokus, Rainbow, and all that utter widdly-widdly axe solo shite. Paranoid was somehow one of the first things I learned to play on guitar, and I borrowed the single from Philip Cameron at school, and I couldn't help but notice that the b-side wasn't bad either. With hindsight I've come to realise that aside from the hair there was never that much difference between Black Sabbath and the Joy Division, whose music I enjoyed without reservation.

More recently I came across a spoken word routine by Henry Rollins in which the lad proposes that innocuously named tropical weather systems such as El Niño be renamed in ways more congruent with their terrible destructive power. One such rebranding would, he suggests, be the First Four Black Sabbath Albums. Weather reports would then warn us that if we should be anywhere up the east coast of Florida this evening we might want to take precautions because the First Four Black Sabbath Albums have been heating up the air down in the gulf and we're probably going to see some serious storm damage by morning. Personally I think it could work, particularly having now heard at least three of them.

Having further differentiated Black Sabbath from anything involving David bloody Coverdale, I am surprised at how simple they actually sound - very basic, just your straightforward blues rock with special emphasis on the more malevolent vibes. I vaguely recall seeing Ozzy Osbourne interviewed on some show, accounting for the formation of Black Sabbath by noting that all he heard on the radio were flower children singing about sunshine and happy times and San Francisco, whilst all he could see out of his own window was Birmingham - or words to that effect. Keeping this in mind, much as I loathe the term industrial music, I'd suggest Black Sabbath did it first. Throbbing Gristle may have aspired to being a noisier Velvet Underground or even Hawkwind, but the mood was more Sabbath than Lou Reed or anyone so self-consciously Bohemian; and as my friend Carl has pointed out, Joy Division were basically Black Sabbath - providing you ignore Closer, which should probably be a given because it was mostly rubbish - and then of course there's Swans, and all those goth bands.

The more I listen to Black Sabbath, the more I realise how difficult it is to find rock music without a trace of their influence to one degree or another. Whilst they may not exactly have introduced the bad vibe to popular music - that being an essential ingredient of the blues from which they drew one hell of a lot of inspiration - they may have been the first to pass it on without embellishment, without trying to make it sound glamorous.

I know the Paranoid album a little better, and I've only just got hold of Master of Reality, so it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's already very clearly on the same level, and there's a noticeable improvement in the lyrics - some of those on the previous one being decidedly ropey in places; and, as with Paranoid, it really makes you wonder how all those shitty NWOBHM bands could have got it so wrong given how the great strength of this music is its simplicity, how it made even those Sexy Pistols sound like fucking ELO in places. I wish it hadn't taken me quite so long to realise any of this, but never mind.

Blur - Think Tank (2003)

I never really understood that whole Blur versus Oasis thing. It seemed sort of akin to Roxy Music versus Showaddywaddy, or the Sex Pistols versus Racey, or even Cab Calloway versus the 1972 US presidential campaign; I mean did Oasis even really count as a band by the same terms? There was at one point this peculiar idea of Oasis being somehow more real, more authentic and therefore soulful by virtue of working class roots in comparison to Blur being all fancy and thinking they're lush and better than everyone else with their fancy foreign hats and weird Vesta curries, which in turn translates to thick and a bit shirty as a signifier of the genuinely working class, which is actually more of a middle or upper class characterisation, the incorrect assumption that working class equates to a bit dim.

Anyway, I always liked Blur, so I nabbed this when I saw it in a box of CDs someone had chucked out and left on a wall in Landells Road. I hadn't really kept up with the band, having been a little put off by the Gorillaz whom I always hated, as I tend to hate anything involving Jamie Hewlett.

Graham Coxon wasn't on this one due to having become quite fond of the pints or something along those lines, which is a shame, as it does sort of sound like something was missing from the formula, and that the something was probably himself. Think Tank is eclectic and experimental, although Blur were always keen to try out new things, but as a whole it has ended up sounding like an album of all the embellishments and electro-acoustic hundreds and thousands one might sprinkle over a track to give it that special flavour, lacking only the actual songs which were presumably still in a carrier bag on the kitchen table. It has the dynamic of Beck's Mellow Gold without taking off in quite the same way because it doesn't really find its identity, and in places it feels oddly forced and what with all the self-conscious glitchy laptop bollocks, you half expect it to break out into drum and bass; and the involvement of Banksy additionally casts a certain aroma of Nathan Barley over the proceedings.

Despite this, Think Tank makes for fine listening in terms of affording an appreciation of the patently considerable talents of those involved, but it is surely as significant that I've played the fucker three times today and I still can't remember the first thing about any of it. It's better than Oasis, but then so are every other group who ever entered a recording studio with the possible exception of the Electric Light Orchestra. Blur are apparently back together and have a new one out soon. I just hope this back together encompasses Graham Coxon and that he brings a few tunes with him.

Pixies - Indie Cindy (2013)

It just goes to show how much attention I've been paying - I didn't even know they were back together, and this is their reunion album; except it isn't. It's actually the three EPS which I hadn't realised they released since getting back together all assembled as an album, and Kim Deal wasn't involved in any of it, so it's the Pixies roughly in the sense of the first Frank Black album being the Pixies, I suppose.

But is it any good?

Well, kinda... I guess. It's that same massive Pixies sound, and that same unsettling contrast of sweet and slightly psychotic, and those weird jagged riffs underpinning the angelic croon; and the lyrics are still mental, and in a good way. Yet there's some detail, something which doesn't quite fit which I can't quite identify. I habitually expect reunion albums to be a disappointment with everyone old, fat and sounding like Jeff fucking Lynne. Thankfully Indie Cindy isn't and doesn't, although it feels a little more like a compilation than anything new, which is of course what it actually is. The new Pixies album was generally something of an event way back in the days of old, always delivering without ever quite being exactly what you expected thanks to a certain quota of completely idiosyncratic tracks doing something to screw up the formula by means which made perfect sense despite everything. This time you get more or less exactly what you would expect, at least providing you didn't really expect old, fat and sounding like Jeff fucking Lynne. Excepting Bagboy, nothing really breaks the pattern, and it all chugs along in generally efficient form with the same sort of fidelity as any reasonably convincing tribute act generating their own themed material in the same style. It's good, often great, but then so was Chris Morris's Mother Banger; and I can't get past Indie Cindy having also having been a cartoon in Poot! comic even without the suggestion of self-conscious smirking equivalent to that fucking abominable song by the Killers about how it's indie rock and roll for me, whatever the fuck it was called; and just to get it all out of my system, the first couple of times I played this, I kept finding myself thinking of those later, more dreary Beck albums with sparkly acoustic guitar drenched in reverb all over, the audio equivalent of velvet paintings of big-eyed orphans with puppies.

Despite all this, it was nevertheless immensely exciting to find Indie Cindy in the racks at Hogwild now that I have my record player plumbed in and am able to listen to vinyl albums once more; and it's great to take that fat slab of 180gsm plastic from the sleeve and to drop the needle into the groove and have that big fucking sound once again come blasting out of the speakers after all these years. So, despite all reservations, Indie Cindy has nevertheless been getting a lot of rewinds in our house, as they say in all the really cool discos. I've a feeling that I will have stopped caring about most of the above reservations after a few more spins.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure (1973)

Arguing against the sort of cultural relativism by which an episode of  She-Ra: Princess of Power may be considered equal to anything ever committed to celluloid by Stanley Kubrick, my mother suggested that for any sentiment or observation one may care to share, there will be better and worse ways by which to express it, and in certain cases, a single optimum way. She used this argument to support her belief that certain ideas discussed in Shakespeare cannot be found discussed with such eloquence anywhere else and thus represent the highest form of the art regardless of whether or not you happen to like Shakespeare. Having finally recovered from deep feelings of inadequacy inspired by what such a system of values may say about my beloved collection of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic DVDs, I have come to realise that she's probably right. This, I would suggest, means that For Your Pleasure really is one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded, and if not the greatest then it's at least top two - the other one being either 8-Way Santa or Infrared Riding Hood - never could quite decide between those two.

I know the fucker's now over forty years old, but it still has the sharp edge of something recorded yesterday, possibly through Roxy Music having sort of stepped sideways and removed themselves from anything that could be identified as a rock continuum. They were of course lumped in with glam rock - some might say epitomised the form - but I never could quite square what they did with all those Double Diamond guzzling bricklayers wearing their birds' green eye-shadow and burping woah woah woah I'm back on Top of the Pops. Roxy Music felt more like pop art, but pop art done properly with style and attention to detail, as differentiated from all that commodified crap Andy Warhol used to splash around with all the choreography of a chimp's tea party. Style, yes - there was some sort of art deco thing going on here; not so much style over content as style as content. Listen closely and most of the tracks on For Your Pleasure resemble compositions more than songs in the traditional sense, particularly the extended freak outs vaguely invoking Pink Floyd indulgence but sharper and colder in form, more like the work of Neu or Faust or one of the German groups. Probably more than anyone who came before, Roxy Music were making art, something a million miles from the sweaty boozepit in which all the usual old hairies were trudging out their fuzz-metal version of Robert Johnson. Some of it sounds so mannered that it made even David Bowie at his most cross-eyed sound like Lieutenant Pigeon. This was the opposite of ELO.

I dislike the cultural retrofetishisation of the 1970s not least because it keeps bringing back the turds it took us a whole fucking decade to mash around the s-bend with a sink splodger. It giggles and expects us to listen to the Rubettes on the grounds of it being funny how they all wore those matching suits and caps, and it washes over just how different Roxy Music were to everything else at the time; and that without them - even more so than Bowie - there would have been no Adam & the Ants, Siouxsie & the Banshees, any of that angular postpunk racket, cold wave or whatever the boutique collectors' labels are calling it this month.

For Your Pleasure is as good as it will ever get.

Calvin Harris - I Created Disco (2007)

This stuff didn't make much of an impression on me when blasted out of a tinny speaker at work for the best part of a year, at least not beyond the fact that Calvin Harris at least wasn't the Killers, Kasabian, or the Arctic fucking Monkeys and was therefore already ahead of the game so far as I was concerned. More recently I happened to notice his having sat behind the desk on a couple of Dizzee Rascal albums, so here I am.

I Created Disco reminds me a little of LCD Soundsystem, although it may simply be parallel studio habits encouraging the comparison - dance music which harks back to the days before house came along to impose that ubiquitous hi-hat on everything, and a love of dry, punchy sounds which work well in large, crowded places, as distinct from the customary excess of reverb compensating for a lack of imagination and basic ignorance of the form, as is so often the case. Initial impressions foster a suspected love of kitsch and corn with Harris as a sort of dance equivalent of Look Around You, but the impression doesn't really stand up to repeated play. The music is too good, and there's too much love gone into its production for this to be some smirking exercise in reintroducing flares to the dance floor. Rather I suspect that Harris, having been born in 2012 and thus still a mere two years old, is too young to have been caught up in the spirit of nostalgia by which it's somehow okay to listen to ELO again; rather I suspect that he just loves making records and trying things out to see what will work. Thus on this debut we swing backwards and forwards between tracks invoking Kool & the Gang, or fat, squelchy bass numbers of the kind Snoop Dogg once favoured, Prince before he went tits up, and even mid-period Devo b-sides; none of which impinges on I Created Disco quite clearly being a new thing, at least as of six years ago, but new to me as I've only just heard it.

Nice work.

Devo - Moody Theater, Austin, Texas (2nd July 2014)

Devo were an early and important discovery for me. I was fourteen or so, and my record collection comprised four Beatles albums. I was aware of punk, although I wasn't quite sure what it was seeing as all I seemed to hear on the radio was either Dan Hartman's Instant Replay or the Electric Light Orchestra; although that said, I'd watched the first Public Image Limited single and Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex performed on Top of the Pops and found both songs strangely hypnotic. Graham, my best friend, lent me his copy of the first Devo album apparently having decided that I needed to hear it. It was on red vinyl, and there was something disturbing about it. It was something new in the world. I listened to it once whilst staring at the weird and freakish figures on the cover as I sat next to the record player, then decided to take it back to Graham. There was something strange and deeply unwholesome about this music. It implied regions of human experience I had never considered, and would rather not know about; but Graham insisted I keep at it, give it another listen, and so I did.

Devo became my new favourite band, and have remained pretty much unchallenged in this capacity ever since. Henry Rollins once observed that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who get Devo and those who don't, and generally I've found this to be true whilst thanking providence that I can be counted amongst the first group. The last person I knew who didn't get Devo was the pothead owner of an atheist bulletin board for whom they were essentially interchangeable with Duran Duran. He preferred Kiss and classic rock, and by strange coincidence he was also something of a dick in terms of his interpersonal relationships and how he dealt with other people. Since my brief encounter with that guy, I have known to shun those who don't understand Devo, to walk the other way before they can infect me with their failure and turn everything complicated.

The point that so many somehow miss, is that Devo were never art rock or novelty pop or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. They have always been in essence a folk band, and in American terms possibly the only folk band, the group who see clearly and who understand how our society really works. If they seem a little fucked up stood there in their fake plastic breasts and with those things on their heads, then maybe you need to take another look around yourself, at this world in which we were denied the silver rockets promised by Hugo Gernsback, where Archie has that sister with an IQ of thirty-seven who somehow never gets a mention in the comic books, with Betty and Veronica forever lost in their own lurid fantasy existence of cowboy pharmacology and giant babies. The bottom line - at least for me - is that Devo have ever been so finely attuned to the ongoing backwards progress of human culture, so sensitised to the real stuff, that almost any band or artist stood next to them will inevitably look like teenagers trying to appear cool whilst smoking the wrong end of their first cigarettes; and as a band devolving backwards along the timeline of their own career in keeping with everything else that's happened since the industrial revolution, it seems fitting that now, forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line they should be taking the dark Ohio basement in which they recorded their very first songs on tour.

I know most of the material played tonight from the Mechanical Man EP, from the two Hardcore Devo collections of formative recordings originally released by Rykodisc, and a handful of tracks which eventually made it onto the first two official albums. The original recordings sound muffled in places, prone to tape degradation, the best that could be done under primitive circumstances, bluesy science-fiction surf tunes scraped together with home built synthesisers on a rough framework of spastic rhythms. Transposed to a stage before hundreds of eager Texan spuds, it's peculiar how the songs remain the same whilst forming new, unfamiliar shapes. I feared it might sound as weird and cranky as those archive discs, partially because I was there with Mrs. Wax Cylinders whose main frame of reference was this being the band who once had a hit with Whip It. I needn't have worried, and found myself surprised at how funky some of the songs sound in such a setting, even how heavy. The loudest band I ever saw was probably Terminal Cheesecake, and although this wasn't at even half their volume, Devo - against all odds, the novelty band who got a namecheck on Different Strokes and upon whom a Kiss fan might rightly pour his hairy chested scorn - sounded or maybe felt bigger, heavier, darker, funnier, and more relevant to the mess we've gotten ourselves into than ever. Mechanical Man achieved an effect resembling the sort of thing to which Black Sabbath once aspired; Bamboo Bimbo could have been the Swans at their most pensive and grunting; Fountain of Filth and I've Been Refused came on with such righteous energy as to leave no doubt of this being the band formed in response to the outrage of the Kent State Shooting of May, 1970. They didn't exactly play all of the hits - I personally would also have liked to have heard Chango and maybe Bottled Up - but it was all of the good stuff, all the weirdly terrifying and yet strangely intoxicating forms found when you flip the Beach Boys over and scrape off all that stuff that's been growing on their underside; Jocko Homo and Gut Feeling and even the infant-headed Booji Boy finding his way onto the stage for a few numbers with the help of what was either a baby walker or a Zimmer frame, depending on whether you're looking backwards or forwards.

Finally, to boil the above bones down into something that will settle better on top of your beer, it was not only a good gig, but possibly the greatest gig I've ever attended by at least a few definitions, some quantified by hairs erect on the back of my neck throughout the performance. Forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line, and Devo are still able to surprise me. I don't know if there's ever been another band capable of such a feat, who could retrace their first steps and still take us somewhere entirely new.

Beck - Morning Phase (2014)

For my money, Beck lost something when he revealed himself to be a Scientologist. Regardless of the quality of the lad's music, from that point on I found it difficult to entirely throw the full weight of my support behind his efforts. It was sort of like finding out that a good friend has an entire room of their house dedicated to the Princess of Wales or listens to the Electric Light Orchestra or something. Although this probably doesn't bother Beck in the slightest. I'm sure he's very happy living in that mansion, eating hot dogs all day long, Panda Cola and Cresta on tap, occasionally turding out another album of quirky backwards acoustic hip-hop country when the coalman needs paying.

Morning Phase is one of those albums recorded every five years or so when he gets fed up of quirky backwards acoustic hip-hop country and wishes to showcase his talents as a classically mellow songwriter, and it would be a great album but for the fact that he's already recorded it once before and it was called Sea Change. It's fine, all very classy and beautifully judged and that, bitter-sweet plicky-plucky slow, slow mournful songs with a ton of reverb and softly psychedelic percussion, but it all sounds exactly like the previous album which sounded like this, and it wasn't exactly what you would call a chuckle-fest first time around.

This is, I suppose, where I have to question what young Beck - or Donald Beck to give him his full name - is doing with his life, if he's still this fucking miserable despite all the Scientology and hot dogs. I mean it's okay, but the ambience of well I'm sort of happy, but I'd better slash my wrists because I expect this is as good as it will ever get becomes much of a muchness after the first three or four songs drift past like depressed teenagers with their shoelaces tied together, none of which is enlivened by the quirky backwards acoustic hip-hop country for which he is better known. In many ways, Morning Phase is a great album, just one that outstays its welcome even before you've listened to it.

Beck, my little son - for God's sake, cheer up. Have a fucking pie or something.

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.

Ceramic Hobs - Oz Oz Alice (2010)

Remember that slightly troubled kid at school whose parents forbade him to listen to records by anyone other than the Swans and Splodgenessabounds? Well...

No. No. No.

Let's start again...

So you've just purchased a brand new shit-throwing machine. You've followed the instructions, duly bolted down all the gaskets, and now you're out in the yard ready to give it a whirl. You throw the toggle and stand in admiration as a controlled storm of stinking effluence arcs across the path, and then fuck—

In a panic you remember too late where you left all the groups last night, and now they're covered in it! The Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra - all dripping in reeking human poo! It's a disaster! You rush them into the kitchen, bundling them all into the sink and begin scrubbing away with a brillo pad, trying to console yourself with the thought that at least no-one will be able to tell with ELO. The dog comes in, brushes against your leg and you fall, for some reason, reaching out to steady yourself and accidentally hitting the control for the waste disposal. There's a disgusting gurgle as all the bands are sucked down the plughole - even though that isn't actually how a waste disposal works - and you know it's too late. You go outside for a smoke, then come back in and disconnect the waste disposal from the power supply, then set to work on clearing out the fetid gunk of what used to be the Birthday Party, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Pink Floyd, and the Electric Light Orchestra. You hold a gobbet to your nose and sniff, and if you're anything like me, which you probably aren't, it reminds you a bit of Oz Oz Alice; which is at least preferable to sounds like The Fall, as frequently opined by morons in reference to anything which, bearing no comparison to U2, must therefore logically constitute a Mark E. Smith rip off.

Bollocks.

The mad have by some definition become the last minority upon whom it's still apparently okay to perform dubious medical experiments; and for the sake of clarity here, by mad I mean those of the United Kingdom who have had occasion to be sectioned under the mental health act, as opposed to folks who might wear a Marilyn Manson T-shirt and regard themselves as a bit edgy. Mad - a term reclaimed by the Mad Pride movement - describes those who may suffer from a variety of mental conditions to greater or lesser degrees, and is no more useful as a blanket description of a particular type of person than any other impersonal collective noun - black, white, gay or whatever. Being mad does not necessarily determine one's level of intelligence, sexual preference, creativity, employability, or how useful a person is likely to be in the wider context of society. Nevertheless the mad are the one group to whom an entirely different set of laws are routinely applied in contrast with the rest of us. Things can be done to the mad without requiring the consent of the individual, and any movement in opposition to this finds itself additionally in opposition to not only the legal system, but in some cases - so it has been argued - to the interests of both psychiatric and pharmaceutical professions.

Ceramic Hobs, a band comprising some who have themselves had dealings with representatives of the mental health profession, are amongst the more conspicuous of the Mad Pride bands, at least from where I'm stood; and perhaps unsurprisingly their music really gets in there, representing a uniquely fractured vision of much greater honesty and intensity than the usual Radiohead feeling a bit sad because they don't like working in an office type of deal. From certain angles, it's the more terrifying end of psychedelic garage - the kind with cartoons of evil mushrooms growing from murderous looking band members on the record cover - filtered through Smell & Quim or one of the more unpleasantly odiferous noise groups, and it rocks. It may initially sound like a wall of noise, or at least one of those jam sessions where everyone gets pissed off and the guitarist suddenly starts playing Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo because he's bored - which does actually happen here on Toto In Africa - but the more you listen to Oz Oz Alice, the more sense it makes, or at least the more it takes shape; and by the third or fourth spin, every last distorted crackle and rustle of mangled master tape sounds like art, and good art, as in something that's been put there for a reason.

It's harrowing and bonkers of course, but nevertheless absorbing for representing such a raw and genuine vision, something that is clearly enjoying itself and doesn't give a shit as to the listener getting it in quite the same way as all those Oasis fans identifying with their idols. Also, it's funny and even somehow educational - funny not least during the deathly serious delivery of the when I'm pooing on your head section of the title track, amongst other things; and educational because sometimes it's a good fucking thing to get yourself some insight into how other people think, particularly when they think in ways quite different to whatever you're used to.

Oz Oz Alice is a mess but it's also quite brilliant; and it's the exact opposite of U2, Radiohead, and anything you will ever see on The X-Factor.