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

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

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

Wait! Come back! We have guest stars!

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

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

Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - 20 Speed Metal Death Threats (2023)

I'm generally sceptical of both downloads and CDRs because there are too many arseholes out there releasing five noise albums a week by such means and treating anyone who doesn't fall over themselves to bag the lot like some corporate tool who should probably stick to BTS*. Happily, there are exceptions to most rules, and in this case Peter Hope very much continues to be one of them. This you can tell by how much care and attention goes into these things - each short run CDR edition of the new download being lovingly put together with artwork, booklets and so on by the man himself as something which will remain a pleasing object even should all the zeroes and ones eventually turn to digital mush - which is where the download comes in handy. More significantly still, prolific though he certainly is, Peter Hope is always worth a listen. Not many can issue five or six full length albums a year to this sort of standard.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's another one, and if the back catalogue is perhaps a little too eclectic to allow for anything to be meaningfully singled out as his finest work, it might be this one. At least I've been playing it a lot. There are twelve tracks rather than twenty, and none of them constitute speed metal, but the title nevertheless makes intuitive sense if you're familiar with Hope's approach to his art where ideas and sounds are bolted together with the urgency of a Schwitter's assemblage - no obvious concessions to traditional aesthetics and yet seeming entirely faithful to the kind of blues which was played on a broken guitar under circumstances of grinding poverty. It's mostly electronic, although doesn't quite feel it, revelling as it does in its own dirt, crackle and distortion. This is nothing which would comfortably accommodate a barcode - in both the aesthetic and ideological sense - being genuine outsider music - not the cute version, but the untamed stuff which resists commodification or repackaging as a consumer accessory. This is a free-range noise which probably shouldn't exist given the focus groups and how many surveys we're bombarded with on a daily basis.

The Exploding Mind seems to represent a particular focus exemplified by Hope's work under that banner, although in practical terms also typically features collaborators. Mrs. Dink and Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists both feature on this album, despite which 20 Speed Metal Death Threats maintains its pace without sounding like the latest by various artists; and Warmonger - created with Phil Jones and stealing Requiem's malevolent synth-pulse from Killing Joke - is frankly a masterpiece.

Avail thineself of this long player yonder.

*: I had to look this up for the sake of making a contemporary reference rather than just invoking Rick Astley or someone else who is probably dead by now. If you don't know who BTS are, I honestly wouldn't worry about it.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

This was originally submitted to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review, but I get the impression Ed found it a bit fishy and so passed it onto me for target practice, along with pages of off-putting photocopied press material explaining just how amazing the band were. Sure enough, it looked like something in need of a good clip around the ear - world music earnestly sampled over prog rock, guitar solos, Terrance fucking McKenna, and five white guys cradling cute ethnic instruments on the back cover doing that face which Sting sometimes does to let you know that he's in touch with the ancient rhythm of the spheres and just recently met this really amazing old guy halfway up a mountain in Baja California…

Oh - and the full name given on the cover is the Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Π, with the Π presumably being mystic shorthand for Paranoise. Anyway, that was a whole two decades ago and Ishq gets a second go because, against the most dour expectations I've possibly ever harboured, it still sounds fucking amazing. I doubt there has ever been such a gap between what I anticipated and what I actually experienced. Musically Paranoise are competent as fuck and fairly proggy with all sorts of funny time signatures, but with killer songs, really beautiful stuff which, just as the press release claimed, invoke Led Zeppelin's Kashmir amongst other things. In fact a lot of Ishq reminds me of that era of Led Zeppelin, back when heavy rock really was heavy rock rather than metal, but there's an occasional hint of something jazzier, maybe the more new-agey end of the Killing Joke back catalogue, even fucking Styx on the particularly monumental I Own; and what differentiates these songs from anything else to which that description may loosely apply, is the use of samples. Ethnic wails selotaped to a beat are nothing new, as the Severed Heads, Moby and a thousand others are my witness, and as with others who've been down the same road, I have to wonder about this sort of thing which, at worst, seems like cultural tourism with traditional vocals sourced from Kenya, Bulgaria, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere, united seemingly by their lack of electricity and plumbing. I believe othering is the term, but I'll refrain because it's a neologism favoured mainly by complete wankers, and because Paranoise at least credit those they've sampled as co-writers, and because the blend of pounding mathematically weird rock and native voice is frankly fucking dynamite. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you really have to get it right, and Paranoise absolutely nailed it on this record.

Of course, the message of Ishq is ecological, anti-corporate and aspires to revolution, so the use of indigenous voices - those most trampled upon by the guys we're singing about - is appropriate, even bringing a balance to the narrative it might not have had were it just five white dudes from Connecticut singing about how they don't like Nestlé. Additionally, great use is made of spoken pieces by Noam Chomsky and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, with only Terrence McKenna's drippy Woody Allen impersonation letting the side down - not that what he says is without value, but as usual he seasons his testimony with psychobabble. Still, a minute of rolling eyes and pulling faces is easily overlooked in context of something which rocks this hard for a full hour, which states its case with such conviction and confidence, and which doesn't really sound quite like any other record I can think of. I somehow imagined one of the more self-important of Sting's solo works, but got a more worldly Physical Grafitti without the kiddy fiddling.

The Police - Zenyatta Mondatta (1980)

Simon Morris, Ceramic Hob and celebrated musicologist, recently posited that the Police and Nirvana were essentially the same thing, and he's right. In both cases, there were three of them, they were very popular, they combined rock guitars with a whining noise, and Nirvana's first album was called Bleach which references the collective hairstyles of the Police. That being said, there are differences in so much as that whilst the Police sang songs about isolation, prostitutes, an inflatable sex toy, and the end of the world, Nirvana's oeuvre focused primarily on having a tummy ache and wanting only cool people in attendance at one's pop concert. Also one of their best songs ripped off Killing Joke.

Of course, I actually like Nirvana, albeit not quite so much as several other bands from their neck of the woods, so I'm writing this primarily because I dislike sacred cows and it's funny to upset those who believe Kurt died for our sins, when I'm pretty sure the coroner's report would have described a very different cause of death. Further to the posthumous reputation of the man, it differentiates from that of Sting in so much as that he is remembered as a tortured Jesuseque genius, yet was probably just a regular bloke who spent too much time thinking about things; while Sting, on the other hand, often appears to hold to an absurdly elevated opinion of his own artistic and spiritual credentials, and yet is widely understood to be a bit of a goon, albeit with the redeeming feature of having helped take the piss out of himself in that Zoolander film. The outcome of this, given public opinion being what it is, is that the Police will probably never be rescued from their own reputation as stadium-filling bores.

Still, I can't quite get with the flow on this one, and the music still sounds great to me. They came along to hog the charts at just the right time, when my ear had become attuned to anything with a vaguely punky vibe, and yet before I'd fully developed the cynicism by which I would deem music anyone else had heard of - let alone people working in Wimpy Bar - as cheap, populist, and therefore unacceptable; and the Police must have had something going for them because not even Sting's subsequent ascent to full goonhood has tarnished my regard.

This was the album recorded here and there whilst on one of those massive world tours full of screaming girls, the album composed at the height of their fame, and accordingly it's a bit uneven with the feel of a scrapbook, or even a travelogue - at least compared to the first two, both of which felt pretty solid and consistent. On the other hand, Zenyatta Mondatta works because there's nothing truly terrible here, and two tracks in particular are about the best things ever recorded by any combination of those involved; and because Bombs Away and When the World is Running Down are of such phenomenal quality, I've played this thing to death over the years to the point of it having become embedded in my psyche, and it's become so embedded in my psyche that objections along the lines of either Outlandos d'Amour being a better record, or it's the Police, man, get a grip you cloth-eared twat, for fuck's sake! simply don't register.

It's a smoother record than were the first two, luxuriating in sounds and studio polish of a quality foreshadowing at least two of these people making names for themselves as composers of film soundtracks. There's some of the cod reggae, although it's mostly closer to cod ska, and to be fair, none of it really resembles an impersonation because the cod element was more a starting point than anything; unless you just really need to loathe Sting and all ships in which he hath sailed - which I can sort of understand.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da is probably about as irritating as you remember it being, and there seem to be a lot of instrumentals, and I never quite warmed to Behind My Camel, not even when it was inexplicably pinched by Ice Cube for something or other; but beyond these minor niggles, Zenyatta Mondatta holds together beautifully as a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

It's just a good album.

Sorry.

Neon Hearts - Popular Music (1979)

Here's a name which first lodged itself in my consciousness whilst watching Look! Hear! back in the early sixteenth century - as I believe I may have mentioned here - and it's somehow taken me thirty years to get hold of the album, a fancy red vinyl reissue by this point. Initial impressions, or at least this century's initial impressions are of a band resolutely of their time - sleeveless t-shirts, eyeliner, thousand yard stare, and honking saxaphone, and yet the shock wears off with just three plays as Popular Music nails itself very firmly to your soul.

Neon Hearts really are peculiar - a sort of punky Roxy Music with glam splashes of maybe X-Ray Spex or Cockney Rebel, and a strangely well spoken lead singer swooping all around the lyric with a wink and a smile much in the spirit of Neil Innes, of all people - or maybe Neil Innes with a hint of Adam Ant back when he still used to scare the life out of everyone. Specifically Tone Dial - as he is called - does that thing Neil Innes used to do where you can't actually tell if he's sincere or taking the piss in massive quantities. There's a mild preoccupation with the artificial, manufactured, and generally fake - as the name implies - and so we have Popular Music, the title track and single which should have been enormous. I recall a maxim about how the best way to have a hit on fabtacular seventies radio was to write a song about it, and Popular Music ticks all of the boxes so hard it almost foreshadows both Alan Partridge and Denim, right down to the preposterous exclamation of great song! Amazingly, and against all odds, the other nine tracks are at least as strong, and have since become so firmly ingrained in my mind's ear that it feels as though they've been there all along, and that I've crossed over into an alternative universe where this lot turned up on everything from Whistle Test to Cheggers Plays Pop.

Neon Hearts seem best remembered for having spawned Raven, Killing Joke's late bassist; and I have to say it's quite a pleasure to see him tarted up like the one with the earrings from Mud on the cover, given his later presence as a hurhurhuring chorus to Jaz Coleman describing Boy George and other purveyors of - ahem - pouffy music being marched off to some hopefully figurative gas chamber. So, much as I've loved Killing Joke, I've had my reservations, and this sort of redeems one of them. We really should have embraced the Neon Hearts when we had the chance. I guess you could say we fucked up.

Another one I bought from the very wonderful Overground Records, if you're interested.

J.J. Burnel - Euroman Cometh (1979)

I had some reservations. Much as I've loved the Stranglers, they had distinct periods of experimentation with being macho shitheads, and more recently I encountered Hitler salutes delivered in praise of Euroman Cometh on a peculiar blog constituting an assemblage of quotes of far right inclination. Mostly it was excerpts from interviews in which various members of Killing Joke proposed which demographic groups they would like to see sent to a hypothetical gas chamber, mainly referring to fairies, effeminate types, nancy boys, anyone who likes Boy George, people who listen to pouffy music, other fairies who have somehow eluded the initial sweep, over and over - what larks! It was hard to work out whether the author of the blog had compiled all of this material as evidence for the prosecution, or because he too wished to see fairies sent to some hypothetical gas chamber, but the suggestion of Euroman Cometh being cut from the same jackbooted cloth was troubling, particularly in the wake of certain fat folky fuckers who just happen to be stood on stage in black uniforms singing about how they quite like Europe.

Thankfully I was mistaken, as I probably would have realised had I bought this at the time. Burnel's Crabs sounded great on the Strangler's Christmas EP, but apparently not so great as to inspire me to buy the album, but never mind. Euroman Cometh is thematically a call for European unity as a progressive and essentially inclusive entity, a refutation of American influence and the more unpleasant episodes of recent European history; and even Burnel's motorbike fixation is turned to a restatement of this ideal on the cover:

The Triumph Workers Co-operative at Meriden have proved that personally motivated enterprise coupled with group interest is a necessary ingredient in successful socialism and the sham they call national socialism could only be suggested and perpetrated by enemies of the people.

See, Dougie - that's all it fucking takes, you goose-stepping wanker.

Musically speaking, Euroman could almost be a Stranglers album, albeit one with a subtle shift of emphasis in the direction of the European sensibility it strives to communicate, so it growls and swaggers just as you would expect whilst somehow invoking Metal Urbain, Grauzone, and other cold wave types who added grumbling bass to one of those primitive rhythm machines which was usually just a wooden box with a button marked rhumba on the side. Strangely, the only minor disappointment is that the studio version of Crabs isn't quite so convincing as the live version which accompanied the release of Don't Bring Harry; but this is otherwise a fucking cracker.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Funny how certain things send you straight off in search of a particular bit of music. This one came back to me through the reproduction of a Daily Mail cartoon likening Muslim refugees to a plague of rats infesting host countries, just as Nazi cartoonists once made the same analogy with Jews; and the first track here is Like Rats which, aside from the parallel title, pretty much summarises the shittiness of a world run almost exclusively for the benefit of horrible Daily Mail reading cunts.

I was introduced to Godflesh with Us & Them, but for some reason have only recently begun to venture further into their back catalogue. I'm not sure why being as I love the shit out of Us & Them; although with hindsight, it's weird to consider that it's almost their album of uptempo pop songs, at least compared to this beast.

Actually, I suppose I was introduced to Godflesh - or at least to Justin Broadrick - much earlier when he recorded tapes of electronic noise as Final, and a few of his tracks appeared on the same noisy cassette compilations as some of my own stuff. I don't recall much about the music, beyond that one track was called Belief, but the fact that I remember it at all suggests it had something going for it. Also, the transition from power electronics to this sort of noise metal makes a lot of sense, and whilst Godflesh weren't the only band to go down that particular road, they remain the most listenable of their kind for my money - possibly excepting Ramleh who were kind of going for a different thing anyway.

Where Us & Them seems to share some kinship with Killing Joke or even Joy Division, Streetcleaner is a different, more primal monster. This one isn't so much songs as power electronics with riffs and a drum machine. Ordinarily, much as I love Brer Drum Machine, I'd raise an eyebrow at his use under circumstances where an actual drummer would have sounded so much better - like on Big Black's otherwise astonishing Atomiser, for one example. Streetcleaner initially sounds like it could do with a human bashing the skins, not least because the drum machine here is clearly programmed to have more or less the same effect as John Bonham, but after a few listens the reasoning for the choice becomes clear. There's something about the impersonal quality of a drum machine and the very fact of it being a machine which works so well. Music reviews employing the term jackhammer in reference to rhythm seem a bit of a cliché, but this one really does sound like that. It rocks like fuck whilst nevertheless resembling some inhuman mechanical process occurring inside the meat factory, the sort of thing with a start button and that big red plastic mushroom you bash to shut the whole system down when some poor fucker falls in and loses his legs. Add to this massive riffs delivered like concrete blocks onto a loading bay from the back of a truck, over and over and over, and every single one of them landing on your fucking foot.

It's huge and brutal, possibly an heir to the Swans, except Cop seems surprisingly subtle by comparison despite equivalent soul-crushing weight. Extremity has become a bit of a minefield in musical terms as of at least the last decade, mainly thanks to too many industrial types coming to resemble the enemy in their relentless invocation of the violence of civilisation. In fact I'm surprised there hasn't yet been a pro-UKIP power electronics act coming through, but give it time. Godflesh at least seem to have remained true to the spirit of dissent informing earlier generations of noisy buggers, the Grey Wolves for example - whom I mention partially because they're about as dark as it gets and I know they're good lads, and also because I know one of them occasionally reads this stuff, and because for the sake of argument I suppose Godflesh are the Grey Wolves with tunes, just about, at least in terms of what they do to your ears, brain, and arse.

It's hardly pretty, but then neither is the world which has inspired this particular hour long howl of rage, and sometimes it helps to be reminded of the fact with no punches pulled.

Soundgarden - Superunknown (1994)

I'm not quite sure why but I didn't really get this one until I moved to America. Black Hole Sun always sounded astonishing, and is surely one of the greatest singles ever recorded, but initial impressions of the rest comprised mainly guitar solos and a long-haired man in silver trousers stood screaming yeaaaaaaah baby from the top of a speaker cabinet the size of Ted Nugent's rock 'n' roll shack out yonder. It may as well have been Guns 'n' Roses - and please note the correct punctuation of their name whilst we're here.

Then I moved to Texas, gave Superunknown another couple of spins and it all began to make sense. It's not so much that they were ever just another generic band of dudes rocking out in black leather, but that their strengths are subtle, elements you may not notice immediately, or at least I didn't. Black Hole Sun, for example, you could describe as a really bad acid trip given that it's the sort of description which tends to emerge from the Kafkaesque process of writing about music, but actually it's not really like that at all. It might be better to describe Black Hole Sun as an acid trip going somewhere you would rather it didn't go - if we can momentarily ignore the room-dwelling elephant of such descriptions being essentially ludicrous. What I mean to say is that Black Hole Sun, like much of this album, conveys a range of quite subtle emotions. It's nothing extreme in the sense of Killing Joke or whoever.

The more I listen to this, the more it occurs to me that Soundgarden are, or at least were, pretty much a psychedelic band in the vague tradition of Cream and related Woodstocky types. They make with that characteristic seasick psychedelic notation, the slight sense of disorientation and invocation of coming up on some substance or other whilst melting in a chair staring at your foot. There's an element of early Black Sabbath even, maybe without quite such a bad vibe, although still bordering on dark, like it could all plummet into brown acid hell at any moment; and it works because they eschew the more twee excesses of psychedelia, the boss-eyed claims of having just seen a pixie in the garden despite everyone knowing full well that you're talking out of your arse - or bollocks about third eyes having been opened for that matter. Superunknown is, I suppose, biker psychedelia, more pragmatic, more grizzled, and more inclined to shut up when it has nothing it wants to say, allowing the music to speak for itself; and the music is fucking beautiful, near symphonic in its detail and lightness of touch once you've heard past the walls of overdrive and fuzz.

This has possibly been my purplest ever testimony to a record, but fuck it - Superunknown is worth it.

Fatima Mansions - Valhalla Avenue (1992)

Fatima Mansions managed to more or less pass me by at the time, excepting North-Atlantic Wind which Andrew Cox stuck on a tape and which impressed me as possibly the most terrifying song ever recorded; and yet somehow I never got around to further investigation, aside from the Nite Flights 10" which, two decades later, I've still probably played only once. I don't know - it was a blind spot, I guess; possibly the influence of Melody Maker which I read weekly, but almost entirely for the David Stubbs material which was always roughly forty times more entertaining than anything else in there - notably features on all those bands with Union Jack guitars singing quirky songs about Harold Pinter characters whilst pretending Cathy Come Home had only just hit the picture houses.

Or was that all a bit later?

Who cares? It was shite anyway, and whilst Fatima Mansions were patently nothing to do with any of that - or the spirit of optimism in general - I seem to recall their getting voted album of the year or something, which was probably enough to put me off the scent.

With hindsight, even leaving aside the most terrifying song ever recorded, I can see why Andrew enjoyed this stuff. Valhalla Avenue, and I suppose by extension Cathal Coughlan's songwriting, puts me roughly in mind of a happier Jim Thirlwell of Foetus, or at least a more gleeful Jim Thirlwell. It's theatrical to the point of being offensive, apocalyptic cabaret for want of a less ludicrous term - material of such a quality that Sinatra could quite easily have sung a few of these had he been less worried about offending anyone within a fifty mile radius. Actually, I have no idea whether Sinatra ever worried about offending anyone, but lyrical turns such as people dressed as cows form an orderly queue for a drug that makes you dead for a second or two seem a little more barbed than his usual fare, and he probably wouldn't have gone for that whole pretending to bugger oneself with a figure of the Virgin Mary whilst on stage in Rome routine; and yes, seeing as I've introduced religion as a subject, this is the sort of madness which could only have been born of Roman Catholicism in all its God fearing spectacle, which - to briefly turn on the autoreview whilst I go and make a coffee - might account for the manic fervour of Coughlan's delivery, a golden voice delivering sermons with the insane force of ten Ian Paisleys. John Peel apparently said he could have happily listened to Coughlan singing the phone book, and yes, I take his point. Listening to Go Home Bible Mike, it doesn't take long before you too wish Bible Mike would piss off. In fact even vicars listening to Go Home Bible Mike will almost certainly find themselves telling the guy to stick that feckin' book up his poo-chute. Then of course we come to:

In the all-night party at the chemical plant,
Everybody's feeling grand.
The Irish peasants haven't had this much fun,
Since their ancestors fled the land.
A man with a hammer smashes down a wall,
And everybody shouts, "Hooray!"
And the virgins get taken in the shower stalls,
Where the cyanide comes up the drains.
Don't call an ambulance if you can't pay.

North-Atlantic Wind - a nihilist hymn to the inevitability of birth into a cruel world preceding a bleak, meaningless death - still chills me to the bone, and it's just a song, albeit a song which makes Killing Joke at their most embittered sound like Travis having a wistful day because it's raining and the really great indie music record shop is closed; and yet it's scored with that big band sound that could segue effortlessly into something from The Lion King at any moment, whilst nevertheless sharing certain compositional similarities with Nine Inch Nails.

I'm not sure why it's taken me twenty years to catch up with this, but I'm glad to have finally cottoned on.

Spice 1 - 187 He Wrote (1993)

That massive supposedly complete history of rap that will one day be written probably won't be dedicating too much page space to Spice 1, for like MC Eiht, Celly Cel and a few other west-coast notables, he did his thing, and he did it well, but he never really made a massive splash in terms of sales, cult status, or whatever artistic criteria we're judging rap by this week. The nineties will probably end up remembered as the decade of Dead Prez on the grounds of their being responsible black men who rapped about vegetarian food, learning to play chess in coffee shops, and lighting up a few incense sticks before you knob your bird on a Friday night after the pub - with a few nods to Malcolm X thrown in just to show that just because a man is in touch with his feelings, it doesn't mean he's, you know, soft. Whilst it seems unlikely that gangsta rap will be entirely forgotten, it'll probably be remembered as something invented by Eminem, because when a white guy describes that stuff, obviously it's art or at least some sort of statement in the vein of a Scorsese or Tarantino, something of merit as distinct from that stuff which is just kids bragging about guns upon which we'd rather not pour too much scorn in case anyone thinks we're racist.

Just so we're clear, the music of Spice 1 belongs in that category which has thus far eluded sanitisation, reassessment, and subsequent reclamation as something you might enjoy over a glass of wine and a few injections of legal marijuana. It tells the sort of stories you almost certainly won't want to hear, which is a good thing because there's not much point bothering with rap if you're only interested in the more soothing end of the spectrum; and the closest our boy comes to moral responsibility is advising us that if we're really going to pop a cap in someone's ass, then we should at least make it count and pop a cap in the ass of someone we can rob. Wise words indeed.

There is of course a school of thought which states that albums like 187 He Wrote glamorise gunplay because that's what sells, and it must therefore be regarded as inferior product, although said school of thought probably wouldn't state it directly to Spice 1's face. Personally I hold to the view that this interpretation is only that, an interpretation, and is, generally speaking, bullshit which should be obvious as such to anyone attempting to engage with the music on its own terms. Whilst I'm sure Spice 1 never had a problem with the idea that he might be able to sell a few records, it seems pretty obvious that he's talking to his people, as in those who've lived the sort of horrendous crap described here, and whether Sting or C. Delores Tucker understand isn't really relevant; and similarly, ignoring this sort of thing isn't going to change the fact that there are people out there who live in the world described herein. Then there's also the idea that songs about gang violence tend to glamorise gang violence, an idea possibly derived from the occasionally filmic quality of much gangsta rap and the apparent absence of a don't try this at home disclaimer, the song ending with our narrator sobbing, wishing he'd stayed in school and studied to become a dentist. So think on, kids...

Bah, I say. Just get over it and listen to the music. I spent many hours listening to Spice 1 whilst pounding the pavements of south-east London as a postman. Contrary to the popular image of the job being much like that seen in Postman Pat - just wandering around with a few letters, happily spending an hour chatting to Mrs. Goggins at the corner shop and so on - it was often a miserable and deeply fucking thankless task, usually struggling to get five or six hours of work done in about four and breaking your back in the often pissing rain whilst doing so; and whilst I never found myself having to dodge bullets, listening to Spice 1 really helped get me through some truly shitty days, just as I expect 187 He Wrote helped members of its intended audience get through some truly shitty days - and I mean the sort of days in which you try listening to Killing Joke but give up because it just doesn't seem angry enough. In fact it's surprising how tame a lot of supposedly grumpy music sounds when compared to that produced by those who, like our boy here, have experienced real world problems more severe than dad forbidding the wearing of nose rings at the dinner table.

The great thing about the music of Spice 1 is that it combines all the reckless nihilism of its gratuitous violence with a surprisingly uplifting quality. You might almost say it's the blues - Robert Johnson taken to an extreme I suppose, but still very much a soulful and populist take thanks to a massive injection of g-funk with a big fat organic bass end emulating the experience of having your arse kicked by a really happy guy, probably; and whilst the man himself may be deemed lyrically limited by certain dubious criteria, he more than makes up for it with the sheer inventive relish of his delivery, and of all the rappers to engage in that vocal scratching thing that everyone was doing back in '93, he's significantly one of the few to record material that still sounds fucking great two decades later. This is probably what distinguishes his vocal style from being a mere gimmick, in that such tics and tricks were never the only thing up his sleeve, and were more to do with a debt to the toasters of Jamaican dancehall than a passing affectation. This, for my money, is probably also one of the reasons why Spice 1 is perhaps the only rap guy I've heard turning out the occasional full-on reggie tune without sounding like an utter cock.

Neither before or since, I would argue, has music quite this terrifying ever felt so joyful. Mine may well be a minority view, but Spice 1 surely deserves at least one album amongst the acknowledged rap all-time greats, and this one is as good as any.