Severed Heads - Cuisine (1991)

 

Back in the late eighteenth century when I took to recording my own music by bouncing tracks from one wax cylinder to another, I had a vision of perfect pop music recorded by unorthodox means, which is probably why I couldn't pay people to listen to my stuff. It was partially inspired by the first two Eno solo albums being so beautifully infectious as to make the Beach Boys sound like that album Lou Reed made with his washing machine, yet with the sort of weird depth you'd find in a decent novel or painting; and by depth I don't mean the cobblers usually qualified as deep - mathematical musicianship, references to Tolkien, and anything else that sounds great when you partake, if you know what I'm sayin', man. The eighties explosion of bands who read books and played synths suggested that maybe I wasn't the only one to have the same idea; and then when I eventually stumbled across a copy of the Severed Heads' Rotund For Success, leading to my immediately buying every record I could find by them, I recognised something seemingly akin to what I'd been trying to do except about a million times better because it worked. I've never trusted anyone whose entire identity is their love of some band, but for a couple of years at least that could have been me with the Severed Heads.

Cuisine came out, which was exciting until I realised there was to be no vinyl release. I'd assumed those fancy new compact discs were some audiophile deal limited to mostly classical material, and we'd otherwise be carrying on as normal. Puzzling sightings of CDs by Kylie Minogue and Chas & Dave gave me cause to wonder if maybe I had it all wrong, and then suddenly no fucker was buying vinyl apart from me. I didn't know what to do. Foetus released a couple of CD only albums and my enthusiasm began to wither until, a couple of years later, my friend Eddy got so bored of my whining about there being nothing on vinyl that he gave me his old CD player. The idea took some getting used to but I eventually tracked down a copy of Cuisine in an effort to get with the programme. It was good but the moment had gone, like some weirdly uncomfortable interaction with an ex-lover. Of course, I eventually got over it when I discovered the Discman, even though my listening habits had wandered off in another direction by that point.

Thirty-five years later and we have Cuisine on vinyl as nature intended at long fucking last, and somehow it sounds like I'm hearing it for the first time, as the successor to Rotund for Success rather than merely some other stuff they did. I'm not sure I ever bought the idea of CD being necessarily superior to vinyl, nor the one about vinyl being somehow warmer or summink, but Jesus fuck! this record packs a punch of which I was somehow unaware. Severed Heads make sonic technological precision sound as human as even the most ruthlessly authentic blues guitarist captured with the sound of someone frying chips next to the microphone. It's what they do with the technology - deep intestinal bass, heartbeat percussion, and tunes which manage to feel both rapturous and traumatic at the same time. Emotionally, it's a rollercoaster - if you'll pardon my borrowing a phrase from persons who describe things as rollercoasters: the peaks and troughs of an overwrought teenager on some bipolar jag with plaintive lyrics bordering on Dadaism. A good Severed Heads record will make you feel great and tear your heart out at the same time, and this one is no exception because there's no such thing as a bad Severed Heads record - nothing they ever released has left room for improvement.

I know the above reads as self-indulgent hyperbole. These are just the words that came out when I sat down to listen to this album. The short version is that Cuisine is fucking great and you probably need to hear it.

Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

More recently reissued on CD by Klang Galerie, Mysterious Kitchens was a Terse Tapes compilation cassette from way back in the depths of the Precambrian. Terse Tapes, as you will doubtless recall, was the Australian organ from which the mighty Severed Heads didst squirt forth. Featured artists include Pissy Relay Switches, the Nobodies, Wet Taxis, Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign, Lamington Lady, Holiday Funn, and Mindless Delta Children amongst others. As you may have guessed from the fameproofing of the names in combination with this being a cassette from 1980, what we have are weird noises recorded on cheap equipment by a subs bench of about ten persons working in various combinations under different names. Mr + Mrs No Smoking Sign may be vaguely familiar as an early incarnation of the Severed Heads, which it is, although Tom Ellard and Garry Bradbury are each involved with half of the other named artists on Mysterious Kitchens so it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and Pissy Relay Switches actually sound closer to Clean or Ear Bitten. Standouts include the Nobodies, seemingly the only act failing to share its membership with anyone else from what I can tell, who fall marginally closer in sound to early Cabaret Voltaire or Devo, for want of a better comparison; also Garry Bradbury's Wet Taxis who notably managed something of a career beyond this compilation. Primitive rhythm boxes, cheap keyboards, tape loops, hiss, and one effects pedal between the lot of them accounts for the sound, generally speaking, although there's plenty of variation, with Tom Ellard's involvement betrayed by his luxurious Pre-Raphaelite melodies which sound gorgeous even when recorded on what may as well be one of those little plastic records you used to find in the back of your talking Action Man.

One for the kids there.

Mysterious Kitchens is rough as fuck but has a joyous peculiarity that elevates it way above the standard photocopied industrial collections of its day - closer in spirit to the Residents and their like than any of the Gristle bunch; and honestly it's a lot more fun and interesting than many of its more technologically adept successors.

Severed Heads - Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)

 

...or just The Big Bigot as was its initial Australian release. One thing I've taken from conversations with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists, and which has stayed with me, is the importance of layering when mixing a record. Glenn had strong opinions on mixing, often insisting greater effect was to be had with certain sounds or instruments some way down in the mix, half heard and not always obvious on first listen. This, as I've found, gives the ear more to work with, achieving effects and juxtapositions which you just don't get with the bog standard mix which strives to leave everything on more or less equal footing in the overall sound, and which is usually the mix for which everyone else will settle. Part of this is simply paying attention to the treatment of the original sounds so as to avoid music from which you can identify the exact synth, drum machine or whatever within the first minute of listening - which is how Depeche Mode have always sounded to me, at least before the leather trousers.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it is I'm referring to has one of the most powerful demonstrations of its validity in the back catalogue of the Severed Heads, and particularly on this record, possibly their greatest to my ears, although it's a tough choice between this, Haul Ass, Rotund For Success, and er… probably seven or eight others.

The Big Bigot is, I suppose, synthpop by virtue of tunes, song structure, lyrics and so on, and these are songs which really tear your fucking heart out; yet it's often difficult to tell what the Severed Heads were doing that apparently no-one else has considered. Beyond the bass, the rhythm, the pensive yet arrestingly cheery melody, there's all sorts of sampled or looped clutter in the mix gurgling away, and yet none of it sounds arbitrary. Somehow the whole always blends into something so beautifully arranged as to suggest old masters more than abstract expressionism, as it probably should. It's that deal with a tornado blowing through a scrap yard to assemble a jumbo jet, and I can only assume that an approach similar to that described by Glenn Wallis must be responsible. It feels as though random elements have worked together to carve out songs equivalent to Plato's perfect solids, compositions existing in the subatomic underpinnings of the universe channelled and brought into being by Tom Ellard and occasional pals. There's nothing here to remind you of anyone else or how anyone else works, nor anything that anyone else has been able to duplicate. I've been listening to this record for more than thirty years and I didn't even realise there's a Clapton cover on side two.

So what does it sound like, given that the above is probably less than helpful as descriptions go. Confidence! sounds like being trapped in the head of a terminally lovesick teenager with a near death experience for a chorus. Harold & Cindy Hospital begins as big band for malicious elephants and ends up getting Raptured in the evangelical sense. Legion is the most terrifying song you've ever heard that doesn't involve either distorted guitars or metal types pulling faces - it really feels like it's coming for you. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the songs are about, but there's something Biblical going on in this unnerving euphoria threaded through with something weird and dark, almost old testament, without having delivered any of the cues which might usually lead to such conclusions. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it's genuinely glorious. If Legion doesn't bring a lump to your throat at the very least, are you even alive?

Severed Heads - Ear Bitten (1980)

Here's one those reissues of something which didn't quite exist first time around, at least not in this form. Ear Bitten, the Severed Heads debut album was one side of a split release, with someone called the Rhythmyx Chymyx providing the music on the flip. The two bands shared costs, then a substantial number of those copies pressed were destroyed in a house fire further limiting the potential audience for this material. The Severed Heads also issued a cassette called Side 2 purportedly of music you would have heard on the reverse of Ear Bitten had there been no Rhythmyx Chymyx; and now the ever wonderful Dark Entries label have reissued this album, or these albums, pairing Side 2 with its notional other half for the first time and throwing in a second disc of unreleased material from the same era. It's honestly one fuck of a lot to digest in a single sitting, not least due to this being the Severed Heads at their earliest, arguably weirdest and most awkward - a good few years before the technopop. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about reissues with newly excavated material, because there's usually a fairly good reason for your not having heard those other tracks, and I've never been keen on director's cuts or remixes. Just give me whatever you think is the best version and I'll listen to that, okay?

Still, considering that I was otherwise never going to get to hear this one, I have no grounds for complaint, not least because the quality remains consistent across all four discs. Much of this music was recorded, or at least started off, on cassette recorders and the  sound is endearingly basic, so what I mean by quality is that it's all good stuff, more or less, with nothing sounding like material which should have been left in the cupboard.

Ear Bitten is mostly loops, sound collages, and distorted primitive electronics with an occasional heavily processed rhythm or melody derived from something which was probably bright pink with cartoon animals printed on the casing. Yet somehow, it's immediately recognisable as the Severed Heads in larval form; and whatever it is they did that made their music so addictive, they were already doing it here with this racket. Both the original single side of Ear Bitten and the material from Side 2 work very well as short albums in their own right, or played sequentially as halves of the same concept with each track complementing its predecessor much (or at least a tiny bit) like Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, albeit with weird fucking pictures made from torn photocopies vandalised by magic marker. In fact, all four sides work as a continuous piece if you want them to.

Having been recorded more than forty years ago, it's inevitable that I've heard many things - mostly through the weirdy music tape network - which remind me of this, even though Ear Bitten was earlier and, I would imagine, more startling at the time; but although the tape hiss and the boom of television sets recorded on a condensing microphone are familiar, the record still sounds fresh, benefiting from that elusive Severed Heads sparkle which no-one else quite managed to capture.

Severed Heads - Haul Ass (1998)

I bought one just before it got deleted, the better tracks creamed off for a wilderness years retrospective named Focus. Neither Cuisine, Gigapus, Haul Ass nor Under Gail Succubus were shifting units on Bandcamp and were therefore deleted and reprocessed lest their antinumismatic energies irradiate other releases with a spirit of failure. I only discovered its existence as a download album when receiving news of its impending deletion. I didn't even know there was a Severed Heads page on Bandcamp prior to my purchase of the Clifford 2000 compilation from Medical Records, and I've considered myself very much a fan of the Severed Heads for at least the last three decades. Tom Ellard seems to have become the weirdy music Van Morrison in terms of online grumbling about stupid fans and lack of support; and yes, I could have googled Severed Heads at some point to see if he was still alive, but dude, I have a life to live, and wonderful though most of your music certainly is, it's probably best not to assume it will be central to the existence of everyone who hears it and thus subject to pilgrimage.

Cuisine was pumped and dumped by our Canadian label over a few months in 1991.

I started work again, now meeting rejection after rejection. We were out of style.

In 1993 I tried flying to Canada to talk face to face about Gigapus. Old friends were now too busy to meet. The A/R guy suggested a bass player and a female singer. Soon after that label was nothing but female singers.

I didn't have a CD player when either of those came out, and I didn't have an internet connection until 2007, which is probably why I didn't get around to buying a copy of that later Severed Heads album which was issued in an edition of three CDR copies in a fucking suitcase, like the lightweight fairweather fan that I am. While we're here, Cuisine and Gigapus still sound like transitional albums, a little too digital for their own good and driven by a slightly more downtempo version of the bassline that kept Stock, Aitken & Waterman at the top of the hit parade for a couple of years - which is probably why the A/R guy suggested a female singer, sort of like Lisa Maxwell who sang the chorus on Heart of the Party; and while we're still here, I'm pretty sure World Serpent - the international label and distributor with which I was dimly associated for most of the nineties through Konstruktivists - would have bust a nut to get Severed Heads on the books, given some of the losers they did sign thanks to tenuous association with David Tibet's milkman or whoever.

Never mind. Sometimes one has to disassociate the art from the miserable bugger who didst gift it to us, his unworthy, ungrateful so-called fucking fans; and the irony is that now that circumstances have aligned in such a way as to allow me to finally listen to Haul Ass without having to jump through all sorts of silly hoops, it is - I would argue - revealed as what happened at the other side of the transitional phase represented by the previous two, and easily the best, most convincing thing he'd recorded since Big Bigot or Rotund for Success - neither of which should ever have been considered acts easily followed. My only criticisms would be that it's CD length and therefore probably a little longer than it needed to be, and that Ellard's voice is often what makes his albums so I probably could have stood to hear more of it than on just three tracks - or however many it is.

Haul Ass is mostly techno, or techno drifting off into other realms, but techno of the pure, heavily layered Severed Heads variant and hence unlike anything over which one would ever expect to hear Kylie Minogue squeaking away - a sort of sombre optimism with brief interludes of euphoria. More than anything, the album packs the kind of powerful emotional punch which got me buying their records in the first place - not just the heartbreaking watercolour melodies you might expect, but even those screwy, kitschy sound collages such as Dreamsong and All That Matters is You. Anyone can plug a synth into an effects box, but there was never really anyone who sounded quite like Severed Heads or who did the same thing. They should have been huge but weren't, and that's unfortunately all there is to it; and you can't even buy this one any more. I would have bought the fucker twenty years ago had it been a realistic option.

Here's where you can't buy it from.

Sleaford Mods - Spare Ribs (2021)

Everyone seems to think this is the best one yet, a return to form and all that, which usually translates to honest, it's quite good, definitely not as bad as it could have been; but fuck me, it might actually be the best one yet, and certainly does a lot to remind me how fucking amazing Austerity Dogs sounded when I first heard it. I'm not sure what they've done differently, or the same, or how they've shaken off the suggestion of trying to keep the magic going despite hanging out with Phil Collins on an episode of Tony Blair's Great British Celebrity Cake Factory - which may well have been just my ears - but Jesus Christ it's worked. This one strips the paint right off the walls.

Musically and lyrically, it's mostly what you would expect, or perhaps hope for - the same flavour of bile, venom, piss, and late night doner kebabs yet without sounding like a retread of previous efforts. There are plenty of one-string guitar loops, cheap video game rhythms and so on, and not a trace of anything unnecessary, and somehow it all adds up to grooves which almost equate to Severed Heads hanging around on the council estate. Nudge It is particularly powerful, hammering away with a bass that might be detuned floor toms on a cheap eighties drum machine for all I can tell. Everything has the sound of equipment plugged into the wrong sockets, overdriven signals achieving some effect which you could never achieve if you tried to do it on purpose.

As for Mr. Williamson, you already know what he does best, and he does it better than ever here - so caustic it makes it difficult to look the album in the eye for fear of it picking a fight.

Spare Ribs is so good it's hard to know what else to say about it beyond for God's sake, don't spill its pint: another one that makes anybody stood next to it look like an idiot.

Anzahlung - I've Lost My Footing On the World (2020)

 

As a medium to severe Cravats devotee for at least four decades now, I've spent quite a lot of that time tantalised by the prospect of the Shend's solo material, which has been unfortunately sporadic; and unfortunately because what little there is to be had seems to afford glimpses of something genuinely magnificent. I'm referring here to a couple of tracks which appeared on obscure compilations, Piston Smash & the Morning Dobermen who were listed as one of those DCL groups in a fanzine back in the eighties - and I knew someone who apparently had a tape of the same but can't even remember who it was - and, of course, the Singing Man.

Anzahlung additionally features Joe 91 of the Cravats - here in his postmortem incarnation as Dead Joe - and thus hardly qualifies as Shend solo material, yet of all which has sprung forth from the Cravats over the years, it seems thematically and sonically closest to Pixie Denial and what other Shendish fragments I've encountered, and is therefore fab.

There have been rumours of I've Lost My Footing On the World being some sort of pandemic lockdown album which, if true, at least proves that it's an ill wind which blows no good. It's sort of minimal and home-produced, but is of such composition as to dispel thoughts that it might have been casually squeezed out for the sake of killing time. Initial impressions suggest Suicide had they been an outgrowth of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, maybe a faint suggestion of the Sleaford Mods at least informing the possibility of an album recorded by means of little black boxes, but as it builds emotional presence with each consecutive spin of the vinyl which you probably should have bought a couple of months back, it goes through a sort of biker version of Severed Heads phase before blooming into its own absolutely weird and entirely stunning thing.

The best tracks might be Standing Still and Busy Always Ends in Why? but it's a close run race. Let's hope that either there's more where this came from or that the pandemic lasts long enough to oblige a follow up.

Severed Heads - Clifford 2000 (2020)

Severed Heads were more or less my favourite thing ever for a long, long time, but I lost track when everything switched to compact disc and 1991's Cuisine came out in that format alone. I couldn't really afford a CD player at the time, and I wasn't convinced by the new medium or the fervour with which friends seem to be replacing entire record collections. Cuisine and Male, the live Foetus thing, were the first albums I really wanted but which I wouldn't be able to play. Of course, I eventually caught up, only to find that Cuisine had a bit of a going through the motions feel, like an album made while trying to get to grips with some new piece of equipment - which may have been the case for all I know. 1994's Gigapus was a significant improvement, but still it felt a little as though it might otherwise all be over. Even the high points were beginning to sound a little closer to Stock, Aitken and Waterman than I usually liked.

Of course it wasn't the end, because Severed Heads carried on releasing albums on CDR, ordered by fax, and which didn't make much difference to me because I wasn't online until about 2007; and CDR has been about the worst, least reliable medium we've had, so I've always felt somewhat reluctant to pay money for one. I have forty year-old cassette tapes which still play fine - in fact most of them still play fine. Of all the CDRs I've ever burned or been given, I have a handful which remain good.

Never mind, because Clifford 2000 is a potted history of what Mr. Ellard got up to in the years following Gigapus, now preserved on four sides of durable vinyl guaranteed not to turn into Merzbow just before your record player refuses to acknowledge its existence; and it's sort of heartbreaking to discover how good this stuff was - Severed Heads at their very best, the dissonance combined with heartbreaking melodies and a certain je ne sais quoi of the bed-wettingly peculiar, unashamedly populist and yet put together upside down and always with something bolted onto the rhythm where you least expect it, so it sounds like pop without actually resembling anything you've heard before. Clifford 2000 might even be the greatest collected Heads since Come Visit the Big Bigot and is as such absolutely essential; and while we're here, I'm sure I have room on the shelves for a few more in this general spirit, should anyone feel inclined to issue more enduring versions of the Op discs or any of the others from which this material is harvested.

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.

Severed Heads - Clean (1981)

I'd heard of the Severed Heads, but they were mostly just an amusing name until I chanced upon a copy of Rotund for Success for mere quids at Greenwich Market. I took it home, played it, and by the end of the week had tracked down every last Severed Heads record I was able to find, then spent the next year playing them all to death. I'm not sure there was ever another band for which I fell quite so hard, so suddenly, and those records don't seem to have lost any of their power. Listening to Come Visit the Big Bigot now, thirty years later, still gives me a bit of a funny turn. Yet weirdly, I was somehow unaware of their having released anything much before Since the Accident and had always assumed Blubberknife to be the only thing of note. In fact, up until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't realised that Since the Accident wasn't even their first album; and it turns out that neither was Clean, it being the second. Thank fuck for reissues.

I had reservations, believing the earlier Heads to be mostly the stuff with the tape loops, as heard on Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live in the Past and the aforementioned Blubberknife; and the looped material is certainly interesting, even powerful, but for me, it was always the tunes. Clean has therefore been a bit of a revelation given that I expected noise, or at least something of a racket. Actually it is something of a racket, but a racket with drum machines, rhythm, mood, and those twinkly sequenced melodies which no-one ever did quite like Tom Ellard. Another revelation, one which came to me just this morning, has been that everything I ever liked about the music of the Severed Heads is shared by, of all things, John Barry's Persuaders theme; so if you somehow never heard them, even though we're now two decades into the next century along, the Severed Heads are the Persuaders theme in the mind of an eighties computer, or possibly a watercolour impression of the same, images blurring as the rain begins to fall and a lovely lady artist in a floppy hat enjoys her Cadbury's Flake which, I rather think you'll find, tastes like no chocolate ever tasted before.

That last sentence exists because it's otherwise difficult to describe the full emotional impact of Tom Ellard's greatest work - and actually most of it is great.

Clean - which is now expanded to a double with a shitload of bonus material, because that's how it tends to work these days - is a formative, rudimentary, slightly raw sounding version of that greatness dating from before our man built up the confidence to vocalise, and before these things began to sound like songs or lullabies or anthems. At this point, Severed Heads were approximately the antipodean Cabaret Voltaire, spreading their invocations of the sublime across extended grooves formed from elements which hadn't always started life as music. It's a little like Since the Accident on a reduced budget, except without my implication of it necessarily lacking anything which it needed to work. It wasn't the full ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which was to come, but we were very much heading in that direction.

Lady Gaga - Artpop (2013)

So far as I've been concerned up until very recently, Lady Gaga was just wossername who brought us Poker Face, a song comprised entirely of choruses which sounded like it had been recorded on an expensive phone. It came on the radio at work to bring pleasure only in the knowledge that we at least weren't tuned to the station which played Chelsea Dagger by the fucking Fratellis every seven bleeding minutes. More recently I joined one of those facebook groups you hear about, specifically one in which members post a piccy of the cover of whatever they're listening to at the time, then we all say how we like it too, or we think it's shite, or how our next door neighbour once bummed the drummer or whatever. It's fun, but not without its annoyances, one of which is provided by the doubtless absolutely lovely and well intentioned guy who posts a picture of whatever he's listening to embellished with photocopied paper dollies of famous pop stars stood around the record cover along with a tattyfilarious script of their conversation.

ELVIS PRESLEY: Hey guys, I see Dave's checking out the first Doobie Brothers album.
BARBARA STREISAND: That's a pretty ropey looking copy.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Yeah, I hope he didn't pay too much for it.
ELVIS PRESLEY: Well, the Clash told me it was something he found in his dad's loft, so I guess he didn't pay anything.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Is that right?
THE CLASH: Don't ask us. We were still in the pub.
JOHNNY CASH: I think you mean me. People are always getting us confused.
BARBARA STREISAND: Ha ha!

No. I don't know why either, but to get to the point, our man recently posted a photograph of this Lady Gaga album as subject of imaginary debate amongst cut-out pictures of top poppers. Fuck's sake, I muttered darkly to myself, even more disgusted than usual; and then went off for a listen to some of the album on YouTube just to confirm that it was as shit as I thought it would be. Somehow it wasn't, at least it didn't sound that way on that particular morning, and so I wondered if I perhaps had Lady Gaga all wrong. After all, of the musical artists I rate most highly, my initial impression of almost every last one has usually been what the fuck is this shit?

Weirdly, whatever that not actually terrible track may have been, it sounds completely different on the actual disc, and completely different to the point that I'm not even sure which one it was. More annoyingly, Artpop is Madonna for people who post videos of themselves talking about their top five favourite Manga characters on YouTube and is about as good as I had a feeling it would be, at least in so much as it probably sounds amazing if you're under thirty and fucking stupid...

Nope. Not apologising for that one, and I don't care if I've just turned into my dad frowning at the Sex Pistols - young people are shit. Theoretically they can't all be shit, but I don't seem to have encountered too many exceptions to the rule: useless fuckers forever fiddling with their phones and texting about how all music is pointless now, not like the good old classic rock days of Oasis and Muse, or Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John, and old people are always going on about books but you can't learn nuffink from books because that ain't life and there's nuffink wrong with games because some of them have got really good stories now blah blah fucking blah - fuck you, kids. All of you. Develop some fucking discretion.

Sadly, Artpop is post-music, just the sonic extension of a larger, more substantial memeplex incorporating visuals, ringtones, sneakers, YouTube, and marketing strategy. It means well and it tries hard to deliver an authentic experience, but even with the best intention, it remains a McDonald's Fruit Bag™ at heart. I'm trying to pinpoint just what it is that fails to work, that lets the side down, but there's so much going on, and so much which sounds like it should work without actually succeeding that it's hard to identify any one specific turd in the musical swimming pool. Of course, being post-music, it all sounds like it was recorded on a phone, full of flourishes which never could have arisen prior to our developing the ability to move waveforms around on a screen. I'm a huge fan of weirdy electronic techno, and yet what happens here all feels too smooth and easily achieved, and it might almost resemble the Severed Heads -  ordinarily a recommendation - but for the problem that musically it only really does one thing, and it does it over and over. Everything sounds like a crescendo, like a musical analogy of the worst of modern cinema - the tender interlude from The Fast and the Furious again and again and again, all soft focus and a single tear forming in the corner of an unnaturally enlarged cinematic eye whilst five orchestras shit themselves in unison just in case that blind guy living on Pluto missed the point of it being an emotional moment.

I could live with this if Artpop had some dimension other than the celebration of its own artificiality, its own failure to resemble anything occurring in nature, but the rest of the sentence, had I bothered to spell it out, probably depends on how much you care about Andy Warhol, which personally I never did. The sexuality is up front and lurid, better done than the perpetually gurning Miley Cyrus forever holding her flaps apart and inviting you to take a lick, but still ultimately as clinical and calculating as any vagina airbrushed and clean shaven in the name of selling beer, guns, or cigarettes. I quite like sexy music, but properly sexy music rarely spells it out, and Gaga doesn't have the voice to pull it off, in either sense of the expression. She's decent, but then doubtless so are many other X-Factor contestants, and she only seems to do two things, either gushing operatically over musical crescendos or that wearyingly stern now I'm going to shove this up your arse, you naughty boy voice; excepting some bluesy effort towards the end of the disc to which she just isn't well suited. For fuck's sake woman, put some clothes on. We've seen enough.

Artpop is an advert for car insurance, a soundtrack for people who think that the fashion industry is important, techno which misses the great innovation of techno having been its rejection of personality. Artpop probably isn't quite so terrible as I've made it sound, but for something which tries so hard, it's surprising how little it really does.

Le Lu\Lus - Operating on Specific Cues \ Early Works 1982-86 (2014)

I'm fairly certain I recall Le Lu\Lus as having been the three-piece Lulu Boys who seemed to turn up in Sounds music paper all the time, and usually with the suggestion of some managerial type doing his or her absolute best to shove them in the general direction of pop stardom. This impression was later supported when they showed up in a photo-story in the children's comic Oink! The band had been offered as first prize in some competition or other, the prize specifically being a pop concert by this bunch whom kiddo had probably never heard of right there in his or her own front room, and of course the winner also got to appear in the photo-story documenting the happening.

Still, it worked for Lou Reed...

The idea was funny, although I have to admit, it struck me as kind of desperate, and I've a feeling Le Lu\Lus - as they were by that point - also turned up on Tomorrow's World or some similar show demonstrating a new species of synthesizer or something. The sad thing was that whilst this lent Le Lu\Lus a certain desperation, or so it seemed from where I was stood, the fact was that they were actually pretty fucking great at one time, and definitely deserving of a wider audience.

I base this on Operating on Specific Cues which was released as  a C50 on the vaguely upmarket Unlikely Records tape label. Le Lu\Lus were sort of like how Severed Heads would have sounded if they'd tried to turn themselves into Bananarama, providing you factor the bored woman singing along to the radio in a launderette in Neasden out of the equation, that being what Banananaramamama always sounded like to me. Le Lu\Lus appeared to make use of sampling before anyone cheaper than Michael Jackson could afford to indulge, which I'm fairly sure must have been a whole load of boffinesque manipulation of taped sounds - screams, calls of the jungle and so on - to which I presume the title was a reference. Combining this with some impressive studio jiggery pokery, they spent about six months of 1985 sounding roughly fifteen years in advance of their time. Of course, they could have pulled on combat boots and pretended to be futuristic robots like every other fucker who ever bought a Front 242 record, but Operating on Specific Cues never wanted to be anything but the world's most fantastic pop album - sort of like the Archies of 2099. The songs are touching, funny, and silly without so much as a raised brow in sight, invoking The Jetsons, a sort of Edgar Rice Burroughs version of animal passion, and all that other stuff that was far too uncool for the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. With song titles like Chocolate Banana, Spaceman Bassman, and Asteroid Chicane, it may seem difficult to believe Le Lu\Lus weren't some sort of precursor to whichever demons were responsible for Barbie Girl, but they really weren't. In part this was thanks to Denny Gibson having such a great and quite distinctive voice, and in part to the strength of the songs shining through despite being dressed as extras from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

It is of course wonderful that Vinyl-on-Demand should have seen fit to reissue the humble ferric oxide as big beautiful slabs of plastic, although to briefly complain that my free Rolls Royce is not quite the colour I would have liked, I sort of wish they had just done a straight reissue with the same tracks, possibly as a single album. This collection, wonderful as it is, shuffles the contents of the tape in with other marginally later material, at least some of which sounds like the band had got hold of a proper sampler, which unfortunately seems to have meant they suddenly sounded like everyone else.

Still, it's nice to see this stuff at last granted some sort of recognition.

Severed Heads - Gigapus (1994)

Much like Australia's flora and fauna, Australia's Severed Heads always seemed to inhabit some peculiar evolutionary tangent to everything else, not least to those artists generally but probably wrongly regarded as their kin through a shared habit of pissing about with drum machines. Formed in the late seventies, even the sarcasm implicit in their name was at least a decade ahead of its time - mocking the likes of Throbbing Gristle and SPK whilst later presenting the delicious contrast of something which may as well have been named after a horror film yielding some of the sweetest pop music you could ever wish to hear.

Seriously, Severed Heads were never merely an interesting band, one of those acts with which you might bulk up a tape of Skinny Puppy and Front 242 for the sake of variety. There was something absolutely vital and fundamental about them. My first Severed Heads record was Rotund For Success picked up at Greenwich market probably only a year or so before Gigapus came out. I'd heard the name and assumed it might be my sort of thing. It so transpired that it was my sort of thing, and within three weeks I'd obsessively tracked down every other record I could find by them.

In search of comparisons, it's a tough job where Severed Heads are concerned. Aside from an obvious lack of boogie-woogie piano, guitar riffage, or a man in silver trousers stood screaming from a podium, they never sounded or felt like any of those other electronic bands, except I suppose bits of Chris & Cosey if you squint a little. They peddled none of the usual drearily industrial fixations, never marched up and down a stage exhorting audience members to work that body, and early Brian Eno albums are the only records I can recall doing anything similar, although the resemblance is nevertheless thin. Leaving aside those weird understated songs which tear out your heart, I guess the clue to the Severed Heads sound was always their pushing forward, creating music some way in advance of its time, notably on the Big Bigot album which you would swear features sampling technology, although apparently most of it was done with tapes and elbow grease.

Gigapus was their last major release prior to Volition Records imploding, and with subsequent albums appearing as CDrs direct from the band - an inauspicious tail end to the story one might suspect, although it should probably be noted that even this was ahead of the trend, or at least ahead of persons such as myself developing the expectation of CDr only albums usually being shit. Gigapus sounds odd to me in so much as it seems to represent technology having finally caught up with the band's ambition, all of these sounds being tailored digitally rather than through sleepless nights of messing about with tapes and effects boxes. Nevertheless, Gigapus still avoids sounding quite like anyone else using the same clobber. It doesn't hold together quite so well as Rotund For Success, not least because the instrumental tracks are in the majority, but neither is it the disappointing last real album I feared. In fact, it's hard to believe that Gigapus was recorded two decades ago. At the risk of committing hyperbole, Severed Heads really were one of the greatest bands of all time, and even this - not quite one of their greats - serves as further evidence of the fact.

Wire - Manscape (1990)

I'm not quite sure why I don't have more by Wire. I can appreciate them for sure, but for some reason, for all their dazzling brilliance, I've never found myself actively seeking out their records. Consequently those objects I do possess tend to have been picked up in bargain bins because it was Wire and it was cheap and I couldn't quite work out why I'd never got around to buying the thing when it came out. Manscape found its way to me by a friend in England who sends me money by converting pound notes into dollar bills at the bank, and then concealing these within the casing of a compact disc which he sticks in the mail. He lives off the grid, as the expression has it, without anything resembling a bank account, and this really is the easiest way for him to pay me for services rendered. He's also a fan of Wire, but I imagine this one wasn't so much to his liking.

Apparently recorded under the increased influence of dance music as it stood around the close of the eighties, Manscape differs from other Wire releases in sounding very much like they knocked it out in a studio recently vacated by Duran Duran. It has that same drum machine sound, those same McGeochisms in the guitar department, and a suggestion of brightly coloured suits with shoulder pads and promotional videos with everyone doing that eighties dance in which you keep your elbows still whilst jerking your quiff from side to side; but, it's still Wire, and it sounds like Wire. It took a good few plays before I stopped asking myself what is this shit?, but I got there eventually.

Obviously it's not a patch on Chairs Missing, but it's not actually bad once you get past the cognitive dissonance, and arguably constitutes a worthy exercise in seeing if gold can be wrought from the sort of hairspray fuelled production which keeps threatening to break into Addicted to Love; and surprisingly it can, although maybe not so surprisingly as I suppose PIL and Simple Minds usually managed the same trick well enough. Manscape is further aided by Wire's peculiarly self-aware lyrical concerns falling somewhere between those of David Byrne and Laurie Anderson, and the simple fact of there being some fucking great arrangements on here, particularly on Where's the Deputation? and What Do You See? both of which have more than a whiff of Severed Heads about them.

Thinking about it, Manscape feels like the work of a band who've just discovered Come Visit the Big Bigot in some respects, which can only be a good thing, even if it's not necessarily the first reason why you might want to buy a record by Wire.