23 Skidoo (2000)

I was warned off this one, and to be fair, I had my doubts. It was their first album in sixteen years, and the last thing I'd heard before this was Shugyōsha Step which appeared on the Funky Alternatives album back in 1986; and while Shugyōsha Step was all right, it had a faint tang of leaders having become followers, falling a couple of years behind with that there break dance music. These sort of comeback albums don't always work, and you had to wonder if maybe the lads felt inclined to cash in on having been sampled by the Chemical Brothers.

On the one hand, this eponymous fourth album doesn't seem to represent a significant sonic leap forward from 1984's Urban Gamelan; but on the other, Urban Gamelan sounded pretty damn fine to my ears, so at least we're getting back into the saddle on a good footing. 23 Skidoo were never really what you'd call popular in the Chemical Brothers' sense, but at the same time, either the extent of their influence has been disproportionately widespread, or they simply tapped into a certain groove before everyone else. It seems significant to see the likes of Massive Attack thanked on the cover, not to mention the appearance of Roots Manuva and Pharoah Sanders on a couple of tracks. This record might almost be seen - or I suppose heard - as a restatement of intent, maybe a reclamation of territory, particularly as 400 Blows ultimately turned out to be such a complete waste of everyone's time. It's unapologetically smooth jazz with a weirdly angular aesthetic, beautifully atmospheric, even hypnotic, reclaiming rhythm from all the usual robosuspects in their camouflage pants, and hopefully giving aneurysms to any industrial historians trying their durndest to shoehorn anything this organic into the Ministry backstory.

Nothing for sixteen years and then a double album which effortlessly made everyone else look like a complete cunt - not bad going.

The KLF - The White Room (1991)

My suspicions were aroused way back in the eighties when an interview with the lads in some music paper revealed how they had taken to calling themselves Rockman Rock and King Boy D, just like the rappers you see on the telly, and which seemed to carry a faint stench of trying too hard. At some point I was slung a tape of 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?) by someone who assured me it would blow my mind, which it didn't, and in fact I thought it was fucking awful. Then there was Doctorin' the Tardis which was also wank, unless you regard everything which makes a reference to Doctor Who, no matter how ham-fisted, as a work of genius. It was big, bold, crass, and populist according to theories set forth in their book about how to have a hit single, but it sounded exactly the same as their supposedly philosophically cunning underground material to me. Finally they became the KLF, most of which passed me by, excepting a version of What Time is Love? which I had on some compilation album, and which was okay, I guess.

Surprisingly, I didn't have high expectations for this record. To be fair, I didn't have any expectations, not really. The above impressions were fleeting, and there must surely be some reason for their popularity, I told myself. The White Room seems to be in all sorts of lists of best things ever, so fifty cents in a sale seemed like a risk worth taking.

Except I get the thing home and find I've bought me a fucking hip-house album, and whilst hip-house may not have been an entirely worthless genre because there are always exceptions to any given rule, it sort of was when you really think about it; and this is hip-house fused with whatever you call music recorded by middle-aged white guys utilising the voice of a black man suggesting we put the needle on the record when the drum beats go like this. Underneath it all are a couple of nods in the general direction of acid, trance, or whatever title it had been given that week. They're decent enough tracks, but as with everyone else who ever knew better through having been to art college, the KLF can't let anything simple work on its own terms and have to throw a shitload of once trend-setting tech at it as a self-conscious distraction from the fact that they might have felt more comfortable rocking out as a traditional Hawkwind covers band. Thus did we end up with stadium house, which in this case can be equated to Trevor Horn's idea of dance music, which can in turn be equated to the proverbial unidexter at an arse kicking competition in utilitarian terms. Naturally the KLF hired a bunch of marginally funkier helpers so as to keep the thing from bearing too close a resemblance to a school geography project, not least being Tony Thorpe of 400 Blows; but ultimately the best which can be said of The White Room is that it isn't quite as funny as Porridge's attempts at house music.

Excepting things involving Ken Campbell and the novels themselves, has anything good ever resulted from thematic overinvestment in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy? I'm struggling to think of anything. It might be argued that Drummond and Cauty eventually redeemed themselves with their worst artist of the year award and the spectacle of Rachel Whiteread puckering her mouth into a dog's bottom of disdain as she grudgingly accepted all that lovely lolly whilst loudly announcing that it would of course be given to starving artists, because it matters that they shouldn't have to get real fucking jobs like normal people; but that came after and as such provides little consolation as one struggles to get through the full, terrible forty-three minutes of this bollocks.

400 Blows - The New Lords on the Block (1989)

It all seemed so promising when they first showed up with Beat the Devil, and then reviews hinted at influences taking in both Chic and Throbbing Gristle, and then there was Andrew Edward Beer's declaration of intent in the booklet accompanying Larry Peterson's Sudden Surge of Power compilation tape.

What I strive for in the confines of each piece of music is something which is best described by a term I apply to music and sound which can reach a level of perfection, and which I call universal sound and rhythm. It is rather like watching a tape level read out. I try to hit the peak of music and reach that same plateau of perfection which is so evident in the best of Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, Steve Reich and Erik Satie; and similar is another type of music which has incorporated these peaks and perfected them over centuries of improvisation, the folk music of Great Britain and Eire.

Like much of the work above, it is more an atmosphere which is created about the piece than actually trying to get from A to B and back again, then quickly fade the song. As the composer Charles Ives said, 'individual notes do not matter so much as the spirit'. This is why we use tapes so much, for they can express in a word or sound experiences and things which would need much explaining in lyrical form before the listener would begin to understand the significance.

We do not only want to reach a musical purity, for individual sounds can mean as much; but we are wary of a perfect form of music, for nothing should ever be perfect, the ultimate, the masterplan...

Although we are still a small band, we record in large twenty-four track studios and use some expensive equipment because these facilities need to be there so that we are not restricted, and all channels of sound and rhythm can be at our fingertips. Even so we may end up using very few tracks and performing on maybe only one or two instruments. We go into the studio with a minimum of information, but with many ideas and begin from there. We are as much manipulators of sound as players of instruments*.

Then they released The Return of the Dog, still one of the greatest singles of all time so far as I'm concerned - beat driven, sophisticated, luxurious, and resembling nothing else I've heard before or since. 400 Blows were funky, but an entirely different concern to all those Sheffield dudes parping away on their trumpets in Bundeswehr vests. There was something legitimately jazzy about the Blows, and with hindsight their early outings make me think of a sort of northern soul equivalent to what 23 Skidoo were up to around the same time.

They followed The Return of the Dog with Declaration of Intent, a single which, if not quite so astonishing, nevertheless succeeded as postscript to a record which otherwise made everything else released that year sound shit; and then the album came out and it was all over.

If I Kissed Her I'd Have To Kill Her First, wasn't terrible, but it was massively underwhelming and as such the last thing anyone could have expected from a band capable of coming up with The Return of the Dog. It sounded like they were pissing about in an expensive studio, which I suppose was exactly what they were doing. It sounded as though they'd ran out of ideas.

The Return of the Dog seemed rich, exotic, and even expensive in 1983, particularly through vague descent from a parent genre then busily following the New Blockaders down an unusually noisy rabbit hole full of tape hiss and distortion. They achieved a reasonable impersonation of Shakatak and the like with the next few singles, and an arguably efficient cover of Movin' by Brass Construction, and then inevitably they discovered house music contemporaneous to every other white guy with a Yamaha drum machine deciding that it looked easy and that he could do that, no sweat. So by the time The New Lords on the Block came out, possibly as some sort of New Kids related pun, that once expensive sound was now churning forth from the bedroom or garden shed of every other midi-fixated post-industrial disco boy; and it seems not insignificant that Concrete Productions, originally their label, had taken to releasing Funky Alternatives, a series of compilations which - like 400 Blows themselves - began well before devolving into a series of generic orchestral stabs over sampled beats with tapes of American televangelists wailing away in the background. I mean, Pop Will Eat Itself were on one of the later volumes, for fuck's sake…

I owned a copy of If I Kissed Her I'd Have To Kill Her First at some point but got rid of it on the grounds of being unable to remember why I'd bought it. I still own a copy of this one, although I can't actually remember buying it, but I guess I held onto it because it never sounds quite as bad as I expect it to be. There are no less than two remixes of The Return of the Dog, nearly a decade old by this point, neither adding anything worthwhile to the original; and there are a couple of what I suppose were intended as atmospheric pieces, just tapes of film dialogue with a few effects which sound as though they were included mainly for the sake of using up some studio time which had already been paid for; and then there's the house music resembling everything else recorded in 1991. Listening close, it's possible to discern a few unique polyrhythmic touches which seem to recall the luxurient imagination of their glory days, or possibly day; and although the album grows with repeat listening, the best that can be said about it is probably that it gives a decent account of how good the record should have been, but wasn't.

Shame.

*: This text has been fairly extensively edited for spelling, grammar, and an approach to punctuation which seems to have been undertaken in homage to Hugo Ball.

Funky Alternatives: Best of Volume One to Eight (1996)

In case anyone has forgotten, 400 Blows were at least notable for citing their main influences as Chic and Throbbing Gristle, which made a lot of sense given their authentically funky yet oddly gritty sound and a handful of mostly decent records of which at least The Return of the Dog and Declaration of Intent should be considered works of true inspiration. When they started releasing the Funky Alternatives compilations through their own Concrete Productions label it seemed like a minor revelation from where I stood, at least in bringing together massive names like New Order and The Shamen with more obscure but equally noteworthy groups such as Nocturnal Emissions and of course 400 Blows themselves.

I kind of lost track after the first few volumes, and the last I encountered was the fifth one which I saw in a shop a few times but was never tempted to buy, probably due to the presence of My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. The eclecticism of the first few discs had given way to that late 1980s understanding of electronic dance music as a skinhead in one of those vests with a German eagle motif grunting along to a soundtrack of drum machine, sequencer, and a tape of a man saying Praise Jesus! It seemed like the game was up, at least judging by the fact that even Phil fucking Collins was making records with tapes of American televangelists.

Also, I suppose I had begun to wonder just what was meant by Funky Alternatives - alternatives to what exactly? It seemed like a vestigial hangover from the punky loam in which 400 Blows and others had at least some of their roots, dance music but not that disco shit like Tony Blackburn plays, oh no - an unnecessary bit of asceticism if ever there was, particularly as it unwittingly resulted in the formation of the Exploited, and Earth, Wind & Fire now sound like the Sex Pistols compared to Justin Bieber or whoever. That said, club-orientated white guy dance music - as something distinct from music you can dance to - was, with a few exceptions, pretty much a waste of time prior to the rise of DJ culture so far as I can tell, racist though that may well be. Whilst I have multiple reservations about DJ culture, or specifically about the DJ culture which ended up stood in fields in Somerset at 4AM waving a luminous stick above its head for six hours, it did at least engage with dance instead of just assuming anyone could do it because it's just a drum machine and some stuff innit. It sought inspiration from what was going on in Chicago, Detroit and other places, rather than that Work! Obey! music by bands with names like Efficiency Unit and the Funky Marchers.

From what I can tell, most of the tracks on the latter volumes of Funky Alternatives seemed to have derived from these wilderness years: plenty of those horrible roadies let loose in a studio and having a go bands like Pop Will Eat Itself, Meat Beat Manifesto, and the Revolting Cocks: thump thump thump thump - heavy metal guitar - thump thump thump thump - Praise Jesus! - thump thump thump thump - bit of rapping by someone who can't rap etc. etc.

Also featured here are Die Krupps who can piss off on the grounds of having named themselves after a German arms manufacturer who famously supported the Nazi regime and made use of slave labour during the second world war, although in their favour, their so earnest it might almost be a pisstake brand of stomping EBM at least fosters an appreciation of how Nitzer Ebb - unfortunately absent from this collection - were actually nothing like so generic as you might recall. Actually Nitzer Ebb sound like Led Zeppelin compared to half of these tracks.

The rest of the disc is okay I guess - some fairly good stuff, some steaming shite - although mostly it inspired me only to seek alternative listening, either those first three greatly more eclectic volumes of the original series, or some Front 242 who did this sort of thing with a lot more imagination.