ABBA - The Magic of ABBA (1980)

I thought ABBA were amazing when I was a kid, definitely the bestest since the Beatles. Naturally I fancied the blonde one and have vague memories of some formative fantasy involving the Beatles reforming so that they could play a concert with ABBA, which would be the bestest concert ever, at the conclusion of which I'd somehow cop off with the blonde one, despite my being merely ten. ABBA was proper music, and so Matthew and myself would quietly sneer at Sean who was still listening to the Wombles.

My dedication waned as the years passed, particularly once I'd discovered Devo, but endured at least enough for my collection to include a scratched 7" of Knowing Me, Knowing You procured from a bargain bin at some point. Later when I joined Academy 23, Andy Martin developed some weird theory about my being a massive fan of ABBA and would entertain himself by imagining my visitors astonished and scandalised as I blasted them first with Coil, then all those ABBA albums like the crazy, unpredictable character he had apparently mistaken me for. The joke got on my tits after a while. I had one scratchy single and, in any case, had never particularly liked Coil.

ABBA's legacy was further diminished by Mamma Mia!, or the fifteen minutes I manged to watch of the DVD, wherein ABBA songs somehow punctuate the saga of Meryl Streep seeking to identify the father of her daughter, Karen from Mean Girls. It could be almost anyone, it seems, because Karen from Mean Girls was conceived during a train full of Ruperts pulled by Meryl Streep at some ghastly seventies sex happening.

Nevertheless, here we are. I always liked the idea of a greatest hits album without ever quite getting around to buying one. Friends and relatives now routinely present my wife with stacks of their old, unloved vinyl records which she paints and transforms into decorative objects, and the latest skip delivered to our door included The Magic of ABBA. It seemed a shame to turn it into another ornament given the record being in excellent condition, and given that we already have a whole garage full of Mantovani and the like.

Yet somehow I find it genuinely weird listening to this thing in 2020, having failed to truly pay attention to these songs since they seemed like the only real competition for the Beatles. ABBA wrote decent songs for sure, but with hindsight it sounds as though they may have been inadvertently responsible for that sparkly sound everyone assumes came from the Cocteau Twins, beloved of television and advertising executives around Christmas - the musical equivalent of Thomas Kinkade's twinkly winter scenes. The twin vocals are strange too, overproduced possibly with Phil Spector in mind, only really working when one individual vocal takes the lead and otherwise coming close to a forerunner of autotune.

Wankers will of course object on the grounds of it being cheese and just a bit of fun and I should lighten up and what's wrong wiv me and it's just a bit of fun; but I don't know. ABBA don't sound terrible, but being less shit than Mud or the Rubettes is hardly a recommendation, and no golden moment has endured without something getting in the way - never mind the Eurokitsch of Fernando, Chiquitita and their like, even the good stuff sounds strange. I can no longer listen to the proto-metal of SOS without my brain hearing Little Frank singing, but with my cardboard hands it would be no good; and Does Your Mother Know just seems a bit Jimmy Savile: yes, I would indeed like to shag you, but I'll politely decline your kind offer on the grounds of your being twelve, if it's all the same.

The darker, more haunting tracks, The Name of the Game and Knowing Me, Knowing You still just about manage to foreshadow Joy Division but seem to be exceptions to a generally underwhelming rule. This really should have been better. It's true what they say about how you can never go home.

Looney Tunes (1976)

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

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

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

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

Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition (1979)

...or Metal Box or whatever you want to call it. I have a great many all-time favourite albums, and of their number this is the one I have probably heard the least. I'm pretty sure that at some point an entire decade has passed without my having listened to this record, quite possibly two decades.

Public Image Ltd. were the first proper group that I liked when, at the age of about twelve, I graduated from playing my trusty quartet of Beatles albums into flexidiscs to listening to the top forty countdown on the wireless and noting that I quite liked some of this new punk rock stuff, or whatever it was, and I found Public Image particularly hypnotic. It wasn't that I hadn't liked anything before that point, but it had mostly been Abba and that sort of thing - tastes which neither translated into vinyl nor endured beyond puberty to any great extent. Public Image expressed something I didn't even know required expression, a sort of alienation or sense of distance dividing myself from almost everyone else; and the weird thing - at least with hindsight - is that I discovered Public Image Ltd. before I'd even heard of the Sex Pistols and spent a couple of months doubting that there was really any connection.

Having discovered music, it still took me a while to see the benefit of spending my pocket money on something other than Doctor Who books or Micronauts, and it didn't quite dawn on me that there might be a Public Image Ltd. album until Dean Howe tried to sell me his copy of Metal Box. I think he'd found it disappointing. Conversely I thought it was great, but those three discs didn't seem to like my record player, and the needle jumped all over the shop. Looking closely at the vinyl, the grooves resembled little zig-zag lines presumably due to the deep bass frequencies. Dean sold it to someone else, and I eventually bought the reissue when it came out as a more conventional double album. Annoyingly I've found this version similarly difficult to play even now that I have a relatively fancy record player, and so the thing has just sat in my collection ignored more or less since I bought it.

I suppose the benefit of all this, if there is one, is how fresh it still sounds now that I've chanced upon a copy on compact disc. By means I don't even understand, I know the thing like the proverbial back of my hand - every last little scrape and clang - and yet listening to it in 2016 is much like hearing it for the first time.

The Public Image Ltd. debut album, which I heard after I'd bought this one, seemed a transitional affair - a great big noisy discordant fuck you with all of the Chuck Berry sucked out of the mix just in case anyone had been anticipating Sex Pistols part two. Rotten seemed on the defensive, very much resenting the mechanics of his own fame, and yet unwilling to quite disappear off the deep end like some spoilt rock star recording an album of his own farts, so for all the walls of noise, First Issue pulls back from rewriting Metal Machine Music and heads off in roughly the same direction as Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Metal Box was where everything really came together. Rotten no longer sounds like he's even thought about anything relating to the Pistols for at least a year, and more than anything they're making the record they want to hear. You probably already know what it does - lengthy jams which sound very much as though they were improvised live, repetition and a certain minimalism allowing one to fully appreciate the acoustics, and easily as hypnotic as that first single. Coming back to this, I've also been surprised at how much electronic sound is woven through the structure of the record - often barely within earshot - and also how much is entirely instrumental. It's a frosty affair succinctly encapsulating how Britain felt in 1978 without recourse to slogans - damp and conducive to death - born as a vague fusion of dub reggae and all the German stuff of which Rotten was a fan, but not quite sounding like either. Aside from my preferring Another, the b-side of Memories, to its instrumental which appears on here as Graveyard, this really is a perfect record, and it will remain a perfect record regardless of how many Country Life butter adverts he appears in.

Deviation Social - Compilation Tracks 1982-85 (2010)

Deviation Social were by their - or rather his - own admission, hardly prolific, releases being limited to a couple of cassettes and a lonely 7" selling more as a vague trickle than anything invoking images of hot cakes, but nevertheless they - or rather he - seemed to be a name for a little while back there, sneaking in under the radar of general weirdy music in the spirit of Throbbing Gristle just before somebody suddenly decided that it was not only all industrial but that it was a movement. I refer specifically to Throbbing Gristle because, aside from anything, more or less every fanzine review described Deviation Social as their tribute band. Whilst it's true that Arshile Injeyan's influences were worn pretty much on the sleeve, also incorporating SPK and the like, the Gristle-isms are more apparent in the presentation which, if lavish, spoke of the customary Porridgey fixations whilst insisting that Deviation Social were a multi-media enterprise rather than a pop band, because you know how we all used to have such trouble telling the difference between Abba, the Rollers, Racey, and some bloke stood on a stage holding a skull whilst talking about Charles Manson through an echo delay. Well, we were all young once, so never mind.

Having been predisposed to appreciate a Throbbing Gristle tribute band, I would have loved to have got my hands on one of those tapes, but I was still at school at the time, my income being pocket money and the wages of a paper round. The first cassettes I ever sent for through the post were paid for by getting my mum to write out a cheque, and so sending for stuff from America always seemed like it might be taking the piss somewhat, what with the currency and everything. Still, I got there in the end, seeing as we now live in the age of nothing quite staying past tense forever, and I suppose it was worth the wait for this stuff to rematerialise on lovely thick slabs of vinyl.

So there's a track called She Wants To Be With Manson, and the previously mentioned pretence of being a corporate art assault unit rather than merely some bloke with a few effects pedals, and there's the tediously inevitable recurrence of the number twenty-three; but, you know - musically Deviation Social weren't significantly more a karaoke Gristle than any number of other bands of the time, at least no more so than Gristle were themselves karaoke Hawkwind. There's a reliance on unsettling tapes of speeches made by bad guys, which - let's face it - was a trick pulled by everyone and their fucking milkman at the time, but Deviation Social definitely had the makings of being their own distinct entity in these tracks, and might have been remembered as such had they just been a bit more prolific. There's not much in the way of tunes here, at least not tunes for the sake of tunes, and there are a lot of grating electronics and effects without the disadvantage of Porridge reducing everything to an exercise in studied irony. Deviation Social was, roughly speaking, power electronics before power electronics became a formula, and oddly some of it also reminds me of very early Devo.

This isn't the greatest, most original record you will ever buy, but you could do a lot worse, and it's still a mystery how Deviation Social seem to have been generally overlooked, not least in a world in which people still bother with utter pish like Sleep Chamber.

The Professionals - I Didn't See It Coming (1981)

As a kid, the Sex Pistols were roughly the first group I discovered that weren't the Beatles, Abba, or the Wombles. I recall my dad talking about some pop stars who stuck safety pins through their noses, and I remember one sunny day when he came in from the afternoon's milking chuckling about a song he'd heard on the radio called We're So Pretty Vacant.

Arf arf, my mum conceded and we all laughed.

Then my friend Sean showed me his Sex Pistols record, the one with the cartoon of Sid Vicious on the cover and Friggin' in the Riggin' on the other side. I was thirteen and that was more rude words than I'd ever heard in my life, plus I was intrigued because I couldn't quite work out if the band were real or not - which is probably thanks more to Sean and myself giving his Wombles album such a hammering than the cartoon on the cover. In any case, all I knew for sure was that I had encountered magic of some description. Clearly the music industry held the same view, milking the Sex Pistols cow for every last drop, every last variation or loose association; and I was fascinated by the Adrians Records mail order catalogue with its own special Sex Pistols section featuring rare discs by people who had once made some sandwiches for the band, or who simply had a picture of Sid Vicious on the cover of their single - not such a worthless exercise as you might think given that 99% is Shit by the Cash Pussies turned out to be pretty damn great, and just the sort of thing that the idiotic McClaren probably thought he was doing.

The Professionals were of course what Steve and Paul did next, so naturally I awaited the fruits of their labours with punky anticipation; although it's sobering to listen to this stuff now and realise that it's probably how the two of them hoped the Sex Pistols would sound, had McClaren not tried to turn them into the New York Dolls - basic power pop roughly in the tradition of the Kinks, Small Faces and so on. This shouldn't be taken as an indictment, reducing the pair to Lydon's backing band as some might have it. Steve Jones' guitar sound remains pretty much unique even thirty years later - a great big burping Cockney steamroller of noise somehow aspiring to the sort of music that works best in fast cars. It actually sounds nourishing, good for the soul in some way.

I Didn't See It Coming is a weird album, and one that admittedly should have been better: great, punchy, anthemic songs produced as though someone was hoping for a spot on one of those John Hughes film soundtracks, the sort of thing with a scene in which Michael J. Fox rolls up the sleeves of his suit jacket and leads American teenagers in eighties dancing upon the hoods of cars stalled in a gridlock, cars driven by squares who don't understand young people. Steve Jones was ever a bit of a singing bricklayer when it came to vocals, but the production here makes a futile effort to smooth out his rough edges leaving the poor sod sounding like a backing singer on his own record. This CD reissue also includes the earlier Professionals singles - on which he sounds much better - and which are pretty hard to fault. He was never the greatest vocalist, but on the other hand, there's not many that could get away with:

We all know how it ends,

For the rock 'n' roll Hollywood God,

Found by one of your friends,

With your head flushed down the bog.

So, it's smoother than it probably should have been, but even given all of the above, I Didn't See It Coming is still a thumping good collection; another one to add to the list of things that need remixing by Steve Albini.