Ringo Starr - Ringo the 4th (1977)

 

While did the reviewer even listen to the record customarily serves as the feeble defense of those who wouldn't recognise good music without the application of some sort of response conditioned by electrodes and positive reinforcement, no cliché is ever entirely without some moment at which it briefly applies with thermonuclear conviction, and that's what the fuck we have here. Google searches for this album will summon the same shitty review rephrased over and over and over amounting to another hilariously terrible failure by the guy who made tea for John, Paul, and George, even more worthless than the previous album, and that was bollocks…

I don't know what people really ever expected from Ringo given that he wasn't actually John, Paul, or George disguised with sunglasses and a fake hooter, so the routine criticism of his having  yet again failed to record either Band on the Run or Mind Games seems extraordinarily redundant and even unfair. This one is alternately either a dinosaur-rock artefact or Ringo climbing aboard the booty-shaking bandwagon with all the grace of a rhinoceros mounting a swan, and I'm sure there are others out there if you can be arsed to look.

Anyway, as the title implies, it's Starr's fourth solo album, excluding two covers collections released while he was still a Beatle, and honestly a significant improvement on Ringo's Rotogravure which had followed the warmed over Beatlisms just a little too far down the trail into easy listening territory, possibly hoping guest spots from famous friends might compensate for any shortfall. Ringo the 4th, once you're able to hear past its failure to chart - which I realise doubtless spoils it for many - is accordingly more upfront and strident, borrowing from both Motown and disco, most likely because that was what was happening at clubs and parties, and our man was spending a lot of time at clubs and parties due to his being Ringo. It's not hard to understand.

Without calling in favours from McCartney, Clapton, or any of the usual suspects, the record at least doesn't feel like an ex-Beatle holding on for dear life, and if it fails to work as the greatest album ever recorded, it fails on its own terms. It's mainstream, but not really MOR, and efficiently rather than over-produced. You already know what Ringo sounds like, and that's how he sounds here, so unless you were expecting Bauhaus then there shouldn't be a problem. It rocks in the right places and features a good quota of cracking tunes; it chugs in the right places; as Ringo's disco album I'm not convinced it isn't actually better than Bowie's disco album; and there's something genuinely warm and soulful in these songs, if you can just make the effort to get the fuck over yourself.

Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture told me about visiting his friend Roro Perrot Vomir. They were listening to this record and Andy asked why Ringo had a woman sat on his shoulders on the cover.

Because he's Ringo, Roro replied. He can do what the fuck he likes. This album was Ringo doing what the fuck he likes, and whatever you hear probably says more about you than it does about himself.

Joy Division - Still (1981)

I spent about six of my late teenage months so deeply immersed in Joy Division that even now, nearly forty years later, I have no idea whether they were really any good. I'm old enough to have enjoyed them when Ian Curtis was alive, when their records were still on Factory, and tend to disregard the testimony of anyone arriving at the party more recently because it will usually be pure dog shit, the usual recycling of Ian and the lads stood looking mysterious in front of the Parthenon because they've just been reading Camus. You know, they had their moments, but get a fucking grip.

Oddly, I never owned any of their albums. I had the singles, and my friends, Pete and Graham, had the other stuff, so I taped it and spent what little money I had on records I wouldn't be able to get from Pete or Graham. It was quite exciting when Graham got hold of a fourth or sixth generation tape copy of what we referred to as the Warsaw bootleg featuring all the stuff which never made it onto any of their official records, and which was at least as good, often superior despite the ropey quality. Still, which both Pete and Graham snapped up on the day it came out in that cloth bound gatefold hardback format, was almost as exciting, not least because it featured better quality recordings of certain tracks from the Warsaw bootleg.

It sounds decent in 2021, mostly, but this lot could never have lived up to their absurdly inflated reputation, forged as it was in the white hot intensity of a thousand acne-spattered bedrooms. They rocked hard back when they were called Warsaw, and Unknown Pleasures and the singles captured the magic of their better Black Sabbath impersonations, but Closer amounted to maybe half a decent album, and New Order's Movement was probably the best thing done by any combination of these people.

Still is two albums, one of them being at least as good as Unknown Pleasures, or would have been had they included something better than the ropey cover of Sister Ray. Unfortunately the other album is live. To be fair, it's about as good a Joy Division live album as you're ever likely to hear, but nevertheless suffers from the same problems as most of their other live recordings, the fluffed notes, the missed cues, and Decades, a song which carries the distinction of sounding exactly the same when you disconnect your turntable and push the record around by hand with one finger on the label. That said, it's nice to hear the Curtis version of what would become New Order's Ceremony. In fact, they probably should have slapped that on the end of the first disc instead of Sister Ray and made it a single album.

Did I mention that we have a tribute act called Joyhaus here in San Antonio? I gather it's one bloke with a drum machine and he covers songs by Joy Division and Bauhaus. Doesn't that just say it all? One day it will be possible to separate the music from their frankly fucking ridiculous legend, but sadly that day is still some way off. They had some nicely moody songs which sounded just right when you realised that some fellow teen was never going to grant you access to his or her underpants, but they really weren't the messiahs. They weren't even particularly naughty boys.

Josef K - Young and Stupid (1981)

The album is a compilation from 1987, but the songs all precipitate from 1981 at the latest - in case anyone was wondering about my dating. This is me catching up with a mental note made back in 1981 upon hearing Josef K's Endless Soul on the C81 compilation put together by persons at New Musical Express. I never bought NME, at least not regularly. Every time I saw a copy it irritated the living shit out of me. I think my friend Pete bought it because he really needed to know who was cool that week, so that's probably why he had C81, and thus was I able to borrow the tape because I wanted to copy the Cabaret Voltaire track; and Josef K's Endless Soul was about the best thing on there.

Yet somehow I never got any further. I think it was an impression formed of Josef K being one of those Postcard records bands, meaning they probably wore jumpers and sang twee songs about picnics and ginger beer, like Haircut 100 but without the tunes. I think this impression may have derived from the aforementioned Pete regarding Postcard as the most amazing stable of artists ever assembled, at least for a couple of weeks, which was tiresome and off-putting. I never worked out who he thought was impressed.

Thankfully, once I'm beyond my previously established comfort zone of Endless Soul, it turns out that Josef K sound nothing like I imagined they might. In fact, they sound a bit like how I always hoped Bauhaus would sound, but didn't - spiky, and angular guitar riffs mixed in with choppy funk, but more like a soul band than purveyors of the customary doom such a dynamic might ordinarily entail. The chords are weird, sharp, and jazzy, and the production is that bone dry post-punk thing falling somewhere between Gang of Four and Metal Box, aside from the cracking of an occasional, possibly conditional smile - as I suppose you'd expect of a band named after Franz Kafka's most beloved character. They should have been massive, but never mind.

The Skids - Days in Europa (1979)

With hindsight, I wonder if it was this album which pretty much finished off the Skids. I don't particularly recall any widespread public reaction against the initial release of the record sporting a cover looking one hell of a lot like Nazi propaganda, but then I was fourteen at the time so maybe I wouldn't. The Absolute Game, the album which came after, sold better, but they otherwise seemed to have disappeared off the mainstream radar by that point. It can't have helped that Richard Jobson was clearly fascinated by the period of European history between the wars, and particularly the art. There seems to have been quite a lot of it around at the time, what with Bauhaus and then various New Romantic types invoking that whole cabaret thing. Jobson dismissed suggestions of Nazi sympathies as nonsense, as of course he would, and I have to say there's nothing on this album suggesting the sort of dubious nostalgia peddled by Death in June and the like. Mostly it seems to be about the contrast of the optimism and even idealism of that era - regardless of the thrust of at least some of that idealism - with how it all turned to shit, so far as I can make out. Thematically a lot of Skids material seems to have been about beautiful losers by one definition or another.

And the memory shall linger,
And the memory shall fall,
It was a day in Europa,
My regression recalls.

Hail to the mighty, the ritual begins,
Hail to Apollo, the cleanser of sins,
Hail to Europa, she always wins.

So far, so Von Thronstahl, but the key is probably - at least hopefully - in the delivery, which is more the ruined decadence of Diamond Dogs than Laibach. I suppose it's possible that someone might genuinely have been simply exploring contentious ideas and images, and given Jobson's parallel obsessions with Busby Berkeley and Wilfred Owen, I'm going to assume that was the case for the sake of argument; but also because we've all forgiven David Bowie, and musicians are by definition mostly idiots who do stupid shit without any appreciation of the consequences; and as an optimist I'm applying this to any subsequent records which may or may not have had the word joy in the title.

The Skids were musically a massive glam stomp scored to what seemed like the world's biggest guitar - the late Stuart Adamson's somehow characteristically Scottish riffing which can't really be described without mentioning bagpipes - big slabs of sound bisecting each bar like the abstract forms of constructivist art. It invokes a certain Celtic cultural identity although thankfully expressed without being at the expense of anyone else's cultural identity; and it's given form by Jobson enthusiastically hooting away like a big, happy modernist bloodhound - ever a champion of style as substance. Away from the Skids, Adamson's music donned a traditional fisherman's sweater then deteriorated into folksy homilies about women called Morag forlornly awaiting the return of Johnny from the wars, but let's not dwell on that.

Aside from the kerfuffle invoked by albums with pictures of Aryan sporting personalities on the cover, and the unfortunate patronage of national socialist wingnuts like Von Thronstahl, Days in Europa is actually not so good as it really should have been with Bill Nelson at the desk - amazing singles and then some other tracks, but really nothing like so convincing as either Scared to Dance or The Absolute Game. I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble had I dug out one of those for a spin, but never mind.

A Certain Ratio - Early (2002)

I felt a bit sorry for A Certain Ratio being more or less reduced to a joke about fake tan in Michael Winterbottom's otherwise fine 24 Hour Party People, not least because any conversation banging on about the eternally seeping talent fistula of the Manchester music scene will almost certainly neglect A Certain Ratio whilst singing the praises of crappier entities who flogged more records; although it turns out that Martin Moscrop was musical supervisor for the film, so maybe that was just how it looked to me. I gather A Certain Ratio used to slap on the fake tan before taking the stage back in the early days. I assume it was simply an exercise in generating some distance between themselves and the ruthlessly pasty punky new wave environment of the time.

I don't for a second believe there was really anything inherently racist about punk or new wave at the end of the seventies, even if it was mostly a white thing, but at the same time it seems potentially significant that bands such as Skrewdriver were able to shift ideological gear without actually sounding any different; and then of course it occasionally seemed like there might be a bit of a subtext to the traditional punky hatred of disco. Anyway, I can see why A Certain Ratio might have felt inclined to get away from that, and from - I suppose - pale grey audiences of Joy Division fans crying into their chips. Never mind all that there's always been a dance element to our music, man bollocks, A Certain Ratio were a big, funky disco act which just happened to have emerged from the north of England rather than some New York club, and they were a big, funky disco act long before it was cool, and way before Cabaret Voltaire started slapping that bass whilst mumbling about James Brown. In fact, so far as I can tell, you might legitimately trace most of England's eighties white soul back to this lot, which probably means that Blue Rondo a la Turk and Spandau Ballet were sort of their fault, but never mind.

The thing which set them apart from many others was an understanding of their limitations and a willingness to work around them, which is why you might not even immediately recognise that sound as belonging to a big, funky disco act - because this is actual soul, dance, disco or whatever the hell you want to call it, rather than a bunch of white guys engaged in a Kenny Everett impersonation with unconvincing handclaps and whoops of get on up in a phoney American accent. At the same time, of course it's an experiment - as I suppose might seem implicit from the Eno reference in the name - but one with which they were fully engaged, as should be any musician doing anything other than just going through the motions and making the right noises; and this is why you get oddities like the misleadingly named All Night Party - as sunless an entity as ever was and which at least saves us the trouble of bothering to own Bauhaus records. Sometimes the horns don't quite get there, sounding like the brass equivalent of one of those school bands all sawing away on their strings, but the spirit of the enterprise as a whole keeps it together.

I'd say this band were magnificent but of course they're still going in some form or other, so I suppose the past tense is misleading, being a specific reference to the material collected on these two discs. With hindsight, this version of A Certain Ratio might represent the raw seam of sweaty goodness which others tapped for eventual transformation into all that was horrible, slick, devoid of soul, and gratifyingly annoying to Morrissey in the eighties. A Certain Ratio was what all those really shit bands were supposed to sound like, but they just didn't have what it takes.

The Sound - Jeopardy / From the Lion's Mouth / All Fall Down ...Plus (2014)

Here's an odd one, at least from where I've been stood. I was most certainly sentient between 1980 and 1982 - spanning the original release dates of these three albums - and not only was I sentient, but I was possibly at the most rabidly teenaged stage of my record collecting, a period during which I could pick even a Classix fucking Nouveaux album from the rack and wonder to myself what it sounded like. These years also happened to be the only time of my life during which I managed to keep diaries going right through until December. I'm presently transcribing some of these diaries for my own entertainment, and I have in particular noted firstly just how much I obsessed over certain bands at that age, and secondly, how little sense any of the rest of it makes thirty years down the line. I have therefore found myself having to look up quite a lot of stuff on the internets and the Googles in order to work out what the hell I was writing about, and it is during one such search that YouTube suggested I might also like to have a listen to New Dark Age by the Sound on the grounds of my watching something else that had happened in the same year. The cover art of both Jeopardy and From the Lion's Mouth - the first two albums - looked vaguely familiar, but I had never heard of the Sound. Then I recalled them as the band which had appeared on the front of issue seventeen of Alternative Sounds, the Coventry based fanzine produced by Martin of Attrition and which had been mentioned on Look! Hear! on the telly and everything. I went to the vault to investigate, but it was actually a band called the Silence who had appeared on said cover. Sound and silence - I suppose you can see how I might get them confused. Anyway, I recalled New Dark Age as something once recorded by SPK - a satisfyingly portentous title if ever there was - and so I clicked on the video to see what these Sound lads had been about.

A week later, I've developed such an obsession that I'm making my way through the four discs of this reissue of their first three albums, playing them over and over and over, and I'm seriously fucking bewildered as to how this bunch somehow escaped my attention. How they slipped past my teenage radar I will never know, given that they weren't particularly obscure, as indicated by the John Peel sessions and BBC Live in Concert bonus disc included here. The only explanation I have is that the Sound only exist in retrospect, their entire career having been retrofitted to the early eighties by some time-active power.

The excessive ghastitude of my flabber is down to the Sound being so much the distillation of everything I loved at the age of fifteen in musical terms that it seems inconceivable that I should only discover them now, three decades later. I suppose you might describe them as a cross between Wire and Joy Division with more of a power pop sensibility; except the more you listen, the poorer a fit such comparisons seem; and was there really ever a half decent band who suffered those Joy Division comparisons aside from Joy Division themselves? Maybe it would be better to suggest the Sound were quite clearly sprung from that same well of emotionally volatile post-punk which yielded Echo & the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and U2 - before they turned into Rio Tinto-Zinc - but then the Sound clearly pissed all over those bands too. Maybe the Sound were how we all hoped New Order would turn out, how New Order might have been had they not spunked up the entirety of their potential on that first album.

Well whatever, the Sound are - or I suppose were - sparse, punchy, tuneful, and intense, the song writing is of such absurdly powerful quality as to mean there's not a single track to be skipped amongst these four discs. Almost everything here could have been a hit single had we not been distracted by all the other shit that was around at the time, Bauhaus and the Cure and all those other sucked-in cheeks tosspots who somehow managed to forge out careers without a single decent album to their names. I Can't Escape Myself, Contact the Fact, Winning, Sense of Purpose, Party of the Mind, Monument, Calling the New Tune, Skeletons, Unwritten Law - one of those rare wonders wherein the bassline seems to bear no relation to the rest of the song and yet it all fits together with absolute perfection of intent, and Missiles - one of the most emotionally powerful anti-nuclear songs I've heard... all air-punchingly fine; and after a while you realise there's not much joy in picking out individual tracks, there being nothing which lowers the average, not even the four rare tracks recorded with Kevin Hewick who at first sounds like one of those horrible sub-Bowie types from some mushroom tea based Canterbury group. Even the live material sounds amazing, which is something very few groups ever managed on disc, in my view.

After three weeks of this lot on heavy rotation, I had to force myself to pack away the box and listen to something else. Absurd though it may seem, the Sound were just too good, too powerful. Never mind hairs stood up on the back of the neck, some of this stuff was beginning to bring tears to my eyes. I'm slightly fucked off that it's taken me thirty years to discover this group - particularly considering the tripe I've endured in a similar vein which isn't anything like so good - but better late than never.