Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

Excepting David Bowie and four Beatles albums inherited from childhood, my first broad appreciation of music was punk rock and the weirdy electronic noise which seemed to share its general spirit. I came to Led Zeppelin late, never having heard them on the radio and being naturally suspicious of anything embraced by the hairies with which I shared a school and a rural hometown, assuming it was probably all pretty much the same deal as Whitesnake; although I actually enjoyed Iron Maiden on the quiet, for whatever that may be worth. I finally popped my Led Zeppelin cherry, so to speak, in 1988, prior to which I hadn't knowingly heard so much as a note of their music. My friend and (at the time) downstairs neighbour Martin gave me this double album, having found a ratty looking copy in Oxfam or somewhere and taken it upon himself to repair the sleeve and clean up the two discs. He already owned the album but didn't like the idea of there being an unloved copy somewhere in the world.

'Thanks,' I probably said without obvious sincerity while not wishing to appear ungrateful, then listened to it mainly so I could at least tell him I'd done so before tactfully explaining that it really wasn't the sort of thing I enjoyed.

The first massive surprise was that it didn't sound anything like I'd expected. It sounded so raw and loud, yet without mere volume being a consideration, that it seemed like the band were hammering away right there in the corner of my damp bedsit. The second massive surprise was that I really, really liked what I was hearing. The emphasis was on the music and the interaction of those playing it. It had some of the raw energy of punk with bluesy touches, but not the sort of blues I'd come to associate with late night dullards, and while there was instrumental noodling aplenty, it all seemed to have a point - none of that widdly-widdly histrionic bollocks which always sounded like some twat trying hard to impress his mates. It didn't sound like anyone was wearing a cut off denim jacket with Judas Preist or Angle Witch tattooed on the back in leaky ballpoint; and above all, it didn't sound old, like a relic of times been and gone. Somehow it seemed marginally closer to David Bowie than all that other stuff.

More than three decades later, it still sounds fresh to me, still with that early morning sparkle of a clear blue sky, no fat, no stodge, no blubbery indulgence or congratulating ourselves at what bad boys we are; and for a group who pointedly stuck to albums in the expectation of you giving it your most serious attention, they're kind of populist with big, big tunes cranked out in heavy, heavy chords, and yet nothing which quite sounds like a run through of whatever anyone else had been doing. For something which was, at the very best, merely adjacent to prog rock, few of the songs truly follow any established structure, each going its own direction and taking whichever path seems to work.  So instead of fifteen grunting anthems to shagging while drunk in charge of a motorcycle, we have songs as soundtracks with instruments unheard on rock records of the time, the pensive neoclassical grandeur of Kashmir, blues for standing stones, the Biblical epic of In My Time of Dying, and even a spot of country. For one of those bands routinely described as the fathers of this, that and the other, they were almost entirely their own unique entity.

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.

David Bowie - Reality (2003)

This one came out during those forty or so years when I was looking the other way, and if we're to be honest, so were most of you lot. Excepting a few inconsequential squares in polo neck sweaters working for hospital radio, people with hearing jumped ship around the time of Let's Dance - to make an admittedly massive generalisation - because why the fuck wouldn't you? Some of us came to regret the decision, while others were too busy with everything else that has happened during the last four decades; and besides, we were tired of yet another true return to form sounding like more of the approximate same, and there's not much point getting upset about it. Anyway, I eventually saw the error of my ways and so I went back, overcome by curiosity, and it was all better than I remembered, even if the ironically titled Never Let Me Down remains difficult to love; but Reality is the one which had me kicking myself, because it might even be his greatest album - if such an accolade is even meaningful.

The drums pound just as they did on Heroes, and all that excess of instrumentation weaves away in the background, almost unnoticed until you can't shift the fucker from your internal jukebox; and yes, he churned out a couple of actual good 'uns prior to Reality, but this was the one where it sounded like he meant it, and it sounded like he was enjoying himself, and it sounded particularly like he'd stopped caring about what anyone else might think. This is the one, moreso than the final two, where I suddenly remembered how exciting it used to be to come home with a new Bowie album, which was back in the days when I still had school on Monday. The new Bowie album always did a whole shitload of stuff you hadn't expected - by which I don't mean cod reggae with Tina Turner on the chorus - and it was new and exciting and you'd feel connected to something you couldn't even describe.

I still don't know what the hell this album is about, beyond the obviously insubstantial quality of modern life, and yet it affects me deeply. She'll Drive the Big Car in particular tears my heart out every time and I'm not even sure why, except that it felt like Dave understood something profound but bigger than words and difficult to squash into a song, something good, and he was doing his best to share it around.

You know that writing about music is a waste of time, right?

Nitewreckage - Take Your Money and Run (2011)

Here's another pie in which Dave Ball had a number of fingers, and one which seems to have slipped under the radar, or at least under my radar. This is a shame because pretty much everything Dave Ball has had a hand in has been at least great, and usually essential listening. English Boy on the Love Ranch was another one and yet they too sank without trace, which I mention mainly so as to illustrate that there's been more Dave Ball out there than you may realise.

Nitewreckage were thematically and sonically closer to Soft Cell than the Grid - the other one we've all heard of - and distinctive for showcasing the vision of vocalist and cabaret performer Celine Hispiche who chats, sings, screeches, howls and croons her way through a series of terrifying stories of domestic abuse, sordid hook-ups, and emotional blackmail bearing only superficial resemblance to Marc Almond's stint on the same microphone, but delivered with equivalent visceral passion. The whole album feels like a night on the town in Soho - and a rainy night at that - which you're definitely going to regret, but with Hispiche putting on a screw face and doing whatever the fuck it takes to get through - as distinct from Almond's bruised innocence. Even with all those synths grinding away, there's an element of X-Ray Spex to this one.

Sorry - that's about as close as I can get to a working description, and I'm slightly puzzled that we haven't heard more of Celine Hispiche on the strength of this bunch. If it turns out that she simply exploded shortly after they finished the album, it really wouldn't be that difficult to believe. Take Your Money and Run is as good as anything Soft Cell ever recorded without it even being obvious that we have the same guy banging away on the piano. Also, their version of Bowie's Repetition makes the one on Lodger sound like the cover.

David Bowie - Toy (2000)

I wasn't going to bother on the grounds that I don't just automatically spunk up a wad of cash every time I see that the latest squeeze of the postmortem Bowie udder has yielded yet another boxed set of unreleased answering machine messages, this time issued as fifteen 8" picture discs depicting the master's kneecaps through the ages and yours for just fifty billion smackers, you fucking chump; but then the American government gave me a whole bunch of money and I thought, fuck it - I'll only regret it if I don't.

Toy, as everyone in the universe knows, was Bowie doing covers of songs first recorded by himself back when he was merely a calf. The selling point - aside from it being Bowie - seems to be how much fun you can tell they were having, despite which, the label were disinclined to release it at the time.

My initial impressions were that, firstly - it was better than I'd expected, and secondly - that despite being better than I expected there's not one song here which improves on the original version. I'm quite keen on Bowie's sixties crap, corny and overly mannered though at least some of it may be, and on close inspection I realise Toy mostly covers what I vaguely regard as the lesser tracks - I Dig Everything, Can't Help Thinking About Me and so on; on the other hand, the lad revisits The London Boys, and he does a great job, a powerful rendering which is almost there, except we're talking about The London Boys, the original of which is arguably one of the greatest things ever produced by western civilisation; so although middle aged Bowie produces as great a version as you'll hear, it will never be the original.

Anyway, after a week or so of listening to the thing, I begin to get a feel for it. There are actually four tracks I've never heard before for reasons given in the first paragraph, and they're pretty great; and the rest of Toy slowly establishes its own identity as something other than slightly more expensive sounding versions of songs I remember from when I was little. So, it's nowhere near as good as Heathen, but it's probably better than Hours, and Hours isn't actually bad so why not, I suppose. That being said, the reason this seemed to cost so much is that it's the same album three fucking times spread over twelve sides of vinyl, the rest of the material being outtakes, demos, alternate versions and - ugh - remixes, none of which I'm likely to bother listening to a second time. The twelve proper tracks fit very nicely on a natty wee 10" double album with each disc in an overly informative sixties style inner sleeve suggesting we play these phonograph recordings with such and such a stylus etc. etc. - and it's all you need, and probably all Dave needed us to hear.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd (1973)

Typographic jiggery pokery usually gets on my tits when it comes to music artists and their work, but Skynyrd get a pass because 1) it was the seventies, and 2) it's fuckin' Skynyrd, dude - get a grip. In the event of that having been an H.M. Bateman sound effect I just heard, and because I suppose we have to get it out of the way - no they weren't; it was the record company's idea; no it isn't; Neil Young himself admitted it had been a dick move on his part; and anything else you may feel you need to know is explained in detail on the internet, most of which is fairly easy to find.

I first discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd when I heard Free Bird on the radio back in the eighties. I'd missed the beginning of the song and the DJ didn't bother to name names once it was over, and it took me a couple of years to work out what I'd taped - because it had seemed worth taping. Initially I thought it was some lost Bowie number from the Ziggy Stardust era. The vocal didn't sound quite right but the guitar was definitely something in the vein of Mick Ronson, or so it seemed to me.

Eventually the penny dropped and I also added Sweet Home Alabama to the tally of still guilty pleasures, or at least pleasures which some bigger boys had explained were to be considered guilty; so I picked up a greatest hits CD on the cheap, half expecting it to comprise two admittedly sublime songs in amongst a whole passel of gun toting anthems to slave ownership, that being the narrative one tends to find affixed to Lynyrd Skynyrd; and being white working class guys from the south, it doesn't really matter if it's true or not because it probably is - so we're habitually told. Unfortunately, it turned out that every single track on the disc was amazing - not even merely listenable, but as unto pure spun gold plucked from the harps of a heavenly host of particularly bluesy angels; and so now, realising I've wasted most of my life by not listening to this band, I'm backtracking; and the first album seemed like a good place to start.

Anticipating a couple of admittedly sublime singles in amongst a half hour of twanging sounds of lesser substance, I'm once again surprised and even humbled to realise how great this band were at the height of their powers. This was post-sixties guitar rock drawn heavily from the blues, but drawn by dudes who lived that stuff on a daily basis and who learned it from the stoops and porches of the wrinkled old guys who came up with it because the wrinkled old guys who came up with it lived in the same neighbourhood; meaning Skynyrd were a very different affair to Clapton and those taking a cheap if expertly played holiday in someone else's tradition, because this was a continuation, part of the same heritage, and it was anything but colonisation. Not only do you listen to this music, but you feel it in all parts of your body because it communicates to heart and soul with such intensity as to amount to a direct link to whatever went into these songs, which are so fresh and clear that they could have been laid down only yesterday; and I didn't even realise this kind of music could do that, even the whiskey soaked honkytonk numbers. This also means that Lynyrd Skynyrd may be one of the most unfairly maligned groups in the history of music, at least regarding the idea that there could be even so much as a whiff of anything which people who went to better schools might declare to be racism; but as I've come to appreciate since I first arrived in Texas, some people simply don't like the south, and their disdain is such as to sustain all of the usual stereotypes without trial. Honestly, aside from the sheer pleasure of being part of the right gang, I suspect it's down to fear. No-one likes to be reminded of the underclass, particularly those who've either escaped or insulated themselves from it, and they particularly dislike that underclass trying to tell them anything.

Well, have you ever lived down in the ghetto?
Have you ever felt the cold wind blow?
Well, if you don't know what I mean,
Won't you stand up and scream?
'Cause there's things goin' on that you don't know.

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right,
I hope they never sleep at night.
They better make some changes,
And do it soon.

I was told to expect something from the depths of hillbilly hell, and against all expectations this turns out to be one of the most powerful, heartfelt, and expressive rock albums I think I've ever heard - musically, emotionally, even spiritually if you like. I just wish it hadn't taken me a whole four decades to reach this understanding.

Bill Nelson - Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam (1981)

Bill Nelson probably got me buying 7" singles. I rarely bothered with them during my teenage years because albums seemed better value and my pocket money didn't stretch that far, so I didn't get into the habit; plus my friends Pete and Graham, respectively sons of a retired colonel and a bank manager who had seemingly done better in the pocket money lottery than myself, were usually well stocked up on all the singles I would have bought, so I taped their copies. All the same, Bill Nelson's Do You Dream in Colour? seemed like the best thing I'd ever heard at the time, and still retains most of its magic, not least for featuring three killer b-side tracks. Naturally I bought the album.

Years later, I notice that I never bought the 7" of Do You Dream in Colour? which seems like a massive oversight. I have the other tracks on The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything compilation, but sometimes it's nice to have a stack of three or four singles to play when you're having a shave and getting ready to go out, and so I tracked a copy down on Discogs; then noticed that somehow I'd confused my having taped the Stranglers' Christmas EP from Graham with possessing a copy of my own, so I bought one and then took to buying up all the singles I should have picked up first time round, which is thanks to Bill Nelson. Do You Dream in Colour? really is a fucking cracking record.

I still don't fully understand why Bill Nelson wasn't massive, given some of those singles. My guess is that he didn't quite fit into new wave, having been in a band which had featured an airbrushed guitar turning into a skull on the cover - and he clearly wasn't a skinny tie guitar band from New York singing about girls and soda pop; and his music was presumably too weird for old school hairies. Of course, there was quite a head count in the Bowie-influenced cattle truck at the time, and it could be argued that Nelson ticked more boxes than most - Banal could almost have come from the Scary Monsters sessions, for example; but listen close and it sounds more like parallel evolution than influence. We have the post-glam chug and stomp of Banal or Disposable, but there's an angular, spiky edge suggesting European art cinema rather than Warhol's factory, and literary influences that are possibly more Ballard than Burroughs or whoever, perhaps with some early Roxy chucked in; somehow, despite which, I'm not sure it's possible to mistake Quit Dreaming for the work of anyone but Bill Nelson.

This is a genuinely huge album with a massive sound which artfully strikes a balance between filmic bleeps and squelches with rocking the fuck out - big, bold populist riffs and heroic vocals. Weirdly, it's not even like this was the high point prior to some overproduced tail off, it being the first of a whole string of solid albums which somehow seem to have been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't already a fan. How the hell did that happen?


Never mind. If you didn't already get the memo, Quit Dreaming really is a masterpiece in every sense.

Smell & Quim - Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome (1999)

It's strange that it should have taken so long for the power electronics scene to embrace the pitch changed voice as heard on Bowie's thematically ancestral Laughing Gnome and of course whatever it was that Alvin & the Chipmunks did, but it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that only Smell & Quim had the balls to step up to the bat when the time came. Unfortunately there were only fifty numbered copies in a fancy hand-crafted box - of which mine was forty-two, thanks for asking - but it's your lucky day because someone has been brave enough to unleash this monster on CD - at long fucking last.

Pushy Gothic Gnome Versus Charity Techno Gnome comprises an hour of Smell & Quim's characteristically batshit dada noise, opening with the eponymous gnomes telling us a little about themselves - our Pushy Gothic Gnome is from Bradford in West Yorkshire and very much enjoys the music of the Sisters of Mercy, for example. What follows may even be some sort of noise opera for all I'm able to tell, for certainly it feels as though a story is being told even if it's one which is more or less dependent on the listener's interpretation of the subsequent barrage of noise, feedback, backwards tapes, cheap and tinny rhythms, digital delay, air raid siren, howls, whistles, twanging noises, and other effects by which this work might be viewed as arguably the closest anyone from the noise planet ever came to sounding like the Residents. Then again the Residents second album was called Baby Sex and that was pretty chaotic, so maybe it's not quite such a stretch.

I've been listening to this bunch for thirty years now, and I still don't understand them, but on the other hand I just can't say enough good things about their work, of which this is a particularly fine representation.

Available from this lot.

Adam & the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980)

I was probably born at exactly the right time to appreciate this one. I'd just turned fifteen and was already vaguely aware of the Ants, and if not intimately so, enough so to have anticipated this second album and got some pleasure out of it before you suddenly couldn't escape from the fucking thing. Six months earlier, I'd found the Ants disturbing yet fascinating, mainly because for me - tucked away in the Midlands and still at school - they seemed only to exist as an indie chart presence and rumours. The music press hated them, and the astonishingly thorough lack of coverage lent them the appeal of forbidden fruit. Paul Woods told me he remembered a few of their early performances, notably one in which Ant supposedly provoked audience members into beating him up and appeared to be getting off on the thrashing. This, Paul said, was quite disturbing to watch, and that's my only real clue as to why the Ants should have been so reviled in their early days, although personally I suspect it may have been more to do with the Cromwellian demand for authenticity during those early post-punk years. Adam & the Ants had art college associations and were born from a fifties revival band called Bazooka Joe and were therefore fake, unlike the Clash - something in that general direction anyway.

Of course, it's all bollocks, as was the notion of their having sold out due to thirteen-year old schoolgirls buying this album. Adam & the Ants - here meaning mainly Adam Ant so as to include everything up to Vive Le Rock - had been an essentially theatrical concern from the very beginning, hence few anthems to either the dole queue or boredom as a general condition - very much sons of Bowie, and Roxy Music in particular. It's all too easy too think of this as the third version of the Ants, following on from the fetish-punk decadence then stark European cinema phases; and this was populism, musical eclecticism, Morricone's sense of scale, and songs which specifically referred to being in a band called Adam & the Ants. I seem to remember one critic objecting that these songs were about antmusic, as distinct from actually being antmusic such as we'd heard on Dirk Wears White Sox. Looking back now, without having to filter out appearances on Jim'll Fix It or the Basil Brush Show, it's difficult to miss the continuity. Sure, they were absurd, even pantomime with Los Rancheros and Jolly Roger and a lot of what came after, but they always had been. Music hall was sort of the point, and had been from the very beginning with Young Parisians, Punk in the Supermarket, Il Duce and others. The only difference here is the camera pointing in yet another direction, new scenery, change of wardrobe, and with a shift from black and white to garish technicolor.

Having been listening to the Ants for a full four decades, I still don't fully understand why they weren't massive from the start, so their abrupt ascent to teenybop stardom with this album is hardly surprising because, aside from anything else you might take into consideration, Kings of the Wild Frontier is an unreservedly great record. If Dirk had been European cinema, this was Hollywood, maybe even the Hollywood version of Hollywood - wide-eyed optimism, noble ideas albeit in cartoon form, and Link Wray twanging away in the background establishing a sort of pop classicism. It steals from pretty much everything, blends, mixes, matches, but steals with love, and so we have spaghetti westerns sharing grooves with the b-movie horror of Ants Invasion or Killer in the Home. Mostly it's a collage, elements which shouldn't go together but which work perfectly, and as such it's a pretty fucking weird record to have occupied either a number one slot or a teenage bedroom at the tail end of the seventies.

I've never been embarrassed to admit to loving this album, or Prince Charming or any of those which came after for that matter, and I've no idea as to the general health of the Ants' legacy these days. You may not like it now but you will seemed quite prescient back in November 1980, and I'm sure there's still time if you didn't but nevertheless fancy giving it a go.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

Cabaret Voltaire - 1974-76 (2019)

I realise this one has been around for yonks but I've only just heard it. I missed out on the Industrial Records version by a couple of months, and was never tempted by any of the CD reissues because they all seem to have been reissued at the same time as five million other things, representing a tidal wave of rarities, and I didn't feel like taking a second job just for the sake of keeping up with all that Grey Area stuff. Now, however, it's been issued on vinyl as is only right and proper, so here we are.

Pleasingly, this material is somewhat less rudimentary than I imagined it would be, based on Is That Me (Finding Someone at the Door Again?), the b-side of Nag Nag Nag dating from the same era. Nevertheless, the music is fairly rudimentary, recorded on a domestic reel to reel - it says here - therefore possibly not even a four track; electronic rhythm is provided by one of those lounge boxes with five or six settings, samba, bossanova and so on; instrumentation is sparse, everything on the cheap, with a few rudimentary effects filling in. In other words, they did as much as they could with whatever was available, so it's somewhat noodly, like very early Gristle without the arts council funding - swooping sine waves, clangs, bleeps, and farts - but it's very atmospheric, and pretty impressive for something recorded around the same time as Diamond Dogs. Most peculiar of all is that 1974-76 seems more like a forerunner to the moods and loops of The Voice of America than to the velvet distortion of Mix-Up, their first album proper.

Oddities of particular interest include Do the Snake and She Loves You. Snake is what you used to get when suburban whitey rendered his low-fi interpretation of disco music safe in the knowledge that no-one outside the band would ever hear the thing, stilted and self-conscious exhortations to get on down and so on - we've all been there, I'm sure; and if you listen closely you will notice that She Loves You is actually a cover of the Beatles song, with all of its moptopped screamarama pared down to something weird and paranoid which sounds as though it was recorded inside a cupboard, which may well have been the case. Elsewhere on these two discs, you will find nothing obvious or overstated - as has generally been true of Cabaret Voltaire's work - and neither is there any padding, anything which could have been shed for the sake of brevity. As always, the strength of this band are elements which emerge and which remain difficult to pin down, never anything flung directly in your face; and even if it's a little basic in places, this collection holds its own in relation to the likes of Voice of America, Red Mecca, Microphonies or any of the others.

David Bowie - Tonight (1984)

Yes, I know, but it's not like he's going to be recording any new ones so it seemed like time I went in, just out of curiosity. After all, it might not be that bad.

Having been loyal to Bowie right up until Let's Dance, I spent most of the eighties looking in the other direction. It seemed as though he'd lost the plot from where I'd been standing, and I still loathe the plinky-plonky banality of ying-tong-iddle-I-China Girl, and it was surely only a matter of time before he turned up dressed as a foam rubber parrot on Celebrity It's a Knockout!

Anyway, I've grudgingly come to accept that I was wrong about Let's Dance - excepting Bowie's cover of Aneka's Japanese Boy - and I guess the same is true of this one, which is weird. I expected it to be worse, like Let's Dance with shoulder pads and blonde highlights instead of tunes. Firstly I should admit that both Blue Jean and Loving the Alien sounded all right as singles, even at the time, if admittedly not cut from quite the same cloth as Rebel Rebel or Drive-In Saturday. They've aged pretty well, particularly now that the glossy eighties production has begun to sound like a novel affectation rather than something from which there's no fucking escape. Loving the Alien actually comes surprisingly close to magnificent, particularly the Howard Goodall style staircase of ascending notes leading up to its suitably epic chorus.

The prosecution should probably also take into account that Bowie does cod reggae on this record, and twice, and one of those times in the company of his famous friend Tina Turner. It should be awful but somehow isn't, although I've never really had a problem with cod reggae, apart from finding it funny. It additionally provides a clue to why Tonight turned out as it did, at least once we take into account that it's produced by Hugh Padgham, father of the gated snare and other eighties crimes: Bowie wanted to be Sting.

Play Tonight enough and it sounds okay; another few days and it sounds decent once you've stopped noticing the haircuts and the jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow; and by the end of the second week, it sounds better than either Low or Heroes, or if not better, at least like it had some idea of what the fuck it was doing.

Everything I've ever known is wrong.

Einstürzende Neubauten - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala (1987)

I'm not sure why I never noticed it before, but I'm beginning to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, or at least I have. Simon Morris of the Ceramic Hobs, an approximately close personal friend with whom I often enjoy a round of golf and himself no stranger to an ear-splitting racket, recently opined that he regarded them as either shit, grossly overrated, or a combination of the two, without quite being able to put his finger on why; which intrigued me because, although very much a fan, I could see that he had a point somewhere in there, or at least a perspective. I bought the earlier albums when they came out, and yet despite having just described myself as very much a fan, it's somehow taken me thirty-two years to bother with this one and I'm not sure why.

The first person I knew to listen to Einstürzende Neubauten besides myself was a vaguely gothy art college girl who also liked Tom Waits and ended up singing in a jazz band. She would occasionally drift off into a reverie about Blixa Bargeld's cheekbones, a fixation which I came to associate with her slightly disturbing monologues about the pleasure taken in not eating much and being able to feel her own rib cage. I suppose that's art school for you. Bargeld of course ended up in Nick Cave's band, presenting a similarly unfortunate association. I'm not saying Cave is lacking talent, but I've never seen whatever it is that others apparently see in his music, possibly excepting The Mercy Seat which is as wonderful as the rest is a droning racket. All of which seems to characterise Einstürzende Neubauten as the noise band most likely to turn up on the soundtrack of a Neil fucking Gaiman adaptation; but there's a reasonable chance I'm talking bollocks here.

The realisation that comes to me after a week of listening to - and enjoying, I hasten to add - Fuenf Auf Der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala, and the thing which leads me to think we've been wrong about Einstürzende Neubauten all this time, is that they're actually more traditional than you might realise. Clearly they take delight in the subtleties of sounds derived from non-musical instruments, so we're still some distance from the Spencer Davis Group, but the noises and scrapes and clangs tend to form something vaguely Brechtian, very theatrical and - I suppose - amounting to medieval serfs forced to scrape a lament together with whatever metal objects happen to be at hand. I probably shouldn't be so surprised. Drilling holes in the ICA was nothing if not theatrical. They pull faces and make noises, but it's still entertainment.

Here they cover the Grateful Dead's Morning Dew, and it sounds oddly like Even Better Than the Real Thing by U2, but better, and preferable to the original to my ears, although probably not so good as Devo's rendering. It doesn't sound even remotely out of place either.

Having come to this realisation, I dug out Halber Mensch and gave it a spin, and sure enough, beyond the fact that we're hearing some dude thumping plastic water bottles with a wrench, at heart it could be a late seventies Bowie album. I don't suggest this to be a bad thing, by the way, and it doesn't mean I enjoy Einstürzende Neubauten any less, but it's been eye-opening and explains the Cave association. Further objections should probably be ignored on the grounds that the worst aspect of anything will always be its stupid fucking fans.

The Butts Band (1974)

I always had a bit of an uncomfortable aversion to the Doors. On the one hand I've never been particularly impressed by Jim Morrison, or at least I've never been impressed by the myth of Morrison as visionary prophet; but on the other it's difficult to deny the quality of the music, even with himself belching his sixth form poetry over the top. I'm not even sure why I'm bothered, given the high quota of shitheads already taking up shelf space in my record collection and how I can still listen to the Pistols without recalling Lydon sharing a trustworthy working class pint with grinning Nigel Farage; but never mind because I've just discovered the existence of the Butts Band.

I never realised that the Doors had recorded albums without Morrison, which is probably my fault for assuming that all music was shit prior to the Damned releasing New Rose. It turns out that just two Doors were involved, but crucially neither of them were Jim Morrison due to his having departed for that great sixth form common room in the sky, making it possible for me to appreciate the vibe without anything of a self-important disposition getting in the way; and they must have been doing something right, because this is some considerable distance outside of my comfort zone.

The problem I have with the seventies is that, contrary to the claims of nostalgic telly shows, it really wasn't all David Bowie and Marc Bolan popping around Twiggy's house to watch Doctor Who, and I know this because I was actually there, meaning I was actually there in the seventies rather than at Twiggy's house. Mostly it was young beige men with flares, beards and sunglasses wishing they were on a beach in California, and the music was horrible and earnest and twiddly in all the wrong places*; but in every shower of shite there's always some undigested diced carrot representing the form as it should have been, and should be remembered - something which sounds amazing even before Quentin Tarantino ironically stripes it onto footage of a sharp dressed man kicking someone's head off. I can think of about a million records that should have sounded like the Butts Band but didn't, but never mind.

They've retained that bluesy quality which made the Doors sound so powerful, dark and brooding without becoming ponderous; and on this foundation they've built a record which is actually sort of light without being fluff, and even pretty funky. It has a soulful edge without sounding like it's trying to prove anything, and which probably means we're long overdue Michael Gira feeling he has to cover I Won't Be Alone Anymore. This is a record which probably constitutes a postscript, and yet to my ears it sounds like a refinement of what they were doing before. Would that a few more seventies also rans had been this good.

I gather there was a second album with a different line-up augmenting Densmore and Kreiger, but they got it so right on this one that I'm a bit wary of tracking it down.

*: Relax, Daphne - I didn't mean ELP.

The Hare and the Moon - The Gray Malkin (2010)

Just to get it out of the way, I was once quite partial to the neofolk. It's appeal, at least for me, lay in the juxtaposition of musical forms which had, by that point, become indelibly stamped as innocuous through childhood memories of watching Val Doonican or the Spinners on the telly, in stark contrast with the subject matter, the black uniforms, the whole ambiguity of are they or aren't they? - which has obvious appeal when you're young, irritable and disinclined to think about anything in too much detail. Then as you get older, you realise that they are - or were in a few cases - which is probably partially why we're in the mess that we're in now and why no-one seems quite certain as to whether Hitler is still a bad guy or just someone who went about things the wrong way. Anyway, the realisation left something of a bad taste in my mouth because really, I knew on some level that there was more to our neofolk banner carriers than simply not liking reggae. Having one of the more corpulent representatives of the form visit me in my own home, take up space on my sofa, use my artwork, call me a fairy on his website, and then turn out to have really, really, really disliked reggae all along was also annoying, and has subsequently somewhat sucked the fun out of listening to the one Sol Invictus album that wasn't shit.

So, it takes work to get me listening to neofolk, and I notice with some sense of relief that the Hare and the Moon wisely shun the term on their Bandcamp page, rather citing their influences as M.R. James, Arthur Machen, and Black Sabbath, amongst others. This is actually a cassette edition of their second album issued by the ATSLA label in 2014, kindly sent to me by the man from ATSLA. It's a bit strange getting a cassette tape through the post in the year 2018, but strange in a good way because I prefer physical objects to things downloaded. I tend to appreciate music stored on physical media due to the greater effort expended in creating it, obtaining it or listening to it. Also, having spent the last couple of years digitising tapes from my own collection, some dating back to 1980, I have come to realise that reports of cassette tape as an unreliable, second rate medium have been grossly exaggerated. Of the hundreds of cassettes I've digitised so far, I have encountered no discernible reduction in sound quality, excepting on a couple of Memorex tapes, and Memorex were always shit so it's no big surprise. By contrast, I've lost count of the number of CDRs which have since degraded into digital slush.

Cassette tapes were a wonderful and democratic medium. Almost anyone could record something. They were cheap and easy to duplicate and to send to other people. One could listen to a cassette tape without requiring a fucking password or expensive glitch-prone technology. The odd one might get chewed up, but it was pretty rare if you kept your tape deck clean and stuck to decent quality tapes; and maybe they won't last forever, but most of them will probably last as long as you're alive and I don't know why anyone would need them to last longer.

So yes, this is a nice thing to have received in the post; and to finally get to the point, the Hare and the Moon tap into the folk tradition and the folklore of the British isles and its countryside without any of the bollocks I've grown to find so distasteful, or any of that whining about one's culture being under assault. I grew up in the British countryside, which was actually sort of terrifying. My childhood was spent within a stones throw of Meon Hill in Warwickshire, famed for witchcraft related murders having taken place in living memory; so as a child, the background noise of my existence was very much the sort of thing invoked by M.R. James and seen in The Wicker Man, which is why I now live in a city. The Hare and the Moon capture the rhythm of that world very well without necessarily sounding like an historical re-enactment of anything. Traditional instrumentation is here blended with the electronic to produce a fusion which reminds me a little of Eno's work with David Bowie; and so, something I might ordinarily have avoided turns out to defy expectations, and to provide a breath of very fresh air. Had neofolk been a bit more like this than how it mostly turned out, the world might have been a better place.

Get it here.

Blancmange - Happy Families (1982)

I had a couple of singles and happily taped the hits off the wireless, but Blancmange otherwise passed me by, or at least failed to have quite the same impact as Soft Cell - another couple of blokes with a synth newly arisen from the grooves of Some Bizarre Album. To say that Blancmange seemed tame in comparison to Soft Cell may be redundant on the grounds that everybody seemed tame in comparison  to Soft Cell, at least for a couple of months back there; and on the other hand, at least Blancmange seemed to know who they were, unlike Depeche Mode - the other sons of that same creative flowering, roughly speaking - who seemed to want to be a different group every couple of weeks and yet always sounded like what happens when you press the demo button on a Casio VL Tone, even after that weekend when they found those special grown-up sex clothes in a trunk at the back of dad's wardrobe.

So I hadn't really thought about Blancmange in nearly thirty years, which might seemingly characterise their having been a bit of an Alan Partridge act, forever doomed to supply cosily literal soundtracks to quirky regional news features about people who live on the ceiling, or who've seen a word, or who can't explain something. Then I found this in a record store in Austin and remembered that I'd vaguely intended to buy it at some point; and it's not half bad.

Blancmange chose the name as something pink and silly, in contrast to other bands of the time naming themselves the Dark Satanic Mills or the Bleak Industrial Cooling Towers - as Neil Arthur once explained on the wireless, the tape of which I still have somewhere - which makes a lot of sense with hindsight. Bands reliant on synths and drum machines were a novelty back in 1982, but not that much of a novelty, and what distinguished Blancmange was music rooted in soul, big band, Burt Bacharach, James Brown, things which jam and demonstrate familiarity with African rhythm. There's not much trace of Johnny Thunders here, not even a lot Bowie, and if Soft Cell were the Velvet Underground with sequencers, then Blancmange were something in the region of the Talking Heads; which is an odd thing to realise, but Happy Families really does sound like a cousin to Remain in Light what with the soulful choruses, the choir, the rhythmic build up and Neil Arthur's peculiarly self aware lyrics.

I thought Happy Families would be okay, but I didn't realise it would be quite so solid and enduring as it is, and I've Seen the Word is still a beautiful piece of music.

Nine Inch Nails - Add Violence (2017)

This is apparently the second of a series of three EPs. I'd actually given up on the idea of getting hold of them and resigned myself to eventually picking up the compact disc collecting all three, having been told that one would eventually appear. I'd had a look on the Nine Inch Nails website, but I could barely work out what I was even attempting to purchase. There they were, Not the Actual Events and Add Violence, something about the download, and then the physical component with no clue as to what form it took. Having no wish to find I'd somehow bought a cake with instructions for recreating the music iced around the sides, I didn't bother. Even more galling was the presence of the mission statement on the same virtual page.

In these times of nearly unlimited access to all the music in the world, we've come to appreciate the value and beauty of the physical object. Our store's focus is on presenting these items to you. Vinyl has returned to being a priority for us - not just for the warmth of the sound, but the interaction it demands from the listener. The canvas of artwork, the weight of the record, the smell of the vinyl, the dropping of the needle, the difficulty of skipping tracks, the changing of sides, the secrets hidden within, and having a physical object that exists in the real world with you… all part of the experience and magic.

Digital formats and streaming are great and certainly convenient, but the ideal way I'd hope a listener experience my music is to grab a great set of headphones, sit with the vinyl, drop the needle, hold the jacket in your hands looking at the artwork (with your fucking phone turned off) and go on a journey with me.

That's canny good like, Trent, I imagined myself saying to the screen in a broad Tyneside accent, but I don't seem to be able to find the fucker in order to actually buy it. It was frustrating and perhaps even a little saucy considering Nine Inch Nails were about the only band whose stuff I was still trying to buy when vinyl went tits up first time around. My copy of The Downward Spiral sounded like it had been pressed on repurposed car tires, and then there were all those fucking bonus tracks exclusive to the CDs...

Well, never mind.

Anyway, there I was in Barnes & Noble looking for the February issue of the Wire, which I wouldn't ordinarily buy but there was a feature on the Ceramic Hobs for which the cheeky cunts have used a photo of the same lifted direct from my Flickr page. So they've given me a credit - although I've a feeling the photo was actually taken by Rob Colson, albeit with my camera - but a note to say dear bloke, we've just used your picture of Simon Morris, so ta in my Flickr inbox would have been nice. Anyway, Barnes & Noble still didn't have the magazine for something like the sixth week in a row, casting suspicions on their claim that the February one would deffo be on the racks soon, so I wandered into their music department, just out of curiosity. It was about as good as I expected - nothing less than 180gsm vinyl, bewildering reissues of seventies hairies whose albums never should have been released first time round, awkward teens stood self-consciously fondling Beatles records, the Cockney Rejects and Sham 69 sections looking predictably slender, and - much to my surprise - a couple of physical components by Nine Inch Nails. So I bought them.

To finally get to the point, Not the Actual Events is decent, and yet has conspicuously failed to glue itself to my turntable like I thought it would. Excepting remix albums, whatever Nine Inch Nails thing I've just got hold of will generally edge out all other listening material for at least the first two weeks. The music of Nine Inch Nails does pretty much one thing for most of the time and is as such immediately recognisable, so the new stuff will always be variations on an immediately recognisable theme; but the magic of Trent Reznor - and now presumably Atticus Ross - is his - or their - serving up that same basic recipe with just enough of a tweak to make it feel like the very first time you've heard it expressed so well, and so clearly. Not the Actual Events is mostly wonderful, and yet somehow sounds like it could be stuff left over from The Slip or one of the others, although it could be significant that it should be the platter to get the heave-ho once Add Violence glued itself to the turntable.

Add Violence does whatever it is that Actual Events didn't quite achieve, sounding very much like yet another Nine Inch Nails record whilst at the same time somehow sounding nothing like the others - angst expressed as the Stooges covered by Coil, or possibly the other way round, distressed tapes of synthesiser music from seventies kids shows amped up until it resembles Black Sabbath; and all of that good air-punching stuff. I'm sure Actual Events will grow on me, as do those tracks you always get on the album which aren't Ashes to Ashes or Paranoid or Questions and Answers, but as for Add Violence - it's fucking amazing.

David Bowie - Let's Dance (1983)

Just to reiterate, I drifted away after the third or fourth album hailed as a true return to form by latecomer Bowie zombies who had discovered the bloke when he played a whispy Gandalf in Labyrinth. I longed for a return to greatness, but time and again those amazing comeback and this time I'm not joking records proved themselves unlistenable. After Black Tie White Noise turned out to be an improvement only in the sense that a B.A. Robertson album is probably an improvement on anything by ELO, I decided that enough was enough. Of course it turns out that he eventually did remember how to make a decent record, and weirdly I've come to regard the run of albums from Heathen through to Blackstar as his best work. So, all you gormless wankers who spent the eighties crowing he's back and he's brilliant at every lame Tina Turner team-up, every guest spot with Gordon the Gopher, thanks for fucking nothing, you stupid cunts.

Anyway, it seemed like time to take the plunge and get hold of this one on the grounds that I may have been wrong. Let's Dance was a great single, but I hated China Girl with its plinky-plonky something Chinese this way comes riff, and the album cover looks like a card you'd buy for a fourteen year old boy. All that's missing are the words on your birthday and a racing car in the lower right corner; but the problem wasn't just that Bowie, having grown tired of pretending to read Albert Camus, wanted to be a pop star again. The problem was also that with the best will in the world, Let's Dance was never going to sound great stood next to Scary Monsters.

I've now played the thing a million times so as to give it every possible opportunity to sink in and to work whatever magic it may have, and okay - I will grudgingly concede that it isn't that bad, generally speaking. I can see how Dave may have felt inclined to revisit his roots, specifically his rhythm and blues roots as heard on those Lower Third records, because the problem with the sort of introspection which had informed his previous four or five albums is that one eventually gets sick of the sound of one's own voice, and so I guess he just wanted to have fun making a record again. With that in mind, it's to his credit that he therefore made a vaguely decent record with Let's Dance in so much as that it goes back to his roots without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia, even moving things forward a little in trying something new with the big, live, occasionally even raw, sound of Nile Rodgers' production. I suppose then this is almost Bowie's punk album, at least in spirit, or certainly more so than the austere noodling of Low or Heroes.

I can appreciate this record a little better these days, particularly given that The Next Day sounds like him trying to get Let's Dance right in a couple of places, but it nevertheless remains a flawed album. This investigation has reminded me that Modern Love was also a great single, and that China Girl would be decent were it not for the Charlie Chan riff; but if you took away either Modern Love or the title song, you'd be left with a great single and six above average b-sides. I firmly believe there's a case for Let's Dance as a better album than Low, Heroes, or Lodger, but I don't know whether that's really saying anything.

Toyah - The Blue Meaning (1980)

I fancied Toyah something rotten when I was at school*, knowing her mainly as the punky presenter of Look! Hear!, a Birmingham based yoots programme featuring weekly performances by local acts such as the Neon Hearts, Ruby Turner, and others. Then, following her turning up on an episode of Shoestring, I realised she also had a band so I made my own Toyah badge using Humbrol enamel paints, copying the logo out of Smash Hits. Then, when I finally heard the actual music, it was okay, but somehow wasn't quite so amazing as I felt certain it would be. I mean, it was all right, but, well - you know...

I never heard The Blue Meaning at the time, having drifted away by that point, so I'm only just hearing it now, and incredibly - against all expectation - a couple of plays in and it's actually pretty fucking great. To backtrack, I picked it up as part of a double disc package along with Sheep Farming in Barnet, the first album, but not really an album seeing as it was just a collection of EPs and singles. Sheep Farming in Barnet was mostly the stuff I heard which left me underwhelmed, even at the age of fourteen. Neon Womb was great of course, and Danced and Our Movie, but once you're past those, it all blends into one and the individual tracks really don't work together as an album. She has a great voice, but nevertheless rather than sing she started out overacting to the music, like a sexier William Shatner - whoops, whistles, comedy John Major voices, all manner of funny noises - the kind of sounds which traditionally accompany spooky expressions of surprise made as though trying to convince the audience that you really are subject to the influence of dark forces. Similarly the music of that first handful of discs seems to be some prog band's idea of punk, or at least - cough cough - new wave; so the enterprise steers perilously close to resembling rock opera. I know that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing every single time...

Anyway, I guess once she'd got it out of her system with the stuff on Sheep Farming, whatever it was, The Blue Meaning really comes together as sounding very much like an album rather than a series of weird squeaking noises bearing no particular relation to each other. She's reigned in the overacting, developed a convincingly pseudo-operatic bellow, and the music rocks pretty darn hard, like it really wishes it had been produced by Tony Visconti. In fact I had to look at the sleeve to check that it wasn't, and I can easily imagine Next Day-era Bowie vocalising over some of this stuff. It's not punk, and never really was, and as has been pointed out from time to time, lyrically it's mostly pseudo-mystical horseshit about pyramids, crystal balls, and sphinxes: it's a self-involved teenage girl spending five hours putting on her make-up, making it look as weird as possible just so she can pull a spooky face and make you think she's deep and mysterious; but fuck it - you know all those Beach Boys records? They were just about cars and girls, most of them! Honest! If you've somehow mistaken The Blue Meaning for St. Paul's letters to the Galatians, then you're probably missing the point. I know how these days we're all busily declaring that everything from the eighties was tittersomely brilliant, at least now that we don't actually have to dress up in any of that shit, but The Blue Meaning is a real cracker of a debut album.

*: I recently discovered that the children's show Teletubbies was filmed on the farm upon which I grew up as a child, and of course Toyah was the voice of Teletubbies. I suppose, it might be a coincidence.

David Bowie - No Plan (2017)

What's the possibility of my being able to write anything useful or meaningful about this? Minimal, I'd say, but fuck it - let's see what comes out...

It's been a year since he went and it still feels wrong, or at least unnecessarily weird - not least with that whole idea of Bowie having been the glue holding the universe together, which is why it's all turned to shit since and we've got fucking Wotsits Hitler running the show; and listening to No Plan facilitates my appreciation of how his being gorn still doesn't seem to make sense. Here are four tracks recorded while he was in the process of dying - as are we all, I suppose - one from Blackstar, and three I've never heard, which I guess must be the last things he recorded and which failed to appear during his lifetime. The new material feels very much part of the album and the direction it took, sombre without necessarily sounding depressive, overtly jazzy, and somehow seeming both luxuriously lush and yet a fucking tough listen at the same time.

I don't want to get too bogged down in what it all means, because that's why you listen to the thing so there probably isn't anything I can say which is worth saying; but the crucial point is that, like Blackstar, the record does its job, and does it exceptionally well, and at least as well as any of Bowie's former glories. When I Met You is, I suppose, the last new Bowie song I will ever hear, and it feels like he knew it in so much as that it's kind of up, almost as though our man had grown tired of cataloguing the minutiae of his own impending demise.

See - I told you it'd be horseshit.

Just listen to the record.