The Tubes (1975)

 

With 1979's Remote Control as my gateway drug, I've backtracked to the debut album, mainly because I happened upon a copy in Half Price Books, and Lordy - it's a good 'un. Back when I first discovered punk, I asked my friend Grez whether there were other punk bands aside from the Stranglers, Sex Pistols and the Boomtown Rats. There was also the Damned, he helpfully informed me, and an American punk band called the Tubes. We were about fourteen and sheltered in our small town rural existence but the misreading has somehow stayed with me, possibly cemented by Crass punning White Punks on Dope as White Punks on Hope a couple of years later. True enough, the photographs did seem to depict a bunch of weirdos, and everyone from Joe Jackson to Squeeze counted as punk for us at that age.

I suppose if we really need boxes to stick them in, they were a blend of glam, prog, showbiz, heads down no nonsense boogie, and stadium rock with a touch of underground comix thrown in as seasoning. Stick this on the turntable and it sits quite well next to Lynyrd Skynyrd but for a fair quota of complex proggy arrangements of the kind everyone did at the time, and some of it is so majestic that it could almost be Man Who Sold the World era Bowie, notably Space Baby. What sets it apart from all those genres which it actually isn't, at least not full time, is the spiky edge, the media savvy, and the suggestion that they might be taking the piss to some extent. If it sounds a little like an album which should have featured either a wizard or a nude woman on the cover, their gleeful disdain for all the bullshit of modern living sets it some way apart from Jethro Tull roundly condemning the rising cost of agricultural supplies. It's like stepping into an alternative universe where REO Speedwagon or one of that bunch somehow made a good record, with the fruity guitar and keyboard solos, an operatic rock holler shaking its curly locks, and somehow with not a trace of California muso-stodge. With ingredients at which I might scowl under other circumstances, The Tubes is somehow a perfect debut album and a genuine work of the art - every track a classic and good enough to have been a hit single even with the screwy time signatures. Imagine Devo in sequinned loon pants if that helps.

Devo - Nitrous Nightmare (2026)

 

I loves me some Devo, but it's difficult to ignore that their posthumous archival releases now outnumber the formal studio albums. Said posthumous archival releases have mostly ranged from great to amazing but I'm beginning to wonder how much more of this stuff is yet to come, how much remains to be pressed on four, six, or eight sides of collectible splatter effect vinyl.

Nitrous Nightmare captures a 1975 live performance notable for Devo clearing the room of its generally indifferent and occasionally hostile audience, most of whom had expected moderate rockers playing sixties faves in preface to the happier sounds of the Sun Ra Arkestra. We've already heard the highlights on The Mongoloid Years but here's the set in full, complete with awkward silence in lieu of applause. The sleeve notes are fascinating for the sake of context, although the recording does little to capture the reputed tension. Aside from Hardore era songs played and recorded reasonably well, there's a lot of silence, an occasional joke cracked at the expense of an indifferent audience, and not a whole lot else besides a vague sense of confusion. The account describes a doubtless flared and hirsute gentleman from the audience expressing his concerns by snatching the microphone during Jocko Homo to answer Mark's question with the proposal that, You're not men, you're fucking assholes, which I'm sure was high drama on the night but you struggle to hear it on the recording. This leaves us with a lot of silence, some actual applause contrary to the claims, and versions of songs that sounded better on Hardcore Devo. Yay.

I'd say this would have made more sense as a bootleg cassette, or as a CD occupying the same ecosystem as a bootleg cassette; but of course it's also a CD so it's my fault for buying the double vinyl and no-one held a gun to my head. All the same, it's Devo so I don't regret the purchase in any sense but there's a limit to how many previously unreleased live recordings I need. I appreciate the guys still have to make a living and I certainly don't begrudge them doing so, but surely there's still some studio material right down in the bottom of that barrel - maybe that which was recorded as the Wipeouters or Dove*, or even more solo Jerry. Nitrous Nightmare isn't a bad album by any description, but regardless of whatever happened on the night, it's more an underwhelming dream than anything.

Also for what it may be worth, I've been in bands that cleared every single person from the room by the third song, so it doesn't seem that big a deal. You can still hear faint applause and appreciative whistles on side four of this one.

*: Assuming these haven't already been shoved out on green quadruple vinyl.

Mysterious Kitchens (1980)

 

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

One for the kids there.

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

Martha & the Muffins - Metro Music (1980)

If they are remembered at all, I suspect Martha & the Muffins have been reduced mainly to a question in a pub trivia quiz with vague suggestions of a time when new wave was angular, quirky, and wore a skinny tie; although to be fair, it was four fucking decades ago. Like everyone, I thought Echo Beach was great, but retained impressions beyond the token hit single thanks to my record collecting pal at school who obsessively snapped up subsequent singles by anyone whose debut smash had already found its way into his heart, particularly if coloured vinyl was involved. So I dutifully borrowed and taped the five or six which came after Echo Beach along with the b-sides because - who knows? - just in case, and life went on.

Recently going through old tapes - all of which still play just fine, thank you very much - listening to Saigon again, not having heard it in maybe thirty years or more, was like being punched in the face. The song chugs along on its tidy wee new wave beat, keyboard wistfully keening away in the background, and then we come to the end of the verse and that riff is like going over the humpback of a rollercoaster just as the amphetamine hits. I was aware of there having been an album or two and had vague memories of studying the sleeves in record stores, specifically HMV in Coventry. It seemed like further investigation was long overdue.

The production is slightly flat, underscoring the illusion of the tidy little college band in shiny shoes playing their songs for you, but this only means it takes longer for the magic to work its way through; and the more you listen, the more it seems like the Muffins were at least a Canadian equivalent of the Talking Heads, probably more jagged than they sound here but nevertheless something which conveniently coincided with the mainstream more than played up to it. We're not quite talking Devo, but we're definitely not talking Huey Lewis and the fucking News. Behind the radio friendly mix, the instrumentation is pretty wild, peppering all manner of structural somersaults with blasts of jazzy noise, and offsetting squeals of the unexpected against metronomic repetition of a kind which would doubtless have beardy old men wetting themselves had it been originated in Düsseldorf in the seventies. I suspect this band were not served well by their own billing which seemed to miss everything that made them worth hearing, and surely the Peter Saville sleeve should have been a clue.

Devo - Art Devo (2024)

Between Hardcore, Recombo DNA, Pioneers Who Got Scalped and the rest, it's difficult to believe there was still any unheard primal Devo left at the bottom of that much scraped barrel, and I'd begun to get the feeling of someone in an energy dome squeezing my monetary udders with just a bit more relish than seemed polite; so it was lucky I bothered to look at the track list of this one. Not only is Art Devo yet more previously unheard material from the celebrated fountain of filth, but it isn't even more of the same, this time focussing on raw demos and recordings which somehow make the Hardcore tracks sound like the studio work; and yet again, near half of these are entirely new to me. I don't have the time to sit down and tally up how many tracks appear on which studio albums, but I'm fairly certain we've now reached the point where the previously unheard outnumbers the officially released.

The emphasis steers more towards the twangy mutant blues of Devo's early seventies incarnation than the homemade synth era, although it's still pretty fucking weird for the most part - and either well recorded or beautifully restored. Some of it sounds like ZZ Top after an accident at the power plant, while other tracks were patently performed at some poetry event, cheekily augmented with guitar, effects, and that drum kit they made by attaching guitar pickups to household objects. Thematically, they were squelchier than ever back when this material was recorded - massively uncomfortable listening, gleeful perversion as consumer ritual disappearing backwards - both literally and figuratively - up its own ass with a big grin and a creepy thumbs up. Looking out the window in 2024, it's terrifying how far ahead of their time they were, and amazing how many hitherto unrevealed revelations are to be found in this huboon stomp each time we return. Given Devo's stated mission to travel their own career path in reverse, this must surely be their first and hence last album, but I wouldn't put money on it.

Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

First a little context - where many English children growing up in the seventies attended C of E schools, mine was apparently NW of BHM which, as all former Sounds readers will recall, stood for New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Unfortunately for myself and maybe six other kids, I wasn't massively keen on the form, meaning I was essentially gay 'n' stuff, preferring the rampantly homosexual music of Joy Division, the Ruts, Devo, and a load of other funny haircut bands, as the genre was known at our school. I didn't even like Queen or Judas Priest, for Ozzy's sake! What a massive bender I was!

My unreservedly heterosexual pal Crispin attempted conversion therapy by forcing me to borrow the first two Iron Maiden albums, and to my surprise I found that I actually sort of liked them. It was like the heavy metal I heard blasting from every bedroom window in town, from every garage and milking shed, and yet it had a punky edge which appealed to me; and thus were my ears jimmied at least a little way open. The Number of the Beast followed and I was grudgingly forced to admit that it too was not without merit, even with the addition of a more traditionally hairy rock vocalist who did that wobbly scream thing with his voice and sounded as though he might be wearing silver trousers.

Years passed and I lost touch with anyone who might expect me to borrow further Iron Maiden albums, and so life became much easier in terms of my musical palate. Then one day, probably late nineties, I happened to pass a junk shop when I noticed a box of records outside perched on a table - actually just seven records, the first seven Iron Maiden albums - excluding the live one - for a quid each and in what looked like good condition. The tidiness of the transaction was hard to resist, and even if the four I'd never heard turned out to be rubbish I'd still be able to look at the covers and follow the story of Eddie as he has a lobotomy, reincarnates as an ancient Egyptian God, becomes a futuristic cyborg, and so on and so forth.

The first three sounded even better than I remembered, Piece of Mind, Powerslave and Somewhere in Time all sounded good, and this one sounded fucking amazing beyond all expectation and accordingly glued itself to my turntable for the duration of the next few months.

I appreciate that we're all way too sophisticated for this sort of thing, and that the otherwise mighty Rollins regards Maiden as the most ridiculous band to ever stick their tongues out on a stage; and I know there's a thin line between Maiden and Spinal Tap, but fuck it.

This one was inspired by an Orson Scott Card novel, and accordingly invokes all of usual horror tropes picked up from Dennis Wheatley and Tomb of Dracula comic books, all delivered as Dickinson pulls an operatically scary face to the soundtrack of a million widdly-widdly guitar solos; but even the notion that so melodramatic and populist a take on the occult might be ridiculous is itself ridiculous, unless you somehow think David Tibet has a direct line to the real stuff; and if that's so, let me know when he's recorded anything half as powerful as Moonchild or even Can I Play with Madness.

I still don't understand how Iron Maiden succeed with the same formula as all those other leather studded wankers who made my school years so fucking depressing, apart from that they get it right and don't sound like a bunch of disgruntled farmhands showing off their 50cc motorbikes to each other in the town square on a windy Tuesday evening. They gurn and wail and scream and go right over the top somehow without trying too hard, and they only ever sound like Iron Maiden even on an album such as this with all of its convoluted song structures and funny time signatures; and whilst there are virtuoso moments, nothing ever distracts from the whole; so all of the pieces fit together in an almost symphonic sense. I'm not even sure Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is metal, or that it matters given that most metal is shite.

All I know is that this is an amazing record.

Jihad Jerry & the Evil Doers - Mine is Not a Holy War (2006)

Apparently an entire year crept past before I realised there was a vinyl reissue of the 2006 album, which in any case I hadn't actually got around to buying because I hadn't looked close enough to realise that it was more or less a lost Devo record.

Well, I got on board as soon as I could, I guess.

I assume the lads had come to regard Devo as pretty much over by 2006, hence the slight shift in aesthetic emphasis, although not so much of a shift as to have retained the album title for the reissue. Mine is Not a Holy War - as it's no longer known - could be viewed as the Devo record bridging the gap between 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps and Something For Everybody of 2010 on the grounds of featuring all other members of Devo and reviving a couple of songs from the early years. It's probably not as good as Something For Everybody - which was frankly astonishing - but it's better than Smooth Noodle Maps, and Smooth Noodle Maps was nevertheless a decent album bespoiled by generic eighties production which made it sound like Bon Jovi. Here we get more expensive sounding retreads of I Been Refused, Find Out, and I Need a Chick alongside material with which I'm entirely unfamiliar. Find Out is an improvement, I Need a Chick probably should have been left alone, and I'm still not sure what to make of I Been Refused. It's a decent rendering but the original demo version may be my all-time Devo favourite, so I'm still trying to work out what I think about the fresh coat of paint. The newer material is, for what it may be worth, dynamite.

It's a pretty great album despite my piddling fannish reservations, giving emphasis to Devo's bluesier roots and keeping absolutely true to the rubber pants wearing mutant spirit of de-evolution. Now that Devo really do seem to have become past tense - barring attempts to flog expensive books of pictures to the rest of us - I could probably stand to hear a whole lot more from Jerry.

Zones of Industrial Wasteland - Sectors (2019)

Having taken delivery of another care package from the very wonderful AUT label, I find amongst the latest selection of Sweden's finest, this full cassette album from Zones of Industrial Wasteland whom I recall from the label's Att Förstå Ensamhet compilation a while back, so that was the first one out of the box and into the tape deck - and yes, tapes in 2020 still strikes me as all sorts of weird, but I'm sure there will be those who say the same of any physical media, so there doesn't seem much point in getting too hung up on any of it.

Zones of Industrial Wasteland is one Janolof Enberg, author of a virtual album called One Mountain back in 2015 and which was a  more overtly dance orientated thing from what I can tell. Sectors is techno in so much as that pretty much everything you hear seems to have been generated within a metal box of some description, or at least processed therein; and while it mostly adheres to one time signature or another, as marked by certain muted percussive sounds, it's more in the way of soundtrack music than anything to which you might necessarily bust a move. For sake of lazy reference, think some of the less thumping moments in the career of Front 242, but geared towards the sort of movies where darkly militaristic craft cruise through smoke-choked apocalyptic skies; so there's a touch of maybe Vangelis, or whoever it was who scored Blade Runner. This sort of thing seems to be fairly easy to do, but is hard to do well, and Enberg does it very, very well - dark, moody and deliciously expansive without ever quite tipping over into pulling scary faces or pretending to be a robot. There's a strong suggestion of craft, sounds which have been worked at, nothing you'd spot as an obvious preset, and with plenty of interesting stuff kept bubbling along in the mix beneath the main theme, suggesting something along the lines of Chris & Cosey scoring the sort of moody techno thrillers already invoked.

Also, Maintenance Drone - which I recall from Att Förstå Ensamhet - opens with a sample which I'd swear was taken from some early Devo home movie, so obviously that gets extra points from me.

Virtual version here.

The Tubes - Remote Control (1979)

Amongst my memories of first discovering music, or at least music which wasn't the Beatles, the arrival of my first tape recorder is significant for reasons which are probably obvious. I don't remember hearing much music on the radio as a kid, but I heard enough to be aware of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. I used to go to stay at my grandparents' house in Kenilworth every other weekend, and there was a point at which whatever the usual arrangement had been, suddenly it was just my dad coming to fetch me home on Sunday evening, and because it was my dad, he had the radio on, usually tuned to the top forty countdown. This meant that I heard a selection of the same songs with such frequency as to imprint them on my memory as things I liked, and when I was given a tape recorder for my birthday, naturally the first thing I did was start taping things I liked from the radio; and Prime Time by the Tubes was in there right from the beginning, even though I'm not sure the dates add up right.

Later I learned that the Tubes were an American punk band, and later still I concluded that they were an example of how America never understood punk. I no longer quite hold either of these views, although I still maintain that a bunch of poets hanging around with Lou Reed in some New York loft was never, ever the birth of punk.

Anyway, I loved Prime Time so much that I immediately ran out and bought the album some forty years later when I happened across a copy in a crappy second hand store which seemed suspiciously like some guy's front room. I played it once and decided that I'd been right about Americans failing to understand punk.

Then, another year or so on, I dig the thing out for a second play and find that it has something, even if hanging onto the idea of the Tubes as an American equivalent to the Pistols is obviously a waste of time. I guess they were punk in so much as that they were a bit freaky, relatively speaking, and none too bothered about fitting in; plus there was a fairly low calorie anti-establishment message centered around the idea that too much telly is bad for you. I don't know about the earlier material, but musically this one is operatic and conspicuously well played, a little like a weird conflation of Kiss and Devo but coming out sounding a bit like Styx in their Mr. Roboto period. It's so theatrical it's almost Rocky Horror. Guitar solos, mullets, vocal harmonies, futuristic monosynth and sax solos: ordinarily I might duck for cover before Michael J. Fox shows up and tries to teach me a thing or two about what it's like to be young, but fucking fuck it - this is a great album. The songs, big pompous poodle-haired wedding cake compositions though they may well be, have got serious pull, never mind just Prime Time. There's TV is King, I Want It All Now, Only the Strong Survive, and about the only song I was less struck on is the ballad, Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand) but my wife has been going crackers over that one, so everybody's happy.

Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.

My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.

Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.

This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.

The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.

The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.

Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.

All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.

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.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968)

I'm out of my depth here, never really having had much to do with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or anything from the long-haired end of the sixties. It either hasn't grabbed me, or hasn't had the opportunity to grab me for one reason or another, which has never really felt like a problem given that I've always had plenty of other stuff to listen to, and I don't trust anyone who feels their record collection must include a representative selection of everything. It's not a fucking competition.

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel I've been missing out where Frank Zappa is concerned. I always liked the idea of the man, but never knowingly heard any of his work until the late, great Andrew Cox gave me this for Christmas. Given that Andrew passed away back in 2009, it's probably fair to say that it's taken me a while to click with the record, although in my defence there have been a few years spent in transit and without a turntable between then and now.

It seems Zappa viewed the long-haired end of the sixties with suspicion equivalent to my own. Scratch anyone who feels the need to tell you just how laid back and far out they are and you'll invariably find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Obviously this one was taking the piss out of Sgt. Pepper, or what Sgt. Pepper seemed to represent, but ran much deeper than mere sarcasm, revealing a healthy distrust of utopian sentiment as being no more revolutionary than the hula hoop or the beehive hairdo; and if it fails to offer an alternative to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, that's because it doesn't fucking have to because it's not chess. If you don't want to know that you're being used, then that's your tough shit.

Musically, Money goes along with certain conventions of its era, subverting ragtime, doowop and others to the cause of its opprobrium, then glueing all the bits together with an avant-garde sensibility hinting at musique concrete and the weirder end of jazz, but with a precision and targetting which can be mistaken for neither. There's none of that saggy far out shit here, no aimless giggling at its own reflection, but neither is the record in any sense mean spirited. Frank doesn't want to piss you off so much as he wants you to wake the fuck up - which is probably why you'll laugh your ass off with this record, at least if there's any hope for you.

I guess this is approximately where Devo got started, and certainly the Residents, or at least that's how it sounds to me. I'd say that I wish someone had told me, but they sort of did.

Dickies - Dawn of the Dickies (1979)

I find it strange to think that I bought this, one of my all-time favourite albums, almost by accident. Pete had just discovered his new bestest band ever, probably Echo & the Bunnymen or something similarly floppy, and so he was selling his recently purchased Dawn of the Dickies. I wasn't really that much of a fan, but Nights in White Satin was okay and I figured I probably needed some representative Dickies material in my collection, and Pete only wanted three quid which would save having to pay more at some later date. I coughed up the money, took the album home, salivated over the blue vinyl, played it once or twice, and then dutifully added it to the collection between Devo and Fad Gadget. I only truly realised what I'd bought a couple of years later when I played it out of curiosity, having noticed that, excepting the singles, I couldn't remember what it sounded like.

I don't recall seeing the Dickies noted as anything special in any of the four million true history of punk things I've read, and they don't seem to be remembered as anything much more than having existed and briefly flogging a shitload of novelty records to people like me, or at least like Pete. Whenever Kenny Everett or some other late seventies comedian took the piss out of punk, ignoring the bright green comedy mohican and the hilarious safety pin through the head gag, it usually sounded like the Dickies - ninety miles an hour, whiny, and with a shitload of jumping around. In more earnest circles, their stock seemed forever undervalued through being American and having supposedly missed the point - at least according to Gene October - and, well - for all the implied chaos, those records seemed suspiciously well played.

The Dickies formed after a couple of them went to see the Damned on their first American tour - which makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; and the rest of their crimes come down to having failed to hang out with the usual set of New York wankers in the early days, aside from supporting the Ramones - which also makes one hell of a lot of sense when you think about it; but what surely matters is the music, and the music is fucking astonishing, particularly this album.

The singles were funny, better than they probably should have been, and The Incredible Shrinking Dickies was a decent debut, if not necessarily a life-changing one, but here's where it all came together. Essentially they were, or probably are, a more complicated Ramones, at least technically with the middle eights and saxophone solos, but with that same cartoon aspect, albeit a west coast version trying to watch Saturday morning kid's shows but unable to keep still for the corn syrup jitters; and the reason it works is that they never even seemed to acknowledge the gag, powering through their own ninety mile an hour odes to disposable culture with the same ferocity as any of the more obviously ludicrous covers, cheerily embracing everything with the delirious enthusiasm of Zippy the Pinhead. I actually bothered to check the credits for Manny, Moe and Jack just to be sure it isn't a cover of some long lost commercial for Pep Boys automotive supplies, and it isn't, but it really could have been.

The thing which makes Dawn of the Dickies greater than the sum of its parts, and more than just some novelty record, is the expertise with which all of those parts are joined together, so bubble gum melody is never sacrificed to mere velocity or even to volume, and Leonard Graves Philips' absurd nasal vocal starts to sound kind of poignant after a while, even soulful; and so, regardless of subject, cuts like Fan Mail or Attack of the Mole Men have an epic quality, as though some timeless truth is revealed as we learn how they climb up on ground and then attack. Great wisdom is seldom found in the places you would most likely expect to find it, and even if Dawn constitutes great stupidity, it carries itself with enough dignity to fool the best of us.

Chrome - The Visitation (1976)

This was Chrome's first album, recorded by Damon Edge and others prior to the involvement of Helios Creed, and it's a significantly different beast to the ominous android chug with which they became associated. The pulp science-fiction obsession was already well and truly cemented in place as indicated by titles such as Sun Control, Return to Zanzibar, and Memory Lords Over the Bay, and was already well and truly cemented in place with a ton of drugs by the sound of it, and not the mellow ones either. You may recognise the guitar solos fried in acid from later Chrome recordings, and also the tendency to shove things through various industrial strength flange pedals, but otherwise The Visitation is garage punk, albeit fucking weird garage punk rooted in bad trip psychedelics. Warner Brothers said it sounded like the Doors but didn't want to release it, obliging Edge to start his own label. I don't quite see the Doors thing, but there's a lot which reminds me of very early Devo - particularly in terms of subject matter - and even Sparks; and Kinky Lover comes pretty close to being a warped cover of the Beatles' Come Together.

That said, despite these differences, The Visitation is somehow immediately recognisable as Chrome, and you can play Alien Soundtracks straight after without really missing too much of a step. The point of continuity is the vibe, which was cold, dirty, scary, and deeply alien even back when they could have covered the Eagles without anyone doing too much of a double take.

If you're unfamiliar with this band, then they're almost certainly the thing you've been missing all this time.

You're welcome.

Električni Orgazam (1981)

Back in the early eighties, my school friend Eggy went on holiday with his family to what was then Yugoslavia. Passing through the airport on the way home, it occurred to him that he should bring back presents for his pals, Grez and myself, and thus accordingly he picked a couple of random music cassettes from the nearest stall. I had first dibs so I took this one, based on the cover looking sort of interesting, meaning Grez ended up with a tape of some bunch named Kamelioni - not very good, apparently, which I'd kind of guessed might be the case.

Amazingly, Električni Orgazam turned out to be a great pick, regardless of my having no fucking clue what any of it was about. I played the tape a lot. When I bought a CD burner, it was one of the first things I took the trouble to digitise, and now, having discovered the joy of hunting stuff down on the internet, I actually have the fucker on vinyl, kindly sold to me by a very helpful Croatian gentleman - nice big sleeve like a proper record as issued by Jugoton, the Yugoslavian state record label! This thing turning up in the mail felt like a message from space or discovering that Lord of the Rings really happened. I slapped it on the turntable, vaguely worrying this was going to be one of those exercises in nostalgia which doesn't quite pan out, faded photos of some distant holiday romance which has everyone scratching their heads, but no - this record still sounds incredible. It wasn't just my imagination.

To get into specifics, I chose Električni Orgazam over Kameleoni because the name sounded edgy and the cover reminded me of both Dadaism and Cabaret Voltaire's Voice of America album; and the first thing I was reminded of when I first played the tape was Cabaret Voltaire dabbling with sixties-inspired organ noodles on Red Mecca and others. Beyond this comparison, I suppose Električni Orgazam were maybe the angular Serbian Wire or Devo or something of the sort, but populist with a faint swirl of the fairground or cabaret about them - weird and spikey, but never quite bleak enough to have been remembered as cold wave. It seems they went a bit chicken in a basket after this first album, also losing Marina Vulić - their female bassist who, it turns out, was actually very, very easy on the eye - although the early warning signs can probably be discerned in both the obligatory Beatles cover and Fleke, the token white reggae number apparently translating as Stain. Then again, whilst the Yugoslavian state may well have obliged artists to a standardised quota of cod reggae and Beatle coverage, I don't really care because both tracks are wonderful. In fact, I prefer Fleke to quite a lot of proper reggae, so nyer.

Aside from Douglas P recording benefit albums for an end to this terrible genocidal war with proceeds seemingly going to those actually doing the genocide, my knowledge of the former Yugoslavia and its music is limited to Laibach, this album, and Mi Nismo Andjeli. Mi Nismo Andjeli is a film of which the title translates to We Are Not Angels and which was sent to me on DVD by some other Discogs bloke apparently because he had a copy laying around and he wanted to say thanks for buying stuff from me. It was made in 1992 and is definitely one of the weirder and more entertaining random presents I've ever received from a stranger. Furthermore, it seems to suggest a comedic sophistication we of the West have historically denied those Eastern block countries because we're too busy chuckling at Borat with his big moustache. In fact, Mi Nismo Andjeli suggests the former Yugoslavia developed strains of sarcasm we still don't understand even now, and which would make sense of both Laibach, and how Električni Orgazam had an unusually jolly quality to all those starkly spiky riffs.

Of all the best kept secrets over which I've ever evangelised,  Električni Orgazam is a genuine work of genius. I only wish they hadn't turned into the Serbian REO Speedwagon after this one.

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.

Tad - Quick and Dirty (2018)

Record Store Day fills me with cynicism. I've always listened to record albums because that's my preferred medium, so I don't need a special day. I collect record albums because I like music, not for the sake of being a collector, and anyone who ever used the term vinyls as a plural noun can go fuck themselves. A few Record Store Days back, they issued an exclusive double album of Devo live in Seattle, and because I fucking love Devo, I had to have it. I knew Hogwild would open at nine so I got there at seven, and even then found myself stood behind a hundred or so teenagers. The queuing itself wasn't bad. The only other person over thirty was queuing directly behind me. He was after something or other by Wire and told me he loved all the English bands of that era. He also told me that he used to live in Mexico City but had come back to San Antonio because he was tired of getting kidnapped, so it was an interesting conversation. Two hours later, the doors opened, and by the time I made it in, there was no Devo live double album to be had because apparently they hadn't even ordered the fucker; and yet copies were quite naturally already for sale on eBay and Discogs at extortionate prices, so I wasn't very happy about that.

This time I forgot about Record Store Day, despite having read that there would be a Tad album amongst all the usual worthless exclusives - Barry Manilow in red vinyl and the like. I guess I'd subconsciously resigned myself to being unable to get hold of a copy, and typically it was going for twice the price on Discogs that same afternoon; but I dutifully trudged along to the store next day, just in case, and fuck me…

Quick and Dirty is one side studio material and one side live, and the studio material is previously unheard, half of what we may as well call a lost Tad album - which is a very exciting thing indeed. It's been a while since I saw Busted Circuits and Ringing Ears so I have only a vague impression of how the band just kind of dissolved following a series of kicks in the proverbial teeth, and I'm not even sure I was aware they were still enough of a concern to have recorded the six newly unearthed tracks in 1999.

Tad, for the uninitiated, were how Joy Division would have sounded had they grown up in rural American woodland with only a job at the sawmill to look forward to - much harder to kill, more honest about the enduring influence of Black Sabbath, and numerous shitloads heavier. In fact Tad were pretty much the heaviest thing ever. The music speaks of rural horror, boredom, loathing, and shitty deeds undertaken for the sake of maintaining sanity, all of which contrasts with something quite vulnerable at the heart of the storm. Musically it's concrete blocks of grinding sound pinned together at bizarre mathematical angles, yet pinned together by human craft and muscle rather than engineering. There's a mechanistic quality in the relentless advance of these rhythms, born not from machines but from those brutalised by their own lives; or it makes Godflesh sound like the Sundays, if you prefer.

The six new tracks neatly fill a gap between Oppenheimer's Pretty Nightmare and the stuff Doyle recorded with Hog Molly a year or so later. Hog Molly chugged a little harder with less contrast in evidence, and were lyrically more single-minded, songs often relying on the repetition of innocuous phrases posing more questions than were answered; which can be heard here on Mummified Cop and others blending with the suggestion of melancholia and melody I assume must have come from Kurt Danielson.

I'm not usually wild about live albums, not even Tad's Live Alien Broadcasts which is decent but, bizarrely, somehow fails to invoke the raw energy of their studio recordings; so it's nice that the live side of Quick and Dirty really captures them, huge, crushing, terrifying, sweaty and probably a bit on the aromatic side, but still nailing it all down with absolute precision, and nothing lost to the sludge.

Quick and Dirty has made me very happy, so I suppose I'm going to have to concede the point that one good thing has come out of Record Store Day.

The Members - At the Chelsea Nightclub (1979)

Have you ever noticed how much punk rock was concerned with wanking? Close to half the playing time of At the Chelsea Nightclub seems to concern itself with banging one out by agency of a firm hand and dirty thoughts. I've consequently developed a pet theory about this being the principle factor distinguishing late seventies punk - and related affectations - with what came before. I floated the idea on facebook, and whilst a few precedents were offered - and no less than two from the Who - earlier hymns to masturbation have generally been couched in more veiled, poetic, or even heroic terms, and it's only once we get to the Jubilee year that you really start to hear songs revelling in the sweat-drenched shame of burping the worm following purchase of gentleman's interest material from a newsagent staked out for a full two hours beforehand so as to be certain that no-one I knew was you know is already in there. Everyone had a song about wanking - the Stranglers, Alternative TV, the Vapors, Pork Dukes, Buzzcocks, Snivelling Shits, the Undertones, Devo, even Gary Numan - in fact especially Gary Numan, come to think of it; and this is why punk was great.

At the Chelsea Nightclub is what punk sounded like outside the capitol, in small satellite towns up and down the country with kids desperate to relieve the crushing boredom and apparent lack of any future other than one channelled through some fucking awful technical college; and of sufficient desperation as to not really give a shit about the cool or the moody - hence the healthy appreciation of both tunes and fun. There's a lot about this record which will have attracted subsequent frowning, and at least two of the twelve songs refer to something on the cover of a magazine, which I seem to recall being a popular lyric amongst your skinny tie types that year, and of course there are all those yobbo foghorn backing vocals. The Members were - and possibly still are - something inhabiting a point equidistant between pub rock, the Clash, maybe a bit of the Stranglers, and with a great big splodge of cod reggae thrown in because it was 1979. I already knew the album had potential on the strength of The Sound of the Suburbs being one of the greatest singles of all time, but it's somehow taken me three decades to buy the thing.

Amazingly, it's a genuinely great album without a weak track, and - at least for me - a powerful invocation of those long hot seventies summers of Midlands Today, getting drunk for the very first time, and failing to have sex with anyone besides myself. I'd object to the cod reggae but I can't because it's done so well and with such love as to bypass all possible propensity for sneering. Nicky Tesco singing in his special reggae voice might seem initially odd, like a vocal equivalent of blackface, but really it's just what suits the music and surely isn't any more an impersonation than all those phony American accents on rock records. Furthermore, there's Love in a Lift - a more excitingly sordid precedent to Aerosmith's shitty airbrushed hair metal anthem of '89 - which welds cod reggae to some of the most powerful twang heard since Duane Eddy; and Offshore Banking Business seemed to notice a specific problem with capitalism at least two decades before everyone else started going on about it. It's one of those records which sounds initially familiar, then begins to bear less and less resemblance to anything else you've heard, the more you listen.

Devo - Something For Everybody (2010)

I've always found the idea that anybody could have a single all-time favourite music artist a little weird, but if pressed I'd have to say mine were Devo in so much as that whilst there have been months, perhaps even years, without them being much of a presence in my headphones, there has never been a time when I've stuck on a Devo record and found I wasn't really in the mood for it. Setting aside a pre-pubescent fixation with the Beatles, Devo were probably the first group I really got into as a teenager, and got into with sufficient fervour as to get me buying the records. They scared the living shit out of me when I first heard that debut album, a red vinyl copy lent to me by my best friend Graham, but once I got past my suspicion of this music as something weird, unwholesome and mutated - which of course it was - I was hooked, and apparently for life.

A couple of years later I was hanging out with a former Cravat and we were talking about Crass, of whom we were both fans. Ideally, we concluded, Crass should make records which sounded like the Human League or Roxy Music by which to smuggle their message into the hit parade and reach people who might genuinely benefit from their perspective on society; at which point of the conversation I realised it had already happened, and that's what Devo were. Of course, whilst Devo may not actually have much to say about anarcho-syndicalism, like Crass, they've never been shy in pointing out everything which is wrong with our society and our forever needing daddy to tell us what to do. The main difference is that you can dance to the Devo version because it's fundamentally stupid and fun, and even though it was born from Gerald Casale's outrage at witnessing cops shooting kids at Kent State, musically it's the Monster Mash as envisioned for a future designed by John Waters and Hugo Gernsback; and it's like this because it's a satire on culture, not something removed from it and living by its own laws in Epping Forest - which isn't a criticism of Crass, by the way, simply an acknowledgement of different strategies.

Something For Everybody will probably remain the final new Devo album given the passing of a Bob, and a couple of those left behind supposedly no longer on the greatest of terms. Continuing Devo's taking the piss out of society, the music industry, and themselves, the album was supposedly written by focus group in response to questionnaires asking what consumers would like to hear from Devo. I remember filling in one online, and that's supposedly why we have the blue energy dome on the cover, as opposed to any other hue of headgear. We also got to pick which tracks made it onto this album which, tellingly, makes for much better listening than the collection of rejects and leftovers which was later issued as Something Else For Everybody. I say much better listening, but what I actually probably mean to say is that this is an unequivocally perfect album, illustrating as it does why there can never be a musical institution greater than Devo.

Yes, I know, and I don't care. There are people who don't get Devo. I've met them on internet forums sniggering about how Devo is like totally gay LOL before returning to the thread discussing which Judas Priest albums rocked the hardest, which sort of proves that Devo were right about a few things.

With Devo, each song is a puzzle in so much as that there is either a directly progressive message, or one otherwise implicit in the form, and it's usually communicated in terms which combine the novelty of the Archies with the mind-expanding strangeness of the Residents; and unscrambling that puzzle, you arrive at a place wherein it becomes impossible to sustain ridiculous devolved ideas, or so my theory goes. What this means, or what I think it means, is that if you get Devo, then you're probably doing something right; and you've probably never stood outside Planned Parenthood wearing an NRA t-shirt and holding up a crucifix; and you almost certainly didn't vote for the Annoying Orange. The music of Devo improves our world by making us better people, and if you need proof - next time you get your heart broken, eschew the usual soundtrack of miserable fuckers in favour of almost anything by Devo. I promise, you'll notice the difference in a very short time.

So yes, this will most likely be the final Devo album, which is a shame but - Lord - what a finale! Musically it's almost a summary of their entire career - the sharp, irresistible pop of Freedom of Choice, the synthetic grandeur of Shout, and the faintly disturbing mutant novelty of their weird primal phase - Fountain of Filth, Buttered Beauties and the rest, not even omitting the occasional Popeye-style ethnic caricature switched on its head as happens with Cameo. Something For Everybody rocks hard and dresses like the Jetsons whilst still managing to squeeze out a tear of more genuine feeling than anything Sting ever did in a rain forest.

In the bigger scheme of things
We haven't been around here more than a moment.
And yet too many, it seems,
Believe we are creating a brand new world around us.
We are creating a brand new world without us.
Maybe it really is okay.
Although we're digging our own graves,
At this moment.

I could write about how no-one really took them seriously because they were scared of the truth about de-evolution, namely that it was never a marketing gimmick like Adam Ant pretending to be a pirate or whatever; but some of us did take them seriously, and I guess we've been proven right because we're now living in the world described in Don't Shoot (I'm a Man).

This might be our very last chance. Let's not fuck it up.

Athletico Spizz 80 - Do A Runner (1980)

Hearing Where's Captain Kirk? on the radio in the evenings  probably constituted my first awareness of it being possible for music to be wonderful without troubling the mainstream top forty or ending up introduced to pop picking telly viewers by a flared kiddy fiddler. Prior to the two or three spins it took for the song to sink in, I'm not sure I was even aware of there having been music other than stuff which had been on Top of the Pops at some point. Spizz, who by then had expanded to Athletico Spizz 80, featured in a double-page spread in my first ever issue of Sounds music paper, which I bought having become increasingly frustrated with the some of the hopeless shite receiving coverage in Smash Hits. The Sounds feature was illustrated by, if I remember correctly, team Spizz leaping athletically around a basketball court in what would eventually be recognised as skateboarding gear, and it made me think of Devo, another fairly recent discovery for me.

I've never quite stopped thinking of Devo where Spizz are concerned, which isn't to imply any sort of influence of one on the other, only that Spizz seemed to be the English expression of whatever had caused Devo. There seemed to be a shared sense of humour, a similar love of retrofuturism; and of course both bands have been regarded as faintly ludicrous novelty acts by those for whom anything with less testosterone than Ted Nugent may as well be Pinky & Perky. I have no strong recollection of how Do A Runner was greeted by the music press back then but suspect it may have been a general scratching of the head, as typified by an unusually Partridge-esque David Hepworth asking, 'It seems to me that the album sees Spizz going in a lot more serious direction than the singles previously had done. What do you think about that?' on the wireless back in August, 1980, to which Spizz himself responded:

Well, I don't know about that. Singles are supposed to be fun, pokey, short, snappy things and albums are just a whole wider range of what someone can do with a recorded piece, and that's what it is. It's basically a collection of all the songs which we didn't want to see disappear without reaching vinyl. We wanted to get all these out on record before they disappeared because we thought they were worth it and we didn't want to lose them, or to get tired or get old before they got to vinyl.

The notion of Spizz as a novelty act - as differentiated from simply a band or bands with a sense of humour - most likely stems from the success of Where's Captain Kirk?, doubtless fortified by later Trekkie-pleasing songs such as Spock's Missing and Five Year Mission; but it's a warped vision, as is obvious even from a quick ear cast in the general direction of the aforementioned fun, pokey, short, and snappy singles - not least the magnificent No Room which still makes most other records of that year sound shit, to be quite honest. Similarly, Do A Runner hardly constitutes frowning modernist essays from a former circus entertainer, what with the wilfully ludicrous Clocks Are Big and the general spirit of the thing, and - for fuck's sake - how could we ever have forgotten?:

Nuclear scientist producing plutonium,
Nasty little substance that we can't controlleum.

I suspect it's simply that we like a little more narrative consistency in our rock ascendencies, and Do A Runner was always at a serious tangent to a bloke jumping on stage with a guitar at some punk gig and making stuff up. It is equivalent, I suppose, to a new John Otway album sounding like Tangerine Dream; not that this does, but it's hard to miss the eight-minute pseudo-krautrock instrumental of Airships, or the weirdly angular Beefheartisms of Intimate, Rhythm Inside and others; except I suspect most of this material simply evolved out of the combination of these five people being in the band that year, and these being five people with no real interest in simply chugging out a few standards.

Do A Runner wasn't really quite like anything I'd heard back in 1980, and it still sounds reasonably unique thirty-five years later. I know Spizz did okay and is still remembered, but what with this one and Spiky Dream Flowers, I still don't quite get why he wasn't much, much bigger. I suppose someone will eventually dig this out and be able to listen to it without thinking of William Shatner, maybe even appreciate it for it's own very considerable merits. Maybe that person will turn out to have been me.