Severed Heads - Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)

 

...or just The Big Bigot as was its initial Australian release. One thing I've taken from conversations with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists, and which has stayed with me, is the importance of layering when mixing a record. Glenn had strong opinions on mixing, often insisting greater effect was to be had with certain sounds or instruments some way down in the mix, half heard and not always obvious on first listen. This, as I've found, gives the ear more to work with, achieving effects and juxtapositions which you just don't get with the bog standard mix which strives to leave everything on more or less equal footing in the overall sound, and which is usually the mix for which everyone else will settle. Part of this is simply paying attention to the treatment of the original sounds so as to avoid music from which you can identify the exact synth, drum machine or whatever within the first minute of listening - which is how Depeche Mode have always sounded to me, at least before the leather trousers.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it is I'm referring to has one of the most powerful demonstrations of its validity in the back catalogue of the Severed Heads, and particularly on this record, possibly their greatest to my ears, although it's a tough choice between this, Haul Ass, Rotund For Success, and er… probably seven or eight others.

The Big Bigot is, I suppose, synthpop by virtue of tunes, song structure, lyrics and so on, and these are songs which really tear your fucking heart out; yet it's often difficult to tell what the Severed Heads were doing that apparently no-one else has considered. Beyond the bass, the rhythm, the pensive yet arrestingly cheery melody, there's all sorts of sampled or looped clutter in the mix gurgling away, and yet none of it sounds arbitrary. Somehow the whole always blends into something so beautifully arranged as to suggest old masters more than abstract expressionism, as it probably should. It's that deal with a tornado blowing through a scrap yard to assemble a jumbo jet, and I can only assume that an approach similar to that described by Glenn Wallis must be responsible. It feels as though random elements have worked together to carve out songs equivalent to Plato's perfect solids, compositions existing in the subatomic underpinnings of the universe channelled and brought into being by Tom Ellard and occasional pals. There's nothing here to remind you of anyone else or how anyone else works, nor anything that anyone else has been able to duplicate. I've been listening to this record for more than thirty years and I didn't even realise there's a Clapton cover on side two.

So what does it sound like, given that the above is probably less than helpful as descriptions go. Confidence! sounds like being trapped in the head of a terminally lovesick teenager with a near death experience for a chorus. Harold & Cindy Hospital begins as big band for malicious elephants and ends up getting Raptured in the evangelical sense. Legion is the most terrifying song you've ever heard that doesn't involve either distorted guitars or metal types pulling faces - it really feels like it's coming for you. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the songs are about, but there's something Biblical going on in this unnerving euphoria threaded through with something weird and dark, almost old testament, without having delivered any of the cues which might usually lead to such conclusions. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it's genuinely glorious. If Legion doesn't bring a lump to your throat at the very least, are you even alive?

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.

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.

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)

It was the timing which sucked me in, the timing combined with the novelty of a record made from replayed samples of existing sounds, something which then remained unknown outside the Fairlight CMI being put through its paces on an episode of Tomorrow's World. Back in 1984, I was obsessed with the Italian Futurists and felt they shared some sort of rebellious impulse in common with the music I tended to like; so when this lot turned up, openly acknowledging Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises manifesto and on a label named after one of Marinetti's concrete poems, it caught my attention; and yet something didn't quite sit right. It might have been some sort of misplaced proprietorial regard of Futurism on my part - these people were cashing in on the thing which only I knew about and only I really understood and they hadn't asked my permission; but also it was irritating how Trevor Horn, when asked about Zang Tumb Tumb, said only that it was an onomatopoeic percussive sound, adding I suppose it's rather Dada.

Next they seemed to be everywhere, and so much so that I heard every single track on this album long before I bought it, which was actually a couple of years later on a wet Saturday afternoon when I couldn't really find anything else in the record shop. By that point the thing had become so ingrained that it couldn't fail to sound good, as indeed it did, and as it still does. It's sharp, funny, and stupid, and it has all sorts of things going on, and it's beautifully produced as you would expect; but I don't know if it was ever important or even particularly ground breaking, as many have since claimed.

The samples were, so I am informed, mostly presets which came with the Fairlight CMI, so most of what Art of Noise did was in the arrangement, and presumably in Horn's ability to make it all sound as lush as a Ferrero Roche advert; because at best what we have here is what Throbbing Gristle would have been were they all nicely behaved Oxbridge graduates, which is why Paul Morley made for such a good fit. The clues are all over the place, not least in sampled bass lines playing what may as well have been Rock Around the Clock and so inadvertently foreshadowing Jive Bunny; and then more recently I rediscovered a tape of the Horn promoting the first Art of Noise record on the wireless, during which he opined:

I think the truth of it is that people don't learn how to play their instruments properly nowadays. They learn how to talk to the music press. They learn how to do their hair. They learn about what to wear and what to say, but the basic physical learning of - do you know of anybody in a group nowadays who is a good guitar player? Do you know if the guitar player in Duran Duran is a particularly good guitar player? In the old days you knew who was a good player, you knew that Eric Clapton [was a good guitar player].

Seriously, grandad, fuck the fuck off. Of course, Morley and Horn were only ever involved in the most negligible sense, at least according to J.J. Jeczalik, but it seems significant that they were able to hitch their wagons to the Art of Noise in the first place without anyone noticing a disparity. Morley dismissed later Art of Noise releases as novelty records, seemingly implying that this one should be considered high art, which doesn't really work. It's great pop music, but it was never art, which, considering how Art of Noise achieved a whole shitload of musical firsts, is quite shocking; but then you might also argue that Jive Bunny did a whole load of stuff no-one had done before.

Acid Trax volume two (1988)

I'm not sure quite where I first heard the term acid house, aside from that it was definitely absolutely nothing to do with fucking Porridge. The name intrigued me given its being such a peculiar juxtaposition of concepts, but made sense when my friend Carl played me a Serious label compilation album - a mixed DJ set of the Chicago-originated material which appears in full on this double. It was weirdly minimal, just a drum machine and a funny noise for the most part, and a funny noise which suggested diarrhoea or weird chemistry experiments, the sound we hear on that episode of Tom & Jerry where Tom is accidentally sucked into a mad scientist's labyrinth of pipettes and test tubes. Subsequent investigations in darkened rooms helped make the narcotic association, but I still believe that particular angle was somewhat overstated in terms of the actual music. Of course on the other hand, D-Mob's somewhat ludicrous defence of how you thought it was a drug, but now you know you're wrong probably stretches the point a little too far.

For anyone who has only just been born and who can't be otherwise arsed to look it up on their internet, acid house - the original Chicago version as spewn forth from the Trax label - was mostly based around a drum machine and the mighty Roland TB303, or else boxes pretending to be the mighty Roland TB303. Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of using the mighty Roland TB303 - as is my own proud boast - will be able to tell you with confidence that it represents the very zenith of musical technology, if not actually western civilisation. Some of what we have here sounds like random patterns of squelchy notes, the TB303 equivalent of a keyboard smash given form by repetition alone. They're not even tunes as such, just hypnotic grooves which draw you in - something to do with the fascination of a form of repetition which constantly mutates as the lads twiddle those filters back and forth.

As with anything of electronic derivation, acid house attracted the usual criticism from music bores, namely that anyone could do it because all you had to do was press a button innit, and where's the fackin' talent in that, can't compare it to Clapton man naaaaah, my kid coulda done that etc. etc. - all erroneously predicated on the notion that any given art form must prove its worth by garnering the approval of those who actively dislike that art form, and would rather we all just sat around listening to them bang on about Jimi Hendrix.

The thing is with acid house, whilst anyone may well have been able to do it, not that many did, or at least not that many did with any degree of success, and mainly because everyone missed the point and assumed it to be mostly just variations on the template used for Acid Man by Jolly Roger: drum machine - bass, hi-hat, snare, hi-hat, bass, hi-hat, snare, hi-hat over and over, squelch squelch squelch and usually a sampled phrase in which someone uses the word acid, or dance, or makes some corny reference to taking a very, very lot of drugs. It maybe wasn't quite so dad gets down with the kids by wearing baseball cap twisted backwards as Porridge's bewildering cargo cult version of acid house, identifiable as such only by what was written on the record sleeve, but you listen to this stuff, and it becomes obvious how far off the mark everyone was in terms of this particular bandwagon. Out of the sixteen tracks here recorded by a handful of guys under different names, there are barely two which sound the same, and not one with that Jolly Roger beat that became so ubiquitous during the nineties; and they nevertheless all somehow sound like part of the same family. I think this is probably the key to why this stuff still sounds so good, namely that nothing quite like it has been done either before or since. Working with such a limited, minimal palette, you can really tell that no effort has been spared to get the most out of each groove, building up an atmosphere with hardly anything but a bass boom, a ping, and the sound of a farmer in wellington boots making slow progress through a muddy field; or the frankly breathtaking Jackin' Tall by Lidell Townsell which is the sound of a robot in wellington boots making slow progress through a muddy field on his way to a piano-smashing competition.

This is some of finest electronic music ever made.

Whilst we're here, I find it somewhat amusing to note the aforementioned Porridge of Psychic TV has somehow managed to insert himself into wikihistory as the man who invented this shit, as opposed to - ooh off the top of my head - just being some clapped out performance artist breaking out the drum machine in a desperate bid to appear relevant, the logic being here, let me have a go - I'm an artist you know, so once I apply my genius to this thing - whatever it may be - the results are sure to be ground-breaking. I will show these housey fellows what they were probably trying to do, but couldn't through lacking the vision. Why, I'll bet they've never even heard of William Burroughs - ha ha!