Looney Tunes (1976)

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

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

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

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

The Goodies - The World of the Goodies (1973)

For the benefit of younger readers or anyone who genuinely believes there's really such a thing as a YouTube celebrity, Decca's World Of albums were pretty much everywhere in the early seventies - budget-priced compilations or reissues, usually the oeuvre of easy listening types but with a few oddities making up the numbers. My copy of Bowie's debut album is the Decca reissue as The World of David Bowie, for example, and it still seems a shame that we never had The World of Adam and the Ants collecting those early demos about rubber trousers and having a lady step upon one's bollocks, doubtless illustrated with an anachronistic stock photo of himself performing on The Basil Brush Show.

The World of the Goodies was possibly the eighth album I ever owned - following four by the Beatles, two film soundtracks, and Doctor Who and the Pescatons - costing me a Dinky Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle or similar from my friend Sean. I spent a lot of afternoons around Sean's house over the summer holidays, during which time we played this one into a flexidisc, alongside the Remember You're A Womble album and Spike Milligan's Record Load of Rubbish. It was also Sean who introduced me to the Sex Pistols a couple of years later, inadvertently inspiring the cull which led me to get rid of this one because it wasn't punky enough, and it was a comedy record, which definitely wasn't punk, or summink; but thanks to us now living in the future and the existence of the internet, I am able to correct my mistake.

The Goodies was of course the wacky television situation comedy which rewrote the King of Monsters as a giant kitten and introduced the idea of a biological weapon which turns its victims into circus clowns. It was Monty Python for kids - although for my money it seems to have aged a little better - and so this, a reissue of The Goodies Sing Songs from the Goodies, was their debut album, or - seeing as there's no point denying it - their debut novelty record.

The more one attempts to define what constitutes a novelty record, the more a consistent definition proves elusive. The crudest division, and the one I probably subscribed to when my first copy of The World of the Goodies found itself airbrushed from history, demands that novelty records lack authenticity of some sort, that they aren't real in quite the same way as the first Clash album is supposedly real. However, as I seem to recall Stewart Home writing in Cranked Up Really High, punk was mostly novelty records, or at least the good stuff was; which leaves me with a newer definition, namely that novelty records simply divide listeners into those who enjoy music, and those who principally enjoy being perceived as connoisseurs of the right sort of music - which is usually the stuff you find making up the lists in Mojo magazine. Although of course comedy records and novelty records aren't always the same thing, and we're definitely on significantly thinner ice with the comedy album, possibly because comedy is such a subjective experience. For myself, anything which introduces itself as either crazy or hilarious will always need to work at least three times as hard to get a laugh, and if you have to tell people that what you're doing is funny, then it probably isn't.

The Residents, for example, recorded an album of electronic interpretations of traditional Inuit music - a work which seems fairly typical in the context of their back catalogue. On the other hand, Weird Al Yankovic's career seems to have been mostly cover versions of established hits embellished with comedy lyrics - sort of like Mitch Benn, Richard Stilgoe, and all those other unfunny fuckers. There's a massive difference, and it is signified by the fact that the Residents chose that name rather than - titter snurf - The Weird Residents. Do you see?

There's some funny shit on The World of the Goodies - mostly comprised of songs written as incidental music for the television show - but it succeeds because Bill Oddie was almost certainly a frustrated rock star, so, like much of the Bonzos back catalogue, these are songs with a sense of humour - or wit as we sometimes call it in the trade - rather than just comedy with tunes. Not that there's anything wrong in comedy with tunes, and the faux-country misery of Mummy I Don't Like My Meat does its job well:

Tomorrow we'll curry the poodle,
He should last us a couple of days...

However, were it nothing but gags, it might become repetitive quite quickly, so thankfully it isn't. Oddie has a great bluesy voice which lends itself fairly well to everything from heartfelt gospel to growling biker anthems; and Taking You Back is in particular a magnificent beast, pounding rock bordering on acid-fuelled Hendrixisms which more or less justifies whatever price you might have to pay for a copy of this thing. Elsewhere we swerve in and out of some fairly convincing progressive pseudo-p-funk work-outs, folksy interludes, and the sort of whimsy you might associate with the Kinks and the like - notably Winter Sportsman; and most crucially of all, it sounds like a proper record rather than just three blokes smirking at you and pulling faces for forty minutes.

Most surprising for me has been how much of this thing I had forgotten, possibly because at the age of ten it was mainly the jokes which caught my attention. I suppose this means that this one has been a grower in the fullest sense of the term - aside from the fact of it being missing from my collection for at least three decades - and I'm astonished by how fresh and exciting it still sounds compared to so much of the chugging session player muso crap which emerged from the same decade, and which seems generally better remembered because most of us enjoy being seen as connoisseurs of the right sort of music, more than we enjoy the music itself.