Gavin Friday - Ecce Homo (2024)

 

Somewhere in an alternate reality, spurred on by the success of his contribution to In Strict Tempo, Genesis P. Orridge formed a synthpop act with Dave Ball, went on to even greater things, and none of us had to spend any more time thinking about Psychic TV. It didn't happen but Gavin Friday and Dave Ball would have been at least as good, and now we have evidence to support such a claim. It's been forty years but better later than never.

I half expected a slightly more disturbing Soft Cell album, but the tone and mood remain consistent with Friday's work with Maurice Seezer; although no-one could possibly doubt that it's Dave Ball twiddling the proverbial knobs given his invoking John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg, or even Kurt Weill (probably) with the best of them. Gavin Friday always had one of the more powerful voices to emerge from whatever the fuck it was he emerged from - gorgeous, and darkly sexy whilst equally liable to scare the living shit out of us with songs one can easily imagine crooned by Sinatra somehow without any of the obvious contradictions getting in the way.

As with others of his - or our if I'm being honest - Friday's vintage, thoughts inevitable turn to change and what the hell happened, so yielding reflection on When the World was Young - chilling and poignant because I'm not sure what the hell happened either. Rather than pointing out how everything is now fucking stupid (which it is) he instead ruminates on what we got right and on what should be remembered - even in the ominous yet nevertheless uplifting Glitterstomp of Lady Esquire - without squirting generic rainbow juice over everything, case in point being the sublime Cabarotica, a memory of Soho in the early eighties. Avoiding music press as I've tended to do, I've never formed assumptions regarding the lad's sexuality because it makes no difference to me; and I enjoy the idea that it ultimately doesn't matter because I miss those years before we had to fill in forms, wear badges, and pass tests in order that adjacent arseholes - the social equivalent of useless upper management material - should feel validated. Just as significant an indication of the man's character is The Best Boys in Dublin, a moving tribute to Friday's beloved sausage dogs, and I'm not sure how much more you really need to know.

The loss of the late, great Dave Ball is an enduring source of sorrow and this masterpiece is both a fine memorial to himself, and a testament to Gavin Friday as an artistic colossus whose powers remain undiminished.

Nine Inch Nails - Tron: Ares (2025)

 

I wasn't going to bother given that this is the soundtrack to a Disney movie, and while I can't deny that the Trentster has proven himself a dab hand at movie soundtracks, they've rarely been the sort of thing I would listen to over and over. I never saw the first Tron movie because it sounded like a huge pile of wank, as does this one, plus it apparently stars the impressively unwatchable Jared Leto and to paraphrase Garry Bushell without even the slightest trace of irony, cyberpunk generally holds about as much interest for me as that Yoko Ono film about arses.

But it was there in the store, and the sheer novelty of buying a brand new CD by a band I like in a place of retail with a till and a cashier and all the trimmings proved overwhelming.

To be fair, my experience of Reznor's soundtrack work is limited to bits and pieces on early bootlegs. It's mostly approximately ambient and all very nice, and I know I enjoyed The Social Network without remembering anything about its soundtrack; but this is either something different, or at least if you squint it feels like a proper Nine Inch Nails album, or possibly one of the better remix jobbies - even though I'm not unreservedly wild about those either. It's full CD length and features just four tracks which count as songs and are thus part of the canon; then an indeterminate number of instrumentals, some stripped down from parts of the four songs, others seemingly autonomous but all serving to reiterate specific musical themes just as you would find in a movie soundtrack by John Barry, Akira Ifukube, or one of those guys; and the instrumentals more or less feel like songs but for the absence of vocals, pasted together from the same grinding sequencers, pensive rhythms, and wailing electronic threnodies.

Crucially it's tense as fuck while retaining a certain ruined beauty, like the very best of Nine Inch Nails - a sort of wrist-slashing orgasm combined with a punch in the face over and over and over until it sounds like the only music in the world; which is pleasing.

Still not going to bother with sodding Tron though. Nice try, Disney but nein danke.

Snoop Dogg - Missionary (2024)

I don't know if anyone could have foreseen a new Snoop album on Death Row given at least a couple of decades of exhausting bullshit from the label's previous owner. It's probably not such a surprise that the aforementioned former owner filed for bankruptcy in 2006 and the label has been changing hands ever since, existing mainly for the sake of collecting royalties on former glories. It could have been different - cut those losses, maybe put some effort into promoting Rage's album, maybe make something of having Kurupt, Above the Law and Crooked I on the books rather than wasting all that time on pot shots launched at former employees; but no, so never mind. Not only do we have brand new Snoop on Death Row - because he bought the label - but it's produced by Dr. Dre.

I somehow lost track of Snoop, the most recent one I own being Ego Trippin' which came out in (cough) 2008 because apparently I haven't had my finger on anything resembling a pulse for some time. I don't know that he's ever done a bad album, but the last few I heard didn't particularly grab me in a major way - nothing I regret buying, but sometimes you have to be in the right mood. So I'm hearing Missionary as a comeback by virtue of my having failed to notice the hundred or so albums he's squeezed out since I've been living in the same country. Musically it's more traditional than Dre's Compton, taking the perfectionist excess in an entirely different direction so it's almost like big band music of the sixties through a hip-hop filter, a big, brassy sound built from an entire orchestra's worth of high-definition instrumentation conveying the full range of jazzy moods. It wouldn't work were it not conducted with such an expert hand, and so the blend of John Barry scale with street level lyricism and all the funky electronics you would hope for, is honestly breathtaking. Also, Snoop himself is more lyrical than I've heard him in a while - which admittedly may be my failing to pay attention - but here he reminds us why we've heard of him in the first place, beyond his sharing a cell with Martha Stewart or mugging to the camera during the Olympics. Even 50 Cent sounds decent on this record.

First the bee population of the UK is proven to be on the increase, then Snoop releases a new album on Death Row, and I'm taking both of these as signs. Perhaps things are looking up at long fucking last, despite some unusually shitty elephants in the room.

Soft Cell - *Happiness Not Included (2022)

I feel I could justifiably just write fucking hell and leave the review at that. I generally experience a certain degree of scepticism regarding any comeback that wasn't Elvis, but I'm not sure it applies here. There's a difference between a group recording their first new material in twenty years and the reanimated corpses of formerly beloved entertainers giving the loyal fanbase udder one last desperate squeeze which - funnily enough, Soft Cell obliquely address on Nostalgia Machine, which almost counts as the grandson of Memorabilia if you squint a bit.

Anyway, I inevitably approached this one with caution because you never know, and even Elvis kind of blew it at the end. Thankfully, it sounded pretty good, and continued to sound pretty good, and then one morning I woke with I'm Not a Friend of God stuck in my head, something which probably hasn't happened since I woke with Little Rough Rhinestone lodged in my head back in whichever century that was. After Cruelty Without Beauty, I knew this would be worth a listen, but I'm not sure I imagined it would be this good.

It works because there's no self-conscious effort to repeat former glories beyond simply doing what Soft Cell always did best. We're not trying to pretend it's still the eighties like in Stranger Things, and we're not trying to pretend that anything is fun or cool because that's never anything that Soft Cell were about - in case you somehow failed to notice. Musically, we're mixing technopop with traces of soul of the kind Dave Ball always did so well, along with a few less obvious elements, and Ball's John Barry homages seem to have evolved into a relative of Aaron Copland - which is odd but sounds perfectly natural - and Tranquiliser has about it a trace of Nashville in certain respects; and yet Purple Zone, recorded with the involvement of the Pet Shop Boys and very much sounding it, is nevertheless perfectly at home.

Almond's lyrics remain as beautifully acerbic and well observed as ever, not least because no-one is trying to pretend we're still eighteen, and this stuff speaks to me just as it did when we were all a bit younger, randier, skinnier, and possibly more perverted. In fact it moves me right now in 2022 just as it did in 1981, and the title track is in particular an air-punchingly joyous fuck off to certain representatives of the generation which believes it invented many of the feelings expressed on this record but really didn't. I vividly recall once sitting in a school art room listening to a couple of hairies dismissing the teenybop benders who dared soil a Jimi Hendrix masterpiece, and I knew then that I was on the right side of history - to make an overused contemporary reference. This album lets me know that I still am, which is nice. Never mind the comeback, *Happiness Not Included may even be the best thing they've ever recorded.

Severed Heads - Clean (1981)

I'd heard of the Severed Heads, but they were mostly just an amusing name until I chanced upon a copy of Rotund for Success for mere quids at Greenwich Market. I took it home, played it, and by the end of the week had tracked down every last Severed Heads record I was able to find, then spent the next year playing them all to death. I'm not sure there was ever another band for which I fell quite so hard, so suddenly, and those records don't seem to have lost any of their power. Listening to Come Visit the Big Bigot now, thirty years later, still gives me a bit of a funny turn. Yet weirdly, I was somehow unaware of their having released anything much before Since the Accident and had always assumed Blubberknife to be the only thing of note. In fact, up until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't realised that Since the Accident wasn't even their first album; and it turns out that neither was Clean, it being the second. Thank fuck for reissues.

I had reservations, believing the earlier Heads to be mostly the stuff with the tape loops, as heard on Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live in the Past and the aforementioned Blubberknife; and the looped material is certainly interesting, even powerful, but for me, it was always the tunes. Clean has therefore been a bit of a revelation given that I expected noise, or at least something of a racket. Actually it is something of a racket, but a racket with drum machines, rhythm, mood, and those twinkly sequenced melodies which no-one ever did quite like Tom Ellard. Another revelation, one which came to me just this morning, has been that everything I ever liked about the music of the Severed Heads is shared by, of all things, John Barry's Persuaders theme; so if you somehow never heard them, even though we're now two decades into the next century along, the Severed Heads are the Persuaders theme in the mind of an eighties computer, or possibly a watercolour impression of the same, images blurring as the rain begins to fall and a lovely lady artist in a floppy hat enjoys her Cadbury's Flake which, I rather think you'll find, tastes like no chocolate ever tasted before.

That last sentence exists because it's otherwise difficult to describe the full emotional impact of Tom Ellard's greatest work - and actually most of it is great.

Clean - which is now expanded to a double with a shitload of bonus material, because that's how it tends to work these days - is a formative, rudimentary, slightly raw sounding version of that greatness dating from before our man built up the confidence to vocalise, and before these things began to sound like songs or lullabies or anthems. At this point, Severed Heads were approximately the antipodean Cabaret Voltaire, spreading their invocations of the sublime across extended grooves formed from elements which hadn't always started life as music. It's a little like Since the Accident on a reduced budget, except without my implication of it necessarily lacking anything which it needed to work. It wasn't the full ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which was to come, but we were very much heading in that direction.

Mrs. Dink - D(EE)P R(IS)K (2019)

Having followed Peter Hope down the acid rabbit hole, figuratively speaking, I now encounter Mrs. Dink, another name associated with the New York Haunted label and as such further evidence of its dedication to musical excellence and innovation. Mrs. Dink - whom it should probably be noted also has material available from her own Degenerate Trifecta label - crafts pounding progressive techno which overloads the senses with all manner of disorientating filtered clatter whilst keeping your ass locked firmly to the rhythm, thus overruling any problems derived from what you expected the music to do. Unusually for this sort of thing, it features that same blend of a light multilayered touch with something hard which once characterised the very best of Front 242, yet without any of the attendant testosterone poisoning. In fact Super-Mighty Pre-emptive Strike reminded me a little of John Barry, at least in terms of mood.

I'll shut up now, but this one is very, very good.

Get it here.