Shameful Ca$hin (2025)

 

Shameful Ca$hin began life as a conflation of the Girl Guided Missiles  - whom you may recall from here - and some former Cravats, specifically the formative line up of the same - although one of the four has strummed and bellowed in both groups. They got together for fun and for the joy of playing pubs. They didn't have a name and so for a while it was Cravats 2 or '77 Cravats for the sake of flyers, and because their repertoire incorporated Precinct, Shut Up, Pressure Sellers, Crash Barrier Dancer and others forged by that very first line up - alongside a few newies. The  Cravats hadn't existed as the Cravats for a couple of decades by that point so it didn't seem conspicuously cheeky until a reformed version coalesced with new material and someone from their label denounced the undertaking as a shameful cash in in the comments box of a live performance posted on YouTube. Legitimately peeved, the lads decided, We're having that! and thus was Shameful Ca$hin born.

Inevitably, the new numbers began to crowd out the resurrected material until there was enough for an album - a proper album on two sides of vinyl like nature intended, just as it was in the good old days, or at least the marginally less fucking stupid days. I've known Martin, guitarist and vocalist, for many years. He played me this album at his flat when I dropped by back in 2024. I was blown away. It was melodic, powerfully muscular, distinctly shirty without getting so angry as to lose the plot. It felt like hearing the Stranglers or Sham 69 for the first time and I was excited to learn they were planning a vinyl release.

Nothing seemed to happen for a while and then it appeared on Bandcamp. I downloaded and listened once but couldn't quite square what I heard sat at my PC with what I'd heard at Martin's place; but now that the vinyl has appeared I realise this may be something to do with either MP3 files or just the superior sound of music blasting from proper speakers. In keeping with the Girl Guided Missiles having been one of the few bands to form due to musical differences, as the legend has it, Shameful Ca$hin are musically all over the place, and yet so tight and so confident that it takes a while for the ears to register abrupt segues into tangential detours such as country and western. It's because this is what bands used to do rather than simply churning out a dozen versions of the same song, lest we've somehow forgotten Led Zeppelin's brief dalliance with reggae. The thing you notice, the first thing that hits you is the sheer driven power of the music - a motorbike beat even if that isn't exactly what they're playing. There are touches of the Who, the Clash, the Dolls, the Stones, others you may not even recognise, and Nowhere Fast could have been the greatest song Eddie & the Hot Rods never got around to recording, hitting you in the chest with the same apocalyptic pathos as Beginning of the End; but the album is nevertheless very much its own thing, distinguished more by its differences than whatever comparisons might be made. This is particularly true lyrically because, let's not deny it, none of us are getting any younger, and Shameful Ca$hin speak to me as a person of equivalent vintage in addressing that which troubles them without giving too much of a shit about appealing to anyone but themselves, which is as it should be. Thus they skewer pretty much everything that's wrong with the world right now, not least that it didn't used to be quite so fucking ridiculous back when we were all in short trousers; and they do it with wit, cracking tunes, and air-punching hooks.

Just when you think it's all over, this comes along. I'm not claiming that the Shameful Ca$hin album rocks more than anything has rocked before, but it's certainly in the running.

Get it here before they're all gone.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

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

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

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

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

Nitzer Ebb - Showtime (1990)

 

The further we travel, the stranger they seem with the accumulation of hindsight; or if not strange - at least not how the Residents were strange - then not very much like what they seemed to be at the time. Beyond the sounds coming from boxes with plugs rather than boxes with strings, I suppose it comes down to mostly haircuts and graphics which kept Nitzer Ebb in the same corner of the record store as Borghesia and all those other marching up and down bands. Maybe there's a certain shared attitude expressed as a love of frowning, but such characteristics arguably extend the arbitrary field to everyone else from here to Led Zeppelin - although Showtime shares more common ground with Physical Graffiti than with whatever the hell Borghesia did, for what that may be worth.

They've freely admitted to starting out with sequencers because they couldn't be arsed learning guitar, and so inevitably first took to the stage as a sort of council estate version of DAF, more violent than hypnotic. As their sound developed, the mania remained the constant, and so the second album moved away from music sounding quite so obviously like the machinery from which it had been generated, bass deepening to a subsonic pseudo-organic rumble contrasting with the factory noise. Showtime went a step further, bringing in sounds and rhythms which seemed more in keeping with jazz and blues records, still stomping away but as a hybrid, like a sound trying to escape its own limitations. The reason none of this struck anyone as peculiar is, I presume, because the smoky menace and basement grind were there all along, but initially limited to Doug's harrowing vocal forever on the point of losing control.

Showtime seemed to slip past the post without much notice at the time, but you can tell it was the album before the one that sounded like Queen and the progression makes perfect sense. It lurches and growls with rockabilly intensity as the music fights itself, the swing and the drunken sway straining against electronics as precise and deadly as ECT; and the crazy thing is this wasn't even their best album, not by some way.

I actually wrote this about a month ago. The timing is just tragic coincidence.

Jethro Tull - Benefit (1970)

Having already grimaced at length on the subject of my tenuous relationship with Jethro Tull back in 2021, I'll add only that my current working theory is that you're probably safe with anything recorded prior to 1973, beyond which it begins to feel like school at the weekend. Benefit, picked up cheap out of curiosity mainly because it was there, seems to support this theory. It arguably lacks the manic energy of This Was, and those Open University maths modules were beginning to make themselves felt in the composition, but it hasn't yet turned into something with which to beat listeners over the head. They had spent a lot of time on tour in the US with Led Zeppelin and the like, and the influence of this excursion is felt in songs turning out extra-English. We still have something of the influence of jazz, blues, folk and the rest, with everything blended so finely as to have become its own flavour with occasional Renaissance frills taking us outside the usual 4/4 expectations and a mix that serves to remind that it wasn't always about sheer volume. It's an unmistakably English sound with few traces of Chuck Berry, and not just English, but specifically the rural English of haystacks, birdsong, hedgerows, woolly jumpers in the pissing rain, and pubs which have been in business at least since the crusades. Even if it gets a mention, there's not much trace of London Town to be found, and it leaves me feeling weirdly nostalgic for my childhood which felt very much like this album in some respects.

Everything you hear on this record would be developed further into ever more ornate conventions until the element of soul had been reduced to an equation which only worked because Ian was right there in front of the microphone telling you how important it was and so insisting you shut up and pay attention; but on Benefit it's still fresh, sparkling in both sun and rain, reviving the spirit and reminding us of what matters in this life.

Remember Englishness? Having moved to the US some fifteen years ago, it's not anything to which I give much thought, but fuck - it's wonderful to experience music so honest, so free of artifice, with such a good heart, that reminds me of how England felt without needing to push down on anyone, without any weird parochial agenda, without some fat skinhead twat from Surrey (off the top of my head) fog-horning on about this week's scapegoat.

Given previously stated reservations about this lot, it's lovely to discover I was wrong.

Frequencies - Blame Frequencies (2016)

I was at junior school with Sean, the bass player. I lived on a farm. Sean and my friend Matt lived in nearby villages. We'd spend most of the summer holidays commuting between our respective houses on bikes. Sean was the first person I knew with a record by the Sex Pistols, also Tubeway Army and Cheap Trick - which was an interesting development being as we'd spent at least one summer prior to that formative moment playing the Wombles album into a flexidisc. I mention this just so you know this is unlikely to be an impartial review.

Sean and I lost touch for a couple of decades, then hooked up again more recently, which has been nice, bringing the unexpected discovery that those early friendships have ultimately proven more enduring, and more fun, than most of those made in more recent years. Apparently the stuff you believe yourself to have in common with people isn't always what you actually have in common with them, but enough of memory lane. Let's give the disc a spin.

Sean gave the disc a spin - several spins in the end - as the three of us sat around shooting the breeze at his house, filling in a couple of decades worth of gaps, the usual stuff. I hadn't been aware of his musical inclinations when we were children, it being something which just kind of grabbed him in his twenties. There was, for me, a moment of unease - as there usually will be when your old friend gives you a blast of his band and you're scared it's going to be the worst music you've ever heard, and fuck it you're going to have to say something nice; but thankfully it never came. The music, I soon realised, sounded good. Then we played it again, there being just seven tracks on Blame Frequencies and I realised it sounded like something I would listen to out of choice - which is pretty good going. I have a fair few all-time favourites which didn't really sound like anything until I'd been playing them for at least a week.

I kept thinking of Led Zeppelin as we sat listening, not that it sounds anything like Led Zeppelin, but it has that same breezy quality they had in their gentler moments, like a spring morning captured on tape. Listening now and hence probably closer, Led Zeppelin doesn't work at all, although it retains that elusive early morning sparkle, invoking an era before rock bands channelled themselves into whichever genre got the bums on seats, before anyone was really trying to sound like anyone else, when you might hear an accordion or even bagpipes on a record despite a painting of Satan on the cover and the band logo in sheet metal lettering. The bass slaps and throbs, funky as anything. The guitar illustrates with metal chords, jazz chords, or the sort of frenetic chopping that famously got James Brown up off of that thing; and the vocals are golden, soaring up from the music with everyone else perfectly balanced in their own corner of the sound. It's beautifully put together - tight, clean, clear, and no flab. This is probably what you'd call classic rock these days, except I wouldn't because it seems a little insulting, implying a revival or preservation of something we used to enjoy, and Frequencies shouldn't be defined as such. Their myriad influences were, I would guess, never more than starting points, and none of them seem obvious;, although if it helps, Blame Frequencies also reminds me of Porcupine Tree in so much as that they too invoke what you'd probably call classic rock without sounding like revivalists, beyond which, the comparison is vague, more to do with mood than anything.

Anyway, I have no idea how you would get hold of this disc should you be so inclined, and it seems the band no longer exist in quite this form, a shift of line-up having regrouped as something which will probably be called Squoove, which I may have spelled wrong; but they play live, and I'm sure there will be other discs so - I don't know - keep watching the skies, I guess.

Stylic - Preacher EP (2022)

 

I don't know why I took a chance on this one over other doubtless wonderful sets squirted forth from New York Haunted's virtual spigot on a seemingly weekly basis - because they're always great - and I suppose it was just the cover image which caught my attention by putting me in mind of Craggy Island's finest.

That's how superficial I am.

Well, superficial or not, other factors must account for why I've ended up playing the thing so much, namely that it bangs and is proper peng and fire and that, as we teenagers say. Preacher is techno or dance or summink, but with what I presume to be that distinctive New York Haunted sensibility in that it sits at a bit of a distance from everything else I've heard and is at least as much concerned with sonic power as getting your back up off the wall. Stylic's brand of techno has an undercurrent of the sort of EDM I recall from the nineties, particularly Nitzer Ebb before they turned into Led Zeppelin, without really sounding like anything from a previous decade. I assume this to be the samples, that specific snare and so on, rather than what it does on the floor; although the mood may also be a factor - a sort of euphoric stomp with added 303 squelch stood at the bar waiting for its turn. The second track, Led, is in particular a work of crazy genius, welding Robert Plant's orgasm noises from the aforementioned Zeppelin's Lemon Song* to Front 242 driving disco trucks across an international checkpoint. Why no-one has syncopated Plant's cum-face before is revealed as a complete fucking mystery as the track sweeps you off your feet, or your chair in my case.

Everything else holds up too, for what it may be worth - three tracks plus three remixes, although not of Led probably because it simply couldn't be made any more amazing than it already is; and we even get one of those remixes in which the label seems to specialise which veers towards Throbbing Gristle effects overload. Someone needs to vinylise this monster ASAP.

 

*: I'm pretty sure it's the Lemon Song but I can't be arsed to check right now. It's the one where it sounds like he's shooting his muck anyway.

We Be Echo - Isolation (2021)

Mother of God - I'm sure the previous one came out about three weeks ago, but whatever the case may be, the lad is quite clearly on a roll. Isolation continues on the trajectory begun with Darkness is Home then The Misanthrope with improvements here and there, greater confidence in the vocal department, sharper mixing or whatever. It's difficult to quite say what sets this one apart from the other two, but there's something for sure, and even as Kevin Thorne continues to work with what might seem like a restricted musical palate, he's kept it sounding fresh, very much like a new thing each time another album comes out of the gate. As before, it's mostly drums, bass, and vocals - driving songs, or maybe grooves with some distant kinship to Joy Division or maybe Suicide or Chrome - particularly Into the Eyes of the Zombie King - but not entirely like any of the above. The wall of bass - everything here is played on four strings - is such that it's taken me three albums to really notice what's going on with the percussion, and although it isn't a main feature, this material would be the poorer with just a Doctor Rhythm ticking away in the background. I assume the percussion is programmed but it somehow doesn't quite feel like it, and has an almost John Bonham sense of presence in so much as that it pounds and is doing more than just keep time. One might expect an album called Isolation to sound pretty miserable, particularly when it's the follow up to one called The Misanthrope, but it's actually quite difficult to describe how this album makes me feel - sad, sort of wistful, not actually unhappy, and yet kind of warmed by the cinematic wash of emotion. I know I probably said the previous one was the best yet, but it could actually be this one.

Girl Guided Missiles (2021)

You can probably be forgiven for having missed the Girl Guided Missiles first time around. They released one single - now worth a fortune if you can find a copy - and made enough of a rumpus on the local live circuit for a guy I hadn't seen since school to remember having seen them in some pub roughly forty years ago. I only know them because I've known Martin de Sey since the eighties, Martin being the Girl Guided Missiles' guitarist, occasional vocalist, and apparently the only member to have troubled his local barber shop while they were together as a group. Knowing Martin as I do, this is unlikely to be the most impartial review you'll ever read but you're free to stop reading at no additional charge.

The Girl Guided Missiles may be one of the few bands who ever formed due to musical differences, as the cover notes report, which actually makes a lot more sense than you might expect once you listen to the disc. In essence they seem to have comprised one ex-Cravat turned sharp suited mod and three denim clad hairies, and the sounds they made were a similarly incongruent musical Frankenstein monster which somehow pulled together and worked through the raw enthusiasm of the enterprise. I'd hesitate to guess at potential influences but I can hear traces of T-Rex, Buddy Holly, the Pistols, Status Quo, Suzy Quatro, and possibly even Kiss - or at least there are comparisons to be made with Paul Stanley's pseudo-operatic falsetto; and yet a couple of the tracks made me think of a biker version of the Moody Blues, while Games's Up and Trendy Wendy don't fall far short of channelling the Undertones. I should probably also mention that Further Education is an absolutely classic punk single (or should have been) of the kind which might have seen the light of day through the Step Forward label in an alternate universe; so I've described what probably sounds like a compilation album even without mentioning the cowpunk of Josalea, despite which, it's all quite clearly the work of one band with a very clear idea of what they were doing.

Having known one of the lads since we were kittens, I'm familiar with about half of the songs here, which qualifies me to add that I'm impressed by how great they still sound; also that I'm genuinely surprised to recognise the noodley middle eight - or whatever you call it - from Drinker with such a powerful hit of memory sherbert. Had you played it to me in isolation I would have assumed it to be some half remembered passage from something by Steppenwolf or Led Zeppelin. The other songs are new to me, but it already feels as though they're old favourites.

The Girl Guided Missiles were one of those rare bands which shouldn't have worked but somehow managed to sound effortlessly great despite the odds and so briefly carved their own unique furrow, at least in my tape collection, as well as at a succession of drinking establishments in the vicinity of Studley. This posthumous collection beautifully rescues their studio recordings from the tape hiss to which I've become accustomed, and should probably be snapped up by one of those punky boutique labels of which there seem to be so many at the moment.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

This was originally submitted to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review, but I get the impression Ed found it a bit fishy and so passed it onto me for target practice, along with pages of off-putting photocopied press material explaining just how amazing the band were. Sure enough, it looked like something in need of a good clip around the ear - world music earnestly sampled over prog rock, guitar solos, Terrance fucking McKenna, and five white guys cradling cute ethnic instruments on the back cover doing that face which Sting sometimes does to let you know that he's in touch with the ancient rhythm of the spheres and just recently met this really amazing old guy halfway up a mountain in Baja California…

Oh - and the full name given on the cover is the Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Π, with the Π presumably being mystic shorthand for Paranoise. Anyway, that was a whole two decades ago and Ishq gets a second go because, against the most dour expectations I've possibly ever harboured, it still sounds fucking amazing. I doubt there has ever been such a gap between what I anticipated and what I actually experienced. Musically Paranoise are competent as fuck and fairly proggy with all sorts of funny time signatures, but with killer songs, really beautiful stuff which, just as the press release claimed, invoke Led Zeppelin's Kashmir amongst other things. In fact a lot of Ishq reminds me of that era of Led Zeppelin, back when heavy rock really was heavy rock rather than metal, but there's an occasional hint of something jazzier, maybe the more new-agey end of the Killing Joke back catalogue, even fucking Styx on the particularly monumental I Own; and what differentiates these songs from anything else to which that description may loosely apply, is the use of samples. Ethnic wails selotaped to a beat are nothing new, as the Severed Heads, Moby and a thousand others are my witness, and as with others who've been down the same road, I have to wonder about this sort of thing which, at worst, seems like cultural tourism with traditional vocals sourced from Kenya, Bulgaria, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere, united seemingly by their lack of electricity and plumbing. I believe othering is the term, but I'll refrain because it's a neologism favoured mainly by complete wankers, and because Paranoise at least credit those they've sampled as co-writers, and because the blend of pounding mathematically weird rock and native voice is frankly fucking dynamite. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you really have to get it right, and Paranoise absolutely nailed it on this record.

Of course, the message of Ishq is ecological, anti-corporate and aspires to revolution, so the use of indigenous voices - those most trampled upon by the guys we're singing about - is appropriate, even bringing a balance to the narrative it might not have had were it just five white dudes from Connecticut singing about how they don't like Nestlé. Additionally, great use is made of spoken pieces by Noam Chomsky and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, with only Terrence McKenna's drippy Woody Allen impersonation letting the side down - not that what he says is without value, but as usual he seasons his testimony with psychobabble. Still, a minute of rolling eyes and pulling faces is easily overlooked in context of something which rocks this hard for a full hour, which states its case with such conviction and confidence, and which doesn't really sound quite like any other record I can think of. I somehow imagined one of the more self-important of Sting's solo works, but got a more worldly Physical Grafitti without the kiddy fiddling.

Cabaret Voltaire - Groovy, Laidback and Nasty (1991)

'Micro-phonies sounds about right,' quipped my one time friend Paul, 'because they're phonies!' The thrust of his satire - cleverly recycling the same actual joke made by the band in the title of what was then their latest album - was that Cabaret Voltaire had sold out in producing a queer gayboy disco record which may as well have had Boy George singing on it etc. etc.

Drum machines?

Bum machines, more like!

Hopefully he exploded when this one came out.

To be fair, the sight of Stephen Mallinder doing the butterfly in a hoodie with a big sporty stopwatch swinging from his neck in the video for Hypnotised is somehow massively comical, and very much suggestive of an album trying far too hard, which is why I've only just bought this. How bad could it be? I asked myself, repeating a question which seems to have informed quite a few of my musical purchases of late.

Obviously it doesn't really sound like a Cabaret Voltaire album, even though it is; but in their defence, the next logical question would be what does a Cabaret Voltaire album actually sound like? I suppose the answer depends on which one you're listening to, and it probably would have been just as weird had they dug out an old copy of Voice of America, analysed how it was recorded, and then impersonated their former selves like we apparently wanted them to. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty scores low for tapes of evangelical preachers, drums played through a flange pedal, or Mal doing that weird vocalising thing which never quite sounds like language so much as Sean Connery having a seizure.

Yushnar arwar sharwar nawurhar…

Groovy, Laidback and Nasty is house music, which doesn't have to be a problem, because 1) if anyone had earned the right to jump on the house music gravy train, it was Cabaret Voltaire, 2) I like house music, and 3) they do it very well.

This last point is what seals the deal, and which differentiates this from one of Porridge's hilarious attempts to get down with da mans dem, and specifically due to the involvement of persons such as Marshall Jefferson and Paris Brightledge; besides which Cabaret Voltaire always had some vague connection to northern soul and black music in general, particularly the sonic experimentation of dub producers. It's not like they ever had much of a through line from Led Zeppelin or Whitesnake; and when you stick the record on, it sounds fucking great - at least more convincing than all those fuckfaced baggy twats of the day, jangling away and insisting that there had always been a dance element to their dopey shuffling songs. Mal's vocal, if limited, is surprisingly conducive to what is basically soul, and the music very much inhabits its genre rather than standing outside waiting to be let in. You can already hear traces of Kirk's Sweet Exorcist beginning to emerge, so it's not even like Groovy fails to bring anything new to the table; and once again I wish somebody had told me all of this back in 1991.

Kid Rock - Devil Without a Cause (1998)

I must admit it's been a while since I dug this one out. It's the whole hanging out with Donald deal which bothers me, although realistically the aforementioned hanging out with Donald is only the latest idiocy in a career founded on the same, and I doubt that anyone was surprised. Kid Rock's whole schtick is that he's a bit of an arsehole, and so Devil Without a Cause is largely about boozing and shagging until your liver explodes and your knob falls off, then doing it again whilst listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd turned up to eleven. I haven't looked too closely for fear of what I might find, but I expect he doesn't have much time for what I'm sure he terms political correctness, and I really, really wish he hadn't had such a hard-on for the Confederate flag; but then I like the music I like because it's music that I like rather than because every last opinion held by the artist synchronises perfectly with my own, and I'm probably going to hang onto those Kate Bush albums even though she's just outed herself as a massive fan of Theresa May. I draw the line at where the thought crimes of the artist are so overpowering as to infect my perception of the music.

MC Ren rapping about killing whitey doesn't bother me because it's obvious he was simply having a bad day, plus it's funny and you can see where he was coming from. I can still just about listen to Death in June with a peg over my nose, although they sound somewhat comical on this side of the millennium. I wish I'd never found out about Beck being a Scientologist. Skrewdriver, on the other hand, helpfully recorded music which was already shite thus saving the rest of us any need to debate whether it's possible to enjoy the stick 'em in a boat and send 'em back song without condoning the message, such as it is.

Maintaining a set of rules about what you will allow yourself to enjoy is a waste of time, so selections probably have to be made on a case to case basis extrapolated mostly from gut reaction; and I guess it must take a lot to stir my gut to righteous indignation.

The fact of my having felt the need to write those three paragraphs probably relates to why Kid Rock enjoys playing the arsehole, not to mention that he was never going to get to hang out with the cool kids or NME readers, regardless of his serious yet routinely overlooked credentials. So he's a white rapper, or was, but I guess we're all over that one by now. His flow belongs clearly to that sing-songy old school cornball style which is otherwise fine if we're digging out old Run DMC records or banging on about the tediously studied authenticity of Ugly Duckling; and while Kid's descent into autotuned stadium country has been appalling but probably inevitable, he's nevertheless paid dues and was once something of a whizz on the two record players - as we rap types call them; and Devil Without a Cause is unfortunately a fucking great album - not merely better than you expected, but one of those discs which glues itself into the player and stays there.

If he's an arsehole, he's the best arsehole he can possibly be on this record; and the music effortlessly weds pounding boom bap to Led Zep riffing and the kind of Skynyrd-isms which turn even the most urbane of us all misty eyed and countrified - not least on Black Chick, White Guy which just plain tears your heart out; and Welcome 2 the Party gets under your skin like nothing since the wholesale borrowing of Good Times by Chic. It's a populist album in the broadest sense, just like those early rap records before we got all uptight and snooty about it; and it's a populist album aimed squarely at people who maybe didn't make it to college, and who maybe don't have much going for them, and who probably won't respond too well when you sneer and suggest they might do better to listen to someone less sexist, J-Live for example. It's low rent, but there's a generous spirit here, and it's inclusive and probably doesn't really care if you voted for Hillary providing you're not going to be a dick about it.

While Kid Rock may be a dick who has been occasionally known to hang out with Ted Nugent, close inspection reveals him to be an otherwise decent guy in most senses that count, or at least some way from being your archetypal Republican shithead. Similarly this album almost certainly isn't what you may believe it to be, even if it does spend a lot of time belching in your face and then chuckling over how upset you are. It will probably be at least another hundred years before Devil achieves the sort of recognition it probably deserves, so don't whine about never having got the memo.

AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)

Just to get the namedropping out of the way, I've never met any members of AC/DC and nor am I knowingly related to any of them, but I briefly delivered mail to the house in Overhill Road, East Dulwich outside which Bon Scott breathed his last following an evening of partying with unusual vigour back in February, 1980. You could tell it was the place from the memorial graffiti which sporadically appeared on adjacent municipal surfaces. This was in the nineties which, by happy coincidence - at least for me - was the point at which I finally began to understand AC/DC, the key to which is that if you feel you need to understand AC/DC then you're probably thinking about it too hard.

They were one of those groups beloved of everyone except me in the town in which I grew up, and the reason they weren't beloved of me was because everyone else liked them, which meant they must be crap; and also that I hadn't actually heard any of their records. Someone or other lent me the 7" of Whole Lotta Rosie but all I can recall is thinking that it sounded a bit sexist.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can appreciate that AC/DC were basically punk for anyone who didn't live in a big city, as were most bands associated with that whole hairy scene of the time. All I could see were five blokes who looked like everyone at my school and who probably would have regarded Joy Division as poufs, and all the emphasis on guitar solos seemed designed to appeal to shitheads; but, I was a bit up myself - as they say - and doubtless annoyed that everyone seemed to be having sex with girls except for me, which wasn't actually AC/DC's fault, not directly. They seemed stupid, and apparently I wasn't able to work out that stupid was sort of the point, although raw, rootsy and basic would be a better way of putting it.

Years passed and I heard bits and pieces, and it became increasingly hard to deny the power of those choppy bluesy guitar riffs - just chords, but there was something special there, some sound they had in common with the finer end of Led Zeppelin, just more direct. There's a reason that the opening bars of Back in Black score that scene in Iron Man, as opposed to something by Ed Sheeran.

I eventually bought this because a record store had opened on Lordship Lane, but they didn't have much stock and Highway to Hell was about the only thing I could find which seemed like it might at least contain a few surprises. Specifically it contained one surprise, namely that it's a fucking masterpiece contrary to what I had believed at the age of seventeen when I knew everything. AC/DC do one thing and that's rock, which would be stupid but for how well they do it, almost better than anyone else ever; and they rock like few have rocked before or since because they have a vision.

Nobody's playin' Manilow,
Nobody's playin' soul,
And no-one's playin' hard to get,
Just good old rock 'n' roll.

I know. They really didn't need to print the lyrics on the cover. It makes them sound like shitheads, but let's face it - Manilow ain't that great, some soul music was kind of bland, and whatever other objections you may have, you probably wouldn't say it to their faces; and it might be argued that taking umbrage with AC/DC for appealing to shitheads whilst failing to address the concerns of the supposedly sophisticated is a waste of time and misses the point. It could be argued that this material is outrageously sexist - although on close inspection it's actually more like evil Benny Hill - but you might do better to direct any available outrage at something which actually makes people miserable in the real world.

It wasn't the first, it wasn't the last,
It wasn't that she didn't care.
She wanted it hard, wanted it fast,
She liked it done medium rare.

Milligan-esque narrative swerves aside, it's really just a record of men singing songs about how they like to drink beer and how much they appreciate nude ladies - which has been a theme central to rock 'n' roll and the blues from which it sprang from the beginning; and at the risk of turning into Milo Yiannopoulos, I generally share these interests with AC/DC so I don't have a problem with any of it.

On the other hand, Night Prowler makes for uneasy listening as the slowest, arguably heaviest, and unfortunately sexiest track on the album, seemingly belonging to the lyrical subgenre of heavy metal odes to stalking women; but it's a misleading impression possibly fostered by the rest of the album being songs sung for the ladies, sort of. The point of Night Prowler is the mania of the killer rather than his choice of victim. It's a horror story, so it's supposed to upset you, and by way of a clue, there's a bloke with horns on the cover of the record. You know, had I had the sense to embrace this back when I was seventeen, my life might have turned out completely different, and I have an uncomfortable feeling it might even have been a bit better.

Mex - Do You Wanna Fuck Around? (2017)

Just to kick off in what will probably seem like one hell of a tangent, independent art cinema is, perhaps surprisingly, very much an unfamiliar realm for me. I've seen the odd thing inevitably borrowed from Ted at work, but most of those were weird and terrifying, and probably not representative of your average independent art cinema production. My friend Noel made purchase of a Ben Dover video whilst visiting London and so we watched a bit of that seeing as Noel was kipping on my sofa. For the uninitiated, Ben Dover produced a whole string of independent art cinema videos in which himself and a bloke with a video camera travel England, proposing sexual intercourse to random women working in shops, service stations, or just out walking the dog. The encounters seem casual and opportunist, even if they're almost certainly staged, and the appeal is probably mostly in the cheap and cheerful realism. Ben Dover's independent art cinema looks as though it could happen at the end of your road with one or more of the neighbours; and Ben Dover himself resembles a self-employed plumber more than a mogul of independent art cinema, although I suppose it could be argued that he sort of is a self-employed plumber. Anyway, all I can remember from the one Ben Dover production I watched was a scene in which our man enters an actress whilst persuading her to additionally stimulate the penis of the bloke with the camera, who accordingly chirps, 'This is indeed an unexpected bonus!'

Weirdly, it turns out that Mex once came fairly close to providing soundtrack music for Ben Dover; or at least I'm sure I read that somewhere. Do You Wanna Fuck Around?, subtitled Soundtrack Reflections on a Golden Age of Vice, is therefore an album of what could have been, music for imaginary independent art cinema productions. Naturally it's instrumental, barring snatches of dialogue invoking celluloid seventies blueys more than Ben Dover encouraging giggling cashiers out of their knickers. Musical cues come from psychedelia, bits of the Velvet Underground, and things which have since been reclassified as acid jazz in certain quarters - organ swirling over a big fat beat with blues guitar licks squirting hither and thither, at least as wild and sensual as those films always seemed to think they were despite so often resembling Abigail's Party with budget cuts in the wardrobe department. Doubtless owing to the inspiration of similar sources, whilst this could almost be a funkier, wrinkle-free Led Zeppelin in terms of instrumentation, musically it makes me think of Fatboy Slim, or rather what Fatboy Slim should have sounded like, that same sort of punchy bass heavy go-go but without the whole element of trying too hard.

As might be discerned from the first paragraph, I'm hardly an authority in the field of independent art cinema, but it seems to me that the one thing Mex gets wrong is that I don't recall ever seeing a bluey with music this good. In fact, the few I recall had awful midi-synth soundtrack music of a general type which ended up recycled as vapourwave and Go Kart Mozart. So here is an album which is actually better than the thing it's trying to be, if you see what I mean, and another argument for Mex as one of the most underrated artists and producers in the biz.

Procure yourself a copy by following the link to Mex under Some Stuff at the top left of this page.

Nitzer Ebb - Industrial Complex (2010)

I didn't even realise they had reformed until a little over a year ago, and this one is now already seven years old, or of equivalent vintage to the first Black Sabbath album by the time Never Mind the Bollocks hit the shops. It's thirty-two years since Nitzer Ebb's debut album, which in relative terms is the same span of time as divides the aforementioned Bollocks from the Andrews Sisters bothering the top slot with Rum & Coca-Cola, whatever the hell that was. The passage of time sure is weird, and I feel somehow obliged to scorn this with the same kind of disregard as was showered upon the Rolling Stones back in my days as a younger and at least thematically spikier man; but I can't because it would be silly, and good fucking God what a cracker of an album it is; besides I always liked Start Me Up.

My first impressions were something along the lines of chuckles over how they've once again dug out the sequencers, perhaps having seen the error of their Led Zeppelin impersonating ways, as heard on Ebbhead and Big Hit.

That's right, lads, I smirked to myself, give the fans what they want, because I am essentially a bit of an arsehole.

So they've gone back to the same basic musical recipe book we all remember from the years when they were that band who sounded a lot like DAF; and yet what they've cooked up from those recipes seems very much a continuation of where they were going on the aforementioned Big Hit. Industrial Complex comprises songs, and songs with all those complicated changes and linky bits people like Elton John tend to write, as you will begin to notice once you get past being pounded around the head with a pulsing sequencer. Furthermore, Douglas McCarthy's voice - always distinctly bluesy - sounds better than ever, wrenching genuine soul and pathos out of some of those lines. What this adds up to is, I suppose, that band who sound a lot like DAF making music which somehow feels like the Groundhogs or one of that bunch. Some of this may be thanks to the drums - massive, pounding, and certainly acoustic - pushing the music along on a muscular, organic surge in peculiar contrast to all the bleeps and squelches; and yet it doesn't feel in any way mannered, which I only mention in case I should have accidentally invoked Depeche Mode's self-conscious efforts to sound like a real band by having the one who looks like a poodle play harmonica during their CBeebies version* of an old SPK record.

Hit You Back, I Am Undone, and the white knuckle glam stomp of On the Road are as magnificent as anything this lot have ever recorded; and fuck it - they were always better than DAF. I don't care what anyone says.

*: I should probably thank Gary Robertson for this joke.

Mudhoney - Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988)

The only reason for my failing to have nabbed this when it came out nearly thirty years ago that I've been able to come up with is that I was never a tool who based my record buying habits on whether or not a band was from Seattle and might thus be friends with that hunky Kurt with his dreamy blue eyes; plus it's not like I was short of stuff I wanted to buy that year. Mudhoney sounded like they might be the kind of thing I liked, not least because almost everything I played in the Dovers - the band of which I was a member at the time - was played through the same Electro-Harmonix pedal after which this was named, or at least after which the original six-track EP was named. This version also includes the preceding singles.

Still, better late than never seeing as this turned up in my usual store and there didn't seem like any good reason to not buy it. Nothing really stands out for the first couple of plays, but it quickly gains ground third or fourth time around. Mudhoney, as I now appreciate, were pretty much a slightly hairy garage punk band in the general vein of Iggy & the Stooges, wild but tuneful, and sounding very much like they'd be a blast live. The fact of their having been fans of Billy Childish isn't difficult to understand. In fact - if you'll pardon the supreme wankiness of such a digression, dear reader - they kind of remind me of the aforementioned Dovers, which is curious. I suppose we should have capitalised on having occasionally stood in the same room as Billy Childish, but never mind.

Providing they haven't turned into Supertramp in the intervening years without my knowing - which is possible given that I've only just realised they had albums other than this one - Mudhoney lacked the musical sophistication of Seattle favourites Tad, who I suppose might be characterised as a concrete mixer rendering expertly played Led Zeppelin covers; but on the other hand they sound a shitload more fun than Nirvana ever did, and I realise that view is probably mainly just me and no-one else. It's self-loathing and booze through a fuzz pedal cranked up far too loud, and yet you can sort of tell it wants you to have an air-punchingly good time; so there are none of those songs about only wanting cool people at their shows. I really wish I'd bought this at the time instead of that shitty Revolting Cocks record.

Shellac at Action Park (1994)

I've just noticed that Shellac have now been going longer than those acts I once regarded as peddlers of dinosaur rock back when that suddenly seemed like a thing, and this is weird because I've had this album for most of those twenty plus years and it feels as though I'm only just beginning to understand it. This was either a birthday or Christmas present from my friend Andrew, the one who pegged it, and is thus yet another example of him having introduced me to something I now consider essential listening. Oddly, I found Action Park a little impenetrable at the time - more or less a series of angular riffs and scratching noises scored to a pounding drum rhythm; yet the more I played it, the more its power came to the fore.

People have the wrong idea about Steve Albini, assuming him to be some sort of bloody minded lo-fi figurehead, a man who won't rest until everything has been reduced to a wax cylinder recorded with a microphone made out of old fag papers and knicker elastic. Rather it's the case that he's trying to get to the beauty of the instruments as they sound without all the reverb and chorus and horseshit, none of which are strictly necessary unless you have something to hide - a complete dearth of ideas for example. This isn't to say that the very idea of the studio as instrument is always the province of shitehawks, only that other flavours are available, or at least that they should be.

Albini's musical asceticism extends to the album as object, in this case an object which looks as though it's been purchased from a wooden display box on the counter of a hardware store, and specifically the kind of family owned hardware store tended by a man with strong opinions on possums and raccoons. The music also has a bit of a hardware store feel to it, certainly something involving hammers and sore thumbs. Yet none of this is really quite novelty - some cutesy exercise in nostalgia or punk rock as a Hal Roach production - so much as a reaffirmation of the sheer power of music as visceral and human. Those scratchy riffs and weird, harsh chords executed with the sort of precision timing by which one might operate a lathe or a band saw all slot together to form an almost sculptural whole of complex patterns founded in something surprisingly simple. The drums pound, the bass growls, Albini gives himself a sore throat, and there isn't even standard issue heavy metal distortion on this album, yet it makes Physical Graffiti sound like the Sundays. Steve Albini has made some great records, but this one makes everything which preceded it sound tame.

Godflesh - Streetcleaner (1989)

Funny how certain things send you straight off in search of a particular bit of music. This one came back to me through the reproduction of a Daily Mail cartoon likening Muslim refugees to a plague of rats infesting host countries, just as Nazi cartoonists once made the same analogy with Jews; and the first track here is Like Rats which, aside from the parallel title, pretty much summarises the shittiness of a world run almost exclusively for the benefit of horrible Daily Mail reading cunts.

I was introduced to Godflesh with Us & Them, but for some reason have only recently begun to venture further into their back catalogue. I'm not sure why being as I love the shit out of Us & Them; although with hindsight, it's weird to consider that it's almost their album of uptempo pop songs, at least compared to this beast.

Actually, I suppose I was introduced to Godflesh - or at least to Justin Broadrick - much earlier when he recorded tapes of electronic noise as Final, and a few of his tracks appeared on the same noisy cassette compilations as some of my own stuff. I don't recall much about the music, beyond that one track was called Belief, but the fact that I remember it at all suggests it had something going for it. Also, the transition from power electronics to this sort of noise metal makes a lot of sense, and whilst Godflesh weren't the only band to go down that particular road, they remain the most listenable of their kind for my money - possibly excepting Ramleh who were kind of going for a different thing anyway.

Where Us & Them seems to share some kinship with Killing Joke or even Joy Division, Streetcleaner is a different, more primal monster. This one isn't so much songs as power electronics with riffs and a drum machine. Ordinarily, much as I love Brer Drum Machine, I'd raise an eyebrow at his use under circumstances where an actual drummer would have sounded so much better - like on Big Black's otherwise astonishing Atomiser, for one example. Streetcleaner initially sounds like it could do with a human bashing the skins, not least because the drum machine here is clearly programmed to have more or less the same effect as John Bonham, but after a few listens the reasoning for the choice becomes clear. There's something about the impersonal quality of a drum machine and the very fact of it being a machine which works so well. Music reviews employing the term jackhammer in reference to rhythm seem a bit of a cliché, but this one really does sound like that. It rocks like fuck whilst nevertheless resembling some inhuman mechanical process occurring inside the meat factory, the sort of thing with a start button and that big red plastic mushroom you bash to shut the whole system down when some poor fucker falls in and loses his legs. Add to this massive riffs delivered like concrete blocks onto a loading bay from the back of a truck, over and over and over, and every single one of them landing on your fucking foot.

It's huge and brutal, possibly an heir to the Swans, except Cop seems surprisingly subtle by comparison despite equivalent soul-crushing weight. Extremity has become a bit of a minefield in musical terms as of at least the last decade, mainly thanks to too many industrial types coming to resemble the enemy in their relentless invocation of the violence of civilisation. In fact I'm surprised there hasn't yet been a pro-UKIP power electronics act coming through, but give it time. Godflesh at least seem to have remained true to the spirit of dissent informing earlier generations of noisy buggers, the Grey Wolves for example - whom I mention partially because they're about as dark as it gets and I know they're good lads, and also because I know one of them occasionally reads this stuff, and because for the sake of argument I suppose Godflesh are the Grey Wolves with tunes, just about, at least in terms of what they do to your ears, brain, and arse.

It's hardly pretty, but then neither is the world which has inspired this particular hour long howl of rage, and sometimes it helps to be reminded of the fact with no punches pulled.

New Model Army - No Rest for the Wicked (1985)

New Model Army were never obvious candidates for membership of my record collection, but they sort of came to me through a process resembling osmosis. I spent at least a couple of weeks of 1985 in proximity to Chatham's small but daunting contingent of New Model Army fans, wearers of leather jackets and clogs who regularly undertook a hajj to Bradford, presumably to camp out in Slade the Leveller's garden or something. Ordinarily I might have been a bit creeped out by such over-investment in the oeuvre of just one band, but as I came to appreciate, New Model Army were actually a pretty good band, and if you're going to join a cult, than it may as well be one with a few decent tunes to its name - thus disqualifying anything involving Porridge. New Model Army appealed to me for the same reason that the Apostles appealed to me, specifically that with all the anarchy, peace and freedom then so popular amongst the yoots of a certain social stratum, it was kind of refreshing to hear songs about kicking Nazi heads in or throwing insurance salesmen from the top of tall buildings.

In terms of their following, New Model Army seemed to be what happened once goths got fed up of townies taking the piss and duly started punching faces, presumably having come back from summer holidays spent lifting concrete blocks on some farm somewhere - kids with an inherent distrust of authority who might be a bit sensitive in certain respects, but nevertheless enjoyed the occasional punch-up of a Saturday night after the pubs had closed.

Musically - at least at the time of this album - New Model Army were sort of Crass or maybe Conflict crossed with Big Country, or something in that general direction. It was a huge, pounding sound designed to reach all the way to the back of the stadium, an anthemic cry by which rugged men would face the sunset with their long hair flowing majestically in the north wind like anti-authoritarian lions. It was the point at which Led Zeppelin crossed over with Steeleye Span or summink. I suppose what I'm scrabbling at is New Model Army playing folk music, albeit a face-punching variant drenched in patchouli and preferring snakebite to anything one might serve in a pewter tankard. In other words it's populist, perhaps even addressing the accusation that I've heard made of Crass and others that the harsh form taken by the music greatly limits the range of its audience, which is a contradiction when that music is specifically concerned with communication. New Model Army's music on the other hand gushes in positively cinematic terms. It's powerful and simple with obvious mass appeal, and such obvious mass appeal that I got away with buying my dad this album for Christmas one year, telling him it was a bit like Big Country or Thin Lizzy.

Of course, it might be pointed out that the direct simplicity of most New Model Army songs, the way in which they tend to reduce everything to black and white, isn't significantly different to what the Daily Mail does - all furrowed brows and mobs formed on the promise of how we're not going to stand for it any more. It might also be pointed out - as I'm sure that bloke from Conflict probably noticed - that New Model Army unwittingly represent commodified revolution, a low calorie upsurge of ambiguously directed anger and emotion when compared with those of their contemporaries who managed to put out records without signing to EMI. Whilst both points may hold some water, I'd say it's probably a question of degree, and even a Crass album is probably commodified revolution if you've purchased it through Amazon, so there's possibly not much joy in getting too puritanical given that even commodified revolution is better than growing up with nothing stronger than Peters & Lee.

Thirty years later, No Rest for the Wicked still sounds fresh, not even particularly dated - which is surprising considering all the flangey bass effects. This is probably because they've always seemed like they mean it, and they achieve that rare synthesis of sounding both uplifting and fucking furious in the same breath; and it can't hurt that their message of not letting bastards grind you down is unfortunately timeless.

Bow Wow Wow - Girl Bites Dog (1993)

Ah - Malcolm McLaren: the madcap orange genius so often portrayed as a fiendishly playful post-Situationist mash up of Fagin and Guy Debord, and yet actually just a bit of a fucking twat, a failed art student who would have happily buggered himself with a sink splodger on national television if he thought there was a chance it might increase the stock of his fame by association; a manager of such talent that he failed to do anything interesting with the New York Dolls, saw the Sex Pistols as the next Bay City Rollers, and somehow bifurcated the band which had recorded the genuinely astonishing Dirk Wears White Sox into two considerably less interesting parts. What a fucking prick he was.

That said, I very much bought into Bow Wow Wow at the time, most of which was probably down to the band rather than the supposed tentacular influence of Gingerbollocks. However, as a grown man approaching fifty, they now sound quite different to my elderly ears, not least because I hadn't heard any of this stuff since I sold the cassettes to my friend Eggy back in 1982. Being fifteen at the time and somewhat slow on the uptake, the sexualisation of then fourteen-year old Annabella Lwin didn't seem that big a deal to me being as I knew a number of fourteen-year old girls and understood that they themselves very much enjoyed the Hunks in Trunks photo features in Jackie magazine. I took Your Cassette Pet into school because Miss Davies encouraged us to provide background music for our art lesson. It proved quite popular, and all the girls chortled at the orgasmic squeaking on Sexy Eiffel Towers, and that didn't seem like a big deal either; yet with hindsight, I find it difficult to listen to these songs without turning into Hank Hill, Louis Quatorze for example:

With his gun in my back, I start to undress.
You just don't mess with Louis Quatorze.
He's my partner in this crime of happiness,
'cause I'm just fourteen!
Oh I love it when he says so seriously,
With his gun in my back, 'Honey, make love to me.'

Oh la la - shagging an under-age kid at gunpoint, c'est tres romantique; and just to be absolutely clear on this, yes I'm being sarcastic. Given the sexual subject matter that once kept Adam Ant in square meals and pointy shoes before he got famous and ended up as Basil Brush's straight man, I can look past most of Bow Wow Wow's songs as either representative of the thoughts of at least some teenage girls, and valid in a sort of Max Ernst sense. That is to specifically say that they just about got away with it in the name of art, I suppose; but it's a tougher sell when you factor in the McLaren angle and recall that all of this ran parallel to his efforts to start a pornographic magazine for school age kids informatively entitled Chicken. I recall him coming on the radio to explain how children are sexual beings who love to hang around and pose and appear sexy, which may be daring, adventurous, and subversive, or may all be just a bit too close to Jimmy fucking Savile for comfort.

Now then, now then, now then...

Thankfully Chicken never happened because McLaren was basically a twat who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, or at very best an extremely lucky twat who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery; and so while his influence on Bow Wow Wow can certainly be heard, you can sort of ignore it. Annabella Lwin may not have been the greatest vocalist but she could hold a tune and yelped with conviction; and led astray or otherwise, this was still in essence the band who had recorded Dirk Wears White Sox. The affectations sound comical with hindsight - Native Americanisms apparently borrowed from old episodes of The Lone Ranger coupled with tribal sounds that may as well have scored films in which blacked-up actors point at cauldrons rubbing their tummies and smiling at their white captives; but it works as a sort of African influenced rockabilly, as music designed to sound great at a party without any real concession to any other context; and Gold He Said and I Want My Baby on Mars at least are genuinely fine songs.

I've an uncomfortable feeling that either Bow Wow Wow or someone of their ilk is ultimately to blame for the pervasive aesthetic of the scene in that crappy Matrix film with the big underground rebel cave and like everyone's grooving and raving to this like really wicked music and like they all have dreads and awesome tatts and like everyone's like off their faces, man, and it's like totally amaaazing... which probably isn't Bow Wow Wow's fault, at least not directly; and strangely it's W.O.R.K. which annoys me the most of all these songs in respect to subject, it being a nebulous critique of the work ethic predicated on the thesis that it's a drag having to do stuff which isn't like rilly cool 'n' shit, yeah? Conversely, I myself tend to regard the work ethic as a fairly healthy impulse which prevents one turning into a useless slack-jawed wanker, so again I must take the Hank Hill position, I tell you what.

Most surprising of all is that these songs sound pretty much the same on fancy compact disc as they did on my crap mono portable cassette player as taped off a medium wave radio station in 1982, which is to say that the production is unflattering and simple, but not even simple in the sense of Billy Childish cranking something out in front of a single microphone and it still making Led Zeppelin sound like Scott McKenzie. Had McLaren really had anything going for him in managerial terms, he might have spent less time trying to generate controversy and a little more making sure his band were getting their money's worth in the recording studio. So I say again, what a fucking prick he was.

Bow Wow Wow had much to recommend them, but none of it directly their manager's doing, and thirty years later, there's a portion of this compact disc which still makes me feel bad on behalf of everyone involved.

Nitzer Ebb - Big Hit (1995)

I never really bought the idea that Nitzer Ebb had only ever wanted to be The Groundhogs, as peddled by the lads when they started sampling guitars and doing Queen covers on As Is and Ebbhead; and mainly because up until that point they may as well have been a DAF tribute act, so far as I was able to tell, albeit a jolly good DAF tribute act. That said, they were always at their best when at their bluesiest, I thought, even if the vocals were the only obviously blues inspired element, the rest usually being a bunch of bleeping sequencers having a fight in a pub car park.

Ebbhead was pretty good, in my view, and certainly an improvement on the slightly disappointing Showtime which, with hindsight was I suppose the transitional album between the marching up and down whilst frowning really hard era and rocking out like Kiss; but that was it for me. I failed to cross paths with Big Hit because, as with the new material of almost everyone else I was listening to at the time, it failed to appear on vinyl, and I didn't catch up with compact discs until a good few years later when my friend Eddy gave me his old CD player in order to shut me up about being unable to buy the music I wanted to hear. My tastes had also mutated somewhat by that time, and so it never really occurred to me that I might go back and pick up where I'd left off in 1992. Andrew Cox told me he'd seen Nitzer Ebb on the telly, and that they had turned into Nirvana with a guitarist and everything, but it seemed too late to go back.

Happily Andrew's observation was very much a generalisation, and Big Hit sounds nothing like Nirvana. More surprisingly, nor does it particularly sound like either Nine Inch Nails - although that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing - or any of those horrible industrial metal wankers all pretending to be the Blade Runner Ozzy Osbourne over grunting Metallica samples. Big Hit actually sounds like Ebbhead done right, by a band who had at last found their feet. The blend of prog-rockisms, live instruments, and sequencers is so seamless as to render comment obsolete, and is probably done better than anyone has managed to before or since; so this really isn't industrial types pretending they've been into Richie Blackmore's Rainbow from the very beginning so much as just a great rock band sprung from an earlier somewhat different incarnation. Big Hit is probably what anyone who liked Led Zeppelin in the 1970s imagined music would sound like in the year 2000, and Flood Water in particular gallops along like some sort of biomechanical update of Immigrant Song. It's funny how at the time this lot sounded like one of many, but with hindsight it seems they were fairly unique.