Gambit of Shame - No Bounds (2021)

I first encountered Gambit of Shame on 1983's A Sudden Surge of Power cassette compilation which famously featured material from Chris & Cosey, Attrition, Test Dept and others. Massively impressed, I bought the single pairing the title track of this retrospective with 18 Out of 20 and waited for the legend to grow, which sadly never happened. The Gambit turned into Skin Side Out who issued a further couple of characteristically wonderful singles, following which it all went quiet until now.

No Bounds assembles the single, the compilation tracks, and other material recorded at the time, amounting to twenty-one blistering songs which seriously beg the question of why it never came to pass for them. There's a touch of the sixties spy movie soundtrack, certainly Josef K - or at least whoever influenced Josef K - like a slightly punkier, snappier version of early Roxy Music amounting to a wild, swirling sound which prefigured Franz Ferdinand more directly than any more obvious source of inspiration; and strangest of all, at least to me, my favourite tracks turn out to be not those I've had rattling around my head for the last three decades, but Maisonette Fairlawns and Ideas in London, neither of which I'd heard until a couple of weeks ago. That said, the single tracks still sound great, and it's nice to hear the eponymous Gambit of Shame from Sudden Surge without all that tape hiss for the first time ever. This lot were better than most of whatever else I was listening to back then and should have been fucking enormous.

Bernadette Cremin & Paul Mex - Mutual Territory (2018)

Poetry still makes me anxious godammit, but I'm trying, and I'm not actually having to try too hard with this one because it's excellent. As before, Mex effortlessly soundtracks Bernadette Cremin's words with jazzy, bluesy touches which hint at familiar forms without simply duplicating or impersonating, and the whole reminds me, of all things, of Clock DVA's Advantage album - hard stories told with a collar turned up against bitter winds howling down rain soaked streets, but with a whole lot of soul.

What differentiates Mutual Territory from what I may appear to have described, or tried to describe, is that whilst the music and images form a near seamless, moody whole, a perfect synthesis of atmosphere and narrative, I suspect the parts would work as well alone - as witnessed by the closing instrumental - because Cremin's testimony is shocking, chilling and yet powerfully familiar, and her words - softly spoken and measured - are delivered with the sort of gravity that silences a room. Cremin captures and dissects tiny instances of daily life, the prosaic and the painful, working at each one until it's as sharp as the point upon which someone's entire existence might change, hopefully for the better but there's a lot of room for ambiguity. It can be tough to listen to in the same way that Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth is tough to watch, albeit possibly not quite so dark or relentless, but similarly it draws you in.

Mutual Territory has some of the intensity usually credited to records by Nick Cave - which I can never quite see, personally speaking. It hurts a bit but is not without redemptive qualities, and musically, it could be one of the best things Mex has ever had a hand in. My only complaint is that the musical setting of Hipsway Cabaret emulates that Venga Boys Eurothrob a bit too faithfully for comfort, although maybe that's the point given that this is hardly cosy listening.

Get it here.

Mex - Dark of the Moon (1981)

Dark of the Moon is a stage play from the 1940s written by Howard Richardson and William Berney. I hadn't heard of it either, but it sounds distinctly gothic - in the sense of Edgar Allen Poe rather than black clothes and too much hairspray - set as it is in a rural Appalachian community, and telling the tale of a witch boy who wishes to become human, having fallen in love with a human girl. This CD is the soundtrack of a 1981 production composed by Paul Mex with Cliff Silver of Sad Lovers & Giants.

Dark of the Moon is instrumental and fairly minimal - so much so that I imagine it could have been performed live for the production without too much of a headache incurred. The sound comes from guitar, delay, and a couple of gas-powered monosynths, one of which sounds suspiciously like a Casio VL-Tone at certain points. More than anything it reminds me of some of the German stuff from the seventies, things involving Conny Plank and the like, Cluster and so on. Obviously I have no idea how well any of it would have worked in the context of the play, but it nevertheless makes for a fairly powerful CD in its own right. The disc comprises thirty or so fairly short pieces, nothing longer than a few minutes, and all heavily reliant upon the repetition and recurrence of certain themes. This being the year 2019, Dark of the Moon initially sounds fairly primitive, as I guess it is, but its presence makes itself felt with repeat plays, and one ceases to notice the technology as a very specific mood is summoned, one which might not have settled so heavily upon one's soul had it been sprung from a more digital source.

Yes, I did just refer to this music settling upon one's soul, which is because there's a lot of power here, possibly specifically because the thing is so minimal and hence so direct. It has none of the idle, noodling quality of Cluster, or whoever it is I'm thinking of here. I gather Dark of the Moon is produced as a freebie thrown in with orders of other material from Mex, which I suppose makes sense given it being quite unlike anything else I've heard from the man, but this shouldn't be taken as indicative of it representing some kind of also ran or even a booby prize. Had this been slapped onto inch-thick vinyl by one of those boutique labels, I'm sure someone or other at the Wire would have been wanking themselves silly over it by now.

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.

Bernadette Cremin & Paul Mex - Guilty Fist (2015)

Just to get the customary objections out in the open, whilst it isn't strictly true that I hate poetry, I probably hate enough of it to render the assertion more or less accurate; although, to break it down a little further, the specific sort of thing which brings me out in hives is poetry which knows that it is poetry and which introduces itself as such with either a wry Stilgoe-esque smirk or the sort of studied glacial nonchalance that can only be perfected by many hours spent gazing either into a mirror or up its own bumhole. It's the teenager who has somehow managed to have seen it all before and who understands just how shocking his words must seem to the audience at the - ugh - poetry slam, enunciating cock like the word might be new to us. It's my former housemate Steve poeting about how fucking her is like escaping from a drowning helicopter, when we all know he never even got close, and that the unlucky lady in question had more sense than to let that passive-aggressive little misanthrope anywhere near her ha'penny.

On the other hand, I very much like Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and others whose work I tend to think of just as writing, because that's what it is. So my criteria seems to rest upon how much the work is involved in the mythology of its own self-importance. In other words I like writing which just gets on with the communication without having to tell us what form it's going to take; and getting at last to the point, the writing of Bernadette Cremin, whoever she may be, very much belongs in this second category.

On the face of it, Guilty Fist is someone reading poetry to the accompaniment of suitably atmospheric music, except it's nothing so mannered as the description might suggest. Bernadette Cremin speaks her own words with the sort of gravity which demands you stop whatever you're doing and pay attention, and her testimony is spot on - clear and straight to the heart of the matter with chilling precision, neither showboating anything too ostentatiously shocking nor necessarily reducing everything to its lowest common denominator. She gets the balance exactly right, perfectly blending the narrative with the mood of the music, dispelling the suggestion of either being mere accompaniment; and this syncretism is further achieved when she slips into song and turns out to have a pretty decent bluesy voice.

Her subject matter seems to be highly personal and quite intense, so listening is a profoundly psychological experience. The music, mostly arranged by Mex, takes a downtempo direction with bluesy, jazzy, even occasionally pseudo-classical inflections. I'd say it reminds me a little of Portishead, except I never really liked them that much, and this is better. At times I'm reminded of In the Nursery when they were slapping marble columns on the covers of their records and pretending to be French, or maybe even Cranes, if anyone remembers them. Certainly there's a gothic element, gothic as in reading Mary Shelley with a glass of whine rather than dressing up like Nosferatu. Anyway, whatever it is, it's very powerful.

Treat yo'self!

Mex - Intense Living (1981)

Mex should require no introduction, but then by the same token the Annoying Orange shouldn't be president, so if he does then I refer you to the reviews I wrote as reproduced here and here so as to avoid having to repeat myself.

Intense Living was the second album and it's a huge pleasure to have it remastered and on a fancy compact disc and everything. As with Alternative Pop Music, it's still a little rough around the edges and I suppose might be termed lo-fi if you want to make a virtue out of the fact - which always struck me as a bit pointless, personally speaking; but the material and the sheer joy and punky spirit of the whole enterprise - or possibly post-punky spirit - should compensate for how difficult it is to hear Cliff Silver's wristwatch ticking away during the quiet parts. Where the first tape was mostly just Mex, so far as I recall, this one was Mex aided by the aforementioned Cliff Silver from Sad Lovers & Giants, and with a live drummer - or possibly a tape of a live drummer - and it's very different. In fact, it was very different to every other tape I bought that year.

I seem to recall my corner of 1981 involving a lot of long coats, many of them worn by myself, some sucking-in of the cheeks, and a fairly austere embrace of the return to year zero proposed by punk, or by some elements of punk. In the mean time, Mex had added shameless disco to the ingredients of his pop perfectionism, and not even the studiously cool kind of disco favoured by chiselled Mancunians with trumpets. I'm talking walking basslines, wah-pedal funk, flares, glitter balls, and a synth borrowed straight from the Open University Department of Television Signature Tunes. Add to this Mex's occasional Duane Eddyisms and somewhat whispy - at least on this occasion - vocals, and the result was a tape which just didn't sound like anything else in my collection, and didn't even seem like it was trying to sound like anything else.

Some of it has dated, I suppose - the short-wave radio twiddling of Alien Transmission - but not in a bad way, and the whole nevertheless sounds as great now as it did back then. If you require references, it might be argued that the first Denim album had something of Intense Living about it, and there are bits which remind me of LCD Soundsystem; but I'm reaching, because neither of those were ever embedded in my consciousness quite like Sea of Green, Full of Eastern Promise, or Keith in America.

Genuinely wonderful.

Buy one here.

Mex - Alternative Pop Music (1980)

A few months back I suggested that by rights some boutique vinyl label should be battering down Mex's door for permission to reissue his entire back catalogue. Well apparently that didn't happen, so here we are with Alternative Pop Music once again available from the label which first put it out all those years ago.

Older readers may recall my recently enthusing about Mex's current album -  Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde in case you haven't yet bothered to stop him and buy one - whilst waxing in a vaguely lyrical tone about its predecessors and lamenting the fact of my copies being presently stuck in a cardboard box on a different continent thus making it quite difficult for me to listen to them. When this turned up in the mail - in both shiny faux-vinyl compact disc and highly collectible cassette formats - I experienced a natural moment of fear that it might not be so good as remembered.

Mex was amongst a small number of DIY types whom I first discovered on home produced mail order cassette at the age of sixteen, a key point at which I suddenly understood punk rock, weirdy music, and all the exciting associated possibilities of the medium. Mex is distinguished as one of the people whose work I actually played a lot, like you would play that record you just bought, the one which had you wobbling with anticipation for at least a month in advance and which had just turned up at your nearest WHSmiths or wherever. I may have flapped my long coat and muttered darkly about the latest important recordings of Test Dept or Mnemonik Korpse Brigade, but at home I was hammering those Mex tapes.

Momentarily listening with an objective ear, I am of course fully aware that these songs appear to have been recorded on a humble four-track of some kind; and that the rhythm section alternates between what sounds like Bontempi organ presets and those tapes of studio-recorded drum tracks you used to be able to buy from the back pages of the music paper, and tapes which in this case had been played a few times by the sound of them; and that the keyboard sounds a lot like a Casio job; and that Mex himself never quite appeared to settle on a vocal style with which he was happy on this tape, so the singing sounds a little odd in places; and there are false starts, mistakes, bars where the guitar struggles to catch up with everything else. None of this comes as a surprise because I'm so familiar with this group of songs that it seems weird to consider how many years have passed since I last heard them. Even at the time it was obvious that Mex was finding his way on this first cassette, and that's part of what made it sound so great, at least for me. This was immediately recognisable as pop music, but it was our version, and therefore distinct from all that pastel coloured hairdresser crap on the telly. Whispers in the Night, Into the Eyes, The Valley of Mystery, Evil Creature and the rest - played with the wind blowing in a certain direction, they make Katrina & the Waves sound like Fudge Tunnel.

I've often thought of Mex as a sort of underground version of Haircut 100, which is partially the breezy acoustic guitar pop aspect of the Happy Life era songs, but is more just a coincidence of timing. Alternative Pop Music could be lazily compared to anything from a cheerier Joy Division to the less broody end of psych-garage with a bit of Motown thrown in there somewhere, played and produced with fewer basic amenities than such points of reference might suggest. It's probably just me, but for something that may as well have been recorded in the cupboard under the sink, Alternative Pop Music has a big sound, and if you listen closely, maybe you'll hear it too.

Now can we have Intense Living?

Alternative Pop Music is available here.

Mex - Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde (2014)

Mex is one of those best kept secrets you always hear about, although he really shouldn't be, and it seems typically ironic that whilst his best work has yet to set any mainstream chart ablaze, you've almost certainly heard him on something at some point given his session and studio work dating back to at least the first version of Wham Rap! by Andrew Ridgeley and the other feller. I myself first encountered the music of Mex when he cropped up on a cassette compilation put out by the Cause For Concern tape label. I hadn't long discovered that whole early eighties DIY tape scene, and I'd dived in with such enthusiasm as to have lost track of what was going on in the world of regular music with its coloured vinyl and Susan Tully dressing up like Boy George. My corner of the ferric oxide universe was a fairly noisy one populated by Cultural Amnesia and their ilk, so Mex came along as something of a breath of fresh air, independent, home-made, and yet definitely the sort of pop music you need when you're a teenager - so breezy as to make Haircut 100 sound like Kleistwahr. I bought the single Happy Life, which still rates as one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded to these ears, and then I bought the tapes.

Both Alternative Pop Music and Intense Living - which should be considered the first two Mex albums, with this one as the third - are low-fi for economic rather than aesthetic reasons, but even with the occasional muddy mix or duff note or the rhythm of what sounds like a Bontempi organ, I played those fuckers to death, and I can still sing the songs even now despite my copies of the cassettes being presently interred within a cardboard box on a different continent.

Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde is, as I say, the third album, which is exactly what it sounds like, rather than a comeback in consideration of the thirty year gap. Whatever magic he was working back then remains patently undiminished, and this time the songs benefit from all those intervening years of experience and a beautifully crisp production. The Mex himself was apparently a little nervous about what sort of response this collection would receive, which is understandable given that I was myself a little nervous about listening to it for fear of the possibility of it being some grizzled old bloke reviving past glories and ending up resembling Creme Brulee's Les McQueen from The League of Gentlemen.

It's a shit business...

Happily such fears are proven entirely unfounded, even should be considered blown away by the opening bars of Angry Man which, whilst being unmistakably Mex, peculiarly also invokes the rockier end of Nine Inch Nails and even Jim Thirlwell since he packed in the grunting and growling and took to singing once more. Being Mex, there's a Beatley element, maybe a trace of Kinks with the more tuneful hundreds and thousands of the punk rock cake sprinkled over the top, but nothing that renders the occasional saxophone or trumpet solo too incongruous - kitchen sink psychedelia maybe, or something along those lines. The tunes, sombre as they may be in a few cases, work their way under your skin like the very best of Beck or Blur or whoever else once dealt in this sort of bitter-sweet pop; except this album, against all the odds, bears no trace of nostalgia or recaptured glories. The material is too strong, too confident for that, even pausing to give the listener a thoughtful neck rub at the halfway mark with the sadly poignant Think About It.

By rights We Don't Speak The Same Language Anymore should be a hit of such magnitude that we're all thoroughly sick of hearing it before the year is out, but then by rights some boutique vinyl label should be battering down Mex's door for permission to reissue his entire back catalogue. I'm not sure if either of these are likely to happen, but then again I never expected a 2014 Mex album to sound anything like this good. Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde is, excuse my French, fucking gorgeous, a perfect pop record. Full marks also for the presentation, one of those screwy jet black compact discs upon which the label side is printed so as to resemble a tiny vinyl album.

Don't just sit there. Buy it!