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.

The The - Ensoulment (2024)

I have a sort of knee-jerk suspicion of artists I enjoyed in my early twenties getting back in the booth all these years later, but, leaving aside that no-one wants a Flock of Seagulls reunion album, I should probably be suspicious of my suspicion as a hang-on from the punk rock programming which, for example, dictated that the Rolling Stones were fit for the knacker's yard by 1977; and while there was much fun to be had in upsetting the older generation, Miss You was unfortunately a fucking great record. In fact, even Emotional Rescue was a cracker and the revisionism now seems quaint given that they'd only been going a couple of decades; and Matt Johnson's The The are now cautiously approaching their half-century.

More crucially, The The sound as vital as ever - keeping in mind that even their early records had the quality of an extended world weary sigh set to a pounding bass drum. No-one, so far as I'm aware, ever complained about Johnny Cash or B.B. King failing to retire, and The The was never about upsetting the older generation. If it was about upsetting anyone, it was Johnson's own generation, and his focus has remained fixed even if the man himself has clocked up a few more years; and given the current state of the societal shitshow, it's amusing that you could probably characterise Ensoulment as upsetting the younger generation, at least based on the garbage to which so many of them are seen to subscribe on social media. Lyrically, Ensoulment is on target and at least as caustic as Fatima Mansions at their most blistering. Musically, it's the familiar organic blend of rock, soul, jazz, blues, country, and all the rest without fully sounding like any of them, or like the sort of worthy soundtrack to which spritely eldsters beatifically nod their heads in television commercials for prescription medication. It's pleasant but innocuous on first spin, and by the third or fourth, you can't stop playing the thing and your wife comes in from the other room to ask what you're listening to, and possibly to remind you to take your pill.

Did we ever suspect any of these people would be doing anything this good in the distant future, a quarter of the way into the next century? I had no idea myself.

Public Image Ltd. - That What Is Not (1992)

 

I came across an online review of 2012's This is PIL claiming it to be the best thing since 1984's This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get thankfully preventing the possibility of the PIL legacy concluding with one of those crappy nineties records. This irritated me because, aside from the possibility of Album actually being their finest moment, I happen to like those crappy nineties records despite their failure to deliver another Metal Box. That said, I wasn't actually sure about That What Is Not because I'd somehow forgotten its existence. So I dug it out, stuck it on the turn table, and there it stayed for the next couple of weeks.

It's still very much stadium PIL, perhaps even more so than the previous three with the occasional guitar solo which could have been lifted from REO Speedwagon, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's probably more Pearl Jam than any of the seventies hairies. Above all, the strangest element is that it's almost an uptempo happy record, and Lydon is smiling on the back cover - not necessarily unusual but it's a genuinely cheery, unconditional smile rather than the one we're used to which suggests he's just seen Strummer go flying after stepping on a banana skin. It communicates the possibility that he was probably very much enjoying living in a significantly sunnier part of the world, which is something I understand very well, and - excepting the customarily caustic commentary - that's what That What Is Not sounds like.

I wonder if it would help if we thought of this as a John McGeoch album, because it's that too. I assume we haven't yet found a reason to sneer at McGeoch, although if we have I'm not really interested. That What Is Not has a massive, punchy sound, thanks in no small part to the horn section, harmonica and soulful backing vocals floating around in the mix just like on an eighties Rolling Stones record, and the bile is seasoned with a surprising quota of joie de vivre, or possibly just glee; and it would almost be a slightly more jagged Pearl Jam but for one of Lydon's greatest ever performances, at least technically. I know he mostly does just the one thing, but it's arguably at its greatest and most expressive here in voicing what may even be amongst his finest lyrics. Unfairground and Good Things are in particular face-punchingly wonderful and deserving of inclusion on whatever the next greatest hits package happens to be; and it's a shitload better than This is PIL while we're here.

So there.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.

We Be Echo - The Misanthrope (2021)

 

It's not that I never imagined I'd still be listening to We Be Echo in 2021, but I didn't expect it to be new material; or for there to be quite so much new material - this being the second new album in about six months; or that the new material would actually eclipse those tapes from back when we were all a whole lot younger. With The Misanthrope we've gone beyond the possibility of attempts to revive former glories, which is weird because it seems like a new, unfamiliar dynamic in music biz terms, like Emotional Rescue turning out to be the definitive Stones album.

I suppose the biggest initial surprise was We Be Echo evolving into something sounding so much like a band and hence somewhat removed from the days of boxes plugged into a music center. As with Darkness is Home, this is very much a guitar orientated sound, or at least bass guitar orientated, presenting potential comparisons with Wire, Joy Division, the Talking Heads impersonating Joy Division, Neu, or even the first couple of Eno albums; but the more I listen, the more I realise this is a fairly logical progression from Third Door from the Left, Kevin Thorne's other band of times passed, and specifically from It's Not Us which seems vaguely ancestral to this material, at least in terms of mood.

For an album called The Misanthrope, this is a surprisingly uptempo set. The bass pounds and chugs with melodic intensity over driving beats and Thorne's increasingly confident vocal, and if it's slightly frosty in tone - possibly cold wave as I believe people who need to have names for things would call it - it's passionate, emotional and informed, so I would imagine, by turmoil. Love You Anyway and Need You Like Water are particularly powerful in this respect, presenting near solid walls of mood with the intensity of epic landscape painting or even something from Faith, the only decent album the Cure ever made, but without the disadvantage of being by the Cure. It's been a while since I got earwormed this hard by anything, but Love You Anyway may even be We Be Echo's New Dawn Fades.

 

 

 

Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.

My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.

Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.

This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.

The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.

The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.

Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.

All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.

The Dentists - Heads and How to Read Them (1990)

The Dentists were the local big deal when I first moved to Kent, or at least they were the local big deal which didn't involve Billy Childish. Once they began to enjoy success further afield, local goth types of my acquaintance took to a degree of sneering, therefore requiring that I venture a little way outside my limited social comfort zone in order to hear the music of the Dentists and decide for myself, and once I did, I quickly realised that they were popular for a reason; the reason being that they were fucking great.

Later they apparently became associated with something called C86, which was something to do with an NME compilation tape and has been retroactively declared a movement, specifically a movement of mostly jangly sixties-inspired bands. I still don't quite see this, being as most of the C86 bands were - excepting Josef K and maybe two or three others - fucking atrocious. Never mind.

Anyway, I vaguely knew the Dentists, seeing as how they were local lads. I once spent a boozy afternoon around Mick Murphy's house; Mark Matthews put out the first ever fanzine to feature something I had drawn; and I knew Alun, their second drummer, fairly well. Indeed, I vaguely recall the grumbling amongst members of Apricot Brigade when Alun jumped ship to tap the skins for what was frankly a much better band - following Ian, the Dentists' original drummer, having been temporarily inconvenienced. Grousing accompanied the release of Down and Out in Paris and Chatham, the first record to feature Alun but I went out and bought it anyway, and actually it was a magnificent record.

Since then I've tended to regard the difference between those first two incarnations of the Dentists as a sort of Beatles-Stones thing, with softer, poppier songs giving away to something more raw, as characterised by You Took Me By Surprise - which I've only just noticed almost borrows from The Word by the Beatles; and listening to Heads and How to Read Them, I notice my Beatles then Stones equation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Heads is a different beast to Some People, but is great for similar reasons, and is by no means a lesser record. For the uninitiated, the Dentists did that pure pop thing like a distant cousin to the Smiths but without the burden of Morrissey, having some of that breezy quality of the Monkees without it being some cheesy fresh-faced sales pitch - just consistently great songs with hidden depths and of such quality that the usual labels seem a bit pointless. This second album is notable for the peculiar key change - or whatever the technical term may be - during the chorus of House the Size of Mars, and the infectious waltz of Crocodile Tears, amongst other things.

There were a couple of later records, and whilst there's nothing specifically lacking in what I've heard of them, there seems to be a faint major label sheen, something suggesting some A&R twat may have been drooling over the possibility of selling the boys to all those Ravey Daveys who thought the first Stone Roses album was the greatest record of all time; when actually it was the wrong way round, and the Dentists were always the superior group, which goes for those Smiths comparisons too.

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Peepshow (1988)

I picked up Superstition the other week, which sent me retracing my footsteps back to this one which then duly glued itself to the turntable. This is probably some sort of reverence feedback deficit due to my not having thought about Siouxsie & the Banshees for a long, long time squared with how highly I once rated them, and continue to rate them as I now realise. I'd forgotten how great they were.

I'm doubtless misremembering, but I recall more of a kerfuffle over Siouxsie having had a haircut than the release of this record, which less forgiving persons seem to recall as having belonged to the oh, are they still going? years. Tinderbox - the one before this, excepting the covers thing - was an odd collection thematically fixated on heat, deserts, dessication, and sterility building up to the climax of Lands End, the closing song seemingly representing a symbolic deluge. It felt a bit like they were aware of running short on inspiration, although it was actually a pretty great album - just not startling like its predecessors. This was the point at which the Banshees chug had begun to creep in, having begun with Dazzle or thereabouts - those driving tracks which sound a bit like Russian folk music, and which I suppose came to represent default Banshees - stuff to which goths could whirl around and do that silly dance where they make their hands swim back and forth in front of their faces. Tinderbox, for all its fine points, was mostly generic Banshees chug.

Peepshow chugged here and there, but you can really tell they're also pissing about, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck, and most importantly stepping outside the goth comfort zone - which makes sense given that there were about a million other bands who had photocopied the same blueprint by this point; and they had yet another new guitarist - the bloke out of Specimen, oddly enough, which seems kind of like doing a Numan and marrying your own groupie, but Jon Klein seems to have been an undeniably decent match.

The Banshees were no longer quite the group which had recorded The Scream, but that's progress for you. Peepshow is nevertheless startling and angular in places, with a technical velour developed over the previous few albums but kept from becoming bland or gratuitously lush by what sounds like the band rebelling against their own tendency to chug. Peek-a-Boo sounds peculiarly like the Rolling Stones briefly funky period; there's the ludicrous and yet wonderful Burn Up which could have been the Casey Jones theme tune; and then The Last Beat of My Heart which gets my vote for possibly the most heart-wrenching piece of music ever recorded, definitely one of the greatest things the Banshees ever did, and it features an accordion for fuck's sake! Only the cock-obvious nursery horror of Rawhead and Bloodybones really lets the side down, sounding like it might have been an acceptable b-side a few years earlier, but even in '88 resembled the sort of generic goth landfill upon which Tim Burton would eventually build a career. Maybe they were taking the piss.

Anyway, Peepshow is mostly amazing. I'm a little surprised that I somehow managed to forget.

The Boomtown Rats (1977)

Many years ago I was in the habit of regular posting on a Doctor Who forum, but packed it in because it got too depressing with all but a minority of fans apparently suffering from a form of arrested development leaving them bitter, surly, and tending to fixate on the things of childhood to the point of Fascism. Weirder still was how self-important so many of them could get about shit which just wouldn't matter to anyone sane, necessitating the forum imposing draconian rules - no pun intended - regarding personal attacks of such rigour that somebody was actually banned for insulting Adolf Hitler; and I really wish I'd made that up. Unfortunately this only inspired the membership to find ever more devious means by which to troll their fellows, resulting in what might conceivably be the most concentrated region of passive-aggression on the entire internet. Anyway, to get to the point, I held my ground in the music section for a while, that being where the people I've bothered to stay in touch with tended to hang out; but even that got to be a bit too much in the end, as each week brought a whole new selection of extraordinarily dispiriting thread titles hinting at the ruthlessly conservative psychology of the majority of the membership. There was Sonia's Back!, and Oh My Gosh - it's Mika!, and the one which still gets me, Best Boomtown Rats Album? presumably complete with a poll.

This last one bothered me partially because it belongs so firmly to that part of the world in which people haven't yet realised that Alan Partridge was a parody, but partially because it's hard enough liking the Boomtown Rats as it is without a bunch of hopeless wankers stood behind you wearing clothes their mum bought for them, grinning and giving you the thumbs up to show that you're one of the gang. Just half an hour ago I happened upon a YouTube clip of unexpected praise for punk rock from numerous establishment popsters of the late seventies, and there's Cliff fucking Richard heaping praise on the Boomtown Rats. I'd actually forgotten how much I hated Cliff Richard.

The Boomtown Rats came along at just the right time, at least from the viewpoint of selling records to kids of my admittedly impressionable age group. They were a bit of a mess, like a gang of Irish Bash Street Kids, and they pulled faces on the telly; but there was nothing to which one's parents could legitimately object because they were never really a punk band, despite spiky hair and one of them dangerously wearing his jimjams on stage. They were actually more or less a Rolling Stones tribute act and as such could be enjoyed on the strength of their musicianship and finely crafted songs by old farts, or indeed anyone who'd never quite understood the point of the Damned. Listen close enough and you have to wonder if someone hadn't been listening to Queen, what with the call and response and those vocal harmonies.

I didn't have a telly between 1984 and about 1993, and nor did I share a house with anyone who did have a telly, so I missed most of the stuff which might have tainted my already conditional regard of Bob Geldof, meaning I'm still able to listen to Boomtown Rats albums without too much baggage getting in the way, beyond their having been treasured amongst certain Doctor Who fans who really wish it was still 1973, back when everything was better than it is now; which is probably why this one still sounds pretty fucking decent, at least to me.

Of course, it's nothing surprising, nothing you haven't heard elsewhere. The Boomtown Rats debut album is essentially a Rolling Stones tribute act at the height of its powers, the right selection of familiar rock 'n' roll hooks, and a singer vaguely impersonating Bob Dylan, but doing it all in such a way as to enable suspension of disbelief, or at least as to enable the suspension of my disbelief when I was fourteen and Dean Howe flogged me this because he'd discovered either Iron Maiden or AC/DC or something which sounded a bit less like Bruce Springsteen; and it still sounds good, even exciting on more pumped up numbers such as Kicks, Looking After Number One, and so on. The one with the hairbrush allergy may have given his kids stupid names and pissed on his chips more than once in recent years, but he once made an album so good as to prove impervious to subsequent associations; and let us also take into consideration that he presently annoys the living shit out of Jonty UKIP Lydon, which has to count for something.

Third Door from the Left - Face the Firing Squad (1981)

Face the Firing Squad really feels like it should be referred to in the same sentences as Second Annual Report, The Voice of America, Tissue of Lies and other brooding classics of the admittedly loose genre which I can never quite bring myself to consider industrial. It dates from roughly the same era and I played it to death at the time, but being released as a cassette, I suppose it's inevitable that it shouldn't be so well remembered. Third Door from the Left were Kevin Thorne and Raye Calouri, who met at Throbbing Gristle's performance at the YMCA in 1979, and Kevin's name appears in the list of those invited to the recording of Heathen Earth, alongside members of Coil, Konstruktivists, and others you will have most likely heard of; and you may recall Kevin's name adorning the covers of numerous Chris & Cosey releases in his capacity as designer.

Anyway, we might lazily characterise Third Door as occupying a sort of half way point between Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, or at least live Gristle. The comparison isn't entirely unjustified, or no more so than saying the Rolling Stones were just Charlie Patton for suburban whities; but there's a lot more going on than just strange sounds and dark moods. For starters, Third Door from the Left were never afraid of a guitar sounding like a guitar, and regardless of the pensive sense of menace, you might say they were significantly more accessible than anyone from whom they may have taken inspiration. The sheer emotional weight of It's Not Us still floors me thirty-five years later in ways that Joy Division never quite managed. Seriously, it makes New Dawn Fades sound like the theme music from the Generation Game.

This edition has been lovingly pressed up as a record by Vinyl on Demand, meaning no more coughing up hundreds of quid on Discogs for a Woolworths cassette which probably won't play. The quality remains as it was on the original cassette release, which isn't a problem as it was a fairly decent recording given the limitations of the equipment of the time. At the risk of sounding like a bit of a knob, I'd suggest that this one is essential.

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.

The Pixies - Head Carrier (2016)

'Holy shit,' I exclaimed upon finding this in the racks, having failed to anticipate that they might have had plans beyond those reunion EPs which ended up collected as Indie Cindy. 'Is this actually a proper new album?' I asked at the counter, because obviously I had to buy the thing even if it turned out to be just forty-minutes of Black Francis farting into a bucket lovingly and puzzlingly pressed up as 180gsm vinyl.

'Yes,' they both said. 'It's the new album.'

'Is it any good?'

'Yes,' said the woman.

'Have you heard the last one? I mean it was okay, but...'

'Yes. Don't worry,' she elaborated, 'this one's much better.'

It isn't that Indie Cindy was bad in any sense, but it just wasn't amazing where their first four studio albums were. It was material from a band getting back together after years apart, and it was a compilation, and for all that it had working in its favour, it very much sounded like both of those things. It was an assemblage rather than a complete self-contained entity, whereas Head Carrier really is the new album and very much feels like it.

I'm still getting used to the notion of contemporary Pixies in the year 2016, trying hard not to recall what I thought of the Rolling Stones back in the early eighties, and whilst I'm still not sure this is quite up there with Trompe Le Monde, it comes pretty fucking close, and the more I listen the better it gets. This older, wiser Pixies initially seem to lack some of the shock of their younger selves, as expressed in all those asides to violent Buñuel-esque images, but the stories told are as peculiar and distinctive as ever, like a more visceral take on the Talking Heads in their folksy Americana period. This one fixates to some extent on the martyred St. Denis of Paris, commonly depicted carrying his own severed head - hence the title - but how it all works is probably up to you. Musically we're back with that fucking massive guitar sounding darker, warmer, and less digitised than on the Indie Cindy material, and with Paz Lenchantin as a perfect fit for Kim Deal without any suggestion of karaoke; and it does what a Pixies record should do given that Black Francis originally formed the band with the stated intention of their being the greatest rock band of all time. We sort of lost sight of that on Indie Cindy, but Tenement Song and the faux-Tejano of Plaster of Paris are as powerful and chilling as any of their past greats.

They've still got it.

The Jesus & Mary Chain - Psychocandy (1985)

Returning to the individual who once told me that New Musical Express was an anagram of Manchester Evening Post, during a more recent phone call we were discussing some record or other in terms which led him to reveal how his girlfriend had told him, 'that's so typical of you - preferring the song that's on the b-side.' I can't even remember what the subject was, but it came across as my friend congratulating himself for being always ahead of the curve, thinking outside of the box, taking the road less travelled and so on. It was as though he'd thrown on a beret, tapped the shades a little way down the bridge of his nose and cast me a look to say, you know, the thing I really dig about Miles...

This was hardly the first time, and this mannered, self-conscious edginess is clearly something which still matters to him. He just has to be stood at the window as you enter the room, affecting surprise as he is discovered studying the sleeve of the record now playing. Oh hi - I was just checking out some Basset Hound Fudgecicle - what do you think of their new album? - knowing full well you've never heard of the cunts. It goes all the way back to when we were at school, meeting Steve Harris crying with laughter because he'd just come from the house of our mutual friend, and our mutual friend had been wearing his mod suit.

'You could shave with the creases in his trousers,' Steve howled, even though I don't think any of us had started shaving at that point.

At the time I was myself no stranger to musical obscurities, having acquired quite a fanzine habit, but the difference between us was - so I hoped - that my discoveries weren't the most cock obvious shite that fucking everyone was listening to because it had been all over the NME for the past three months, and I couldn't have given a shit about being seen listening to it at an interesting angle, my treasured Matfield & the Pond cassette casually positioned on the coffee table in the movie set of my fascinating life.

The Sisters of Mercy were pretty big for those months during which the lad took to wearing black clothes and an array of beads. I discovered said Sisters about ten years later by accident, having long suspected they wouldn't be my sort of thing at all - quite wrongly as it turned out. The Sisters of Mercy were soon usurped by the Jesus and Mary Chain as my acquaintance revealed how he'd never liked the Sisters of Mercy, and in fact he wasn't even sure whether he'd ever heard anything by them. So this was one aspect of what I already disliked about the Jesus and Mary Chain, namely their stupid fucking fans.

I always hated that whole Creation Records thing of which the Jesus and Mary Chain were a significant part. It seemed like the return of some of the worst aspects of rock, not least the rock star as some guy in black leather trousers enjoying a series of blow jobs and expecting you to be impressed. It was a confession that punk and that which came after had all been a bit embarrassing, but now it was safe to listen to the Rolling Stones again. It was safe to go on about just how amaaaaaaazing the sixties had been even if you'd only been five at the time. It was safe to pepper your speech with words like gear, cat, fab, and dig and to know that you were amongst friends who would neither laugh at you nor call you names. It felt sort of like a betrayal, although of what I'm not entirely sure, but a betrayal nevertheless - a backtracking, a cop-out, a return to statements of the bleeding obvious made in the knowledge that the bestselling brand was really just what everyone had wanted all along.

Anyway, I'd seen Whitehouse live - which was quite an experience, although not necessarily a good one - and here were this new band who similarly played in front of a wall of feedback. Naturally I was curious, and my friend - the one who had never liked the Sisters of Mercy - sold me a copy of Upside Down, the record everyone was talking about. He had two because he'd bought a copy and then it was reissued with a picture sleeve, which he had to have. The pounding drums sounded pretty good, but otherwise it felt like some badly recorded sixties record, the Beach Boys played too fast on a shitty radio in the next room. It was okay, just nothing startling. It seemed like it was attempting to evoke the experience of stumbling around half-pissed with your hair in your eyes, just noise and distortion and adrenaline. The Ramones had already done it and were still at that time engaged in doing it about a million times better so far as I was concerned.

Then I surprised even myself by buying this album, most likely because there was nothing else in the shop which I wanted at the time, and also because I wanted to feel like I was in touch with what was happening and going down, or at least like I wasn't missing out. I played it a load, but now I can only hear these fourteen not-quite-songs filtered through subsequent interviews with the Reid brothers telling everyone how great they were, how hard they worked to produce such classic material, and how nothing was ever the same again after this record. As Velvet Underground tribute acts go, it has some decent tunes - mostly variations on the same one: E then B... Joy Division Joy Division Joy Division, E then B again and maybe A in there somewhere, mumble mumble, attempted American accent, candy, drugs reference, candy - that most commonly used of Scottish words - moan moan, pound pound, something that sounds a bit like Good Vibrations played backwards and end at just under two minutes. Job done.

Pardon Me.

As I was saying, decent tunes but it's really just a collage of every record the Reid brothers ever liked enough to stick on the pub jukebox, or every record the Reid brothers ever liked enough to make sure you discover them listening to it - Oh hi - we were just checking out some Big Star - what do you think of their third album?; and it does the same unremarkable thing over and over for about forty minutes, and this was the one that somehow changed everything. It makes Status Quo sound like fucking Schoenberg.

Psychocandy my arse.

Klark Kent (1980)

I know it's hard to like the Police these days in light of the vast and shitty shadow subsequently cast by their most cheekboned member, but they caught me at just the right point of my growing up and getting into music, making such an impact that even Ouch at his most tantrically rain-forest homeopathiary cannot diminish their light. The objections I've heard mostly seem to revolve around the Police having attempted to pass themselves off as a punk band and their playing crap reggae. I was eleven in 1977 and living in rural Warwickshire and was thus indisposed that night down the 100 Club when the Sex Pistols invented safety pins, the word fuck, and ruthless authenticity, so can't really comment on the first; and whilst it's true that the constabular version of reggae may have been a poor substitute for the actual thing, I'm not sure Stewart, Andy, and Ouch were ever really claiming to be anything they weren't, or that they ever had any serious intention of putting Gregory Isaacs out of business.

Klark Kent was of course the cunning disguise of Stewart Copeland, drummer of Curved Air and then the Police. Given some of the rubbish for which Ouch has been responsible since 1986, I'd venture to say he was also probably the main reason that the Police were ever any good, and you can sort of hear it on this bright green 10" oddity. Klark Kent slapped out a couple of wonderfully bratty pop singles before this, Don't Care and Too Kool to Kalypso, establishing himself as some sort of pseudo-fratpunk pioneer, which would seem comical with hindsight had he not made such fucking great records. His voice was never so strong as that of Ouch, but then it didn't need to be because his compositions were so weird and distinctive, a mish-mash of unorthodox influences welded into his own unique form of alien bunny hop and somehow smuggled onto vinyl as the Beach Boys in straight trousers. It's not that we're talking anything quite so bizarre or terrifying as the Residents, but Klark Kent always made more sense stood next to them than next to the Rolling Stones or whoever. The Police were never punk obviously, and neither was Klark Kent, although you might smuggle him in under the radar on the grounds of bands like Split Enz or Talking Heads ending up on the same misjudged compilation albums of the time, you know - picture of some sneering and suspiciously glamorous punkette with red spikey hair and increasingly generic ransom note lettering.

This is another one of those records it's taken me thirty years to get hold of, and it sounds as great as I knew it would. I still don't quite understand why it was just a 10" and why no Thrills or Office Girls - the two tracks on the flip of Don't Care comprising one of the greatest ever b-sides in the history of stuff - but frankly ah couldnae gie twa shites. It's a shame that my Klark Kent kollection should be complete now that I have all eleven songs, but that's still eleven better than anything Ouch ever managed on his own.

Gary Numan - Berserker (1984)

Whilst I was mightily partial to a bit of Numan at school, Gary and I parted ways round about the time his album covers began to resemble budget versions of action films which hadn't even had the sense to rip off anything that had been worth ripping off in the first place. This wasn't so much a direct reflection on his music as that I was on a budget and suddenly aware of there being plenty of other stuff out there which I liked better. Occasionally I would pause in my local branch of Our Price to briefly examine the cover of Strange Charm or The Fury with an indulgent smirk, amused by the fact of his still churning it out regardless, then head for the counter to complete purchase of my sophisticated Heaven 17 album.

Years later, having completed my fine art degree and realising that I was pretty much fucked, I moved to a bedsit in Chatham and resigned myself to beans on toast having become an exotic luxury, a rare treat enjoyed when I could afford to buy a loaf of bread. I no longer had the money to buy my records new as they came out, and took to trawling the racks of Plastic Surgery, a second-hand place in Maidstone which, if nothing else, at least bought me up to date with Kate Bush and Gary Numan for relatively little outlay - thus inadvertently priming me for the appreciation of Vostok Lake some years later. I was intrigued that Gary Numan had continued to release stuff despite my failing to buy it, and so I took the White Noise live double album for mere pennies on the grounds of it including older material I already knew I liked, in the event of the newer songs turning out to be as pants as I was fairly sure they would be; and against all expectation I played that live double into two large flexidiscs, then bought Berserker, the associated studio album from which many of the newer tracks were derived. Life was pretty miserable at the time, and Gary seemed to understand.

Ha ha, you may well observe, customarily smirking at the slightest mention of our beloved comical Bowie impersonator, or else having decided that it's now okay to admit you like Numan in the same way you might admit to liking Leo Sayer or the Rubettes.

Ha ha.

I never had any problem with openly admitting to the pleasure I took from Numan's records. Sure, he may have been a light aircraft piloting knobesque Conservative voter who married his own stalker at certain points in his life, but there are many other artists whose political views fail to align in precise accord with my own, and we're not exactly talking No Remorse here. Additionally, Gary was hardly the only person to draw inspiration from David Bowie, and nor was his inspiration drawn exclusively from that particular sausage-seeking well. The crime seems to have been that his version of Bowie was always more technical college than art school, music for the chess club guys with their boxes of cheese and onion sandwiches and terminal virginity - the kids who would never be cool enough to dance upon the hood of a gridlocked vehicle like Michael J. Fox teaching those grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. Of course, this says more about those who deem that which must be regarded as saaaaaaad this week than the actual music, the artist, or his fans.

Gary's crimes, aside from those mentioned above, seem to be based around having a big fat face which never lent itself to robot impersonations so well as those of his peers, and having a bit of a nasal voice, and failing to conceal his influences, and the one song on every album describing how much the music press hates him and how little he cares. The last point probably holds some water because sour grapes are never a good look, although the rest can be put down to either personal taste or being so much irrelevant bollocks. Whilst it could be argued that having been a sort of conflation of David Bowie and John Foxx, he briefly turned into Japan, then Robert Palmer, and has more recently been heard sounding quite a lot like Nine Inch Nails, this doesn't have to be a problem unless you want it to be. Even when the influences are kicking you in the shins, a Gary Numan album will only ever sound like a Gary Numan album, and besides, if it's okay for Bowie to send his butler out to look for one of those drum and bass chappies when he feels the self-conscious need to be down with the kids, I don't see why anyone else should be denied the benefit of the doubt.

The bottom line here is that, for all his faults, Numan can make just two notes sound like no piece of music you've ever heard, invoking isolation and alienation with such profound conviction as to make all those other glumsters sound like twenty-four hour party wankers. In other words the proof of the pudding is in eating the thing, and in that respect, this man has a fairly astonishing track record providing you keep in mind he may not necessarily have set out to sing the song you want to hear.

Beserker emerged from the transitional period between Numan turning funky and then deciding to be Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love on Metal Rhythm - another great album, by the way. For something which sounds like it's trying quite hard to get into its own party, it's a surprisingly chilling record, particularly on Cold Warning and My Dying Machine. Lyrically it's business as usual in so much as it's anyone's guess what any of it could be about, and there's the customary selection of William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick one-liners hinting at that which Gary apparently dare not describe; but crucially, as ever, the level of obvious sincerity is terrifying, so painful you can barely look it in the eye. This is Numan's strength. Regardless of how lame he sounds, how well he measures up to your expectations, or what the blistering fuck he's talking about, he really, really means it, and that's why he sounds so great when life has been kicking you in the face for any length of time. Ironically, Bowie now sounds like his own Phil Cornwell impersonation by comparison.

One day some Mojooid will mislay his copy of Exile on Main St., slap on Beserker by accident, and recognise it as the fucking cracking record it is and always has been; and then we will all be told it's okay to admit to liking Gary Numan yet again, or at least the old stuff, like the one that got sampled on that dance tune. At this juncture it may be worth noting that some of us never needed permission.

Hole - Live Through This (1994)

According to a bloke on the internet, fresh evidence has recently come to light regarding Courtney Love's supposed assassination of Kurt Cobain, the widely venerated singer man of Nirvana and the Linda McCartney of Hole. I'm not sure what this supposed evidence might be because at the time I was busy watching paint dry and found it impossible to tear myself away, but the important thing was nevertheless of such quality as to inspire a bunch of blokes on a popular social networking site to express their views, which is nice because as you know blokes on popular social networking sites tend to keep their views to themselves as a rule. One of them daringly opined that Kurdt Cobain was the voice of a generation, which works providing you discount the great majority of yoots present within that same generation who never gave two shits about the guy, you know, like anyone who ever bought a Tupac CD. If he was the voice of a generation, was he really ever saying anything beyond I want my mummy? Whilst There There is often hailed as a great album, and the success of singles like I Got A Pain In My Stummick and I Hurt My Finger surprised everyone, were they really good enough to justify the proposition that Kurtd Cobain, the Lady Diana Spencer of Grunge, died for our sins?

I would say not, and would further deny his being anything besides a modest talent - not even a member of the best Seattle band, that being Tad. He had a pretty face and was able to articulate a vague sense of whining dissatisfaction with modern life that could stand for almost anything from I done a poo in my pants to my dad sucks without alienating those who knew their period of rebellion would last just long enough to get them through college; and of course there were those natty little tunes, the plaid shirt Beatles with a fuzzbox; and onto this canvas was projected whatever people needed at the time, which unfortunately turned out to be a sort of rock Jesus for the mumbling and disgruntled when he shot himself and the legend turned all Sidney Vicious for a while. More annoying than Kurt's unexpected sainthood was that the elevation of such human sacrifices tends to require the parallel canonisation of a devil, which turned out to be Courtney Love probably because she had a massive gob and was a woman.

I can't speak for Love's actual character, my understanding of it being based on a media image that I'm not inclined to trust. Perhaps it is true that Kurtd Cobain, the innocent Queen of Hearts of Rock was led astray by another one of those crazy mad period women, forced to take heroin because she had told him it was just some sweeties or something, and that this terrible titty-witch didst rob us of a noble soul who would otherwise have remained stood to this day upon a high mesa with his hair blowing majestically in the wind like someone hunky from The Lord of the Rings, his beautiful spirit free and untramelled, whatever that means, but I seriously doubt it.

Conspiracy theory even stretches to suggest that the mighty Cobain wrote most of this album. I'll concede that there may be parallels, notably the preponderance of milk as a theme, but it's nothing that can't be accounted for by Kurdt having told her indoors all about his great day at the studio with the guys whilst she was washing the dishes, making him some chips, or ironing his lumberjack shirt ready for the pop concert. Furthermore, if Cobain was really capable of writing songs this good, you would think he might have kept one or two for inclusion on his own records.

Courtney Love may indeed be the world's most enormous cockmongler for all I know, but I rest my judgement on her music being as it exists independent of any supposed media harridanry, and particularly as the rest looks like the usual stuff where it's funny when Keith Richards pulls that crap, but a chick, man - that be fucked up.

Live Through This is probably one of the greatest rock albums of all time, in my view - a record so good that when I first bought a copy it took me about six months before I finally managed to turn it over and listen to the second side. Lyrically, it's both deeply affecting and chilling in suggesting the horrors of a less than ideal upbringing or the more unpleasant corners of human sexual politics without spelling everything out which, I would cautiously suggest, grants Live Through This an appeal beyond the Riot Grrrl audience, something more trailer home than student bar. It's the sound of the shittiest day you've ever had, but with tunes. As an album, it's so good that there's almost no point writing about it, aside from to remind people of its being good, and that Courtney Love's media presence should generally be regarded as a separate, possibly unrelated entity. I've nothing against Nirvana beyond believing them to have been somewhat overrated for a band who recorded a song about how they only wanted the really cool people listening to their music, but this is as good as they could have sounded had they been something other than an Iron Maiden tribute act.

Alanis Morissette - The Collection (2005)

Inevitably we come to Alanis Morissette, the one-woman empowering tampon advert meeting all your daily Nirvana requirements for readers of Cosmopolitan and viewers of Desperate Housewives alike, the beef curtain Cobain you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite, singing her way through the self-help section with just enough grunge to appear tasteful, and of course the woman who brought us Ironic.

Ha ha.

Ironic, as Ed Byrne, the wry Irish-themed chipmunk and professional comedy game show contestant observed, is a song without any ironic content, although you might regard that as itself ironic which would suggest that Alanis Morissette is actually fucking with us and knows more than she's saying. Whilst Byrne's routine undoubtedly comprises some of the most hilariously wry observations ever made by a stand up comedian, it's not entirely true, and he might have done better just telling his little jokes, prettily fluttering his eyelashes, and flicking his lush Celtic locks over one shoulder like the lady in the shampoo advert. Whilst certain situations described in the song Ironic may indeed be more properly characterised as simple bad luck, it seems safe to say that most of them would be considered ironic given a wider context. Rain on one's wedding day for example, whilst not in and of itself ironic, might be regarded as such after many weeks without rain, and it doesn't take hugely inventive leaps of imagination to frame the other examples given as having some potential irony. However, Alanis Morissette's job is to get over a certain level of meaning in a snappy three-minute pop song, not refute the existence of a Deity on a fucking message board, and if you can't quite see what she was getting at in Ironic, then you're probably an idiot. Little Richard's Tutti Frutti might equally well be considered gibberish in so much as the lyrics would doubtless be judged insubstantial were they to be submitted as a thesis as part of a doctorate in behavioural studies, but I suspect anyone with half a brain will understand what he was talking about.

Let's start again.

Whilst some criticisms made of the Morissette may well be justified, I find it hard to get around the double standards here - a variation on the rock classic of how Keith Richards snorting marijuanas out of a teenage vagina and then writing a song about it be some painful, frowning, manly shit and telling it like it is and that, whilst Courtney Love - or whoever else you care to mention with the same XX chromosomal configuration - must by definition be some crazy incoherent period lady castrating them menfolks on the way to the nuthouse; and I suspect Morissette's supposed loony menstrual no talent harridan credentials can be blamed upon her singing songs whilst failing to pop them out for the lads. Elsewhere we find related slings and arrows predicated on the notion that people who either read self-help literature, live in Portland, or who occasionally wish their boyfriend were less of a twat should not be allowed to listen to music because their problems aren't as artistic as that talentless hat-wearing wanker out of The Libertines eating heroin sandwiches.

It's all about the music, man, as these Mojo reading bumfaced cockmonglers themselves keep telling us over and over, and frankly Alanis Morissette scores quite well in that department. Not only does she have a reasonably amazing voice - expressive with a good range - but she knows how to knock out a tune, and understands the dynamics of putting a bit of music together. So it's all fairly self-involved, but really no more so than Nine Inch Nails, or probably about half of the music already in your collection; and whilst we're here I'm surprised how much of this actually reminds me of Trent Reznor's work, sort of a female Trent Reznor but grown-up and with a few vaguely folky, vaguely stadium trip hop touches chucked in for the sake of contrast. I'm not saying it's the most mind-blowing music ever recorded, but I really do feel the Morissette deserves significantly less sniggering from the cheap seats, not least because it's mostly hur hur hur chicks can't rock, man.

Nevertheless, excepting a hugely ill-advised Cole Porter cover to which her voice is entirely unsuited, and Mercy which is apparently from a prayer cycle or summink and thus steers a bit too close to Sting's Amazonian Experience for comfort, this is a surprisingly great set of songs. The almost absurdly powerful Thank You is still probably one of my top ten from whichever decade that was; and the big singles mostly sound even better than I remember; and Crazy rescues the Seal song from its mackerel-guzzling flipper clapping origins; and Uninvited almost turns into Led Zeppelin's Kashmir without anyone slipping in puddles of patchouli oil and breaking their neck.

Ironic will probably forever remain at best a guilty pleasure in public imagination thanks to the Ed Byrnes of the world - although it is admittedly entertaining when keyboard warriors cite it as evidence of the supposed American inability to grasp irony, given that Alanis Morissette isn't actually American - but fuck it, regardless of whatever received wisdom you may be labouring under, this is some damn good stuff.