Sid Vicious - Sid Sings (1979)

If there was ever a mythology which outstripped the individual from whom it was spun more than Sid - and there may well be - I can't think of anyone at the moment. The spectacle of Sid grew to such proportions following his death as to become indistinguishable from mainstream caricatures by Kenny Everett and the like, and so much so that it hardly seems worth stating. On the other hand, the image of Sid as some useless chump - lucky doesn't seem quite the right term here - who barely knew which end of a bass guitar was which, a man named after his own hamster - doesn't seem entirely fair either. As usual, the truth was probably somewhere in the middle. My friend Eddy remembers him as just some amiable, slightly lively bloke who turned up at all the early punk gigs, someone you'd say hello to without feeling you needed to know the story of his life - which seems to match the accounts given by other Sex Pistols. Rotten describes him as easily led, maybe a little guileless; although during the Vermorel interview he comes across as, if not a high-functioning genius then certainly far from stupid. Additionally, you can hear him idly plucking away on his bass at certain points on the tape and he's not actually bad even if his playing suffered following four-thousand pints and an arm candy chaser. At least he was technically no more basic than a million other punk bassists of the time.

This cobbling together of posthumous live recordings was massively cynical but naturally I bought one, even though it could be argued that the free Sid poster was probably closer to the spirit of the enterprise than the music on the record. The music is mostly Iggy or Dolls covers performed with various Heartbreakers, notably excepting Born to Lose from the final English Pistols performance, at least prior to the reunion. The quality isn't great but it's good enough and I've heard worse, and Sid was actually a decent vocalist. He didn't change the world but he was funny and he made things a little more interesting for a while.

C'mon Everybody and Something Else were both very important to me at the time, regardless of anyone trying to point us in the direction of better art or superior musicianship; and ignoring the bullshit, looking past the whole whining caboodle to Sid Sings as a record of some punky bloke having a good time on a stage, it's hard to fault.

Wilding and Unwilding - Hard Noise to Scumrise (2020)

I've a feeling that almost every single review of this man's work will almost certainly have opened with a paragraph similar to what follows, but you'll just have to bear with me. Back in 1980 I was an only infrequent listener to John Peel due to having to get up for school the next day, but two or three of those infrequent hearings were distinguished by himself playing There Goes Concorde Again by ...And the Native Hipsters, a genuinely odd six minutes of Dada minimalism which didn't really sound like anything else I'd heard at the time. It made a big impression and reached number five in the independent charts. Weirdly, it also made an impression on a few of my wee pals, some of whom I hadn't even recognised for the sort of kids who would listen to Peel, most peculiar being Paul Boulton who resembled the singer from the UK Subs, regarded Sid's version of My Way as a protest song, and who was trying to form a punk band called the Suburbans - he thought Concorde was a bit weird but really good. So my equivalent of being able to remember where you were when Kennedy was shot is probably my recollection of that strange couple of days when everyone I knew seemed to be into There Goes Concorde Again. A few years later I ended up at Maidstone College of Art and discovered that one of my tutors, Bob Cubitt, had been loosely involved with ...And the Native Hipsters, which naturally impressed the shit out of me; and now, a million years in the future, Wikipedia informs me that Tony Visconti had aspirations to re-record There Goes Concorde Again, and that William Wilding - the man at the heart of all of this - has also performed as Woody Bop Muddy, a name I remember mainly because my friend Eddy used to go to see him perform quite a lot.

Anyway, my point is that this is what he is - or possibly they are - up to now, and that There Goes Concorde Again is probably a lot to live up to, but Hard Noise to Scumrise is fucking excellent and therefore does. Some of what we have here is noise, and noise in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer, so we have slabs of untreated musique concréte delivered to our ears in sequences which, while appearing arbitrary, hint at a fairly refined sense of composition. Band-saws, drilling equipment, bits of factory, and whatever the hell else is making those noises doesn't usually sound quite so musical, at least not without going down the obvious route of sampling everything for novelty covers of Tutti Frutti; but this is familiar urban noise with unfamiliar punctuation and therefore works a little like Einstürzende Neubauten without the haircuts or self-conscious emphasis on cheekbones.

Additionally we have musical elements which introduce themselves, notably a powerful horn section, which further removes Hard Noise to Scumrise from the sort of thing everyone else would probably do given similar ingredients. Order seems to form from apparent chaos as the album progresses, allowing a Beefheartian element to surface - bluesy growling and absurdist lyrics, or absurdist with a point. It's unexpected but we adjust, much as we adjust to gentle acoustic guitar and pulsing synth, following the album where actually very few have gone before, generally speaking. The final track, and probably the hit single is Scum Always Rises, a genuine soul-drenched howler scored for jackhammer, chainsaw, and cocktail piano which somehow summarises everything that's been wrong with the world at least since we abandoned hunting and gathering, and does it with only a few words and a handful of pertinent location recordings. Hard Noise to Scumrise really is a masterpiece, very satisfying if occasionally disorientating listening from end to end.

Bag it hither.

Broken Britain (2011)

I wouldn't ordinarily bother to write about anything below a certain level of crapness, despite the thrill of shooting a fish in its proverbial barrel; but this makes the cut because it's so crap as to be genuinely impressive whilst still being amazingly crap - so none of that stuff about something being so bad that it's good here. Broken Britain really is absolutely shite. It's a punk compilation from a couple of years ago, or at least that's what it seems to aspire to be - a memorial to that time when we all kicked in our television sets because Sid Vicious swore on Midlands Today, and when the Clash had that hit with a song about the Queen being a moron.

Presuming you remember those Top of the Pops albums of the seventies - copyright dodging hits of the day faithfully reproduced by session musicians; well, that's sort of what we have here, except obviously that would be tacky and not very punky at all, so I think we're pretending this is something else - just like in the Sid Vicious song, Something Else, yeah?

Hooray for punks and punk rock!

Stick your bollocks up your arse, misses! Ha ha!

So far as I can tell, we do actually hear 999, the Business, and the Stranglers on this disc, although fuck knows where they found a Stranglers cover of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth; and that's definitely punky cockney dolly bird Lydia Luvaduck Lunch giving it some welly on a live version of In My Time of Dying, probably live in broken Britain or something. The rest though…

We have massive punky hits faithfully covered by bands you've mostly never heard of, bands which sound suspiciously as though they've all been recorded in the same studio with the same instruments - four from the Clash, four Pistols numbers, then Teenage Kicks and a couple of Joy Division biggies, and er… Denis, the Blondie song, instead performed by the likes of the Belfast Dolls, the Badgers, Discord 76, and Mandi and the Morons - a more punkily anarchistic bunch you couldn't wish to meet, if the names are any indication. On the other hand, Beki Bondage is undeniably real because I remember both Stand Strong Stand Proud from listening to Peel and her truly splendid knockers from the pages of Sounds, which were quite rememberable* due to my being a sixteen-year old boy at the time. Here she covers the Pistols' EMI, complete with faithfully reproduced ad libs which only made sense sung by Rotten at a very specific time of his career. Likewise, some of the Clash covers sound similarly odd given that Complete Control - for one example - is about being in a band called the Clash; and I don't know who the Cook 'n' Jones responsible for Silly Thing could have been, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Steve or Paul.

Plucked from the cheapo rack of the store, or possibly even a gas station, Broken Britain promises a couple of familiar names alongside covers rendered by obscure types who probably had one single played on local radio before they fizzled out and all got jobs at a local car showroom, but I don't think that's what we actually have here. Second - or possibly third - impression is that this might do well if you listen to it with the air conditioning on full blast, or if you're not really familiar with any of these songs. Should you be some punky young dude browsing the stalls of a Mexico City street market, and a punky young dude who doesn't speak much English, then Broken Britain might seem worth a punt.

Maddeningly, even this theory is undermined by a peculiarly operatic cover of Who Killed Bambi? and Dresden's version of the Talking Heads' Psycho-Killer, neither of which give a shit about duplicating the originals. This Bambi, if otherwise completely pointless, at least allows us to hear the lyrics, such as they are, for the first time ever; and Dresden, whatever it may be, sounds suspiciously like John Otway or even Unlucky Fried Kitten. I was never that struck on Psycho-Killer, and now I understand why - because it should have been recorded by Frank Butcher from Eastenders as is apparently the case here; which is why, despite everything, I'll be hanging on to this otherwise entirely pointless piece of crap.

It was a Christmas present, in case you were wondering, but thankfully not mine.

*: This is a word invented by a Wheel of Fortune contestant which I'm trying to pass into common parlance.

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

Fuck it - let's do this. Nevermind is the greatest rock album ever recorded and the work of the most profoundly sensitive man-genius ever to die for our sins. We know this because of its enduring popularity and the undeniable lasting influence it had on everything which followed, or at least quite a lot of what followed. I don't think Nevermind made much difference to, off the top of my head, anyone inhabiting fields of music which weren't white blokes with guitars, but - you know…

Personally I found it all a bit mystifying at the time. They sounded okay, and they had some pretty songs, but there were about a million other bands I liked more, bands whom I felt did the same thing better. Nirvana weren't even top of the Seattle pile in my house, but still, I suppose, they had something which spoke to indie kids already bored with sun hats and the Stone Roses. Nirvana sounded big and they rocked, and the McCartneyesque simplicity of those riffs was hard to ignore, and Butch Vig's mix was just so fucking nice and tidy, and there was Kurt with his dreamy blue eyes looking a bit sad, and didn't you just want to take him home and make him some soup, maybe watch Three Men and a Baby on VHS with him - something funny to cheer him up a bit?

Well, I didn't, but clearly he communicated something of the sort to a certain cross-section of his fans; and you could hear the words, and he wasn't like totally gross like that fat guy from Tad.

I'm so ugly, but that's okay 'cause so are you.
 

See! He understood!

Lithium just sounds like some glam stomper with a fuzz guitar to me. Maybe it's the chorus with its presumably unintentional homage to Olivia Newton-John's A Little More Love. You could stripe it onto footage of the Bay City Rollers and no-one would know the difference.

Then we come to Polly.

Polly wants a cracker.
I think I should get off her first.
I think she wants some water,
To put out the blow torch.

The song seems to reference the popular seventies joke about the person who paints their parrot with emulsion because they would have preferred one of a different colour, and who then changes their mind.

'I told you the paint would kill it,' says the man in the shop.

'It wasn't the paint,' explains the star of the joke, 'it was the blow torch I used to get rid of the first coat.'

Polly always sounded like it was trying too hard to my ears, yet another example of the slightly tedious mainstream surrealism similarly favoured by Neil Gaiman, Tim Burton and all those other useless wankers - the formulaic juxtaposition of innocence and horror which squares, people without imagination, and twelve year-old boys always seem to think represents something profound.

Pippi Longstocking with an assault rifle!

Winnie the Pooh in the gulag!

Alice scoring 'ludes in Wonderland!

See!

Did I shock you?

Did I blow your mind?

I'm not even going to bother with the song about how they only wanted cool people at their shows. I don't like gun wielding shitheads either, but there must surely have been a better way of putting it than In Bloom.

Still, the bottom line is that nothing I could say here will ever matter, because Nevermind is just too big to pick a fight with, and even I have to admit it's a great record providing you don't overthink it. Nirvana was grunge beating the music industry to its own commodification, and that's their genius and their significance, which is why we'll still be seeing dunderheaded murals of Kurt high-fiving John, Jimi, and Sid for many years to come. He was never the messiah - nor even a particularly amazing song writer, for that matter - and the real tragedy is that I doubt he ever regarded himself as anything of the sort. Most likely he would have been mortified by the idea.

Nevermind is toe tapping tunes nicely sung and recorded, but that's really all - no more, no less. I had this on tape, then ended up buying the record on a day when I just really wanted to buy an album, and this was the only thing in the store I could imagine listening to. More than twenty years later, I still haven't played it much because I've had no reason to do so. All of its parts are right there on display with nothing to draw me in any further. There is as little mystery in the grooves as in the sledgehammer allegory of the cover, an image which even an episode of sixties Star Trek would dismiss as a bit obvious.