Level 42 - Level Best (1989)

Having bought this, I realise that I've never knowingly met one other person who ever liked Level 42, such has been my social circle. I therefore have a possibly false impression of them as existing somewhere on the Sting-Lighthouse Family spectrum, something beige and tasteful which Alan Partridge would have in his car, and of course there was that album which came with a free pair of driving gloves…

The Wikipedia page refers to jazz funk and something called sophisti-pop, but I don't care. The hits wormed their way into my consciousness before I had time to form any of the usual objections based on the presumed existence of anything called sophisti-pop, and those selfsame tunes have stayed there ever since; and yes, weirdly there were enough of them for a greatest hits album. There are six or seven on here which I don't recognise, which still leaves more than just The Sun Goes Down and that other one.

As you may recall, it's all very smooth and sounds fairly expensive, but all that ostentatiously complicated slap bass, jazzy electric piano, and pitch perfect vocal harmony is dynamic rather than just tasteful for the sake of it, with all those extra notes working the sort of profoundly emotive melodic power you usually only get with a symphony orchestra, depending on what it's playing. In other words, at least with the likes of It's Over, Leaving Me Now, or The Sun Goes Down, the thing wrenches your heart right out of your chest before you've even had chance to admire the razor crease in its chinos or the expertise with which that cocktail was mixed. I'm not kidding. The way those notes fit together in the chorus of It's Over is genuinely fucking astonishing to me, enough to bring a tear to the eye even when you haven't actually split up with anyone, or noticed the line which appears to run:

Don't look for me around this town,
'Cause I will be so far away, you'll never find me anywhere,
And I won't take no souvenirs,
No perfume, no pictures, no brassiere…

Thankfully that isn't what he's singing.

There's some degree of cheese, I suppose - the token song about a flying saucer encounter, and of course the massively futuristic Micro Kid whom older listeners will recall as having had megathoughts, whatever those were, and Hot Water is built upon that chuggy rhythm which I assume has since been made illegal because no-one does it these days; none of which seems to matter because this lot somehow made all that shit sound amazing - not so much the Shriekback of the golf course as Kool & the Gang with a rocket up their arse.

Wyclef Jean - The Carnival (1997)

 

I haven't always been well disposed towards Wyclef Jean, so this represents quite an about face for me. I found the Fugees underwhelming and exhaustingly worthy, rap music for people who read Mojo or who shop at Whole Foods. I wasn't wild about their solo material either and was particularly appalled by Wyclef's colonisation of Another One Bites the Dust, improbably billed as a collaboration for some movie soundtrack or other. It was the Queen song stretched out so as to accommodate lines from Wyclef and Canibus, with Mercury's verses prefixed by Mr. Jean asking, Freddie, where you at? as though to conjure the image of some magical jam with the afterlife - although the actual answer to the question of where Freddie was at should logically have been, I'm fucking brown bread, pal. Don't you watch the news? Additionally, there was Gone Till November which I couldn't avoid for about six months or so, and which annoyed the hell out of me. The song takes the form of an address from a bad lad who has been sentenced and is off to do his time in the stripey hole. Take care, mum, he says - although, I'm paraphrasing here - and sorry about being a criminal. It's just that I'd prefer not to work a nine to five because robbing banks is easier, given my lack of qualifications. At the time I somehow missed the inference of the song and assumed it to be Wyclef telling everyone he was off for a lovely six month holiday, sipping rum from a half coconut on some beach because work is for squares and suckers. I found this irritating because my job was fairly back breaking but fucking off to Barbados didn't really seem like an option.

Then he turned up on an episode of that Jools Holland thing, which wasn't really a massive surprise.

Several decades later, I experience an unexpected tug of nostalgia for Gone Till November, not least because I realise the subject matter isn't quite so gormless as I somehow took it to be. I haven't thought about Wyclef in a long time and am surprised to recall the strength of my dislike for the man, which of course prompts a re-evaluation. Because I'm nothing if not a contrarian, it probably helps my volte-face that Wyclef's most vocal critics have themselves tended to be complete fucking cocks, one of whom I seem to remember objecting on the grounds that Wyclef thinks he's Bob Marley, the evidence presumably being that they're both musical black men with dreads and are therefore essentially identical.

Anyway, the only thing I've been able to find wrong with The Carnival is all the extraneous yacking between tracks, of which there seems to be a lot. Much of the album is framed as a courtroom drama with songs provided in evidence in the case of Wyclef accused of being too fly, or something of the sort. It's not that it's not actually funny, because it sort of is - and the interview with the world's scariest rapper made me literally laugh out loud - but the album simply doesn't need it because it's already good enough, which I really didn't expect. The fact of Wyclef playing a shitload of instruments to a fairly high standard doesn't actually mean he's merely dabbling when it comes to either the rap or hip-hop production, and certainly no more than it means he thinks he's Bob Marley. The key to the man seems to be that he never really gave a shit about ticking the right boxes or fitting neatly into any single genre, so he takes the sort of eclectic approach which means you're a multi-instrumentalist if you're a white guy, but apparently doing too much if you're Wyclef Jean; and he's eclectic because he fucking loves music and, above all, he tries to entertain and keep things interesting for the rest of us - hence even that Jools Holland slot.

As you might expect, The Carnival drifts all over the place, musically speaking, with a substantial Latin or Caribbean influence on a lot of the material, but it's cheery and sincere rather than cheesy, being born from an obvious and infectious desire for the listener to have at least as much of a blast as those playing the stuff. In case I've made it all sound like Tito Puente, hip-hop production nevertheless dominates, and it's a fairly polished sound - as distinct from the rough as fuck we're all used to - but draws heavily on dub and the whole sound system dynamic so we don't have to think about Sting nodding his head with approval as he listens to the record; not unless we really want to. Weirdly, excepting Gone Till November, much of the album blends into a relatively seamless landscape of uptempo beats and tunes, nothing really standing out but working as a whole because, possibly excepting the chatter, there are no real duds to ruin the mood. It's not the greatest album I've ever heard, but it's decent for something I once assumed would be fucking terrible. Better late to the party than never, I guess.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

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

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

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

Yella - One Mo Nigga ta Go (1996)

Of all the former members of NWA, Yella seems to have been the most overlooked in terms of the ensuing legend, at least unless you want to start talking about Arabian Prince and others whom even those who were actually in NWA have trouble remembering. This is probably because Yella was never quite so visible as the rest, and we never worked out what he actually did. I mean we know he was the DJ, or he was the other DJ, but er…

Of course, whereas the other four have had post-NWA musical careers which kept their works within the general vicinity of the wider public attention span, Yella shuffled off to produce independent art films catering principally for a male audience, so you could argue that he sort of switched lanes.

Well, sort of, except for producing, or at least having something to do with tracks on a few of the later solo releases by Eazy-E, releases which were actually pretty fucking great, contrary to the history established by people who write for the Source and others; and prodding the internet reveals that Yella produced a whole shitload of records which did well, back when he was still pushing the buttons; and actually there was this solo album, which didn't quite set the world on fire but is nevertheless solid as fuck.

That said, One Mo Nigga has such a laid back, mellow vibe that you can pretty much listen to the entire album without noticing it, then wonder what happened to track two as the disc spins to a stop in the player, at least at first. It's mostly a g-funk variant of light jazz funk-soul-R&B-all of that good shit, taking it slow and smooth and so polished that it wouldn't sound out of place on a Sting album; but the more you listen, the more you begin to feel it, and there's a lot of feeling on this one - it being a memorial to Eazy-E who had recently passed and who was the one still talking to Yella, I guess. It works because, among other factors, Yella knows his strengths and, aside from a few particularly poignant spoken pieces, leaves the vocals to others - BG, Knocc Out, Kokane and various Ruthless vets. There's nothing which punches you in the face like you might get with an Ice Cube set, because even with the few darker, street level numbers, the vibe is set firmly at four in the morning. It's music which knows what it's like to lose a buddy, and which knows there's not always anything to be said, so you just have to deal with it. One Mo Nigga ta Go probably proves the truism about the quiet ones at the back. It's not that it's unlike anything you've heard before, but nothing you've heard before will have sounded quite like this album.

David Bowie - Tonight (1984)

Yes, I know, but it's not like he's going to be recording any new ones so it seemed like time I went in, just out of curiosity. After all, it might not be that bad.

Having been loyal to Bowie right up until Let's Dance, I spent most of the eighties looking in the other direction. It seemed as though he'd lost the plot from where I'd been standing, and I still loathe the plinky-plonky banality of ying-tong-iddle-I-China Girl, and it was surely only a matter of time before he turned up dressed as a foam rubber parrot on Celebrity It's a Knockout!

Anyway, I've grudgingly come to accept that I was wrong about Let's Dance - excepting Bowie's cover of Aneka's Japanese Boy - and I guess the same is true of this one, which is weird. I expected it to be worse, like Let's Dance with shoulder pads and blonde highlights instead of tunes. Firstly I should admit that both Blue Jean and Loving the Alien sounded all right as singles, even at the time, if admittedly not cut from quite the same cloth as Rebel Rebel or Drive-In Saturday. They've aged pretty well, particularly now that the glossy eighties production has begun to sound like a novel affectation rather than something from which there's no fucking escape. Loving the Alien actually comes surprisingly close to magnificent, particularly the Howard Goodall style staircase of ascending notes leading up to its suitably epic chorus.

The prosecution should probably also take into account that Bowie does cod reggae on this record, and twice, and one of those times in the company of his famous friend Tina Turner. It should be awful but somehow isn't, although I've never really had a problem with cod reggae, apart from finding it funny. It additionally provides a clue to why Tonight turned out as it did, at least once we take into account that it's produced by Hugh Padgham, father of the gated snare and other eighties crimes: Bowie wanted to be Sting.

Play Tonight enough and it sounds okay; another few days and it sounds decent once you've stopped noticing the haircuts and the jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow; and by the end of the second week, it sounds better than either Low or Heroes, or if not better, at least like it had some idea of what the fuck it was doing.

Everything I've ever known is wrong.

Blur - Leisure (1991)

It could be that I've remembered some of the details incorrectly, but I seem to recall this - Blur's debut album - greeted with a degree of cynicism, subsequently sinking into mumbling about how such a band could have had such an inauspicious beginning. It was baggy, as was everything else at the time, and the record label was EMI pretending to be an indie so as to be down with the kids, meaning this was actually Phil Collins trying to pass himself off as the first four Wire albums, or summink.

However: bollocks.

Blur were fucking great, and this was a fucking great debut by a fucking great band, which was fucking great. Suggestions that the lads should have maintained their integrity by saying no thank you, Parlophone, we were actually hoping to sign with United Dairies, aren't really worth taking seriously, beyond which we're left with the notion that Blur somehow lacked authenticity, which usually translates into failure to have been born in Manchester; because being from Manchester is not only a biographical detail, it's something in the music, something which defies definition, rather conveniently. Being from London is different and means you're not real, you sip cocktails with Eamonn Holmes at the weekend, and when you walk like a monkey and claim to be mad for it, you're just pretending.

Leisure is like a spikier version of early Pink Floyd, plenty of substance abuse, and some swagger, but it's balanced by a certain chemical ambiguity, a sense of come down or hangover which is neither mad for it nor necessarily sane for it. The baggy aspect may simply have been timing, or it may have been something emphasised in production, but it seems significant that for an album which hints at the psychedelic experience with such conviction, Leisure still doesn't sound dated, and is easily as good as anything the Stone Roses ever came up with. These be some killer songs, regardless of Damon Albarn having eventually turned into Sting.

The Police - Zenyatta Mondatta (1980)

Simon Morris, Ceramic Hob and celebrated musicologist, recently posited that the Police and Nirvana were essentially the same thing, and he's right. In both cases, there were three of them, they were very popular, they combined rock guitars with a whining noise, and Nirvana's first album was called Bleach which references the collective hairstyles of the Police. That being said, there are differences in so much as that whilst the Police sang songs about isolation, prostitutes, an inflatable sex toy, and the end of the world, Nirvana's oeuvre focused primarily on having a tummy ache and wanting only cool people in attendance at one's pop concert. Also one of their best songs ripped off Killing Joke.

Of course, I actually like Nirvana, albeit not quite so much as several other bands from their neck of the woods, so I'm writing this primarily because I dislike sacred cows and it's funny to upset those who believe Kurt died for our sins, when I'm pretty sure the coroner's report would have described a very different cause of death. Further to the posthumous reputation of the man, it differentiates from that of Sting in so much as that he is remembered as a tortured Jesuseque genius, yet was probably just a regular bloke who spent too much time thinking about things; while Sting, on the other hand, often appears to hold to an absurdly elevated opinion of his own artistic and spiritual credentials, and yet is widely understood to be a bit of a goon, albeit with the redeeming feature of having helped take the piss out of himself in that Zoolander film. The outcome of this, given public opinion being what it is, is that the Police will probably never be rescued from their own reputation as stadium-filling bores.

Still, I can't quite get with the flow on this one, and the music still sounds great to me. They came along to hog the charts at just the right time, when my ear had become attuned to anything with a vaguely punky vibe, and yet before I'd fully developed the cynicism by which I would deem music anyone else had heard of - let alone people working in Wimpy Bar - as cheap, populist, and therefore unacceptable; and the Police must have had something going for them because not even Sting's subsequent ascent to full goonhood has tarnished my regard.

This was the album recorded here and there whilst on one of those massive world tours full of screaming girls, the album composed at the height of their fame, and accordingly it's a bit uneven with the feel of a scrapbook, or even a travelogue - at least compared to the first two, both of which felt pretty solid and consistent. On the other hand, Zenyatta Mondatta works because there's nothing truly terrible here, and two tracks in particular are about the best things ever recorded by any combination of those involved; and because Bombs Away and When the World is Running Down are of such phenomenal quality, I've played this thing to death over the years to the point of it having become embedded in my psyche, and it's become so embedded in my psyche that objections along the lines of either Outlandos d'Amour being a better record, or it's the Police, man, get a grip you cloth-eared twat, for fuck's sake! simply don't register.

It's a smoother record than were the first two, luxuriating in sounds and studio polish of a quality foreshadowing at least two of these people making names for themselves as composers of film soundtracks. There's some of the cod reggae, although it's mostly closer to cod ska, and to be fair, none of it really resembles an impersonation because the cod element was more a starting point than anything; unless you just really need to loathe Sting and all ships in which he hath sailed - which I can sort of understand.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da is probably about as irritating as you remember it being, and there seem to be a lot of instrumentals, and I never quite warmed to Behind My Camel, not even when it was inexplicably pinched by Ice Cube for something or other; but beyond these minor niggles, Zenyatta Mondatta holds together beautifully as a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

It's just a good album.

Sorry.

Devo - Something For Everybody (2010)

I've always found the idea that anybody could have a single all-time favourite music artist a little weird, but if pressed I'd have to say mine were Devo in so much as that whilst there have been months, perhaps even years, without them being much of a presence in my headphones, there has never been a time when I've stuck on a Devo record and found I wasn't really in the mood for it. Setting aside a pre-pubescent fixation with the Beatles, Devo were probably the first group I really got into as a teenager, and got into with sufficient fervour as to get me buying the records. They scared the living shit out of me when I first heard that debut album, a red vinyl copy lent to me by my best friend Graham, but once I got past my suspicion of this music as something weird, unwholesome and mutated - which of course it was - I was hooked, and apparently for life.

A couple of years later I was hanging out with a former Cravat and we were talking about Crass, of whom we were both fans. Ideally, we concluded, Crass should make records which sounded like the Human League or Roxy Music by which to smuggle their message into the hit parade and reach people who might genuinely benefit from their perspective on society; at which point of the conversation I realised it had already happened, and that's what Devo were. Of course, whilst Devo may not actually have much to say about anarcho-syndicalism, like Crass, they've never been shy in pointing out everything which is wrong with our society and our forever needing daddy to tell us what to do. The main difference is that you can dance to the Devo version because it's fundamentally stupid and fun, and even though it was born from Gerald Casale's outrage at witnessing cops shooting kids at Kent State, musically it's the Monster Mash as envisioned for a future designed by John Waters and Hugo Gernsback; and it's like this because it's a satire on culture, not something removed from it and living by its own laws in Epping Forest - which isn't a criticism of Crass, by the way, simply an acknowledgement of different strategies.

Something For Everybody will probably remain the final new Devo album given the passing of a Bob, and a couple of those left behind supposedly no longer on the greatest of terms. Continuing Devo's taking the piss out of society, the music industry, and themselves, the album was supposedly written by focus group in response to questionnaires asking what consumers would like to hear from Devo. I remember filling in one online, and that's supposedly why we have the blue energy dome on the cover, as opposed to any other hue of headgear. We also got to pick which tracks made it onto this album which, tellingly, makes for much better listening than the collection of rejects and leftovers which was later issued as Something Else For Everybody. I say much better listening, but what I actually probably mean to say is that this is an unequivocally perfect album, illustrating as it does why there can never be a musical institution greater than Devo.

Yes, I know, and I don't care. There are people who don't get Devo. I've met them on internet forums sniggering about how Devo is like totally gay LOL before returning to the thread discussing which Judas Priest albums rocked the hardest, which sort of proves that Devo were right about a few things.

With Devo, each song is a puzzle in so much as that there is either a directly progressive message, or one otherwise implicit in the form, and it's usually communicated in terms which combine the novelty of the Archies with the mind-expanding strangeness of the Residents; and unscrambling that puzzle, you arrive at a place wherein it becomes impossible to sustain ridiculous devolved ideas, or so my theory goes. What this means, or what I think it means, is that if you get Devo, then you're probably doing something right; and you've probably never stood outside Planned Parenthood wearing an NRA t-shirt and holding up a crucifix; and you almost certainly didn't vote for the Annoying Orange. The music of Devo improves our world by making us better people, and if you need proof - next time you get your heart broken, eschew the usual soundtrack of miserable fuckers in favour of almost anything by Devo. I promise, you'll notice the difference in a very short time.

So yes, this will most likely be the final Devo album, which is a shame but - Lord - what a finale! Musically it's almost a summary of their entire career - the sharp, irresistible pop of Freedom of Choice, the synthetic grandeur of Shout, and the faintly disturbing mutant novelty of their weird primal phase - Fountain of Filth, Buttered Beauties and the rest, not even omitting the occasional Popeye-style ethnic caricature switched on its head as happens with Cameo. Something For Everybody rocks hard and dresses like the Jetsons whilst still managing to squeeze out a tear of more genuine feeling than anything Sting ever did in a rain forest.

In the bigger scheme of things
We haven't been around here more than a moment.
And yet too many, it seems,
Believe we are creating a brand new world around us.
We are creating a brand new world without us.
Maybe it really is okay.
Although we're digging our own graves,
At this moment.

I could write about how no-one really took them seriously because they were scared of the truth about de-evolution, namely that it was never a marketing gimmick like Adam Ant pretending to be a pirate or whatever; but some of us did take them seriously, and I guess we've been proven right because we're now living in the world described in Don't Shoot (I'm a Man).

This might be our very last chance. Let's not fuck it up.

Sylvie & Babs - The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion (1985)

Yes, I'm well aware of it being Nurse With Wound, thank you very much, but I'm pretty sure it was listed as above when released, the reason being that Steve Stapleton regarded the Hi-Fi Companion as something quite separate and distinct from the Nurse With Wound canon, which it sort of is, or at least was. So I'm sticking with the original version of the story, plus I seem to recall the United Dairies mail order list had this down as something other than Nurse With Wound, and listed under comedy for what it may be worth - along with Hastings of Malawi, whatever the hell that was.

Of course, it's now difficult to get through a whole day without having to hear some cunt's aspirationally humorous plunderphonic deconstruction of existing bits of music, but back in 1985, 'twas not yet so overegged a pudding as it has become, and possibly because no-one had a sampler so it was harder. Sylvie & Babs were principally Stapleton and the gang making music with bits of other people's records, and - so I gather - making it the extraordinarily complicated way by splicing together inch thick strips of studio tape and so on in the spirit of Pierre Schaeffer and those guys as opposed to just sitting next to the radio with one finger on the pause button and then selling the end result to people with a photocopy of your knob on the cover like Hamilton Bohannon* would have done.

To start again at the beginning, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as industrial, then you're a fucking clown; you wear big red shoes; you have a bowler hat on your head with a giant flower coming out of it; and when you drive your car, you honk the horn twice every few yards and the doors have usually fallen off by the time you reach your destination, which will almost certainly be a clown shop which you're visiting in order to make purchase of clown supplies. This description also applies, albeit to a lesser extent, if you've ever described Nurse With Wound as a noise group or - ugh - sound artists; although Nurse With Wound are very much about sound and the psychological and physiological effects it can have on the listener: so it's definitely music, but works more like a sonic analogy of the art of Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaist types than does music with tunes, verses, a chorus, or which is made using musical instruments. The next sound you hear on a Nurse With Wound record may often be the last sound you would expect to hear depending on whatever has gone before, which distinguishes them from those acts more obviously reliant on repetition. It can be hard work listening to Nurse With Wound, but also very rewarding because it's never quite like anything you will have heard before, possibly including previous Nurse With Wound albums. They're not something you can listen to all the time, but every so often, you'll find there's nothing better if the time is right.

Well, that's the theory anyway, and I haven't actually heard the last five-hundred or so records so for all I know he may be cranking out handbag house with Nick Griffin these days, but for the sake of argument, let's just pretend it's still 1985 and that I'm right. I failed to buy this at the time because there was other stuff I wanted, and Nurse With Wound were an acquired taste even by my standards; also, it wasn't that easy to get hold of their stuff. I had Insect & Individual Silenced, which was fucking great, but apparently not so great as to keep me from flogging it when I decided I really needed those first two albums by You've Got Foetus On Your Breath. Millions of years later, I find this on CD and notice that I actually know three of the people who appeared on here amongst the lengthy list of collaborators, which is weird. In fact, I've been in bands with two of them; and one of them was Andrew Cox who was my bestest buddy for a while, and who is no longer with us, and who I still miss like crazy; so I couldn't really not buy it.

I suspect all those bargain basement cassette versions of Nurse With Wound have spoiled the real thing for me over the years, because in 2017 Sylvie & Babs sound drearily familiar rather than weird and surprising, at least on first listen. The key seems to be getting past the point of trainspotting where it all came from - snatches of My Boomerang Won't Come Back and the like, which seem intrusive whilst they remain familiar, although maybe that was the point. After a few spins, it picks up - which again is the opposite of what I expect to get from a Nurse With Wound record given how they seem so often reliant on shock and surprise; but this eventually settles into a sort of musicality suggestive of narrative which is almost certainly in the ear of the beholder. I suppose this could be what differentiates Sylvie & Babs from Nurse With Wound - unless it's just my lugholes - namely that increasing familiarity with the material brings some sort of pleasure, just like you get from Sting and Coldplay, beyond which, one is drawn to focus on the bizarre acoustics at play. That made sense in my head when I thought it.

The Sylvie & Babs Hi-Fi Companion is decent, and it's nice to hear Andrew's voice again - repeating the phrase it ain't necessarily so, in case anyone was wondering - but it isn't startling, and more than anything it makes me wish I'd found some other means of financing my purchase of those early Foetus discs. Time to get looking for another copy of Insect & Individual Silenced, I suppose.

*: Name changed so as to protect the annoying.

Psychopathics from Outer Space (2000)

I'm cycling on the Tobin Trail just past Los Patios when I pass a young boy and his father. The boy looks to be about eight or nine, wears a red baseball cap, shorts, and there's something weird going on with his t-shirt. The precise detail only register a split second before I pass him. He has a cardboard sign hung around his neck by a piece of string. The sign reads I'M A LIAR in block capitals. The man I presume to be his father walks about ten feet behind, a fat shithead walrus-moustache type. What the fuck? explodes from my mouth quite loudly, but I'm already past the Walrus and his publicly shamed kid. I really want to turn back and point out that we're not living in Saudi Arabia, and that maybe the Walrus could have resolved the situation by actually talking to the kid, because I'm damn sure I'M A LIAR isn't going to make it better, and - aside from anything else - I kind of resent being made party to this mediaeval public shaming of a small boy who, let's face it, probably didn't rob a bank, commit a murder, or anything of that magnitude.

But I don't turn back, which is possibly for the best because no doubt even if I managed to say the exact right thing to aid the Walrus in understanding the full extent of his own shitheaded stupidity, it probably wouldn't help the kid; and the guy is clearly a bully so probably wouldn't be above kicking my ass.

Also, it seems peculiarly significant that I'm listening to Insane Clown Posse as I cycle, and as I pass the Walrus and his kid.

Insane Clown Posse are, for anyone who didn't know, a generally shunned rap act - at least so far as the mainstream media is concerned. They're a couple of white guys in clown paint performing novelty toilet humour raps about horror movies operating on roughly the same level as an episode of South Park. They will almost certainly never get to work with Sting, or be asked to drop guest verses on albums by Common, Lauryn Hill, or J-Live. They're not even a proper rap group because they weren't hanging in the park with Kool Herc in 1977, and their freestyles are fucking terrible, and all of their fans are white trash crackers; and white trash crackers don't count. That's most of the traditional criticisms, should you be unaware of any of them.

Personally, my only problem is that it feels like they've been treading water since The Wraith, besides which most of the criticism can be negated by simply bothering to listen to the music. They're not the greatest rappers in the world, but they're often genuinely funny, wringing every last drop of potential from what ability they have, and frankly I've heard worse; and the beats - at least when supplied by Mike Clark - were fucking great, fat and funky, as good as anything ever cooked up in a New York basement. The hypothetical crime therefore seems to be their enduring appeal to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, so it's basically an issue of class - your traditional demonisation of anyone too poor, unsavoury, uneducated, or just plain stupid, the stratum below even those who at least look good in moody black and white photographs illustrating articles on either poverty or outsider art in culturally prestigious media.

This compilation assembles tracks from both Insane Clown Posse and their protégés, Twiztid - who occupy much the same territory albeit with a sharper, more lyrical edge. Specifically Psychopathics from Outer Space is a dubiously official bootleg assembling tracks burdened with uncleared samples and the like, but crucially this material derives mostly from a time at which both groups were at the height of their powers. What this means to you depends upon how much you enjoy axe murder gags mixed in with your fart jokes, which in turn spins upon the possibility that you may not be the target audience, and that this stuff simply may not be for you. You could probably argue that it's all terribly sexist and at least as homophobic as your average episode of South Park, but to do so would miss one important point, namely that delving below all the cartoon gore and the blow jobs, there's a surprisingly progressive morality to all this shit. The victims in these tales of comic horror are almost always bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, wife-beating drunkards, and other overprivileged types, and the underlying message of be ye not a fucking douche is delivered without a hint of sermonising, and most significantly it's delivered to massive swarms of dispossessed white trash, the people arguably most vulnerable to exploitation by forces with vested interests in their acting like bullies, shitheads, racists, rednecks, and wife-beating drunkards.

Anyway, on top of that, the disc rocks like nobody's business, and we even get Ice-T on one track. $50 Bucks alone might be worth the cover price - a peculiar combination of wistful country rock and fat-ass swagger that renders all those other shitty rap-rock crossover acts completely redundant; and then there's Twiztid's She Ain't Afraid which must easily rank amongst the most raucously pornographic tracks ever laid down, sort of like Smell & Quim without having to stick your fingers either in your ears or down your throat; and all with the sneer and frisson of a funky Sex Pistols. Of all the bands you need at your side when you've had a shitty day, there's something really cathartic about this bunch, which is probably aided by the music offering more than just straight nihilism.

So some of this was in my thoughts as I cycled past the Walrus, because the world needs less of his kind; and because - to paraphrase some conservative sociopath or other - either raise your kids the right way, or the music they listen to will end up raising them for you, although in the case of Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid, that may not be such a terrible thing after all.

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.

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.

Spice 1 - 187 He Wrote (1993)

That massive supposedly complete history of rap that will one day be written probably won't be dedicating too much page space to Spice 1, for like MC Eiht, Celly Cel and a few other west-coast notables, he did his thing, and he did it well, but he never really made a massive splash in terms of sales, cult status, or whatever artistic criteria we're judging rap by this week. The nineties will probably end up remembered as the decade of Dead Prez on the grounds of their being responsible black men who rapped about vegetarian food, learning to play chess in coffee shops, and lighting up a few incense sticks before you knob your bird on a Friday night after the pub - with a few nods to Malcolm X thrown in just to show that just because a man is in touch with his feelings, it doesn't mean he's, you know, soft. Whilst it seems unlikely that gangsta rap will be entirely forgotten, it'll probably be remembered as something invented by Eminem, because when a white guy describes that stuff, obviously it's art or at least some sort of statement in the vein of a Scorsese or Tarantino, something of merit as distinct from that stuff which is just kids bragging about guns upon which we'd rather not pour too much scorn in case anyone thinks we're racist.

Just so we're clear, the music of Spice 1 belongs in that category which has thus far eluded sanitisation, reassessment, and subsequent reclamation as something you might enjoy over a glass of wine and a few injections of legal marijuana. It tells the sort of stories you almost certainly won't want to hear, which is a good thing because there's not much point bothering with rap if you're only interested in the more soothing end of the spectrum; and the closest our boy comes to moral responsibility is advising us that if we're really going to pop a cap in someone's ass, then we should at least make it count and pop a cap in the ass of someone we can rob. Wise words indeed.

There is of course a school of thought which states that albums like 187 He Wrote glamorise gunplay because that's what sells, and it must therefore be regarded as inferior product, although said school of thought probably wouldn't state it directly to Spice 1's face. Personally I hold to the view that this interpretation is only that, an interpretation, and is, generally speaking, bullshit which should be obvious as such to anyone attempting to engage with the music on its own terms. Whilst I'm sure Spice 1 never had a problem with the idea that he might be able to sell a few records, it seems pretty obvious that he's talking to his people, as in those who've lived the sort of horrendous crap described here, and whether Sting or C. Delores Tucker understand isn't really relevant; and similarly, ignoring this sort of thing isn't going to change the fact that there are people out there who live in the world described herein. Then there's also the idea that songs about gang violence tend to glamorise gang violence, an idea possibly derived from the occasionally filmic quality of much gangsta rap and the apparent absence of a don't try this at home disclaimer, the song ending with our narrator sobbing, wishing he'd stayed in school and studied to become a dentist. So think on, kids...

Bah, I say. Just get over it and listen to the music. I spent many hours listening to Spice 1 whilst pounding the pavements of south-east London as a postman. Contrary to the popular image of the job being much like that seen in Postman Pat - just wandering around with a few letters, happily spending an hour chatting to Mrs. Goggins at the corner shop and so on - it was often a miserable and deeply fucking thankless task, usually struggling to get five or six hours of work done in about four and breaking your back in the often pissing rain whilst doing so; and whilst I never found myself having to dodge bullets, listening to Spice 1 really helped get me through some truly shitty days, just as I expect 187 He Wrote helped members of its intended audience get through some truly shitty days - and I mean the sort of days in which you try listening to Killing Joke but give up because it just doesn't seem angry enough. In fact it's surprising how tame a lot of supposedly grumpy music sounds when compared to that produced by those who, like our boy here, have experienced real world problems more severe than dad forbidding the wearing of nose rings at the dinner table.

The great thing about the music of Spice 1 is that it combines all the reckless nihilism of its gratuitous violence with a surprisingly uplifting quality. You might almost say it's the blues - Robert Johnson taken to an extreme I suppose, but still very much a soulful and populist take thanks to a massive injection of g-funk with a big fat organic bass end emulating the experience of having your arse kicked by a really happy guy, probably; and whilst the man himself may be deemed lyrically limited by certain dubious criteria, he more than makes up for it with the sheer inventive relish of his delivery, and of all the rappers to engage in that vocal scratching thing that everyone was doing back in '93, he's significantly one of the few to record material that still sounds fucking great two decades later. This is probably what distinguishes his vocal style from being a mere gimmick, in that such tics and tricks were never the only thing up his sleeve, and were more to do with a debt to the toasters of Jamaican dancehall than a passing affectation. This, for my money, is probably also one of the reasons why Spice 1 is perhaps the only rap guy I've heard turning out the occasional full-on reggie tune without sounding like an utter cock.

Neither before or since, I would argue, has music quite this terrifying ever felt so joyful. Mine may well be a minority view, but Spice 1 surely deserves at least one album amongst the acknowledged rap all-time greats, and this one is as good as any.