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 Who - Tommy (1969)

I realise I've done this the wrong way around, being entirely familiar with Ken Russell's 1975 movie while only just having heard the original due to the Who never having been fully on my radar; not that I ever had anything against them. I own a few singles, and still think of them as a mostly great singles band at least up until the second half of the seventies, but the albums always looked a bit messy with those faintly gimmicky titles. Listening to this, I find I miss Olly Reed's slightly flat, slightly forced singing at least as much as that of Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, and even Jack Nicholson, so thankfully the quality of the material soon overpowers such reservations. I had assumed it would sound like a mere demo version of the Tommy with which I'm significantly more familiar, but it's really its own thing.

Tommy, as you will know unless you're very young or an idiot, is the tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind child who somehow excels at pinball, regains his senses as a fairly heavy handed metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, and ultimately acquires a cult following; and the story is told through song, hence the term rock opera. I'm sure I've seen Tommy credited as one of those many albums which was apparently the first concept album, but really, who gives a shit? Fuck off with your silly time signatures and your fake goblin ears.

I'm not actually sure how well the tale is conveyed as just music, given how well versed I am with the movie - which follows more or less the whole thing beat for beat - but it seems to communicate an emotional truth regardless, even if you're wondering why Tommy's mum - and indeed everyone else - sounds like Roger Daltrey. Against my expectation, it has quite a basic, jazzy production with very little reliance on effects, and the instrumentation is all kept beautifully clear and expressive, so much so that one would hardly think this bunch once had the reputation of being the loudest band in the world. Additionally, I've never been entirely convinced by Roger Daltrey's voice - there's nothing wrong with it, and that's what's wrong with it as someone or other said; and yet he's great here - the blustering rock bellow presumably being still to come.

Tommy includes some of Townsend's greatest, most powerful songs, in my opinion, here in a more vulnerable, raw emotional form than the version with the visuals and explosions; and although I still can't tell which version works the best, or even if there's a comparison to be made, the narrative seems arguably richer, more mutable, more open to variant interpretations in sound only. It's about enlightenment, but it's about abuse of power, and even about yesterday's underground becoming tomorrow's establishment - revolution and even enlightenment colonised and transformed into the new orthodoxy. The Who returned to that theme more than once, and it seems particularly fitting for the tail end of the sixties - and for right now, come to think of it.

Ghost - Opus Eponymous (2010)

You've probably seen the pictures - a sort of demonic skeletal pope fronting a band of five identically anonymous guys in devil masks known only as the Nameless Ghouls. You may have wondered what they sounded like, or not as the case may be. I didn't because I assumed it would almost certainly be some guy throwing up into a food mixer as a thousand overdriven guitars thrashed out grunting riffs at five-hundred miles an hour; but a regular reader suggested I might like to give this a listen, and so I did, partially due to feeling a little guilty about all the fun I've had taking the piss out of Al Jourgensen whilst knowing said regular reader to be quite the fan; and partially out of a slightly craven sense of gratitude for the fact of my now apparently having a regular reader.

Amazingly, aside from a general enthusiasm for Satan, Ghost sound nothing like I expected, and I mean not one single box ticked - not even the same ballpark. Death metal seems a little bit of a stretch, as does black metal when you consider the names ordinarily associated with the genre; really it's more like the sort of thing which would be arbitrarily labelled heavy metal back when Black Sabbath were still something new. Ghost seem to recognise the musical arms race which has resulted in bands like Marduk and other church-burning types as a bit of a mug's game. It seems to have begun with the pursuit of pointless widdley-widdley guitar solo virtuosity - the sort of thing which only a complete fucking bore could ever appreciate - then going from one extreme to another until you end up with what may as well be someone grunting whilst stood next to a cement mixer. Ghost have wound it all back to a time predating even the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, resulting in hard rock with a few proggy touches invoking the Glitter Band at least as much as Strapping Young Lad. The customary grunting and growling is eschewed in favour of a beautiful, clear voice, not quite so operatic as to be annoying but more in that direction than you might expect from a guy dressed as a demonic pope. Musically, it almost touches on Queen or even the Who from around the time of Tommy; and it really is pop - all the darkly chugging riffs and the vocal harmonies and the pseudo-psychedelic swirl of a church organ. Once you start listening to this thing, it's difficult to stop.

Of course, the raw pop appeal contrasts dramatically with both the subject matter and a bizarre image amounting to a metal equivalent of the Residents. Thematically, it's Satan all the way - Antichrists, Elizabeth Bathory, omens, witches, the black goat with a thousand young, and all that other good stuff which once kept Hammer Films in business. I'm mainly accustomed to Satanism as a sort of intellectual game played by slightly inadequate misanthropes who took Ayn Rand too seriously, so I've never given much thought to the possibility of it being an actual religion as an inversion of Christianity - as opposed to just kids flashing their arses from the rear window of the coach during a school trip. If it is an actual religion in some sense, then I suppose Ghost might be its representatives. They sound serious, but then they would do, I suppose. It could be the genuine thing or it could be Spinal Tap, and for me that's their great strength, thematically speaking - there's just no knowing beyond that we're clearly expected to have a blast listening to it, which we do.

Bikini Kill - Reject All American (1996)

That whole riot grrrl thing more or less passed me by. Most of that which received coverage in the music papers seemed to be written by the fantastically irritating Everett True and I therefore ignored it on principle. I bought Huggy Bear's Taking the Rough with the Smooch 10" plus that split album they did with Bikini Kill and can't recall the first fucking thing about either of them aside from a vague memory of screeching aplenty and it all sounding a bit like a Billy Childish side project without the tunes or much of a reason to exist. I saw Huggy Bear live a few times, and don't remember much about either them or the Voodoo Queens - who I think were supporting - apart from what a wake-up call the brilliantly insightful Supermodel Superficial turned out to be. I had always imagined, for example, that in person Naomi Campbell was probably sort of like a cross between Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky but with tits, so the Voodoo Queens certainly set me straight about that one, let me tell you.

Huggy Bear also recorded at Redchurch Studio, as frequented by the band I was in at the time. Fred the engineer hadn't been particularly impressed by them. 'It seemed to be just this young boy apologising for being male whilst some of the girls stood around taking the piss out of him,' he sighed, shaking his head and lamenting the death of the guitar solo. 'You know what I mean, man?'

I picked up some riot grrrl zine from Rough Trade. I can't even remember the name of the thing, but no-one I'd heard of was involved and it seemed to be self-absorbed incoherent shit from cover to cover - the print equivalent of some teenager stood on a chair shouting I'm expressing myself and you can't stop me for a couple of hours. It was so bad it actually made me slightly nostalgic for Smiling Faeces and its like. Smiling Faeces covered bands with names wherein the letter A was customarily circled so as to double up as a symbol of studded leather and home-brew based anarchy, and the editor asked probing questions like when did you form?, how many people are in the band?, and what do you think of the government?; but at least he was fucking trying.

Anyway, more recently I saw a fairly engaging documentary about Kathleen Hanna and was inspired to wonder if maybe I'd been missing something. The split album with Huggy Bear still didn't sound like anything too amazing, but I picked this one up cheap before the curiosity wore off, and okay - I do see the point, at last; I mean I've always seen the point of working outside the music industry, messing up the stereotypes and so on, but it's also nice when the music has a bit of a fucking tune to it. Unlike the seemingly cacophonous Huggies, this rocks and rants and screeches with just enough garage-based passion to remind me how much I love X-Ray Spex, and if someone had played me this disc without telling me who it was, instead claiming it to be some forgotten Sex Pistols support band, I'd probably believe them. Some of it even reminds me of the Who when they were good! The politics and the feminism were of obvious importance to Bikini Kill, but you can really tell they actually wanted you to have a good time listening to their music and at their shows; which I suppose is where the English version failed so hard, let's have a good time not really being something we ever did with much conviction. More importantly, Bikini Kill understood that the medium and message were not necessarily mutually exclusive, and that one shouldn't negate the other - Geri's girl power being something which probably could have been communicated by means other than tits bulging from a Union Jack push-up bra, for one example. The songs are short, sharp and catchy without quite ranting or succumbing to sloganeering, and yet there's no ambiguity about what we're dealing with, no sensitive testicular feelings spared for the sake of a sale or a play on MTV or whatever was around at the time.

I never liked the term riot grrrl on the grounds that no actual riots resulted, so far as I'm aware, and grrr is just letters that idiots write on facebook when they wish to communicate anger but have no intention of actually doing anything about whatever has pissed them off; so I'm just going to call this punk rock, because that's what it is, and because it's a shame that very little punk rock is ever quite this good. Time to have another go with that split album, I guess.

The Damned - The Black Album (1980)

There's an argument for The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette being one of the greatest punk albums of all time, but I'd probably go further and nominate it as being potentially the greatest record ever made, which of course means it would have been something of a tough act to follow; and they almost managed it.

I bought The Black Album in the week it came out, but for reasons I no longer recall, got rid of it at some point - probably one of those ludicrous purges teenagers such as myself would impose upon their record collections from time to time. I remember liking the album too, but presumably must have concluded that it just didn't fit in; and by the time I'd begun to regret the decision it had been reissued as a single album which offended my collector sensibilities for reasons that no longer stand up to scrutiny. Anyway, buying it again as a double CD with a ton of extra tracks, I sort of see what the problem may have been, namely that both The Black Album and the band who recorded it really didn't fit anywhere; and this is probably why, of that generation, people are still banging on about the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and even Eater if you can be bothered to hunt around a bit, but where The Damned are concerned, not so much.

The Black Album was a bit of an oddity in 1980. First generation English punk groups were branching out left, right and centre, distancing themselves from that which they had inspired and which had increasingly taken to belching out yappy dirges about Thatcher in a studded leather jacket with the word BALLS painted on the back in Tippex. The Damned in particular took the opportunity to further pursue their increasing musicality into territories formerly populated by the quirkily English and whimsical, experimental prog rock types, and psychedelic garage bands of the 1960s. The Black Album actually sounds like a hell of a lot of different things, such is its variety, stretching even to the beautifully breezy-and-yet-sinister Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which Frank Sinatra probably could have covered without stretching a point too far. The problem with this, depending on how much you care about such things, is that for a short time it seemed to have left The Damned in an awkward place - the punk band who turned out to be Pink Floyd after all, but somehow weren't sufficiently po-faced to pull it off as they might have done had they all met at art school. I suspect this may be part of the reason why The Black Album doesn't quite seem to be remembered so well as it possibly should be, and maybe why I ended up flogging my original double vinyl - I couldn't decide where it appeared on the Joy Division to Splodgenessabounds spectrum, because clearly I was a fucking idiot.

Casting expectations aside, The Black Album gives very good account of itself once allowed to work on its own terms. Musically it is the fruit of major talents in regard to both composition and delivery, and Dave Vanian surely has to be one of the most underrated vocalists of his generation. The song writing is intelligent and yet still raucously funny, somehow managing to keep a hold on the energy which made Machine Gun Etiquette so exciting whilst doodling all sorts of baroque scrollery around the edges, resulting in the equivalent of Smash It Up played on a harpsichord, or summink.

I'm gonna be a lazy slob,

Stuff the folks and sod the job.

And tell the foreman that I'm ill,

And in a week I'll be here still.

Yes I will.

Take a look outside,

Those lively arts are on the slide,

And culture's just a bore,

When you're angry ,young and poor,

But if I got my way,

Those idle rich would pay,

When the discussion starts,

On the lively arts.

Oddly, as a whole the succession of the first eleven tracks almost seems to hint at a narrative at least of the kind The Who have turned into feature films, although this may be an illusion fostered by a passing resemblance to the same at a few intervals, or at least The Who with a superior vocalist and better songs; or maybe I mean Roxy Music, a sort of Addams Family revision of their first few albums, something in that general area...

That said, although the seventeen minute long Curtain Call is nice enough as The Damned doing Gong or one of those Krautrock bands, I can see why it was left off the initial reissue; and the same is true of the six live tracks which, on record, only really make you want to listen to the studio versions. This double also includes a stack of singles and b-sides which are nice enough, but really all you need are the eleven songs from Wait For the Blackout through to Therapy, the part which counts and which came so close to serving as a respectable follow-up to Machine Gun Etiquette without entirely repeating the formula.