The Goodies - The World of the Goodies (1973)

For the benefit of younger readers or anyone who genuinely believes there's really such a thing as a YouTube celebrity, Decca's World Of albums were pretty much everywhere in the early seventies - budget-priced compilations or reissues, usually the oeuvre of easy listening types but with a few oddities making up the numbers. My copy of Bowie's debut album is the Decca reissue as The World of David Bowie, for example, and it still seems a shame that we never had The World of Adam and the Ants collecting those early demos about rubber trousers and having a lady step upon one's bollocks, doubtless illustrated with an anachronistic stock photo of himself performing on The Basil Brush Show.

The World of the Goodies was possibly the eighth album I ever owned - following four by the Beatles, two film soundtracks, and Doctor Who and the Pescatons - costing me a Dinky Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle or similar from my friend Sean. I spent a lot of afternoons around Sean's house over the summer holidays, during which time we played this one into a flexidisc, alongside the Remember You're A Womble album and Spike Milligan's Record Load of Rubbish. It was also Sean who introduced me to the Sex Pistols a couple of years later, inadvertently inspiring the cull which led me to get rid of this one because it wasn't punky enough, and it was a comedy record, which definitely wasn't punk, or summink; but thanks to us now living in the future and the existence of the internet, I am able to correct my mistake.

The Goodies was of course the wacky television situation comedy which rewrote the King of Monsters as a giant kitten and introduced the idea of a biological weapon which turns its victims into circus clowns. It was Monty Python for kids - although for my money it seems to have aged a little better - and so this, a reissue of The Goodies Sing Songs from the Goodies, was their debut album, or - seeing as there's no point denying it - their debut novelty record.

The more one attempts to define what constitutes a novelty record, the more a consistent definition proves elusive. The crudest division, and the one I probably subscribed to when my first copy of The World of the Goodies found itself airbrushed from history, demands that novelty records lack authenticity of some sort, that they aren't real in quite the same way as the first Clash album is supposedly real. However, as I seem to recall Stewart Home writing in Cranked Up Really High, punk was mostly novelty records, or at least the good stuff was; which leaves me with a newer definition, namely that novelty records simply divide listeners into those who enjoy music, and those who principally enjoy being perceived as connoisseurs of the right sort of music - which is usually the stuff you find making up the lists in Mojo magazine. Although of course comedy records and novelty records aren't always the same thing, and we're definitely on significantly thinner ice with the comedy album, possibly because comedy is such a subjective experience. For myself, anything which introduces itself as either crazy or hilarious will always need to work at least three times as hard to get a laugh, and if you have to tell people that what you're doing is funny, then it probably isn't.

The Residents, for example, recorded an album of electronic interpretations of traditional Inuit music - a work which seems fairly typical in the context of their back catalogue. On the other hand, Weird Al Yankovic's career seems to have been mostly cover versions of established hits embellished with comedy lyrics - sort of like Mitch Benn, Richard Stilgoe, and all those other unfunny fuckers. There's a massive difference, and it is signified by the fact that the Residents chose that name rather than - titter snurf - The Weird Residents. Do you see?

There's some funny shit on The World of the Goodies - mostly comprised of songs written as incidental music for the television show - but it succeeds because Bill Oddie was almost certainly a frustrated rock star, so, like much of the Bonzos back catalogue, these are songs with a sense of humour - or wit as we sometimes call it in the trade - rather than just comedy with tunes. Not that there's anything wrong in comedy with tunes, and the faux-country misery of Mummy I Don't Like My Meat does its job well:

Tomorrow we'll curry the poodle,
He should last us a couple of days...

However, were it nothing but gags, it might become repetitive quite quickly, so thankfully it isn't. Oddie has a great bluesy voice which lends itself fairly well to everything from heartfelt gospel to growling biker anthems; and Taking You Back is in particular a magnificent beast, pounding rock bordering on acid-fuelled Hendrixisms which more or less justifies whatever price you might have to pay for a copy of this thing. Elsewhere we swerve in and out of some fairly convincing progressive pseudo-p-funk work-outs, folksy interludes, and the sort of whimsy you might associate with the Kinks and the like - notably Winter Sportsman; and most crucially of all, it sounds like a proper record rather than just three blokes smirking at you and pulling faces for forty minutes.

Most surprising for me has been how much of this thing I had forgotten, possibly because at the age of ten it was mainly the jokes which caught my attention. I suppose this means that this one has been a grower in the fullest sense of the term - aside from the fact of it being missing from my collection for at least three decades - and I'm astonished by how fresh and exciting it still sounds compared to so much of the chugging session player muso crap which emerged from the same decade, and which seems generally better remembered because most of us enjoy being seen as connoisseurs of the right sort of music, more than we enjoy the music itself.

Glen Glenn - Rockabilly Legend (1987)

It took me some time to get my head around rock 'n' roll, as in the specifically American rockabilly variety developed during the fifties and frequently involving quiffs and plaid shirts. My friend Sean's sister liked Elvis, and so we taunted her by referring to him as Elvis Smellvis, which is funny when you're ten. The rest of my limited understanding derived from Top of the Pops occasionally featuring horrible holiday camp cabaret acts such as Showaddywaddy, Matchbox, and Shakin' Stevens - although the latter should probably get some time off his sentence for an admittedly respectable cover of Ricky Nelson's It's Late, among others. I don't know - maybe it was never so bad as it seemed at the time, but English rock 'n' roll made no sense to me, it being something I would mostly associate with people in Burnley pretending to be cowboys. Rockabilly done right should be hot, sunny, and kicking up clouds of dust. It doesn't work in the cold and the pissing rain.

Additionally, when at the age of twelve-ish I graduated from Wombles albums to punk rock - a more entertaining kind of novelty record - it was hard to keep from being swept up in the suspicion that our natural enemies were teddy boys like Rockabilly Ray at school, who was a fucking idiot whichever way you looked at it.

Then in 1984 I moved to Maidstone, Kent, the next town along from Medway with it's thriving garage scene - if we really have to call it that - loosely in orbit of Billy Childish and his band, the Milkshakes. The Milkshakes seemed like something different in so much as they weren't pretending to be American. Amazingly, they weren't even pretending that it was still 1957. They weren't quite playing the kind of thing I was listening to that year, and yet I couldn't help but appreciate their raw energy and no bullshit aesthetic; and this was around the time that my friend Carl attempted to convert me to the Cramps. I liked the Cramps, but even better were Carl's Born Bad compilation albums collecting all the original music the Cramps had covered, stolen, or otherwise mutated. I listened to Born Bad and suddenly I understood; and one aspect I appreciated about a lot of this music was that, when you got down to it, it actually wasn't trying to be Herman Munster, and the trash epithet didn't really fit and was even kind of insulting, because this was some real heartfelt, quality workmanship.

Glen Glenn's Everybody's Movin' wasn't the greatest cut on Born Bad, but it had enough going on to inspire me to snap up this retrospective compilation when I spotted it in the local branch of Our Price. So far as I can tell, Rockabilly Legend comprises mainly demo recordings, broadcast performances recorded directly from the television set by Glenn's dad with a reel-to-reel tape recorder next to the speaker, and a couple of singles which made it big, but probably not quite so big as they deserved thanks to a spell in the military somewhat curtailing our man ever quite building up a full head of showbiz steam in publicity terms. I've had this album nearly thirty years which is roughly how old some of the songs were when I first bought it, which is a truly weird thought. Obviously I generally tend to review material I've had hanging about for a while in this series of reviews - as opposed to ringtones fresh off the MP3 presses - but why this one and why now is nevertheless a reasonable question.

I knew I would experience a certain quota of country music when I first moved to Texas, although it hasn't turned out to be quite so ubiquitous as you might expect, which is nice because I dislike the contemporary stadium version of country with its radio mics, autotune, and songs making incongruous references to facebook. On hearing that I would be moving here, my cousin said he would have to do me a mixtape of alt-country - whatever the hell that is. I declined the offer because the term suggests bearded individuals who own Sonic Youth records hanging around a raw juice bar discussing Hank Williams, and I think I'd probably rather listen to the real thing, if anything. Nevertheless, country has at last crept up on me - or rockabilly, or whatever you would prefer to call it - when it suddenly dawned on me how much sense this music makes now that I'm living here, as though it's part of the landscape, which I suppose it is. As William Shaw observes in Westsiders:

All music is about geography, in a way. It's either about the place in which it's made, or the place where the maker wants to be.

I still find the notion of cowboys in Burnley mystifying, but over here with the sun, the dust, the possums, and the cacti, I can at last appreciate rockabilly and country as folk music with a profound sense of its place and people, as opposed to an exotic novelty. It somehow explains what I experience as I step outside my front door each day. It feels right, and the discovery of my wife being distantly related to Johnny Cash no longer strikes me as weird.

Anyway, before I disappear completely up my own fundament, let's talk about the actual music. Above all, Glen Glenn favoured a deceptively simple sound which is actually pretty hard to get right in my experience - a raw, acoustic rhythm with wild rock 'n' roll flourishes, yet smooth and even kind of cheery. For all the crap that's been written about rock over the years, and the kind of rock from which almost all else is ultimately derived, it's easily forgotten that this is a well-intentioned music, something which really wants you to have a good time and is supposed to make you happy even with those bluesy origins. Glen Glenn somehow manages to sound both wholesome and worldly, and now that my ears are located in Texas, I realise some of these tracks could have been recorded yesterday, neither six decades nor rudimentary recording techniques diminishing any of Glenn's natural sparkle. I guess it's the mark of a true artist that he can work with a popular form, something resembling a lot of other things which have been around for a while, and yet make it sound new, something fresh and exciting each time the needle hits the record. Glen Glenn packed some serious quality into a career without that much longevity in commercial terms, or by the standards of artists with more extensive back catalogues; and One Cup of Coffee and a Cigarette is easily one of the greatest songs of the fifties for my money, as good or perhaps better than anything you care to name by persons who are better remembered. As titles go, Rockabilly Legend may sound like an overstatement, but it really isn't.

More about the man and his music here.

The Professionals - I Didn't See It Coming (1981)

As a kid, the Sex Pistols were roughly the first group I discovered that weren't the Beatles, Abba, or the Wombles. I recall my dad talking about some pop stars who stuck safety pins through their noses, and I remember one sunny day when he came in from the afternoon's milking chuckling about a song he'd heard on the radio called We're So Pretty Vacant.

Arf arf, my mum conceded and we all laughed.

Then my friend Sean showed me his Sex Pistols record, the one with the cartoon of Sid Vicious on the cover and Friggin' in the Riggin' on the other side. I was thirteen and that was more rude words than I'd ever heard in my life, plus I was intrigued because I couldn't quite work out if the band were real or not - which is probably thanks more to Sean and myself giving his Wombles album such a hammering than the cartoon on the cover. In any case, all I knew for sure was that I had encountered magic of some description. Clearly the music industry held the same view, milking the Sex Pistols cow for every last drop, every last variation or loose association; and I was fascinated by the Adrians Records mail order catalogue with its own special Sex Pistols section featuring rare discs by people who had once made some sandwiches for the band, or who simply had a picture of Sid Vicious on the cover of their single - not such a worthless exercise as you might think given that 99% is Shit by the Cash Pussies turned out to be pretty damn great, and just the sort of thing that the idiotic McClaren probably thought he was doing.

The Professionals were of course what Steve and Paul did next, so naturally I awaited the fruits of their labours with punky anticipation; although it's sobering to listen to this stuff now and realise that it's probably how the two of them hoped the Sex Pistols would sound, had McClaren not tried to turn them into the New York Dolls - basic power pop roughly in the tradition of the Kinks, Small Faces and so on. This shouldn't be taken as an indictment, reducing the pair to Lydon's backing band as some might have it. Steve Jones' guitar sound remains pretty much unique even thirty years later - a great big burping Cockney steamroller of noise somehow aspiring to the sort of music that works best in fast cars. It actually sounds nourishing, good for the soul in some way.

I Didn't See It Coming is a weird album, and one that admittedly should have been better: great, punchy, anthemic songs produced as though someone was hoping for a spot on one of those John Hughes film soundtracks, the sort of thing with a scene in which Michael J. Fox rolls up the sleeves of his suit jacket and leads American teenagers in eighties dancing upon the hoods of cars stalled in a gridlock, cars driven by squares who don't understand young people. Steve Jones was ever a bit of a singing bricklayer when it came to vocals, but the production here makes a futile effort to smooth out his rough edges leaving the poor sod sounding like a backing singer on his own record. This CD reissue also includes the earlier Professionals singles - on which he sounds much better - and which are pretty hard to fault. He was never the greatest vocalist, but on the other hand, there's not many that could get away with:

We all know how it ends,

For the rock 'n' roll Hollywood God,

Found by one of your friends,

With your head flushed down the bog.

So, it's smoother than it probably should have been, but even given all of the above, I Didn't See It Coming is still a thumping good collection; another one to add to the list of things that need remixing by Steve Albini.