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.

Eddie & the Hot Rods - Teenage Depression (1977)

A memory of the sublime excellence of Do Anything You Wanna Do brought me here. The song doesn't appear on this album, but the cover imprinted itself on me a long time ago when my mum used to drop me off at Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon. I'd go to the back of the store and rifle through the punk section, studying the covers and wondering what the hell they sounded like - this, the UK Subs, the Rezillos and others. I sort of knew what punk was, and that there probably wouldn't be much point in my buying the record even had it been within the range of my pocket money. I doubt my parents would have banned it from the house, but they would have looked at me funny.

With just a cover to go on, I formed vague ideas about how punky and nihilistic the bands were, and this one scored highly, even before I realised it was the band who sang Do Anything You Wanna Do; this one and Ha Ha Ha by Ultravox, which was actually a bit of a let down when I finally heard it. Teenage Depression, however, far surpasses my admittedly nebulous expectations.

Of course, with hindsight, whether or not Edward and his Hot Rods were really a punk band depended on where you were stood at the time, and no longer seems to matter so much as it did when I was thirteen. They looked a bit like some bemulleted glam band without the glitter, additionally qualifying as pub rock on a technicality, and one of them ended up in the Damned, and now I think of it, there's not a whole lot of difference between this and the first Damned album; but then, the group didn't actually incorporate anyone called Eddie. Everything we ever thought we knew is wrong.

Teenage Depression chugs and rocks like a bastard, including five covers - The Kids Are Alright, 96 Tears and so on - belted out with such passion as to blend seamlessly with the rest; and then there's the truly magnificent On the Run which could almost be Hawkwind at their mind-bending, biking peak. The title track, a deceptively chirpy amphetamine rocker cheerily bemoans the misery of school, hating having to wear a tie, stuck in some shitty lesson gagging for your next line of nose candy. Try telling kids today what it was like and they won't believe you.

I expected a lot from this record on the strength of the cover, and amazingly it delivers. What a fucking great band this lot were!

Young Fathers - White Men are Black Men Too (2015)

As I may have mentioned on previous occasions, I'm old and fat and I don't understand modern music, modern music being more or less everything that's happened since about 1992 for the sake of argument. That was the year when it stopped making sense, roughly speaking - when the sort of things I disliked began to outnumber the good stuff, and the term independent took on a meaning other than that which exists outside of the mainstream - fey, jangly shite which wanted to be 1967 when it grew up, which - by the way - it had no intention of doing. I didn't stop listening, but my tastes had been forcibly marginalised by everyone deciding they had wanted to be glittery pop stars all along.

There has been the odd thing to catch my attention since then, but generally I've been pursuing my own avenues of inquiry; and in my absence, the means of production have changed, in turn affecting the basic function of music as a commodity, leading to post-music which has more in common with ringtones or memes than that stuff I once purchased as circles of black plastic back in the old days when everything was better than it is now. It's not that I have a problem with change so much as that change of style shouldn't be mistaken for change of basic function, so thinking I might get something from Lady Gaga comparable to that which I once got from a UK Subs album is like going to McDonalds and expecting them to fix your car. Even worse is when everyone gets all misty-eyed and tries to be my mate by digging out the old Joy Division or Wire records and having a go, hence all those heritage industry Editors types, musical analogies to Peter Kay asking who remembers Curly Wurly.

So it's really nice to be surprised every once in a while, which probably hasn't happened since I heard Austerity Dogs, although the Sleaford Mods, for all their brilliance, may as well be a couple of old codgers I met whilst working at Parcel Force. Young Fathers conversely derive from the generation which should be making music, and which should be scaring the life out of old farts such as myself. I had assumed the present state of the art to be seventeen-year olds channelling the Byrds at some shitty SXSW industry showcase, or trembling emo wank through two minutes of reverb decay on the Catfish soundtrack, but happily there is also this - whatever it is.

The music could quite easily be waveforms copied and pasted to and from different parts of the screen; and a live video shows four blokes on stage, one with an upright drum kit, one with a tiny keyboard gaffa-taped to some sort of fashionably archaic suitcase synth, and that's the instrumentation; so I don't really know quite who does what or how it results in what can be heard on White Men are Black Men Too, but maybe it doesn't matter because the whole is so much more than the sum of its parts.

This was an attempt to make a perfect pop album - so it says on the internet - so I've no idea what they were doing before or how it compares, but perfect pop is justified regardless of initial impressions of something bolted together in a carpenter's workshop. It's musical, but there's a lot of drone, and a lot which sounds like it might not have originated with a musical source, and the whole sounds dirty like those old Motown records from the sixties. Stand it next to Peter Hope's Exploding Mind and you probably have a completely new genre, industrial gospel or something - invoked mainly in the hope that anyone reading this will be far too embarrassed to ever use such a term.

Yes gospel, leaning on the bluesier end of the scale with a distinctly African feel - two of the group having roots in Nigeria and Ghana to some degree or other - gospel in its celebratory rather than specifically God-bothering aspect. They're probably not the greatest vocalists in the world, but they're not bad and they have real heart, far more so than the overproduced histrionic vocalising that has been passed off as soul music for these last couple of decades; and yet somehow the record does all of this whilst sounding like Suicide in places, maybe even Joy Division at a stretch - according to some YouTube bloke, although I'm not too sure about that one myself. It's dark and introspective yet uplifting at the same time, just the sort of thing you need after a day of life punching you in the face. This one is astonishing - the best new album I've heard in a long, long time.

UK Subs - Another Kind of Blues (1979)

It seems peculiar to consider that more time has gone by since this came out than had passed for all those ageing teds to whom Charlie Harper sang this ain't the fifties any more. The UK Subs emerged at roughly the same time as a bunch of other supposedly second or maybe third wave punk bands who made even Sham 69 seem like old school veterans, or at least that's how I remember it. For the past million years I've tended to associate them with the Angelic Upstarts, Cockney Rejects, and all those other later footbally types - a few decent songs here and there, but somehow lacking colour, and lacking colour even in comparison to Sham 69.

Stranglehold was one of those yappy singles with some guy barking about something punky over fuzzy guitars; She's Not There was just another cranked up version of some sixties record I hadn't even heard, the sort of thing clogging up a million punk covers compilations with expensively mohicaned models sneering unconvincingly on the cover; but still I would go into Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon every weekend and look at all those albums I couldn't afford to buy, amongst which was Another Kind of Blues. The singles I'd heard hadn't been that impressive, but I was still pretty sure it would be worth a listen, and I thought the cover was great, and it was on blue vinyl; but the bottom line was that pocket money and the weekly fiver from my paper round wasn't going to stretch to taking such chances.

Decades pass and I don't spend too much time thinking about the UK Subs beyond the occasional discovery of some curious detail like how they were buddies with Crass in the early days, which seemed to reflect well on both bands, as did Henry Rollins turning out to be a big fan. Then my friend Eddy's band supported them at the Amersham Arms in New Cross, and Eddy - who can usually be relied on to slag off almost anything that isn't on top of its game - described them as a genuinely great live band, adding that Charlie Harper is one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet. Then some comedy metal combo did a cover of Down on the Farm and so made Charlie a millionaire for life off royalties, which seems like karma doing its job for once.

Finally catching up, the UK Subs who recorded this album didn't really sound much like I expected them too, and definitely had many of the qualities I liked about other records I bought at the time. There's some of that slightly yappy texture of Stranglehold, but mostly it's cranked up rhythm and blues, very tuneful, very punchy, and very, very addictive. The lyrics might not be Shakespeare, but then if you want Shakespeare, looking for him on a UK Subs album is probably not a great start, and they do their job as well as you could wish for. Crash Course and TV Blues both stood out for me as tracks that have been conspicuously missing from my life for the last thirty or so years, but to be honest, there's not a single clunker here.

There's been a lot of utter bollocks spouted about punk in recent years, mainly by those who assume that as a phenomena it was only really happening if you were one of about twelve people seen frequently at the right end of the King's Road during August, 1974. Conversely, Another Kind of Blues, regardless of being a supposed latecomer to the party, is more like something you could call the real thing on the grounds that this album sounds exactly like it felt being fourteen in 1979.

A fucking cracker!