Sigue Sigue Sputnik - The F1rst Generation / 2econd Edition (1997)

Number are also letters! Yay!

I seem to recall that I first encountered Sigue Sigue Sputnik as we were all sat around the telly watching The Tube or one of those shows. We all watched in bemused silence, and then Martyn Smith sneered, 'did I hear someone say Toxteth?' Toxteth was a song by Churchill's Shoe, a band featuring my friend Carl on vocals. The joke was that Carl had a ton of dyed hair and Sigue Sigue Sputnik were therefore just the sort of hopeless crap that he would listen to.

What a loser.

Ha ha!

A month or so later we were at some party and Love Missile F1-11 was playing. It took me a moment to recognise it. I didn't wish to appear too knowledgeable just in case anyone took the piss out of me for liking that which was quite obviously hairdresser's music. 'Is this what I think it is?'

'It's Sigue Sigue Sputnik,' said Steve McGarrigle.

'Oh,' I said. 'They were on the telly.'

'I didn't see that but I bought the single,' he laughed without a trace of shame.

Peculiarly, my friend Carl ended up designing a few of Sigue Sigue Sputnik's record sleeves, including this one. Martyn Smith on the other hand became known, I suppose, as the guy who drew Bastard Bunny, a violent dope-smoking skinhead rabbit - if you can imagine that - and the guy who drew the version of Bastard Bunny which achieved the not inconsiderable feat of having significantly less charm that it's earlier more badly drawn incarnation. He'd never liked Carl, and was probably still stinging from some observation on the general uselessness of Camden-based lifeforms sat on their arses all day smoking dope and listening to Pink Floyd, or whatever shite NME was pushing as the new thing that week.

Anyway, needless to say I bought the singles and the albums as they appeared, and I said oooh and so on when Carl told me about Tony James dropping in to pass comment on some record cover or other. Tony James is a very nice man, apparently.

Many years later I find The F1rst Generation as I trawl the racks of CD & DVD Exchange in San Antonio, Texas. 'Look,' I say to my wife, 'here's another one for which Carl did the cover,' because I am myself still slightly astonished by the fact, and that the thing should have turned up here, and how small the world now seems. I buy it of course, because it's Carl's cover and I have a vague memory of hearing a promotional cassette of early Sigue Sigue Sputnik demos which sounded like some band playing in a village hall, with real drums and everything.

Well, whatever those tracks were, they aren't here, these being proper studio demos. The problem is, I suppose, similar to that of certain electronic bands doing live albums lacking the rough edges, noodling and screw-ups which tend to make live albums interesting. This material is so similar to that which ended up on Flaunt It! as to make very little difference.

Bum ching bum ching - video camera spacecraft heroin ladyboy - bum ching - Duane Eddy riff, and then Tony James twiddling the knob on his digital delay for five minutes...

Sigue Sigue Sputnik were never really about songs as such, so Martin Degville's contribution is more or less singing lists of things which sounded futuristic in 1987 or whenever it was, which tends to preclude anything devastatingly unusual emerging from this lot. Of course, they were basically Suicide garnished with a bit of T-Rex, more about general impression than anything musical in the traditional and potentially self-important sense, which was also what made them exciting during those first fifteen minutes. They were named after a Moscow street gang because the original Sex Pistols had been a New York gang, but despite the undisputed genius of the man who brought us the excellent Dancing With Myself, quickly devolved into a band seemingly gathered on the premise of Sid Vicious having been the most pivotal Sex Pistol. I'm not even sure why this should be, although I suppose the self-conscious futurism was doomed to get old pretty quick as such things always tend to. I suppose it could have been the presence of Martin Degville, seemingly the living embodiment of whatever point Martyn Smith had been trying to make, a man whose charisma and raw talent might best be summarised by the fact that I was once able to reduce Carl to speechless hysterics by using the words Martin Degville solo album in a sentence, and his laughter set me off, and we ended up rolling around on the floor breathless with hilarity for the next thirty minutes.

Martin Degville solo album - just think about it.

From what I can tell, my friend Daphne seems to view Sigue Sigue Sputnik as a parody of capitalism, satirical through being pushed to an extreme. I can see what she means, but I've a feeling her interpretation credits the band with more conscious purpose than is probably their due; and this really was supposed to be just a big, loud, crass, uptempo noise in an era without a whole lot of anything to inspire good cheer, and it dated so fast because it wasn't designed to do anything else. Surprisingly, for all its flaws, the enthusiasm remains fresh and so this is actually a very listenable collection in spite of itself; and it's bloody stupid of course, but bloody stupid in a good way. I just wish they could have found someone a bit less knob-esque to handle the vocals.

Gary Numan - Berserker (1984)

Whilst I was mightily partial to a bit of Numan at school, Gary and I parted ways round about the time his album covers began to resemble budget versions of action films which hadn't even had the sense to rip off anything that had been worth ripping off in the first place. This wasn't so much a direct reflection on his music as that I was on a budget and suddenly aware of there being plenty of other stuff out there which I liked better. Occasionally I would pause in my local branch of Our Price to briefly examine the cover of Strange Charm or The Fury with an indulgent smirk, amused by the fact of his still churning it out regardless, then head for the counter to complete purchase of my sophisticated Heaven 17 album.

Years later, having completed my fine art degree and realising that I was pretty much fucked, I moved to a bedsit in Chatham and resigned myself to beans on toast having become an exotic luxury, a rare treat enjoyed when I could afford to buy a loaf of bread. I no longer had the money to buy my records new as they came out, and took to trawling the racks of Plastic Surgery, a second-hand place in Maidstone which, if nothing else, at least bought me up to date with Kate Bush and Gary Numan for relatively little outlay - thus inadvertently priming me for the appreciation of Vostok Lake some years later. I was intrigued that Gary Numan had continued to release stuff despite my failing to buy it, and so I took the White Noise live double album for mere pennies on the grounds of it including older material I already knew I liked, in the event of the newer songs turning out to be as pants as I was fairly sure they would be; and against all expectation I played that live double into two large flexidiscs, then bought Berserker, the associated studio album from which many of the newer tracks were derived. Life was pretty miserable at the time, and Gary seemed to understand.

Ha ha, you may well observe, customarily smirking at the slightest mention of our beloved comical Bowie impersonator, or else having decided that it's now okay to admit you like Numan in the same way you might admit to liking Leo Sayer or the Rubettes.

Ha ha.

I never had any problem with openly admitting to the pleasure I took from Numan's records. Sure, he may have been a light aircraft piloting knobesque Conservative voter who married his own stalker at certain points in his life, but there are many other artists whose political views fail to align in precise accord with my own, and we're not exactly talking No Remorse here. Additionally, Gary was hardly the only person to draw inspiration from David Bowie, and nor was his inspiration drawn exclusively from that particular sausage-seeking well. The crime seems to have been that his version of Bowie was always more technical college than art school, music for the chess club guys with their boxes of cheese and onion sandwiches and terminal virginity - the kids who would never be cool enough to dance upon the hood of a gridlocked vehicle like Michael J. Fox teaching those grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. Of course, this says more about those who deem that which must be regarded as saaaaaaad this week than the actual music, the artist, or his fans.

Gary's crimes, aside from those mentioned above, seem to be based around having a big fat face which never lent itself to robot impersonations so well as those of his peers, and having a bit of a nasal voice, and failing to conceal his influences, and the one song on every album describing how much the music press hates him and how little he cares. The last point probably holds some water because sour grapes are never a good look, although the rest can be put down to either personal taste or being so much irrelevant bollocks. Whilst it could be argued that having been a sort of conflation of David Bowie and John Foxx, he briefly turned into Japan, then Robert Palmer, and has more recently been heard sounding quite a lot like Nine Inch Nails, this doesn't have to be a problem unless you want it to be. Even when the influences are kicking you in the shins, a Gary Numan album will only ever sound like a Gary Numan album, and besides, if it's okay for Bowie to send his butler out to look for one of those drum and bass chappies when he feels the self-conscious need to be down with the kids, I don't see why anyone else should be denied the benefit of the doubt.

The bottom line here is that, for all his faults, Numan can make just two notes sound like no piece of music you've ever heard, invoking isolation and alienation with such profound conviction as to make all those other glumsters sound like twenty-four hour party wankers. In other words the proof of the pudding is in eating the thing, and in that respect, this man has a fairly astonishing track record providing you keep in mind he may not necessarily have set out to sing the song you want to hear.

Beserker emerged from the transitional period between Numan turning funky and then deciding to be Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love on Metal Rhythm - another great album, by the way. For something which sounds like it's trying quite hard to get into its own party, it's a surprisingly chilling record, particularly on Cold Warning and My Dying Machine. Lyrically it's business as usual in so much as it's anyone's guess what any of it could be about, and there's the customary selection of William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick one-liners hinting at that which Gary apparently dare not describe; but crucially, as ever, the level of obvious sincerity is terrifying, so painful you can barely look it in the eye. This is Numan's strength. Regardless of how lame he sounds, how well he measures up to your expectations, or what the blistering fuck he's talking about, he really, really means it, and that's why he sounds so great when life has been kicking you in the face for any length of time. Ironically, Bowie now sounds like his own Phil Cornwell impersonation by comparison.

One day some Mojooid will mislay his copy of Exile on Main St., slap on Beserker by accident, and recognise it as the fucking cracking record it is and always has been; and then we will all be told it's okay to admit to liking Gary Numan yet again, or at least the old stuff, like the one that got sampled on that dance tune. At this juncture it may be worth noting that some of us never needed permission.