Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

Excepting David Bowie and four Beatles albums inherited from childhood, my first broad appreciation of music was punk rock and the weirdy electronic noise which seemed to share its general spirit. I came to Led Zeppelin late, never having heard them on the radio and being naturally suspicious of anything embraced by the hairies with which I shared a school and a rural hometown, assuming it was probably all pretty much the same deal as Whitesnake; although I actually enjoyed Iron Maiden on the quiet, for whatever that may be worth. I finally popped my Led Zeppelin cherry, so to speak, in 1988, prior to which I hadn't knowingly heard so much as a note of their music. My friend and (at the time) downstairs neighbour Martin gave me this double album, having found a ratty looking copy in Oxfam or somewhere and taken it upon himself to repair the sleeve and clean up the two discs. He already owned the album but didn't like the idea of there being an unloved copy somewhere in the world.

'Thanks,' I probably said without obvious sincerity while not wishing to appear ungrateful, then listened to it mainly so I could at least tell him I'd done so before tactfully explaining that it really wasn't the sort of thing I enjoyed.

The first massive surprise was that it didn't sound anything like I'd expected. It sounded so raw and loud, yet without mere volume being a consideration, that it seemed like the band were hammering away right there in the corner of my damp bedsit. The second massive surprise was that I really, really liked what I was hearing. The emphasis was on the music and the interaction of those playing it. It had some of the raw energy of punk with bluesy touches, but not the sort of blues I'd come to associate with late night dullards, and while there was instrumental noodling aplenty, it all seemed to have a point - none of that widdly-widdly histrionic bollocks which always sounded like some twat trying hard to impress his mates. It didn't sound like anyone was wearing a cut off denim jacket with Judas Preist or Angle Witch tattooed on the back in leaky ballpoint; and above all, it didn't sound old, like a relic of times been and gone. Somehow it seemed marginally closer to David Bowie than all that other stuff.

More than three decades later, it still sounds fresh to me, still with that early morning sparkle of a clear blue sky, no fat, no stodge, no blubbery indulgence or congratulating ourselves at what bad boys we are; and for a group who pointedly stuck to albums in the expectation of you giving it your most serious attention, they're kind of populist with big, big tunes cranked out in heavy, heavy chords, and yet nothing which quite sounds like a run through of whatever anyone else had been doing. For something which was, at the very best, merely adjacent to prog rock, few of the songs truly follow any established structure, each going its own direction and taking whichever path seems to work.  So instead of fifteen grunting anthems to shagging while drunk in charge of a motorcycle, we have songs as soundtracks with instruments unheard on rock records of the time, the pensive neoclassical grandeur of Kashmir, blues for standing stones, the Biblical epic of In My Time of Dying, and even a spot of country. For one of those bands routinely described as the fathers of this, that and the other, they were almost entirely their own unique entity.

Cabaret Voltaire - Groovy, Laidback and Nasty (1991)

'Micro-phonies sounds about right,' quipped my one time friend Paul, 'because they're phonies!' The thrust of his satire - cleverly recycling the same actual joke made by the band in the title of what was then their latest album - was that Cabaret Voltaire had sold out in producing a queer gayboy disco record which may as well have had Boy George singing on it etc. etc.

Drum machines?

Bum machines, more like!

Hopefully he exploded when this one came out.

To be fair, the sight of Stephen Mallinder doing the butterfly in a hoodie with a big sporty stopwatch swinging from his neck in the video for Hypnotised is somehow massively comical, and very much suggestive of an album trying far too hard, which is why I've only just bought this. How bad could it be? I asked myself, repeating a question which seems to have informed quite a few of my musical purchases of late.

Obviously it doesn't really sound like a Cabaret Voltaire album, even though it is; but in their defence, the next logical question would be what does a Cabaret Voltaire album actually sound like? I suppose the answer depends on which one you're listening to, and it probably would have been just as weird had they dug out an old copy of Voice of America, analysed how it was recorded, and then impersonated their former selves like we apparently wanted them to. Groovy, Laidback and Nasty scores low for tapes of evangelical preachers, drums played through a flange pedal, or Mal doing that weird vocalising thing which never quite sounds like language so much as Sean Connery having a seizure.

Yushnar arwar sharwar nawurhar…

Groovy, Laidback and Nasty is house music, which doesn't have to be a problem, because 1) if anyone had earned the right to jump on the house music gravy train, it was Cabaret Voltaire, 2) I like house music, and 3) they do it very well.

This last point is what seals the deal, and which differentiates this from one of Porridge's hilarious attempts to get down with da mans dem, and specifically due to the involvement of persons such as Marshall Jefferson and Paris Brightledge; besides which Cabaret Voltaire always had some vague connection to northern soul and black music in general, particularly the sonic experimentation of dub producers. It's not like they ever had much of a through line from Led Zeppelin or Whitesnake; and when you stick the record on, it sounds fucking great - at least more convincing than all those fuckfaced baggy twats of the day, jangling away and insisting that there had always been a dance element to their dopey shuffling songs. Mal's vocal, if limited, is surprisingly conducive to what is basically soul, and the music very much inhabits its genre rather than standing outside waiting to be let in. You can already hear traces of Kirk's Sweet Exorcist beginning to emerge, so it's not even like Groovy fails to bring anything new to the table; and once again I wish somebody had told me all of this back in 1991.

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (1971)

Black Sabbath initially came under the heading of artists to be avoided on principal thanks to my having grown up in a rural Warwickshire town in which a preference for Joy Division - or indeed almost anything with short hair - over Tygers of Pan Tang revealed one as a bare bummer who liked men's cocks and to dress up as a woman and was definitely gay and liked gay men's cocks and liked to feel them and thought Boy George was an inspiration 'cuz you were into men's bums and arseholes and that and being as gay as possible and liking men's cocks and if someone had invented a men's gay cocks sandwich you'd be first in fucking line for a bite, you gay cunt. To be fair, it didn't have to be Tygers of Pan Tang. In fact it didn't really matter so long as it was NWOBHM and you weren't a gay bastard who liked gay men's cocks because you were gay. I'm sure you get the picture.

Despite all the aversion therapy, I eventually came to understand the distinction between certain bands - notably Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden - and all the other useless wankers with knockery vixen warrior women clogging up the covers of their shitty records - Whitesnake, Def Leppard, Krokus, Rainbow, and all that utter widdly-widdly axe solo shite. Paranoid was somehow one of the first things I learned to play on guitar, and I borrowed the single from Philip Cameron at school, and I couldn't help but notice that the b-side wasn't bad either. With hindsight I've come to realise that aside from the hair there was never that much difference between Black Sabbath and the Joy Division, whose music I enjoyed without reservation.

More recently I came across a spoken word routine by Henry Rollins in which the lad proposes that innocuously named tropical weather systems such as El Niño be renamed in ways more congruent with their terrible destructive power. One such rebranding would, he suggests, be the First Four Black Sabbath Albums. Weather reports would then warn us that if we should be anywhere up the east coast of Florida this evening we might want to take precautions because the First Four Black Sabbath Albums have been heating up the air down in the gulf and we're probably going to see some serious storm damage by morning. Personally I think it could work, particularly having now heard at least three of them.

Having further differentiated Black Sabbath from anything involving David bloody Coverdale, I am surprised at how simple they actually sound - very basic, just your straightforward blues rock with special emphasis on the more malevolent vibes. I vaguely recall seeing Ozzy Osbourne interviewed on some show, accounting for the formation of Black Sabbath by noting that all he heard on the radio were flower children singing about sunshine and happy times and San Francisco, whilst all he could see out of his own window was Birmingham - or words to that effect. Keeping this in mind, much as I loathe the term industrial music, I'd suggest Black Sabbath did it first. Throbbing Gristle may have aspired to being a noisier Velvet Underground or even Hawkwind, but the mood was more Sabbath than Lou Reed or anyone so self-consciously Bohemian; and as my friend Carl has pointed out, Joy Division were basically Black Sabbath - providing you ignore Closer, which should probably be a given because it was mostly rubbish - and then of course there's Swans, and all those goth bands.

The more I listen to Black Sabbath, the more I realise how difficult it is to find rock music without a trace of their influence to one degree or another. Whilst they may not exactly have introduced the bad vibe to popular music - that being an essential ingredient of the blues from which they drew one hell of a lot of inspiration - they may have been the first to pass it on without embellishment, without trying to make it sound glamorous.

I know the Paranoid album a little better, and I've only just got hold of Master of Reality, so it hasn't quite sunk in yet, but it's already very clearly on the same level, and there's a noticeable improvement in the lyrics - some of those on the previous one being decidedly ropey in places; and, as with Paranoid, it really makes you wonder how all those shitty NWOBHM bands could have got it so wrong given how the great strength of this music is its simplicity, how it made even those Sexy Pistols sound like fucking ELO in places. I wish it hadn't taken me quite so long to realise any of this, but never mind.

Revolting Cocks - Big Sexy Land (1986)

I liked the idea of this band, if you could really call some guy hanging around in a studio with his mates a band. After all, there was the determinedly offensive name, and the involvement of at least two members of the greatly superior Front 242, and that they were obviously all just having a laugh; and of course Stainless Steel Providers was possibly the greatest single to ever feature a two-note bassline; but I found myself hugely disappointed that the Cocks didn't turn out to be those three shifty looking chaps they always had on their record sleeves, but were another one of those horrible industrial supergroups who, much like Journey, Pigface and the Traveling Wilburys, worked by the flawed premise that if you get enough famous people together in the same place, awesomeness will surely come to pass. I've never bought into the idea myself. It smacks too much of wouldn't it be amazing if they had Spiderman in an episode of Star Trek?

Whilst I would hardly wish to imply that Alain Jourgensen - the Jeff Lynne of Revolting Cocks - is in any sense bereft of talent, mainly because I thought Lard and Pailhead were decent enough, there looks to be an awful lot of poop in his back catalogue from where I'm standing.

Ministry were Depeche Mode who wished they'd ticked the box marked Slayer, and that was on their good days; the group who daringly brought caged titty dancing and rubbish tattoos back to rock because that's what we really needed - Whitesnake with a fucking synthesiser, although maybe not quite so poetic seeing as Ministry were seemingly aimed at people who hadn't cottoned on to Spinal Tap being a comedy. We already had Motorhead. We didn't need a version that was safe for consumption by fans of Psychic TV.

Of course, it has been said that Ministry's Twitch album was a significant influence on both Nine Inch Nails and everybody else, ever - although I've noticed this is said mostly in YouTube comments so I'm not sure if that counts, particularly as Twitch owes one hell of a debt to its producer Adrian Sherwood, as does much of the first Nine Inch Nails album; and the bottom line for me is that one of Jourgensen's four billion side projects was called Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters - I mean seriously?

How old was he at the time?

Twelve?

Okay Al, you're one scary guy and we're all terrified. You don't like going to church, but you do like to drink beer and watch bare breasts jiggling up and down. We get it now.

So maybe it isn't all the work of a gurning manchild pulling scary faces and saying ooga booga hail Satan to his mum, but mostly...

Big Sexy Land isn't terrible, but it's pretty damned average - distorted drum machine, noise, someone grunting the usual bad guy stuff in the hope of fostering tedious ambiguity regarding whether the song expresses condemnation or approval of death, murder, and stubbing your big toe; and the usual routinely shocking samples deployed in the usual way - tattoed penis tattooed penis tattatattatattatattatattoed penis, and I know it was 1986, but I was there too, and this sort of crap sounded balls-achingly obvious even then. The only element missing is the obligatory tribute to Charles Manson.

Perhaps through being no stranger to the business end of a drum machine, the problem is that I've done this sort of thing myself so I know how easy it is; but usually you return to your monsterpiece three days later and record something less predictable over it rather than slap it on an album and flog it to people.

To be honest, it's possibly not even the fact of Big Sexy Land being such a complete waste of time that bugs me so much as all those gibbering industrial rock baboons who seem to believe that Jourgensen invented bad-ass, plus paying three dollars for this at CD Exchange and still feeling like I've been diddled. I was expecting at least a few chuckles.