Nitewreckage - Take Your Money and Run (2011)

Here's another pie in which Dave Ball had a number of fingers, and one which seems to have slipped under the radar, or at least under my radar. This is a shame because pretty much everything Dave Ball has had a hand in has been at least great, and usually essential listening. English Boy on the Love Ranch was another one and yet they too sank without trace, which I mention mainly so as to illustrate that there's been more Dave Ball out there than you may realise.

Nitewreckage were thematically and sonically closer to Soft Cell than the Grid - the other one we've all heard of - and distinctive for showcasing the vision of vocalist and cabaret performer Celine Hispiche who chats, sings, screeches, howls and croons her way through a series of terrifying stories of domestic abuse, sordid hook-ups, and emotional blackmail bearing only superficial resemblance to Marc Almond's stint on the same microphone, but delivered with equivalent visceral passion. The whole album feels like a night on the town in Soho - and a rainy night at that - which you're definitely going to regret, but with Hispiche putting on a screw face and doing whatever the fuck it takes to get through - as distinct from Almond's bruised innocence. Even with all those synths grinding away, there's an element of X-Ray Spex to this one.

Sorry - that's about as close as I can get to a working description, and I'm slightly puzzled that we haven't heard more of Celine Hispiche on the strength of this bunch. If it turns out that she simply exploded shortly after they finished the album, it really wouldn't be that difficult to believe. Take Your Money and Run is as good as anything Soft Cell ever recorded without it even being obvious that we have the same guy banging away on the piano. Also, their version of Bowie's Repetition makes the one on Lodger sound like the cover.

Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori (2007)

Fucking Hell. I knew nothing about this lot beyond that We're All Going to Hell is a cracker, so I look them up on the web, discovering that they were briefly an internet phenomenon of some magnitude, and also that they're no more due to Yellow Thunder Woman passing away just over a year ago at the age of forty. I therefore say again, fucking hell.

We're All Going to Hell blew my knackers clean off when I first stumbled across it on One'sTube - currently at 193 thousand views and rising - and being only loosely internet savvy, it's somehow taken me nearly fifteen years to nab the album, possibly because it seemed unlikely that it could deliver on the promise of that one song; but it does. Of course, it does.

There were two of them, a bloke from England called Robin, and Yellow Thunder Woman, which was actually her name due to Native American heritage. The music reminds me a little of the Eels, or at least how the Eels should have sounded, wrapping crushingly acerbic commentary in a pill so sweet that it's dancing around with flowers in its hair - acoustic guitar, bubblegum, apple pie, pseudo-McCartneyisms, country stylings with a touch of blues, occasionally incongruous electronic touches, and what sounds like a Casio SK1 preset on the chorus of Hell, and yet lyrically it's almost X-Ray Spex at their most scathing. The Day the World Turned Bluegrass, sort of...

There's no single element which makes the whole because everything is good, and it's difficult to imagine how this combination of words and music could be improved; but special mention should probably go to Yellow Thunder Woman who sang with a voice sweet as golden sunlight and yet powerful as an industrial laser, and natural - without any of that warbling vocalisation bollocks you hear when a singer has nothing but technique; and she's brown bread, which is upsetting.

I don't know what else to say.

 

 

Börn (2014)

It means Children and they're from Iceland, or they were. They seem to have been quiet since 2015 from what I can tell. This seven-track eponymous debut album came to my attention thanks to the excellent Simon Morgan, a man who keeps one ear to the ground. Pretty much any music I enjoy of under ten years vintage has come to me thanks to a tip from Mr. Morgan - Sleaford Mods, Parquet Courts, Pessimist, Enhet För Fri Musik, and now this, which is probably the best yet.

Börn aren't exactly like nothing I've heard before, and what they do has a certain familiarity, but the way they do it blasts you off your feet like it's the first time. Yelping vocals hark back to Poly Styrene or Siouxsie Sioux at her most terrifying; drums pound like that dude from the Cramps, and the rest is formed from angular slashing chords and that chugging bass that did so well for every single band formed in 1981. I'd say it's like an angrier, more relentless take on The Scream, but even that just seems like a load of words when you slap the thing on the gramophone. Maybe the best way of putting it is that somehow you can really tell that this is the work of a band from a country which recently arrested its own government. There's just no arguing with this record, and I don't even understand what they're saying. This is what all rock music should sound like.

Neon Hearts - Popular Music (1979)

Here's a name which first lodged itself in my consciousness whilst watching Look! Hear! back in the early sixteenth century - as I believe I may have mentioned here - and it's somehow taken me thirty years to get hold of the album, a fancy red vinyl reissue by this point. Initial impressions, or at least this century's initial impressions are of a band resolutely of their time - sleeveless t-shirts, eyeliner, thousand yard stare, and honking saxaphone, and yet the shock wears off with just three plays as Popular Music nails itself very firmly to your soul.

Neon Hearts really are peculiar - a sort of punky Roxy Music with glam splashes of maybe X-Ray Spex or Cockney Rebel, and a strangely well spoken lead singer swooping all around the lyric with a wink and a smile much in the spirit of Neil Innes, of all people - or maybe Neil Innes with a hint of Adam Ant back when he still used to scare the life out of everyone. Specifically Tone Dial - as he is called - does that thing Neil Innes used to do where you can't actually tell if he's sincere or taking the piss in massive quantities. There's a mild preoccupation with the artificial, manufactured, and generally fake - as the name implies - and so we have Popular Music, the title track and single which should have been enormous. I recall a maxim about how the best way to have a hit on fabtacular seventies radio was to write a song about it, and Popular Music ticks all of the boxes so hard it almost foreshadows both Alan Partridge and Denim, right down to the preposterous exclamation of great song! Amazingly, and against all odds, the other nine tracks are at least as strong, and have since become so firmly ingrained in my mind's ear that it feels as though they've been there all along, and that I've crossed over into an alternative universe where this lot turned up on everything from Whistle Test to Cheggers Plays Pop.

Neon Hearts seem best remembered for having spawned Raven, Killing Joke's late bassist; and I have to say it's quite a pleasure to see him tarted up like the one with the earrings from Mud on the cover, given his later presence as a hurhurhuring chorus to Jaz Coleman describing Boy George and other purveyors of - ahem - pouffy music being marched off to some hopefully figurative gas chamber. So, much as I've loved Killing Joke, I've had my reservations, and this sort of redeems one of them. We really should have embraced the Neon Hearts when we had the chance. I guess you could say we fucked up.

Another one I bought from the very wonderful Overground Records, if you're interested.

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.

Devo - Moody Theater, Austin, Texas (2nd July 2014)

Devo were an early and important discovery for me. I was fourteen or so, and my record collection comprised four Beatles albums. I was aware of punk, although I wasn't quite sure what it was seeing as all I seemed to hear on the radio was either Dan Hartman's Instant Replay or the Electric Light Orchestra; although that said, I'd watched the first Public Image Limited single and Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex performed on Top of the Pops and found both songs strangely hypnotic. Graham, my best friend, lent me his copy of the first Devo album apparently having decided that I needed to hear it. It was on red vinyl, and there was something disturbing about it. It was something new in the world. I listened to it once whilst staring at the weird and freakish figures on the cover as I sat next to the record player, then decided to take it back to Graham. There was something strange and deeply unwholesome about this music. It implied regions of human experience I had never considered, and would rather not know about; but Graham insisted I keep at it, give it another listen, and so I did.

Devo became my new favourite band, and have remained pretty much unchallenged in this capacity ever since. Henry Rollins once observed that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who get Devo and those who don't, and generally I've found this to be true whilst thanking providence that I can be counted amongst the first group. The last person I knew who didn't get Devo was the pothead owner of an atheist bulletin board for whom they were essentially interchangeable with Duran Duran. He preferred Kiss and classic rock, and by strange coincidence he was also something of a dick in terms of his interpersonal relationships and how he dealt with other people. Since my brief encounter with that guy, I have known to shun those who don't understand Devo, to walk the other way before they can infect me with their failure and turn everything complicated.

The point that so many somehow miss, is that Devo were never art rock or novelty pop or weirdness for the sake of weirdness. They have always been in essence a folk band, and in American terms possibly the only folk band, the group who see clearly and who understand how our society really works. If they seem a little fucked up stood there in their fake plastic breasts and with those things on their heads, then maybe you need to take another look around yourself, at this world in which we were denied the silver rockets promised by Hugo Gernsback, where Archie has that sister with an IQ of thirty-seven who somehow never gets a mention in the comic books, with Betty and Veronica forever lost in their own lurid fantasy existence of cowboy pharmacology and giant babies. The bottom line - at least for me - is that Devo have ever been so finely attuned to the ongoing backwards progress of human culture, so sensitised to the real stuff, that almost any band or artist stood next to them will inevitably look like teenagers trying to appear cool whilst smoking the wrong end of their first cigarettes; and as a band devolving backwards along the timeline of their own career in keeping with everything else that's happened since the industrial revolution, it seems fitting that now, forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line they should be taking the dark Ohio basement in which they recorded their very first songs on tour.

I know most of the material played tonight from the Mechanical Man EP, from the two Hardcore Devo collections of formative recordings originally released by Rykodisc, and a handful of tracks which eventually made it onto the first two official albums. The original recordings sound muffled in places, prone to tape degradation, the best that could be done under primitive circumstances, bluesy science-fiction surf tunes scraped together with home built synthesisers on a rough framework of spastic rhythms. Transposed to a stage before hundreds of eager Texan spuds, it's peculiar how the songs remain the same whilst forming new, unfamiliar shapes. I feared it might sound as weird and cranky as those archive discs, partially because I was there with Mrs. Wax Cylinders whose main frame of reference was this being the band who once had a hit with Whip It. I needn't have worried, and found myself surprised at how funky some of the songs sound in such a setting, even how heavy. The loudest band I ever saw was probably Terminal Cheesecake, and although this wasn't at even half their volume, Devo - against all odds, the novelty band who got a namecheck on Different Strokes and upon whom a Kiss fan might rightly pour his hairy chested scorn - sounded or maybe felt bigger, heavier, darker, funnier, and more relevant to the mess we've gotten ourselves into than ever. Mechanical Man achieved an effect resembling the sort of thing to which Black Sabbath once aspired; Bamboo Bimbo could have been the Swans at their most pensive and grunting; Fountain of Filth and I've Been Refused came on with such righteous energy as to leave no doubt of this being the band formed in response to the outrage of the Kent State Shooting of May, 1970. They didn't exactly play all of the hits - I personally would also have liked to have heard Chango and maybe Bottled Up - but it was all of the good stuff, all the weirdly terrifying and yet strangely intoxicating forms found when you flip the Beach Boys over and scrape off all that stuff that's been growing on their underside; Jocko Homo and Gut Feeling and even the infant-headed Booji Boy finding his way onto the stage for a few numbers with the help of what was either a baby walker or a Zimmer frame, depending on whether you're looking backwards or forwards.

Finally, to boil the above bones down into something that will settle better on top of your beer, it was not only a good gig, but possibly the greatest gig I've ever attended by at least a few definitions, some quantified by hairs erect on the back of my neck throughout the performance. Forty plus years, countless albums, and two fallen soldiers down the line, and Devo are still able to surprise me. I don't know if there's ever been another band capable of such a feat, who could retrace their first steps and still take us somewhere entirely new.