Lady Gaga - Artpop (2013)

So far as I've been concerned up until very recently, Lady Gaga was just wossername who brought us Poker Face, a song comprised entirely of choruses which sounded like it had been recorded on an expensive phone. It came on the radio at work to bring pleasure only in the knowledge that we at least weren't tuned to the station which played Chelsea Dagger by the fucking Fratellis every seven bleeding minutes. More recently I joined one of those facebook groups you hear about, specifically one in which members post a piccy of the cover of whatever they're listening to at the time, then we all say how we like it too, or we think it's shite, or how our next door neighbour once bummed the drummer or whatever. It's fun, but not without its annoyances, one of which is provided by the doubtless absolutely lovely and well intentioned guy who posts a picture of whatever he's listening to embellished with photocopied paper dollies of famous pop stars stood around the record cover along with a tattyfilarious script of their conversation.

ELVIS PRESLEY: Hey guys, I see Dave's checking out the first Doobie Brothers album.
BARBARA STREISAND: That's a pretty ropey looking copy.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Yeah, I hope he didn't pay too much for it.
ELVIS PRESLEY: Well, the Clash told me it was something he found in his dad's loft, so I guess he didn't pay anything.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Is that right?
THE CLASH: Don't ask us. We were still in the pub.
JOHNNY CASH: I think you mean me. People are always getting us confused.
BARBARA STREISAND: Ha ha!

No. I don't know why either, but to get to the point, our man recently posted a photograph of this Lady Gaga album as subject of imaginary debate amongst cut-out pictures of top poppers. Fuck's sake, I muttered darkly to myself, even more disgusted than usual; and then went off for a listen to some of the album on YouTube just to confirm that it was as shit as I thought it would be. Somehow it wasn't, at least it didn't sound that way on that particular morning, and so I wondered if I perhaps had Lady Gaga all wrong. After all, of the musical artists I rate most highly, my initial impression of almost every last one has usually been what the fuck is this shit?

Weirdly, whatever that not actually terrible track may have been, it sounds completely different on the actual disc, and completely different to the point that I'm not even sure which one it was. More annoyingly, Artpop is Madonna for people who post videos of themselves talking about their top five favourite Manga characters on YouTube and is about as good as I had a feeling it would be, at least in so much as it probably sounds amazing if you're under thirty and fucking stupid...

Nope. Not apologising for that one, and I don't care if I've just turned into my dad frowning at the Sex Pistols - young people are shit. Theoretically they can't all be shit, but I don't seem to have encountered too many exceptions to the rule: useless fuckers forever fiddling with their phones and texting about how all music is pointless now, not like the good old classic rock days of Oasis and Muse, or Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John, and old people are always going on about books but you can't learn nuffink from books because that ain't life and there's nuffink wrong with games because some of them have got really good stories now blah blah fucking blah - fuck you, kids. All of you. Develop some fucking discretion.

Sadly, Artpop is post-music, just the sonic extension of a larger, more substantial memeplex incorporating visuals, ringtones, sneakers, YouTube, and marketing strategy. It means well and it tries hard to deliver an authentic experience, but even with the best intention, it remains a McDonald's Fruit Bag™ at heart. I'm trying to pinpoint just what it is that fails to work, that lets the side down, but there's so much going on, and so much which sounds like it should work without actually succeeding that it's hard to identify any one specific turd in the musical swimming pool. Of course, being post-music, it all sounds like it was recorded on a phone, full of flourishes which never could have arisen prior to our developing the ability to move waveforms around on a screen. I'm a huge fan of weirdy electronic techno, and yet what happens here all feels too smooth and easily achieved, and it might almost resemble the Severed Heads -  ordinarily a recommendation - but for the problem that musically it only really does one thing, and it does it over and over. Everything sounds like a crescendo, like a musical analogy of the worst of modern cinema - the tender interlude from The Fast and the Furious again and again and again, all soft focus and a single tear forming in the corner of an unnaturally enlarged cinematic eye whilst five orchestras shit themselves in unison just in case that blind guy living on Pluto missed the point of it being an emotional moment.

I could live with this if Artpop had some dimension other than the celebration of its own artificiality, its own failure to resemble anything occurring in nature, but the rest of the sentence, had I bothered to spell it out, probably depends on how much you care about Andy Warhol, which personally I never did. The sexuality is up front and lurid, better done than the perpetually gurning Miley Cyrus forever holding her flaps apart and inviting you to take a lick, but still ultimately as clinical and calculating as any vagina airbrushed and clean shaven in the name of selling beer, guns, or cigarettes. I quite like sexy music, but properly sexy music rarely spells it out, and Gaga doesn't have the voice to pull it off, in either sense of the expression. She's decent, but then doubtless so are many other X-Factor contestants, and she only seems to do two things, either gushing operatically over musical crescendos or that wearyingly stern now I'm going to shove this up your arse, you naughty boy voice; excepting some bluesy effort towards the end of the disc to which she just isn't well suited. For fuck's sake woman, put some clothes on. We've seen enough.

Artpop is an advert for car insurance, a soundtrack for people who think that the fashion industry is important, techno which misses the great innovation of techno having been its rejection of personality. Artpop probably isn't quite so terrible as I've made it sound, but for something which tries so hard, it's surprising how little it really does.

Sham Pistols - Natural Born Killer (1979)

I vaguely remember following the story in Sounds music paper as Steve Jones and Paul Cook, at a loose end following the implosion of the Sex Pistols, began hanging around at Sham 69's house. Sham 69 seemed to have got into the habit of splitting and then reforming on a more or less daily basis, but had reputedly definitely called it a day following the release of The Game, their disappointing fourth album which Pursey hated. Being a fan of both groups, obviously I was excited by the prospect of the Sham Pistols - a name I presume to have come from some journalist rather than any of those involved - whilst being at least a little sceptical, even at the age of fourteen, of what was essentially a supergroup, an entity forged through celebrity rather than the usual social channels. Peculiarly it turned out that I was right when Sounds reported how it had all fallen apart with everyone going their separate ways. Those involved had shared roughly comparable degrees of fame through production of noisy guitar-based rock records, beyond which they had nothing in common apart from the fact that I thought they were great. The two former Pistols declared that it had been worse than working with Rotten, and Pursey observed that he had known all along that it would never work, such were the differences between them.

Sham 69 seem to be remembered as the band responsible for Oi! in so much as that of all those punk bands of the time, they were the most conspicuously lacking any sort of art school heritage, and they appealed to football hooligans and your actual working class types who couldn't give a shit about bondage trousers or hair gel. Nevertheless they made some fucking great albums which probably don't sound anything like you would expect, combining monosyllabic terrace appeal with surprisingly refined musical or artistic touches presumably sprung from Pursey's slow transformation into Marcel Marseau. This transformation may possibly be why Sham Pistols were doomed from the start. Pursey was already moving towards whatever the hell Imagination Camouflage was supposed to be, and the belching Cockney steamroller of Steve Jones' guitar was pulling too much in the other direction, at least from where Jimmy was stood.

I hadn't realised they ever really got beyond hanging out and trying to understand each other's jokes, let alone studio recording or sharing a stage, so my ears extended out on stalks when I first encountered this, just like in a Tom & Jerry cartoon; and weirdly, given how much I expected of this union at the age of fourteen, it doesn't disappoint. Side one is four entirely new and substantially beefy studio tracks - only one of which was to be recycled by Cook and Jones' Professionals. Sham Pistols actually sound exactly like Sham 69 with Steve Jones playing guitar, and significantly better than anything Sham had done at least since That's Life - which I state as a fan, in case that isn't obvious. Side two comprises four songs recorded live in Glasgow, Pretty Vacant, the Clash's White Riot, and a couple of Sham 69 numbers. They're nothing earth shattering, but just for the raw energy and the sheer peculiar novelty of this record, everything works pretty well. Natural Born Killer should by all rights be an oddity, a collectors' item rather than something you listen to, but against expectation it adds up to something much fatter and meatier than the sum of its parts, with everyone bringing the best out of each other, even if they all secretly regarded each other as tossers.

It was never going to last, which is a shame, but it's nice to have something to show that it happened, and that it was very briefly as great as my fourteen year-old self once hoped.

The Clash - The Singles (2008)

Despite apparently being surrounded by massive fans of the Clash all proclaiming Strummer's brilliance and insisting that one really had to live in London at the end of the seventies to truly understand their appeal - which may well be true given that I didn't and don't - I've always had trouble with this band. It's not something I can really pinpoint with any degree of either ease or accuracy, just a vague sense of bewilderment with their enduring popularity. They were the blokey punk band, it always seemed to me - if you really want to call them a punk band - the boys you could trust if it bothered you that the Sex Pistols seemed like a bit of a novelty act and Siouxsie and the Banshees were too weird. They were the punk band it was okay to enjoy between Bob Dylan albums without spoiling your appetite, upholding a grand tradition of workmanlike efforts in proper rock that would eventually lead to Billy Bragg and Ben Elton; council estate Springsteen, or at least something aspiring to the same. They were so bored with the USA, and then a few albums later they were doing Brand New Cadillac.

Possibly it's simply Joe Strummer, a former boarding school pupil whose Holland Park residence was some way from any council estate, and whose daddy wasn't so much a bank robber as a British foreign services diplomat; as John Lydon has noted on several occasions:

Joe's a very nice bloke. He's just ashamed of his own class roots. Which is of course the antithesis to me. You are what you are, and you should work accordingly with the tools you've been given. But to pretend to be working-class drives me crazy, because that's what I come from and am. When someone tries to pretend to be that, they rubbish my achievements. My repression is not a new coat to be worn so casually as indeed neither is his. We all suffer, but on different levels, and as long as we play in our own fields, we'll all be happy. I might add that living in a council flat is not a jolly romp. That is the bane of my existence; it is not something to glamorise.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having both Lord Snooty and Ivor Lott sat on different branches of one's family tree, but to pretend otherwise is just peculiar. Nevertheless it seems sadly consistent with the Strummer I saw interviewed on one of those four million true story of punk documentaries that were doing the rounds a few years back. I can't be arsed to hunt about for YouTube clips or the exact quote wherein Joe and some other Clash bloke describe their experience at Notting Hill carnival. Apparently a policeman had sort of looked at them in a funny way, and that was what had inspired the song White Riot - you know, police harassment and that, just walking down the road minding your own business looking forward to some smashing reggae music and some of that rice and pea and that, and like some pig looking at you all funny like, all suspicious, yeah? Talk about a police state, you know what I mean?

Furthermore, even had our boy never foreshadowed Rick out of The Young Ones, there was that weird yelpy singing, like he could never quite decide whether he was English or American, like Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs, someone playing a role.

Of course, the Clash were more than just Joe Strummer, and Mick Jones always seems to have had a knack of keeping things interesting despite overwhelming odds, channelling Nile Rodgers amongst others; and for all his potential, possibly even inconsequential shortcomings, Strummer was involved in some fucking great records even when he sounds like he really, really wants to be Bruce Springsteen, or at least someone a bit more working class. London Calling, Bank Robber, and indeed about two thirds of the tracks here are pretty much untouchable as singles, sometimes in spite of themselves as with The Magnificent Seven with its pitiful yelping rap, and Train in Vain which I'm fairly sure was used in some eighties film wherein Michael J. Fox teaches the squares and adults a thing or two about what it's like to be young; and the rest aren't too bad, by and large, excepting the fucking dreadful Hitsville UK and a few other eighties atrocities which I imagine to be from the same period.

The Clash still sound to me like the one punk band whose compact discs would be allowed anywhere near Jeremy Clarkson's Lamborghini, and they were probably to blame for inventing white reggae when there was actually nothing wrong with the existing black reggae, and for every single album released in 1978 featuring a token reggae number towards the end of side one, although I suppose that's forgiveable on the grounds that the Ruts were great - not least because they probably did it better. If I consider all of the punk bands I ever liked, the Clash will almost always be the very last on the list, below even Chron Gen and others whose names I can barely remember these days; with just one imaginary chart position elevating them above complete crap like Green Day and those pretty fly for a white guy wankers; but for all of this, there really are times when the Clash sounded like the best thing in the world and it makes perfect sense that they should be so eulogised by so many, and those times tend to arise whilst their songs are playing and all of the above is reduced to a whining irrelevance.

The Damned - The Black Album (1980)

There's an argument for The Damned's Machine Gun Etiquette being one of the greatest punk albums of all time, but I'd probably go further and nominate it as being potentially the greatest record ever made, which of course means it would have been something of a tough act to follow; and they almost managed it.

I bought The Black Album in the week it came out, but for reasons I no longer recall, got rid of it at some point - probably one of those ludicrous purges teenagers such as myself would impose upon their record collections from time to time. I remember liking the album too, but presumably must have concluded that it just didn't fit in; and by the time I'd begun to regret the decision it had been reissued as a single album which offended my collector sensibilities for reasons that no longer stand up to scrutiny. Anyway, buying it again as a double CD with a ton of extra tracks, I sort of see what the problem may have been, namely that both The Black Album and the band who recorded it really didn't fit anywhere; and this is probably why, of that generation, people are still banging on about the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and even Eater if you can be bothered to hunt around a bit, but where The Damned are concerned, not so much.

The Black Album was a bit of an oddity in 1980. First generation English punk groups were branching out left, right and centre, distancing themselves from that which they had inspired and which had increasingly taken to belching out yappy dirges about Thatcher in a studded leather jacket with the word BALLS painted on the back in Tippex. The Damned in particular took the opportunity to further pursue their increasing musicality into territories formerly populated by the quirkily English and whimsical, experimental prog rock types, and psychedelic garage bands of the 1960s. The Black Album actually sounds like a hell of a lot of different things, such is its variety, stretching even to the beautifully breezy-and-yet-sinister Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which Frank Sinatra probably could have covered without stretching a point too far. The problem with this, depending on how much you care about such things, is that for a short time it seemed to have left The Damned in an awkward place - the punk band who turned out to be Pink Floyd after all, but somehow weren't sufficiently po-faced to pull it off as they might have done had they all met at art school. I suspect this may be part of the reason why The Black Album doesn't quite seem to be remembered so well as it possibly should be, and maybe why I ended up flogging my original double vinyl - I couldn't decide where it appeared on the Joy Division to Splodgenessabounds spectrum, because clearly I was a fucking idiot.

Casting expectations aside, The Black Album gives very good account of itself once allowed to work on its own terms. Musically it is the fruit of major talents in regard to both composition and delivery, and Dave Vanian surely has to be one of the most underrated vocalists of his generation. The song writing is intelligent and yet still raucously funny, somehow managing to keep a hold on the energy which made Machine Gun Etiquette so exciting whilst doodling all sorts of baroque scrollery around the edges, resulting in the equivalent of Smash It Up played on a harpsichord, or summink.

I'm gonna be a lazy slob,

Stuff the folks and sod the job.

And tell the foreman that I'm ill,

And in a week I'll be here still.

Yes I will.

Take a look outside,

Those lively arts are on the slide,

And culture's just a bore,

When you're angry ,young and poor,

But if I got my way,

Those idle rich would pay,

When the discussion starts,

On the lively arts.

Oddly, as a whole the succession of the first eleven tracks almost seems to hint at a narrative at least of the kind The Who have turned into feature films, although this may be an illusion fostered by a passing resemblance to the same at a few intervals, or at least The Who with a superior vocalist and better songs; or maybe I mean Roxy Music, a sort of Addams Family revision of their first few albums, something in that general area...

That said, although the seventeen minute long Curtain Call is nice enough as The Damned doing Gong or one of those Krautrock bands, I can see why it was left off the initial reissue; and the same is true of the six live tracks which, on record, only really make you want to listen to the studio versions. This double also includes a stack of singles and b-sides which are nice enough, but really all you need are the eleven songs from Wait For the Blackout through to Therapy, the part which counts and which came so close to serving as a respectable follow-up to Machine Gun Etiquette without entirely repeating the formula.