Hero of a Hundred Fights (1999)

I'm backtracking from their EP, The Cold, the Remote, to this earlier recording, a full length album but this time lacking anything referencing the writings of Lawrence Miles. I was somehow under the illusion of the name having come from a role playing game, but it's actually a characteristically nebulous painting by J.M.W. Turner, and this information still doesn't provide much of a clue as to what the hell is going on here.

Hero of a Hundred Fights sound like free jazz melded in a transporter accident with Shellac, so obviously it makes perfect sense that the later work should be produced by Albini; but meanwhile in 1999, there was this album, just a beautiful recording so clear it feels as though we're there in the room, and not even any effects to speak of beyond natural valve amp distortion and the sound of a man screaming his throat out. The music, even at its most discordant, has the soft, injured beauty of a wound after it has healed and the pain has subsided to a dull warmth, all tied up in the staccato mathematical knots of a structure which seems to have involved one hell of a lot of algebra. There's not much to say about this one because the music has already said everything, even if it's in an unfamiliar language.

Who the hell were these people and what happened to them?

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.

Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar (2018)

I loved the previous album, White Men are Black Men Too, so much that I couldn't imagine how they were ever going to follow it up; and predictably the first time I heard this it seemed underwhelming, a variation on the same sonic theme without whatever it was which made White Men sound so astonishing. In fact it seemed like they'd made a rap record with significantly less emphasis on the soulful vocals, which was odd because it sounded totally different the second time I gave it a spin to the extent that I can no longer even work out what nudged me towards that initial impression. What's more, I've now played it enough for Cocoa Sugar to sound at least as good as its predecessor, and what I took from that first hearing seems crazy with hindsight.

My guess as to the nature of the disparity is that Cocoa Sugar is a very different record to White Men, but the Young Fathers' sound is so distinctive, so immediately recognisable and unlike anything else - at least so far as I'm aware - that it takes time to recognise the variation. The sound is, roughly speaking, a sort of African gospel embellished with music made up from sounds found laying around on a laptop, non-musical glitches edited into something with both the musicality and rawness of early Motown. The difference is that where White Men had an additional touch of something resembling the influence of maybe Suicide, this one has a subtly different dynamic with more of a soulful vibe; all of which is frankly a fucking crap comparison, and one which doesn't stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, but it's the best that I can do.

Cocoa Sugar is, after a couple of plays, at least as intense as the last one, and it's nice to have lived long enough to have heard this genuinely amazing group. Maybe that's all you really need to know.

DDAA - Ronsard (1988)

Here's another album I briefly owned, then flogged, then bought back during a moment amounting to either regret, guilt, or curiosity. I seem to recall first encountering the lurid red and green cover on a stall in Greenwich market and picked it up on the strength of King Deebo is Six Tracks for a Kit having been one of the best numbers on those first two volumes of Rising from the Red Sand. I don't really know what I expected Ronsard to do once I got it home, but it didn't seem to do it. At one point, whilst attempting conversation with a boring French goth schoolgirl who had insinuated her way into my home via my girlfriend of the time, I plucked Ronsard from the racks and said, 'look - here's a French band,' which was admittedly lame, but at least got her to shut up about fucking Nosferatu or whatever the hell they were called. Later it went to Vinyl Experience along with records by Z'ev, the Pressure Company and others on the grounds that weirdy music is always worth a bit of money if you wait long enough; plus I'm not even sure I'd even listened to the thing twice.

Once again I'm kicking myself, having tracked down another copy and recognised it as something I would have kept hold of had my brain been working properly back in 1994, or whenever it was.

DDAA have been described somewhere or other as a cross between the Residents and Throbbing Gristle, which probably isn't significantly worse than any other description to be had by throwing lawn darts at the internet whilst blindfold. The music is minimal, noises twanged or scraped or plucked from assorted conventional instruments with very little in the way of effects or production, so it has the feel of an improvised live performance, something you watch rather than which unfolds in a studio. This album comprises two long pieces, one to a side, both of which build into something fairly hypnotic without any overt concessions to tunes or even repetition. There's a slow, regular beat, but it somehow has the cadence of stonemasons tapping away on a building site, or even something tribal. It's a record built from elements which are noticed rather than which intrude, and it feels like poetry more than it feels like anything you could describe as a soundscape, at best a distant relative to Laurie Anderson.

Despite most of the lyrical content being in English - albeit with truly peculiar pronunciation - and despite the insert explaining what Ronsard is all about, I still don't have a fucking clue what Ronsard is all about; but maybe it doesn't matter because it seems to work on some very basic, almost physical level, working like a painting you just can't get out of your head. It worms its way into your consciousness.

Of all the things I've revisited or rediscovered, this has thus far probably been the most powerful by some distance.

Howl in the Typewriter - Manifesto (2018)

My impartiality is probably open to question where this one is concerned. Never mind that I know the bloke, but I actually contributed some vocals, as did my wife, and I know at least a couple of the other people who similarly responded to Stan Batcow's request for remotely recorded guest vocals. Please sing these words, he said, and send me the file so I can weave it into something I've been working on; and we did. Please feel free to grass me up to the trading standards authority if this is a problem.

Howl in the Typewriter is the organ of Stan Batcow, so to speak, former Ceramic Hob and punky DIY stalwart since at least back when I was still at school. He's been at it for a while and is yet to show any sign of reigning it in or, for that matter, giving too much of a shit about sales or catering for any specific audience. Musically he's always carved his own furrow, as does this album, and it's a furrow which still very much works for him and has come to sound more and more unique with each passing year as the part-timers fall by the wayside.

Manifesto is, perhaps typically, an H-bomb scale potshot taken at the commercialism against which Howl have been pitted all these years; and it's a single song lasting over an hour, or at least that's one way of looking at it. Another might be as Crass's Yes Sir, I Will with tunes, or even one of the more impenetrable Jethro Tull concept albums, A Passion Play or one of those; except this is better, or at least I like it more. Howl play a hybrid of punk rock and techno hung on some sort of vaguely proggy structure, themes repeat here and there morphing into reggae, thrash, power electronics, and just plain oddball without it seeming too much like a collage of disparate elements; and whilst its sheer scale and duration is a little demanding, it keeps moving, changing, and manages to never outstay its welcome. I seem to recall reading that Manifesto has been seven years in the making, which I can believe because of the elegance with which all the parts fit together to form a coherent whole, despite being born from a million random elements pulling in different directions. I'm very impressed.

Myself and the misses turn up at around the fourteen minute mark if anyone is interested.

Buy it here for a mere fiver.

Broken Britain (2011)

I wouldn't ordinarily bother to write about anything below a certain level of crapness, despite the thrill of shooting a fish in its proverbial barrel; but this makes the cut because it's so crap as to be genuinely impressive whilst still being amazingly crap - so none of that stuff about something being so bad that it's good here. Broken Britain really is absolutely shite. It's a punk compilation from a couple of years ago, or at least that's what it seems to aspire to be - a memorial to that time when we all kicked in our television sets because Sid Vicious swore on Midlands Today, and when the Clash had that hit with a song about the Queen being a moron.

Presuming you remember those Top of the Pops albums of the seventies - copyright dodging hits of the day faithfully reproduced by session musicians; well, that's sort of what we have here, except obviously that would be tacky and not very punky at all, so I think we're pretending this is something else - just like in the Sid Vicious song, Something Else, yeah?

Hooray for punks and punk rock!

Stick your bollocks up your arse, misses! Ha ha!

So far as I can tell, we do actually hear 999, the Business, and the Stranglers on this disc, although fuck knows where they found a Stranglers cover of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth; and that's definitely punky cockney dolly bird Lydia Luvaduck Lunch giving it some welly on a live version of In My Time of Dying, probably live in broken Britain or something. The rest though…

We have massive punky hits faithfully covered by bands you've mostly never heard of, bands which sound suspiciously as though they've all been recorded in the same studio with the same instruments - four from the Clash, four Pistols numbers, then Teenage Kicks and a couple of Joy Division biggies, and er… Denis, the Blondie song, instead performed by the likes of the Belfast Dolls, the Badgers, Discord 76, and Mandi and the Morons - a more punkily anarchistic bunch you couldn't wish to meet, if the names are any indication. On the other hand, Beki Bondage is undeniably real because I remember both Stand Strong Stand Proud from listening to Peel and her truly splendid knockers from the pages of Sounds, which were quite rememberable* due to my being a sixteen-year old boy at the time. Here she covers the Pistols' EMI, complete with faithfully reproduced ad libs which only made sense sung by Rotten at a very specific time of his career. Likewise, some of the Clash covers sound similarly odd given that Complete Control - for one example - is about being in a band called the Clash; and I don't know who the Cook 'n' Jones responsible for Silly Thing could have been, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Steve or Paul.

Plucked from the cheapo rack of the store, or possibly even a gas station, Broken Britain promises a couple of familiar names alongside covers rendered by obscure types who probably had one single played on local radio before they fizzled out and all got jobs at a local car showroom, but I don't think that's what we actually have here. Second - or possibly third - impression is that this might do well if you listen to it with the air conditioning on full blast, or if you're not really familiar with any of these songs. Should you be some punky young dude browsing the stalls of a Mexico City street market, and a punky young dude who doesn't speak much English, then Broken Britain might seem worth a punt.

Maddeningly, even this theory is undermined by a peculiarly operatic cover of Who Killed Bambi? and Dresden's version of the Talking Heads' Psycho-Killer, neither of which give a shit about duplicating the originals. This Bambi, if otherwise completely pointless, at least allows us to hear the lyrics, such as they are, for the first time ever; and Dresden, whatever it may be, sounds suspiciously like John Otway or even Unlucky Fried Kitten. I was never that struck on Psycho-Killer, and now I understand why - because it should have been recorded by Frank Butcher from Eastenders as is apparently the case here; which is why, despite everything, I'll be hanging on to this otherwise entirely pointless piece of crap.

It was a Christmas present, in case you were wondering, but thankfully not mine.

*: This is a word invented by a Wheel of Fortune contestant which I'm trying to pass into common parlance.

Siouxsie & the Banshees - Superstition (1991)

This, on the other hand, was mostly chug but it fills a gap in the collection. My girlfriend owned a copy back in the early nineties and she used to play it a lot. All I recall of this is a vague impression of Superstition not making much of an impression on me, but I'm a list-making completist at heart so I wanted to see whether it would sound better with the benefit of hindsight, or whether my aforementioned first impression had been accurate; and it seems that it had indeed been more or less on the money.

Should it need stating, Siouxsie & the Banshees tend to make more sense if you think of their career as parallel to that of Roxy Music - which was probably who they were listening to back when everyone else was banging on about the Dolls and the Stooges - in which case, Superstition was probably where they entered their smooth period as did Roxy with Avalon and the like. 1991 was apparently all about those shuffling baggy types, seemingly obliging everyone else to make themselves appear ridiculous by claiming there's always been a dance element to our music, and so on top of the technological studio smoothery, Superstition was the Banshees demonstrating that they too were mad for it, as the kids of the time would have it.

Well, maybe not, but this record does chug quite a lot, and there's the peculiar use of a Schoolly D sample on Kiss Them For Me - although I'm probably just showing my ignorance of what is either some preset drum pattern or something Schoolly D nicked from elsewhere.

So, is it actually a bad album?

Not really. It creeps up on you after a while, which is mostly the songs taking their time to emerge from Stephen Hague's efforts to make them sound like New Order; but emerge they eventually do, and the differences slowly become apparent, allowing the ear to hear something beyond what initially resembles an hour long version of Dazzle. Silly Thing sadly isn't a cover of the Cook and Jones classic - and Lordy what I would have given to have heard that - but was the first tune to break cover, revealing Superstition as more than simply Kiss Them for Me plus eleven b-sides. The whole is too slick, too smooth and too electronic - as the Banshees themselves apparently thought - but remains a lesser record by what was still a great band, the Banshees equivalent of a stadium-era Simple Minds album, which I propose as someone who nevertheless quite liked stadium-era Simple Minds.