Bill Nelson - Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam (1981)

Bill Nelson probably got me buying 7" singles. I rarely bothered with them during my teenage years because albums seemed better value and my pocket money didn't stretch that far, so I didn't get into the habit; plus my friends Pete and Graham, respectively sons of a retired colonel and a bank manager who had seemingly done better in the pocket money lottery than myself, were usually well stocked up on all the singles I would have bought, so I taped their copies. All the same, Bill Nelson's Do You Dream in Colour? seemed like the best thing I'd ever heard at the time, and still retains most of its magic, not least for featuring three killer b-side tracks. Naturally I bought the album.

Years later, I notice that I never bought the 7" of Do You Dream in Colour? which seems like a massive oversight. I have the other tracks on The Two-Fold Aspect of Everything compilation, but sometimes it's nice to have a stack of three or four singles to play when you're having a shave and getting ready to go out, and so I tracked a copy down on Discogs; then noticed that somehow I'd confused my having taped the Stranglers' Christmas EP from Graham with possessing a copy of my own, so I bought one and then took to buying up all the singles I should have picked up first time round, which is thanks to Bill Nelson. Do You Dream in Colour? really is a fucking cracking record.

I still don't fully understand why Bill Nelson wasn't massive, given some of those singles. My guess is that he didn't quite fit into new wave, having been in a band which had featured an airbrushed guitar turning into a skull on the cover - and he clearly wasn't a skinny tie guitar band from New York singing about girls and soda pop; and his music was presumably too weird for old school hairies. Of course, there was quite a head count in the Bowie-influenced cattle truck at the time, and it could be argued that Nelson ticked more boxes than most - Banal could almost have come from the Scary Monsters sessions, for example; but listen close and it sounds more like parallel evolution than influence. We have the post-glam chug and stomp of Banal or Disposable, but there's an angular, spiky edge suggesting European art cinema rather than Warhol's factory, and literary influences that are possibly more Ballard than Burroughs or whoever, perhaps with some early Roxy chucked in; somehow, despite which, I'm not sure it's possible to mistake Quit Dreaming for the work of anyone but Bill Nelson.

This is a genuinely huge album with a massive sound which artfully strikes a balance between filmic bleeps and squelches with rocking the fuck out - big, bold populist riffs and heroic vocals. Weirdly, it's not even like this was the high point prior to some overproduced tail off, it being the first of a whole string of solid albums which somehow seem to have been largely forgotten by anyone who wasn't already a fan. How the hell did that happen?


Never mind. If you didn't already get the memo, Quit Dreaming really is a masterpiece in every sense.

Cabaret Voltaire - Chance Versus Causality (1979)

The unfortunate passing of Richard H. Kirk has, somewhat predictably, resulted in my listening to quite a lot of Cabaret Voltaire of late; and this one has stood out partially because it didn't make much of an impression at first, sounding as it does somewhat basic in contrast to The Voice of America to which it was approximately contemporary, but also because it doesn't really sound like anything else from their back catalogue - although I should probably add that I haven't heard that boxed set comprising a million CDs worth of out-takes and the like.

As you possibly know, Chance Versus Causality is the soundtrack to an experimental film by Babeth Mondini, improvised live by the lads without actually seeing the film. It's very much the opposite of multilayered, often with just a single weird atonal noise occupying the stereo field for some time and very little that's conspicuously musical - snatches of heavily treated guitar being employed for effect rather than in pursuit of anything melodic which therefore may as well be a hoover or something. Edits are often abrupt and incongruous, as is the dry insertion of taped dialogue played both forwards and backwards, amounting to something which suggests the early days of experimental film without the benefit of a visual dimension - unless you're sat looking at the cover. It works through application of the unexpected, through contrast, and through what may well have been a concerted effort to avoid the conventionally musical, arguably placing it more in the realm of Pierre Schaeffer and, I suppose, maybe Stan Brakhage, than even Gristle's After Cease to Exist soundtrack which sounds positively Ennio Morricone by comparison. It's crude, effective, and still sounds surprising after all this time and the more technically sophisticated efforts we've heard since; and, despite the minimalism, it's immediately identifiable as the work of Cabaret Voltaire.

I've seen them written off as overrated in recent years, and I disagree. As a group who worked with semi-improvised grooves rather than anything more obviously structured it's inevitable that some albums were more convincing than others, and the live albums tend to fall under the category of things which probably sounded better if you were there; but even their most chugging pieces never sounded like anyone else, retaining so strong an identity as to render most tribute acts sounding so derivative as to be pointless - although both Portion Control and Bourbonese Qualk admittedly found their own respective voices by the time it came to sticking a record out; and when they got it right, which was a lot of the time, they were genuinely astonishing, and I'd argue moreso than, in particular, even Gristle, through a reluctance to rely on shock effect for its own sake. I'm still not convinced that Chance Versus Causality is the lost classic described by most of the reviews I've seen, but it's a good indication of what made them so special and why we're still listening to this stuff four decades later.

The Bone Orchestra - When Will the Blues Leave? (1987)

The Bone Orchestra involved Charlie Collins and Peter Hope, both formerly of the Box, along with a number of other Sheffield luminaries - not least being a full horn section - and existed in the gaps between musical endeavours which the rest of us are probably more likely to remember. When Will the Blues Leave? was recorded on four track - and mostly live by the sound of it - originally issued on cassette, and really should have been snapped up by some record label and flogged to the point of it being embarrassing back in 1987; which it wasn't because who fucking knows? My guess would be that quality doesn't always receive the recognition it is due.

The songs are some sort of bluesy semi-Brechtian cabaret hybrid suggestive of bars where dreams go to drink themselves into a coma, occupying a stylistic spectrum which flies off in all directions without necessarily sounding schizophrenic, or at least not in the musical sense. The percussion section borrows from either the kitchen or the junkyard, the bass prowls, Charlie Collins honks, hoots and even squeezes an accordion, and Hope channels his demons, some familiar and a few we've never met before - switching from growl to heroic croon to almost Noel Coward on Horse, for example - the one track which reminds me of the Box, for what it may be worth.

I realise it's hopelessly lazy to make comparisons with other artists, but can be difficult to avoid where a blues influence is so pronounced given the spread and extent of the form; but to get it out of the way, When Will the Blues Leave? probably inhabits a building a few blocks along from Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and the Tiger Lillies amongst others. On the other hand, Quick Money reminds me of West African pop music* of all things. In fact, the whole wouldn't have sounded out of place issued on Billy Childish's Hangman label back when he first started hammering out those monthly albums - notably the Black Hands' Capt. Calypso's Hoodoo Party. I'm not sure there's specifically a standout track given the general level of intensity maintained more or less for the duration, but it has to be said, No New Leaves is in particular fucking incredible.

*: I'm thinking of The Vodoun Effect by Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou.

Blade - The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength (1993)

Blade should require no introduction, but then we live in a far from perfect world and it's been nearly thirty years since this album, fifteen since his most recent - unless there's been one which nobody told me about. It's not that he was the first rapper with a British passport, but he was in on the ground floor and maintained enduring visibility back before anyone took UK rap seriously on any kind of scale. He achieved some mainstream success with The Unknown recorded with the late Mark B, even landing an appearance on Top of the Pops, but this was his second album, the one which apparently remains his own personal favourite; which itself reveals him to be a good judge of his own work because it really is his best, at least so far as I'm concerned.

This is a CD reissue I'm listening to, but I can still recall the moment when I lowered the needle onto the first white vinyl disc of the original double, and I recall that moment because what comes out of the speaker is as astonishing as a kick up the arse - the adrenaline rush of organised noise, musical information overload somehow tamed to a funky as fuck beat duplicating the intensity of the Bomb Squad without simply copying the moves; and while we're on the subject of Public Enemy, Blade himself betrays the influence of - guessing here - both Chuck D and Rakim, but his own personality overpowers the delivery to the point that you couldn't really mistake him for anyone else.

As with much of Blade's work, the whole thing was pulled together by the man himself - recorded, pressed, distributed, everything, and the sleeve notes describe our man picking the pockets of teenagers in arcades to finance the release of his debut, arguing that they would only have spunked the money away on nothing. Accordingly you can really feel the graft that's gone into this one, fueled by fried chicken, Lucozade, and sleepless nights sweating over the beats and rhymes - gritty as New Cross, posture free, angry and funny, and refreshingly outspoken in terms of authority and our man's refusal to jump through the usual music biz hoops. Were it not for the fried chicken, The Lion Goes from Strength to Strength is one of the few rap albums which would have made sense on the Crass label, which is no bad thing.

Jethro Tull - This Was (1968)

I'm still trying to work out how I feel about Jethro Tull. Having once been an agricultural youth, I was initially well disposed towards a  band who named their albums after shire horses and who presumably had some kind of affinity with soil, plus Stormwatch had a pleasantly ominous cover. I didn't actually encounter their music until the nineties when I chanced upon a boggle-eyed performance of Witch's Promise from that Top of the Pops repeat show, which I thought was great. My friend Carl gave me a copy of the Twenty Years of Jethro Tull triple CD thing on the grounds that he'd designed the artwork and had a spare knocking around; which was also great, or mostly great. I was in a sort of prog rock punk band at the time, albeit prog with a small p because funny time signatures definitely hadn't figured in the job description and were frankly proving a bit of a chore; but our glorious leader, somehow mistaking my polite enthusiasm for studious obsession, took it upon himself to advance my education despite that I was perfectly happy with my copy of Machine Gun Etiquette, thank you very much. Soon I was in possession of This Was, Living In the Past, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play, Bursting Out, Stormwatch, A, Nightcap, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and some greatest hits thing. Our glorious leader had written on the covers, giving tracks marks out of ten or adding notes about associated singles, then presumably copied those songs scoring above a certain rating of excellence onto a CDR which would take up less space in his collection and therefore be more efficient.

I've really tried with these albums but they just aren't for me. I didn't particularly enjoy playing guitar riffs which required that I count out an ostentatious thirteen beats before repeating the bar or launching into a chorus, and if I'm to listen to music as a mathematical exercise, then it really needs to do more than just showing off whilst a nice overachieving grammar school boy doth politely croon something about maidens fair; and but for the silly time signatures, Stormwatch wouldn't have sounded out of place on Radio 2 back in the days of Sing Something Simple.

And yet there's this.

This Was so named in acknowledgement of it having captured an era of Jethro Tull from which the band were moving on even as the record hit the stores. This Was dates from when they were worth listening to, when they sounded like a band rather than a series of twee equations scrawled upon a blackboard in between betwixt sips goodly swigs from a pewter tankard. What the fuck went wrong?

This Was is sixties blues rock as interpreted by educated white guys, but significantly influenced by the wilder end of jazz and with scant trace of either folky or psychedelic influence - possibly excepting certain parallels heard on the thoroughly gorgeous Move on Alone. What really differentiates this bunch from most later Tull - at least that I've heard - is the low recording budget having prevented too much pissing about, leaving us with a band so live and raw and at one with their own vibe as to foreshadow a Steve Albini production, albeit one without quite such menace. Song for Jeffrey and Love Story particularly seem to oblige the listener to crank it the fuck up and rock out, despite an otherwise relatively polite production; and I'm not suggesting Love Story sounds even remotely like anything from the first three albums by the Damned, but I can imagine what the Damned version would sound like without giving myself too much of a headache.

This Was a band who had a ton of fucking fun playing this stuff by the sound of it, as distinct from the subsequent entity which introduced live versions of its old standards with footnotes explaining how the lads had since added more twiddly bits to keep it interesting for themselves. My former musical boss presumably kept the decent albums to himself when passing on his cast offs, hence the absence of Aqualung and others in the above list; So there's doubtless much that I haven't heard and maybe should, but for the moment I prefer to remember them this way. Given that everything I like about this album seems to have been down to Mick Abrahams who left soon after, this leaves me with the peculiar realisation that I probably need to listen to Blodwyn Pig.

Hard-Fi - Stars of CCTV (2005)

Here's another one about which I've never bothered writing, having assumed I'd already done so at some point; the reason for the assumption being that I listen to it quite a lot and that it's probably one of the greatest albums of all time, at least to my ears.

At least based on what I recall hearing on the radio at work, rock music was pretty much a complete waste of time by 2005, a vast Glastonbury shaped sludgepit full of grinning NME-sponsored idiots channelling the Kinks through a fuzzbox in hope of landing a car insurance advert as Jo Whiley stood to one side pretending to be your mate. Somehow Hard-Fi couldn't fail to shine because they sounded like a real band rather than something which crops up during the closing credits of an edgy Channel 4 sitcom about teenagers smoking crack during a media studies degree.

Stars of CCTV sounds a little like it may have happened as a result of my generation having kids, kids which were then raised in houses featuring a dad who still listened to the Jam on a daily basis. It's not quite the Jam, but there's something of Down in the Tube Station at Midnight in there - the smells if not quite the sounds - a little power pop, maybe even a few old Motors records, and of course the name comes from Lee 'Scratch' Perry; so it's all those things and yet not quite any one of them, because it does something different which isn't reliant upon nostalgia.

The first time I heard Hard to Beat it seemed to suggest what the Jam would have sounded like had they formed two decades later as some filter disco act; and the rave, or possibly post-rave aspect is part of the wallpaper which nailed Stars of CCTV to the place it was coming from, and the place it was coming from wasn't much different to where I was living so I was seriously feeling this shit, as the saying goes. Stars of CCTV sounded like a genuinely working class voice in a world turned over to consumer satisfaction surveys and focus groups. I recognised the stench of south London fried chicken, hangovers, post-war housing, belches of beer past the sell by date from Weatherspoons, freezing your bollocks off outside some club in November, estuary English and bills which may or may not get paid on time. This is what it was like living in south-east London in 2005 but without the voyeuristic glamour of wobbly camcorder documentaries, and without even trying to sell the grime as an aesthetic. It's grim, and yet it's mostly a celebration with all the joy of forked fingers waved at a security camera. To be honest, it's actually similar to what many grime acts were doing at the time but for the fact that it's rock music, even mod in an absolutely literal sense. Stars of CCTV is not a happy album, but it's a long way from being a miserable one, and every last track packs a serious punch. This was what it was really like to be young.

Control (2007)

This may be a bit of a digression but I'm sure it figures given that Anton Corbijn's biopic of Ian Curtis attempts to map the still growing legend of Joy Division, roughly speaking. I read Deborah Curtis' autobiography about a million years ago so I was already approximately familiar with the territory when this turned up on Amazon Prime or one of those, meaning I finally got to watch it; and of course I was a massive fan for about six months, specifically the teenage years during which it's only right that one should fixate on the work of a specific pop group as the most important thing ever. I still remember where I was when I heard that Curtis had died. I was on a coach as part of some school trip to the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and had noticed that Love Will Tear Us Apart - which had been one of our things up until that point - kept turning up on wonderful Radio One, which seemed suspicious.

Should my tone here appear to be working its way towards the dismissive, and aside from the aforementioned six month obsession which burned bright without my actually bothering to buy the albums, I still believe their greatest material was the glacial punk of the Warsaw years, of which Unknown Pleasures seemed to represent the most refined expression; and the first New Order album which, for me, represents the best thing ever done by any combination of those people. It was more or less all over once Movement was in the bag, and, honestly, I never understood the praise heaped upon Closer - three or four decent tracks with some other stuff, albeit beautifully produced other stuff. I still see internet dwellers claiming it be the greatest, most emotionally powerful album ever recorded, and I'm happy for them but I can't understand their way of thinking. They may as well be referring to the first Splodgenessabounds album, although I could at least get my head around that as a view to which someone might reasonably subscribe. Closer sounded too much like those bloody awful live bootlegs of Joy Division bum notes, false starts, and band members failing to play the same song at the same time as epitomised by Decades, a song which, at the risk of repeating myself, is distinguished by its sounding the same when you unhook the belt from your turntable and push the record around by hand. My friend Carl saw Joy Division a couple of times as support to other, less introverted acts and has described their stage presence as wispy and underwhelming, or words to that effect. For what it may be worth, my mother saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club in the early sixties and has since described the evening as nothing special.

Nevertheless, we have this big fucking legend to contend with, and so here it is in bold monochrome, for the sake of mood or possibly false modesty, because no-one could possibly live up to that level of hype, which tends to become cemented in place during one's teenage years. Yes, they were briefly amazing, but so were plenty of others at the time. Joy Division distinguished themselves with a genuinely troubled vocalist who wrote ponderously poetic lyrics drawing from outsider literature, tastefully removed from obvious showbiz affectations and the idea that actually this was just a pop band on stage playing their moody songs for your entertainment. Pay no attention to the glittery curtain but just look at that ominously abstract album cover with its ostentatious lack of information or fart jokes. Classy!

Each time I encounter the legend of Joy Division, I remember Jamie Reid's characteristically sarcastic acknowledgment, as reproduced in Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols book.

The last few years have seen an increase in this cult of vampirism, of which the Viciousburger is only the latest example. Vampires are noteworthy for consuming star corpses in the form of burgers in the mistaken belief that some of the star's charisma will rub off on them; sadly, as you can see, these attempts are doomed to failure and these cultists deluded. The cult is said to have begun in the fifties with Deanburgers: these were very rare, and contained bits of Porsche wreckage and sunglasses - those cultists still alive who tasted them say they were tough but tasty. Perhaps the worst outbreak of vampirism in recent years before the Viciousburger scandal was the Presley burger scandal of 1977. The scandal was discovered when an attempt was made to steal Presley's body from the grave by occultists: the body was already stolen! It now appears that it was minced down and turned into the bizarre cult food, Presleyburgers. These are said to be very expensive ($1000 a throw) and high on fatty content, but it still didn't deter the thrill seeking showbiz crowd: Mick Jagger was said to have eaten several before his recent Wembley concert. Heavy prison sentences imposed in Canada on Keith Richards, another vampire, stopped the spread of this disgusting cult, but with the present Viciousburger scandals, it seems to be flourishing. And even now, there are unconfirmed reports of Curtisburgers, gristly burgers with hints of rope and marble.

Control attempts to tell the story of a real band - four seventies lads with some knowledge of football who liked a pint, enjoyed sexual intercourse, and went to the toilet just like the rest of us; and it attempts to tell the story in terms of the legend of the same, hence the silly black and white footage; and it attempts to balance the legend of Ian Curtis as damaged, brooding seer with the reality of his actually being a bit of a twat in certain respects - as are we all from time to time. The end result is beautiful in the sense of almost everything the similarly vacuous Ridley Scott has ever produced being beautiful, but as with Ridley Scott, we're essentially watching a Hovis advert that thinks it's Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. It pushes the obvious buttons, beyond which there isn't actually very much there because the band already said all that they had to say on the records.

This isn't to say that Control is a bad film so much as that it's more or less pointless. There are worse ways to spend two long, long hours of your life, but that's hardly a recommendation. As I sat watching this with my wife, Oreo - our free range house bunny - hopped over to the side of the cabinet upon which the flat screen telly is sat, to resume eating a handful of cilantro stems we'd given him earlier. He sat up and stared at us, nose going as always, with one green stem after another slowly disappearing upwards into his face; and somehow his bunny lunchtime seemed more profound and more honest than anything happening on the screen.

It cost six million quid to make too.

Incredible.