Public Image Ltd. - The Flowers of Romance (1981)

PIL were an early discovery for me, a band which loomed large in my teenage world for what seemed like an age - the era prior to my discovery of Throbbing Gristle and all the really weird, scary stuff - but which may actually have been a matter of months. I was hypnotised by that first single before I even realised there was any kind of Pistols association; I was chilled yet thrilled by what Annie Nightingale played of Metal Box before it hit the shops; and I was so primed and ready for Flowers that it may even have been the first album I bought on the day it came out.

I never really tired of this stuff but I came to play it less and less as it was eclipsed by other things, and it didn't help that my copies of the first two albums took to skipping all over the fucking shop whenever I tried to listen to them. I assumed it was something to do with those bass frequencies collapsing the walls between the grooves during mastering; then recently I bought a new needle and found First Issue was just fine when I happened to play it, as was Second Edition. It seems that I've spent three decades listening to music with needles which weren't actually quite so good as I had believed, given that I never experienced the skipping problem with anything else. So, after all this time the early, spikier incarnation of Public Image Ltd. were suddenly back on the menu.

It's therefore been one fuck of a long time since I gave this a spin, and Christ almighty - it still sounds incredible. The loss of Wobble really seemed like a disaster at the time and I couldn't see how they would come back from it, at least not without taking on another bassist; but Levene, Lydon, and Martin Atkins squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons, producing something which, although rhythmic, is otherwise almost completely unmusical by any conventional terms but succeeds by the sheer force of its overpowering atmosphere; and it probably doesn't hurt that Lydon's vocalisations had grown particularly haunting and lyrical by this point. I'm still not sure quite where any of it came from, besides being vaguely aware of Lydon and Levene's eclectic influences, but it seems to foreshadow Einstürzende Neubauten of all things, at least in terms of crushing atmospherics derived from flawlessly recorded and immediately recognisable sound sources captured with pseudo-classical clarity.

I vaguely recall some radio interview from the time during which the lads expressed dismay at Adam & the Ants having produced such a relatively weedy sound despite having two drummers, and in light of this monster, they had a point. I'm trying to think of something so heavily reliant upon just percussion as was The Flowers of Romance which came anywhere close to sounding so powerful, but I'm drawing mostly blanks.

Speed Garage Anthems volume two (1988)

I realise it's ancient history, and that when it was brand spanking new it was almost certainly as seen on TV, but I couldnae gi' twa shites. Keeping in mind that music appreciation is entirely subjective, this double disc was nevertheless as good as dance music ever got so far as I'm concerned. I'm not saying it was all downhill from hereon, but this compilation represents the point at which my dance boner achieved its greatest density. Conversely, I recall a degree of sneering dispensed in the general direction of speed garage, or 2-step, or just garage or whatever you want to call it. Chavs, welfare recipients, trainee mechanics and people who worked in high street supermarkets listened to garage and danced around their working class handbags to it at the weekend, with nary a media studies degree student to be seen unless engaged in some sort of anthropological survey. They probably didn't even read Mixmag, for fuck's sake.

From my perspective, by the mid nineties, popular music had mostly degraded into an undifferentiated chantalong mass of turdy indie shite performed by young men with ironic seventies haircuts, and yet I still required something by which to occupy my ears at work and keep me sane during those long, long hours of trudging around in the pissing wind and rain. Radio 1 was unlistenable, as were most of the music stations. Danny Baker hadn't yet taken over the breakfast slot at GLR, and Radio 4 got on my tits, leaving just Kiss 100 FM on the grounds that I could pick it up on my Walkman radio and Steve Jackson hadn't yet been replaced by a complete fucking tool; and this was the sort of thing Jackson played, regardless of whether or not you had a clue what you were listening to, and regardless of it being eight in the morning; and being London based, it really felt like our thing.

Without my bothering to look anything up on Wikipedia, speed garage seemed to be eighties deep house sped up a couple of notches with a few other elements chucked in - R&B, breakbeat, even a touch of jungle, whatever got the job done. It worked like acid by virtue of intense repetition, but with sounds combining the rich vocalisations of soul with the blunted sine waves and filtered sound of 8-bit games, forming a composite which would eventually mutate into grime, dubstep and others. Above all, what distinguished this music was the skipping rhythm straying from the solid 4/4 of pretty much everything else spawned of house music. I've digitally slowed it down in hope of working out what the fuck it's actually doing, but that beat differs from one track to the next, sometimes working with an offbeat, sometimes with hi-hats in a triple time signature, sometimes resembling a traditional reggae rhythm once reduced to a less manic pace. If the squelch of the TB-303 formed the core of acid - the element which draws you in, even transports you - with 2-step, it's that weird sped up clatter of hi-hat.

I picked this one up because it seemed to include most of the greats - Double 99, Ruff Driverz, Dreem Team, Industry Standard, 187 Lockdown, Roy Davies Jnr. and Armand van Helden's version of Spin Spin Sugar which must surely count as one of the greatest remixes of all time. It's over two and a half hours with one track morphing seamlessly and euphorically into the next, and with only a couple of lulls on the second disc where someone threw in a more radio friendly sub-techno hit presumably for the sake of the sales pitch - Bobby Brown and the endlessly overrated Faithless being the worst offenders; but the whole is so fucking powerful that a couple of dips below the average don't seem to make any difference. More than twenty years later, I stick this on and I'm back in south-east London in the pissing rain eating fried chicken - but in a good way - and it still sounds as fresh as the day it was spawned. So much for dance music as an ephemeral form.

Howling Larsons & Nikolaos Lymperopoulos - Poemandres (2021)

Occasionally there will be a piece of music of such self-contained power as to inform the suspicion that any comment one might offer will be essentially dog shit; and that's what we have here. I've known Alan Trench for a long time, and on the last occasion of our being together in the same room, he'd remarried and bought a house on a Greek island with the intention of living there in response to some seemingly mysterious calling. I say house, but I had the impression that it was actually a pile of rubble and the newlyweds would need to undertake some renovation work - and by renovation, I mean things like electricity, running water, and basic plumbing. Anyway, they seemed to know what they were doing, and it sounded exciting in a massively reckless sort of way.

Another couple of years down the line and it seems to have worked out well for Alan and Rebecca, now recording as the Howling Larsons - amongst other wilfully tangential names - and they've produced this, a collaboration with one Nikolaos Lymperopoulos who I'm sure Alan described as their next door neighbour, a man who just happened to be fluent in ancient Greek. It sounds unlikely, but this sort of thing seems to become fairly commonplace once you achieve a certain remove from locales with shopping malls; and in any case, this album definitely derives from somewhere outside the familiar, mainstream reality. Poemandres is nearly an hour of Lymperopoulos reading, chanting, and intoning as follows.

The ancient Greek text, a revelation of the creation of the Universe and the fate and nature of Man, is presented here in the original, using the Byzantine intonation method. This has long been considered one of the most important, and certainly the most famous, documents of the Corpus Hermeticum. The music, performed as a ritual piece, draws the listener into one of the most important mind-states of the Ancient World.

...and that really is what it does, underscoring the spoken account with a powerful devotional drone of church organ and other elements hidden further down in the mix to produce something which actually achieves the promises made elsewhere on Current 93's proverbial tin without the emphasis on crap tattoos and pierced todgers. This is because the Howling Larsons took a different route to many of their showier, better publicised contemporaries in moving to Greece and just getting the fuck on with it. Remember all those [name diplomatically withheld because he's probably reading] albums wherein the lad pretends to be a thirteenth century monk by whacking the decay of his digital reverb up to five minutes? Well, this is the real thing.

Coldsore - En Dolor y Rebelión (2021)

The recent rebirth of Sterile Records brings a welcome return to Nigel Ayers' stewardship of a label which releases work of persons other than members of Nocturnal Emissions; which may seem a strange point to make and I'm certainly not disparaging Earthly Delights as anything other than the home of the hits, but Sterile issued some weird and wonderful stuff back in the early days - Controlled Bleeding, Maurizio Bianchi, and others - and it's always nice to have someone else coming through.

Naturally I'd never heard of Coldsore, but a minute or so of the first track on the Bandcamp page was enough for me to be sure, and now I've been listening to this thing for the best part of a week. They're from Finland, they make a noise, and they're politically progressive - which makes for a nice change. This one is inspired by and dedicated to the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico - which gets a thumbs up from me, obviously. Coldsore's tumblr page seems to make reference to something called doomdrone, which I'll ignore because labelling gets on my tits, although there are probably worse descriptions. What we have are two lengthy pieces of approximately thirty minutes each, utilising electronic and possibly environmental sounds - nothing resembling an instrument, or even suggesting that you could plug a keyboard into it. It's the ambient howl of factories and processing plants abstracted to the point of resembling music, so even if it's not exactly tuneful, there are notes which do what notes customarily do and the effect is powerfully haunting, even moving in an emotional sense without coming too close to anything you might call noise. For the sake of making the usual lazy comparisons, En Dolor y Rebelión isn't a million miles from Nocturnal Emissions more droning efforts - at least in terms of mood - although there's an element which reminds me of Einstürzende Neubauten for reasons I can't quite pin down, a sense of space perhaps. It doesn't feel like something generated from within a metal box. I seem to have ended up listening to quite a lot of atonal things this year, and this is undoubtedly one of the best.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd (1973)

Typographic jiggery pokery usually gets on my tits when it comes to music artists and their work, but Skynyrd get a pass because 1) it was the seventies, and 2) it's fuckin' Skynyrd, dude - get a grip. In the event of that having been an H.M. Bateman sound effect I just heard, and because I suppose we have to get it out of the way - no they weren't; it was the record company's idea; no it isn't; Neil Young himself admitted it had been a dick move on his part; and anything else you may feel you need to know is explained in detail on the internet, most of which is fairly easy to find.

I first discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd when I heard Free Bird on the radio back in the eighties. I'd missed the beginning of the song and the DJ didn't bother to name names once it was over, and it took me a couple of years to work out what I'd taped - because it had seemed worth taping. Initially I thought it was some lost Bowie number from the Ziggy Stardust era. The vocal didn't sound quite right but the guitar was definitely something in the vein of Mick Ronson, or so it seemed to me.

Eventually the penny dropped and I also added Sweet Home Alabama to the tally of still guilty pleasures, or at least pleasures which some bigger boys had explained were to be considered guilty; so I picked up a greatest hits CD on the cheap, half expecting it to comprise two admittedly sublime songs in amongst a whole passel of gun toting anthems to slave ownership, that being the narrative one tends to find affixed to Lynyrd Skynyrd; and being white working class guys from the south, it doesn't really matter if it's true or not because it probably is - so we're habitually told. Unfortunately, it turned out that every single track on the disc was amazing - not even merely listenable, but as unto pure spun gold plucked from the harps of a heavenly host of particularly bluesy angels; and so now, realising I've wasted most of my life by not listening to this band, I'm backtracking; and the first album seemed like a good place to start.

Anticipating a couple of admittedly sublime singles in amongst a half hour of twanging sounds of lesser substance, I'm once again surprised and even humbled to realise how great this band were at the height of their powers. This was post-sixties guitar rock drawn heavily from the blues, but drawn by dudes who lived that stuff on a daily basis and who learned it from the stoops and porches of the wrinkled old guys who came up with it because the wrinkled old guys who came up with it lived in the same neighbourhood; meaning Skynyrd were a very different affair to Clapton and those taking a cheap if expertly played holiday in someone else's tradition, because this was a continuation, part of the same heritage, and it was anything but colonisation. Not only do you listen to this music, but you feel it in all parts of your body because it communicates to heart and soul with such intensity as to amount to a direct link to whatever went into these songs, which are so fresh and clear that they could have been laid down only yesterday; and I didn't even realise this kind of music could do that, even the whiskey soaked honkytonk numbers. This also means that Lynyrd Skynyrd may be one of the most unfairly maligned groups in the history of music, at least regarding the idea that there could be even so much as a whiff of anything which people who went to better schools might declare to be racism; but as I've come to appreciate since I first arrived in Texas, some people simply don't like the south, and their disdain is such as to sustain all of the usual stereotypes without trial. Honestly, aside from the sheer pleasure of being part of the right gang, I suspect it's down to fear. No-one likes to be reminded of the underclass, particularly those who've either escaped or insulated themselves from it, and they particularly dislike that underclass trying to tell them anything.

Well, have you ever lived down in the ghetto?
Have you ever felt the cold wind blow?
Well, if you don't know what I mean,
Won't you stand up and scream?
'Cause there's things goin' on that you don't know.

Too many lives they've spent across the ocean.
Too much money been spent upon the moon.
Well, until they make it right,
I hope they never sleep at night.
They better make some changes,
And do it soon.

I was told to expect something from the depths of hillbilly hell, and against all expectations this turns out to be one of the most powerful, heartfelt, and expressive rock albums I think I've ever heard - musically, emotionally, even spiritually if you like. I just wish it hadn't taken me a whole four decades to reach this understanding.

Campbell / Mallinder / Benge - Clinker (2021)

I've been listening to a lot of Cabaret Voltaire since the death of Richard H. Kirk, and because I'm a pedant who becomes physically aroused at the mere thought of things arranged in alphabetical or chronological sequence, I started with 1974-76, working my way through, one album at a time and incorporating the singles so as to get some sort of overview of their progression. Interestingly enough - at least to me - there were a few surprises, not least being that The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord isn't anything like so great as I remember; and there were even a few revelations - patterns I wouldn't have noticed from listening to an individual record. Most blatant was how little they ever truly owed to rock music, which I state having once regarded Mix-Up as essentially a much weirder take on the Velvet Underground; and conversely how much they owed to black music, James Brown, soul and so on. The influence was never hidden, and was expressed most vividly in Cabaret Voltaire's propensity for extended beat driven jams - grooves rather than songs; but it's easy to get lost in all of the weirdy effects and treated percussion and to lose sight of this element, and of how fundamental it always was to their sound.

Clinker isn't Cabaret Voltaire, but it continues the journey through the presence of one of their number, reaffirming the vision through collaboration with parallel travellers. As with the Wrangler albums, the sound is quite dry, relatively clean compared to Mallinder's previous group, with effects used sparingly, allowing the analogue electronic sound to breath. Julie Campbell's unashamedly funky guitar serves as a perfect complement to the electronics yielding what is essentially a disco record in a reasonably traditional sense but for the absence of backing singers - and by disco I mean that warm sound with the congas and glitterballs, yet remaining awkward and left-field, and without sounding like a retread - imagine Marshall Hain's Dancing in the City stepped up a few beats and with androids as much welcome on the dance floor as anyone else.

It would be unfair to single out Mallinder as uniquely responsible for how great this record is - particularly given the presence of the other two and that the overall sound is much closer to Campbell's Lonelady than to anything of Mal's previous bunch, but for a man with a back catalogue extending into three figures, this may be one of the best things with which he's ever been involved.

Come - Rampton (1979)

I suspect the increasing ubiquity and multiplication of noise artists may have somewhat reduced the impact of the form in certain respects. My first encounter with Whitehouse, for example, was in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine contemporary with the release of Psychopathia Sexualis - so about 1982, I guess. The first thing which struck me as weird was that I'd never heard of this band and yet they seemed to have quite a following. They sounded absolutely terrifying, the music papers refused to write about them, and Rough Trade wouldn't stock their records, and so it was inevitable that I should at least wonder. Forty years later and I'm still not sure what I think about Whitehouse - or even that what I think about Whitehouse really matters - but Come seemed initially promising.

Come was William Bennett's first attempt to scare the living shit out of the public following his exit from Essential Logic, and might therefore be regarded as a formative version of Whitehouse. I thought Come Sunday 2 on the Für Ilse Koch compilation album was terrific, a vertiginously flanged swirl of understated menace reminding me very much of Gristle's live material, so I bought the 7" - effectively the first version of Come Sunday - and discovered the compilation track to be the single fed through a powerful effects pedal. Without the benefit of the aforementioned powerful effects pedal, it was kind of clean, very minimal, and just sounded a bit odd. I still probably would have given Rampton a shot, but Come Organisation vinyl was selling out within weeks of release by that point; and I didn't have much faith in the cassette versions, having originally purchased the tape of Für Ilse Koch and listened to William Bennett pissing about in one channel for the duration, presumably running off the copies on his home stereo little realising he still had one microphone plugged in - watching a bit of telly, making a cup of tea, playing guitar and so on. It was amusing but I traded it in for the vinyl.

Anyway, getting to the point, here's Rampton once again, nicely remastered and pressed, the cover printed rather than photocopied, and me not having to pay four hundred dollars for a copy. I wasn't massively impressed with the Come Sunday 7" but was assured of it being the weakest track on what is an otherwise decent record, and so curiosity caught up with me; and the whole is actually stranger than I expected, possibly not so much for what it does, as for what I expected it to do, which it doesn't. Lest we should have forgotten, William Bennett is a pretty decent guitarist, and Rampton is mostly angular guitar riffage with Daniel Miller playing a bass synth and someone pounding out a pseudo-tribal rhythm on a couple of floor toms. Vocals are way down in the mix and tend to be vocalisations rather than singing. The whole is surprisingly minimal and lacking in effects, excepting a light slapback echo on the vocal, and somehow - and I'm assuming here that it's on purpose - this is its power. This unsettling quality is the fledgling form of all that feedback and implied violence because, no matter how many thousands of industrial music rarities you may have accumulated over the past few centuries, the initial most logical reaction to this record is holy shit, what the fuck am I listening to?

Bennett has cited Yoko Ono's Don't Worry, Kyoko as a significant influence on Rampton, which I can definitely see although this is, frankly, a much better record. The vocals, perhaps not on purpose, are vaguely ridiculous upon close inspection, mostly the sort of lines we used to come out with in the playground when impersonating the mentally ill, and yet somehow this makes the record additionally disturbing when combined with those jagged shards of guitar - regarding which, it's easy to hear why he was asked to join Siouxsie & the Banshees as replacement for John McKay.

Rampton doesn't quite stick its fingers down your throat as did Whitehouse, but there's a powerful sense of something wrong on this record, so much so as to overcome what initially seem like limitations, and even Come Sunday sounds better in the context of the whole. The only wobble, at least for me, comes with the use of tracks from side two of the BBC's Sound Effects volume thirteen - Death & Horror, an assortment of screams seguing into heavy breathing, then more screams as Rampton comes to a close. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone I knew in the DIY tape scene of the time had at least one track featuring those same screams, and naturally I'd done it myself, so hearing that the Master of the Overviolence also went there, admittedly a year or so before the rest of us arseholes, is akin to discovering that Lemmy briefly presented Blue Peter back in the sixties.

Never mind. I'm very glad to have heard this regardless, and should Susan Lawly see fit to stick out either In Country or I'm Jack, I'm certainly curious.