uncarved.org blog

NOT THE REAL BEYOND THE iMPLODE: 7″ EXPLOSION PT 1.

Martin, with an outstanding series of posts about his fave sevens, what they mean to him, when and where he got them. Top stuff – 6 installments so far…

Click here for a complete list of entries in the series  ”the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

6) Marillion, Aylesbury Civic Centre 28/12/86

This was an Xmas fan club gig, in the band’s home town. Yes, I was in the Marillion fan club as well. Jesus. Probably only for a year though, if that helps.

The fan club was called “The Web” after a song on their first LP. It commences, with typical pomp:

The rain auditions at my window
Its symphony echoes in my womb
My gaze scans the walls of this apartment
To rectify the confines of my tomb

I remember its name only because some spectacularly shit policing linked this fact with the horrific “Ealing vicarage rape” earlier in the year. The scumbag attacker had a tattoo of spider’s web, like hundreds, possibly thousands, of skinheads – none of whom would have had much time for Marillion. The fan club agreed to help the cops with their enquiries, as I guess anybody would even if the investigation was clearly going down completely the wrong track. I remember discussing all this with my parents over Sunday lunch.

Anyway, as well as a possible knock on the door from the old bill, fan club membership got you a magazine and the odd newsletter. And the chance to attend an exclusive gig, strickly fi de ‘ardcore.

Unfortunately I can’t remember too much about the night because I have blanked it from my mind. This bit of light repression is because I now find recalling the event more embarrassing than associating it with having been in the fan club of an 80s prog rock band. We heckled the support band. They were rubbish, we were pissed. We probably had a load of teenage sneery punkish hormones racing round our bodies. They were friends of the headliners and… they were just boring blokey rock. So we hung around at the back and shouted the odd comment, I can’t remember what. Except for one thing.

There were I think a number of asides to the audiences between songs, which is a bit much for a support band. One of them concerned the drummer being involved with a car crash and being out of action for a good while. To my eternal shame we responded to this by shouting “we don’t care!”. I am cringing right now, typing that.

I’m sure by this time the band and most of the rest of the audience had realised we were pissed twats and proceeded to carry on as if we weren’t there. In many other gigs I have attended since, this sort of behaviour might have resulted in a severe kicking. So it’s Marillion fans: 1, me: nil, in the tolerance and goodwill stakes.

The rest of the night passed in a drunken blur. There was possibly more friction between fans and band during “Kayleigh”. One of my mates’ Dads kindly drove us home. It was the last time I ever saw Marillion. By the time their next album “Clutching At Straws” came out, I was much less easily impressed. This was down to the fact that the quantity and quality of gigs I attended in 1987 would be immeasurably greater than what had gone before…

Click here for a complete list of entries in the series  ”the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

4) Ultravox, Wembley Arena 5/11/86

Barrel-scraping time. This was Ultravox well after their peak, touring an album (U-Vox) that even their die-hard fans regard as rubbish.

I had mixed feelings about going to the gig but said Ultravox fan was well up for it, obviously. And then was hospitalised with something very nasty shortly beforehand (I can’t remember what, but we went to visit him in an isolation ward).

So I ended up going on my own. I was walking down the street trying to get people to buy my spare ticket (which was near impossible as everyone had them already) and managed to walk into a bollard, crushing my balls mid-sentenc. People laughed. That was the way I rolled as an awkward teenager in the 80s on the mean streets of Wembley.

I eventually sold the ticket to a tout for about 6 and a half pence. The support band were Terraplane, who I remember thinking were shit. I was seated about as far back as it is possible to be in Wembley Arena – i.e. probably in a different postcode to the stage.

The ‘Vox did a passable set of old and (shudder) new material. I am sure Midge Ure was on form.

It was Guy Fawkes night and I was on my own at the back of a fucking aircraft hanger listening to stadium synth pop. I have never been back to Wembley Arena since that night.

5) New Model Army, Town & Country Club 23/12/86

OK so perhaps this gig looks like a bit of a leap. I doubt many of the people who at the Ultravox show made it here as well. I’d been steadily falling under the spell of slightly punkier music. Tapes of Bauhaus and the Sex Pistols had been circulating at school. Parents were being pestered into buying DMs and leather jackets…

Until this point I’d had no idea about punk except seeing something about one of the Sex Pistols being sick at an airport on the news. The few punks that St Albans had to offer seemed incredibly exotic with their mad hair and slogans painted on their backs.

It was angry and there were lots of swearwords and it was definitely better than Midge Ure.

I’d hooked up with this guy at school called Wal. He had originally come to my attention when it was rumoured that he’d taken on his whole class during a woodwork lesson. With a large bit of wood. We bonded over music and hung around a lot, eventually venturing into the local gothy coterie.

Wal seemed like a natural punk to me, he was prone to spontaneity and getting into trouble. He brought me out of myself quite a bit. He ended up really badly falling out with his parents and living in a tent in a mate’s garden. At one point he stole his parent’s car while they were away on holiday (“don’t have any parties, don’t use the car”) . We went on a week-long jaunt to the south coast, sleeping in said car in multistoreys.

So Wal and I headed down to the gig on the train. New Model Army are the godfathers of a particular strain of “crusty” – all that celtic tribalism and tats and jewelry. (Didn’t chart pop sensations The Levellers emerge out of their following or something?) They had a slightly odd puritanical streak to them. And wore clogs.

Some years later when I was a student one of my housemates invited a bunch of New Model Army fans to stay. The noise of their fucking clogs going up and down the stairs was some way beyond my fairly elastic definition of acceptable behaviour for guests.

I can’t remember anything much about the gig.

Click here for a complete list of entries in the series  ”the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

2) Midge Ure Wembley Arena 23/12/85

Back to the Arena, two days before Xmas. I had another school friend who was a big Ultravox fan. He used to regularly curse Joe Dolce whose accordion-bothering “Shaddap You Face” had kept “Vienna” off the number 1 spot in the UK charts.

I thought Ultravox were alright – all those moody synths, overcoats and big words. More on them anon, though. I vaguely recall the queue being flyered by young women in skimpy Santa Claus outfits. Stuff like that makes an impression on you when you’re 16.

The support act was Belouis Some – the great wannabe pop star of the era who never really made it. His one big hit “Imagination” has the classic first line “she lit a cigarette, both hands behind her back” which sounds either glamorous or like a fire hazard depending on your cynicism. It’s here on youtube, but any info on what he is doing now has eluded me. His set was alright but I remember being quite down on his attempts to get everyone to put their hands in the air.

This gig was part of Midge Ure’s post-Live Aid solo career and wasn’t really all that. The place was half full and lacked the atmosphere of the Howard Jones gig. We were sitting up in a balcony miles away from the stage, so we had a better view of the gaps in the audience than the, uh, “action”.

I couldn’t remember what was played, but a quick google turned up “Sleepwalk” (Ultravox), “Fade To Grey” (Visage, which Midge was also in) and “No Regrets” (Scott Walker, which he had released as a solo single many years earlier). I remember quite liking “The Gift” (the album Midge was promoting), but the setlist looks like a bit of a crisis of confidence in retrospect.

The graphic for the hit single off the album (“If I Was”, Number One for a week) was one of those desk toys where you have a load of shiny silver nails in a frame that you can put your hand in and “wooh!” it leaves an impression of a hand in there. That probably sums up a lot of the stadium pop of the time – executive desk toys. Youtube link.

A dodgy download of the album confirms my worst suspicions – dangerously portentious wordy business. There are a lot of cringeworthy lyrics about teenage alienation though:

“She tries to understand what her father preaches / She wants to live a life that a new world teaches”
(She Cried)

“The boy is listening to those records from the past / he wants to make them last / for they make him feel alive / they are the voices of the faces on the wall / he listens to them all / hangs on every little tale they tell [...] one day he even cut their names upon his skin / they mean that much to him / his bedroom window opens to the evening air / the fox is in his lair”
(Wasteland)

I even bought a Midge Ure t-shirt. I managed to drop it a few months later whilst walking somewhere or other and by the time I’d retraced my steps someone had ripped it to shreds. (Or maybe it was “the fox out of his lair, walking in the evening air” eh?). I don’t remember being particularly upset by this.

I didn’t know it at the time but somewhere else somebody else was skanking to untold versions of King Jammy’s “sleng teng”. I had a long way to go…

3) Marillion, Milton Keynes Bowl 28/06/86

Yes, yes, what were we thinking, eh? I spent my 17th birthday here. There was a coach from St Albans to Milton Keynes and four of us from my school got on it.

My main memory is that there were loads of blokes with long hair and denim. In fact I have a horrifiying suspicion that my own barnet had moved beyond Howard Jones spikey into a mullety type affair by this point.

Jethro Tull played “Living In The Past” which I suddenly realised Midge Ure had also covered at the previous gig. I remember someone referring to them as “The Tull” in a Brummie accent.

But I can’t remember anything about the Mama’s Boys, which either means they were middle of the road nonsense, or were so dire I have blanked them from my mind in an act of psychic self defence. Things improved slightly when we struck up the courage to try and get some cider. In retrospect it’s pretty obvious that nobody at these events really gives a toss who they are selling alcohol to as long as you can physically see over the counter. At the time it seemed very daring, ha ha.

Magnum were OK, my rockier mates liked them and they’d even played St Albans Civic Centre I think. (Other fixtures including Hawkwind and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts – all these rockers would come out of the woodwork from surrounding villages…)

Six years after the great secondary school two tone / heavy metal wars, we were a lot more tolerant of musical diversity. I was never that into “rock” and I’m sure some of our crew were never convinced by Marc Almond. Everything was a negotiation, alliances shifted. But a day out was a day out, always riddled with exciting possibilities.

Having said that, Gary Moore was fucking bollocks, obviously. Wanking about with a guitar and big hair. Parisian Walkways and all that. I liked to think of myself as open-minded back then, but I was 100% certain about that not being my bag.

I liked Marillion though.

Perhaps it was that faux sophistication thing again – lots of wordy lyrics and worldly songs about the horrors of war and bad women and messed up situations. And weird proggy little musical freakouts. Oh and those dark bits of sleeve art with jesters lurking in dark bedsits looking abject.

Marillion was the first thing I ever heard on a Sony Walkman. Some kid smuggled his onto the school sports field and we sat around waiting patiently for our turn. It sounded pretty amazing – properly inside your head, loud and majestic and all that. Another dodgy download confirms that it was in fact a load of boshing drums, senselessly tweaky keyboard solos and sixth form poetry.

Marillion were the antithesis of punk (apart from the odd “fuck” in the lyrics), but you forget how popular this stuff was (and is) when you spend your time on more tasteful pursuits – Milton Keynes Bowl has a capacity of 65,000 and it was pretty rammed.

I bought a t-shirt, yes sirree. It had a little drummer boy on it and big yellow Marillion logo. Somewhere there is probably photographic evidence of me with a mullet, wire-framed specs and a Marillion t-shirt. I’ve always had that kind of effortlessly stylish glamour about me, I can tell you.

I think I knew all the words to the songs as well. In fact I can still recall something like “gracefully polluting satellite infested heavens” right now, 23 years later.

We were half cut by the time they came on. I’m sure everyone over 18 was ripped to the gills. We were all outside, under clear skies as the sun was setting – watching one of our favourite bands. Fish was a great frontman.

So we all sang along to all the wordy words in every song. Except “Kayleigh” – even Marillion fans refused to stand for that.

Click here for a complete list of entries in the series  ”the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

So (deep breath) here is the first installment as promised…

1) Howard Jones, Wembley Arena, 17/4/85

My first ever gig, at the tender age of 15. Me and some mates from school. We were all very excited.

Howard Jones, though? Well, I’d been obsessed with “synth pop” since seeing Soft Cell and The Human League on Top of The Pops, but hadn’t been of the age to go to their gigs, right? And to the teen me, Howard Jones seemed like a continuation of that.

For those who don’t know him, Howard was a solo artist from Aylesbury (another London commuter-belt town) who experienced quite a bit of chart success in the mid 80s alongside similar artists like Nik Kershaw. I hated Nik Kershaw, though, obviously, because he wasn’t as good as (i.e. was too similar to) Howard Jones.

I even spiked my hair up like him and took to wearing an overcoat (no blonde for me though, that seemed like a step too far). It was to be the first of many unfortunate hair choices in my life, more about which in due course.

Anyway, the video for his first single “New Song” is on youtube. It features some nice footage of Holborn tube station and some digs at grown ups in suits, ha ha.

It was pop, it was of the moment. It has of course aged particularly badly. You can see with these early gigs, how the teenage me was into stuff that seemed sophisticated but was actually really trite. Howard had a load of songs about the injustices of the world and how everyone should just get along or see through their petty materialist illusions.

The first album, Human’s Lib, had been on rotation on the family cassette radio when I was washing up. Except I had to turn it off when one of the tracks on side two came on because it started “sometimes I’d like to go to bed with a hundred women and men”. I also used to own all his singles on 12″ and as previously confessed, this picture disc:

This gig was part of the tour to support the second album Dream Into Action, which included tunes like “Like To Get To Know You Well” and “Things Can Only Get Better” that in retrospect are a bit more “stadium synthpop” than his debut.

The gig itself was the loudest thing I’d ever heard at the time and there were loads of girls there. I was well happy. I bought a shit load of merchandise including a t-shirt, a metallic badge and a tour programme. I shudder to think how much money I’ve put in Howard’s pockets over the years, come to think of it.

I really enjoyed myself, we all did – finally seeing someone you’d listened to on a daily basis in the flesh… Our idol dedicated one song to all of us in the crowd who had fallen for our mate’s girlfriend/boyfriend. We all cheered, even though we hadn’t.

I love how this crap photo of the gig has now come into its own because it clearly shows the dodgy haircuts everyone had in the audience. It says here on the envelope that it was taken by my friend Tom.

As you can see, we were in the fourth row at Wembley Arena. How come? Well, because a mate and me were both in the Howard Jones fan club. Christ, how bad is that?

I guess that was the beginning of my musical nerdery and thoroughness – it wasn’t like you could just get on Howard’s myspace in 1985. Smash Hits only came out fortnightly in them days! You’d end up sending away a lot of stamped addressed envelopes and hassling your parents to write cheques for you just so you could be sent the odd badly photocopied newsletter. Which, without belabouring the point, you were chuffed to receive. There was no information overload, so the gaps in our knowledge were filled with speculations, fantasies. That gap is pre-filled these days with all the usual trainspottery dross on tap, with added celebrity culture if you are especially unlucky.

Anyway, for the sake of a few quid we got some fantastic seats.

We walked back to the tube station very happy, amongst a throng of people singing songs we’d all just heard. Somehow we managed to balls up reading the timetable and missed a few trains back to Hertfordshire. We didn’t care. My ears were ringing for a couple of days afterwards.

Howard and me slowly drifted apart, but my parents still receive the occasional postcard from his agents about what he is up to, two decades later. Listening to some of his tunes today is quite jarring – I still know many of them inside out, but they are remarkably shrill and preachy, even by mid 80s standards. Perhaps the most lasting legacy was that one of his instrumental b-sides was called “Tao Te Ching” and got me interested in the works of Lao Tzu…

Obviously part of me would rather that my first gig was something like Paul Meme sneaking into The Clash, but I’m too old to worry about my past. Writing this has brought back all sorts of memories – you forget how intense everything is when you’re 15. Howard Jones wasn’t cool even at the time – and neither was I.

And yes, the gig did feature rather literal performance artist Jed “throwing off” his “mental chains” woo woo woo.

An occasional series of posts in which any semblance of my credibility is blown out of the water.

As die-hard anti-capitalists, it’s curious how often music bloggers end up stuck in the rut of expanding their cultural capital. Yes yes, you saw it first, you know more, you have more records, you have a better analysis, you’re The Man. And always so tasteful.

Few find the time to write about aspects of their lives which might detract from their cred. Even the “ten records hiding at the back of your collection that no grown man should own” meme ended up being an exercise in wacky popism rather than abject embarrassment. Because we’ve already purged our collections of the really awful stuff – as part of the process of reinventing ourselves as dashing young things rather than spotty teenagers.

Maybe it’s time for a potlatch?

An envelope full of totally bonkers memory-recall turned up recently. Little squares of paper with dates and band names on them.

Squares of paper from a time in my life where I changed from being a polite boy who toed the line, into a polite teenager with a head full of weird ideas. Who wasn’t quite so sure about that line he’d been toeing…

I grew up in St Albans, a relatively well-to-do commuter belt town famous for its roman ruins. St Albans is about 45 minutes north of London by train on a bad day.

In the autumn of 1980 I started at a comprehensive school which had still had delusions about being a grammar. For example, they didn’t let girls go there. My parents thought this would help me to concentrate on my school work, but instead I found all sorts of other stuff to distract me. It was in many ways a classically nerdy childhood – comics, computer games, mates, science fiction… and music.

School was tribal. In my first year, you were either into two-tone OR heavy metal. Friends from primary school were suddenly all into heavy metal and so of course was I. At least to the extent of wearing a Judas Priest badge, but not knowing any of their songs. I liked Madness and The Specials more, but couldn’t admit to it. I liked Soft Cell and The Human League even more than that, which would have united both rockers and rude boys against me, had it been made public knowledge.

Later that year, I was given my first transistor radio as a Christmas present (Jonah Lewie’s “Stop the Cavalry” is the first song it played me – I was thrilled). At some point a clunky mono portable cassette player followed, which meant I could record my favourite tunes by pressing its tiny built-in microphone up close to the radio’s tinny loudspeaker.

I remember especially liking Tony Blackburn’s Saturday morning radio show for kids. He’d play novelty tunes like Captain Beaky, but also proper hardcore stuff like Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five’s “The Message”. In a parallel universe, hearing that record turned me into an instant b-boy with a catalogue of credible teenage experiences. In this one, it was just another great tune.

I’d spend Sunday nights polishing my shoes and making a vat of sandwiches for my school packed lunch for the whole week. (4 sets of which would then go in the freezer and be thawed out each night. Yes, they tasted disgusting, but I couldn’t be arsed making fresh sandwiches every morning.) During this weekly ritual I’d listen to the Top 40 rundown on Radio 1, occasionally rushing up to record something or other. I didn’t feel like my home taping was “killing music” because I was also spending virtually all of my money on music. Even, at times, money which my parents had given me to buy clothes.

The first album I bought was Adam and The Ants – “Kings of The Wild Frontier”, on cassette, from Woolworths. Many more followed, but I was always really excited by the idea of seeing bands in the flesh, alongside a mass of like-minded fans…

It is fair to say that my first gigs were not by people whose music has aged as well as Adam and The Ants or Grandmaster Flash…

Click here for a complete list of entries in the series  ”the first 23 gigs I can remember going to”.

Warrior in woolworths
Humble he may seem
Behind his serville innocence
He plots and he schemes

Woolworths, one of the UK’s longest running high street general stores, has recently gone into administration. This has heralded much discussion of the guts being ripped out of the “traditional British High Street” – discussions which are underlined with a heavy dose of nostalgia for times gone by.

It’s wrong to stick the boot in when someone is on the ground but my local branch has seemed a bit directionless for years - an uninspiring array of DVDs and computer games, piles of remaindered books and a bargain basement selection of kitchen equipment and kids’ clothes. The toys selection is (was?) OK, so our main reason for visiting has been to sort out material for kids’ birthday parties.

Warrior in woolworths
His roots are in today
Doesn’t know no history
He threw the past away

It wasn’t always thus. Pre-internet and even pre-catalogue shops like Argos, Woolies was pretty exciting. As a small child there was something wondrous about the vast layers of sweets in the “pick and mix” section – something which united kids and pensioners alike. In fact I remember being profoundly shocked, as a child, when I saw an ancient old man shoplifting from the pick ‘n’ mix – my whole perception of old people being respectable and boring was completely shattered! We exchanged glances and I’m sure my expression changed from horror to a wry smile…

In the early eighties Woolworths became a sort of pseudo living room for me on Saturday mornings. They had all the consumer durables that were absent from my family home. An Atari video game which was sometimes left on with joysticks attached (but usually without). Racks of seven inch singles – the entire Top 40 mapped out in picture sleeves. And the focal point – a large TV monitor with a showreel playing highlights of the VHS video cassettes that were for sale. This was in the days when there were only 3 channels on the telly and probably before the inception of breakfast TV. (My daughter simply doesn’t believe this.)

The showreel was a series of hints – little slabs of media which would fire your imagination but never satisfy. Bob Hoskins shouting and a pub exploding in “The Long Good Friday”, Freddie Mercury gyrating in skin-tight leather for the video of “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”, and some films which were probaby straight-to-video, like one I remember about a vigilante truck driver who went around terrorising kids who were interfering with the ambulance signals with their CB radios. Some Saturdays there would be a crowd of us watching it all the way through, maybe more than once.

My local “Our Price” was an intimidating place to be for a twelve year old – lots of towering teenagers in leather jackets, a bewlidering array of arcane material, surly counter staff. Of course I fell in love with the place a few years later, but Woolworths had a much more homely feel to it.

And so it came to be that one Saturday I reached up and handed over my saved up pocket money to the unthreateningly mumsy woman behind the counter and got a copy of Adam and The Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” on cassette in return. My first album, which I still have 28 years later. It still sounds great, too. Well, the actual cassette sounds terrible, but the mp3s I downloaded the other day are wicked – top pop tribalism all round.

Warrior in woolworths
Dips on friday nights
Youths meet at Stockwell tube
Weapons rule their lives

Amongst the nostalgia for pick ‘n’ mix there is also a feeling of dread. In an era of uncertainty it is perhaps only natural to look back to a time when things seemed more friendly – when it was less clear that our lives were dictated by forces completely outside our control.

I doubt that the woman who sold me my first album is still working, but her counterparts across the UK have unemployment snapping at their heels. It’s easy to romanticise the bleakness of boarded up shop windows and empty shopping centres populated by punks and skinheads when looking back at the 1980s, but it’s not much fun when that becomes a prospect in the here and now. So, unplug the jukebox…

Any minute now there will be an avalanche of nostalgia about acid house. Maybe there is already, but I am watching the wrong telly and reading the wrong magazines. 20 years is long enough for people to have jettisoned their revolutionary zeal and/or hedonism and Made A Career Out Of It.

“Yes of course we were crazy in those days, we were just doing it for the fun, nobody had a clue what was going on. Oh I remember the sunrise in Ibiza when Tongy faded in that tune”.

Fade to that one shot they always use of people raving it up in a field, blokes with long lank hair and white longsleeve t-shirts. The same as the footage of that punk getting nicked on the Kings Road for having a chain as a belt. The same as that footage of people gently whirling their arms in the air at Hyde Park, faces painted, flowers in their hair.

Fade to a boardroom. Platinum discs. A designer suit. It doesn’t matter how many wrinkles, it doesn’t matter what era the records are from. Shut up and listen!

“We had fun in those days! Now we’re rich, ok? Which is also a kind of fun. Fun fun fun. The drugs/sex/music were better in those days as well. Everything seems so conservative now.”

A smile.

“Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing, by any means”

Fade out to solemn music: use footage of Grosvenor Square / Brixton Riots / Battle of the Beanfield / Criminal Justice Bill demo.

“Nobody really understood what we were doing, you know? I suppose they felt threatened by all us young people together. But I think we changed things, for the better.”

The Madonna clones, the goths, the skinheads, the ravers, the punks, the casuals, the Smiths fans, all having a good time together. But only at the fancy dress birthday party in 2008. There will be no tribal violence tonight. We have moved on from that, at least those of us who perpetrated or suffered it at the time. Maybe if you didn’t then “This Is England” looks glamorous. Authentic. Sexy.

People forget the fear. Finding yourself alone in the wrong part of town, your tribal allegiance broadcast to everyone else. Footsteps, shouting.

And then home, out of breath, for more mundane angst.

what I am doing with my life / am I ever going to get out of here / will it be worse next time / those exams / those girls / those boys / will I ever get a job / is there a god / is the world going to end / am I going mental / why am I such a spacker / am I ever going to have sex with anyone /

Round and round.

People forget the boredom. Waiting. Always waiting for something to happen, for someone to turn up, for life to begin. Years and years and years of school, paper rounds, homework. Looking out of the same window. Having the same arguments with parents, siblings.

People forget. The nostalgia industry helps wash away those painful memories and replaces them with zingy glamour.

Fade to cosmetic advert with a computer-generated consciousness twinkling away as the little black pock marks of trauma dwindle. Confident eyelashes blink.

“Yes! They were exciting, and dare I say it, important times.”

The credits roll. A teenager looks out of the window. Wondering why life is so shit.

Somewhere, somebody else is making a name for themselves. History is being manufactured.

History is made at night: In Defence of Disco – Richard Dyer

An interesting response to the focus on rock music, punk, folk, etc in 70s left circles.

Beyond the Implode: “POPIST!” – a violent story for younger children.

A salutary lesson in what happens if you:

a) take that trajectory too far
b) spend too much time thinking about pop music

Man like Gutta nominated me for this…

It’s a weird one because like Kek, I don’t really feel ashamed about music any more – I’ve almost always been into pop stuff and… other stuff. Anyone who checked the office party mix will know that, right?

So this is more of a “ten records I have trouble justifying to other people”.

10. Rachel Stevens – Come And Get It (2005)

When you’ve seen the rest of the list, it might surprise you that this humble album has been the item which has caused the most vehement disagreements in our house.

I have no fear of owning up to liking Rachel’s earlier stuff like “Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex-”, and the singles off this album are wicked as well. “Some Girls”, “Negotiate With Love” and “So Good” are extraordinarily well-produced slices of sci-fi pop in which the vocalist is almost incidental.

We also have CDs in the flat by the Sugababes, Girls Aloud and Goldfrapp, which I have mentally filed in the same slot. For me, this is just an update to my Soft Cell and Human League records of yesteryear.

Regrettably the better half doesn’t agree and thinks it’s symptomatic of my mid-life crisis looming large in the form of lustful urges towards Ms Stevens. Which would be fine if I was constantly jerking off to her videos on youtube or had bedecked the bedroom with posters of her, but (as I never tire of saying) she isn’t my type and it isn’t about her.

Unfortunately my argument is slightly undermined by the fact that the non-single tunes on the album are rubbish, apart from the one which samples The Cure.

9. Anything by Vagina Dentata Organ

Probably the best example of industrial culture’s overloading of theory at the expense of tunes, Vagina Dentata Organ are more akin to conceptual art (with a nod to Dali) than music. Essentially the work of one man – Jordi Valls, the “group” focussed on releasing limited edition picture discs featuring unnerving field recordings.

Jordi managed to be one of the few people to exist in both of the notoriously antagonistic Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse camps, possibly because he doesn’t seem to give a fuck about politicking. I met him briefly at some TG art opening and he was completely pissed – staggering about and spilling wine everywhere. Admirable.

So anyway, I don’t have any of the picture discs, just one album of wolf noises, one album of motorbike noises and one album featuring the last 40 minutes of 900 members of the People’s Temple committing suicide in Guyana at the behest of Reverend Jim Jones.

It’s not uplifting party music that’s for sure… but I still respect VDO’s sheer bloody-mindedness.

8. Howard Jones – Pearl In The Shell (shaped picture disc, 1984)

So, talking of vinyl fetishism – this was the first vinyl I ever handed over my pocket money for (having previously bought cassettes for me walkman). I actually have a big post about luscious pouting synth-pop sensation Howard saved in ‘draft’ that I should pluck up the courage to unleash on the world.

Suffice to say that the disc is slightly yellowing these days and the music hasn’t aged that well either. Furthermore, my teenage dreams of owning really rare artifacts that future generations would look at with awe lie in tatters and prove that I am a rubbish capitalist.

7. Two Muppet Show albums (1977, 1978)

These are pop culture genius! It’s fair to say that Jim Henson has had more influence on me than punk. The aesthetic of the puppets (notably their garish fur and googly eyes) is still brilliant and the arrangements of the songs on this are perfect – not least because they are delivered with crazed muppet voices. Me and my sister must have played these a thousand times as kids as well as making my parents suffer them recorded onto cassette on interminable pre-M25 car journeys to see in-laws.

My love of huge horn sections (fnarr fnarr) in reggae might come from here too. It’s more playfully surreal than Vagina Dentata Organ could ever hope – songs about the sound of worms, chicken love, the Great Gonzo eating a rubber tyre to the sound of ‘the Flight of the Bumblebee’, it is all here.

So I probably shouldn’t own this, but make no excuses for it. And anyway I’m now able to enjoy it with my daughter…

6. Five ‘christian pop’ albums

Pop music was one of my main vehicles out of believing in all the Church of England stuff I grew up with, so I have a weird fascination with xtian pop and keep meaning to write something about it. (Seriously – I’d love to do a documentary or book.)

For example, there is something quite compelling about this christian response to Crass. What I like about the genre is that it’s obviously all ideologically driven, like anarchopunk and to a lesser extent industrial music, but always manages to get it a bit wrong.

What is also hugely entertaining is that for every xtian rocker there will be some fusty old vicar going on about how they are either great for “the youth” or actually crypto-satanists who are trying to lure kids into a vortex of evil with their primitive carnal rhythms.

Anyway, these records are all great in their own way, but not the sort of thing to play in front of relatives or children.

5. Sheena Easton – 9 To 5 (1980)

Yes yes, she was the first “reality” pop star and went on to get all pervy with Prince. That’s not the whole story for me, really.

I think I must have bought this at some point in the 90s when I was pissed. It cost 70p and was well worth it just for conjuring up all those images of yesteryear. It has that quasi-Nolans trebly singalonga vocal style but it’s the lyrics which drew me in, I think. There is a drudgery about commuting (which is what my Dad did every day) but also this weird hedonistic frisson running underneath it “he works all day, to earn his pay, so we can play all night”. This comes to the fore towards the end:

“I’m crazy, mad for him,
and he’s crazy, mad for me,
When he steps off the train
Amazingly full of fight”

Which I always misheard and thought was Sheena getting all orgasmic at the prospect of commuters engaging in hand to hand combat. I think it just reminds me of St Pancras and London in the old days, a bit grim but full of possibility…

Several years later I was living in a dive in Haringey and saw Sheena on some daytime TV programme with an L.A. accent talking about how she didn’t understand how people could take drugs because it was all about altering your reality and her reality was pretty amazing. As I looked around our living room I decided that going to get some drugs might not be such a bad idea.

4. Twenty Psychic TV live albums (and twelve other ones… er, and a load of singles)

There’s really no excuse for this at all, and I can only apologise profusely to everyone who has ever helped me to move house.

3. Matt Bianco – Get Out of Your Lazy Bed (1983)

Possibly another pissed charity shop purchase, I don’t actually know if I like this or not. It has a weird skank to it and the daaaaaaaa-dooooooooo-da female vocals probably relate in some distorted way to my love for fifties and sixties (and 00′s – see 10 above) girl groups.

It is unforgiveably jaunty, though, and I have to confess to having used it as a weapon of torture one hungover morning fairly early on in my relationship with my better half.

2. Trio – Da Da Da (1982)

This is just genius, proper minimal synthpop with a casiotone and boom-tish drummng. It even eclipses Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman” in the pop art states by having hardly any lyrics in it and then having those lyrics in German on the b-side.

I have this on loud right now and it reminds me of Kraftwerk and the Art of Noise and Suicide and a whole heap of totally credible stuff that isn’t nearly as fucking POP as this. It seems to annoy the shit out of everyone else in the world though – fellow bloggers aside, no doubt

1. A golden 7″ flexi disc by Jonathan King (1978)

Nobody, of any age or gender, should own this record.

Which is probably why I’ve kept the thing. Did you know Jonathan King once stood as an MP? Neither did I until I found this in yet another (probably sober this time) 90s charity shop trawl.

The record is titled “Vote For Yourself For A Change” and seems google-proof. It features the man himself, talking animatedly, accompanied by the music from the Hamlet cigar adverts (which is of course called something, which eludes me now).

He was basically a populist Tory (“what do you think? Let me represent your views in parliament”), but had “liberal moral views”. Exactly how liberal certainly became clearer later.
On a more positive note, I would like to keep this thing going by nominating:

Dubversion

Expletive Deleted

Panda Rescue

I’m fairly sure they are men…