Halloween Special Track of the Week: The Birthday Party: King Ink (1981)

Looking and sounding like they crawled out of a particularly nasty B-movie, The Birthday Party moved from Australia to Britain, only to find the post-punk scene cooling into New Romantic superficiality. So, spouting fire and brimstone, blasphemy, surrealism, dissonance and pure, red, raw screaming energy, they set about to correct the situation. Lead singer Nick Cave was equal parts Rimbaud and Iggy Pop, a ball of anarchic energy spouting forth appropriated Shakespeare quotes and deranged obscenities whilst attacking his audience. Guitarist Rowland S. Howard mixed up damaged garage rock and feral No Wave noise, aided by multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey and chaotic drummer Phil Calvert, all anchored by Tracey Pew's repetitive, creepy bass lines. Thus The Birthday Party became one of the most striking bands of the era, making a truly terrifying din. That's a complement, of course.
'King Ink', like many Birthday Party songs, is a portrayal of a corrupt soul. The song starts off with just Tracey Pew's sinister bass line, sounding like something that crawled out of a swamp, and a continuous, slow, percussive thump. Nick Cave then introduces us to the bizarre eponymous character, a mess of depression, self-doubt, paranoia and mania. There is certainly a Kafka influence in the lyrics, with Cave telling us that 'King Ink feels like a bug / And he hates his rotten shell', an image that is frequently returned to throughout the song. The song is structured around Howard's guitar, which alternates between sparse dissonance, creaking like hinges on an old door and scraping like nails down a chalkboard, and the 'chorus', during which he plays a rickety and scratchy but quite catchy descending riff. The song's creepy atmosphere is accentuated every now and then by sudden and unexpected crack of the snare drum. But then the lyrics get more surreal. Cave manically implores King Ink to wake up, and the band freak out with him, guitar and drums getting faster and faster and more and more unhinged, until they wear themselves out, leaving just the unchanging bass line, over which Cave unleashes an unholy, blood-curdling scream worthy of Iggy Pop on 'Funhouse'. Pop music gets no more wild, sinister or deranged. But it isn't all doom and gloom - as the song winds to the end, bizarrely, we leave King Ink singing 'What a wonderful life' along with Fats Domino on the radio. For The Birthday Party, unlike many of the po-faced Goths who followed in their wake, had a sense of humour. They were a great band, but with the levels of intensity, mania and drug-taking being sky-high, it was never going to last forever. Nick Cave's ego got the better of him, and he split the band, taking Mick Harvey with him to forge a solo career that has produced much excellent music, oddly winding up as a respected singer-songwriter, some miles away from the anarchic punk he started out as. Roland S. Howard went on to solo projects and collaborations with Einsturzende Neubauten and Lydia Lunch, but tragically, Tracey Pew's excessive drink and drug intake lead to his early death as the band was splitting. As the post-punk revival trundles on, becoming more and more processed and safe, it is a shame there aren't more bands out there taking their cue from the passion and intensity of The Birthday Party.

Track of the Week: The Teardrop Explodes: Reward (1981)

“If The Teardrops had not been composed of three (or more) certified screwball sociopaths, they might have been bigger than The Beatles.” Melody Maker

That The Teardrop Explodes actually managed to hold it together for as long as they did is something of a surprise; even more bizarre is the fact that they managed to create some great music and even have considerable success in the charts. Julian Cope, the band's leader, vocalist and bassist, was a student at Liverpool spending most of his time and money on records as diverse as The Seeds and The Doors through to Krautrock and the first tremors of post-punk. At least, when he wasn't generally causing anarchy with his mates. After hanging around in imaginary bands with various future members of Echo and The Bunnymen and The Wah!, Cope eventually got his act together with equally deranged characters, eventually settling on the line-up of Gary Dwyer on drums, Alan Gill on guitar and David Balfe on keyboards. They recorded the brilliant debut album 'Kilimanjaro' and a string of amazing singles before they started taking industrial quantities of pretty much any drug that came into their path, started behaving even more crazily and after the unfocused 'Wilder' album, split up. Julian Cope would go on to have an erratic yet compelling and often brilliant carrier, similarly defined by his musical eclecticism and his wayward behaviour. Seriously, it's worth tracking down a copy of 'Head-On', Cope's memoirs of the punk era and his time in the Teardrops, for the unbelievable lunacy that these guys got up to on a regular basis.
The Teardrop Explodes' music was a bizarre manic synthesis of all of Cope's musical influences, but this was often what made them brilliant, if also providing their Achilles Heel. The 1981 single 'Reward' is perhaps their finest moment. Driven by a Bond-theme bass line and punching brass, and filled out with psychedelic keyboards, it sounds like nothing else, and is certainly miles away from the monochrome austerity of the post-punk movement. It also contains perhaps the greatest opening line of any song ever, in Cope's cheekily sarcastic 'Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news!'. The lyrics continue in typically daft Teardrop fashion, but who cares when the music's this good? Julian Cope was never a strong singer, but by the this stage he had achieved a weird kind of charisma by almost willing himself to be a star, and his sheer force of personality manages to make up for his limited vocal range. The band's performance is excellent, with everyone but the rhythm section and spooky keyboards cutting back for the verses, until brass swells lead everyone into the rowdy chorus. The energy spills right over at the end, with a fantastically unhinged trumpet solo. The song's catchiness meant that it became a hit, and the band got to play it on Top of The Pops, turning this group of warped eccentrics briefly into huge stars. It couldn't last, of course, and the Teardrops story very quickly descended into madness from here on in, but at least Copey's solo career has provided consolation for the Teardrops' early demise - some 24 years after the band's dissolution, he has continued to make music as bizarre, indulgent, manic and often as brilliant as his first bands', whilst continuing to champion outsider music and pursuing an interest in megalithic history. He is one of pop music's true great eccentrics.

Gig Review: New Order 18.10.06 Carling Academy Glasgow

After the day before's ecstatic Erase Errata gig, it is with some trepidation I stand waiting for New Order to take the stage in Glasgow's cavernous Carling Academy, (not aided by the fact that support band The Shores are one of the worst bands I have ever had the misfortune to see live). After all, Joy Division/New Order are one (two?) of my absolute favourite bands; I have a deep emotional connection to their songs. It has been 17 years since 'Technique', their last great album, and, to be honest, they're getting on a bit and last year's 'Waiting for the Siren's Call' was a hideously awful album; what if they simply can't cut it anymore and wind up embarrassing themselves? Plus I'm not sure how I feel about them playing Joy Division songs again; this could be an incredibly disillusioning experience. But the band take the stage (minus Gillian Gilbert, who is at home looking after her and drummer Stephen Morris' children) and launch into a fantastic version of 'True Faith', and my doubts are assuaged. Tonight they are brilliant; Bernard Sumner dances like your dad at a wedding after too many beers, but that's always been part of his charm - forced into the position of frontman by circumstance, his everyday-guy persona became part of the band's songs. Peter Hook's back gives out halfway through the performance, but he gamely plays on, encouraged by the crowd. The new songs, although less good and received accordingly, provide a necessary breather in a setlist packed with songs that are not just the band's greatest hits, but a good many people's favourite songs: 'Ceremony', 'Temptation', 'Bizarre Love Triangle', 'Blue Monday' and more, played with a passion and intensity that you'd think would be beyond guys this age. What's really striking is, in the live setting, songs like the beautifully tragic 'Temptation' become ecstatic and uplifting: New Order are all too keenly aware of the pain and suffering that everyday people face throughout their lives, but are convinced that there is love and happiness to be found also. Thus is Joy Division's existential angst converted to release on the dance floor. Stephen Morris is the beating heart of the band; his metronomic drumming and electronic programming fuelling the band, and this is wonderfully apparent tonight, with many songs starting simply with Morris' drumming and the synthesiser alone accompanying Sumner's vocals entire verses before the guitars enter. They also play Joy Division classics 'These Days', 'Transmission' and 'Love Will Tear Us Apart', and all three sound absolutely wonderful, the band slipping into Joy Division mode with an ease that belies the necessary emotional difficulty this must involve for them. The audience leaves the concert satisfied. New Order do their fantastic back catalogue proud, and if any band of the last 30 years deserves to sit back and bask in their own glory for a while, it's surely them. After their struggles and trials, not to mention 6 great albums and numerous fantastic singles, New Order have earnt it.

Gig Review: Erase Errata: 17.10.06 Nice 'N' Sleazy

What, really, is the point of live music reviews? Surely there is even more subjectivity involved with live music then there is with music anyway, so what good can a review do? You can never catch the atmosphere of the crowd, the volume, the smells, the chaos that made the gig amazing for one person and absolutely awful for another with any real objectivity, so why bother? This attitude stopped me writing live reviews for a while, which in some way is a shame as it means that several amusing articles about local unsigned bands, the infamous Mac-heckling Bunnymen gig and Scritti Politti's triumphant return to the stage went undocumented. Plus, there's the fact that, generally speaking, as an amateur music journalist on a pitiful student income, I am hardly going to waste money going to see a band I don't already quite like, so they would have to screw up royally before I slag them off. Also, although many people see live music as the ultimate music experience, I never have: true, I have been to many very good, and some great, gigs, but the transcendent musical revelations have always come on record for me.
So why am I writing this? For starters, Erase Errata are the greatest band of our generation. Full stop. I have often toyed with this idea, but after this gig, I am convinced. It helps, of course, that Nice 'N Sleazy is a fantastic venue: a small club with an excellent sound system, it provides an intimate gig experience without the muddy sound usually associated with such places. Plus, Glasgow really has a scene. All the indie kids turned up dressed like extras from a Pulp music video or something, plus the jukebox has eveything on it from The Fall to a No Wave compilation; it's enough to make you quite jealous. It also helps that the support is pretty good; The Royal We stand a good chance of being quite famous quite soon despite the awful band name. But it's really down to the band themselves. Singer/guitarist Jenny Hoyston cuts an unprepossessing figure as she sets up her equipment and casually walks through the crowd to reach the stage, but once she starts playing, she transforms into a commanding and powerful figure. Despite the loss of guitarist Sara Jaffe, the band have loss none of their power or vitality. Bianca Sparta's derranged, jerky drumming provides the group's rhythmic bassis, whilst Ellie Errikson's bass playing is impressively inventive: at some points, the band become almost entiirely rhythmic, as Errikson scrapes her bass with a beer bottle, Hoyston's atonal guitar scratches along with the drums to produce propulsive tribal rhythms. There is a refreshing rawness to the band's performance: they flirt incessantly with chaos, yet they are always ultimately in control, bringing their collapsing songs back from the brink of anarchy. Hoyston's freeform guitar skronk has much in common with No Wave, but this is no mere revival: the band create their own vital creation from the buring embers of No Wave noise. Songs like 'A Thief Detests The Criminal Elements Of The Ruling Class' have an obviouc political agenda, but in their use of case scenarios and intelligent discussion, Erase Errata's lyrics have more in common with Gang Of Four's questioning intelligence then The Clash's soap-box sloganeering. The band are ridiculously good. During the encore, as the band have run out of material to play, the band invite members of the audience to join the onstage for a free-form noise jam, an action that removes the performer-auidience barrier in true post-punk form. I come away from the gig exhilarated an inspired. In short, I am writing this review because this was one of the most exceptional, exciting gig I have been to. Erase Errata stand as a sharp reminder of just how good pop music can be in the 21st century, would that there were more like them.

Track of the Week: Kate Bush: Breathing (1980)

Seeing as the threat of nuclear fallout has raised its ugly head once more, it seems pertinent to revisit one of the most powerful visions of live after the bomb in pop music history. Before 1980, Kate Bush appeared to be something of a novelty; true, her idiosyncratic and adventurous song-writing style had given her one huge hit and several albums that sold pretty well, but despite the drama and emotional range hinted at in her music, no one seemed to be sure if she was in it for the long run. But by her third album, 1980's 'Never Forever', she had started experimenting with even more adventurous song structures, using her voice and the new technology of the Fairlight, and had started to produce her own work, revealing a new ambition and originality. Supported by three gloriously eccentric singles, it became her first album to go straight to number one, and hinted at the brilliance that lay ahead.
'Breathing' is perhaps an odd choice for a single, being as it is a five-and-a-half minute epic about giving birth during nuclear fallout. It still managed to reach number 5 in the singles chart, perhaps as a result of the genuine fear of the possibility of nuclear war breaking out during the Cold War. However, most of the single's success can be put down to its musical brilliance. 'Breathing' was Kate Bush's most ambitious song up to that point, its use of Fairlight effects and multi-part song writing paving the way for the bizarre experiments of 'The Dreaming' and the epic sensual romanticism of 'Hounds of Love'. Few artists would have the emotional ability or sheer audacity to tackle a song about a mother giving birth during nuclear fallout, but those qualities are part of what make Kate Bush so special. It helps that she is blessed with one of the most stunningly beautiful and expressive voices in the whole of pop music, but not only is she gifted, she also knows how best to use her talents. The song opens quietly and delicately, full of dread, with just Kate's vocals accompanied by piano, as she describes how 'Chips of plutonium / Are twinkling in every lung'. The fear is felt not just for the protagonist's own sake, but for her baby, whom she imagines 'Breathing the fall-out in' inside her during the chorus, and so also for the future of the human race. The dynamics rise during the chorus, as the mother thinks of her unborn baby with tenderness and fear for the future. At this point the rest of the band make themselves herd, with special mention for Del Palmer's beautiful, mournful fretless bass playing. Overlaid on top are Kate's multi-tracked vocals chiming 'In, out, in, out', mimicking the flow of air through the mother's lungs, and with a sensuality I probably don't need to explain to most heterosexual males. After the second chorus, there is a quiet piano interlude, over which various noises of panic and static can be heard, together with a sampled radio voice informing the listener how to recognise a nuclear explosion, all courtesy of the Fairlight sampler. This middle bit in particular is reminiscent of the art-rock of Pink Floyd, perhaps slightly fitting since Kate Bush was 'discovered' by Pink Floyd's guitarist, David Gilmour. Then, suddenly, the band enter back in, with the bass playing an ominous minor key ascending riff, as a chorus of voices sing, in increasingly desperate tones, 'What are we going to do without..../We are all going to die without...' whilst Kate Bush's voice rises to a dramatic peak over the top as she pleads ' Leave us something to breathe!'. We know that the protagonist's baby is being born into a world with little or no hope of survival. After reaching its climax, the song ends, leaving us alone with an eerie silence as the last crashing chords fade away, and the tension is left unresolved - we are not told the ultimate fate of the mother and her child. Thanks to its emotionally engaging music and its fearlessness to deal with such large issues, the song is a striking success. 'Breathing' is an emotional and harrowing picture of a possible future in which, as the Sex Pistols had sung three years earlier, there really IS no future, and the unforgettable images it conjures up remind us that we are still living in a world where nuclear fallout is a possibility, something it is easy to forget as we progress with day-to-day life.

Track of the Week: The Monochrome Set: I'll Scry Instead (1982)

The Monochrome Set were a bunch of art students who formed when they left a prototype Adam and the Ants. This was a band who seemed set for stardom: lead by the charismatic Bid (vocals, guitar), who claimed to be descended from Indians, here was a band capable of writing witty, catchy and individual pop music. The Monochrome Set mixed jerky post-punk with music hall melodies reminiscent of the Kinks during their 'Village Green' era, all topped off with a fun but sometimes quite cutting sense of humour. Lester Square's guitar often harked back to the Shadows' gentle pop rather then the harsh distortion of punk, and one read through of the puns in their song titles should be enough to endear The Monochrome Set to you. 'Eligible Bachelors', their third album, is almost a concept album satirising the neurosis of the upper classes. 'I'll Scry Instead' deals, as you might be able to gather from the title, with a young man asking a fortune teller to reveal his fortune to him. Bid gleefully delivers line like 'Dear Madame be clear / Will I be rich next year?' and 'Up above, Venus is in my house / I'm in love with an Aquarius' before sighing 'I'd be richer if that cheque wasn't paid'. Bid sings it all in his magnificent silky croon, somewhat reminiscent of Noel Coward and an obvious influence on Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand's singing style. Yet, while the song is obviously very sarcastic, Bid, like Ray Davies from the Kinks, is able to make you feel sympathy with the characters he mocks as well as laugh at them. The protagonist's naive desire to believe in the power of astrology to change his life despite knowing underneath it all that it's a load of nonsense makes it easy to empathise with him: the guy is simply looking for some sort of order and meaning to his life. All of which would be less impressive if the tune also wasn't so brilliant, but fortunately, with its effortless melody and delicate harmonies, the song is brilliant. It is an unorthodox mix of the post-punk and the arcane, drawing as much from the Kinks at their most pastoral and the Fairport Convention as Wire and XTC. 'I'll Scry Instead', like much of 'Eligible Bachelors', is slightly less eccentric and more soft and smooth then many of The Monochrome Set's earlier songs, but you could hardly accuse them of selling out on an album that includes a Latin invocation of the devil among its tracks. And when the music is this good, it seems simply churlish. 'Eligible Bachelors' should have been the sound of a band dramatically entering the mainstream, and indeed opening track 'Jet Set Junta' remains to this day the Set's highest charting single, but unfortunately most of the world just wasn't listening. The Monochrome Set remain to this day largely undiscovered and grossly underappreciated, but surely the recognition of true talent can only be a matter of time.

Slaughtering Sacred Cows: The Clash

'I think the Clash defeated their political message... I think they just looked for the lowest common denominator, and I think they defeated their message. Nobody believed them.' Mike Watt, The Minutemen

'It was a real battle. We were fighting against the conservatism that had crept into the punk movement. The Clash... were actually quite ordinary as far as the music was concerned.' Gareth Sager, The Pop Group

'"No more Rolling Stones," and they sound just like The Rolling Stones, only not as good... Very disappointing.' Charles Bullen, This Heat

That significant architects of three of the most innovative and forward-thinking bands of the post-punk era feel so uninspired by The Clash should tell you something. For some reason, The Clash find themselves in a position that doesn't really reflect their rather mundane music, and ever since Joe Strummer's death, the band have become unassailable: they were a band of the people; they dealt with relevant political concerns in an intelligent, passionate and humane fashion; they made timeless, great music; they were the sound of British youth in 77. However, if you actually listen to their music, the only one of those statements that isn't palpably rubbish is the final one - something that has never had anything to do with quality, which you can easily prove by giving the Arctic Monkeys a listen.
The reason that The Clash earned the scorn of many post-punk groups is two-fold. Firstly, as Charles Bullen and Gareth Sager quite rightly point out, they were musically very reactionary. That Joe Strummer came from a pub-rock background with the 101ers is evident from The Clash's earliest material. '1977', 'Complete Control', 'Janie Jones', all of the early 'classics' are nothing more then pub rock sped up. By 'London Calling', they'd stopped even bothering to speed it up and embraced pub rock in all its turgid blandness. Excepting the glorious title track, one of the band's few moments of clarity, the album is an embarrassing collection of generic run-throughs closer to ham-fisted parody then the real thing: try listening to 'Jimmy Jazz' (er... jazz) 'Revolution Rock' (a pathetic attempt at fusing reggae and punk) and their mind-numbingly dull cover of 'Brand New Cadillac' (rockabilly) for just a couple of examples. This is especially striking when you compare The Clash to their post-punk contempories: bands like Public Image Limited, Gang Of Four, The Fall and many others were taking popular music way beyond the limits whilst Everybody's Favourite Punks were pedalling backwards faster and faster. The less said about the ridiculous messes that were 'Sandinista!' and 'Cut The Crap' the better - I'm hardly going to kick the band while they're down - but the fact remains that The Clash's strongest album after 'London Calling' is 'Combat Rock', a full-on embracing of stadium rock and all its trappings. Hardly the move of a band with integrity, but more to the point, the music is staggeringly awful, apart from the standard pub-rock-Clash fare of 'Should I Stay Or Should I Go'.
The second issue with The Clash's music is their lyrics: whilst these days they are often praised for simply having a political stance, back in the day with bands like Gang Of Four and The Minutemen finding new ways to talk about politics that didn't patronise the listener with the hackneyed soap-box slogans that The Clash favoured, you can see why Mike Watt feels that The Clash devalued their own political message by reducing it to easy-to-wear slogans. Most bands who talk about politics these days have unfortunately drawn from The Clash's method of politicising rather then treating the issues with the thought and concern they deserve. The main effect is, of course, that you simply wind up preaching to the converted and not really doing your cause any measurable good - people should believe something because they have thought about it and understood it, not because Joe Strummer says so.
But the main problem that I have with The Clash is that at the end of the day, their music is DULL. Yes, dull. For all the talk of excitement, 'The Clash sound like a kick in the head', 'Most important and vital bands of their generation' I can't hear it. All I hear is a guy with a fairly cool voice singing clichéd lyrics over a band that desperately want to sound like The Rolling Stones, but can't quite make it. Now, shoot me, but if that's the most exciting band in the history of rock 'n' roll, then the history clearly needs rewriting.

Track of the Week: The Normal: Warm Leatherette (1978)

"I wanted to express the idea that electronic music was the real punk rock and that punk rock was really pub rock, sped up." Daniel Miller

Bored by punk rock but inspired by Kraftwerk and avant-garde electronic music, as soon as the price of synthesizers fell, Daniel Miller bought himself a Korg 700 analogue synthesizer and a Revox B-77 tape machine and recorded the 'Warm Leatherette'/'T.V.O.D.' 7 inch single in his living room. None of the record labels he took it to were interested in releasing it, so Miller created his own record label to put it out on, under the name The Normal. Almost 30 years later, The Normal have not followed up their only single, but the reverberations of its two songs are still being felt in the world of electronic music, and Miller's label, Mute Records, releases records by a whole range of experimental artists.
'Warm Leatherette' was inspired by J. G. Ballard's cult novel 'Crash', which is about a dark subculture of people who fetishize car accidents. Miller was a big fan of the book, and had even started work on a prototype screenplay for a film adaptation with some of his friends. The song's lyrics deal specifically with the idea of deriving sexual pleasure from a car accident: 'A tear of petrol / Is in your eye / The handbrake / Penetrates your thigh / Quick - let's make love / Before you die' contains some of the key images from the novel, expressed with a brutality that Ballard himself would have been proud of. The whole thing is made even more disturbing by Miller's deadpan delivery. The music adds to the seediness of the whole proceedings - minimal electronic beats with repetitive synthesizer noise over the top. The single kick-started the post punk electronic movement, with Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League following The Normal's lead and creating some of the most innovational music in pop music history. To this day, 'Warm Leatherette' sounds great, and hasn't dated in the way a lot of early electronic music has. The song's emphasis on the programmed rhythm has proved prescient, linking it to all types of modern electronic dance music - Miller even claimed back in 1978 that one day, dance music would be nothing but the rhythm, something that seems more and more likely to happen. Others would take Miller's musical vision to fruition, and Miller himself chose to run Mute Records rather then continue making music himself. Mute Records today holds an impressive roster of artists, ranging from Einsturzende Neubauten and Nick Cave through to modern post punks The Liars and reissuing essential experimental music from Can and Throbbing Gristle. For this we can thank Daniel Miller's dedication to experimentation, innovation and independence, something that was apparent in The Normal's one release all those years ago.