I think I bought it primarily for 'Ever Fallen in Love?', but it's a solid collection of tunes, particularly the aching, yearning emotions conveyed in 'Why Can't I Touch It?'. But this isn't a critique blog, it's reminiscence therapy, so I'll stop there.
Of course, I'm totally biased. This is the first album I ever bought, and so has a special place in my heart. I can remember going to WH Smiths in Salisbury with my dad and buying it, and the little round price sticker that I carefully peeled off (£2.99). I can remember playing it over and over on my parents' little Dansette-style record player - well, of course I did, it was the the only album I had.
As I just flipped the record over and played the start of side two, the tribal drumming at the start of the track 'Kings of the Wild Frontier' kicked in. My 18 month old son looked delighted and started jumping up and down, and whirling like a dervish, so maybe this record really does stand the test of time.
It was typical of the sort of work I've done. We work in absudly hot, filthy conditions, producing incredibly beautiful fabrics that graced the pages of Vogue, Harpers and so on. It was quite pressured, as we were always producing to tight deadlines, and our outlets for this pressure were loud music at work, and drinking lots of ale afterwards. One night after work, I drank a gallon of Tanglefoot - quite an achievement, given that I was probably only just 17 at the time. I'm not saying I was unaffected by it - quite the opposite, I vividly remember being horribly, unpleasantly drunk, and it was one of the very few times in my life that I've had to call in sick as a result of drinking too much the night before.
My most vivid memory of this playing at work was one of the partners, Jimmy, coming downstairs and taking the piss out of me for listening to such a crappy version of punk rock. In my defence, I'd argue that this a very punk record - essentially speeded up pub rock, peppered with distasteful lyrics and a pissed-and-proud attitude. But sadly, Jimmy was right - this actually is rubbish, precisely because of the things that I've outlined above.
I almost certainly bought this because it reminded me of my brother. When I saw the cover, it was him that I thought of, taken back to his front room in Salisbury, with a vague recollection of him talking about the mellow guitar work on this album. Maybe I was homesick when I bought it.
I didn't know anything about the band then, and surprisingly to me, I don't now. This is definitely the first time that I've played this, as I expecting some sort of chilled out, Ry Cooder-esque exploration of smoky, slide guitars and sweeping atmospherics. Instead, it's a slightly rowdy new wave racket with faintly new romantic pretensions.
My brother has always had ropey taste in music.
Does it remind me of anything? It reminds me that U2 have made some great records. But for me, this is quite far down the list.
It's odd that I think all this, and have absolutely no desire to go and see them live. I happily watched them tear the roof off the universe when they played Glastonbury, but I did it on TV, from my sofa, possibly from the far end of a bottle of really good white wine. I wonder why that is? Maybe if I don't go and share the experience with thousands of others, then Radiohead still belong to me, and me alone. No one else really understands them like I do. I LOVE YOU RADIOHEAD!
Anyway, as awesome as this album is, it reminds very clearly of one road trip that Rob, Aidan and I made from Leeds to Salisbury. We'd each made a mixtape for the journey, and at the time, Rob and I were really going to town on ours, using samplers to loop bits, overlay several tracks and so on. About halway through Rob's mix, the familiar computer-generated vocal of 'Fitter, Happier' started up. After a few lines of the acual lyrics, just as the mournful piano starts and the synths start to smother themselves to death, something weird happened. The voice started to go off message: 'when the seagulls follow the trawler...an elephant with his trunk stuck up his own dung funnel...' and so on. Basically, Rob had performed a slavish recreation of the track, and then changed the vocal into meaningless drivel from the end of the 20th century. The effect was uproar: I remember wiping away tears of laughter and looking at Aidan doing the same, while he somehow managed to keep driving and not kill us all, with Rob in the back seat looking delighted and laughing at our reaction. It was the most brilliant, perfectly-timed and unlikely cover version I think I'm ever going to hear.
Well, yes and no. Musically, this is now a pretty unappealing record, sounding a bit like Tom Waits fronting a shoegaze Cardiacs - cement-mixer vocals over wall of guitar noise, tempo shifts and angular guitar lines aplenty. And if you don't get the joke (such as it is, that the band are a group of disaffected communists seeking to overthrow the system via sludge-rock), then this isn't a very good album. Actually, I get the joke, and I still don't think it's a very good album.
But the thing that totally redeems them for me is when they played at Salisbury Arts Centre, mid-90s. They came bounding on stage and launched into a note perfect interpretation of 'Unbelievable' by EMF. The place went mental, and in terms of an unexpected icebreaker cover to start a gig with, it was inspired, the lollopping bassline with the gravelly vocals over the top. And Then they launched into one of the tracks from this album, and it all went a bit less mental.
Good concept, average execution.
Cat No: TG82A
Tracks: Final Market. Knuckles The Dog (Who Helps People). Turkey Shoot. Grandma Smith Said A Curious Thing. Hot 'N' Nasty. Enemy Of The People. Earl Scheib. Das Kapital. The Pig Was Cool. Working Hard, or Hardly Working?
