Au Pairs. Playing With a Different Sex.

A bit of queer feminist reggae-disco punk-funk for your weekend. Have The Gossip covered We’re So Cool, yet? They should.

Like Gang of Four, The Au Pairs made authoritative, tight, and imminently danceable songs that rocked their politics just as hard as their grooves. Lesley Woods sang with a smoky, snarky, blues voice and played a twitchy guitar that she used to scratch up the hollows of the throbbing, syncopated punk rhythms. They wanted to take over the world, or at least the pop charts, but disappeared after two albums.

They aimed big while revolutionizing the small. Unlike a lot of political-with-a-capital-p bands, their politics were personal, honest, funny, awkward and unflinching. They weren’t telling anybody what to think, or even what they thought. They were just dramatizing situations and roles, and left it up to their listeners to make the connections to larger contexts. Most of their lyrics address power hierarchies, whether between romantic couples, governments and people, or even within bands. The mixed genders of the group and their use of Jamaican dub aesthetics were both ways to bypass and test the flexibility of those levels of authority. Simultaneously playing with and ignoring sex and gender (sort of like The Raincoats), they mixed it up with everyday stories of the negotiating that goes on in all types of relationships.

Come Again (banned by the BBC) looks at the way even the most private of spaces and moments are fraught with competing demands and sympathies. There’s nothing more transcendently fun than an orgasm, but here (even progressive) women have to be aware of the pressures on them to perform for their partners—it’s only polite—and sometimes fake it; even when they want it, even if they know their partner is trying, especially when they don’t and he isn’t. And what about feeling like you have to because you’re a new woman who changed the rules, and has sex on your own terms—because those women always have orgasms, now, right? Just thinking about it can throw you off your game, even when things had been going well. An allmusic review patronizingly called their songs “hectoring”, but Come Again rocks like crazy and ends with this hilarious and all too recognizable chorus:

Is your finger aching? I can feel you hesitating.
Is your finger aching!?!
Yes, thank you, I got one. Yes, it was nice.
Yes, we should go to sleep now. Yes, yes it was fine—
We must, we must do it again sometime. We must—
Yes, but I'm tired. Cum again? Wot?
Shit, I forgot to put my cap in!

The album came out at a time when the British government was busy ignoring rising levels of Fascist youth violence directed at Asian and Pakistani communities, gay clubs, feminist spaces and performers—anything not white and right wing. At the same time, the government was torturing female IRA prisoners (many falsely accused) while maintaining a public face of innocence. In Armagh, Lesley calls out the way torture and rape are used as tools of governments and patriarchies, both of whom hide behind professions of belonging to a higher order that couldn’t possibly be guilty of those things. We don’t torture / We’re a civilized nation / We’re avoiding any confrontation, Lesley mockingly chants throughout the song.

I wish she were still around today. In just under thirty years, “We don’t torture, we’re a civilized nation” has mutated from denial to excuse to justification. “We’re civilized people, and civilized people don’t torture, therefore all that stuff you’ve seen and heard about that looks like torture isn’t.” It’s become a hallmark of right wing discourse to argue in bad faith and to claim that the horrible thing being done isn’t really happening, and even if it is, they’re just doing it to protect you. Witness the disingenuous claims that anti-choicers don’t hate women or want to punish their sexuality. Why, no! They love women so much, they’re taking away their rights and choices so they don’t make any of those stupid decisions women (especially poor women) are likely to make when there isn’t a man around to tell them what they really want. Right now, in the US, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is trying to make the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal Medicaid funding for abortions services) permanent law. As it stands, it’s a budget item that gets voted on each year (which is bad enough, and has been going on for 34 years), but making it permanent law would have the effect of making abortion coverage illegal for low income women on Medicaid, federal employees, and military women. It would also effectively end abortion coverage in private employer policies, and endanger life-saving emergency abortions at state and local public hospitals. If you live in the US, visit this link to The Center for Reproductive Rights, where you can write to your Congressional representative and tell them to oppose this act.

Playing

Noseflutes. Zib Zob and His Kib Kob.

It’s been a busy week, and I haven’t been able to pay attention to the blog as much as I’d have liked, so here’s some more divine weirdness from the Noseflutes.

I keep asking “why aren’t these bands better remembered?”, but obviously this was never going to be top 40 music. Still, even by the standards of the weird and wooly British underground, the Noseflutes were wildly inventive and really managed to make their purposefully awkward, herky-jerky rhythms and Dada-soapbox vocals gel into compellingly hard rocking songs. They have the same deconstructivist aspirations as A Witness (but less sing-alongable) and the punk spirit of the Membranes (but less bludgeoning).

Eminent could almost (almost) be a Camper Van Beethoven song. Charms has some delightful steel drums. Spitball on My Kisser veers wildly between extremes with exciting, crazed, shrieking choruses. No Plans peeks over the wasteland at country-blues with a punk slide-guitar.

I was going to say they were an art-house version of the Ron Johnson bands, but that makes me think of something refined and winking, like Roxy Music. They’re really more art-studio, and this is kind of a masterpiece.

Zib Zob

Pigbros. Peel Sessions.

8/21/85
1. Cheap Life
2. Hedonist Hat
3. Lick Bones
4. War Food

5/6/86
5. Bad Attitude
6. In Doubt
7. Immensity Home
8. What Counts

Peel Sessions

The Birthday Party. Peel Sessions.

The only hits the Birthday Party ever landed were to their audience’s guts. “Dangerously unhinged” barely begins to describe their mutant hybrid of punk, goth, funk, improvisational jazz and psychotic-sleaze-blues.

The band seemed locked in a death-battle with melody, thrashing and throttling the life out of it, often sounding like each member was playing a different song to the others. Meanwhile, Nick Cave strutted and preened like a demonic carnival barker daring you to buy a ticket to the most depraved freak-show around.

Their bared-teeth wit and gleeful nihilism sound like nothing else ever attempted. “Wherefore art thou, babyface?”, Cave screeches, summoning the haints and voodoo-dollies that haunt the roots of rock and outlaw country—spavined vinyl gods out for a final, delirious spin.

Peel

Noseflutes. Several Young Men Ignite Hardboard Stump.

The Noseflutes had a more open sound than other death to trad rock bands. The bludgeoning density of Bogshed or The Membranes is replaced by an elaborate clockwork of rotating, interlocking musical tines that sound just as likely to poke you sharply in the eye as create a song. It’s everywhere as twisted and knotty and challenging as you would expect, and Martin Longley’s caustic lyrics and vocals take on a lot more prominence than you usually hear on these things. Elsewhere, they add a keening violin and spooky accordion to songs that constantly sound like they’re snagged on something and trying to pull free.

They manage to cover a lot of distinctive territory without making any of the songs feel repetitive. Like a lot of other bands in this genre, their weirdness seems to come naturally, which makes even the odder aspects easier to relate to. I never get the sense that they’re acting up just for the sake of it (even if the underground scene was a direct reaction to the “listless meringue peddlars” then ruling the airwaves). I think this is just how they hear things.

Several Young Men

Legs Akimbo on myspace

Jackdaw With Crowbar. Hot Air.

Hot Air splits nearly equally between absurdist, political, jump-cut, Dada wailers (A specialty on Ron Johnson. See also: The Membranes, A Witness, Pigbros, The Shrubs, The Noseflutes, and Bogshed. In fact, Tris King, Bogshed’s drummer was also in Jackdaw With Crowbar, as was Wilf from Dog Faced Hermans) and post-punk dub workouts assembled in Tom Waits’ junkyard. Weirdly, it works.

Their live shows were immersive multimedia events, with the band playing within projections of experimental films made especially for them. Apparently they’ve reformed, inspired by the ease and immediacy of laptop production (gigs in the 80’s often had to wait while their film maker spliced broken reels back together in the tour van), so look for their gigs if you live in the Leamington area.

Hot Air

Myspace

Website

King of the Slums. Barbarous English Fayre.

Sometimes the when and the where are just as important as the what. I first heard King Of The Slums on a Walkman as I wandered along a canalbank in Wigan through the teeth of a winter evening downpour. What I heard slotted into the moment perfectly. . . though I'd heard nothing remotely like it before.

Sour, twisted guitars framing austere power-riffs, a lone violin sobbing to itself on the outskirts of melody, and that voice; cold and desperate as an Ancoates drizzle, informing me that he would disappear up his own backside or end up breeding whippets.

'The Pennine Spitter', along with 11 other excellent reasons why KOTS are one of the most compelling bands on the planet, is here on this summation of the band's career to date. 'Barbarous English Fayre' is a rasping litany of tattoos, gasworks, shaving cuts and squeaking prams. A haunting, savage voyage into the underbelly of English life.

For England, and specifically the North, is the love / hate object they return to constantly. It's this obsession, and subsequent use of images like Britannia, The Union Jack and Enoch Powell, that has seen them occasionally smeared as fascists. This is a dim and insulting slur. KOTS sing of this country entirely without gloss and sentiment, without political hectoring but with an ironic and trenchant realism.

In 'Bombs Away On Harpurhey' they explode the myth of Thatcher's 'go for it' culture (as if it needed exploding) with a sparking, snarling grace. In 'Venerate Me Utterly' the shabby dreams of the luckless are evoked brilliantly. Love, ambition, failure, all are viewed with the same pitiless, sardonic eye.

The absence of a lyric sheet may prevent you from realising that Charlie Keigher is the best unknown lyricist in Britain. Ordinary phrases ('Mere slip of a lad', 'You're not much to look at') are invested with a new and menacing meaning while the music has an alien beauty all its own.

The new stuff is stunning. 'Up To The Fells' is as wild and sombre as its title. 'Full Speed Ahead' is their most powerful and direct statement yet. It might even be a hit. Ha!

Forget the Euro art-bores and the pimply Yank college boys, outside of the mainstream King Of The Slums are practically peerless. In five years' time you'll be claiming you loved them. So do it now.

Stuart Maconie, 1989 NME Review

Soft Boys. Two Halves for the Price of One (Only the Stones Remain & Lope at the Hive).

Released after the band had broken up, Two Halves was exactly what it claimed. Individually titled and designed as a double A-Side, Only the Stones Remain collected their last studio sessions up against Lope at the Hive, a swaggering, gutsy set recorded live at the Hope & Anchor. A few of the songs later made it onto the 1976-1981 compilation, but the full album has never been reissued. Never one to hide their influences, The Soft Boys indulge in numerous cover songs here, with a faithful rendition of the The Bells of Rhymney on the studio side, and rollicking versions of Astronomy Domine, Outlaw Blues, and Mystery Train finishing out their live set.

Two Halves

Soft Boys on myspace

Museum of Robyn Hitchcock

Rose of Avalanche. First Avalanche.

Like the In Rock album, First Avalanche was the result of another dispute with their record label. Unlike NEMS, who could never get The Boys’ albums out on time, Leeds Independent Label was so eager to cash in on Rose of Avalanche that they rarely waited for the group to finish a whole album, instead jumping the gun and issuing collections of singles and b-sides without the band’s consent. This one came out in 1986, just as the band signed to Fire Records.

ROA never fit snugly into any one category, boasting a big, stadium ready sound that amalgamated elements of Lou Reed by way of Felt by way of David Bowie by way of Bauhaus by way of the Doors. Singer Philip Morris’ voice has the requisite deep-death twang, and Glen Schultz’s guitar alternated between blistering and stately. They sound oddly American for a band with indie-goth aspirations, and occasionally they succumb more to mannerism than inspiration, but for an unauthorized compilation, there’s still plenty of good songs—particularly A Stick In the Works, A Thousand Landscapes, and L.A. Rain.

First Avalanche

ROA official website

ROA on myspace

Public Image Ltd. Steel Leg v the Electric Dread.

Technically, this isn't PIL, but it contains enough of them to count. Credited to Keith Levine, Jah Wobble, Don Letts and someone who may or may not be John lydon, it was an early foray into the deep, spaced-out dub that would be perfected on Metal Box.

Julian Cope says it best:

Ahahaha...this is a 12 incher of 4 reckless post-punk/post-dub workouts. Issued in the wake of Public Image Limited’s “First Issue” album, it’s all rough demo spiky-Levene guitar with Jah Wobble wielding his brown-spotting bass into the face of everyone, as usual. It’s deep, spaced dub meeting the throwaway quality demanded of punk at the time with no concessions whatsoever. 1978 was pretty early for such successfully infectious dub from a younger generation born a culture away from Jamaica. Despite (or because of) this, Wobble’s a bassist with Greenwich Town session player feel, and Don Letts raps on “Haile Unlikely,” exiting on the cross-faded dub version, letting the electronic interruptives and echoed drum beats take the feel beyond sung words, as all the best dub does effortlessly.

No doubt Steel Leg was John Lydon in disguise, as the Carlsberg-oiled background punk rant on “Steel Leg” attests, throwing in jibes and vocal noises as only he would. “Stratetime And The Wide Man” is more weightless dub suspension with tinkling percussion and would be a complete space-out were it not for Wobble’s grounding bass audio compass. It goes beyond mere punky reggae partying -- it’s a PIL t-shirt worn by Syd “Family Man” Barrett with the words D-U-B replacing P-I-L, as the Finsbury Park crew’s ancestral memories of multiple Hawkwind records works its way through the mix with electronics like Dik Mik meets The Aggrovators. Future Public Image Limited records would combine further outings of dub, punk and Krautrocking beyond all reasoning, this EP a signpost pointing the way.

Steel Leg

Public Image Ltd. Commercial Zone.

From wikipedia:

In May 1981 PiL moved from London to New York City, but in October 1981 their American record contract with Warner Brothers expired and was not renewed. In January 1982 the British music press reported that PiL had tried to record a new album in New York with producers Adam Kidron and Ken Lockie, but split instead - this was promptly denied by the band in a press release the following week.

In May 1982 drummer Martin Atkins rejoined the band and PiL started recording their new studio album for Virgin Records at Park South Studios in Manhattan, with sound engineer Bob Miller co-producing. On 29 August 1982 new bassist Pete Jones joined the band in the studio, the new line-up played its debut concert four weeks later (28 September 1982 in New York City). During the summer and autumn of 1982 the band planned to form their own record label (Public Enterprise Productions) and license its releases to Stiff Records USA for the American market, but these plans never materialized.

In early November 1982 PiL announced the imminent release of a new single "Blue Water" and a six-track mini album You Are Now Entering A Commercial Zone on their new label. This did not happen, instead the band continued recording at South Park Studios for a full-length album.

By May 1983 a new track "This Is Not A Love Song" was earmarked as a new single for Virgin Records, but PiL broke up when first Pete Jones and then Keith Levene left the band. The remaining members, John Lydon and drummer Martin Atkins hired session musicians to fulfill touring commitments and carried on under the PiL name. The single "This Is Not A Love Song" (with "Blue Water" as a 12" single B-side), both from the Park South sessions, was released by Virgin Records in September 1983 and went to no.5 in the UK single charts.

In summer 1983, in PiL's absence, Keith Levene took the unfinished album tapes and did his own mix. He then flew over to London and presented them to Richard Branson as the finished new PiL album for Virgin Records, but John Lydon decided to completely abandon the tapes and re-record the whole album from scratch with session musicians. This new version of Commercial Zone became This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get in 1984.

Levene decided to put the album out himself on the American market and founded the label PIL Records Inc. for this one-off release. The first limited pressing was released in November 1983 and was heavily imported to the UK and European market. A second pressing (with the track listing changed around and a shorter mix of "Bad Night") followed in August 1984 in an edition of 30,000 copies, to compete directly with the official re-recorded album This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. Virgin Records promptly took legal actions and stopped the distribution and any further re-pressings of Commercial Zone.

Commercial Zone

PIL on myspace

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. +/- Rob's House 7".

S.I.D.S. describe themselves as “a synth-punk trio from Atlanta. No electronics-lite here, just great driving punk rock done with keyboards, in the tradition of the Screamers and early Tuxedo Moon.” I’ll add that The Liars, Devo, and Throbbing Gristle also probably feature prominently in their record collections. Kind of dancy, kind of dark-wave, heavily distorted songs with frazzled bullhorn vocals shouted from the end of a very long corridor and vaguely evil John-Carpenter’s-Halloween-synths overtop a more intricate than expected, high-register drum kit.

Supposedly, the live version of the band includes a cardboard cutout of Sid Vicious playing a pre-programmed Yamaha keyboard. Awesome.

Plus Minus

SIDS on myspace

Prolapse. Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes.

Prolapse’s early sound—furious, demented, loud and raw—has been honed into an unsettling, trance-inducing, dubbed-out soundscape. It’s an atypically beautiful album that manages to pile on shards of jagged guitar noise, but still make it shimmer. It’s menacing, angry music—mechanically ragged, full of white noise and despair—but buoyed by driving, krautrock grooves. Like PIL and the Fall attacking Transient Random Noisebursts era Stereolab.

Linda Steelyard sings like she remembers some lovely melody, but her ghostly vocals have grown frayed and tense, constantly stalked by Scottish Mick’s garbled ranting (always lurking just under the surface of the melody, subliminally muttering about all the things in the world that are out to get you). Truthfully, the closer you listen to what she’s singing about , the more Linda starts to sound just as insane—a shell-shocked little girl babbling a stream of unconsciousness (like mindlessly listing every variety of shoe she can think of in Essence of Cessna).

An archaeology of between-station, late-night, extreme-conspiracy-theory art rock.

Ghosts

Prolapse on myspace

Dumptruck. D is for Dumptruck.

Dumptruck hailed from the early 80’s Boston music scene, but sounded more like their southern gothic counterparts, R.E.M. (by way of Joy Division), or the Feelies if they had been factory workers. Hovering between knotty art-punk and jangly college rock, they had a certain melodic dryness that—coupled with Kirk Swan and Seth Tiven’s deadpan vocals—gave them a rather alienated, dejected sound. They’re not necessarily singing about depressing things, it’s just that they sound like two people who have spent too much time in abandoned places. Which, from an artistic standpoint, can be a good thing. The guitar and bass have their own moods—sometimes working in concert, sometimes competing, at and other times just ignoring each other altogether. The singing could be described as flat if it weren’t for their odd vocal inflections and the way they stress unexpected parts of their lyrics—things that seem like they don’t need pointing out. The words rarely rhyme, although they feel like they do, and they never quite sync up with the music. It’s a surprisingly effective conceit that somehow ends up investing the songs with a tension and ambiguity that only registers unconsciously.

The reissue adds live tracks that show the band in a more confident setting, revisiting these songs with a lot more energy and flirting with a countrified Mission of Burma sound.

D is For...

Dumptruck on myspace

Dumptruck website

Liquid Liquid. Liquid Liquid.

Bass and drum (though not drum n' bass). Skeletal, tribal, punk-funk that's slinkier and tighter than a line of blow off the Thin White Duke's thin, white ass.

Liquid Liquid bubbled up from that period in early 80's New York when disco, rap, punk, no wave, and the cacophony of the street merged into a new mutant sound. Like Homer Simpson's demand that BTO just get to the chorus in Taking Care of Business, Liquid Liquid (and their labelmates ESG and the Bush Tetras) just wanted to find the core of a song—the part that jiggled the jello in your brain goo—and let it ride. Distilling drums, cowbells, Latin congas, Fela Kuti's afrobeat marathons, reggae, gamelan, and whatever rhythm the kids were banging out in the park, Liquid Liquid pounded out a hypnotic groove that's echoed through the Talking Heads, PIL, !!!, LCD Soundsystem, and Mi Ami.

Liquid Liquid

Liquid Liquid on myspace

Official website

Close Lobsters. Never Seen Before.

Spangled and scintillating like light on rippling water or silver sequins on a black dress. Fast sounds, big hooks. Fire Station Towers and Wide Waterways (an Only Ones cover) were both excellent. You will feel better after listening to this.

Never Seen Before

Close Lobsters on myspace

Close Lobsters. Nature Thing.

Nature Thing is, like all the Close Lobsters' best songs, barbed and jangly. This single also includes a cover of Neil Young's Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Leonard Cohen's Paper Thin Hotel, and a live version of one of their early songs.

Nature Thing

Close Lobsters on myspace

Close Lobsters. What Is There to Smile About.

Short and tight without a single wasted moment. The Close Lobsters hailed from Paisley, which seems fitting considering their hazy neo-psych/indie/jangle pop sound. Horribly underrated and unjustly forgotten, especially since of all the C-86 bands, the Lobsters exemplified the absolute best of the post-Smiths period of snarky, trebly, British pop. Everything they did still sounds fresh, from their sharp hooks to singer Andrew Burnett's pointed, adenoidal vocal style. I keep hoping they'll get back together.

Smile

Close Lobsters on myspace

V/A. Take 5.

A mixture of "awkward" and indie-pop. Plus Spacemen 3. My favorite part is the way Death By Milkfloat shouts "YOU LOOK WEIRD!".

1. King of the Slums - Spider Psychiatry
2. Cud - Treat Me Bad
3. Yukio Yung - Jean Gabin
4. Dog Faced Hermans - Yellow Girls
5. Death By Milkfloat - Vagrancy
6. Kilgore Trout - Peacock Nose
7. Jackdaw With Crowbar - Lies
8. Bachelor Pad - You'll Be Mine
9. House of Love - Plastic
10. Boy Hairdressers - Assumption as an Elevator
11. Spacemen 3 - Rollercoaster

Take 5

V/A. Sprat and Mackerel Compilation Extravaganza.

Some insanely good contributions by eminently weird bands.

1. Jackdaw with Crowbar - Sailor Soul Survivor
2. The Shrubs - Ballet Gorilla (live)
3. Datblygu - Hen Ysgol Cloff
4. The Noseflutes - Shallow for Deep
5. The Membranes - Electric Storm
6. Sperm Wails - Lady Chatterly's Lover
7. Plant Bach Offnus - Pyrdredd
8. Howl In the Typewriter - Water Yr Plants
9. Howl In the Typewriter - Close
10. The Noseflutes - Girth
11. The Lungs - The Day James Cagney Died

Sprat