Wire - Our Swimmer

Label: Rough Trade
Year of Release: 1981

Somewhat shockingly, I could have chosen just about any Wire track for inclusion on this blog, since they were never a conventionally successful band by most measures. They were denied hits throughout both their punk heyday (although it's possible "Outdoor Miner" might have charted if EMI hadn't been caught trying to hype it) and their eighties career on Mute. Like The Velvet Underground, Wire are a band whose sales figures impressed less than their critical acclaim or subequent degree of creative influence.

Given that they have a new album out now ("Object 47") it's worth casting our minds back to their pre-Mute, post-EMI career wilderness. "Our Swimmer" was released after they'd been booted off of The Greatest Record Company in the World(TM) and into the wild to fend for themselves. Pressed and distributed by Rough Trade before they'd discovered The Smiths (and therefore before they had anything approaching a budget), "Our Swimmer" was positively received at the time, but understandably didn't bring them success any more than their major label offerings.

It would cause a lot of unnecessary upset and bring forth tons of accuasations of hyperbole if I honestly said that this single was a "lost classic", but nonetheless it's still a damn fine addition to Wire's already sturdy canon. There's a grinding, almost krautrock insistence to the A-side which nags away at your feet, whilst the B-side "Midnight Bahnhoff Cafe" is an eerie piece of work which hints at the more electronic sound they'd develop on Mute Records. Due to the fact that this single was a Rough Trade one-off which fell between the stools of their EMI and Mute careers, it's been allowed to languish in relative obscurity ever since, a victim of licensing rather than its own quality. Of course, it's situations like this one that MP3 blogs were made for...

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World Of Twist

Talking of Earl Brutus - as we were, several times over - World of Twist also featured Gordon King and Nick Sanderson in their line-up, but were an entirely different proposition, being a stylistic crush of seventies disco, early nineties electronica and the Manchester scene of the time. They're only featured on this blog by the skin of their teeth since they narrowly missed the Top 40 a number of times, but are surely one of the best bands of the era not to have bothered Mark Goodier during the chart rundown.

Their sole album "Quality Street" is usually talked about with a certain amount of caution. "It could have been so good but the production's all wrong/ they're the wrong songs/ it doesn't capture their live sound" - so many fans seem to feel that as a piece of work it was unrepresentative and flawed. There may possibly be a grain of truth to all these accusations, but from beginning to end it still sounds to me like the electronic cousin to The Stone Roses' debut - both albums have the same sense of endless optimism, scaling euphoric peaks and dropping blissed out, defiant lyrics regularly. It may not be perfect, but when compared to more critically acclaimed albums of the era - The Inspiral Carpets' "Life", anyone? - it easily comes out on top most times. Too varied in its stylings to really be completely vogue-ish, it still stands up now. Alan McGee felt that World of Twist should have had the success Pulp later came along and took instead (which I slightly disagree with as a piece of hyperbole, but we'll let him have his say) and Oasis used to play "Sons of the Stage" at their early gigs.

Lead singer Tony Ogden decided he didn't want to be the band's vocalist anymore shortly after the album came out, and the band rapidly disintegrated shortly after. An explanation has never really been given for his decision, and it seems unlikely we'll get one now since he passed away in 2006. A World Of Twist reformation will therefore never happen in a hundred years of Madchester revival tours, purely because two of the key contributors (Sanderson and Ogden) are now no longer with us, but their album has become available online via iTunes and other MP3 sites with bonus tracks attached, and is a must-buy. No self-respecting fan of early nineties alternative music should be without a copy.

And whilst I'm dropping my opinions about, why don't we take a look at their single "The Storm" getting reviewed on Juke Box Jury?



Bernard Sumner not making a great deal of sense, there.

And here's an MP3 of "Lose My Way":

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Serendipity Singers - Beans In My Ears

Label: Phillips
Year of Release: 1964

When the team behind "Spinal Tap" put out "A Mighty Wind", critics were very quick to pick up on why it was a less effective piece of work. Whereas Tap seemed to be partly about pricking the pretentions of every wannabe rock genius, and highlighting the hidden absurdity behind the seriousness of many a "spokesperson for a generation", Wind picked a humble, earthy target that didn't really make bold claims for itself in the first place. Plenty of the lighter, less politically orientated Greenwich Village folk artists of the sixties knew damn well they were slightly preposterous anyway.

I mean, how else do you explain this?. Describing the song before you download the MP3 would ruin the surprise and also partly the charm of the thing - although suffice to say it does find a way of becoming more lyrically absurd than even its title would suggest. Clearly aimed at the children's market, "Beans In My Ears" nonetheless caused me to nearly fall off my chair laughing the first time I heard it (which possibly explains a lot about my mental age). It's a triple whammy of syrupy close harmonies, endless repetition of ridiculous lyrical ideas, and also a little bit of light comedy gold.

If we really needed more proof that it's not just the British who pounce upon eccentric novelty records, this entered the Top 30 in the USA quite comfortably, although it failed to chart over here. Clearly we were having a taste lapse in its week of release on Philips.

Sorry for not being able to find a photograph or a scan of the sleeve or label for this one, by the way... Apologies also to anybody who thought this might be some sort of psychedelic Captain Beefheart-inspired track, although a Beefheart cover of this would surely make some sort of peculiar sense.

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Silicon Teens - Memphis Tennessee

Label: Mute Records

Year of Release: 1979

Mute Records these days are (regrettably) a subsidiary of EMI, with an almighty juggernaut of a back catalogue of albums by Depeche Mode, Erasure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Inspiral Carpets, and... er... Art Brut in their canon. In 1979, it was all a wee bit different - they were just a tiny operation run by Daniel Miller which put out his own work (under the name The Normal) and that of Boyd Rice and Fad Gadget.

The Silicon Teens were actually no more than Daniel Miller again, operating under a different pseudonym. Actors were hired to play the roles of teenagers who had got into synthesiser technology, and the idea was presumably that the band would be futuristic synth heart-throbs who might bring on a new young computerised music revolution. Releasing a series of quirky covers like "Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)" and "Memphis Tennessee" (above) they took primitive rock and roll into the monophonic digital age. Drum machines that sounded absolutely nothing like drums provided the rhythmic backdrop, although there's something oddly satisfying (and these days unusual) about that generic "bffff-chhhkk" noise which populated a lot of Throbbing Gristle, early Human League and early Mute work.

It almost goes without saying that the Silicon Teens became something of an irrelevance around Mute headquarters when a genuine teenage synthpop band - namely Depeche Mode - got added to the roster, and the time for pretending was over. Unless, of course, Depeche Mode are also a bunch of actors playing a role in a giant Daniel Miller scam, but that's rather unlikely.

Microdisney - 39 Minutes

Label: Virgin
Year of Release: 1988

"If a power were to lift him up/ make him rich, would he admit it was luck?/ or say he'd earned it/ claim a state of grace..."

We've already been acquainted with Microdisney thanks to my entry on "The Clock Comes Down The Stairs", of course, and in that I claimed that "39 Minutes" was their most satisfying major label album. I might also be so bold as to claim it's the album where their identity became the most solid, Cathal Coughlan's lyrics suddenly finding untold levels of bile whilst the arrangements of the music became more lush and fully realised.

The stories that surround this period of their recording career are legendary in some circles. When I interviewed Sean O'Hagan back in the mid-nineties he claimed that Virgin Records were a particularly "predatory" company to be signed to, and the effects of this environment began to eat away at his psyche almost as much as the salad years on Rough Trade had some years before. The Microdisney who were now being fed still didn't seem any fitter or happier. When they asked to be given control of their own mechandising, they ran off a series of "Microdisney are Shit" T-shirts, an act which may now seem like a rather childish piece of rebellion, but in the context of the marketing obsessed times actually seemed amazing. This was, lest we forget, an age of multi-format picture discs, square shaped records, overpriced CDs, free posters with the twelve inch single, etc. It made complete and total sense to mess with and parody everything with an anti-slogan. Virgin, to their credit, appeared not to mind much.

It didn't end with the T-shirts, however. There's a sneaking sense on "39 Minutes" that the band knew their number was up with the label, and were pissing on their remaining chips. The lead single "Singer's Hampstead Home" was a very thinly veiled attack on labelmate and cash cow Boy George. As Cathal Couglan stated at the time, it's a lyrical tirade against the mentality of celebrities who compain about their lack of privacy then invite the press around to talk about their houses and locations, purely to show off their wealth. Precisely what Boy George was doing in Hampstead at the time, of course. "He only had planned lines to say/ but he said them in a witty and stylish way" sneers Cathal indignantly on the track, mocking the pseudo-Wildeisms of the star in question.

Amidst the lush production of the album, there's also a sense of some very eccentric overspending which at times seems hilarious. Stock Aitken and Waterman protegees The London Boys feature on the anti-Benetton track "United Colours", for instance, although there are some other similar sounding backing vocalists credited elsewhere who are known as The Fabulous Golden Showers. We can only hope that this wasn't a pseudonym. Additionally, there's a joyful tap dancing solo on the anti-Royal Family track "Send Herman Home". Rumours have persisted that they actually hired professional tap dancers to deliver this in the studio, but that seems like an expensive kitchen sink too far.

Whatever, there's no doubt that whilst "39 Minutes" isn't a perfect album (nor the best Microdisney LP, in fact) it is possibly the only one I can think of that marries apparent anarchy with eighties gloss so successfully. It's more or less impossible to see the joins between O'Hagan's soft and sleek (and occasionally orchestrally enhanced) visions and Cathal's seething contributions. At its best, in fact, it's like a savage parody of the worst excesses of late eighties culture - embracing the thing it despises so hard that it shatters its rib cage. You might not like the album, but it's certainly a difficult thing not to admire. More so than any other album of the period, it gives an honest impression of the styles and attitudes of the time, condemning them not long before the cracks began to show. As a cultural artefact, it's worth 39 Minutes of anyone's time.

Tracklisting:

1. Singer's Hampstead Home
2. High & Dry
3. Send Herman Home
4. Ambulance For One
5. Soul Boy
6. Back To The Old Town
7. United Colours
8. Gale Force Wind
9. Herr Direktor
10. Bluerings

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