William Kent, earlier, buying Szechuan chips (I need you to copy the recipe. I'll pay you)
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- Thread starter Corpsey
- Start date
William Kent, earlier, buying Szechuan chips (I need you to copy the recipe. I'll pay you)
william_kent
Well-known member
ok, I knew a guy whose sister went out with Ian Astbury when he lived in birkenhead, pre Southern death cult
Gossip please
william_kent
Well-known member
If I had the recipe I wouldn't be paying £4 for a bag of chips!
if you are ever in Manchester I recommend these:
edit: sweat drips from my brow just looking at this, although the photo doesn't even indicate how angry these chips are, when they arrive they are a violent shade of red
Totally up for that. Will take me about 8 hours to come down, but fuck it. I don't really speak to her anymore since she tried to scam the family by pretending to have cancer (knowing how Fortuna works, I wouldn't dare...) Can tell you more about The Fox though...hang on, are you Catalog??? 😮
william_kent
Well-known member
Oh yeah, Denis Nilsen...she did work with him in the Jobcentre in Cricklewood, and also George Michael's cousin.
Tell us the seduction story...
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I think this is how luka pictures himself when he's sat on the south bank
86: THE VIOLATORS – “SUMMER OF ’81 / LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG” 7”
We’re probably not going to get that much decent Goth/Oi! crossover during our brief stint on this planet, so I kinda feel compelled to rave about the tiny smattering of tunes bequeathed to us by THE VIOLATORS. I know next to nothing about this fantastic group, except they came from Derbyshire and were a proper subcultural oddity for the early ‘80s: a mob of spruced-up ‘clockwork skinheads’ fronted by a goth chick, inhabiting a temporary DMZ between the bootboy yobz and the slightly more cerebral Crasstafarian/Class War types.
Before he became a full-time Sun hack, Garry Bushell used to champion Oi! in music weekly Sounds. However, he always seemed to big up the dullest tunes of the era. The ‘classic’ Oi! compilations he threw together aren’t all that, to be honest. Oi! The Album was OK but had way too much plodding rock filler and ‘joke’ shit by the likes of Max Splodge (Bushell really has appalling taste: he couldn’t even make a song called ‘Itler Was An ‘Omo funny). Strength Thru Oi! was similar, and if you really believe Bushell genuinely had no clue who ‘cover star’ Nicky Crane was, here’s a bridge I picked up earlier. Carry On Oi! was shit – a ska version of the Dambusters theme, for fuck’s sake – and 85% of Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot wasn’t even Oi! (also, any record featuring moron ‘poet’ Attila The Stockbroker gets an instant NIL PWONTS on my watch).
Amazingly, Bushell gave the first two Violators 7”s good reviews, but didn’t include the group on any of his comps – shame, as they’d have blown Infa-Riot and Criminal Class out of the water. On a tangent, I was chuffed to FINALLY discover an online scan of one of my favourite Viz features, ‘Garry Bluto On The Box’, which still cracks me up now ((to anyone born after 2000, his early ‘90s Sun column was basically him ranting about there being too many gays on TV, while demanding a royal pardon for Reggie Kray)).
Anyway, this single - what a fucking scorcher! Documentarians really ought to give Ghost Town a rest and instead tack Summer Of ‘81 on top of their retro footage of Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side, Toxteth and St Paul’s going up in flames. I don’t want to slag off The Specials…but Ghost Town is hardly brimming with bus stop-burning energy, right? Watching the old bill clutching dustbin lids as makeshift shields against a meteor shower of petrol bombs doesn’t scream ‘ghost town’ to me: the streets were plenty busy those nights. To me, every second of Summer Of ’81 sounds perfect – the closing “ENGLAND….RIOT RIOT RIOT RIOT!” chant as legendary as the Pistols’ “NO FUTURE FOR YOU” countdown on God Save The Queen. In the space of five years, the UK had flipped to outright neoliberalism, and the younger siblings of Rotten’s/Strummer’s ‘blank generation’ were being forced into rip-off YTS schemes and subjected to routine, increasingly violent police harassment.
The B-side rocks like a bastard too. Shit, why weren't this group bigger than the Angelic Upstarts?
And that was it, really: this killer single, the (great but not quite as good) Gangland 7” and a few not-so-hot tracks on the Country Fit For Heroes sampler. Soon after, they ditched their Oi! edge and went into full ‘Banshees B-side’ mode for a third single, Crossings Of Sangsara (I like it, anyway). Then they changed their name to Taboo and promptly disappeared into the void for a few decades - until the Information Superhighway brought us all together again. To be honest, they could have gone on to record Crazy Frog and they'd still have my eternal respect for Summer Of ’81.
We’re probably not going to get that much decent Goth/Oi! crossover during our brief stint on this planet, so I kinda feel compelled to rave about the tiny smattering of tunes bequeathed to us by THE VIOLATORS. I know next to nothing about this fantastic group, except they came from Derbyshire and were a proper subcultural oddity for the early ‘80s: a mob of spruced-up ‘clockwork skinheads’ fronted by a goth chick, inhabiting a temporary DMZ between the bootboy yobz and the slightly more cerebral Crasstafarian/Class War types.
Before he became a full-time Sun hack, Garry Bushell used to champion Oi! in music weekly Sounds. However, he always seemed to big up the dullest tunes of the era. The ‘classic’ Oi! compilations he threw together aren’t all that, to be honest. Oi! The Album was OK but had way too much plodding rock filler and ‘joke’ shit by the likes of Max Splodge (Bushell really has appalling taste: he couldn’t even make a song called ‘Itler Was An ‘Omo funny). Strength Thru Oi! was similar, and if you really believe Bushell genuinely had no clue who ‘cover star’ Nicky Crane was, here’s a bridge I picked up earlier. Carry On Oi! was shit – a ska version of the Dambusters theme, for fuck’s sake – and 85% of Oi! Oi! That’s Yer Lot wasn’t even Oi! (also, any record featuring moron ‘poet’ Attila The Stockbroker gets an instant NIL PWONTS on my watch).
Amazingly, Bushell gave the first two Violators 7”s good reviews, but didn’t include the group on any of his comps – shame, as they’d have blown Infa-Riot and Criminal Class out of the water. On a tangent, I was chuffed to FINALLY discover an online scan of one of my favourite Viz features, ‘Garry Bluto On The Box’, which still cracks me up now ((to anyone born after 2000, his early ‘90s Sun column was basically him ranting about there being too many gays on TV, while demanding a royal pardon for Reggie Kray)).
Anyway, this single - what a fucking scorcher! Documentarians really ought to give Ghost Town a rest and instead tack Summer Of ‘81 on top of their retro footage of Brixton, Handsworth, Moss Side, Toxteth and St Paul’s going up in flames. I don’t want to slag off The Specials…but Ghost Town is hardly brimming with bus stop-burning energy, right? Watching the old bill clutching dustbin lids as makeshift shields against a meteor shower of petrol bombs doesn’t scream ‘ghost town’ to me: the streets were plenty busy those nights. To me, every second of Summer Of ’81 sounds perfect – the closing “ENGLAND….RIOT RIOT RIOT RIOT!” chant as legendary as the Pistols’ “NO FUTURE FOR YOU” countdown on God Save The Queen. In the space of five years, the UK had flipped to outright neoliberalism, and the younger siblings of Rotten’s/Strummer’s ‘blank generation’ were being forced into rip-off YTS schemes and subjected to routine, increasingly violent police harassment.
The B-side rocks like a bastard too. Shit, why weren't this group bigger than the Angelic Upstarts?
And that was it, really: this killer single, the (great but not quite as good) Gangland 7” and a few not-so-hot tracks on the Country Fit For Heroes sampler. Soon after, they ditched their Oi! edge and went into full ‘Banshees B-side’ mode for a third single, Crossings Of Sangsara (I like it, anyway). Then they changed their name to Taboo and promptly disappeared into the void for a few decades - until the Information Superhighway brought us all together again. To be honest, they could have gone on to record Crazy Frog and they'd still have my eternal respect for Summer Of ’81.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Garry Bushell, I thought he was semi-dead!
85: WILLIAM KENT, DEPICTED AS THE SUN KING
uh, I mean
COIL - "LOVE'S SECRET DOMAIN" LP
I learned my first spell in infant school: RAIN RAIN, GO AWAY / COME AGAIN ANOTHER DAY. It’s a good one to cast if you’re moving flat and a storm’s brewing. I’ve never known it to fail, but there are two stipulations: 1) cancelling the rain must be for the greater good (ie, you can’t withhold rainfall from a besieged town afflicted by drought); and 2) you’re only postponing the shower…you WILL get soaked to the bone some other time. The rain gods never miss.
I picked up the tab for this conceit in New Orleans in 2012 (at Marie Laveau’s grave, no less) when I suddenly got hit by one of those downpours where the rain’s so cold and heavy it knocks the breath out of your lungs. I squelched back to the French Quarter wetter than a Mississippi wharf rat, thinking I should have just put up with that mild drizzle in London last month.
This is what you’re telling to ‘GO AWAY’
Since then, I’ve used magic to: obtain lucrative racing tips from GANESH himself; turn myself invisible (to escape police kettles/ticket inspectors); make a dickhead neighbour move out; turn straight women lesbian; find a passport I’d accidentally tossed in a bin; unblock a sink; win free air tickets; cure myself of flu within an hour, to go to a gig; give myself instant flu, to avoid a swimming lesson; resurrect a werewolf; and get away with submitting a £800 karaoke bill as a ‘work expense’. I even attended a Chakra Realignment retreat hosted by my good friend and master magus FABIO LANZONI, who taught me the sacred art of lingam massage. When I went for my first haircut after Lockdown, the barber joked “That was you, wasn’t it? You spent all last year saying you wanted to work from home…you wished it, didn’t you?”, and I almost felt Klaus Schwab scan me.
You’ve got to be careful, though…some Chthonic entities like to play rough. I knew one poor sap who summoned the GREAT GOD PAN so that he could keep it up for 72 hours of non-stop SATYR SUPER-SEX. Sadly, he didn’t realise Pan is a ‘panic’ god who prefers to scare the shit out of Arcadian shepherds – so, instead of shagging his girlfriend’s brains out, he went completely fucking mental and burned down his kitchen. Sadder still, he spent the next few years in a psychiatric ward, mogged off his face and retreating into a murky labyrinth of conspiracy theories and paranoid ramblings. And saddest of all: that man was me.
Not really – but it is a risk when you dabble in this stuff. I mean, you rename yourself Jhon Balance and then fall to your death: someone or something on the other end of the unicursal hexagram is having a laugh. Fortuna doesn’t give a fig for your tears…she spins her wheel and gets her kicks. I genuinely think this is why curses and hexes often backfire: nobody appreciates an impatient, interfering cunt…not even Fortuna.
If I were you lot, I’d get into manifesting instead: far safer! Worked for Oprah and Brian Rose. I AM A MONEY MAGNET…MONEY FLOWS TO ME…show me a chaos magician driving a Maserati with five supermodels fighting over him, anyway…I ATTRACT ABUNDANCE AND PROSPERITY EASILY…Pan lying dead in a pile of leaves in Arcadia, hooves sticking up in the air…I OPEN MY SOUL AND MIND TO CREATIVITY…Graham Bond chucking himself onto the lines at Finsbury Park Station…CAN I MANIFEST MY GIRLFRIEND TO HAVE A SLIM BODY?
Guess which one didn't spend a decade of Sundays charging sigils
This is the Coil era I love best: sleazy throbbing disco nights down Heaven, the lads necking rhubarbs ‘n’ custards instead of eating their broccoli. I like the fact Coil met some handsome Dublin lad and got him to pose for the Love’s Secret Domain promo pics as a fake group member, giving him the name ‘Otto Avery’. Years ago, when I got offered on-the-side freelance work from other B2B publications and couldn’t use my real name, I wrote under pseudonyms like Harry Roberts, Imelda Davis and Otto Avery (only the latter ever earned me a raised eyebrow from the editors). Unfortunately, Google search results became way too good, so I just use ‘Joe Muggs’ now. Oh, stop it. Mock his TEDX talk all you like, but it inspired me to lose weight. But back to Otto Avery! What a star. He didn’t even have to go to the effort of prancing around on stage like Bez.
What to say about an album that I’ve lugged around in my psychic Bag For Life since I was 17? LSD-era Coil was there for me when no-one else was, rave didgeridoo ‘n’ all - so to hell with objectivity. For me, it’s the bridge between Unknown Pleasures and Sweet Vibrations. I also can’t help comparing this album with Death Is Not The End by Shut Up And Dance, released the same year: SUAD’s Cape Fear sounds like it could be a hard-edged, manic remix of Coil’s The Snow, and then there’s the obvious Green Man reference and grim reality burns like Runaways and Derek Went Mad. Both are top-rate psychedelic, nocturnal records.
LSD also features one of the greatest pieces of ‘dark ambient’ I’ve ever heard.
Maybe they’d have bagged the Hellraiser contract with this stuff instead. If there’s a better soundtrack to chatting to Soho prostitutes in the snow at 3am, asking if we can come inside but to buy drinks instead of hand-jobs, then getting a late-night Chinese and taxiing it to Fire in Vauxhall to spend the next five hours guzzling scotch’n’cokes and swapping cigarettes for popper hits with trans Thais in a High-NRG vortex…it’s probably Night Dubbing by Imagination. Actually, I hate to trot out that clichéd line, “Every time I listen to it, I hear something new” – but with LSD it’s true.
I think Coil’s power waned a lot after they left London. Maybe you just need to be on the right ley line: Mark E Smith wasn't entirely wrong when he sang Hard Life In Country. I’d also recommend the accompanying ‘out-takes’ collection Stolen And Contaminated Songs (Her Friends The Wolves and Who’ll Fall are brilliant) and the Wrong Eye 7” – an early version of Windowpane, with Glaswegian hellcat Rose McDowall crooning over the rhythm track in a fucked-up VariSpeed haze.
Another REALLY good spell is to shout Abrakebabra! and magically terminate the post because you can't think how to wrap it all up. Bye!
uh, I mean
COIL - "LOVE'S SECRET DOMAIN" LP
I learned my first spell in infant school: RAIN RAIN, GO AWAY / COME AGAIN ANOTHER DAY. It’s a good one to cast if you’re moving flat and a storm’s brewing. I’ve never known it to fail, but there are two stipulations: 1) cancelling the rain must be for the greater good (ie, you can’t withhold rainfall from a besieged town afflicted by drought); and 2) you’re only postponing the shower…you WILL get soaked to the bone some other time. The rain gods never miss.
I picked up the tab for this conceit in New Orleans in 2012 (at Marie Laveau’s grave, no less) when I suddenly got hit by one of those downpours where the rain’s so cold and heavy it knocks the breath out of your lungs. I squelched back to the French Quarter wetter than a Mississippi wharf rat, thinking I should have just put up with that mild drizzle in London last month.
This is what you’re telling to ‘GO AWAY’
Since then, I’ve used magic to: obtain lucrative racing tips from GANESH himself; turn myself invisible (to escape police kettles/ticket inspectors); make a dickhead neighbour move out; turn straight women lesbian; find a passport I’d accidentally tossed in a bin; unblock a sink; win free air tickets; cure myself of flu within an hour, to go to a gig; give myself instant flu, to avoid a swimming lesson; resurrect a werewolf; and get away with submitting a £800 karaoke bill as a ‘work expense’. I even attended a Chakra Realignment retreat hosted by my good friend and master magus FABIO LANZONI, who taught me the sacred art of lingam massage. When I went for my first haircut after Lockdown, the barber joked “That was you, wasn’t it? You spent all last year saying you wanted to work from home…you wished it, didn’t you?”, and I almost felt Klaus Schwab scan me.
You’ve got to be careful, though…some Chthonic entities like to play rough. I knew one poor sap who summoned the GREAT GOD PAN so that he could keep it up for 72 hours of non-stop SATYR SUPER-SEX. Sadly, he didn’t realise Pan is a ‘panic’ god who prefers to scare the shit out of Arcadian shepherds – so, instead of shagging his girlfriend’s brains out, he went completely fucking mental and burned down his kitchen. Sadder still, he spent the next few years in a psychiatric ward, mogged off his face and retreating into a murky labyrinth of conspiracy theories and paranoid ramblings. And saddest of all: that man was me.
Not really – but it is a risk when you dabble in this stuff. I mean, you rename yourself Jhon Balance and then fall to your death: someone or something on the other end of the unicursal hexagram is having a laugh. Fortuna doesn’t give a fig for your tears…she spins her wheel and gets her kicks. I genuinely think this is why curses and hexes often backfire: nobody appreciates an impatient, interfering cunt…not even Fortuna.
If I were you lot, I’d get into manifesting instead: far safer! Worked for Oprah and Brian Rose. I AM A MONEY MAGNET…MONEY FLOWS TO ME…show me a chaos magician driving a Maserati with five supermodels fighting over him, anyway…I ATTRACT ABUNDANCE AND PROSPERITY EASILY…Pan lying dead in a pile of leaves in Arcadia, hooves sticking up in the air…I OPEN MY SOUL AND MIND TO CREATIVITY…Graham Bond chucking himself onto the lines at Finsbury Park Station…CAN I MANIFEST MY GIRLFRIEND TO HAVE A SLIM BODY?
Guess which one didn't spend a decade of Sundays charging sigils
This is the Coil era I love best: sleazy throbbing disco nights down Heaven, the lads necking rhubarbs ‘n’ custards instead of eating their broccoli. I like the fact Coil met some handsome Dublin lad and got him to pose for the Love’s Secret Domain promo pics as a fake group member, giving him the name ‘Otto Avery’. Years ago, when I got offered on-the-side freelance work from other B2B publications and couldn’t use my real name, I wrote under pseudonyms like Harry Roberts, Imelda Davis and Otto Avery (only the latter ever earned me a raised eyebrow from the editors). Unfortunately, Google search results became way too good, so I just use ‘Joe Muggs’ now. Oh, stop it. Mock his TEDX talk all you like, but it inspired me to lose weight. But back to Otto Avery! What a star. He didn’t even have to go to the effort of prancing around on stage like Bez.
What to say about an album that I’ve lugged around in my psychic Bag For Life since I was 17? LSD-era Coil was there for me when no-one else was, rave didgeridoo ‘n’ all - so to hell with objectivity. For me, it’s the bridge between Unknown Pleasures and Sweet Vibrations. I also can’t help comparing this album with Death Is Not The End by Shut Up And Dance, released the same year: SUAD’s Cape Fear sounds like it could be a hard-edged, manic remix of Coil’s The Snow, and then there’s the obvious Green Man reference and grim reality burns like Runaways and Derek Went Mad. Both are top-rate psychedelic, nocturnal records.
LSD also features one of the greatest pieces of ‘dark ambient’ I’ve ever heard.
Maybe they’d have bagged the Hellraiser contract with this stuff instead. If there’s a better soundtrack to chatting to Soho prostitutes in the snow at 3am, asking if we can come inside but to buy drinks instead of hand-jobs, then getting a late-night Chinese and taxiing it to Fire in Vauxhall to spend the next five hours guzzling scotch’n’cokes and swapping cigarettes for popper hits with trans Thais in a High-NRG vortex…it’s probably Night Dubbing by Imagination. Actually, I hate to trot out that clichéd line, “Every time I listen to it, I hear something new” – but with LSD it’s true.
I think Coil’s power waned a lot after they left London. Maybe you just need to be on the right ley line: Mark E Smith wasn't entirely wrong when he sang Hard Life In Country. I’d also recommend the accompanying ‘out-takes’ collection Stolen And Contaminated Songs (Her Friends The Wolves and Who’ll Fall are brilliant) and the Wrong Eye 7” – an early version of Windowpane, with Glaswegian hellcat Rose McDowall crooning over the rhythm track in a fucked-up VariSpeed haze.
Another REALLY good spell is to shout Abrakebabra! and magically terminate the post because you can't think how to wrap it all up. Bye!
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Stapleton cover too!
I don't think he dared reference Lockerbie, but yeah, 'hotter than a barbecue in Fred West's back garden' was his style. He also used to go on and on about Jo Brand and Gerry Adams.
sufi
lala
No reaction emoji suffices to express my appreciation
84: JJ BURNEL - "FREDDIE LAKER/DO THE EUROPEAN"
OK, this is really Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacque Burnel’s Euroman Cometh solo LP, but I tend to skip the other nine tracks: these two would have made a great 12”. The other songs aren’t completely awful, but the album’s basically junk-sick, temporarily homeless Burnel sleeping on the floor in the recording studio in winter, experimenting with a drum machine and FX: these two tunes are really where it’s at.
Ironically, Burnel was the only person on the British Isles who ever sported a Euro flag prior to 2016 – when half the country jumped on the bandwagon (poseurs!) Though, back in 1979, his EU armband got him slated as a neo-fascist by certain music hacks. Not that many of them directly confronted him about it: Burnel was quite tasty at karate-kicking members of The Clash around Dingwall’s, and he didn’t treat journos who’d critically panned No More Heroes much better.
Freddie Laker is a rant about the US banning Concorde from most of its airports because it was ‘too noisy’, which Burnel deemed a malicious, unsophisticated Yank attack on the supersonic plane’s culturally superior Anglo-French developers. In the early ‘80s, you could fly from London to New York on Concorde in just under three hours. When I was a kid, the aero sector seemed to have an exciting future. By 2003, that trip would surely be reduced to 30 minutes, using our new ring-wing planes: quicker than a tube ride from Burnt Oak to Waterloo. By 2020, living in a technologically advanced world where all diseases and viruses had been eradicated, we’d be teleporting into Manhattan within seconds.
Yeah, right – flying sucks now. You spend hours on the tarmac before take-off because the dozy pilot left his Boots meal deal landside and simply can't cross the Irish Sea without it. In my day, pilots were cool and girls fantasised about bagging one for a husband. They drank like Russian sailors, shagged like bonobos and actually flew the fucking thing – instead of switching on an autonomous flight system and spending the next 12 hours blathering away about their favourite Dr Who episodes. When was the last time you heard anyone say “Mmm…yeah, I’d really like to date a pilot!” And why would they? Who’d want some dork who flies in circles around airports for hours because he’s “too stressed” to deploy the landing gear (which doesn't work anyway)?
What a fiasco. Did you see that Boeing door that fell out mid-flight? Could’ve sucked a passenger into the ether. But no, don't worry about that: just ensure you throw your toothpaste in the bin so it doesn’t blow the plane to smithereens. You can’t even play Operation Wolf at Heathrow now. Who’d have guessed engineering would devolve to Edwardian levels?
Jeez…are we only at 84?...anyway, the shit-fi video shows JJ and his band goofing around in Covent Garden. The ‘wacky’ suedehead guitarist didn’t even play on this song (or album) and I'm not sure how the rhythm box became a human with a powerpop haircut. It still sounds great at high volume (and the drum pattern after the first line of each verse always throws me):
(Heroin - the Euroman's Ozempic)
Do The European is the other obvious highlight. I think this album was the last thing Burnel recorded before his original, busted bass amp died, and he never sounded quite as aggressive afterwards. I honestly can't pick between Burnel, Wobble, Will Heggie or the bloke on the first New Model Army LP for post-punk bass supremacy:
Like half-hour transatlantic flights, decent Youtube audio quality remains a pipe dream, so you might need to track these down elsewhere for the best results. Engineers, huh? Promised us the brightest of futures, but what did they actually deliver? Horsey androids sputtering “I’M SORRY…I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH THAT!” down the blower?! Burnel’s dream of pan-European unity didn’t take off either, but he stuck to his guns at least, unlike most of Twitter: last time I saw him online, he was kicking off about Cornwall being full of pro-Leave ingrates. A day before he played a gig there, lol.
OK, this is really Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacque Burnel’s Euroman Cometh solo LP, but I tend to skip the other nine tracks: these two would have made a great 12”. The other songs aren’t completely awful, but the album’s basically junk-sick, temporarily homeless Burnel sleeping on the floor in the recording studio in winter, experimenting with a drum machine and FX: these two tunes are really where it’s at.
Ironically, Burnel was the only person on the British Isles who ever sported a Euro flag prior to 2016 – when half the country jumped on the bandwagon (poseurs!) Though, back in 1979, his EU armband got him slated as a neo-fascist by certain music hacks. Not that many of them directly confronted him about it: Burnel was quite tasty at karate-kicking members of The Clash around Dingwall’s, and he didn’t treat journos who’d critically panned No More Heroes much better.
Freddie Laker is a rant about the US banning Concorde from most of its airports because it was ‘too noisy’, which Burnel deemed a malicious, unsophisticated Yank attack on the supersonic plane’s culturally superior Anglo-French developers. In the early ‘80s, you could fly from London to New York on Concorde in just under three hours. When I was a kid, the aero sector seemed to have an exciting future. By 2003, that trip would surely be reduced to 30 minutes, using our new ring-wing planes: quicker than a tube ride from Burnt Oak to Waterloo. By 2020, living in a technologically advanced world where all diseases and viruses had been eradicated, we’d be teleporting into Manhattan within seconds.
Yeah, right – flying sucks now. You spend hours on the tarmac before take-off because the dozy pilot left his Boots meal deal landside and simply can't cross the Irish Sea without it. In my day, pilots were cool and girls fantasised about bagging one for a husband. They drank like Russian sailors, shagged like bonobos and actually flew the fucking thing – instead of switching on an autonomous flight system and spending the next 12 hours blathering away about their favourite Dr Who episodes. When was the last time you heard anyone say “Mmm…yeah, I’d really like to date a pilot!” And why would they? Who’d want some dork who flies in circles around airports for hours because he’s “too stressed” to deploy the landing gear (which doesn't work anyway)?
What a fiasco. Did you see that Boeing door that fell out mid-flight? Could’ve sucked a passenger into the ether. But no, don't worry about that: just ensure you throw your toothpaste in the bin so it doesn’t blow the plane to smithereens. You can’t even play Operation Wolf at Heathrow now. Who’d have guessed engineering would devolve to Edwardian levels?
Jeez…are we only at 84?...anyway, the shit-fi video shows JJ and his band goofing around in Covent Garden. The ‘wacky’ suedehead guitarist didn’t even play on this song (or album) and I'm not sure how the rhythm box became a human with a powerpop haircut. It still sounds great at high volume (and the drum pattern after the first line of each verse always throws me):
(Heroin - the Euroman's Ozempic)
Do The European is the other obvious highlight. I think this album was the last thing Burnel recorded before his original, busted bass amp died, and he never sounded quite as aggressive afterwards. I honestly can't pick between Burnel, Wobble, Will Heggie or the bloke on the first New Model Army LP for post-punk bass supremacy:
Like half-hour transatlantic flights, decent Youtube audio quality remains a pipe dream, so you might need to track these down elsewhere for the best results. Engineers, huh? Promised us the brightest of futures, but what did they actually deliver? Horsey androids sputtering “I’M SORRY…I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH THAT!” down the blower?! Burnel’s dream of pan-European unity didn’t take off either, but he stuck to his guns at least, unlike most of Twitter: last time I saw him online, he was kicking off about Cornwall being full of pro-Leave ingrates. A day before he played a gig there, lol.
83: VARIOUS – “CHEAP AND NASTY VOL 1” LP
‘Canned Maggot Records -Made In Hackney’?? ‘Sleevenotes by ALF GARNET’??? Must be another megadose of the sort of mind-rotting PUNK ROCK muck that drives Mojo hacks to tears. In this case, ‘Alf Garnet’ was listed Londoner DAVE FERGUSON, king of the Postcard Punx – and somebody YOU almost certainly stepped over if you ever visited Rough Trade West in the ‘90s/’00s. Back then, ‘Fergie’ would squat outside the doorway with his box of punk tapes and crackly vinyl, or be sprawled on the pavement like a spider monkey in bondage trousers, gobbing at anyone bold enough to hand him an acid jazz club flyer (I once saw him hurl one back with such deft, deadly aim, the flyer actually twisted and looped mid-air and bonked the leafletter on the snout.)
Dreadful ‘ska-punk’ band Culture Shock once recorded a song called Punks On Postcards, berating the LDN punx who made a few bob posing for tourist tat-shop postcards/American visitors, and accusing them of being sell-out phonies. Why, though? It’s not like they were posing for Raytheon. As a lifelong advocate of the fine art of skiving, I fully endorse making money through nothing more laborious than being snapped by Japanese tourists. Might suck a bit when it rains, but doorways (and spells) exist – and it beats working in a vegan café.
Culture Shock may have considered the Postcard Punx ‘fakes’, but I reckon it was pure jealousy. After all, people paid to take pics of London punks because they looked funny, colourful and cool – whereas nobody wanted photos of Culture Shock, because they were a bunch of ugly hippy cunts.
Dave Ferguson (in the 'Shining' T-shirt) rallying his '50p a pic' swell mob
When he wasn’t pulling faces for Saudi housewives down the Dilly or Trafalgar Square, Dave F supplemented his giro by churning out punk bootlegs like this. Nice cover pic of Charlie and his girls, taken at the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds. I saw this tableau ‘for real’ in the early ‘80s, as well as Gary Gilmore getting ventilated (could’ve watched that one all day) and Robespierre’s noggin on a pole. And all for £5! God, life was so much fun back then. Death begins at 10. Why can’t Putin hurry up and drop the fucking bomb. Anyway, enough of this bollocks – what does the record sound like? Here are Dave F’s peerless sleeve notes and my ramblings – as he puts it: “WE AIM TO PLEASE YOU WITH SEVEN RARE PUNK 7”S CAPTURED IN THEIR GLORY… YOU HAVE OUR WORD THAT THERE’LL BE NO MOD OR POWER POP SHIT IN THESE GROOVES!” Right on.
THE JERMZ – Power Cut/Me And My Baby
The NYC blackout of July 1977 inspired one of the best disco stompers of all time: The Trammps’ (The Night The Lights Went Out In) New York City, where the band celebrate all the jiggery-fuckery that went on in the dark. Politicians said it was a pity/But that was the night they called New York LOVE CITY! they croon. No offence, Trammps, but scoring in zero-vis conditions mightn’t be the brag you think it is…
On the other side of the pond, Yorkshire punks The Jermz were obviously more interested in the other antics that went on during the blackout - namely, MASS LOOTING. Top notch record. Me And My Baby is a great S&M tune with lyrics written by someone who’s probably never done it: can imagine these oiks being thrown out of the Torture Garden for indiscriminately swinging dog chains around. You think I’m some vanilla hick, but I once dated a girl who tried to dominate me. Unfortunately, the lazy mare forgot to bring a blindfold, so she wrapped a Spurs scarf around my bonce instead. I then got Chas & Dave’s Ossie’s Dream in my head while she was riding me like a kinky Frankie Dettori, and I burst out laughing - which didn’t go down well. Imagine having to console your own dominatrix and reassure her “It’s not you…honest”.
DISORDER – Air Raid/Law & Disorder
Dave F: “NO, NOT THAT BUNCH OF GLUE SNIFFING HIPPES FROM BRISTOL BUT TRUE PUNKS FROM THE OUTER REGIONS OF NEWCASTLE…ONE OF THE BAND’S GRAND FATHERS WAS A WW1 VETERAN & EXTREMELY PATRIOTIC WHO COLLECTED BOOKS AND MEMORABILIA, ETC FROM THE WAR. TO SAY HE WAS GUTTED WHEN HIS GRANDSON RIPPED OUT A PAGE TO MAKE THE RECORD SLEEVE FROM ONE OF HIS MOST TREASURED BOOKS IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT! WHILST THE BAND WERE PLAYING A GIG, THE DRUMMER WAS SHOT IN THE EYE WITH AN AIR-GUN AND THEY USED THE COMPENSATION TO FINANCE THE RECORD!”
Bushwick Bill missed a trick there. Fancy bringing an air-gun to a gig! Everyone’s a critic. And why couldn’t this have happened to Babyshambles? Well, what can I add to Dave’s summary except Air Raid is better than anything on No New York and has one of the most awesome minimalist ‘guitar solos’ out there. The flip, Law & Disorder, contains the line I WANNA STAB THE QUEEN, and the DESTROY, DESTROY, DESTROY SOCIETY/DESTROY, DESTROY, DESTROY EVERYTHING! chorus is pretty glorious.
VICTIMIZE – Baby Buyer/Hi-Rising Failure
From Cardiff. Wales gave us some good early punk singles – N.C.B. by Llygod Ffyrnig is my favourite – and, later, bands like Yr Anhrefn and The Oppressed. Victimize’s bad-taste 7” front cover, cashing in on the late ‘70s/early ‘80s ‘child snatcher’ craze, seems calculated to wind up the likes of Mike Read, but maybe the radio promo copy got lost in the post? Good, early Damned-style chug-a-long, but I have to question some of Hi-Rising Failure’s lyrical attempts at urban grit: “Living up here on the 86th floor”? Where...Singapore??
FX – South’s Gonna Rise Again/OBE/Slag
Dave F: “500 WERE PRESSED BUT MOST OF THESE WOULD OF BEEN TRASHED BY OUTRAGED ‘TEDS’ WHO FOUND IT IN THE ROCKABILLY SECTION IN THEIR LOCAL RECORD SHOP, PUT THERE BY THE OWNER THINKING IT WAS A COVER VERSION OF THE OLD JESSE JAMES NUMBER! HOW WRONG CAN YOU GET !!!”
Very wrong – no way you’d guess this is actually an ode to Brighton & Hove Albion hooligans storming Selhurst Park – but the cover art’s such a mismatch, it’s kind of hilarious. OBE is a great rant with one of the most recycled punk riffs ever, and lyrics like: “You get medals from your country, you get ribbons from the queen / The VC cross of valour, ‘cos you’re an old has-been / Honoured for your services and duty to the crown / Give me half a chance and I’ll pull the whole lot down”. You can tell the shadow of WW2 still loomed over the culture at this point in time. Slag is boring. Hope at least one outraged Ted didn’t trash his copy: it’s previously sold for £343 on Discogs. Thank God for Canned Maggots Records, saving me money since 1997!
THE RIVALS – Future Rights/Flowers
Dave F: “TO BE FRANK, WE KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT THE GROUP”
Should’ve included this LP in the ‘Liner Notes’ thread. Future Rights is a superb slow-burner, predicting the rise of an ultra-religious totalitarian state over a tense metallic riff, while Flowers is a mindless 2-minute blast that sounds like a bunch of punks jumping all over each other in the back of a pub, minutes before the landlord calls the cops and permabans all ‘punk nights’ – you can almost smell the Evostik, Concrete hairgel and Dry Blackthorn. Sadly, the baby-faced skinhead drummer got ousted by a future member of Leftfield (seriously!): would love to know Dave F’s thoughts on that.
THE BLEACH BOYS – Chloroform/You Got Nothing
Dave F: “ALTHOUGH 1000 WERE PRESSED, A LARGE NUMBER WERE DESTROYED BY ONE OF THEIR MOTHERS WHO DECIDED THAT THE RECORDS WERE EXTREMELY DISTASTEFULL!”
Ah, it’s just a bit of fun, ma. Who hasn’t wanted to knock ‘emselves unconscious after a hard week at school? “You can keep formaldehyde/Airfix glue makes me sick inside/Now I’m happy through to dawn/’Cos I’ve been sniffing chloroform”. Production as scuzzy as the Northern Line in 1980 and a singer who sounds like Billy Childish yelping through a Covid mask. The flip’s not as good, but it contains the relatively polite insult “You got nothing ‘cos you’re so sick/You ain’t worth a ball of spit”. In a world where the Geto Boys, GG Allin and Whitehouse have subjected their long-suffering listeners to every obscenity under the sun, it’s nice to hear punk records that keep it civil (the tamest punk ‘insult’ I’ve heard is still “imbecilic burk!” in a song by anarcho-crusties DIRT).
THE SCONEHEADS – “Morton’s Always Trying To Be Hip/D’Ya Want Duffed/Bathtime Funtime”
Worst of the lot. I hate intentionally ‘wacky punk’, and would gladly have seen Thatcher live 200 years to avoid the campaign to get that Notsensibles song into the charts the week she snuffed it. If you’re determined to be an idiot on record at least do it properly, like The Bleach Boys or Skrewdriver. Shame, as The Sconeheads are pretty good musically.
The market for ‘rare punk’ bootleg comps has completely dried up since this came out – why bother pressing up vinyl when people can grab it all off Soulseek for free? Similarly, tourist demand for pics of punks has plummeted – though it seems one Brazilian ‘zombie punk’ in Camden is still clocking in. But is the game still worth it? This guy's currently charging £1 for a pic – the equivalent of 32p in 1984. Dave F was charging 50p a pic back then…the equivalent of £2.01 today! And they tell us not to worry about inflation!
Speaking of lost Londoners, does anyone remember the old guy up Notting Hill with a dog in a pram?
‘Canned Maggot Records -Made In Hackney’?? ‘Sleevenotes by ALF GARNET’??? Must be another megadose of the sort of mind-rotting PUNK ROCK muck that drives Mojo hacks to tears. In this case, ‘Alf Garnet’ was listed Londoner DAVE FERGUSON, king of the Postcard Punx – and somebody YOU almost certainly stepped over if you ever visited Rough Trade West in the ‘90s/’00s. Back then, ‘Fergie’ would squat outside the doorway with his box of punk tapes and crackly vinyl, or be sprawled on the pavement like a spider monkey in bondage trousers, gobbing at anyone bold enough to hand him an acid jazz club flyer (I once saw him hurl one back with such deft, deadly aim, the flyer actually twisted and looped mid-air and bonked the leafletter on the snout.)
Dreadful ‘ska-punk’ band Culture Shock once recorded a song called Punks On Postcards, berating the LDN punx who made a few bob posing for tourist tat-shop postcards/American visitors, and accusing them of being sell-out phonies. Why, though? It’s not like they were posing for Raytheon. As a lifelong advocate of the fine art of skiving, I fully endorse making money through nothing more laborious than being snapped by Japanese tourists. Might suck a bit when it rains, but doorways (and spells) exist – and it beats working in a vegan café.
Culture Shock may have considered the Postcard Punx ‘fakes’, but I reckon it was pure jealousy. After all, people paid to take pics of London punks because they looked funny, colourful and cool – whereas nobody wanted photos of Culture Shock, because they were a bunch of ugly hippy cunts.
Dave Ferguson (in the 'Shining' T-shirt) rallying his '50p a pic' swell mob
When he wasn’t pulling faces for Saudi housewives down the Dilly or Trafalgar Square, Dave F supplemented his giro by churning out punk bootlegs like this. Nice cover pic of Charlie and his girls, taken at the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds. I saw this tableau ‘for real’ in the early ‘80s, as well as Gary Gilmore getting ventilated (could’ve watched that one all day) and Robespierre’s noggin on a pole. And all for £5! God, life was so much fun back then. Death begins at 10. Why can’t Putin hurry up and drop the fucking bomb. Anyway, enough of this bollocks – what does the record sound like? Here are Dave F’s peerless sleeve notes and my ramblings – as he puts it: “WE AIM TO PLEASE YOU WITH SEVEN RARE PUNK 7”S CAPTURED IN THEIR GLORY… YOU HAVE OUR WORD THAT THERE’LL BE NO MOD OR POWER POP SHIT IN THESE GROOVES!” Right on.
THE JERMZ – Power Cut/Me And My Baby
The NYC blackout of July 1977 inspired one of the best disco stompers of all time: The Trammps’ (The Night The Lights Went Out In) New York City, where the band celebrate all the jiggery-fuckery that went on in the dark. Politicians said it was a pity/But that was the night they called New York LOVE CITY! they croon. No offence, Trammps, but scoring in zero-vis conditions mightn’t be the brag you think it is…
On the other side of the pond, Yorkshire punks The Jermz were obviously more interested in the other antics that went on during the blackout - namely, MASS LOOTING. Top notch record. Me And My Baby is a great S&M tune with lyrics written by someone who’s probably never done it: can imagine these oiks being thrown out of the Torture Garden for indiscriminately swinging dog chains around. You think I’m some vanilla hick, but I once dated a girl who tried to dominate me. Unfortunately, the lazy mare forgot to bring a blindfold, so she wrapped a Spurs scarf around my bonce instead. I then got Chas & Dave’s Ossie’s Dream in my head while she was riding me like a kinky Frankie Dettori, and I burst out laughing - which didn’t go down well. Imagine having to console your own dominatrix and reassure her “It’s not you…honest”.
DISORDER – Air Raid/Law & Disorder
Dave F: “NO, NOT THAT BUNCH OF GLUE SNIFFING HIPPES FROM BRISTOL BUT TRUE PUNKS FROM THE OUTER REGIONS OF NEWCASTLE…ONE OF THE BAND’S GRAND FATHERS WAS A WW1 VETERAN & EXTREMELY PATRIOTIC WHO COLLECTED BOOKS AND MEMORABILIA, ETC FROM THE WAR. TO SAY HE WAS GUTTED WHEN HIS GRANDSON RIPPED OUT A PAGE TO MAKE THE RECORD SLEEVE FROM ONE OF HIS MOST TREASURED BOOKS IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT! WHILST THE BAND WERE PLAYING A GIG, THE DRUMMER WAS SHOT IN THE EYE WITH AN AIR-GUN AND THEY USED THE COMPENSATION TO FINANCE THE RECORD!”
Bushwick Bill missed a trick there. Fancy bringing an air-gun to a gig! Everyone’s a critic. And why couldn’t this have happened to Babyshambles? Well, what can I add to Dave’s summary except Air Raid is better than anything on No New York and has one of the most awesome minimalist ‘guitar solos’ out there. The flip, Law & Disorder, contains the line I WANNA STAB THE QUEEN, and the DESTROY, DESTROY, DESTROY SOCIETY/DESTROY, DESTROY, DESTROY EVERYTHING! chorus is pretty glorious.
VICTIMIZE – Baby Buyer/Hi-Rising Failure
From Cardiff. Wales gave us some good early punk singles – N.C.B. by Llygod Ffyrnig is my favourite – and, later, bands like Yr Anhrefn and The Oppressed. Victimize’s bad-taste 7” front cover, cashing in on the late ‘70s/early ‘80s ‘child snatcher’ craze, seems calculated to wind up the likes of Mike Read, but maybe the radio promo copy got lost in the post? Good, early Damned-style chug-a-long, but I have to question some of Hi-Rising Failure’s lyrical attempts at urban grit: “Living up here on the 86th floor”? Where...Singapore??
FX – South’s Gonna Rise Again/OBE/Slag
Dave F: “500 WERE PRESSED BUT MOST OF THESE WOULD OF BEEN TRASHED BY OUTRAGED ‘TEDS’ WHO FOUND IT IN THE ROCKABILLY SECTION IN THEIR LOCAL RECORD SHOP, PUT THERE BY THE OWNER THINKING IT WAS A COVER VERSION OF THE OLD JESSE JAMES NUMBER! HOW WRONG CAN YOU GET !!!”
Very wrong – no way you’d guess this is actually an ode to Brighton & Hove Albion hooligans storming Selhurst Park – but the cover art’s such a mismatch, it’s kind of hilarious. OBE is a great rant with one of the most recycled punk riffs ever, and lyrics like: “You get medals from your country, you get ribbons from the queen / The VC cross of valour, ‘cos you’re an old has-been / Honoured for your services and duty to the crown / Give me half a chance and I’ll pull the whole lot down”. You can tell the shadow of WW2 still loomed over the culture at this point in time. Slag is boring. Hope at least one outraged Ted didn’t trash his copy: it’s previously sold for £343 on Discogs. Thank God for Canned Maggots Records, saving me money since 1997!
THE RIVALS – Future Rights/Flowers
Dave F: “TO BE FRANK, WE KNOW FUCK ALL ABOUT THE GROUP”
Should’ve included this LP in the ‘Liner Notes’ thread. Future Rights is a superb slow-burner, predicting the rise of an ultra-religious totalitarian state over a tense metallic riff, while Flowers is a mindless 2-minute blast that sounds like a bunch of punks jumping all over each other in the back of a pub, minutes before the landlord calls the cops and permabans all ‘punk nights’ – you can almost smell the Evostik, Concrete hairgel and Dry Blackthorn. Sadly, the baby-faced skinhead drummer got ousted by a future member of Leftfield (seriously!): would love to know Dave F’s thoughts on that.
THE BLEACH BOYS – Chloroform/You Got Nothing
Dave F: “ALTHOUGH 1000 WERE PRESSED, A LARGE NUMBER WERE DESTROYED BY ONE OF THEIR MOTHERS WHO DECIDED THAT THE RECORDS WERE EXTREMELY DISTASTEFULL!”
Ah, it’s just a bit of fun, ma. Who hasn’t wanted to knock ‘emselves unconscious after a hard week at school? “You can keep formaldehyde/Airfix glue makes me sick inside/Now I’m happy through to dawn/’Cos I’ve been sniffing chloroform”. Production as scuzzy as the Northern Line in 1980 and a singer who sounds like Billy Childish yelping through a Covid mask. The flip’s not as good, but it contains the relatively polite insult “You got nothing ‘cos you’re so sick/You ain’t worth a ball of spit”. In a world where the Geto Boys, GG Allin and Whitehouse have subjected their long-suffering listeners to every obscenity under the sun, it’s nice to hear punk records that keep it civil (the tamest punk ‘insult’ I’ve heard is still “imbecilic burk!” in a song by anarcho-crusties DIRT).
THE SCONEHEADS – “Morton’s Always Trying To Be Hip/D’Ya Want Duffed/Bathtime Funtime”
Worst of the lot. I hate intentionally ‘wacky punk’, and would gladly have seen Thatcher live 200 years to avoid the campaign to get that Notsensibles song into the charts the week she snuffed it. If you’re determined to be an idiot on record at least do it properly, like The Bleach Boys or Skrewdriver. Shame, as The Sconeheads are pretty good musically.
The market for ‘rare punk’ bootleg comps has completely dried up since this came out – why bother pressing up vinyl when people can grab it all off Soulseek for free? Similarly, tourist demand for pics of punks has plummeted – though it seems one Brazilian ‘zombie punk’ in Camden is still clocking in. But is the game still worth it? This guy's currently charging £1 for a pic – the equivalent of 32p in 1984. Dave F was charging 50p a pic back then…the equivalent of £2.01 today! And they tell us not to worry about inflation!
Speaking of lost Londoners, does anyone remember the old guy up Notting Hill with a dog in a pram?
When I was 17, I thought music journalism would be a good way of avoiding an honest day’s work. Then I saw Bjork and PJ Harvey doing a cover of Satisfaction at the 1994 Brit Awards and thought: maybe not. But then, in 2007, I landed my dream job – on the hip London style ’n’ culture bible WOOFAH.
I was employed as the resident ‘hatchet man’ (ie, the editors would give me the worst promo releases toreview slag off, sparing THEM a kicking whenever Jet Star or Roll Deep sent the heavies ‘round.) I used to go by the highly original pen name ‘Martin C’, so the editors’ mantra soon became: WE didn’t write those mean things about your release…it was Martin C! Luckily, enraged dubstep producers assumed Droid, Paul Meme and John Eden were referring to fellow Woofah scribe MARTIN CLARK – so they flushed his head down the bog at the Rhythm Factory instead.
Not that I escaped trouble: I still come over queer when I recall the night Kevin Martin lunged at me with a sharpened Dixy Chicken bone ‘shank’ outside the Albany. And then there was the time me and a fellow Woofah hack decided to bolt from a late-night taxi without paying, only for me to somehow get knocked out by a line of stationary supermarket trolleys.
None of my friends liked ragga when I was a teen. Actually, they hated it. Listening to Major Mackerel was a lonely hobby. Even the tiny handful of people I knew who liked dub and rocksteady had no time for ragga. And so, around the mid-‘90s, I stopped listening to it and forgot all about it.
Years later, a new bloke from Barons Court joined our company on the picture desk. We went for a drink one night and had a massive argument about the Labour Party (he was pro; I wasn’t). Then we talked about sport and books, and had a row about those too. He later told me he was on the verge of walking out. And then – damned if I can remember how – but Ninjaman, Tiger and Shabba Ranks came up in conversation, and we sat there ‘til chucking-out time, talking about records, clash tapes and DJs we’d both played to death in our teens.
I’d pop round to his house on weekends and then we’d walk to the end of Petticoat Lane Market, where a rasta in a leather jacket used to sell clash tapes. We had our favourites; it was almost like football teams. We both liked Tiger for his warmth and wit, and both hated Super Cat for killing Nitty Gritty. He swung Team Shabba; my don was Ninjaman. His boy was General Trees: mine was Professor Nuts. He dug Buju and Cutty Ranks; I backed Mad Cobra and Red Dragon. So, if the rasta had, for example, the tape “NINJAMAN vs GENERAL TREES, FALMOUTH”, it simply had to be bought, both of us willing our DJs on to victory over a crate of Guinness.
One of us would hand over a £5 and we’d head back to his place for the contest. There was a lot of pride and ego riding on this: it was my DJ vs his. I still remember the Saturday afternoon we played the NINJAMAN vs ZEBRA tape, where Zebra (a Tiger knock-off) pins Ninja to the ropes early on, calling him an old cokehead and whipping the crowd into a merry frenzy. Looks like your boy’s lost it, my mate would grin. But then, whaddya know: Ninja would make a quip, throw Zebra off guard – and suddenly he was spitting bullets left, right and centre and had the crowd eating out of his hand. That was when my mate would glower and say: “You can buy the tape off me…for £10”.
Here are some tunes that remind me of those days. Narrowing these down to three spots in a Top 100 list is like deciding which of your kids you kick off the burning plane, so I picked these after a few whiskeys. It won’t be the last bit of ragga that appears here.
82: MAD COBRA: “CALL IT OFF”
Cobra was obviously influenced by Ninjaman, which isn’t a bad thing. Beats the blatant imitators that came along later (don’t get me started on Merciless). Embracing gunman lyrics and slackness was an enjoyable fuck-off to the right-on stoner crust-punks and their Twinkle Brothers LPs, but Mad Cobra’s actually being a peacemaker on this Gulf War melodrama. The bass response on some of the Sinbad/Mr Doo pressings is amazing.
81: KING KONG – “DIGITAL WE DIGITAL”
Come crowd of people, don’t have no fear/Flash rub a dub and drink your beer. King Kong is one of my favourites: his vocals never fail to soothe my soul, even when he’s singing about Colonel Gaddafi or AIDS, and the bassline on this is everything I wanted Wayne Smith's ‘first digital reggae’ tune to sound like. Finding this particular mix as a single track on Boobtube was a chore, so here’s the full album – look, I timestamped the track for you, and the version plays straight after. Terrible sound quality, but what can I do (EDIT- it's at 07:04)
80: TOP CAT – “PIRATE RADIO STATION”
OK, be honest: who else got a copy of the book Radio Is My Bomb: A DIY Manual For Pirates out of the library with the vague notion of knocking up your own transmitter in a biscuit tin – then took it straight back because you couldn’t understand a single one of the fucking diagrams? Solder what to what? Slag off Soundcloud all you like, at least you don’t need a degree in electronics to share your mix with the masses. Some listeners may feel a nostalgic buzz as Top Cat namechecks deceased stations across London, Manchester and Birmingham while taunting the DTI. This record is 30 years old now, can you believe it? What happened to 2023 by the way? NFTs? Remember those? ASDA Spiderman? I've got time damage.
I was employed as the resident ‘hatchet man’ (ie, the editors would give me the worst promo releases to
Not that I escaped trouble: I still come over queer when I recall the night Kevin Martin lunged at me with a sharpened Dixy Chicken bone ‘shank’ outside the Albany. And then there was the time me and a fellow Woofah hack decided to bolt from a late-night taxi without paying, only for me to somehow get knocked out by a line of stationary supermarket trolleys.
None of my friends liked ragga when I was a teen. Actually, they hated it. Listening to Major Mackerel was a lonely hobby. Even the tiny handful of people I knew who liked dub and rocksteady had no time for ragga. And so, around the mid-‘90s, I stopped listening to it and forgot all about it.
Years later, a new bloke from Barons Court joined our company on the picture desk. We went for a drink one night and had a massive argument about the Labour Party (he was pro; I wasn’t). Then we talked about sport and books, and had a row about those too. He later told me he was on the verge of walking out. And then – damned if I can remember how – but Ninjaman, Tiger and Shabba Ranks came up in conversation, and we sat there ‘til chucking-out time, talking about records, clash tapes and DJs we’d both played to death in our teens.
I’d pop round to his house on weekends and then we’d walk to the end of Petticoat Lane Market, where a rasta in a leather jacket used to sell clash tapes. We had our favourites; it was almost like football teams. We both liked Tiger for his warmth and wit, and both hated Super Cat for killing Nitty Gritty. He swung Team Shabba; my don was Ninjaman. His boy was General Trees: mine was Professor Nuts. He dug Buju and Cutty Ranks; I backed Mad Cobra and Red Dragon. So, if the rasta had, for example, the tape “NINJAMAN vs GENERAL TREES, FALMOUTH”, it simply had to be bought, both of us willing our DJs on to victory over a crate of Guinness.
One of us would hand over a £5 and we’d head back to his place for the contest. There was a lot of pride and ego riding on this: it was my DJ vs his. I still remember the Saturday afternoon we played the NINJAMAN vs ZEBRA tape, where Zebra (a Tiger knock-off) pins Ninja to the ropes early on, calling him an old cokehead and whipping the crowd into a merry frenzy. Looks like your boy’s lost it, my mate would grin. But then, whaddya know: Ninja would make a quip, throw Zebra off guard – and suddenly he was spitting bullets left, right and centre and had the crowd eating out of his hand. That was when my mate would glower and say: “You can buy the tape off me…for £10”.
Here are some tunes that remind me of those days. Narrowing these down to three spots in a Top 100 list is like deciding which of your kids you kick off the burning plane, so I picked these after a few whiskeys. It won’t be the last bit of ragga that appears here.
82: MAD COBRA: “CALL IT OFF”
Cobra was obviously influenced by Ninjaman, which isn’t a bad thing. Beats the blatant imitators that came along later (don’t get me started on Merciless). Embracing gunman lyrics and slackness was an enjoyable fuck-off to the right-on stoner crust-punks and their Twinkle Brothers LPs, but Mad Cobra’s actually being a peacemaker on this Gulf War melodrama. The bass response on some of the Sinbad/Mr Doo pressings is amazing.
81: KING KONG – “DIGITAL WE DIGITAL”
Come crowd of people, don’t have no fear/Flash rub a dub and drink your beer. King Kong is one of my favourites: his vocals never fail to soothe my soul, even when he’s singing about Colonel Gaddafi or AIDS, and the bassline on this is everything I wanted Wayne Smith's ‘first digital reggae’ tune to sound like. Finding this particular mix as a single track on Boobtube was a chore, so here’s the full album – look, I timestamped the track for you, and the version plays straight after. Terrible sound quality, but what can I do (EDIT- it's at 07:04)
80: TOP CAT – “PIRATE RADIO STATION”
OK, be honest: who else got a copy of the book Radio Is My Bomb: A DIY Manual For Pirates out of the library with the vague notion of knocking up your own transmitter in a biscuit tin – then took it straight back because you couldn’t understand a single one of the fucking diagrams? Solder what to what? Slag off Soundcloud all you like, at least you don’t need a degree in electronics to share your mix with the masses. Some listeners may feel a nostalgic buzz as Top Cat namechecks deceased stations across London, Manchester and Birmingham while taunting the DTI. This record is 30 years old now, can you believe it? What happened to 2023 by the way? NFTs? Remember those? ASDA Spiderman? I've got time damage.
Looks like he's wearing a neck brace in that thumbnail.