Speakers Push Air

OK, as promised, I’m going to post up my own take on this “10 Records That Make My Sphincter Clench When Someone Is Flicking Through My Collection” thing..

Thing is, it’s not easy, for two main reasons: first, when I was younger, I could be quite ‘year zero’ about stuff. I had a childhood listening to some horrors - Barclay James Harvest, Steve Hackett, Camel, Marillion, Cat Stevens. When I was 12 or 13, due to the influence of a much older but (in the late 70s) comparatively cool uncle, I literally had the record collection of someone twice or even three times my age. What the hell was a 12 year old kid doing listening to Baker Gurvitz Army or The Moody Blues?

Actually, I’m almost weirdly proud of that time. Yes, I was mostly listening to toss (and missing out on the “rubbish disposable pop” that all my mates liked - you know, The Specials, Dexys etc) but even then I was curious and had an insatiable appetite for new stuff. It was a good grounding too - when I reject some new hot-shit act from the States as being godawful prog, I know what I’m talking about!

In the early 80s, when I discovered punk, indie, reggae and the like, all that stuff went. Apart from a few artists I still adore (the perennial Thin Lizzy, all the good stuff like Neil Young, Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen), it all went, it was all purged in favour of Crass and The Smiths.

The other problem with doing something like this is that not only am I no longer embarassed about liking anything, but I do love - with no irony, no angle - pop music. So there’s no room in this list for my Girls Aloud or my Kylie or my Christina Aguilera records. So, like Eden had it, this is more of a “ten records I have trouble justifying to other people”.

It’s going to be in two parts, too - this is too painful a venture to take on in one go.. And I’m not going to post links either - you really don’t need to own this stuff. But just in case you won’t take my word for this, I am providing mp3s.

10. Shelleyan Orphan - Epitaph, Ivy & Woe

It was the mid-80s, I was a quasi-goth (never had any truck with the grimmer end of it all, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Ghost Dance, all that) but was a 4AD completist and had worked out the link between appearing all poetic and sensitive, the Cocteau Twins and sleeping with cute goth art students. Along come Shelleyan Orphan…

I should have known, from the first time I saw them on the Tube - them performing with some art students knocking up some wretched artwork on stage behind - that they were a disgrace. But I stuck with it. They were local (Bournemouth), the girl had lovely Merchant Ivory hair, it was UTTERLY pofaced and pretentious.

And the lyrics?

“Toil all day delusions come around
Cotton heat in brilliant skies above
Moon parades in southern sphering globe
She’s in croon my sweet tongues mellow slave
Southern Bess plantation queen love’s sealed in dream
Southern Bess Virginia brown from south to sun
In Summertime”

Shudder.

I keep wondering if some poor, tryhard schmuck is suddenly going to hit upon Shelleyan Orphan as precursors to some of the current post-Banhardt/Newsom folk bollocks being foisted upon us. That would be very funny indeed.

9. Meat Loaf - Paradise By The Dashboard Light

I know, I know. But I LOVED this album when I was 11 or 12. And I can’t quite give it up. The sheer absurd, bloated pomp of it. And it is, in its own way, pretty funny - not ironic, perhaps, but certainly self-aware, conscious of its own grand guignol folly. Steinman does have something about him (look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t get over-excited when you heard he was going to work with Sisters of Mercy? Eh?) and this album would have me running around my bedroom with excitement. The ballads were always pretty dire, but the rockier tracks just made me soarrrrrrrr…

Plus, this track was about the sexiest thing the 11 year old me had ever heard - in its own way, as fundamental to my awakening sexuality as that sex scene in Don’t Look Now, Olivia Newton John and Kate Bush on Top Of The Pops.

8. Urban Cookie Collective - The Key, The Secret

A nice short one after the preceding memoirs..

I was always a sucker for really really cheesy euro-dance, and this is best / worst example I can find at the back of the shelf.

7. Genesis - The Carpet Crawlers

Even when I was listening to lots of dodgy 70s prog, I could never stand the really over-the-top stuff like Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer and the rest. Genesis were as far down that road as I could go, and even then their worst excesses scared me off. But this is another album I can’t quite give up on - yes, it’s widdly concept album wank, but there’s some songs on it I do still really like. (And like it or not, vile moonfaced cuntsock Phil Collins was a great drummer).

6. Chas & Dave - Ain’t No Pleasing You

People seem to be engaged in some mostly (but not entirely) ironic recuperation of Chas & Dave. Robert Elms would probably describe them as ‘classic neckerchief rock’. Listen: they’re rubbish. Really, really rubbish. Not funny, not charming, just vile.

But this song is of a different order. I was at a party in a squat (not a squat party) in a Bermondsey pub a few years back and they were having a “cockney wanker” theme night (a slightly dodgy enterprise, to be honest - is it that far from a student union chav night?) but it was fairly entertaining and funny. I was roped in to sing this song and it was only in trying to learn it that I realised it’s actually positively symphonic. Melodically complex, brilliantly arranged. And strangely affecting Honest…

They hate each other, you know….