WET WET WET: End Of Part One: Their Greatest Hits

 

(#508: 30 July 1994, 4 weeks; 3 September 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Wishing I Was Lucky/Sweet Little Mystery/Angel Eyes/Temptation/With A Little Help From My Friends/Sweet Surrender/Broke Away/Hold Back The River/Stay With Me Heartache/This Time/Make It Tonight/Put The Light On/Goodnight Girl/More Than Love/Lip Service/Blue For You (Live)/Shed A Tear/Cold Cold Heart/Love Is All Around

 

I worry about Marti Pellow. There was a recent interview with the great man in The Guardian where he admitted having in the past been addicted to alcohol and heroin, in that order. In the interview he says, albeit not without qualification, that he has been sober and clean for over twenty years. A brother died of alcohol-related causes in 2000. He is frank about all of this; he became a big star with all the superficial rewards, and the bigness temporarily blinded him.

 

Yes, I am supposed to be talking about a group, not simply its lead singer. But the man born Mark McLachlan fifty-six years ago in Clydebank has been its inescapable face, even though he left the band in 2017. He is of my generation, grew up a thirty-minute train ride away from me in Uddingston. We had Raw Deal (out of which came the McCluskey brothers, later of The Bluebells), Clydebank had Vortex Motion as its resident punk band. I am unsure whether they ever played as such outside of Clydebank High School but Pellow – his mother’s maiden name; “Marti” was an adaptation of his school nickname “Smarty” – ended up joining them, and after a couple of years’ hard rehearsing the band re-emerged as Wet Wet Wet, which in the Glasgow scene of the mid-eighties was enough to mark them as Not The Jesus And Mary Chain; likewise, their manager, Elliot Davis of “The Precious Organisation,” was Not Alan McGee (let alone Alan Horne).

 

I was not a fan of the Wets. I held the far-from-unique opinion that Pellow fancied himself so much he’d make himself pregnant. Their music of the eighties proffered little of appeal or use to me. I recognised what they were attempting to do but the overall sound picture was so glutinous and headachy – much more so than the feedback of the Reid brothers – that I saw only cabaret time on a six-monthly probationary period.

 

Listening to the songs on their first best-of has given me little reason to change my mind. Significantly the standout song, by several stripes, is “This Time” from The Memphis Sessions, recorded with Willie Mitchell in 1987 before they became big; a quite magnificent study in emotional stasis, rather like Little Jimmy Scott rattling bones with The Blue Nile. Otherwise I hear intelligent, finely-wrought but inadequately-expressed songs which reminded me of how sixties Glasgow soul-pop reliable Chris McClure rebranded himself as seventies all-round entertainer, nightclub owner and pantomime stalwart Christian. Less Sam Cooke, more Sydney Devine. Likewise, “Blue For You,” from their dully-finessed second album Holding Back The River, here appears as a live performance, from the Royal Albert Hall in November 1992 (with only three days’ notice to rehearse their entire set with a hundred-piece orchestra), and it is as if compromise has been dusted down and thrown off the yuppie handcart – this is a quietly thunderous performance.

 

High On The Happy Side, here generously represented, marked the point where the band decided to fuck it and do what they wanted, and again one is witness to the sound of adults, not obedient children having their hair combed back to make the best of impressions at the end-of-term prizegiving ceremony. It didn’t last, however; the two new songs from 1993, recorded with Nile Rodgers – does Rodgers even remember recording them? His sorely candid memoir, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny, which I read while in hospital three years ago this month (well, about a month and a half afterwards; they were too busy trying to keep me alive for me to indulge in any reading), suggests that this might not be the case – are efficiently anonymous, and it was in this form that End Of Part One was initially released, in November 1993.

 

Then came the movie, and the cover version.

 

1994 was the year in which Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity was published, and despite its very acute passages on mortality, emptiness and the aimlessness of a life spent jumping from island to island, avoiding anything approaching commitment, and despite the high probability that a peripheral character, who makes only one brief, albeit central, appearance in the novel, is based on me, it is difficult to evade the feeling that a desperately wrong turn has been taken; here we have affluent relationships, where nothing, not even parental cancer, is really ever at stake, where people do indeed jump from relationship to relationship as the whim or the desperation takes them, such that a rather unattractive crossword puzzle or abacus of needlessly interweaving connections is formed, where seriousness is invariably shaken off with a wry shoulder shrug, even when the multiple clues which Hornby provides throughout the book leave us in no doubt that Rob Fleming is at best one step away from being Patrick Bateman (and that is one of numerous reasons why American Psycho is the greater book – Ellis allows Bateman to plunge into the bloodied emptiness which Hornby, being an All-Round Good Bloke, can only imply).

 

Far, far worse, however, is an incipient reactionism which very much resembles the long-held grudge of a middle-aged man given the rejection slip by the NME at an impressionable age and duty bound to take his extended revenge. High Fidelity marks the beginning of the New Anti-Seriousness in Britain, where under a completely misguided misreading of the principles of socialism, the only music now worth considering is that purposely furnished to provide the masses with what they want. It sets its bias in favour of the mass consumers and against the creative individual (since new ideas are now considered de facto Thatcherite) with such matey virulence that any attempt at making genuinely new music – or writing about it, or because of it - will now be routinely scoffed at as elitist and pretentious, an act of treacherous individualism against The People. This way lies the Exhibition of Degenerative Art, not to mention Nuremberg.

 

At the end of High Fidelity, Sonic Death Monkey – the kind of invented group name which could only have been invented by someone who despises new music with all of his blackened heart – become Backbeat, and noisy experimentation gives way to “Twist And Shout.” This cosy scene is depicted as a happy ending, and to this day it chills my blood to the colour of lapsed vinegar.

 

The triumph of Four Weddings And A Funeral, and “Love Is All Around,” gave early warning that the Hornby side would win this argument by means of sheer demographic weight. The film is a deviously constructed snakes and ladders board of nothing very much, except finding ways to delay Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell from ending up together. Is it the act of a spoilsport to point out that there is so much more to Auden than having his words traduced to the level of Rent-An-Elegy? Or that Kenneth Griffith’s ancient madman – played by the same man who spends much of the first half of the final episode of The Prisoner delivering an extended lecture on the varying nature of revolt – provides the film’s only spark of actual life? In the end we are presented with a toytown Britain of bright bricks of placid agreeableness; like the Village it looks new and colourful and beneficent, but try straying a millimetre out of its hidden boundaries and see how quickly Rover is unleashed upon you.

 

“Love Is All Around,” as re-interpreted by Wet Wet Wet, would seem sufficient reason for any Number 6 to want to kick his radio speakers in (only to have them speedily replaced by an electrician five seconds later); as written and recorded by the Troggs in the autumn of 1967, its “feel it in my fingers” mood and dazedly floating music place it as late period pop-psychedelia. Typically for the Troggs, it was slightly out of time – the Autumn of Love was deteriorating into the Winter of Big Ballads – and their slight clunkiness when approaching a ballad was to be expected; but the stylistic conflict works (“Any Way That You Want Me” was their other slow-burning classic, and Spiritualized at least understood its greatness sufficiently to cover it) in such a way that you want to believe Reg and the boys that such peaceful disorientation and rebuilding could still happen. In other words, even with a band of blundering beefcakes like the Troggs, the original works because of its subtlety.

 

Richard Curtis, who wrote the screenplay for the film, offered the band a choice of three songs to cover; “I Will Survive,” “Can’t Smile Without You” and “Love Is All Around.” It was immediately decided that the Troggs song was the only one with which the band could really do anything.

 

Nonetheless, you know that disappointment is imminent when the bombastic drums and overwrought rockist guitar which open Wet Wet Wet’s reading give way to Pellow’s utterly shade and nuance-free delivery. Enticement and charm are replaced by robustly ruddy bellowing, everything highlighted in CAPITAL LETTERS just in case you haven’t long since got it. Pellow doesn’t waste time in adding entirely irrelevant asides (“Got to keep it moving!” – but why, if love is allegedly all around you everywhere you go?) and there is a particularly unpleasant Glasgow pub belch of a “Hey!” at 3.02.

 

Yet it gave off the correct signifiers of Soul and Passion and Et Bleeding Cetera and people were evidently happy for Pellow just to pull the approved faces. Since it became 1994’s biggest-selling single in Britain, spending fifteen very long weeks at number one, the presumption was that Pellow would turn around, give a wry shoulder shrug and genuinely wonder what was wrong; after all, wasn’t he simply giving the people what they wanted, as opposed to giving people things they didn’t know they wanted? Didn’t Reg Presley himself give it his approval? Didn’t it buy at least one band member their house (it did)? But given everything else that was available to the music lover of 1994, it would seem that the success of “Love Is All Around,” a record which appears to argue that Engelbert was the real point of 1967, looks like one of the biggest disasters in all recent music – if we’re talking long-term consequences.

 

To their credit, the band ended up holding a similar view, deleting the single after those fifteen weeks at the top on the reasonable grounds that they were sick to the back teeth of it. Jarvis Cocker appeared on Top Of The Pops during this period, producing a sign from beneath his jacket proclaiming “I HATE WET WET WET”; Pellow, again not unreasonably, wanted to punch Cocker in the gob. Perhaps he might feel the same about me in the remote chance that he reads this. It would be a shame. The guy clearly loves music. I remember a feature about him on Network 7 back in the eighties where he went through his singles and talked about how much he loved The Clash and Prince (there is a preponderance of Prince-esque vocal gulps throughout the first album). At the same time as High On The Happy Side, the band put out an album of covers entitled Cloak & Dagger, credited to “Maggie Pie & The Impostors,” which demonstrates their impeccable tastes – Todd Rundgren, Tom Waits, Carole King and Smokey Robinson are all represented, as are their Dundee antecedents The Average White Band. We could have a fine natter in the pub, if only I went to pubs any more (I have not set foot in one for over a decade). But even, or especially, then, I kept on thinking to myself; is he happy? I still worry about him.

The ROLLING STONES: Voodoo Lounge

 

(#507: 23 July 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Love Is Strong/You Got Me Rocking/Sparks Will Fly/The Worst/New Faces/Moon Is Up/Out Of Tears/I Go Wild/Brand New Car/Sweethearts Together/Suck On The Jugular/Blinded By Rainbows/Baby Break It Down/Thru And Thru/Mean Disposition

 

We haven’t seen the “world’s greatest roots-rock band” (Christgau) here since 1980. What became of them? Not much. There was the souped-up rush job of reworked seventies outtakes, Tattoo You – indispensable for Sonny Rollins’ playing on “Waiting For A Friend,” if nothing else; Undercover, which despite the strong anger of its near title-track (the last Stones song anybody really remembers), was as lazy a record as the Stones ever put out; Dirty Work, with Jagger and Richards barely speaking and unpleasantly vituperant cod-rockers; and Steel Wheels – the eighties BMW driver’s idea of a Rolling Stones record. As for the live albums, I am not Lowell Thomas.

 

By the nineties, Bill Wyman had become fed up and quit, and bassist Darryl Jones and keyboardist Chuck Leavell had been drafted in as associate members. Producer Don Was apparently insisted that the band rein in their globe-circling musical ambitions and concentrate on being the Stones again. I am uncertain whether this strategy was adhered to particularly strictly; “Sweethearts Together,” a duet Mick and Keith sing essentially to and for each other, and one of this album’s finest moments, is delightfully woozy Zydeco (aided by Flaco Jiminez’ accordion) which calmly warns against remaining in the past – at one point, Jagger sighs, or yawns, “Everyone’s so cynical…” – while “Suck On The Jugular” sees them getting down on the breakbeat and not sounding too embarrassing.

 

I don’t think that Voodoo Lounge was quite the Stunning Return To Form which people endlessly craved (and to this day crave) from the band; moreover, despite being released as a double LP, it is too dissolute to serve as a long-sought bookend to Exile, which certainly wasted little time in telling its listeners what it knew it (and they?) wanted.

 

By abandoning most pretences at being modern, however, Voodoo Lounge finds the band awake, and concentrating, as they had not done in perhaps sixteen years. “Love Is Strong,” “You Got Me Rocking” and “Sparks Will Fly” were rockers strong enough to send Primal Scream flying into the ether - at one point on “Rocking,” Jagger shrieks wordlessly, as though tobogganing into a sarcophagus; elsewhere on the song he declaims “there ain’t no stoppin’ me!,” while Keith and Ronnie’s twin guitars twist their sliding fabrics of feedback. On “Sparks Will Fly,” which sounds faster than any early nineties rock retained the privilege to accelerate, Jagger exclaims “Quit playin’ CARDS!” He turns into Iggy Pop (“Ooh I wanna fuck your sweet ass”) as the band merrily piles up on each other in the manner of rogue dodgems. Mick even offers us a cackle straight out of Paul Lynde. His howl of “Gonna catch fire – pyromaniac!” directly anticipates “Firestarter.”

 

Charlie Watts’ drums make an especial, almost James Earl Jones-like impact throughout the record – his rolls on “Moon Is Up,” set against Wood’s purposely wayward pedal steel, are particularly miraculous. “I Go Wild” and “Brand New Car” are sensual and pulsatile – those languid, sleazy horns on the latter, directly (and unsurprisingly, given who is producing here) out of the first Was (Not Was) album (complete with the same saxophonist, David McMurray) if you succeed in blotting out the terrible lyrical double entendres.

 

“New Faces” and “Blinded By Rainbows” are soft lullabies for the apocalypse – consider the Bono-esque imagery heaped upon the latter song’s climax (“Do you feel the final hour?”) – whereas “Out Of Tears” is the most exhausted and profound ballad the Stones ever recorded, with its astute use of piano, its clearly-defined yet modest lead guitar lines, Jagger’s whispered restraint, perfect inter-band dynamic discipline and a subtly rhetorical use of my favourite pop architectural device, the Picardy third. The singer is now too old and weary even to mourn; he has simply resigned. “Baby Break It Down” is an ominous singalong  which might act as a Generation X “Soul Survivor” – what is the consequence when you can always get what you want?

 

As for Keith, he tries very hard not to be Tom Petty in “The Worst” (and indeed Benmont Tench is intermittently to hand throughout this album), but the six engaging minutes of “Thru & Thru” are quite phenomenal, sung like Springsteen’s relaxed uncle and floating in streams of ambience until Watts’ terrifying Robocop judge’s gavel thunders a heartbeat into the landscape. Yet it never really resolves, indicating that the Stones can never stop, not simply because they do not know how to stop, but also because they do not understand why they should.

The PRODIGY: Music For The Jilted Generation

 

(#506: 16 July 1994, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Intro/Break & Enter/Their Law/Full Throttle/Voodoo People/Speedway (Theme From Fastlane)/The Heat (The Energy)/Poison/No Good (Start The Dance)/One Love (Edit)/The Narcotic Suite – (i) 3 Kilos; (ii) Skylined; (iii) Claustrophic Sting

 

We have been here before, except we haven’t. On the left, dark towers of John Martin fire, urbanity, police, spite; in the centre, a rope bridge as old as, or older than, humanity, and on the right, light fields, gambolling vans and sound systems, beneficent crowds, a hippie giving the other side the V-sign.

 

All very 1970 Edgar Broughton Band, and all very wrongheaded, is Les Edwards’ illustration for the second Prodigy album, since the fulcrum of far-Right thinking, from Hitler through Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to the unidentified but secure oppressors in charge during the second half of Threads, relies on a fiery hatred of cities and the urge towards returning to the pastoral, the agricultural, the hagiographising of a fictitious mythical past and the denial of a future – for these systems’ countless victims, the denial was painful and swift. The illustration should really have been the other way around.

 

Not that Liam Howlett, who for the purposes of the album essentially was The Prodigy – only one other band member, Maxim Reality, pops up, and that is only on “Poison” – need be mistaken for a political fellow. In fact he has been at pains to avoid that happening. Music For The Jilted Generation was framed as an extended protest against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (hence “Fuck them, and their law!”) – the brief, uncredited liner note baldly states: “HOW CAN THE GOVERNMENT STOP YOUNG PEOPLE HAVING A GOOD TIME (sic). FIGHT THIS BOLLOCKS” – but Howlett has subsequently gone on record describing the album title as “stupid”; it was the suggestion of a friend, other mooted but rejected titles being Music For The Cool Young Juvenile and Music For Joyriders.

 

If we interpret “jilted” as synonymous with “betrayed,” then the record may be referring to the betrayal of hardcore capitalism. What, after all, could be more faithful to the Thatcherite creed of free enterprise than illegal – i.e. untaxed – raves, cheerily bypassing outmoded laws, creating something from nothing with absolutely no help from any outside system and making a packet?

 

But the creed proved fallacious. It turned out that some forms of untrammelled capitalism were good and others bad. The role of capitalism was firmly to placate and ease the lifestyles of the mimsy, timid majority of newspaper readers who had spent their lives scrubbing up, placidly obeying (and never questioning) the rules, and were content to be twelfth-best (to the global spivs who actually and ironically were running things). They did not wish to be presented with a phenomenon which they had never been conditioned or persuaded to understand. You Bastards Aren’t Tory Enough! might be a workable alternate title for the record.

 

To add to this baffling bouillabaisse, Howlett refused permission for “Their Law” to be used in a documentary about road protestors, commenting that he liked motorways because they got him to London more quickly. He has steadfastly denied that The Prodigy have ever been a political band, even though their existence is in itself a political act.

 

(I understand Howlett’s dilemma, though. Recently I’ve been watching some ludicrously grandiose promotional videos for the doomed, besuited Mayor of London candidate Brian Rose, a San Diego shyster and, if unchecked, potentially a very dangerous man. He really doesn’t have a hope in hell of winning, and nobody with a soupçon of sense would vote for him – he cannot pronounce “Lambeth” properly, for a start - but I have to admit to being attracted by the big and specifically very West London gestures; there he is, hands stretched out like his antecedent Hughie Green, standing up and being counted on peak-time television in January 1977, in front of gigantic, moving billboards on the east side of the Holland Park Roundabout, or gesturing somewhat smugly at similar billboards on the Cromwell Road section of the M4, stretching out towards Talgarth and ultimately Heathrow. It was that brand of unapologetic bigness which in part inspired me to move to London in the first place. This was not the local parish. You didn’t have to mind your “p”s and “q”s. You could be your real self. It was the eighties and you agree with me so stop pretending you don’t.)

 

But, as Eric Dolphy once sort of said, once the notes are in the air, they’re everybody’s. And The Prodigy are no exception; they are precisely what you make of them. What I make of them is that they are the best and most frightening British rock band since the Sex Pistols and simultaneously the funniest British rock band since the Bonzos (I’ll get back to the Vivian Stanshall/Keith Flint parallels later on in this tale) – though I note Simon Reynolds' astute summation of them as the new Sweet. What the much-missed veteran entertainer Des O’Connor made of them was that their first album, The Prodigy Experience, was his favourite album by anybody – he was inclined to give it a spin in his dressing room to pump him up before he went out on stage (good old Des; once regarded as the least cool inhabitant of the top twenty charts of the late sixties, his two favourite singles were “Louie Louie” and “Firestarter” and on Twitter he followed Jeremy Corbyn and Thundercat).

 

Of course, asinine music press popinjays ridiculed and derided Experience at the time of its release. It is far from a perfect album, largely because most of its hits are present only in remixed form – as with those previous Essex arty wideboys Procol Harum, who declined to include “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” or “Homburg” on their first album because, as Gary Brooker reasonably pointed out at the time, the band’s fans had already paid for those songs once – but it is great ,gleeful, collapsible trash, and you can ask little more from a pop album than that. In any case, the situation was resolved by the Expanded two-CD revised edition which appeared in 2001 and included single mixes, non-album B-sides and other stray tracks. That edition could pass adequately as the greatest of pop albums (although it was eventually superseded by entry #705). In addition, despite the ridiculous early nineties pageboy haircut, the younger Howlett seen on the album’s rear cover bears an alarming but logical resemblance to Alan Freeman.

 

Jilted Generation is a fecund fuckwhip of an album, and I speak as someone who had not listened to it for some time until yesterday evening – on the original cassette which was once glued into my Walkman (and, as with most of my cassettes, still plays perfectly). After the brief “Intro” – modified dialogue from The Lawnmower Man for copyright reasons (presumably the reason why Dan Charnas, now the Pulitzer Fellowship-winning Professor Dan Charnas, is thanked on the sleeve “for his invaluable assistance on the cinematic samples”) – we launch with scant pause for breath into the extraordinary “Break & Enter.”

 

Extraordinary because it still scares the bejesus out of me, as much as it did when I listened to it while roaming around the unpeopled streets of Pimlico early in the morning, in part walking to work. Much of what was then still called jungle worked in the same pieced-together-with-blunt-knives minimalist/maximalist sense. The drums are Etch-A-Sketch trembly. The bass is subatomic and therefore galactic. There was no uplifting reassurance, no motivational positivity – just an emphatic DOWNturn, rubbing one’s entitled nose in guttered groin. If the Tachbrook housing estate had a soundtrack it wouldn’t quite be The Prodigy – the euphoric ominosity of the Drum & Bass Selection 1 compilation on Breakdown Records would be more apt – but it certainly wouldn’t have been out of place.

 

There is no forgiveness existing within the merciless fibres of “Break & Enter.” You walk around the town and half the time expect someone to come up behind you and break your neck while you’re listening to the track. Its tinkly glockenspiel stabs you with icepicks rather than comforting you to slumber. An isolated female voice reiterates the plea “Bring it down to Earth” as though Major Tom were still attempting to come down – but this is sampled from “Casanova” by Baby D, who later in 1994 would keep the comeback single by the Stone Roses at number two behind a remix of the two-year-old “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” (Baby D’s singer was Dee-Galdes Fearon, the wife of Phil Fearon of Kandidate and Galaxy fame, and so that triumph can happily be read as the revenge of Britfunk). A limbless electric piano hovers into eventual view, like the sludge disclosing the remains of Get Carter. At eight minutes and twenty-four seconds, it is the longest track on the album, and its discrete distress could pervade forever.

 

“Their Law” predictably rocks more foursquarely, since it involves, in their only Then Play Long appearance, the great Pop Will Eat Itself. While everybody else was pretending to like The Stone Roses – which they weren’t, because I bought the only available copy of the LP in central London on the day of its release, priced rather steeply at £6.99 - This Is the Day...This Is the Hour...This Is This!, PWEI’s second album (which I bought on Walkman-friendly cassette, which I still own, on the same day), was infinitely more imaginative, entertaining and explosive (perhaps The Prodigy are the greatest and funniest British rock band since PWEI; who’s going to call that?). But “Their Law”’s dynamics, potential Essex Man spivness notwithstanding, are fierce and righteous.

 

“Full Throttle,” beginning with reversed Star Wars dialogue, sees an early appearance of Paula Yates’ “Hey!” sample (over a decade after the Art of Noise used it, but these influences do percolate down the generations) blended with a celestial nursery keyboard trying very hard not to play Joan Armatrading’s “Me, Myself, I” (how important is Thomas Dolby?) over a gulping swallow of a rhythm. “Voodoo People” cleverly manipulates the riff from Nirvana’s “Very Ape” and blends it with guttural flute and lively guitar from one Lance Reckless. “Speedway” keeps up the pressure – how ecstatically does this music all cumulate! – like a hyped-up “Autobahn.” The beats are by this point almost ahuman, the propelling compulsion unceaseable. This music has not aged.

 

Despite what the cassette track listing tells us, the first side actually closes with “The Heat (The Energy)” – commencing with a slow and patient sunrise (a rare chink of light on an album which is otherwise entirely set in the dark) before beats and accents are methodically added and a giant stirs to life. Side two gives us the hits – “Poison” setting the stage for Big Beat, the immaculate “No Good (Start The Dance),” perhaps the fastest song ever to make number four in the pop charts (think about that – number FOUR! – in a world currently being sunk under the pressure of wellermen), a list which does appear to be of another and very distant age. “One Love,” even in edited form, sends the Enigma template into sped-up orchestral hyperdrive.

 

After euphoria must come the comedown, hence the extended “Narcotic Suite.” In part one, Phil Bent, Jazz Warriors flautist, blows over a revamped Bernard “Pretty” Purdie sample (“Good Livin’ [Good Lovin’],” factoid fans) – have we suddenly entered a time loop and resurfaced in 1975 (and Nubya Garcia, Joe Armon-Jones etc. MUST have been listening) - or perhaps simply been beamed across the Atlantic towards the sunnier environs of this record's 1994 mirror, Ill Communication by The Beastie Boys? Presently, however, the second and third sections build up momentum again, like a skonking great nightmare suddenly rearing up its head to come and consume you loudly – and then the whole, glorious thing ends.

 

I recently took delivery of two volumes of compilations – London Pirate Radio Adverts 1984-1993 – which are exactly what they say they are, forty minutes per volume of advertisements reminding us of the blissful illegality of their times, yet still genuflecting with purpose towards the assumed shrine of capitalism. Mostly these are for DJ/club nights, few if any of which were located in the centre of London – outbacks (well, they were then) like Hackney, Stoke Newington, Peckham, East Dulwich, the Lea Valley. There are a couple of ads for dating services and some for shops (including one for a kebab shop, spoken in perfect Greek). Fling a couple of hundred quid at the raving wall and see how many punters stick. Classic tunes you’ve probably never heard of are cited. They didn’t give a toss about Madchester or New Punk or New Glam or Grebo or Britpop – these might all be on another planet as far as those audiences, those listeners, were concerned. I do not know whether we will ever get that tactile fantasy back. But this was the world in which The Prodigy, from Romford, made their fullest sense. A world which, again, attracted people like me towards London, thrusting towards something resembling a future. Music For The FUCK-YOU Generation. That’s more like it. 1970 what? Edgar who?