ANYWAY, the GOOD thing about this is that we get to have the LOCAL BAND, “local” here meaning “not from London” – bands from Scotland or Wales are, of course, labelled Scottish Bands and Welsh Bands (in that order). That’s not to say Local Bands are the same throughout England – for instance, Derby Bands will want to ROCK, Leicester bands will never have anything resembling a singer, Bristol bands will think they are much cooler than anyone else, and Birmingham bands will own a Stereolab record – but the Basic FACTS about them will remain the same. And here they are for you to learn and enjoy.

LET’S CALL OURSELVES FREE BEER

One of the first things a Local Band needs to do is think of a name, and for many it is the ONLY thing they will ever do. It is the LAW that EVERY band, local or not, MUST attempt to think of a name one night in the pub, and the first idea will ALWAYS be “Let’s call ourselves ‘Free Beer’! Then we’ll get a really big audience!” Other suggestions will be “The Band With No Name”, “Cancelled”, “SEX!!!” and “To Be Confirmed” before it moves on to the bass player (who will be The Organised One) saying “What about Beermat? Table? Floor? Pint?” before they think of something stupid that has to be changed after the first gig.

THE FIRST GIG

The first gig will be a ROCKING TRIUMPH, because all the band will force everyone they have ever known to attend. 90% of these people will never have been to a gig ever in their lives, and will be impressed by the fact that the Local Band are even on STAGE, doubly so if they managed to stop the songs at roughly the same time as each other. After this the Local Band will book 15 gigs at the same place in the next two weeks, not put any posters up because they are now famous, and nearly split up during gig 3 because the man from EMI (who the singer’s sister’s friend’s cousin knows because she cleans the offices next door) didn’t turn up. Then they get a Manager.

THE MANAGER

This will EITHER be the most hopeless friendless berk that the bass player knew at school, or one of the Sad Old Twats who always goes to local gigs. All Local Bands MUST have a manager, because it said in an article in Making Music that it looks “professional” and will help them in the contract negotiations that will never come. The Manager will be responsible for having ideas, and promising to get gigs out of town.

IDEAS AND GIGS OUT OF TOWN

Local Bands and their Managers have some SMASHING ideas. These include:

1. Putting “appearing live” on all posters, just so people don’t think you’ll be appearing on a Vidi-Screen or by Hologram or something.
2. Having a Shit Logo, drawn by the guitarist on his computer.
3. Putting large copyright signs over EVERYTHING, to stop other Local Bands nicking their shit logo.
4. Playing gigs that are “a bit more than just a gig.” This will ALWAYS mean that The Manager owns a slide projector.
5. Playing a gig out of town. This is the DREAM of all Local Bands – Local People just don’t understand, it is time to take the message elsewhere. Usually they will play the Rock Garden in London, and discover that their three mates who always come to their gigs in case there are any Groupies there this time look a LOT smaller in a big venue than they do in the back of their local pub. Also getting there will be a NIGHTMARE beyond comprehension, and will usually involve the drummer and his Fiat Punto.

I KNOW A DRUMMER

It is a FACT proved by Scientists (using Science) that in any major European Conurbation you will never be more than three feet away from a Guitarist. This is why if you ever see an advert saying “Guitarist Wanted” you should NEVER ring, as the person advertising will have no friends whatsoever, possibly for good reasons. However, there will only EVER by 3 drummers in any city, and one of them will be a scary old bloke who plays in the jazz band on Sundays. This is because drummers are funded by the council, or something. They will always be in fifteen other bands, and be a bit older than the rest of the band, and will always drive a Fiat Punto, though the older ones may still own a Maestro. They will be the first to leave the band, at which point the singer will say “Why Don’t We Just Get A Drum Machine?” and the rest of the band will reply “Because We Like To Jam.”

WE LIKE TO JAM

Despite years of evidence to the contrary, Local Bands always think it is a Good Idea to “JAM” during their gigs, or rather, to play the end of a song over and over again forever. You can differentiate the “JAM” section from the tedious monotony of the rest of the set by looking at the singer to see if he is even more confused than usual. This usually takes place at the end of the set, followed by another GRATE Local Band Tradition – Feedback.

FEEDBACK

Despite having been around since Henry VIII first left his lute standing too close to the cupboard, Local Bands still think Feedback is a) revolutionary b) daring and c) a Good Idea, despite it being only d) annoying. Rather than try and USE feedback to make an actual noise or something, Local Bands prefer to use it as a “dramatic” end to the set. During the “JAM” at the end of the last song, the singer will walk off. The bass player will soon follow, and then the drummer will finally give up, leaving the guitarist to enjoy his ONLY moment of Getting Any Attention. He will eventually tire of this, prop his guitar against his amp, fiddle about forever until it feeds back, and then storm off. This looks COOL for about 30 seconds, at which point the illusion will SHATTER when his DAD walks on and switches it off, smiling benignly all the while.

OH NO MY PARENTS ARE HERE

The true Local Band will have Proud Parents – they’re the ones who paid for the expensive amps, in the theory that A New Hobby would be much more educational for their progency than the previous Hobby i.e. Perpetual Masturbation. THUS they will insist on attending a “concert” (and insist on calling it a “concert” and not a “multi-media experience). You can always see them stood at the back, clutching a pint (or gin and tonic for mum). They can be differentiated from the Sad Old Twats because their jeans (worn in an attempt to fit in) will be slightly cleaner.

THE SAD OLD TWATS

Every Local Venue will be supplied, by the Council, with a smattering of Sad Old Twats, who add ambience by standing at the back for most of the gig, then entering the “dressing room” (also known as “the Toilet”) unannounced and saying “Great Gig Lads!” They will probably also work for the Local Listings Magazine.

THE LOCAL LISTINGS MAGAZINE

This will think it is The Guardian, and be full of book, record and cinema reviews that no-one ever reads but are there so the writers can get free books, records and cinema tickets. The rest of the magazine will be full of rave reviews of Local Bands using words and phrases long since made illegal in the Real World e.g. “Rockin’” “Competent” “Committed” “Raw Professionallism” “Bitchin’” “Kick Ass” and “Powerful Slammin’ ROCK.” For some reason all Local Listings Magazines have the “g” removed from their keyboards. They will think they are important because Local Bands put bits of their reviews on their posters, because the Local Band has been told of the importance of the Local Listings Magazine by the Sad Old Twats, and so the circle spins, unto its doom at the End Of The Road.

THE END OF THE ROAD

After about six months the Local Band will play a gig organised by The Manager, perhaps in conjunction with The Local Listings Magazine. Posters, featuring many Good Ideas will go up and there will be MUCH EXCITEMENT, but no-one at all will come. The Parents will have a Round Table Meeting and the Sad Old Twats will have now moved on to the next Small Thing. The Drummer will leave, the bass player will go to college, the guitarist will form a band and the singer will moan about it to his girlfriend FOREVER.

And that’s the way it is, the natural life cycle is SHORT but for good reason. Only one Local Band has ever “made it” and been on the telly, and that was The StereoPhonics, and we wouldn’t want THAT to happen again, now would we?

For a while – maybe even a week – after New Year’s, I could still glance at the top of newspapers and feel a quiet, thrilling jolt at the date. Of course I hadn’t thought anything would change when the year did, but even so there was briefly an air about that little row of zeroes, something solemn beyond even the most rational of my cynicisms. Maybe it was only the look of them, oval, open and welcoming, that made me feel sneering was – well, not the wrong response precisely, but an easy, cheap one nonetheless. For those few days, hoping despite the evidence that some kind of change would come felt a great deal less crass than trumpeting that it wouldn’t.

Then gradually you started living in the year, writing it on letters and rent cheques, seeing it everywhere on e-mails and bills and on adverts, adverts, adverts, and the feeling ebbed. You began to resent the year 2000, and those three zeroes came to seem cipherous: bland and endlessly divisible, like the market.

As good a time as any for Kraftwerk to come back: listening to their “Expo 2000”, the music seemed able to contain both reactions. “The 21st Century,” says a Kraftwerk-robot, “Man. Nature. Technology.” And then again in German. In the measured, uninflected words you can hear progress and optimism: the triad of nouns presented as indivisible, a simple fact rather than a wish. It’s a little while before you remember that the song grew out of a trade fair jingle.

Being excited about Kraftwerk’s return might at first seem as silly as being excited about the date change: there was, after all, not even the ghost of a possibility that Kraftwerk could shatter and reshape music like they had once – or so went the legend – done. The very process of techno teleology that had turned them into the most influential band since the Beatles was their downfall. Expectation paralysed them, and disappointment was inevitable: even the records they had made seemed oddly frail next to the all-powerful thought of Kraftwerk The Pioneers, the men who gave birth to dance music.

You could see it in the way their first records were gradually forgotten, and then in the way that people only ever talked in public about the rhythms and the robotics. In order to work as myth, Kraftwerk were reduced to a handful of their most rigid tracks – the pro-tech Computer World rather than the miasmic Radioactivity; the kitschy detachment of “The Model”, not the sharp observation of “Hall Of Mirrors”; the harsh propulsion of “Trans-Europe Express”, never the sentimental sweep of “Neon Lights”. As if you could have danced to Kraftwerk anyway: as if that would have been the point if you had.

Yes, Kraftwerk were a band of staggering originality – conceptually so sharp and musically so visionary that it’s sometimes difficult to believe they even happened. But the Silver Apples were original, too, and so were Cluster, and though those bands get paid cult they’ve never broken through into pop history like Kraftwerk. What you forget about Kraftwerk – what “Expo 2000” can remind you of – is how human and resonant they could be, in the simplest sense, of sparking feelings and bringing a lump to your throat.

Listen to “Europe Endless”, the first track on Trans-Europe Express. It sounds pristine, beautiful, Utopian, even before the soft-spoken voice comes in. There’s nothing ‘rock’ about that voice, but there’s nothing cold or mechanical either. What I hear is history, sadness and hope: the great, scarred old continent looking into a future which might at last be peaceful. Far from the blank-eyed conceptualists their legacy casts them as, Kraftwerk at their peak made intensely reflective, poignant music. Their embrace of the synthesiser’s beauty and stability can be taken as a stern or canny comment on mechanisation – but it can also be heard as music made in a time and place which needed stability, which was weary or suspicious of rock’s wanton drama and rage to expend itself.

As musical ‘revolutionaries’, they did what they did and are now gone: “Expo 2000” is not the work of that Kraftwerk, and will sadden or bore those who believed in it – as was always going to be the case. But when I hear Kraftwerk, I hear the band that better than any other represent the Western Europe I know. Science fairs, civics, socialism, faded grandeur; the motorways, the parks and the public works; sad, proud places where calm is still a feeling new enough to cherish – behind it all I can hear Kraftwerk’s music, unfolding metrically and with an understated depth. This is the group that released “Expo 2000”, men finally freed by pop history to once again make the records they always did. We should keep quiet and let them, I think.

Fight Club is in places a very funny film, and is in places quite a troubling one. It’s troubling because you’re never quite sure how much anyone involved is buying into its modish modern-life-is-rubbish premise, and because it wants in a way to have its cake of soap and eat it. Fight Club is two films in one – Film A is about the awfulness of materialist consumer society and its emasculatory effects, and Film B is about the awfulness of fascism. At some point the Ed Norton character, a frustrated office worker, realises that the Brad Pitt character, a charismatic prophet of liberation-through-violence called Tyler Durden, has completely flipped, and at this point Fight Club switches from Film A to Film B. But while for me that plot point was the Korean storekeeper thing, for you it might have been a lot later, when Pitt starts actually recruiting black-shirted goons or when said goons start talking in hushed tones about “Project Mayhem”. The two films infect one another, which is problematic because in Film A you’re pretty obviously meant to be on Brad Pitt’s ‘side’, and in Film B you’re not. But they’re the same film.

(I’m fairly sure this is all intentional on director David Fincher’s part, of course, because a little bit into Film B, Fight Club goes off the deep end totally and becomes a silly but hugely entertaining thriller, Film C, which foregrounds these questions of identity and where sympathies lie in absurd if gripping style. To say more about Film C would spoil Fight Club from a cool-film point of view, which is the best reason to go and see it anyway, so I won’t.)

Fight Club is satire with delusions of grandeur and delusions of accuracy. As a film about how inhuman consumer-capitalism and the live-to-work lifestyle is, it falls oddly flat. I’m sure David Fincher’s worked in an office, and I’m sure his poet’s soul chafed against its drabness, but even so Fight Club‘s work scenes leave the same sort of nasty taste in the mouth as Radiohead’s railings about “Gucci little piggies”, that mean taste of condescension mixed with self-righteousness. Even something as humble and ubiquitous as Dilbert is more accurate in capturing the cocktail of absurdity, lack of perspective, cynicism and cameraderie that characterises day-to-day corporate life than Fight Club‘s glib diatribes against materialist dronedom. I’ve never actually come across anybody like Ed Norton’s character, anybody who genuinely does define his life by what he owns, but I’ve come across a fair few people like Tyler Durden.

Durden, the Arthur Cravan-goes-MTV central character of Fight Club, is fascinating precisely because he’s so familiar. His insights spring from Hemingway and Laurence, the maleness-is-action ideologues of the early century; his methods are hand-me-down Situationism; his look is pure 90s alternative – goatee and tattoos spliced with retro pimp chic. And all of it is more or less bogus.

The idea that men who beat the shit out of each other are more alive for it – and if anything’s the main idea in Fight Club, this is the one – fell down a bit for me personally because I’ve been badly beaten up and felt, unsurprisingly, really really bad about it. But that was an unprovoked surprise attack, and the fights in Fight Club are more like bouts, pre-arranged and strictly codified. Fighting in the film is basically no different from any other extreme sport – snowboarding with more blood, which is one reason why the leap from fisticuffs to fascism requires a certain amount of faith on the part of the viewer: it’s hard to imagine forging an elite cadre of golden fanatical youth out of, say, white-water rafters. All the business about being more alive after this sort of extremity puts us on familiar ground, the standard sports marketing tactic of equating adrenalin with enlightenment. A terribly 90s enlightenment, of course, combining the pleasant notion that the experiences vouchsafed to you are not for the common man with the assurance that you don’t actually have to do any work for them, you just have to take part.

There’s something very sporting, almost naive, about the fights in Fight Club. Only once, when Ed Norton pounds a lithe blonde boy’s face to pulp, is there any hint of personal tension or rancour in the combat. Everybody stops when asked to and shakes each other’s hands afterwards, and nobody seems to resent their defeats. The combat-ideology of Fight Club is more Victorian Public School than men’s movement, in fact: a sound thrashing administered by Queensberry Rules, and no hard feelings afterwards, chaps. Oh, and anyone who doesn’t fight is a beastly coward. Since this is the kind of thinking that wiped out most of the British officer class in the Great War, perhaps the whole leader-follower dynamic of Film B isn’t so off-base after all.

(Incidentally, Fight Club couldn’t have been made in Britain: the whole live-for-the-weekend culture it posits actually happened here from 1988 onwards, and while we’re still working through the social after effects, a turn to the far right has not so far been among them. But the various scenes where Norton exchanges conspiratorial half-glimpses with his secret weekend companions mark this out as a clubbing film as much as a fighting one.)

The way the fights are shown uncovers a little more of the movie’s flimsiness. I’m not the first to point out that the scene where Brad Pitt, who’s spent half the movie flexing his sweatily muscular bod, mocks a beefcake-centric ad for Calvin Klein underpants rings a bit hollow. But it’s compounded by the fact that even though the ‘rules’ of Fight Club command that shirts and shoes be removed before a fight, none of the fat guys strip off (least of all Meat Loaf with his much-discussed ‘bitch tits’). Flab, unlike Brad’s nasty beard, isn’t ‘edge’ enough for the music-video aesthetics of the film.
Tyler Durden, before he turns into a cult leader, is a mischief-maker. It’s in this capacity – as joker, bullshit-detector, enabler, the only free man in an unfree world – that we cheer him on as Film A runs its course. The mischief he makes, aside from the Korean-shopkeeper live-your-dreams vigilanteism already described, is mostly a string of vicious little variations on the old Situationist idea of detournement, the appropriation and alteration of existing cultural material to expose its underlying banality. So Durden works nights in a cinema, splicing frames from porno films into Disney cartoons. Radical and cool, no? But here’s a question: why doesn’t Tyler also splice Disney frames into pornos? There has always been a problem with this kind of cultural pranksterism, in that the tendency is to just question the assumptions your audience already disagrees with. It’s desperately rare to find anyone going any further into illuminating how their audience’s and their own discourse is subject to the same alienation and predictability. But that wouldn’t be half as fun, of course.

The most unrealistic thing about Fight Club isn’t the shenanigans of its closing forty minutes, it’s the idea that the Fight Club network would be a scary underground threat in the first place. The Situationists Fincher and company are feeding off weren’t stupid people – their starting principle was always that there could be nothing outside the system, or at the very least that the moment you defined activity as being outside, the system would adapt in that instant to absorb it. The idea that Fight Club would avoid ending up style supplement material within half a year of the first fist landing on the first jaw is a cosier pretence than anything Norton’s character subscribes to in his Ikea’d-up existence.

So why does the film pretend in this way? Why does it try so hard to be important? Why do the audience cheer when Brad Pitt makes a Korean shopkeeper cry? In that scene Pitt is seen as heroic because by force of will he’s turning his victim back into an individual. Never mind that a vet is as much a part of consumer society as a shopkeeper is: the man Brad drags out from behind his counter is pitiable for the same reason Ed Norton’s boss is, because he is reducible to cypherdom, because he is part of a ‘mass’, unenlightened and – the greatest sin – un-individual.

In 1992 the Oxford don John Carey published his polemical The Intellectuals And The Masses, which fiercely argued the existence of a turn-of-the-century trend among literary intellectuals to first construct the ‘masses’ as a group, and then to demonise them, belittle their tastes and wistfully fantasize their extermination. Carey’s book is more than half infuriating, because his attack on intellectual snobbery turns out to be a cover for his own smugly middlebrow tastes, and because of his over-reach in linking intellectual disdain with the racial theories of Nazism, an, uh, mass movement led by some of the fiercest anti-intellectuals of the century.

But even if his evidence is slyly selective, Carey’s book is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining, and the main thought it provoked in me is how urgently we need a sequel, The Individuals And The Masses, detailing the adaptation and take-up of mass-inferiority theories by our present alternative culture, the culture Fight Club is feeding off. The subtext of Fight Club, of The Matrix, of 90% of all indie music criticism and underground film writing, is this: there are individuals and there is the mass. The lives of the masses are unworthy of artistic consideration, other than as easy fodder for comparison or mockery. Their tastes are homogenous and wretched. Their emotional lives are stunted and banal. And so on: you can see it in the caricature corporations of Fight Club, in every bad rock lyric which takes a pop at ‘the herd’, in the headlong rush of advertisers and brand managers to claim the 20something demographic, in the revulsion and fear that fans and artists alike have of large-scale success. As I’ve argued before, it’s a dislikeable trend from a political point of view because it leads to a situation where the individual freedom to smoke pot animates far more people than, say, global climate or trade issues. And it’s a dangerous trend from an aesthetic point of view because it’s unsympathetic and inhumane and leads to cosy, reactionary and bad art.

Is Fight Club bad art? Not really – it’s the kind of confused, energising movie you’re glad gets made. Ed Norton’s performance is superb, and the unceasing visual hipness lands squarely on the right side of indulgence. It’s just the chords it’s striking feel a bit off key, and a superficially thought-provoking film ends up less like bare-knuckle boxing and more like wrestling: the fighters are stereotypes, the outcome rigged.

ENDNOTE: Arthur Cravan was a poet, painter and boxer who has been linked to the Dada movement. I thought of him while writing this piece because in 1916 he challenged Jack Johnson, the Heavyweight Champion of the World, to a fight, turned up blind drunk and lost within one round. At the end of another match he surprised the crowd by breaking into a long speech about Oscar Wilde. He disappeared in 1918.

You can tell when you’re in the Midlands because there’s metal on all the taxi radios. There are parts of the country where the 90s didn’t happen, they just passed in a slow iron-grey drag, and though I’ve never been there I imagine Blackwood in South Wales might have been like that too. It’s not poverty these places have in common, it’s the sulkily self-sufficient feeling of not mattering: the sing-song accents, the patches on the jackets, the dead industries, the endless guesthouses that used to be farmhouses, the metal on the radio – all one side of a timeless equation of which the other is metropolitan contempt. The Manics’ first and best shot at the rock anthem is the perfect soundtrack for that flat, ignored landscape. “Under neon loneliness / Motorcycle emptiness” – for all I know they might have wanted it to mean James Dean, but for me it sounds like an A1 service station.

In 1992 the Manics looked cheap but beautiful and that’s what “Motorcycle Emptiness” sounds like, sort of. Not in the Cinderella-meets-Clash sense of the band image, but more literally. The production is thin, especially on the drums, which anyway are far more baggy than bitchin’, and the under-resourced arrangement makes it painfully obvious how much the band are relying on James Dean Bradfield’s studied guitar licks and solos. They’ve certainly sounded less professional than this, but they’ve never sounded more callow, more touchingly like a schoolboy rock band. And yet this is a song which has moved me to the brink of tears. Why?

For one thing, no matter how imitative those licks and solos are, they’re also damned catchy. It seems laughable now but back then I suppose even the thought of a young British band trying to play arena rock, rather than dancing or droning their career away, was an odd one. The first thing I remember about the Manics, before I even heard the music, was their insistence on being a cross between Public Enemy and Guns’n'Roses. I don’t know how serious they were being, but it seemed then and seems now that with such a precise and perfect grasp of the pop concept they would have made superb critics or svengalis. You can’t hear much PE in “Motorcycle Emptiness” but you can hear plenty of the Gunners. Axl Rose’s great trick was to mix up his wastrel rocker appeal with melody and pathos, meaning you wanted to help him as much as you wanted to party with him, and the Manics learned a lot from that. Gold Against The Soul, which “Motorcycle Emptiness” anticipates (it sticks out like an un-sore thumb on its raucous parent album), is a half-classic of sensitive metal, Axl’s confused-nihilist persona internalised and fucked up to the point of collapse, while the riffs just keep on playing.

People sometimes sneer at rock music and call it ‘adolescent’, for all the world as if it shouldn’t be. “Motorcycle Emptiness” bristles with the heightened sensitivities and furious missions of the neurotic boy outsider, and though the themes are pretty familiar – cultural horror, everyday futility, existential loathing – the anthemic setting isn’t. Usually, though, songs like this hold out for some kind of route out, even if it’s only through rockin’ out: not here. In “Motorcycle Emptiness”, escape is illusory and resistance is useless: tramps like us, baby, we were born to ruin. And that’s the contradiction which makes this record so corny and so moving: it’s a song which goes out of its way to deny what its own music is promising. Or, of course, a song which promises with every note the thing it wants to deny.

Kids, I swear, it was a grass-roots musical revolution out there! While the NME nobs sipped Chardonnay in their Wapping skyscrapers and cossetted their chinless audience with flaccid guitar nostalgia, the working class youth of Britain were havin’ it all night in squats’n'warehouses’n'fields’n'car parks, getting loved-up and raving, raving, raving all weekend to an avant-ardkore frenzy, before going back to their tower blocks and sink estates to kill another worthless week listening to the pirates. Such rough glamour, my dears, such a contrast! Luvvit!

If this becomes the accepted version of 90s British pop, as it yet might, then we’ll still only be getting half the story. Pop out of London, into the big Northern clubbing centres on a Friday night, for instance, and you’d have encountered crowds of your authentic working-class Chemical Generation hedonists. Shivering in queues against brick walls with gelled-down short-cut hair or spangled eyelashes or market-bought Hilfiger tops or short silver dresses, these people and the music and nightlife they loved stand fit to be written out of pop history. Their culture wasn’t fast moving or ‘surprisingly’ intelligent or lumpen-experimental enough to matter, I suppose, though they were people out for escape and kicks as plainly as anyone else this decade.

If you’d followed the queue into one of their clubs, the music you’d have heard was ‘handbag house’. In Energy Flash, his near-definitive history of dance music, Simon Reynolds dismisses handbag, the staple clubland fodder of the mid-decade, as “mere disco”. And the very name of this least-loved of genres tells you where many of its critics were coming from. A handbag is functional and feminine, and handbag house was girls’ music, as dismissable and distrusted as anything that ever got called teenybop, but without even the voyeuristic screamy starlust stuff that generally attracts pop-ologists to the female fan.

Handbag was girly, but was it any good? Well, like most pop, it worked a formula, and like most formulae, it won’t win the glow of nostalgic respect until we’re well away from it. But at its best, handbag was a glorious, unaffected, swoon, and JX was its best. Like happy hardcore, this music worked with simple beats and even simpler, easily euphoric melodies, but rather than go all out for rapture-through-speed, it took disco’s sass and yearning, and simply looped the most strident bits. JX’s first hit was “Son Of A Gun”, an anthemically repetitive tune lifted from an old Barbara Roy shouter – by the time of the dreamy “There’s Nothing I Won’t Do” he’d refined and extended his craft. “There’s Nothing…” is handbag house perfected, chiming synth sequences building and looping and breaking around the singer’s breathy devotions. The singing is as plainly effective as the music, with no soul or sophistication to get in the way of the delight. ‘Pure pop’ may be the most overused and smug phrase in the critical dictionary, but for once I can use it without shame: this joy fails all description, and is pure.

The sharp London boy dialogue which bookends Weekender‘s 12 minutes sounds like Billy Liar or some other bolshy, aspirational 60s youth fable. It’s that link as much as the length which tips you off that Weekender is big stuff, a grimy and inchoate attempt to tell you What It’s Like, to cram the whole stupid mess of the 90s into one sprawling record, before it’s all happened and been cut up and bagged and tagged and historified. Weekender is an aggressive, unique record, a record that doesn’t want to be made sense of, a surly epic existing to tell you just that no matter what you’ll read about 1992 in some future pop textbook, it wasn’t like that, wasn’t nearly so neat.

That’s not to say this song’s got any kind of truth to tell. The record’s too addled and phantasmagoric for that, its invisible protagonist led by his nose through a hedonistic wonderland London by the singer, who then turns on him in disgust: “Weekender, fuck off, fuck off and die.” And that’s when the big dirty groove drops out of the song to leave a lurching bad-dream jazz meander. The hapless weekender needs the singer’s guidance but can’t ever truly enter his world, and in this sense Weekender is more political than it seems, a dramatisation not only of post-Rave London but of the classic clubland division between the people for whom it really is a lifestyle and the vast bulk of us, the weekend ravers who drop in and out of the scene at will – “tell at work your weekend tale / Still need the pressure of the daily sale”. And in the end the singer, reconciled, even sympathetic, sends the weekender on his way.

Weekender is a record about drugs and dancing which doesn’t mention drugs and can’t easily be danced to. That doesn’t stop it being as much a classic dance record as anything on this list, though – it was the culmination of a fertile, nervous period when British alternative music struggled to come to terms with the explosion in clubbing and the things it was doing to pop and to life. And Flowered Up (hyped up, loved up, tooled up scam merchants turned seers) were as perfect a faceless, fast-moving, unrecoupable pop package as any one-hit techno kids, it just so happened they were working with guitars and freewheeling, slack-arsed funk as well as the odd sample. Listening back from a non-historical perspective, though, what makes Weekender for you now is the extraordinary voice of Liam Maher, his lunatical Cockney scat coming on like John Lydon playing in Oliver!, a gibbering sound-portrait of a city, a scene, a psyche on the brink of either losing it entirely or sinking back into the doldrums it came from.

Why the Seventies? It’s when Luke Haines grew up, obviously, but it’s also a particularly damp, dark time for British mass culture, when the illusion of national relevancy brought on by the Sixties boom had collapsed. What we, who never properly lived through it, remember from that time is political failure and cultural trivia – chopper bikes, top trumps, Posh Paws, Richard Allen, the three day week, Lieutenant Pigeon, The Rubettes….and this is where Haines comes in.

The minutiae of the Seventies are all that survives of the era in our perpetual, carnival present, and so Haines focusses on them, but he gets the mood right too. Haines’ curdled Britain is the same Britain you see in Gordon Burn’s book on Fred and Rose West, Happy Like Murderers, a country of joyless, pinched lives; the timid and the luckless stumbling about in the dark, then disappearing. sometimes suddenly. Violence, and violent crime, are always bubbling away under the Auteurs’ stark, simple music. Not any more the glam anarcho-violence of Ulrike Meinhof or the Red Army Faction, but a sadder, more rotten kind which the way Haines sings it is lodged in the culture like a splinter. Kids lured into cars and tied up in the boot; suburban kickings on a Saturday night; amateur hitmen hired outside concrete-walled pubs; garage suicides and unwanted gropes.

Where are these bootboys? ‘At tne end of the road / At the top of the charts’ : everything connects, pop music and everyday life most of all. Haines despises the mythology of pop but he can’t get away from it – for every ‘The Rubettes’, where ordinary kids find pop music mocking their attempts to get (it) on, there’s a ‘Future Generation’, which finds Luke hoping, grudgefully, for better times ahead. At times pop mystery and Haines’ repulsed vision blend: ‘Johnny And The Hurricanes’ is a feverish spell, a four minute curse in which Haines has visions of early deaths, black masses, and pop itself sinking back to the smug fifties bonhomie from whence it came. ‘The future’s 1955′ he sings, looking around himself at a sewn-up music business riddled with nostalgia bores, thinking back to the Meek/Parnes era.

Wild interpretation, of course: I should stick to the music, since the lyrics are so cryptic, personal and detailed. And the music is malnourished, in places queasy, but surprisingly varied. The title track resurrects PIL’s paranoid punk-dub lurch with impressive accuracy, ‘Some Changes’ is all over-the-top flourishing and keyboard power chords, ‘Sick Of Hare Krishna’ a spindly acoustic reverie. With five albums behind him, Haines has a tight grip on what exactly he wants from his sound, and knows his limitations. He works his below-average voice to good effect, too, turning its weakness into virulence. Most effective of all is ‘The Rubettes’ and its sickly, desperate reprise, ‘Lights Out’, warping a classically cheesy seventies pop chorus into a ghastly sneer, then surrounding it with taut, thin-sounding guitar pop.

It’s an excellent album, with a couple of caveats – minorly, it sags two-thirds of the way through, with the boring ‘The South Will Rise Again’, where Haines can’t cope with his own scansion, and with ‘Asti Spumante’, whose cut-up lyrics read like Cornershop doing Manics parodies. And more pointedly, there’s a danger in doing this kind of thing that you’ll end up sounding too aloof from the crapness you’re describing (like Bono or Thom Yorke) or that you’ll end up somehow glorifying your grimy subject matter. I think Haines gets away with it, just about, but he’s fallen into both these traps before, with Black Box Recorder and more forgiveably Baader Meinhof. His basic message remains undiluted: England was horrible in the seventies, and it’s scarcely less so now. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves otherwise.

“Choke – it’s predicted DOOM – for ME!”
“I’ll ‘beef’ seeing you – IN GAOL, ME OLD PUB!”*
“Do you think I’m a STUPID FOOL?”
“I’m teaching my dog to sue.”
“Could this be BEATLESMAN’s FINAL “Day In The Life”!??”*
“I’d drunk EIGHT CANS of TANGO and it WASN’T ENOUGH”*
“Does man have a TRUNK? NO!!”

“In his own milieu, on his own terms, Brian Wilson sought to subvert the system by which his music was funneled to the outside world…Brian demanded total production authority on the third Beach Boys album. He wanted no staff A&R men vetoing songs, hiring sidemen, and meddling with arrangements; no go-betweens of any kind except Western Studios’ chief engineering Chuck Britz who would toil for him…For the first time in the history of rock and roll the artist himself had absolute studio authority over his album-length output.” (Timothy White, The Nearest Faraway Place)

You can hear the difference Brian made on the first disc of the Beach Boys’ box set Good Vibrations. Compared to even Wilson’s first productions, the earliest BB songs like “Surfin’ Safari” and “409″ sound…I dunno. They sound well-played but sort of polite. And the vocals? Out-of-tune, atonal, flat, whatever, I’m hardly the best judge but they sound dismal to me. And then, with Surfer Girl album, Brian’s first production credit, all that changes. Double-tracking the vocals to achieve a creamy fullness, adding extra instrumentation here and there to achieve a lush sound, these were songs that were not merely played better, not merely sung better, but they sounded better, too. Soon enough the listener is faced with records that are as booming, thumping, enormous as anything Phil Spector was doing at the time, yet mysteriously, usually without anything resembling an orchestra anywhere in ear-shot. Caressing. Sexy, even.

With Smile, Brian Wilson took that Spectorian fixation about the domination of sound to one logical conclusion, the point the three-minute pop record crumbles into sound-for-the-sake-of-sound, when the sheer sensation of the music begins to overwhelm narrative or sentiment or structure. Example? While the lyrics are usually pretty damned literary, at their most extreme, they’re divorced from any kind of meaning in the straightforward sense. That “doyng-doyng-doyng” bit from “Cabinessence”; the part of “Do You Like Worms?” with its psuedo-Hawaiian babble; the wiggy “George Fell Into His French Horn”, where session musicians explore the lowest registers of their horn instruments, and then “speak” through them sort of like they’re a vocoder or something. Throughout Smile, the line between the sung word and mere sound become criss-crossed and blurred again and again and again. This is where the word becomes subservient to sound, which is only six or so steps on the road to sound-for-the-sake-of-sound, and then sugarplum thoughts about Brian jammin’ with Sun Ra and John Cage start dancing in my head until I realize, duh, the Beach Boys had been doing that for years — it’s called doo-wop, doofus.

O.K. So if the doo-wop angle doesn’t convince you of Smile’s commitment to the destruction of popular song, try the hip-hop angle. Like Fred says, you can spatchcock together all the Smile fragments in all sorts satisfying, even enlightening ways. Which, oddly enough, is exactly how Wilson composed “Heroes and Villains”. Take a listen to all the wonderful “Heroes and Villains” segments on the Good Vibrations box-set: you get pastiches of romantic western movie soundtracks, European romantic movie soundtrack, some Beatley French Horn, ghostly honky-tonk piano coda, rhythmic grunting, repulsive arrhythmic grunting, the Crows’ doo-wop classic “Gee” and various species of psychedelic barbershop quartet music. In a kind of anticipation of the way yr Grandmaster Flashs and yr Double Dee and Steinskis would work with other people’s songs, Brian composed numerous little sections and pieced them together according to an internal logic which owed little to the pop forms of the time.

It’s almost poetic justice that an album which fragments popular song is in fragments itself. Perhaps it’s better that way. I can think of at least four songs whose post-Smile incarnations just aren’t as good as the originals. The after-the-fact tinkering (whether by the other Beach Boys or Brian himself) with “Wind Chimes”, “Surf’s Up”, “Vegetables”, and particularly “Heroes and Villains” makes me wonder if a finished, labored-over Smile would have ended up like an overcooked batch of meat. And anyway, the fragments have their own perfection, as bootlegged music often does. “Look”, next to the singles and the Brian-only “Surf’s Up”, my favorite fragment, is as beautiful as Christmas morning, all fairy-dust resolution, even though the (rather sloppy) editing might fool us into thinking it’s complete. Perhaps the question mark that Smile is now is a more satisfying fate than the exclamation point it could’ve been.

And what if Smile was finished? Could it have dared compete with that other artifact of mass-avant and production-dementia, Sgt.Pepper? Probably not. The overwhelming success of it, both in the critical and commercial realms, was something of a fait accompli. By 1967, the counterculture and the mainstream apologists for the counterculture wanted, needed something of rock culture that could justify the whole sixties experience, something you could take home and hang on the wall. And at the perfect moment, the Greatest Rock Band in the World delivered an album reasonably interesting and ambitious enough that, viewed in the right light and with the right drugs, could take its’ place in the pantheon of Really Important Things. How could the Beach Boys stand a chance against that?

The Singles Bar is open to contributions – if it’s out as a single or on the radio, write about it. I’ll put it up here unedited and take it off when I feel like it. For my part, I write about every single I buy, blindly and disposably, trying to capture a rolling pop moment while the rest of Freaky Trigger turns gradually archival on me.

NAS – “Hate Me Now” (released May, CD Single)

Overblown, preposterous pop-hop sampling the Carmina Burana? “Piss Orff!” you may cry, but it was a neat steal back when Hoodlum Priest did it and it remains so today. Anyhow, pity poor Nas, ticked off because his (obviously) envious homies no longer consider him ‘real’ and ‘street’. The envy argument is just as irritating coming from a hip-hop star as from a Tory MP; but then who could possibly think that Nas has lost touch with his roots when his LP cover shows him turning into an enormous gold sphinx? ‘Hate Me Now’ is likeable fluff despite this, which veers once into actually effective Trickyesque paranoia territory as Nas challenges his scrounging wastrel enemies to make off with his limo, girls, etc. if they dare. On the B-Side he thoughtfully provides us with breakthrough hit ‘If I Ruled The World’ and a soppily enjoyable slice of street-swing sentimentality which boasts R.Kelly as guest star.

YOUNGER YOUNGER 28s – “We’re Going Out” (released May, CD Single)

They try and they try, but the early 80s remain oddly unrevivable. It’s possibly because the great pop records of the era sound so rawly ambitious and detached from ‘rock’ that they catapult themselves right out of the music’s history, existing only possibly as a curious ancestor of dance music but useless as reference points for rock (with a few happy exceptions). Mind you, starting off with the belief that the Human League were a novelty cabaret act rather than the most unguessable pop construct of their era isn’t going to help. That’s what Younger Younger 28s do, though, on this dog of a record, which takes the Oakey/Sulley/Catherall chemistry and pisses in the test tube. The NME hated it because it ‘exploits’ working class pop culture, which is silly posing from a publication that’s spent the best part of the 90s presenting working class northerners as romantically thick. No, YY28s is just a bad single, no more. The B-Sides sound like Pulp produced by Hale and Pace.

LAPTOP – “Nothing To Declare” (released May, CD Single)

An altogether smarter take on synthpop revivalism, Laptop make knowingly blank pop like a more commercial, more glib Magnetic Fields. What stops “Nothing To Declare” from being utterly throwaway are its blockily catchy chorus and its streak of miserabilist cynicism: “I’ve got nothing to declare / Except my loneliness”, sneers Mr.L. As a bonus track you get “We Never Got To Venice” where El Laptop gloomily reads a tourist guide to the city while his machines fizz in sympathy around him. (First of all, though, get last year’s excellent “Gimme The Nite” with Laptop cruising the singles bars and failing miserably despite the excellent chat-up lines: “You seem to be a lot like me / A damaged package filled with uncertainty.”. Baffling, but there you go.)

CLINIC – “The Second Line” (released May, 7″)

Another week, another Domino single. Clinic I seem to remember are from Liverpool and wear surgical gear. This wise old head would be passing surprised if they didn’t also own a few Can records, since the tongue-talkin’ vocals on “The Second Line” are school of Damo Suzuki and no mistake. (Which is cool, by the way.) Nowhere near as leaden in their experimentalism as, say, Ganger or Quickspace, this is sprightly, promising avant-pop which still doesn’t quite take flight until a briefly scabrous guitar solo tears up the track near the end. A dullish rhythm section seems to shoulder the blame, typically.

SHANKS AND BIGFOOT – “Sweet Like Chocolate” (released May, CD Single)

The prettiest No.1 for ages is a pop sugarisation of pirate-radio garage, but you’d have to be quite stupidly hip to care, because “Sweet Like Chocolate”‘s lilting, billowing two-step is running the early Summer and making the capital a significantly lovelier place. A vocal part from the Baby D school of house naifs is matched with perfect production; a deep, swoony string arrangement and tiny background arpeggios flowing over a pert B-line. Like Andy Partridge collaborating with Doolally, its effortless grace leaves the rest of the charts behind.

SHANIA TWAIN – “That Don’t Impress Me Much” (released May I think, Top Of The Pops performance!)

Pop debate alert! Shania, after being serially unimpressed by a rocket scientist and Brad Pitt, is (not surprisingly given her exacting standards) also left cold by men who own a car. But in the very same Top 10, TLC strongly infer that a man reliant on his “best friend’s ride” is a ‘Scrub’ (also known as a ‘Buster’, etc.). Who’s right? I don’t drive, so I’m broadly on Shania’s side. Plus, on the new Atari Teenage Riot album Alec Empire gets in on the act too, with “(Your Uniform) Does Not Impress Me!”? May I be the first to suggest a duet? I like this record partly because the leopardskin-clad Shania is marketed as country (despite being palpably nothing of the sort), which no doubt causes strokes in all those authenticists who thought things could sink no lower than Garth Brooks.

CINEMA – They Nicknamed Me Evil (released April, 7″)

On the B-Side, locked grooves spin on into a spooked eternity: eight dour, clattery instrumental bitelets which even this less-is-more junkie hasn’t bothered letting loop for more than a minute. The chilly A-Side is barely less repetitive: a brokenhearted piano playing high, lonely triads forever; a nervy, flat sound which can never quite sink into the background. Around it doors creak and strings scrape as great Bernard Herrman drones loom up from the shadows, hunting for victims. “They nicknamed me evil” mutters a voice, congested and defensive, and then, much later, “Robert…Crichton was my real name.”. He sounds like he’s not even sure any more. And then, suddenly, the record ends.

So here’s what I liked about Velvet Goldmine: there’s a moment when teenaged glam fan Arthur gets home after buying the new ‘Brian Slade’ record. He puts the record on the player and then lies on the bed, basking in the music, gazing raptly at Slade’s airbrushed, marbled body on the glossy inner sleeve. The scene is charged, muskily hormonal – you expect Arthur to flex like a whore and fall wanking to the floor (and don’t you worry, he does later) – but it’s not just Arthur’s inchoate sexual awakening that gives it this kick. For Arthur is writhing in the grip of a joyous deviance more specialised and just as potent, the fever of the pop fan as they listen to a record for the first time.

The act of giving a record its first spin is a sacred one for a type of pop lover, who wants to transfer some of the record’s power to themselves, making a myth of their own and for them alone. The camerawork hyperbolises this gloriously, zooms in on the vinyl, gorges the viewer on its sheenful blackness; the soundtrack crisply tracking the pop and whirr of the automatic dansette arm. It’s a moment as tacky as it is resonant, and it sets out Velvet Goldmine‘s stall as a fundamentally conservative film, a love letter to a particular, perhaps dated vision of pop, of pop stars. The movie is an unabashed paean to Starlust, the strange sexio-socio-dynamics of the relationship between star and fan – which in Arthur’s case turns at the films literal climax to that between fucker and fuckee, as the sky rains glitter.

Arthur’s a nice lad, rosily and goofily English in a way you don’t see anymore (check out the snub-nosed, graceless, ruddy-cheeked sweetness of 70s Pop TV audiences, then compare to today’s post-Face pop demographic and you’ll see what I mean). He comes down to London looking like a Bay city Rollers fan, faintly out of place – though as the film studiously ignores the stompier side of the glam ‘phenomenon’, you’re left not quite knowing why he’s dressing like he is. It’s just as well, though – without Arthur to ground it, the film would run the risk of turning into an airy parade of cliched decadence.

Velvet Goldmine is openly in love with London, you see, and with one facet of the English outsider tradition – that curious hedonist aestheticism which Haynes roots in Oscar Wilde and his circle, which surfaces in the twenties and thirties as cabaret romance and the naked elitism of Bloomsbury, which in turn is drawn on by Ferry and Eno, crossbred with pop art panache, turned into starcult by Bowie and then proceeds through post-punk technophilia and New Romantic aspiration, and so to the nineties and its final, invisible triumph. The corrosive self-knowledge of Cool Britannia, and the endless, numb parade of dressy club peacocks across the style and dance press’ pages – these are the twin destinations of Glam. Aestheticism on the one hand ironically commodified, on the other ruthlessly and crassly democratised: maybe it’s the knowledge of what Glam ends up as that had Velvet Goldmine leaving me vaguely queasy.

Glam’s thrills come from contrast, and not contrast with the straight (either sense) world, either: Glam admits no such enemies, it’s exciting because its art roots are as much Pop Art as anything, because it sells out so beautifully. Of course Glam Rock was Roxy and Bowie and at a pinch Lou and at a hernia-risking stretch Iggy. It was also Slade, Mott, and Suzi, and its American wing is better served by Alice and Sparks than by TV Eye (particularly a TV Eye as politely performed as Ewan MacGregor’s.) It was ridiculous, it knew it was ridiculous, it even admitted that in song (“Oh dear, Oh Gawd, Oh my, oh blimey!” as Mott sing in Saturday Gigs, reminiscing about their Hit Years): the radical thing Glam does is to realise that ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

Everybody knows this, but the temptation is always to play up the Fin De Siecle aspects at the expense of Feeling the Noize. So it is that the only hint of a beat comes with the black throb of Eno’s Baby’s On Fire, slickly remade by the film’s house band – and it works very well, but it’s hardly Rock n’ Roll Part 2. This is where the movie’s lack of permission to use David Bowie’s songs hurts it most – his particular genius was to combine a concern for art-cred and love of high concept (as befitted an ex-mime) with a greed for success that led him unerringly to the tastiest pop riffs and the largest of beats. The wheyish imitations served up by ‘Brian Slade’ are mildly diverting pastiche pieces, but basically won’t do.

Not that Velvet Goldmine is a bad film, not at all – it stuck with me and is stuffed with neat set-pieces and diverting moments, and even its limited pop sense is often canny: Brian Slade’s be-dressed festival turn is a sharp take on Bowie’s nowt-so-queer-as-folk-rock phase, and the unspeaking Jack Fairy is a compelling creation, not least because of actor Micko Westmoreland’s astonishingly shaped head. And I loved, in the end, all the ambition and conceit, the spaceships and emerald brooches and palare subtitles and hilarious if completely anachronistic videos.

What stayed with me most, though, maybe wasn’t even ‘meant’ to be there. If Velvet Goldmine has a secret to tell then its secret is this: the film is Todd Haynes’ love song to the dead Kurt. Ewan MacGregor’s character, Curt Wild, is analagous to Iggy Pop, but he looks more and more like his Seattle namesake as the film goes on, and by the final, 80s-set scenes the resemblance is total: McGregor’s eyes, even, have that terrible passive melancholy that Cobain’s have in a lot of his final pictures, where he looked like an animal waiting to be put down. These final scenes, where Wild makes peace with his past and gives Arthur a brooch, before walking away, contented and pretty, into the city night, seemed to have nothing to do with Glam or Bowie or Iggy – they felt like a film-maker obsessed with pop stars writing his own happy ending to the only new pop star story the 90s gave us. Maybe not: maybe – to use a horrible, unglamourous phrase – I’m reading too much into it (I don’t even like Nirvana, for one thing). But Velvet Goldmine is, after all, a film about the ineffable importance of image, of what and who you look like. I don’t think I’m wrong.

For thirty-odd years now, underground comics legend R.Crumb has been preaching musical theory to a decidedly sceptical audience. Crumb was always faintly anachronistic in the hippie comix scene (and indeed his best work has all been done since, as his acid-inspired sense of belonging eroded in the cynical 70s and worse 80s, to be replaced with an oddly humane misanthropy) and his taste in music bolsters this impression. Crumb has never made any bones about his hatred for rock, and rock and roll, and indeed anything that wasn’t pressed on shellac by desperately obscure bluesmen and jazzers in the twenties and thirties. His reasons for loving this stuff were the usual ones – real instruments, real emotion, operations outside the mass media and the consumer society, a vigor and liveliness missing from mass culture – but until now he’s never had an opportunity to present his case in the only arena where it matters, on disc.

Background: some bloke working for EMI hit upon an idea, which ran like this. I like making compilation tapes, I like reading ‘cult books’, therefore I’d wanna hear my favourite cult book people’s compilations tapes. Cross-marketing genius, ladies and gentlemen, which has led to the Songbook Series, ten expensive but immaculately packaged CDs put together and annotated by ten writers and cartoonists.

It’s in the selection of these ten that things start getting really screwy. It should surprise nobody that Iain Banks and Hunter S Thomson were selected to burrow down into the vaults in search of compilation manna (and it should surprise even less people that their choices are respectively hackneyed middlebrow alt-rock and once-radical sixties consensus classix). But Ivor Cutler? Savage Pencil?? And even if everyone reading this should know who Peter Bagge is, I’ll wager plenty don’t. What it all amounts to is an act of lunatic generosity on EMI’s part that’s turned a potentially dreary idea into (occasional) music freak gold.

Gratifyingly, it’s the cartoonists’ choices which beat most in time with my pop heart. Savage Pencil picks various flaming psych oddities from the Sixties, Steadman goes mostly for doom-laden classical and holy minimalism. Gilbert Shelton picks goofy and bad-ass fifties rock, and Peter Bagge goes pop with an immaculately bubblegum selection (Spice Girls!) which looked on paper the best choice of the ten (and is needless to say exquisitely packaged).

And then there’s Crumb. Crumb’s inclusion in the choice of writers was immediately surprising, since while he’s a relatively famous man, anyone knowing who he is will also probably know what kind of music he likes. But nevertheless, here in front of me sits “That’s What I Call Sweet Music”, a collection of ‘American Dance Orchestras Of The 1920s’, packaged in a fashion that makes John Fahey’s Revenant label look like K-Tel. Is it good? It’s absolutely wonderful.

This is the motherlode of pop, among the earliest recorded music that was based on good tunes, good dancing and a good time. Crumb’s hand-lettered booklet draws you into the world of the touring Jazz Orchestras, groups of men heading from city to city to give packed dancehalls the “dissipation” they craved. “The biggest problem for musicians in the twenties was finding time to sleep!” writes Crumb. The music is instantly familiar even if most of the tunes are long forgotten – you know it from silent movie scores and cartoon incidental music: the jaunty, knockabout soundtrack to exuberant physicality. Needless to say, every tune here swings and then some.

What you might not be expecting are the vocals, the dynamics, the little touches of invention that really elevate the music from entertaining curio to first-rate pop. “Simple, unadorned, phony style” is how bandmember Eddie Condon is quoted in the sleevenotes on the subject of the singing, and he gets it pretty much right. Urbane, amused, certainly knowing but never ironic in the pinched modern pop sense, the voices throughout are a treat. Not to mention that these people could sing – Rudy Vallee’s breezy saunter through “The One That I Love Loves Me” is an absolute delight, crooned so softly it’s almost like he’s humming to himself, but with a master’s control of phrasing and a relish for the wittily sentimental lyrics. Frankie Marvin, on “Leven-Thirty Saturday Night”, on the other hand, is enthusiastic to the point of goofiness, grabbing the listener by the lapels to implore “Can’t you see, she accepted me-eee”

On that same track, Fess Williams And His Royal Flush Orchestra snap easily from brassy flares to soft rhythmic patter to mid-tempo danceability – on the evidence of this disc, the 20s bands had a grasp of the dynamics of volume which shows the quiet-loud-quiet bluster of most current rock up as relatively elephantine. And whether it’s the original recordings or a terrific remastering job (probably a bit of both!), the production is uniformly great – a surprising lack of crackle or hiss, with lead playing clearly upfront in the mix, but never at the expense of the delicate ensemble work. My one gripe is that most of the tracks stop rather suddenly, perhaps as a side-effect of whatever process took the static off the source 78s.

That’s What I Call Sweet Music is in short a tonic: a window on a forgotten pop world and a handy counterpoint to the current state of Americana excavation, with its emphases on murder ballads and primitive gospel. It’s not hard to detect a certain smugness in write-ups of what Greil Marcus called “The Old, Weird America” – I think I’d be safe in suggesting that it’s the ‘weird’ aspect rather than the ‘old’ aspect which is turning on jaded hipsters. I prefer Crumb’s version (which is there in Harry Smith’s Anthology anyway, just rarely dug out) – an old popular music similar in many ways to the new one: a music to be played whenever people come together to enjoy themselves and make one another’s lives better. Like all good pop, in fact, this stuff isn’t really ‘old’ at all.

This isn’t a manifesto, it’s just a vague statement of intent, or maybe belief. Heaven knows it’s difficult, even absurd, to try and crystallise what I feel about music and music criticism, and even more difficult to condense that into a few paragraphs. But I ought at least to try. As ever, comments are more than welcome.So what do I believe? We’ll start off with something nobody should disagree with.

1) That there’s a stunning amount of worthwhile music out there.

Fair enough, I think. Some years turn up a higher yield of magnificent records than others, but Freaky Trigger doesn’t subscribe to any ‘death of pop’ theories. That’s not to say that some musical traditions and practises aren’t in very bad shape, but the music keeps on evolving and it’s the critic’s job to try and keep pace.

2) That this music isn’t confined by time or genre.

It’s also the critic’s job to keep the faith, though. Pop music didn’t start in ’66 or ’77 or ’88 any more than it started yesterday, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Similarly you won’t find easy dismissals of entire genres in Freaky Trigger: you might find crassness, generalisation and pig ignorance, but then it’s up to you to set it right.So far, so blah. Try finding a rock-crit site which doesn’t gaze starrily at the future while paying homage to the past. Where Freaky Trigger steps out of line, maybe, is that it doesn’t believe in a pop ‘canon’: critics that spend their time compiling exclusionary lists and arguing over who are or aren’t the ‘greats’ are betraying the vibrancy of the music and its listeners – thankfully pop is smarter than they are. We’re living in an era where constant reissue programs (if Father Yod and Beyond The Black Crack can re-emerge, then everything truly is up for grabs), and even more democratically MP3 trading, are dissolving pop’s ideas of time, history, the contemporary and the ‘objective’. If even one person with the right equipment wants to preserve a piece of music, then it will survive: what price your Top 100 lists in the face of that? All the humbled critic can do is act at best as a guide, and the more dilettantish s/he is the better.

3) That the ways ‘rock critics’ look at music tend to be simplistic or patronising.

Freaky Trigger is greedy and largely amoral. I’m interested in pop music from a listener’s point of view, not an economist’s or even a performer’s. Whether a piece of music endured a bloody, constipated genesis or took half an hour’s doodling in the lunch break matters not a whit to me. And if someone else wrote the songs or even played the instuments? I don’t give a damn. Freaky Trigger also doesn’t give a monkeys about what label something’s on, what it’s selling or what it’s advertising.This is down to pragmatism as much as principle: even if I did believe that corporate, plastic, etc. etc. pop was in principle devilish through and through I’d still (I hope) find myself loving stuff like Baby One More Time and Spice Up Your Life. And more generally, I’m sick and tired of being told by critics and fans alike that ordinary music buyers (which we all are anyhow) are mindless automatons whose tastes and opinions are worthless.Of course if a million people buy a record it doesn’t make that record good (certainly not) – what it does mean is that there must be something in that record to make so many people buy it and it’s interesting to speculate on what that something is. And presumably those people play the music and use it in their own lives just like you or I use Sonic Youth (or whatever!). 90% of attacks on chart-pop boil down to “But girls like it!” anyway. I’m not saying a 2 Unlimited fan’s life wouldn’t be enhanced by listening to the Smiths, I’m just saying a Morrissey fan’s life needs No Limits in it too.

So that’s ‘patronising’. As for ‘simplistic’: apart from the whole canon business, Freaky Trigger doesn’t have too much time for rock history as it’s currently understood, either the cyclical model (55-66-77-88-….) or the album-centric privileging of such undefinable shibboleths as ‘meaning’ or ‘substance’ or ‘art’ or for that matter ‘originality’ and ‘weirdness’. I’ve got nothing against meaning – it just strikes me that a rock history where Radiohead is meaningful but Dionne Warwicke or 2 Bad Mice somehow less so has got things too skewed to be useful.

At the very least we need an understanding that pop history (like the ‘proper’ kind) is in fact multiple histories, cycling and peaking independent of one another and also interlocking from time to time, too. The wild proliferation of genres is some unconscious recognition of this, I think.

4) That thinking about music is fun.

One of the problems with being a critic, especially one who likes pop music, is that the moment you try and start being clever someone will come along and call you an intellectual. Or that the moment you start talking about teen pop someone will come along and say you aren’t one. Pop criticism is still hobbled by a pernicious anti-intellectualism, best expressed in the old saw, “But pop/dance/rock is about having a good time!”. As if thinking isn’t about having a good time, and as if you can’t dance to clever music: there’s no difference in my book between an intellectual and a hedonist. That said, for now at least the kind of pop fan who needs a few Deleuze references to validate their taste will be disappointed by Freaky Trigger.

5) That there’s a point to music criticism.

Well, obviously. The point isn’t really to educate or write well (those are useful side effects if you can pull them off) – for me the point is first off to get people thinking about and listening to music in interesting ways, and secondly to fight some kind of rearguard action against the emergent middlebrow cosy consensus about what ‘good music’ is. And if you’d like to join me in my lonely war, you can always contribute.

6) What turns me on.

Finally, Freaky Trigger comes down to personal taste. The music I like came first and the theory later. The attentive reader might notice a fairly liberal use of the word ‘pop’ throughout the ‘zine, describing anything from The Backstreet Boys to Arnold Dreyblatt. This is partly because I like the word a lot more than ‘rock’, and partly because almost everything I listen does indeed have something in it that sounds ‘pop’ to me.

So what do I like? Listing individual records, even genres, would be a bit of a waste of time (that’s what the rest of Freaky Trigger is for!). So I’ll stick with qualities: melodrama, hooks, texture, bloody-mindedness, repetition, wit, good lyrics, good vocals, good titles, hysteria, groove, perversity, image. Most music I love will have at least some of those.That’s your lot. Enjoy!