Julian Cope writes about his album of the month on his website. Sometimes it's some longhaired nonsense that I have no interest in, sometimes it's something that I fancy the sound of and listen to the streaming. In the case of a couple - aging (and now sadly deceased) soul singer Nathanial Mayer and French band The Gunslingers (imagine Teenage Jesus as a speed metal act!) - I've had to buy them.

Occasionally, these albums don't exist other than in the Cope household, and this months Postpunksampler is such a thing. I've got to admit that apart from the more obvious tracks by the likes of Subway Sect, Richard Hell, Dalek I, Swellmaps, Wild Swans, etc, there's a lot of things here I've never heard. Or even heard of!

Tracklisting is...

Metal Urbain — Paris Maquis (3.07)
Zounds — Can’t Cheat Karma (2.42)
Subway Sect — Ambition (3.10)
Richard Hell & the Void-Oids — Liars Beware (2.52)
Germs — Forming (3.08)
39 Clocks — Aspetando Godo (3.53)
Missing Presumed Dead — Family Tree (2.11)
Manicured Noise — Faith (3.30)
Jane Aire & the Belvederes — Yankee Wheels (3.05)
Dance Party — Photograph (3.05)
Dum Dum Dum — Dum Dum Dum (2.57)
Crass — Mother Earth (4.12)
Friction — Crazy Dream (4.23)
Hair & Skin Trading Co. — Monkies (3.24)
Electric Eels — Accident (3.22)
Chaingang — Son of Sam (3.09)
Swell Maps — Read About Seymour (1.27)
The Sods — Transport (2.55)
Reptile Ranch — Saying Goodbye (3.05)
Dalek I Love You — Trapped (3.59)
Colours Out Of Time — As In Another World (3.34)
Wild Swans — Now You’re Perfect (3.15)
Armand Schaubroeuk — Buried Alive (1.43)
Psycho Surgeons — Horizontal Action (1.47)
D.M.Z. — Bad Attitude (2.57)
E.S.G. — UFO (2.33)
Gaz Chambers — Who’s Life Is It Anyway? (11.12)

So, no Wire, but they do get a couple of mentions. Not exactly complimentary unfortunately...

"Even the archetypal Rent-a-Punks of Wire with their stupid loudmouth bassist entirely ditched the 80mph ramalama of their debut LP PINK FLAG, instead delivering for 1978 an album of extremely noise-some and mid-to-slow tempo material entitled CHAIRS MISSING, a record so devoid of the ‘1-2-X-U’ knuckle-head crowd-pleasers of the previous LP that the band’s 1978 shows often enraged the new Punk Rocker hordes greedy for more of the PINK FLAG-stylee; fucking heck, this was not THE RAMONES LEAVE HOME. But then, underneath it all, Wire were precisely the art school types that the revisionists so detested – hell, even back in ’77, their ex-art teacher guitarist Bruce Gilbert had already reached the grand age of thirty-one!"

Think he's doing PF a bit of a disservice obviously, but there's some interesting stuff on the compilation all the same.

You can read the full account and listen to it here...

http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/albumofthemonth/2068/

Enjoy!!

"this sounds almost like it had been written by GG"


Written by Gary Glitter?

Come on.

Come on.


Come on.

Come on.


; )

Nice one - though i think Keith summed it up well in saying that there's some 'interesting' stuff there, rather than'good'. Like many bands that didn't get out of their home town, there's a reason for it - they were rubbish!! Though i'll always doff my cap to those that at least give it a go.

Apart from the few that i know (Crass, Zounds, Maps, Eels, Swans, Sect, Sect Hell, Germs) the ones that struck me as, er, more than interesting were Metal Urbain (so glad there was more to French punk that Plastic Bertand [or was he Belgian?]) & Hair & Skin Trading Co - wft is that name about!

I've printed off Cope's text & am now gonna try & read it - more pertinently, make sense of it!!!! ell i did trawl through it, but it was heavy going! it's 'stream of conciousness' stuff, but as he's publishing it, he might've taken time out to make it a tad more reader-friendly'. It's his take on things, which is fine, & he was drugged up then, if not now, but i i don't remember Strummer laying down punk fashion sense in dictatorial terms as he's suggesting here? any1 know whet he's on about?

Actually going to see Subway Sect this weekend in Glasgow.
Going to check the bands I haven,t heard of on the list later.

GB- was it really? didn't know that. they could have been just blabbing about! still my point is that if the music wasn't all that good then then all these discussions would be moot. i know john got his ass kicked and was sliced up a bit, but their act was mostly "showbiz anarchy".

Methinks J.Cope has his tongue firmly in his cheek a bit with this one.

Still, time to wheel out my favourite joke ever:


Q.What's the difference between The Teardrop Explodes and a Bull.


A. A Bull has horns at the front and an arsehole at the back.

"Methinks J.Cope has his tongue firmly in his cheek a bit with this one."

Absolutely. I always read Cope articles with that in mind. I agree it can be difficult sometimes seeing as he's just too rock'n'roll to use paragraphs! ; )

Anyway, I enjoyed listening to it myself, and will definitely be playing it again. Personally I'm pleased that he's given some exposure to these acts.

be nice to incl Mission of Burma as well. one of the few bands from that era to "re-form" and produce quality new work.

just recently released cd is "the sound, the speed, the light".

a few nice songs in there indeed, but in general hardly the best that has been produced in the post-punk years.
not bad for a change, though, since most of them pretty unknown.

hey, thanks.
this time i have more than half of the tracks. .