Fools, never learn...

After Penetration split up in 1979, our beloved Pauline Murray was very active in the new born post punk scene. She played a lot with our hero Peter Perret and finally got together with the John Cooper Clarke band, The Invisible Girls. They were great musicians and a solid backing band for Pauline: Dave Rowbotham (guitar), Vinney Reilly (guitar), Robert Blamire (bass), Steve Hopkins (keyboards), John Maher (drums). Their sound was fantastic, an evolution of the best Penetration tunes to a new sort of pop punk. Sadly this co-operation didn't last long - little more than an year - but it was a great year! Their music was (is) a brilliant and disconcerting journey through a murky post-punk world. Listen to their eponympous album, one of best of those years, produced by Martin Hannett... someone said it was the greatest record Factory never released. Its format is standard - two sides of 3-minute pop songs – but that's about as close to convention as it dares to drift. Murray shows a surprising willingness (given her back catalogue to that point) to engage with melodic vocals – breathy and urgent on Time Slipping, wide-eyed and credulous on the first tremendous single Dream Sequence 1– but, while there are any number of odd-pop gems, they’re shrouded in post-industrial, nigh-on-apocalyptic arrangements. Pauline played also live with The invisible girls and they toured together germany & somewhere else in Europe. It was 1981... don't know how extensively they gigged but, in my opinion, this was the best of Pauline Murray and an unforgettable document of the emerging sound that would come to dominate the post punk era.

A fist thru the glow

The Urban Verbs were at the center of a small but burgeoning music scene in Washington DC in the late 70’s.This band was born out of a city which was a cultural desert in the late 70's. A place where the suits went home at night leaving a ghost town till dawn. Like a comet streaking through the musical stratosphere the Urban Verbs were picked up on the sonar by such legends as Eno (recording two demos with him!) and Miles Copeland who was at the Corcoran to sign the B'52's and add to his stable of new artists including the comparatively disingenuous band Police. Perhaps it is a weird irony that the Verbs somehow evaporated into the night and were left to those of us that can call them our very own. But as John Foster wrote in 2008, "The Urban Verbs are not a tale of missed opportunities (although there were plenty) but rather a screaming success story". The band’s practice space at The Atlantis building was arguably the center of the DC scene. In 1980, the Atlantis Club became the 9:30 Club, which is widely regarded as one of the best independent-run venues in the country. Urban Verbs played their first official show in January 1978 and had a reputation as a must-see live band. But they also made concerted effort to reach a wider audience by playing punk shows. Traveling to New York to become the first DC band to play CBGB’s, luck would strike The Verbs in a big way. Sessions for their self-titled debut, produced by the legendary Mike Thorne, were underway. So the Verbs were signed to a two record contract with Warner Brothers in 1979 by Bob KrasnowThings seem to be coming together as the group travels to Toronto to open the fourth show in North America for an intense and highly hyped group. That band is Joy Division. In an event that seems unthinkable in today’s information age, they arrive to find the club closed. Apologies are passed out, as the club’s staff informs the band that Joy Division’s lead singer has just committed suicide and the tour has been cancelled. This tone would continue with a challenging second album recorded with Steve Lillywhite. The more challenging material and loss of a pop flavor left the band hopeful a breakthrough critically and commercially was around the corner. They wouldn't have to wait long to get the answer. Warner discarded them soom. With no label support, there was little to propel the band forward. It didn’t end in some big argument but rather just sort of stopped. Momentum was lost. But no one sounded just like The Urban Verbs during their time and no one has since. Unique and challenging music is something that never goes out of fashion.

In peppermint dreams

1985.The Dentists were a much beloved UK indie-pop band that was neither dour and introspective enough to fit in with the c86 crowd, nor interested in the sort of costumes that would have endeared them to the retro-60s clique. What they did have was a singer who sounded like he believed every word he sang no matter how ridiculous the concept, rushed tempos that added excitement, and some great hooks. Even though they were English, I hear them having a lot in common with the New Zealand Flying Nun type bands. There's a lot of frantic strumming, scrappy drumming, simple lead guitar parts and catchy melodies with well-deployed harmonies: basically your well-worn mix of Velvet Underground (as in What Goes On), Beatles (as in She Said, She Said) and garage rock. When I think of that trio of influences I always think of the Feelies, but the Dentists were much looser...anyway If you're looking for jangly guitar-pop in its purest sense, look no further than the Dentists & Dressed, a compilation of their earliest ep's, is as good as any release from the entire genre, and criminally overlooked for far too long. Smart, crisp, and bright, the Dentists deserve (again) your attention.

Glaube nichts

...the "prostitutes". One of the two demos, Dancin' Rigodon, quotes Celine in the title, and adds the curt caption: "Of morality and humanity I truly don't give a damn, just like everyone else, really". In those years Turin was producing a whole lot of music: there came Blind Alley, Eazycon, Changing Club, Teknospray… But if the Turin of those years was the problem, they represented its (dis)solution. The Prostitutes participated in the first occupation to ever occur in Turin, specifically they occupied the Barabba circle, in via Plana. Their first concert was in via degli Artisti, I guess that was back in 1980 .And after that they played together with a few bands at the Smeraldo Cinema... in ten years they played much more around... I was just thinking of situations that could be defined as "proper" concerts, not stuff like pubs or Dottor Sax. I think the whole thing became much more serious around 1982, with the concert at Tuxedo's. Though I don't have very good memory, I can think of five or six concerts in 1985 alone: twice at Tuxedo's, once at Big's, once at the Macabre in Bra, and once in Padua... Their absolutely best concert? probably the one they played in Florence together with Diaframma, Litfiba and I don't know who else. That was a powerful concert, in front of a lot of people. That must have been 1986… then the concert in Verona: it was during a festival, a huge stage and really powerful amplification, like they'd never experienced before...that was the last real Prostitutes concert. They never recorded singles or lps, simply because no one seemed to be really interested & it was too soon and then too late. They never was so they never failed.

Reid things at the ambulance

Jesus and the Mary Chain (sic) sound like my brother singing (out of key), drums straight as they come, guitar dredged up from the remains of the first Ramones album plus an insistent two-note bass. Would be the Doors if they could, flirt dangerously by looking like Goths, and cover ‘Ambition’. But find a hole somewhere and are clawing their way through with naive charm and tuneful odd tuneless tunes. Will be terrible when they start to play, so catch them now. From The Legend! #2, June 1984

Captain Kirk strikes back!

Spizz is a key character in the Punk/New Wave scenario of the late 70s/early 80s. Starting with his roots in the Glam era, he was (and still is) an oblique actor of the movement of the British Punk explosion and beyond. Fast and hyperactive, Spizz took a new name for almost every new release, and topped the newborn indie chart back in early 1980 with his classic single "Where's Captain Kirk?". Spizz's output, polarized by the taken incarnation (Spizzenergi, Spizzoil, Athetico Spizz 80, Spizzles) has always been led by a driving creative boost, with a poppy edge and a constant look to the future. Spizz's work passes through masterpieces of the New Wave era (Soldier Soldier), Punk rock classics ("Where's Captain Kirk") and Spizzological cover versions ("The Model" by Kraftwerk). I am old enough to remember them first time around but now they're still touring around somewhere... welcome back captain Kirk!

Back to the martian men!

The Comsat Angels took their name from a JG Ballard story and titled their first EP Red Planet. But anyone expecting science-fiction lyrics about spaceships and supernovas would do well to look in a musical galaxy far, far away; listening to their first demos (aka England Demos), it's the dystopian realist strain of SF that informs the Comsat Angels. That's not radiation on the cover of their first LP,Waiting for a Miracle, it's the blurry cityscape of the band's hometown of Sheffield. And that's not giddy teenage kicks making the photo blurry; it's despondency in the face of existential futility. The band cites another science fiction tale in the song "On the Beach," but it has no need for the novel's post-apocalyptic narrative: the world of the Comsat Angels is already a bleak and hostile wasteland. Not only were the Comsat Angels as grim as any of their peers, they were as great, too. But in the 26 years since Waiting for a Miraclethey've been relegated to obscure cult status, overlooked even by Simon Reynolds. At any rate, the timing may be slightly off again, as the retro-postpunk wave seems to have crested, but the Comsat Angels at their best transcended trends and flew the genre coop, traveling on their heavenly wings straight for greatness and anyway...