Being the adventures of one Madison Moffat (Queering the Air), whose principal interests are (at least for the purposes of this show): designer savagery, dystopic romanticism and extreme theatrical pretension.
P.W.E.I. Vs. The Moral Majority / Dance Of The Mad Bastards / Pop Will Eat Itself
From the 1990 album Cure for Sanity; this original version features the dark lord responding to The Moral Majority Jerry Falwell Snr, summonsing us to ‘Get up…. and make it snappy!’ Streaming services have since bafflingly sanitised this opening to the album by removing that critical call to action.
Bad Life / Public Image Limited
The 1984 album This is What You Want, This is What You Get seemed to be an intentional self-parody of a band who had insisted “We are not a band, we are a company”. Plastic pop meets a remaining punk attitude; although John Lydon had long disavowed that previous musical moment. I consider this the most intentionally plastic and antagonistic track on the album.
Do That Dance / Primitive Calculators
Just before breaking up, this 246 Johnston Street, Fitzroy based band formed in 1978 and released this single in 1979. It remains for me a precursor to much of the distorted industrial stuff I hear around the traps today.
Mines Full of Maggots / Alien Sex Fiend
From the 1985 album Maximum Security, the point to playing this track from my own adolescent point of view was to annoy my father as much as possible. Sheer agitated repetition, like a clock cycle on dexamphetamine.
Rockit Miss USA (Deathwish IV Mix) / Sci-Fi Sex Stars (pseudonym for Sigue Sigue Sputnik).
A limited edition 12” released by Rough Trade Records in 1986, seemingly because Sputnik’s contracted company EMI wouldn’t touch it. Possibly to ensure EMI’s refusal, the cover features three transgender women half-dressed in bondage gear brandishing whips. Rough Trade decided to cover their more ‘uprightly excited’ body parts with a sticker, that has become more translucent with each decade.
Be Fast Be Clean Be Cheap / Age of Chance
Calling both their style of music and their 1986 mini-album Crush Collision; this track title refers to the Big Food ethos and how it had ostensibly become an industrial relations and socio-economic catchcry for the ‘me decade’. In their parlance, this track is driving with Sonic Force. Indeed.
I Don’t Know What It Is / Pete Shelley
Already brandishing substantial punk credentials as the frontman of the then disbanded Buzzcocks, Shelley’s 1982 solo album ‘Homosapien’ embraced the new wave synthpop sound while maintaining his declaratory vocal sensibility. I view this track as the album’s distillation of both.
Mr DNA / Smart Patrol / Devo
Through the prism of those ‘best of 70s/80s’ compilation albums, Devo may appear about as punk as Shakin’ Stevens. But even their massive hit ‘Whip It’ suggests subversion beneath the novelty. Tracks such as this one from the 1979 album ‘Duty Now For the Future’ are a pulsating scepticism towards mainstream culture and it’s atomising qualities, sitting easily with the electropunk/cyberpunk ethos and sound.
Get a Dog Up Ya / Mr Floppy
On the 1993 album The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Dickhead, Ascot Vale based Mr Floppy mixed ocker frenzy, Oi! and samples from 90s late night television content and advertisements. Their merch included t-shirts brandishing the title of this track, aptly chosen by wardrobe for Ben Mendelsohn’s catalysing character in the grim oz suburban film Idiot Box.
Dictator / The Clash
The Clash imploded as a group, resulting in Joe Strummer going it alone with what appeared to be a collective of models with mohawks; releasing in 1985 the least popular album to bear the band’s name, Cut the Crap. History has been kinder to this album than critics of the time (or Strummer himself) were. The criticism centred around what I find most appealing about it, it’s cacophony. It was derided for the very same reliance on incessant synthetic percussion and sampling that would only a few years later be very trendy indeed.
Seconds Too Late / Cabaret Voltaire
This is the otherwise difficult to find 1980 7” version, from the compilation “The Original Sound of Sheffield ’78 –’82. Later to be known for their Hi NRG and House/Techno recordings, this harks back to their early middling success as Dadaistic post-punks. A serene change of pace for this rather manic episode of Rotations, it none-the-less menaces throughout, with percussion occasionally resembling a metal works incident.
Eight Fivers / Gilla Band
With tracks like this 2022 release, from the album Most Normal, electro-punk (loosely termed) remains in good hands. This Irish self-declared noise band claim imperviousness to any particular genre, but that has never stopped me from pigeonholing. The cynicism towards consumerism, abandonment of good taste, repetition, chanting, clash clash bang bang; all good things.
Oceania ‘Tis for Thee / Nineteen-Eighty-Four Motion Picture Soundtrack [Extract]
This episode ends as all would if the magnificent vision of George Orwell had been realised, striving in glory for our homeland Oceania and for the love of Big Brother. Please stand to attention.
