The art of the cover version as stripped down reconstruction. In which stiff upper lip English public school takes on Atlanta GA’s funkiest and comes home with a surprising away point. 

In fact, the Flying Lizards were most famous for their 1979 chart hit cover of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, dismantled and then reassembled in similar robotic fashion to ‘Sex Machine’. But it’s the much less famous and far more difficult to find, James Brown cover that demonstrates the art of the Flying Lizards cover version at its best. 

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Brian Eno has a reputation for being a very clever man who thinks far more about his music than most of his peers do. He could almost be regarded more as a musical scientist than a typical musician or – God forbid – Rock Star. And with all these preconceptions comes the suspicion that everything he does musically must be pre-planned and thought-out in immaculate detail before he ever picks up an instrument or touches a dial on the mixing desk.

In fact, in many ways, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, he deserves the ‘egg-head’ moniker he’s sometimes given because he does intellectualise and pontificate about his music (and other people’s) more than most musicians or producers will ever do in one lifetime. But the result of all this intellectulising is, paradoxically, not some kind of pre-planned blueprint, detailing exactly how his music should take shape or should sound. Instead, if he plans anything, it’s how to allow randomness into, and to, shape, his music.

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We encountered Caribou and their Rough-Trade-album-of-the year, ‘Swim’, earlier (see ABON 0120). ‘Swim’ is a wonderfully original mixture of thought-provoking ideas and left field dance rhythms. Written and performed by a genuine Dr of Mathematics, it - very appropriately you may think – sets out to prove that music can make you dance and think at the same time.

Whilst it’s not the first record to do that, ‘Swim’ doesn’t have many obvious historical reference points. In fact it doesn’t sound much like anything that has gone before.

Except of course for A Certain Ratio’s early Post-Punk icey Funk.

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If Public Image Limited’s first album (see ABON 0134) helped kick start the Post Punk phenomenon, then their second album, ‘Metal Box’, demonstrated at length and in depth how rich a territory Post Punk could be.

The first album had combined Dub Reggae bass and Can-like Krautrock guitar sensibilities and sounds to create a new music that was more creatively experimental than Punk. As wonderful and ground-breaking as that album was, particularly on stand-out tracks ‘Public Image’ and ‘Annalisa’, it was also a fairly one-dimensional - and short – affair. Almost as if PIL were too awed by what they’d discovered to be able to develop the sound further or laterally beyond that initial creative breakthrough.

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Johnny Rotten, aka John Lydon, is such a colourful, controversial and out-spoken character that it’s not surprising that so much has been written about him. But nine times out of ten what’s written about him completely ignores, or even seems to deny, the fact that, underneath all the media hype and silliness - admittedly often created by Lydon himself - there lays an underrated genuine musical genius. How else can you explain the fact that Lydon was a key character in four - count ‘em - of the most remarkable albums of the past 50 years?

Everyone of course, is aware of ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ by the Sex Pistols. But what is often over-looked is that after he left the Pistols, he produced with his new band, Public Image Limited (PIL), another three phenomenal and phenomenally influential albums, ‘Public Image’, ‘Metal Box’ and ‘Flowers Of Romance’ between 1978 and 1981.

PIL was quite a different outfit to the Pistols.

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The first wave of Punk – from say late ’76 to late ’78 - was consciously revolutionary. As it attempted to rip everything up and start again it shouted its intentions very clearly and very loudly in both the press and in the lyrics it wrote as it went along. Being seen to be revolutionary was at least as important as actually creating something revolutionary. But what seemed radical, dangerous and confrontational at the time, now seems a little tame and safe and in many ways more the natural successor or evolution of ’50′s Rock’n'Roll than a revolution.

That’s not a criticism - some of the most remarkable music ever comes from that period and that genre.  It’s also not a suggestion that Punk wasn’t a very big and necessary departure from what came immediately before - it was and it acted like a well needed cleanser on the bloatedness and laziness of much mid ’70′s music.

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