The first concert I ever went to was in Wolverhampton Civic Hall on May 22 1977. It was part of the Clash’s White Riot tour and the first major Punk gig ever to be held in Wolverhampton. Three days before the gig, The Jam who were supposed to be one of the supports, pulled out. Not that that mattered too much because The Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Slits were still on the bill and anyway it was The Clash that everyone really wanted to see. 

So the bottom-of-the-bill Slits turned out to be the first group I ever saw play live. 

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On the surface Wire are just another Punk group from 1977 playing angry, loud, fast, short songs. But scrape only a millimetre under that surface and you realise how completely wrong that assumption is. Maybe naming their debut album ‘Pink Flag’ was the first big clue that things weren’t going to be quite as they first seemed.

Wire were really a fantastical art project. Closer in attitude and spirit to Brian Eno than, say The Clash. Their raison d’etre was to create new, radical music through a mixture of serious artistic experimentation and often quite funny game-playing. So when they temporarily became a 3-piece after one member dropped out for a while it was no real surprise that they changed their name to Wir. And then back to Wire when he re-joined.

In fact the only completely consistent thread throughout their 25 year on-and-off existence has been that every single song they’ve recorded is not quite as it first seems.

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Dub of the late ’70′s variety. By when Dub had evolved in many different directions. Lee Perry and King Perry were still evolving dub (which they’d effectively invented earlier in the ’70′s) into what I suppose could be called ‘classic’ dub – percussion and bass-heavy with a focus on hypnotic grooves (see ABON 0014). Meanwhile producers like Joe Gibbs (with his engineer and mixer Errol Thompson) and Scientist were creating a different dub style. Maybe best described as Dub-with-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-thrown-in.

With far less emphasis on the bass and rhythm it left room for a more tuneful sound with bucketfuls of sound effects and samples thrown in – from strange blips and burps to doorbells, phones and computer game soundtracks to cowbells, animals and toy instruments.

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Possibly the most raucous and best couple of minutes the Clash ever produced except…when in the hands of Songdog it becomes three and half of the most beautiful and pathos-rich music of the last ten years.

For anyone too young to know – Janie Jones was involved in a sex for radio airplay scandal for which she was jailed. But she must have also been involved in a very beautiful if tragic love story. At least in the world according to Songdog.

Great covers can sometimes completely change the feel of a song. Songdog turn raucous energy into profound beauty and sadness without actually changing one word.                 

Released 2003.

Available on the CD single ‘Janie Jones’: Amazon

3 minutes that contain more energy than the whole bloated mid ’70s ‘Rock’ industry could produce across several double concept albums. Punk had arrived and immediately 80% of the music industry looked irrelevant. Possibly the most raucous and best couple of minutes the Clash ever produced and the first track of their first album.

For anyone too young to know – Janie Jones was involved in a sex for radio airplay scandal for which she was jailed.

Released 1977.

Available on the absolutely essential first Clash album ‘The Clash’: Amazon

So we’ve reached ABON 0015 and nothing yet from the ’60′s. How’s that happened?

Think ’60′s and you think Flower Power, Summer of Love, Spector Wall of Sound, Beatles, Stones, Surf Bands, Soul and Funk and England having a World Class National Football Team. True but that only captures a fraction of the debris from the musical Big Bang that went off sometime in the early ’60′s.

Meet the American Garage Band of the mid ’60′s.

By 1966 America had been subjected to the British explosion of rock bands lead by The Beatles, The Stones,The Yardbirds, The Who, The Kinks et al for a couple of years. One of the consequences had been – for a significant proportion of American youth – an almost compulsive urge to be in a BAND. Any BAND.

The other had been a re-examination by these same proto-bandsters of the American Blues and Rock’n'Roll heritage that the Brits had plundered (and largely watered down) over the previous few years and the American mainstream had forgotten about.

The result was an explosion of Garage Bands. Bands who just seemed to come out of the woodwork, with an obsession for electric guitars and distortion, a knack of creating very modern but often fairly primitive takes on Rock’n'Roll or Blues and usually just one or sometimes two good ideas that turned into singles.

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