Features Disc of the day
The Nightingales
Pigs On Purpose
(Cherry Red, 1982)
The joys of cheap, class-embittered ’80s vituperation explained.
This week is Indie Week on MOJO, and every Disc Of The Day will reflect that theme.
Playing this album in the MOJO offices raises an interesting question. Why, at the impressionable age of 15, was I listening to a discount bunch of wrong-haired Brummie Magic Banders, led by chip-on-his-shoulder working class poet (Rob Lloyd), who spat out his acerbic lyrics over egg-slicer rockabilly guitar, tss-tss drums and skronk jazz rhythms? The rest of my year were expelling their adolescent furies to Iron Maiden’s Number Of The Beast and Venom’s Black Metal, while I was seeking liberation through deadpan indie folk songs of labyrinthine urban minutiae. The answer, I think, lies in the little-discussed idea of indie aggression. Like metal for teenage longhairs, the Nightingales were a wall-of-sound defence mechanism. The difference is that in their rotten sound, pummelling rhythms, and Lloyd’s expectorated, gnomic images, The Nightingales conformed to the private fantasy of the anti-metal kid, the under-nourished bedroom aesthete who dreamily imagined that the oppressors of the outside world could be vanquished with the lead cosh of verbose intellect. The realised joy today is that Pigs On Purpose’s readily decaying production (by lisping bohemian gargoyle Richard Strange), relentless drive and, particularly, Lloyd’s dry observational wit still sounds vicious. Perhaps with this in mind, the CD reissue has been “remastered” to sound, if anything, even worse than the original vinyl. Perfect!
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 09/02/2008
Further Listening
The Fall – Grotesque (Rough Trade, 1980)
The Prefects – Are Amateur Wankers (Acute, 2004)
The Young Knives – Voices Of Animals And Men (Transgressive, 2006)
What’s YOUR favourite UK indie album? Enlighten us below...
Previous Disc of the day
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Van der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts
“Acquired taste” prog diabolists take up stakes, gather kindling, terrify all-comers.
6:00 AM GMT 17/06/2008
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Chris Smither - Don’t It Drag On
26-year-old Crescent City native decamps to Woodstock for growly folk-blues radiance.
6:00 AM GMT 16/06/2008
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Luther Ingram - I Don’t Want To Be Right: The Ko Ko Singles Volume 2
A treasure trove of soul gems by the late, undervalued singer from Jackson, Tennessee.
6:00 AM GMT 14/06/2008
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Killing Joke - Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell
End-time claustrophobia punctuates the last Killing Joke song cycle to feature late bassist Paul Rav
6:00 AM GMT 13/06/2008
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