White Punks on Dope - The Tubes

The one good song from the band from Phoenix Arizona who are still out there making bad Performance Art statements and even worse records. While making stabs at Situationism, the Tubes came across like a bunch of Rag Week students collecting change in drag... more Bernard Bresslaw than Guy Debord.

My first ever glimpse of real life punks was when they used to hang around in groups outside the newly-opened Virgin Megastore in Plymouth City Centre circa 1987...

1987; the Johnny Hates Jazz-era. Even in 1987, at age 13, with Thatcher's Britain in the grip of Brother Beyond fever, the postcard punks outside Virgin seemed to me like men and women out of time... like those American soldiers in South East Asia who still don't know the war is over; the middle-aged men who re-enact Civil War battles every Sunday or the people who still actually think the Usual Suspects is a good film. Morons.

Still, it is a very good tune...

> Download this (6.4 MB)

How I Got Over - The Swan Silvertones

Gospel grooves from a strangely funky strain of Protestantism. At his best, the Lord-praising Reverend Claude Jeter was more soulful than Sam Cooke, funkier than the Famous Flames and wilder than Little Richard...

The Devil might have most of the best damn tunes, but the New Testament is pure Bubblegum (Girls, who's your fave Synoptic Gospel-er? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Ringo?)

In today's secular musical world there's not much place for the Lord... or for 'testifying', speaking in tongues, handling live snakes or even drinking faith-testing salvation cocktails made from 9 parts water and one part strychnine...

That's a pity, I think there are big questions that can only be answered in the pop format: Who are we? Is there a God? Are there any moral absolutes? Why is the person sitting next to me on the tube always reading a pamphlet about the Book of Revelations?

> Download this (3.5 MB)

Manifesto & Book News

If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols, candy-based metaphors for carnal acts or lyrics about hugging, squeezing and rocking all night long, it's in.

Pay Day nights and painted women



> Martin Lampen (latest book news, contact details and other stuff)

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