Quote:
Various Artists ‘Radio 1 – Established 1967’ Universal
Ok. Stop what you’re doing now and go out and buy this record. Seriously: you’ll thank me. You will spend the rest of the week enraptured by it. You will be like a self-loathing middle aged man who has been trapped in a traffic jam with the wife and kids that he hates for seven hours, when, suddenly, there is a particularly vicious accident to stare at. It’s hard to imagine how 2007 (or any other year in the near future) could throw up an artefact so distressingly devoid of value while simultaneously being so hilarious and depressing. It’s like ‘Threads The Musical’ as envisaged by Monty Python. It’s like John Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ on audio book read out by Ronnie Barker as Albert Arkwright from ‘Open All Hours’: “Ger-ger-ger-Graville. We’re born from nothing into a universe that our extremely limited sensory apparatus can make no adequate sense of armed with little more than the false notion that we’re somehow different to animals but with no ability to alter the 100% fatal outcome of our brief and miserable existence that is blighted by us having no free will. We’re fer-fer-fer-fer-fer-****ed.”
Now as you’re all obviously women and men of taste, you’re already expecting this review to be a kicking (and unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how I slice it, I won’t be able to disappoint you on this score) at the very least I should point out the few genuinely decent points about it first.
Yes, like a handful of M and Ms floating on the surface of silage, there are about three songs on this compilation that actually have some intrinsic worth that has nothing to do with sado-masochism. Throughout this two and a half hour atrocity, there are miniature staging posts of redemption meaning that just as you’re about to kick the stool away, swallow the pills or cut upwards along the wrist into the bath of stinging hot water, there is a glimmer of hope that makes you continue with the whole sordid misadventure. Just when you’re ready to cash your chips in Girls Aloud come along and do a pretty good cover of Wheatus’ ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. Now stood next to ‘Sound Of The Underground’ it’s merely pretty good but in the context of this album it’s like getting unexpected early parole from prison on the same day you get the cancer all clear and the limo arrives to take you to a new experimental theme park called Narcotic Sex Land.
Likewise ‘Careless Whisper’ by the Gossip and ‘Like I Love You’ by Maximo Park have enough **** and vinegar to make them worth bothering with, despite both being relatively old songs. (There is a grey area of bands who manage to slink away without smelling too much of manure such as Foo Fighters, Franz Ferdinand and Kylie as well.) But are Radio 1 actually saying that they can only find three bands that are up to the challenge in hand?
The challenge is, of course, to celebrate four decades of the venerable pop and rock station by releasing a double album wherein: “40 of today’s greatest artists cover 40 years of hits”. To be fair this is exactly the album that Radio 1 deserves. Over 30 of today’s most superfluous acts dropping their trousers, gripping their ankles and spraying great arcs of liquid human waste through the ether and straight into your ear canals.
So this frankly breath taking manifesto on how pop and rock can be literally destroyed, which has been conceived by, executed by and designed specifically for *****, opens, quite rightly, with The Kaiser Chiefs. They cover The Move’s disgusting hippy-wigs-in-woolworths anthem ‘Flowers In The Rain’. They once declared that they would happily **** off a tramp for success which is interesting because by appearing on this album, sonically that is what they have been reduced to doing already in order to keep their puny grip on the little fame they’ve still got left.
Like during an unexpected gang attack in a shopping centre in Stevenage, the blows and kicks rain down hard and fast. The Fratellis have taken the sensible move of covering Hendrix’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ (it’s already a cover you ****ing muppets!). Now obviously, I don’t want them to die or anything but it is it too much to ask that the lead guitarist be pushed hand first into an industrial lathe? Before you have time to even vomit, the most despicable man in show business Robbie ‘Stop going on about how suicidal you are and just ****ing do it’ Williams turns up to cover ‘Lola’. Is that the song ‘Lola’ by The Kinks that describes getting off with a man dressed as a woman in Soho? Yes it is. Is this the same Robbie Williams who was in Take That, a band originally marketed as a gay cabaret band? Yes it is. Is this the same Robbie Williams who never ceased suggesting he was gay the second he slipped out of the tabloids for more than a minute a few years back? Yes it is. Is this the same Robbie Williams who sued a national newspaper for suggesting that he was gay, thus meaning that he sees same sex relationships as intrinsically being ‘a bad thing’? Yes. Yes, it is. Oh good. Glad we got that one sorted out. What’s that smell? It’s like a portaloo on the fourth day of Glastonbury? Oh, that’ll be the rank hypocrisy then.
After that bloated and vacuous melanoma on the skin of the record industry we’ve got The Streets managing the Herculean feat of being by far and away the worst thing on this wretched album. And by The Streets what we actually mean is a completely atonal Mike Skinner backed by some extremely bored session musicians. The latter would sound more at place on a cruise ship entertaining the blue rinse brigade, except that if the former were singing, the OAPs would throw him overboard to drown. No amount of cocaine will help Skinner get through this outrage against musical dignity. I feel very sorry for him. Just five years ago he was being hailed quite rightly as some kind of DIY visionary genius but now he’s outed himself as our generation’s Des O’Connor after partially successful throat cancer surgery.
It’s unfair to Skinner to single him out: the whole album reeks of the two day sweat of low rent session musicians. Interestingly this doesn’t just apply to the pop artists but to a lot of the bands as well. For instance anyone who has seen The Enemy, The Klaxons or The Twang play live will attest that they’ve certainly stepped their game up in the last two or three months. They’ve all come on so much as musicians it’s almost as if the singers have just turned up at the studio for an hour to add their vocals to some kind of karaoke backing track! What a preposterous thought! Even though about 50% of the songs here are all in the same key and are suffused with the same sense of ennui that only a failed musician can produce! Some coincidence.
Then we get to the second disc and the quality drops off rapidly.
Kasabian, a band so half-witted that they can’t tell the difference between Stoke on Trent and Manchester, take on The Specials’ ‘Too Much Too Young’ and put on Jim Davidson style ‘Chalky’ accents to sing back up. It’s left to us to guess whether they blacked up in the studio or not. The Editors totally miss the point of ‘Lullaby’ by a country mile. Robert Smith sings this song in a childlike voice because the narrator is a kid, half asleep, scared of what’s under the bed. The Editors deliver the words in the style of Vincent Price informing you that your entire family has been killed in a plane crash. The clue is in the title you ****ing dimwits.
Human language has not yet evolved enough to a sufficient degree to describe Razorlight covering Sting’s ‘Englishman In New York’. And still it keeps on building up like so much slag next to an open cast brain tumour mine. The Kooks, The View, Hard-fi . . .
In a cruel and unusual twist they save up a particular nugget of evil for the penultimate track, The Enemy covering ‘Father and Son’ which is apparently by Yusuf and Ronan Keating. Not Cat Stevens, not Yusuf Islam and not even how it was credited on the Keating single to Islam/Keating. No, the man’s surname, Islam has been taken off. Presumably in case the CD blows itself up or guides a jet into a building or anything.
