Mick Farren - Vampires Stole My Lunch Money (British Punk 1978)

One of the key albums made on the periphery of the late-1970s punk explosion, Deviants frontman Mick Farren's return to raw rock, following most of a decade spent in journalism, was less a timely resurrection than it was a vicious reminder that none of this new noise was actually very new. He'd been doing exactly the same stuff a decade before, and would still be doing it two decades hence. In the 1960s, after all, the Deviants depicted the underside of the peace and love rhetoric by asking just one simple question: what will happen if the revolution succeeds? In the 2000s, they pinpoint the formless agitation which has sucked the optimism out of everything. And in the 1970s, Farren solo snagged the tabloid nihilism which now dominated the punk scene, and played it up for all it was worth. Vampires was released hot on the heels of one of the most glorious singles of the era, the seething teen riot anthem "Let's Loot the Supermarket Again Like We Did Last Summer"; indeed, combine that one track with the best bits of Vampires and there's probably no better illustration of Farren's (continued) ability to press the pulse of the period. Possibly unintentionally, and now certainly unbelievably, Vampires marks the closest Farren has ever strayed towards becoming a true commercial proposition. He opens the album with a Frank Zappa cover, rather than a mutated approximation of what he thought the Mothers should sound like -- at the height of Britain's late 70s culture wars, "Trouble Coming Every Day" had been screaming out for reinvention, but Farren did more than that. Shortened and sharpened, stripped of weary cynicism and imbibed instead with apocalyptic foreboding, it became the statement of intent and detente which the punks had been trying to elucidate all along, and proved that all the latest generation were really doing was mainstreaming the imagery of the radicals of ten years before. In truth, the remainder of Vampires cannot live up to such an incendiary beginning; in its favor, it doesn't even try. With the exception of the remarkably prescient "Bela Lugosi," dedicated to the man who would, a year hence, be subpoenaed by Bauhaus to create the gothic movement, Vampires plays a hard-drinking, beautifully wasted game, living up to a dissolute image which may or may not have been Farren's personal modus operandi at the time, but certainly summed up his public persona. "Half Price Drinks," "I Want a Drink," "Drunk in the Morning" -- there's a definite conceptual angle here, and a rewarding game of spot the rock star, too, as Farren ropes in Chrissie Hynde, Wilco Johnson, Curved Air's Sonja Kristina, Pink Fairy, Larry Wallis, and sundry past and future Deviants to add to the dyspeptic ambience. It's probably the least essential album in Farren's canon, distilling his dark visions into bite sized morsels of fairly catchy poppy songs. But it is also the most enjoyable; a rolling, boiling, sassy swagger which makes only one persistent demand on the listeners. They have to buy the next round.

AMG Review by Dave Thompson

Iggy Pop - The Idiot (Classic album 1977)

In 1976, the Stooges had been gone for two years, and Iggy Pop had developed a notorious reputation as one of rock & roll's most spectacular waste cases. After a self-imposed stay in a mental hospital, a significantly more functional Iggy was desperate to prove he could hold down a career in music, and he was given another chance by his longtime ally, David Bowie. Bowie co-wrote a batch of new songs with Iggy, put together a band, and produced The Idiot, which took Iggy in a new direction decidedly different from the guitar-fueled proto-punk of the Stooges. Musically, The Idiot is of a piece with the impressionistic music of Bowie's "Berlin Period" (such as Heroes and Low), with it's fragmented guitar figures, ominous basslines, and discordant, high-relief keyboard parts. Iggy's new music was cerebral and inward-looking, where his early work had been a glorious call to the id, and Iggy was in more subdued form than with the Stooges, with his voice sinking into a world-weary baritone that was a decided contrast to the harsh, defiant cry heard on "Search and Destroy." Iggy was exploring new territory as a lyricist, and his songs on The Idiot are self-referential and poetic in a way that his work had rarely been in the past; for the most part the results are impressive, especially "Dum Dum Boys," a paean to the glory days of his former band, and "Nightclubbing," a call to the joys of decadence. The Idiot introduced the world to a very different Iggy Pop, and if the results surprised anyone expecting a replay of the assault of Raw Power, it also made it clear that Iggy was older, wiser, and still had plenty to say; it's a flawed but powerful and emotionally absorbing work.

AMG Review by Mark Deming