Has there ever been a musical movement whose cultural legacy has so outlasted its heritage than punk rock?
Grown men get into fights about the merits of different Clash albums, but that aside, underneath all the nostalgia and (ironically) fervent British patronage for ‘Never Mind The Bollocks…’, it’s really a straight ahead rock record in the grand tradition. At the time the snarling appliqué of rebellion which Lydon, Strummer and a few others created in those heady days of the Queen’s Jubilee might have seemed like the end of the world to the Daily Mail, but no modern day Robespierre or Guido Fawkes emerged as a result of repeatedly listening to ‘White Riot‘, and with the benefit of hindsight one was never going to do so.
Punk’s direct influence was more pervasive and longer in the reaping, spawning a thousand awful and thankfully short lived bands, but in the process producing musicians and writers who were prepared to take its open minded creative aesthetic and bend indigenous music to their will. Helped by iconic labels and their maverick impresarios (think Factory, 4AD, Rough Trade, Stiff, Postcard) a clutch of artists emerged who were unafraid to take risks, but conversely happy to use the mainstream labels to propagate their messages, be they esoteric or otherwise.
This halcyon period – arguably bookended by Joy Division‘s landmark début ‘Unknown Pleasures‘ in 1979 and the proto-Americana of Lloyd Cole & The Commotions‘ ‘Rattlesnakes‘ five years later – was arguably the most diverse and exciting of the 20th century, creating sounds and textures still wilfully exploited three decades later.
Matt Johnson had grown up living above a pub in London’s East End, sneaking downstairs after gigs to play the abandoned instruments. Signed to the Some Bizarre label by the legendary Stevo – a man whose motto was always to go further than anyone else – Johnson’s first album ‘Burning Blue Soul‘ had been an impossibly grim and yet fragilely beautiful affair, but ‘Soul Mining‘ was aimed like a cruise missile straight at the charts, its payload of bad dreams and misanthropy wrapped in a velvet glove of overtly pop tunes carefully designed to draw in unwitting fans of teenie denizens such as Howard Jones.
Lyrically it was as confrontational as anything which might have crept onto Radio 1’s John Peel show, and it’s slightly unnerving to hear 30 year old songs still as polemically now: on ‘Waiting For Tomorrow (All Of My Life)‘. when Johnson croaks, ‘I’ve been filled with useless information spewed out by papers and radio stations’, he could just as well be decrying the media drenched opinions smash that is 2014.
Horrified by the re-election of Margaret Thatcher, like many people, his muse however largely remains personal, a conscience capable of delivering richly diverse soundscapes, from the mercurial accordion of ‘This Is The Day‘ to the pummelling tribalism of ten minute closer ‘Giant‘. Sat amongst all this is #Soul Mining’s enduring signature moment ‘Uncertain Smile‘; a song about love as a predictably complicated set of obsessions, wicked in its addictive simplicity and made whole by a genius three minute piano outro crafted by the then plain old Jools Holland, recently of Squeeze .
Remastered by Johnson at Abbey Road, this vinyl only presentation comes in audiophile friendly 180g format and also bursts with all the sort of collateral for the obsessional you’d expect. With the original album horn of ‘Perfect‘ as he’d originally intended it to be, the second installment pulls together a handful of lengthy remixes. It’s here that things are a bit less satisfying; whilst it’s hard to break the likes of ‘Uncertain Smile’ conceptually, a ten minute version of it feels unnecessarily long, and there are moments across the rest when the limitations of the original recording technology loom large in the rear view mirror.
All of that is however frankly ranging on the absurd side of churlish. ‘Soul Mining’ remains in whatever format one of the eighties’ finest records; angry and paranoid, Johnson’s psychoanalysis is uncomfortable – brutal at times – but it’s triumph is that the listener never feels like a voyeur. In favouring more familiar textures rather than succumbing to the synth fetishism of many of his contemporaries, musically it broadly avoids the pitfall of sounding dated, and the diversions into jazz, psychedelia and African rhythms are just compounding subtleties. The result is a record that habits a world as jaggedly sketched as the cover illustration, a manifesto in the form of spellbinding songs.
So what did the punks ever do for us? Well, they opened up our minds, and through that big black hole in perception came records like ‘Soul Mining’ – ones worth selling your last safety pins and rubber t-shirts for.
