Hip Replacement: Metal Box by Public Image Ltd (Virgin)

HAVING just bought the 4 Men With Beards reissue of Metal Box from Piccadilly for an eye-watering 36 quid, I’m struck by a fortuitous piece of weird symmetry when I get home from town after the usual interminable endurance test that is the number 86 bus.

I’ve got the volume on the telly turned down and got as far into the album as Careering – which, pressed on thick 180-gram vinyl, still sounds enormous and magnificent and out there – when John Lydon’s Country Life butter ad comes on (part of a deal for which he reputedly earned a cool five million). Sound and vision somehow match up perfectly.

“It’s all about great butter,” boasts the strapline at the end of the ad.

I wonder if Lydon can even remember when it was all about great music?

Hip Replacement: Magic Reggae by Various Artists (K-Tel International)

THIS is where it starts getting tricky. It’s getting on for three decades ago since I first heard this album, so you’re just going to have to bear with me if it all gets a bit sketchy.

Magic Reggae, a collection of music by Island, Creole, Trojan, Gull, WEA and Lightning Records artists put together by the TV advertised compilation behemoth K-Tel, has got ‘hastily purchased birthday present from Auntie Denise’ written all over it.

Well, it hasn’t. This particular copy of Magic Reggae actually has a green and white sticker saying “3.50, exclusive of VAT” on the back.

But it’s precisely the kind of thing my young, clued-up aunt would have bought me for my birthday. You can see her logic: “Our smith3000 likes reggae, that album has got reggae in the title – job done. Now then, where’s the Tia Maria?”

Having said all that, I could easily have bought Magic Reggae myself. I was as happy with compilation albums as I was with the original releases – and unfortunately not many 10-inch dub plates made it from JA to Scunthorpe, so low-cost samplers and compilations came in handy.

Historically, in 1980, the full extent of Thatcher’s psychotic megalomania had yet to become apparent. The exhilarating, inspiring, inclusive 2Tone phenomenom was at its height.

The year before, I’d somehow had a holiday romance with beautiful, sweet, sultry Lynne from Jacksonville, FL who gently showed me the delights of physical love on a moonlit white-sand beach (it was all very From Here To Eternity), but when I got back to the UK I was utterly dismayed to find that I wasn’t the cute, exotic English kid anymore. As far as everyone else was concerned I was the same old speccy, dorky spaz as ever, totally into Star Wars, reggae, comics and skateboarding, totally uncool – and totally unshaggable.

Doing it once and then not doing it again for about two years was probably even harder than not doing it at all. Not a lot I could do about it though. Obviously, I tried. Without any success. Whatsoever.

This was my frustrated, alienated, love-lorn mindset in the summer of 1980.

Hip Replacement: Temptation by Heaven 17 (BEF/Virgin)

BREAKFAST television was a new and exciting concept. New kid on the telly block Channel 4 was showing the very creepy and disturbing Minipops. Everyone thought it was simply hilarious when some student asked if he could have a P please Bob on Blockbusters. One pound coins and wheelclamps appeared for the first time. Everything was changing.

It was the year that cruise missiles arrived at Greenham Common, prompting massive CND protest marches. David Niven and John Le Mesurier died. I remember it as a time of great fear and uncertainty. The top selling single of 1983 was Karma Chameleon. Terrifying.

In the aftermath of the Falklands war Margaret Thatcher won 42 per cent of the vote in the June general election, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, “over Michael Foot, who led a highly-divided and weakened Labour Party which earned only 28 per cent of the vote. Then Thatcher sucked off Hitler.”

Most of the history books omit this last detail. They are wrong. Thatcher sucked off Hitler. Fact. It says so on Wikipedia. That’s good enough for me.

Anyway, I was at sixth form and, although I didn’t know it (I could probably have taken a decent guess, to be honest) I was just about to fail my A levels. I was a bit distracted.

Me and this – by my standards – very posh girl named Nell had a bit of a flirty thing going on in the Wednesday afternoon general studies session and I eventually got the message and asked her out. We got  the college bus from town to my house and then my dad gave us a lift over to a village a few miles down the road where a guy called Hoss was having his 18th birthday party in a church hall.

Rocking a shabby, baggy black Oxfam suit with crepes, little round John Lennon glasses and spiderplant hair, I must’ve looked a right state. Suave. And I probably had a bit of a spring in my step. A lot of the kids at school thought I was a dork – they might have had a point – but I’d not seen some of them since we left. Turning up with this extraordinarily glamorous Laura Ashley blonde was a wonderful thing. Dreadfully superficial I know, but I’m that kind of guy.

I was knocking back the Bailey’s, trying to affect a veneer of rakish sophistication, but the effect was spoiled somewhat by the fact that I ended up spilling a glassful of the thick creamy liqueur all over the crotch of my trousers. Despite some frantic mopping with wet tissue in the toilet, it left a very large and noticeable oily splash stain, like the aftermath of the most premature case of premature ejaculation you’ve ever seen in your life. I can laugh about it now.

The DJ was playing the standard pop fare of the day, which – according to some bloke off the internet – would’ve included stuff like Let’s Dance by Bowie, Is There Something I Should Know by Duran Duran, Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics, Blue Monday by New Order, True by Spandau Ballet, Beat It by Michael Jackson, Speak Like A Child by the Style Council and, for the erection section, Total Eclipse Of The Heart by Bonnie Tyler.

Classic pop, some might say. Not me. I kinda hated pretty much all of it at the time and with a few obvious exceptions hate it now. But the DJ, I remember very clearly, also played Heaven 17’s big, brassy breakthrough single, Temptation.

Hip Replacement: Charly by the Prodigy (XL Recordings)

E-COMMERCE meant something very different to what it means today.

It’s not like we didn’t have good reason. It seemed like Thatcher had been around forever and she didn’t appear to be in a hurry to relinquish her icy, vice-like grip on the throat of the body politic. We were in recession again, apparently, though I don’t remember noticing the last recession ending. Must’ve missed that bulletin.

Under the circumstances, it really did seem like drugs were the only rational response. Just say Yo!

Hip Replacement: LKJ In Dub by Linton Kwesi Johnson (Island Records)

I HAVE a vague recollection of buying LKJ In Dub with Christmas gift vouchers from the exotic and exciting Record Village in town. I think it had been out for a while, but it was probably one of the first dub albums I ever owned – as opposed to having my enlightened uncle’s copy on extended loan.

No doubt, I would have run home from the bus stop and disappeared up to my freezing bedroom in the attic where I could play my booming reggae, shouty ska and shoutier punk rock well out of the way of the rest of the family. I’d crank up the music and listen to it perched on a storage heater which was hot enough to properly burn my arse but, irritatingly, not actually hot enough to properly heat the bloody room itself.

There’s room here for a big, tortuous metaphor tying in the wintry, discomforting atmosphere of the country at the time with the sub-zero temperatures of my bedroom but, amusingly enough, I’ve got a stinking headcold and I just can’t be arsed. It’d be a bit shit anyway.

I think I’d heard my uncle playing Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Dread Beat An’ Blood, Bass Culture and Forces Of Victory albums and was impressed as much by the throbbing backing music as the rich, exotic timbre of Johnson’s voice. My interest was heightened by a BBC documentary about LKJ which was made by Franco Rosso, who immediately went onto to direct the seminal Brit-reggae flick Babylon.

Johnson’s family came to Britain from Jamaica when he was 11 years old and settled in south London. Inspired by conscious black writers such as Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois, Johnson joined the Black Panther party while he was still at school and later became a committed Marxist. Simultaneously, he developed his poetic voice with the Rasta Love group of poets and drummers and in 1977 was awarded a C Day Lewis fellowship and became writer-in-residence for the London borough of Lambeth.

Johnson’s verse came from a Caribbean oral tradition. He spoke in the rich, sing-song cadences of Jamaica without apology or explanation and while his live performances gave his work a powerful authority and physicality, crucially it lost none of its vitality on the page.

He was working as a reporter for the BBC World Service when he interviewed the one band who could survive a Sunday evening Gong Show-style contest at the Four Aces Club in Hackney. The band was one of the first reggae bands to come out of the UK, Matumbi, and their bass player was Dennis Bovell.

Hip Replacement: The Curse Of Zounds by Zounds (Rough Trade)

AS MUCH as I loved fast and furious bands like Antisect, Amebix and Discharge, who operated at the heavier, more raucous end of anarcho punk, there was also a place within my heart for the bands who took a stealthier approach, who sang rather than shouted, who took their time with what they wanted to say and employed a number of chord changes, hell, sometimes even actual melodies to say it.

Foremost among them were The Mob and Zounds – and the Poison Girls of course, but we’ll have to save them for another time – who always seemed to be linked in my mind, not least because they toured together a lot and shared a drummer for a while. And the two bands also seemed to share a style of approach which often seemed completely at odds with many other bands who released music on Crass Records – not least Crass themselves.

Both the Mob and Zounds employed humour, subtlety and experimentation where others were content to focus on shouting, profanity and buzz-saw guitars – not that there’s anything wrong with shouting, profanity and buzz-saw guitars you understand, but everyone needs a bit of light and shade sometimes, don’t they? Some respite from the anger and hatred, a break from the big ideas? I was very grateful they were around.

They didn’t parrot the by-the-numbers sloganeering endemic in much of the scene, and instead talked about people rather than problems, the personal rather than the overtly political. It was a very different way of working and one that was about setting a mood and creating an atmosphere as much as telling you what was what in the world.

In contrast with the black and white, one-side-or-the-other certainties of Crass and many of the bands on their label, Zounds and the Mob didn’t claim to know all the answers, or indeed any of the answers. They probably weren’t even sure about the question.

Hip Replacement: Grotesque: After The Gramme by The Fall (Rough Trade)

“‘GROTESQUE’ is the new LP by The Fall .. The Fall are the group who keep being brought up and slagged by other insecure bands – this automatically invokes a curse on them which usually takes its toll. This is true. Most people who like The Fall don’t like other groups anyway and don’t own coffee tables.

‘GROTESQUE’ contains very few choruses but a lot of beat and the raw edge of The Fall is retained. If they were psychotic, they’d think every other group was mad except – them. This band thrives on being in tight spots, odd knots, and calling the shots .. SHUUT UP! ENTER

JOE TOTALE: As he writes this weak TV rock filters through from the adjoining room. SMITH SAID ‘78 was the year of the average man. WELL IF That’s true ’80 is the year of the average band. The Fall are the GROTESQUE EXCEPTION.

ON this LP Every class gets what’s COMING TO IT. MY FATHER said: THE FALL WILL OUTLIVE YOUR SINS.

Get this – ‘GROTESQUE’ also tells stories ..”

And what stories.

Hip Replacement: Bad Girl by Bad Girl (Ibiza Records)

A WHILE before we started doing the Microdot parties in Leeds, me and Jez did a few nights at the 1in12 in Bradford called VLF, which stood for Very Low Frequencies or Vegetable Liberation Front, depending on who we were talking to at the time.

On the flyers, we added the subtitle “dub techno touchdown”, which reflected the mix of dub reggae, techno and acid we played.

I don’t think anyone came down to it, ever – apart from our guest DJs Mark and Farrah from Kaos, who not unreasonably demanded their money despite playing to a completely empty venue (except for me and Jez, most likely tripping our heads off and doing stupid dances regardless).

We wanted to create a very specific vibe. I was always very impressed by Renegade Soundwave’s The Phantom, a muscular, serpentine amalgam of dub, techno, hip hop and, with its cheeky White Riot sample, punk rock too, come to think of it.

I liked the way The Phantom combined the heaviness of dub with the trippy energy of acid house, but still had the funk. I wanted to hear more of this kind of stuff, but apart from honourable exceptions like Meat Beat Manifesto and Leeds’s own Ital Rockers’ and their classic Mental Dub, nobody else seemed to be making it – and certainly nobody was playing it in Leeds at the time.

Hardcore seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. It ticked all my boxes. Unlike many other people who were into it, I was coming at it as a reggae fan who was also into house rather than anything to do with hip hop. Though I had a soft spot for odd tunes by people such as EPMD, Digital Underground, Queen Latifah, Public Enemy and KRS-1, I didn’t really know how to dance to any of it – and after years of listening to punk rock maybe I was just a bit weary of blokes shouting stuff at me too.

Hip Replacement: Walt Disney Presents The Story And Songs Of The Jungle Book (Disneyland)

MY MUM and dad drove me up the A1 with a carful of vegeburger mix, tinned soup and vegetables, a Crank’s cookbook, my fanzine collection, a few dozen records and a stereo that was already on its last legs. I’d got a room, sight unseen, in a shared house from a list of recommended landlords the college had sent.

My shifty-looking housemate made himself scarce as soon as we pulled up to the two-up, two-down just off the North Road, leaving me and my increasingly horrified parents in this filthy, smelly hovel with a cute little puppy dog which immediately started to behave in a very unpleasant and completely unacceptable manner, all over the place. It was like Animal Hospital meets Trainspotting, in Darlington.

Ludicrously, I just wanted to get on with living away from home and making my own way in the world blah blah blah – so I was happy to stay in this total shit-heap until I could get somewhere better, but they weren’t having any of it.

They found me a B&B, paid a couple of weeks rent upfront, God bless ’em, and moved me in the same night. Luckily for me. Who knows what kind of ridiculous shit I would’ve ended up getting myself into if I’d stayed? My parents clearly had a good idea.

Hip Replacement: Good Thing Going by Sugar Minott (RCA)

IN MANY ways, being able to get into the football club discos and pigeon fanciers dinner-dances which were held at the village community hall was merely a fringe-benefit of getting served in the White Lion.

I must’ve been about 14 when me and Sally from down the road – blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, blessed at an early age with a mesmerising, gravity-defying bosom, and utterly oblivious to my hopeless, clod-hopping adoration – summoned up all the courage we could muster, took off our school ties and went into the White Lion to buy advance tickets for some do at the community hall one dinnertime.

It was obvious that Sandra behind the bar would’ve been as happy to sell us booze as she was tickets. We had to get back to school but I promised myself I’d return to try my luck the following weekend.

Unfortunately, getting the tickets for the do didn’t really get me any further with the hypnotically unattainable Sally, although it did teach me a couple of lessons which would prove to be invaluable in later life – when it comes to illicit fun after dark, you have to brazen it out and look the part, even if you’re not. And while girls are often quite impressed if you can get them into night clubs, they’re not that impressed.