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: Pink Flag by Wire (Harvest)

ONCE a week, I was banished to Record Village’s other shop, a bus ride away in a nearby small market town called Brigg which was if anything, even bleaker than Scunthorpe, but much more countrified.

The manager got a day off midweek, so I minded the shop and had to deal with one, maybe even two customers a day. The heating always seemed to be turned off. It was pretty grim.

It would have been very boring but for the fact that, y’know, I was hanging around in a record shop – even if it was a bit of a shite one – and I ended up working my way through the shop’s entire stock, more or less. For someone like me, it was nerdvana.

We weren’t really supposed to play interesting stuff in the main shop and generally had to stick to a rigid playlist of whatever major label crap we happened to be pushing that week. There wasn’t quite as wide a range of stock in the Brigg shop but there was enough to go at and I began to look forward to my weekly excursions to mid-Eighties medieval Lincolnshire.

One miserable, God-forsaken, never-ending, quiet-as-the-grave Wednesday in Brigg I heard some new Factory record which turned out to be the raw, wobbly and utterly magnificent Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out) by the Happy Mondays. You can imagine how pleased I was.

Wire were another one of my Brigg discoveries. My uncle Rich was into them, I think, but I only had ears for reggae when I was a kid, a lot of the time, and they didn’t make much of an impression. Later on, Doug probably played them, but I’d have thought they were just another of his dull trad-dad pub rock new wave bands, like Television, Chelsea or the Stranglers.

How wrong can one man be?

Hip Replacement: The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks by Flux Of Pink Indians (Spiderleg Records)

I WATCH the postman wheel his cart down the other side of our road and wonder if eil.com can have got my order to me by today. I get a bit excited all of a sudden.

A few minutes later, he’s coming back down our side of the street. He’s a couple of houses away. I hold my breath. Come on lad, I think, you can do it.

The buzzer goes. “Package for you,” it says in a metallic Mancunian monotone.

Two seconds and three storeys later, I open the front door and take the 12-inch cardboard mailer from the unsuspecting postie. If only you knew what you‘re delivering, I think to myself, idiotically, as I thank him.

I make myself walk back up the stairs at a more sedate pace. It’s a big effort. When I get back in the flat I sit on the settee, open the package and slide the album out of its protective sleeve to reveal the savagely androgynous figures on the cover, still every bit as striking, ugly, perverse and compelling as the first day I saw them.

Hip Replacement: Christ The Album by Crass (Crass Records)

MY FIRST Crass gig was in Sheffield, where a group of people with too much time on their hands had cadged resources from the city council – then led by David Blunkett – to create a community-focussed arts and music venue, complete with vegetarian café, in an old factory near the train station.

The Leadmill opened in 1982, in the wake of rioting in St Pauls, Brixton and Toxteth (followed by a series of copycat mini-insurrections around the rest of the country) and – the way I remember it, at least – keen to head off any youth rebellion in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, the council had sponsored an opening programme of cheap gigs.

In the same situation now, Blunkett would probably just send in the army, but back then he sent Boy George instead.

Hip Replacement: Penis Envy by Crass (Crass Records)

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Crass released an album called Penis Envy, but you wouldn’t know it.

There will be no ill-informed tributes in the New Musical Express, no fawning retrospective on The South Bank Show and no self-satisfied, smug eulogy in The Observer Music Magazine.

Too young, stupid or docile to get Crass the first time around, our media friends prefer to stick to the easy stuff: Sgt Pepper, Smile, London Calling, anything by Nick fucking Drake.

There’ll be no remix albums, and you will search in vain for deluxe box sets, live DVDs, or tickets for a 25th anniversary tour. And while we should be thankful that this particular revolution will still not be televised – even 25 years after the event – it would be a shame if Penis Envy’s silver jubilee were to pass by completely unnoticed.

Hip Replacement: Germ Free Adolescents by X-Ray Spex (EMI)

MUCH as we hate to admit it, blokes often develop what little musical taste we possess from hanging around with women.

We might bemoan their inability to put the right CD in the right fucking case, get all condescending about their blissful ignorance of the intricacies of Jah Wobble’s early career or straight take the piss out of their lamentable regard for Coldplay, but women tend to like stuff because they actually like it, not because it’s fashionable and they think they should. Unlike many blokes.

Hip Replacement: EP1 & Farce by Rudimentary Peni (Outer Himalayan & Crass Records)

EVEN by the less-than-genteel standards of the Crass label, Farce was a ridiculously extreme record – from the seven-inch fold-out sleeve, containing mostly strange spidery drawings rather than the usual typed polemic, to the extraordinary music Rudimentary Peni created, which took the basic thrash blueprint, wiped its arse with it and screwed it up into a tight little ball before exploding all over you like a bad medieval disease.

And there was also the very name of the band itself.