Download: Sweet Thing – David Bowie (mp3)

Fetish act 23 Skidoo were on the extreme cutting edge of that scene, tearing apart funky beats and using the pieces in a abstract collage with electronics, samples, tape loops, white noise, and African percussion. Their sound was like Fela Kuti having a fight with William Burroughs and Brody’s sleeve for their debut album Seven Songs perfectly captured its voodoo stew of the ethnic and industrial with its iconic image of disfigured clay hands playing an African drum against a background of chicken wire. All done with real objects either found or made by hand of course, but I would think that even if Photoshop had existed back in 1982 Brody would still have done it this way because he couldn’t have achieved the same raw, made-by-aborigines feel on a computer.

Fetish had a whole roster of similar arty punk-funkers and No Wave noise merchants on the label, and the rest of Brody’s work for them had an equally ragged, primitive feel, often using his own bold paintings (as did his early work for The Face.) But he evolved out of that style as his design became more formal and clean with the slickness we know as “80s design” in much the same way that the wild post-punk-funk sound evolved into the shiny pop of ABC and Haircut 100.

I bought a lot of weird, out-there records in those days — I was young and adventurous! — but Seven Songs really pushed what was already a very flexible envelope at the time, sounding more like a confrontational art installation than anything resembling “rock and roll” music. Being a designer I’m far more likely to buy a record or book if I like the cover and I probably wouldn’t have taken the risky plunge of buying it unheard — most likely prompted by a rave review in the NME — if I hadn’t liked the sleeve so much. The sleeve is the reason I still have my copy of the record too, because even 30 years later it still sounds like head-fucking music made by aliens and isn’t a album I play a lot (I filed it under “interesting”). But I’m glad I have it as a document of an exciting time when people were making new things out of the rubble left by punk, not just in music but graphic design too.

Download: Kundalini – 23 Skidoo (mp3)
Buy: “Seven Songs (album)

Her latest album Ceremony originally came out in Sweden last year and is being reissued worldwide next month. It’s a suite of songs inspired by the death of her grandfather that she plays on a church organ. Heavy stuff, but beautifully so.

Though I would imagine that these days a young man would probably choose computers or video games as his route to fame, fortune, and groupies.

Download: Man of Mystery – The Shadows (mp3)

London still looked a lot like that until fairly recently. For most of my life St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Tower Bridge, and every old building in the city were that same dirty, sooty colour and I think they all look a bit fake now since they’ve been cleaned up, as if the “real” buildings have been replaced by Disney versions.

Is this going to be the next big thing? Time to break out the velvet flares and Dennis Wheatley novels.

Download: We Could Send Letters – Aztec Camera (original single version) (mp3)