The Brain of Morbius, on the other hand, really should have won every Turner prize for the last ten years. They are relevant, challenging and nihilistically well-crafted in a way that would make Charles la-di-da Saatchi hide in bed with the covers pulled over his eyes, quivering as the urine starts to soak his jim-jammed arse, until someone turned the light on. There is no competition. I know they don't use paint or canvas, but neither does Tracey 'pick-me-I'm-nearly-clean' Emin. I know their art is aural, rather than visual, if you can call half a ton of raw stewing steak in a fish-tank visual. I know aesthetics in any meaningful sense has been cast aside in favour of crass publicity, as people realise life is shit and the best bits are made up. American culture does this to you. Cowboys killing 'Indians' is a heroic thing: firing hand-guns in a crowded street is an exciting, heart-warming spectacle. But forming a band that challenges the very way you think and then keeping it together for more than a decade is, well, just one of those things you were doing when you weren't actively seeking work. If you asked Gordon Brown, surly vizog with his piggy-bank face thinking piggy-bank thoughts, he'd say Bones and Elwell would be more 'productive' if they took jobs stacking shelves in one of Peter Sainsbury's fluorescent-lit hovels. But that is just one reason why they are consummate artisans, while he is a boring miserly turd-bag.
Like early Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, the Grateful Dead, Charlie Parker, Adolf Hitler, Caruso, Jesus, and the Sooty/Braden Show Band, you won't really get a true picture of the Brain unless you are actually there, watching the sweat vapours rise from the convulsing bodies of a live gig. 'Gig' has never been a perfect word. In the Brain's case 'noise with menaces' captures part of it, or; to take another part: a visceral bludgeoning exposition of polytonal expressionist do-da in which the singer explores his own boiling id, the keyboards scare the unquiet ghosts of keyboards as they lie in the back room of Cash Converters, and the whole band is used both as a giant percussion instrument and as a crow-bar for levering off the top of your skull. Only the crow-bar is being wielded by one of the Marx Brothers. Or maybe Yogi Bear. Anyhow, to recap, live the Brain would make Charles 'take-the-money-and-run' Saatchi wet himself. Live the Brain would have killed the Queen Mother long before her face turned into a Caesar salad. Live the Brain essentially constitute a weapon of mass destruction as defined in United Nations Security Resolution 1441a, and UN weapons inspectors are currently scouring South London for the laboratory where the band was put together; so far they've only turned up a genetic research station in Woolwich, secretly owned by HM Government and responsible for much of the queue in Blockbuster Video, and a peculiar toxic cloud which seems to emanate from the Lewisham branch of McDonald's. As a live act, the Brain Of Morbius are proof positive that limited forms of terrorism, at least in music, can form part of an overall campaign against tyranny, especially when the tyranny consists of Britney Spears and a bloke with two record-players. 'Live' is what a band like the Brain still do, just as popular music drowns in sounds that no longer exist 'live' in any sense. Now, the Beatles were overrated live. The Sex Pistols never got it together live. Robbie Williams is absolutely appalling live, like a cracked-voice pubescent, profoundly deaf Engerland supporter on helium, but they still buy his records so fast you'd think there were free chocolate, fags and lottery tickets in every slimy-looking packet. Why is this? Because the world is fucked, that's why this is. Fair and deserving things only happen in the movies. In real life, Bruce Willis would be bald and dead, in a pond-sized pool of blood, from that first hail of bad guys' bullets; and the little disabled boy would be screaming its head off just as that second round of automatic fire gets through to his brain. In real life, religious lunatics from some far-off land can plot to destroy the Pentagon, and get off scot-free for three years and counting, while Bush declares war on everyone else. In real life, true and genuine artists are considered as lazy job-seekers, while lip-synched formation morons buy ever more stupid motor cars paid for by the PRS. It should be a performing right that artists' incomes not be re-routed to a bunch of don't-know-they're-borns who couldn't perform anything if you stuck wires to their testicles and stood them on a box for the rest of the night.
The Brain shouldn't get royalty: they should be royalty, just on the work they put into the average performance. Bones sweats and screams and threatens the walls with his eclectic pogo. All the Queen ever does is waggle a bored wrist as she tries not to smile for the cameras in case she looks too happy, and cozy, and rich. Elwell's keyboards expand concepts of the possible in the sonic landscape, mixing science fiction with vaudeville. All not so bonny Prince Charlie ever does is sell grotesquely overpriced rich tea biscuits to people unlucky enough to be fans of Midge Ure. That one loud band from South-East London has more to offer culturally and philosophically than the entire English ruling class should not be a surprise to us. The cheque is mightier than the pen. The Brain are a pillar of a different establishment, more honest, raw, and infinitely cheaper than putting a cow in formaldehyde, and marginally less smelly. The Brain of Morbius on a CD is a wonderful piece of macro/micro magic, worthy of the TARDIS itself. Fitting such a gigantic sound, furious noise of a generation, onto a tiny silver disc, the same tiny silver disc AOL uses as brainwash detergent, is a marvel of electrickery we should only make the best of. I only hope it hasn't got a scratch that makes it go WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH halfway through.
I've never heard of Victor Ryan. There was Paul and Barry Ryan in the mid-sixties. Barry recorded 'Eloise'. Paul became a hairdresser, discovered he liked it, and so became a chain of hairdressers. Chico Ryan had a brief spell in Sha Na Na. Jim Ryan formed the Critters. The first track takes to my ears like someone's just tuned a tube-train. Baby Dave's drums thunderous clatter with an urgency seldom seen outside a condom packet. Keyboards alternate between deep percussive semitones and a flying analogue synth that i've just swallowed so it will be repeating on me for weeks. This is the band as a film noir, not one of those tacky things with an elderly gut-spreading Robert Mitchum, but an original chiaroscuro mood piece with some gorgeous raven-haired French woman you've never seen since.
"New Gut" has a certain urgency; like peristalsic techno capturing the gruesome tick-tick-tick of the city that never sleeps on account of that teenage fucking nutter in the flat upstairs. Testing testing. Testing your nerve 'til it cracks like so much council concrete, falling on the heads of shoppers too Valiumed out to get out of the way. Bass and drums scratch at the poisoned earth while Elwell's keyboards go for the pneumatic drill, as Bones expounds on the futility of all the shitty things in life, and the futility of the shitty little solutions we attempt, based mostly around our shitty little bodies. The Brain are wont to take working-class banality and create art from a rare and honest perspective on it. Life is shit- so where do you go from that? Do you make it better? Do you instead try to make yourself better, in some striving for what JS Mill might have called 'utility'? No, you go for the futility of making yourself feel better, in pure wool-over-the-eyes Thatcherazism, by climbing onto a sunbed with half a hundredweight of Neapolitan. With chocolate chips.
"Bernard's Oblong" is a more laid back number. Gwynnie's meaty-thumbed bass swings in and out of Baby Dave's steady but heavy rock styliette. The keyboards reflect atonality, the coat with no hook, reminding us that pretty music and detuned noise both nicked each other's toys when they were kids. But the point is we think we're listening to music all our life, when most of existence is filled to the sewage-ridden gills with noise: shitty, industrial, traffic rumble, fucking road-works, cheap telephones and the idiot next door who thinks his power-drill is a ray-gun and he has to put up shelves to defeat the aliens. Bone's stolid anti-vocal reminds us of our true skyline, not the fantasy one with its glowing domes and congestion-free streets, but the reality of unimagined acres of council blocks gone to unimagined ruin just so the cheap-buck-fuckers can get their cheap buck. "Sell the kids and start a new life." The hypnotic motto of the 2nd Me Generation, since the moment they discovered the 1st Me Generation had pinched everything. There's a rousing middle section that gathers the rotting curtains of self-delusion onto a postcard from the id of Nietzche; and a rumbling rutting final section in which Elwell hits the button marked Fireball XL5 and pretends it's a string section. Typical.
"Gonzalez" takes two minutes and eight seconds of your blank repetitive existence and just gives you that clout round the ear your parents can't do any more. The beat is classic Brain, uptempo but never scared of getting quicker, edgey chopped-up punk with a slice of Toots two-tone rock-steady. And always with a gleefully bleak industrial Moogish colouring. The subject matter is sex, or maybe the implicit identity crisis which accompanies the sexual act in neo-capitalist society, where anything that you can't do in a bog roll advert is coarse, and lost lonely individuals collide and separate, self-deluded by unholy rules of permanent commoditised dissatisfaction, wanting to take every shag back to the shop. Sexual honesty is almost always borderline obscenity, but what could be more offensive than using a month-old labrador puppy to wipe your arse with. I wonder if you can train one to lick the claggy bits of bog roll off your anal pubes?
"The Enemy's My Mate" takes simplistic medium-tempo bass and drums in a kind of 2/2 march feel, based around a repeating synth figure of pent-up RADAR-screen bleeping. This alternates with a faster section of frenetic cross-rhythms, speed-freak Beefheart, with a high-pitched mock piano concerto over the top. The logic of the lyrics follows an effortless menace, like a nightmare when you already know the end. It is precisely the same logic used by Thatcher and Reagan to justify selling weapons to Saddam Hussein for twenty glorious years, when he was our chap over there in wogland keeping those filthy Ayotullahs from our oil. "Cock Foster" develops themes of individual insignificance and working-class ill luck over a relentless, threatening rhythm bass around a severe and highly imaginative case of distorted bass. "Happiest Day" takes us to the idyllic pastures of pre-human Earth and then shows us how scary it is. The keyboards spit and hiss and sustain an unstable panic before hitting on a minor-key riff of pop-song pretensions. Bones muses on his big new job as the head of a multi-national, before the song beats itself in the head; Brain physicality made digitally regurgitatible flesh. "Revel In Obesity" is the most self-explanatory song-title since Country Joe's "I Like Marijuana". Near hysterical drumming maintains the pain under a synth riff based on a dark, insistent pedal note, while Bones extols the virtues of gluttony to surreal effect. "Written For The Violin" debunks the world of the 'serious' musician, and in so doing trashes most of what I've written here. Just as well, I was getting egoid. Baby Dave thrashes his unrelenting kit. Bits of brass interject and exclaim like offended longhairs as they leave the room. "Red Giant" hits you like Hendrix doing a Bach toccata and then introduces you to a fast pounding clattersome beat, followed by a faster, more pounding, clattermost beat. The vocals evoke the eventual, and perhaps not so distant, end of life on the planet. Ho hum. "Punch Me ! I'm In Swindon" shudders and jolts along, almost on the verge of self-implosion, but somehow the band are capable of that group insanity few are blessed with. Bones, perhaps only partially intentionally, captures the mortal fear inherent in travel, here in Blunkettland, since all the MPs decided to hide behind armed guards and a concrete wall.
A mere CD has a job on its hands to recreate the Brain's skewed splendour, the thundering blood-rush, let alone the stream-of-consciousness oratics of Bones at full throttle. But the engineering is sparkling clean and things only distort when they're supposed to and part of the thrill of the Brain is captured here in a way many punk bands would envy. If you stick it on, and turn it up to eight or nine, and have a few beers, then you'll capture some of the sweaty magic of the Brain Of Morbius in their theatrical pomp. You won't, however, win the lottery, grow a longer penis, or stop your hair falling out when it wants to; so get used to it.