Manufacturer: Polydor Group
The Sex Pistols' only proper album has become one of those records that is far more talked and written about than listened to. Only a handful of rock & roll bands can genuinely claim to have changed the world, and only one of those can claim to have done it with such a tiny discography (though any number of retrospective albums have been issued since the band met their messy end, this was the only ...
Manufacturer: Virgin
Manufacturer: Bmg
Manufacturer: EMI
The preceding album, All Mod Cons, had already proved there was more to The Jam than just being Mod revivalists, but it was Setting Sons that established Weller as a songwriting force to be reckoned with. The lead-off single "Eton Rifles" was Weller's most confident effort to date--a scathing look at class divisions in Thatcher's Britain. Originally planned as a concept album--The ...
After releasing The Stooges and Fun House--two LPs of brutally elemental rock--the Stooges split, reforming three years later with the encouragement of David Bowie to produce Raw Power. If, at the time, Iggy's music seemed primitive and crude, it also foreshadowed heavy metal at its best and the energy and nihilistic attitude of punk--an energy somewhat tamed by Bowie's ...
Manufacturer: Columbia / Legacy
Smash It Up revisits the decade-long career of the Damned, who famously hitched a ride on the early Sex Pistols bandwagon and then beat them to releasing the first UK punk single, a crazed little beat ditty called "New Rose", in November 1976. Based visually around Dave Vanian's (aka Dave Letts) proto-goth vampire trappings and Captain Sensible's (aka Ray Burns) tutu-wearing wackiness, and ...
Manufacturer: Sanctuary
Cruelly denied the Number One slot when an administrative cock-up at the UK chart returns office credited thousands of album sales to The Police, 1979's The Raven--now re-issued with bonus tracks--found tuneful toughnuts The Stranglers striding purposefully away from the faltering punk scene with a renewed artistic agenda and a head full of hard drugs. A new direction and an overhauled ...
More interested in social comment than political confrontation, the Jam breathed a sophistication that was generally lacking in the British punk movement. The young Paul Weller mixed punk anger with 1960s mod guitar to mark out the Jam from their contemporaries and deliver a set of sharply observed sketches punctuated by stabbing staccato guitar. Cynical and sneering, but never overly abrasive, ...
