WOEBOT

One of my (surely hundreds of) gaping holes in understanding 80s music has been not knowing about The Fire Engines. I discovered the Postcard label last year, I'd always avoided Orange Juice, and had a bit of fun catching up; checking out "Poor Old Soul" and Josef K's "Chance Meeting" for the first time. I have to confess to being just a wee bit non-plussed though, and with hindsight it must be that The Fire Engines gave that era an essential lustre, like Dylan gave the music of the other early folkies. The Franz Ferdiand hype? Well that wasn't really persuasive for me, though on second thoughts I ought to have paid attention a whole lorra lot earlier.

I found these two, which contain nearly identical material, with just enough difference to warrant having them both, in a record store for what I thought was a real bargain. Scanning GEMM it appears that people don't actually pay very high prices for them. Weird. "Spass" was destined for the American market, an alternative to the mini-album "Lubricate Your Living Room" but supplemented with all of their singles. You can pick up an excellent Fire Engines compilation at Domino which is great but makes the odd weird choice like not including the string quartet-led version of "Candyskin", the string quartet Bob Last amusingly described to Simon as "not as expensive as you'd imagine". OK, enough spotter-ism already.

How on earth did a band from Edinburgh produce such a ferociously iconoclastic record? That may be the Glaswegian in me, but really? On the Scottish cultural horizon I reckon there are only two similarly intense gestures. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" and Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting", but no music. This is some vanguard stuff! So oblivious to geography and time that that they half seemed to believe it was joke music almost begins to make sense, were it not for the fact that its track-marked feistiness is so bloody-mindededly serious.

The Fire Engines make a racket like a corruscated, trebly Contortions, except that they ditch James Chance's embarrassing "nigger" stylings (sorry, hate to use that word, but it's intended pejoratively) and come out the other side sounding bleaker and more funky. Like a lot of modern rock, here is music which is defiantly drum-led, on the sleeve Russell Burns get the "lead" credit. Gnarling, insectoid, tooth-ache guitars, seem to grind away at their own axis, grooving around a handful of keys not really going anywhere, narcotically repetitive. Bass doesn't duck 'round the back, but pitched up, throbs in the same tonal centre, kind of like the quasi-bass lines Michael Rother laid down on guitar for Neu! David Henderson's twitchy yelps remind me of an anaemic Lux Interior, again bereft of ham hoodoo. In some ways I can't think of a better example of the qualities of rock. Grooving ain't a trivial thing y'see, its an uber-meta grasp of the internal dynamics of life itself, beyond and above the crude fumblings of theory.

I was playing "Lubricate Your Living Room" to a friend and he started laughing. "Sounds like pub rock", he chortled. Well I guess it does, if the house-band was The Velvet Underground. But what's wrong with that rough corpulence anyway? I mean, how much more cosmically illuminating is raving on e to being drunk in a bar? Genuinely. There's an unequivocal justness to "Everythings Roses" the divine head-cratering roll of those guitars that's unspeakably lovely and how relevant is which particular channelling of electricity? Isn't fetishising synths as wrong-headed as fetishising guitars?

All of which brings me to the Arctic Monkeys LP. In heretically admitting to *really* liking an Indie Rock record Simon has called what must be the first stylistic shift since "the blogs" started. I suppose all that we're left to see is whether anything subsequent scene-wise it can live up to "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not" cos it's a super record. Two tracks in particular are stunning: "I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor" and "Still Take You Home", with no sign of the cloying "compressed" pop-music-played-on-guitars sound which characterises a lot of Indie. Oasis is about the only fair comparison to make, but Arctic Monkeys don't irritate in the way Oasis used to. A song like "Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts" (on the I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor EP), there's no way Noel could write something as emotionally vulnerable as that and, as Simon remarks, the rhythm section is fabulous.

Denigrating new Indie Rock in the light of the old has run its course, and comparing something unimpeachable like The Fire Engines with The Arctic Monkeys (OK the latter may never be as blank-eyed or gnawingly splendid) but really how "original" were The Fire Engines? They weren't original at all! They were third generation VU-copyists! And yet 26 years later they smell as fresh as wet paint. My point? It's what you bring to the table that matters.