Paralysed: listening to Musicophilia's 1981 post-punk collection

It's ill-advised, wrongheaded and thoroughly foolhardy. Yep, listening to all 12 hours of Musicophilia's sprawling 1981 Post-Punk Box Set (2004) compendium of 231 songs and then trying to sum it all up in a puny little blog. Insanity. 

I'm not sure how I came across this impressive feat of post-punk compiling, but a few months ago I stumbled across it and thought, "Oh, OK, this is quite a serious endeavour. It's not just the usual suspects. This is worth a proper listen". And indeed, that's what happened. I bookmarked it and listened to it all the way through three or four times. You should do the same! A full half a day's worth of music. Two-hundred and thirty-one tracks from that golden year 1981. An in-depth survey of some of the best post-punk music (whatever post-punk may be). Regardless of your level of post-punk muso-ness, there's almost certainly going to be quite a lot of music here that'll interest you or that you'll simply enjoy hearing again. Sure, there's a certain amount of familiar/over-familiar stuff - PiL's Flowers Of Romance (still sounding great though), Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime, Altered Images' Happy Birthday, Scritti Politti's The Sweetest Girl, the Stranglers' (quite annoying) Golden Brown, Depeche Mode's (also quite annoying) Just Can't Get Enough, Duran Duran's (execrable) Girls On Film, the Pretenders' (also execrable) Message Of Love, Soft Cell's Tainted Love, Kraftwerk's Computer Love, Grace Jones' Nightclubbing, the Specials' Ghost Town and Tom Tom Club's Genius Of Love. Yes, these are the common-or-garden selections, but in the context of such a big playlist there aren't too many of these. Unusually, there are also a lot of interesting album tracks - eg OMD's Sacred Heart, New Order's Doubts Even Here, Pete Shelley's It's Hard Enough Knowing or Delta 5's Different Fur. And, best of all, there are the songs that - for me anyway - are either totally unknown or at best only vaguely known. This in itself is one very good reason why the collection's worth spending some time on. Hearing - for the first time - songs like the Laughing Apple's Wouldn't You?, Family Fodder's Emergency!, Material's Square Dance, the Del-Byzanteens' Girl’s Imagination, Neonbabies' Profi, the Plastics' Diamond Head, Weekend's Nostalgia or MX80's Promise Of Love is genuinely interesting. But it's not just the appearance of a dozen or two "rarities" that makes the 1981 Post-Punk Box Set worthwhile. It's the overall sequencing and the creation of nine very listenable mixes. Post-punk bores like myself might well fancy that they themselves could fairly easily knock together a couple of hundred well-chosen tunes from 1981 ("easy, mate, just give me an hour or two"), but er, Musicophilia's actually done it. And it's a very solid piece of work which must have involved a lot of effort and some genuine connoisseurship. Evidently, back in 2004 these nine Mixcloud collections were created in the form of ten CD-Rs, with covers and inlays cards, which Mr Musicophilia (Ian Manire from Providence, Rhode Island apparently) made freely available and "sent all over the world" for the cost of materials and shipping. As I've indicated, I don't like a few of the choices and I didn't - for that matter - find the thematical groupings especially engaging (each of the nine collections is gathered under a specific heading, namely: Feet, Heart, Car [or Convertible], Computer, Brain, Amplifier, Cassette, Ice and Fire). But the overall collection is impressive. To take a few random examples: check out the manic horror-dub of Rip Rig + Panic's How Caged Bird, or the fluttery jazz-funk of Laura Logic's Wonderful Offer. Or the dubby/neo-funk weirdness of the Goat That Went Om's The Pirate Song. And ... well, many others. Musicophilia says the year 1979 - not 1981 - was "probably" the year that defined post-punk, but claims 1981 was the year that "most exemplifies [post-punk]'s almost boundless depth and breadth". Though (fwiw) I think that's sort of right, it's surely slightly unwise to tie a huge - and hugely non-specific - musical genre like post-punk to any given year. Couldn't you fairly easily make the same claim about 1982 or 1984? In his uber-influential book on post-punk, Simon Reynolds talks about the "long aftermath" of punk, and extends post-punk to the period 1978-1984. Whatever. In a way it makes little sense to restrict any of this to one calendar year or even group of years. Reynolds himself notes the amazing "density of simultaneous post-punk action" at this time, and in the end that's the main feeling you get about the explosion of musical activity in the wake of the Ramones, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Buzzcocks, the Clash and other trailblazers. To be fair, Musicophilia's also done big compendium-type mixes on 1979 and 1980, and even on the post-post-punk music of 2007-17, as well as another on the slightly mind-boggling proto-post-punk of the years 1968-77. Got all that? Ah, I know. It's becoming too much. Too many years, too much so-called post-punk music - is everything post-punk now? For my part I'm beginning to feel almost paralysed by indecision. What the fuck should I even listen to first? Oh, I know. What about a Gang Of Four song? Maybe one from 1981 ...?

 

PS: there are, to my mind, one or two things that are very slightly curious about these 231 choices. Why, for example, is there one - and only one - track taken from a John Peel session (the Slits' Earthbeat)? Weren't there other Peel versions that could have been used? Also, why are there so many versions that are described as "edit"? Was it a space thing? And are they Musicophilia's own edits? And a couple of minor complaints: Rip Rig + Panic is given as "Rip Rig Panic", which is not the same thing at all, right? While, similarly, the Go-Betweens have lost their all-important hyphen. Plus, the editor in me was slightly disconcerted by some bands being styled like this - "Fall, The" and "Clean, The" - while others were done this way: "The Cramps" and "The Stranglers". Also (ahem), numerous bands seem to have totally lost their definite articles. Oh dear, now the whole of the 1981 Post-Punk Box Set has begun to lose its credibility. Gone, just like that. A work of outstanding love, labour and dedication ruined on account of a few minuscule typographical issues. It's so unfair ...